ARIOSTO.
Ludovico Ariosto was born at Reggio, near Modena, in September, 1474. From boyhood he showed a turn for versifying, and a distaste for the severer study of the law, to which he was destined. This repugnance triumphed over the wishes of his father, an Officer in the Duke of Ferrara’s service, and obtained license for him to pursue his own inclinations. His father died about the year 1500, leaving a small inheritance, and ten children, of whom Ludovico was the eldest. Thus, the care of the family, and the education and establishment of its younger branches, devolved upon him; and this onerous and important duty he faithfully performed, while to his mother, who survived his other parent many years, he ever manifested a filial affection.
In the midst of his domestic cares he still found time to cultivate literature, and he composed several lyric pieces; among others, a Latin epithalamium on the marriage of Alfonso d’Este, son of the reigning Duke of Ferrara, with the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Ariosto was then but a young man, and probably little acquainted with the political and domestic history of the Borgias; the praises therefore which he bestows on Lucrezia, not merely for her beauty, but for her moral qualities, ought not to be too severely criticised; the same excuse, however, cannot be made for a repetition of the same eulogium in his subsequent great poem, when he must certainly have become acquainted with the contemporary chronicles. But all poets were in that age tainted with court flattery, and Ariosto’s object was to gain the favour of his sovereigns and patrons, the princes of Este. Princely patronage was then absolutely necessary to a literary man who was not himself rich, as there was no reading public upon which to depend. Italy was divided into principalities, and distracted by foreign war and intestine dissensions, and the notice of the courts could alone bestow fame upon an author, and save him from neglect and distress.
These compositions attracted the favourable notice of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, Alfonso’s younger brother, a man of information and abilities. Upon personal acquaintance, he was pleased with Ariosto’s manners, and received him as one of the gentlemen of his retinue about the year 1503. Ippolito was a busy politician, and deeply concerned in all the intrigues of that most busy period of Italian politics. He soon perceived that Ariosto’s talents might be turned to account, and employed him in various missions, to Florence, Urbino, and other Italian courts; in the course of which the poet became acquainted with many persons of rank and consequence, and especially with Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, afterwards Leo X., who took a particular liking to him, and admitted him to his familiar society.
Ariosto was recommended by his first patron, Cardinal Ippolito, to Alfonso d’Este, who succeeded to the ducal crown of Ferrara in 1505; and from that time he enjoyed the confidence of both the brothers.
In 1509, Alfonso joined in the league of Cambray with the Pope, the French, and the Emperor Maximilian, against the Venetians; and Ippolito, who was a soldier as well as a statesman, took the command of his brother’s troops. Ariosto accompanied his master to the field, and was present at the campaign of that year on the banks of the Po. He has described, in the thirty-sixth canto of his Furioso, the atrocities perpetrated by the Sclavonian mercenaries in the Venetian service.
It is not our province to follow the operations of this war, farther than to state, that Ariosto was present in several battles, and employed in two political missions to Pope Julius II. The second time, he was compelled to make a hasty retreat from Rome, as Julius had publicly threatened to have him thrown into the Tiber. In 1513, Leo X. succeeded to the Papal throne. Ariosto soon after repaired to Rome to congratulate the new Pope. Leo received him as an old and intimate acquaintance. “He stooped graciously from his holy chair towards me, took me by the hand, and saluted me on both the cheeks. From that moment my credulous hopes were raised to the unknown regions of heaven.” In short, Ariosto now thought his fortune was made. But he had not sufficient patience; he soon grew tired of waiting at Rome without receiving any more substantial proofs of Leo’s benevolence, and, too independent to be importunate at levees and audiences, he turned his back upon all his prospects from that quarter. Having returned to Ferrara, he applied himself with renewed earnestness to his favourite studies. He had long since formed the plan of a great poem on the subject of the wars of Charlemagne against the Saracens, a traditional theme derived from the fabulous chronicle of Turpin, in which some truth was intermixed with a mass of exaggerations, anachronisms, and wondrous tales of paladins, knights-errant, and giants, the offspring of older traditions of Welch or Armorican invention. (See Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” Ellis’s “Specimens of early English Metrical Romances,” etc.) Many French, Spanish, and Italian ballad and romance writers had treated this fanciful theme, each adding something to the common stock of the marvellous from his own imagination. In Italy, three poets of considerable genius, Pulci, Boiardo, and Bello, had composed long poems on the subject, in which the celebrated Orlando or Roland, figured as the great champion of Christendom. Boiardo, departing from his predecessors, gave a new interest to his poem by making Orlando fall in love with Angelica, a Pagan or Saracen (the two are often taken as synonymous in all these romances) princess, of supernatural beauty, and possessed of magical powers, who had come from the farthest Asia to Charlemagne’s camp for the express purpose of exciting the jealousy of the Christian leaders, and thus, by spreading dissension among them, rendering them unable to cope successfully with the infidels. Boiardo did not complete his poem, which he called “Orlando Innamorato;” and he left off the story of Angelica, where Charlemagne, weary of the discord which raged in his camp since Angelica’s appearance, gives her in charge to Namo, one of his squires, until such time as he shall have decided upon the rival claims of Rinaldo and Orlando, his two bravest paladins, to her hand. It is from this point that Ariosto took up the thread of his story, and in consonance with the proverb that from love to madness there is but one step, he determined to make Orlando run mad with jealousy, on discovering that Angelica had eloped with a young and handsome, but obscure squire, of the name of Medoro, for whom she forgets all the objects of her journey to the west, and despises the sighs of Orlando and the other renowned paladins of Charlemagne’s court. Ariosto styled his poem “Orlando Furioso,” and he wrote it at first in forty cantos, which he afterwards increased to forty-six. Orlando’s madness runs through the greater part of the poem, until he is restored to reason by his cousin Astolpho, who brings back his wits in a phial from the moon. Meantime the principal action of the poem, namely, the war between Charlemagne and the Saracens, continues throughout, and ends with the final expulsion of the Moors from France, and the death of their great champion Rodomonte, whose death, like that of Turnus in the Æneid, closes the poem. But it would be idle to look for the unity and the consecutiveness of epic action, as some critics have done, in a poem which is not an epic. There are many actions in the Furioso, all skilfully interwoven together, and making in the end an harmonious whole; but during their progress, the reader finds himself often lost as in a labyrinth, and perplexed how to recover the thread of his recollections. And yet the beauties of description, the fine touches of character and feeling, are so many, that we wander on delighted, as pilgrims who have strayed into an enchanted world, and then gaze, and wonder, and idle along, thoughtless of the end or purport of their journey.
Ariosto was employed for ten years about his poem, from his first beginning to the completion of it in forty cantos. It was printed at his own expense, at Ferrara, in April, 1516, by Mazocco del Bondeno, in one volume quarto. He sold one hundred copies of this first edition to the bookseller, Gigli, for twenty-eight scudi, being at the rate of about fifteen pence a copy, on condition that the bookseller should not sell the copies for more than twenty pence each. This edition is now extremely rare.
Ariosto hastened to present a copy to Cardinal Ippolito, to whom there is an affectionate dedication in the third stanza of the first canto, besides several other passages throughout the work which are highly laudatory of him, of his brother Alfonso, and of the house of Este in general. The Cardinal, after perusing the poem, seems to have been puzzled about the meaning and purpose of it, and he is said to have asked the author “Where in the devil’s name he had picked up so many absurdities?” But whether this story be true or not, it is certain that Ippolito did not relish the work, and that Ariosto gained by it no additional favour with him. Cardinal Ippolito was a busy worldly man; his mind was anything but poetical, his tastes and pursuits were matter of fact; his abilities—and he had abilities—were in a different line, and he told Ariosto that “he would have been better pleased, if, instead of praising him in idle verse, he had exerted himself more earnestly in his service.” This remark we have from Ariosto himself, in his second satire. Much declamation has been wasted on the Cardinal for his want of taste, and for what has been called his ungenerous conduct towards the great poet. But a want of taste for poetry is no ground for moral censure; and if the Cardinal thought no better of Ariosto for exerting a talent which he could not appreciate, at least it does not appear that he esteemed him the less. He retained him in his service as before, until the end of 1517, when being on the point of setting off for his diocese of Gran in Hungary, of which he was Archbishop, he requested Ariosto to follow him; but Ariosto excused himself on the plea of his delicate health and the rudeness of the Hungarian climate. His brother Alessandro, however, accompanied the Cardinal. Ippolito was certainly displeased at Ariosto’s refusal, but he did not stop his pension in consequence of it. It was not until a year or two after that the small pension of twenty-five scudi every four months, of which Ariosto speaks, was stopped, during the Cardinal’s absence; and it is stated by Barotti, in his life of Ariosto, that this took place in consequence of the Duke’s abolishing a local tax, on the produce of which Ariosto’s pension was assigned. Besides this pension, Ariosto enjoyed one-third of the fees paid to the Notarial Chancery for every deed registered, which brought him about one hundred scudi per annum. This he did not lose after the Cardinal’s departure. He seems to have enjoyed some other perquisites, which were, of course, the fruits of his connection with the princes of Este. He was not rich, but, at the same time, he was not in distress. Although he sometimes indulges in outbreakings of poetical querulousness in his satires, which are the best authority for his biography, yet, in the very midst of these, we find expressions of sincere regard and grateful affection for both the Cardinal and the Duke, for Ariosto was a right-hearted man.
After the Cardinal’s death, which happened in 1520, Ariosto was taken by Duke Alfonso into his own service, as one of his gentlemen attendants. The duties of this office, we are told by the poet himself, were merely nominal, and left him ample leisure to pursue his favourite studies. Yet the Duke was very fond of his company, and willingly granted those favours which he requested for himself or his friends. (See Ariosto’s Seventh Satire.) From the general character of Ariosto, however, we may conclude that he was not an indiscreet or importunate petitioner. In 1521, he published a second edition of his great poem, with many corrections, but still in forty cantos only: this edition is as scarce as the first. As he expressed a wish to be more actively employed, Alfonso, in 1522, appointed him Governor of the province of Garfagnana, bordering on the Modenese territory, and situated on the western slope of the Apennines, on the side of Lucca. This country had just been restored to the house of Este, after having been for years occupied by the Florentines and the Pope. The people were divided into factions, which openly defied the law. Ariosto humorously describes in his fifth satire the difficulties of his new office. He remained about three years at Castelnuovo, the chief town of this mountain district, and seems to have succeeded by his firm, yet liberal and conciliatory conduct, in restoring order among that turbulent and rude population, who showed him marked proofs of esteem on several occasions. In 1523, the Duke’s secretary, Pistofilo, wrote to offer him the appointment of ambassador to the new Pope, Clement VII.; but Ariosto declined the honour, saying, that he had already had enough of Rome and the Medici, alluding to his disappointment which he had experienced from Leo X. In 1524, he returned from his government to Ferrara, which he does not seem to have ever quitted afterwards. He had there long before formed an attachment to a lady, whose name he has carefully concealed; and this appears, from his own hints, to have been an additional reason, on several occasions above mentioned, for his not wishing to remove far from Ferrara. By this lady he had a son, Virginio, whom he legitimated by a regular act done before Cardinal Campeggio, in April, 1530. Virginio was then twenty-one years of age. The deed still exists in the archives of the house of Ariosti. In it the Christian name alone of Virginio’s mother, Orsolina, is mentioned, and she is qualified as a spinster; but her family name and rank are left out, honestatis causâ, as it is there stated. This Virginio took orders, and became afterwards a canon of the Cathedral of Ferrara. Ariosto had another natural son, Giovanbattista, who rose to the rank of captain in the Duke’s service.