Apart, but not separated from, nor alien to, nor indifferent: and in respect to this we must resume and develop the analysis already begun by setting readers on their guard against the easy misunderstanding of the "destruction," which we have already spoken of as brought about by the tone and the irony of Ariosto. This must not be looked upon as total destruction and annihilation, but as destruction in the philosophic sense of the word, which is also conservation. Were this otherwise, what could be the function of the varied material or emotional content, which we have examined in the poem? Are the stars stuck into the sky like pin-heads in a pin-cushion (Don Ferrante would sarcastically enquire)? The eloquence of other's but not Ariosto's poetry, arises from a total indifference of sentiment and an absence of content: theirs is the rouge on the corpse, not the rosy cloud that enfolds and adorns the living. Such eloquence produces soft and superficially musical versification of the Adone, not the octave of the Furioso; and to quote Giraldi Cinzio once more, the lover of Ariosto (who gave the advice to readers not to confuse the "facility" of the Furioso with verses "of sweet sound but no feeling"), the eight hundred "stanzas," by one of the composers of that time, which Giraldi once had to read, "which seemed to be collections made among the flowery gardens of poetry, so full were they of beauty from stanza to stanza, but put together, were vain things, seeming, so far as sense is concerned, to have been born of the soil of childishness," because their author was "intent only upon the pleasure that comes from the splendour and choice of words, and had altogether neglected the dignity and assistance afforded by sensibility."
Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought, the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was the case, as it seems to me, with the Cinque Canti, which he excluded from the Furioso and for which he substituted others. In them the cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious moral and political reflections (on jealousy, ambition, wicked men, mercenary soldiers); yet we feel nevertheless that Ariosto wrote them in an unhappy moment, when Minerva was reluctant or averse: the poet did not take sufficient interest and lacked the necessary heat. And is there no part of the Furioso itself that languishes? It would seem so, not indeed in the forty cantos of the first edition, which originated in his twelve-year-old poetical springtime, but in the parts which were added later, all of them (as could be shown) more or less intellectualiste of origin, and therefore (save the episode of Olympia) not among the most read and most popular. The most intellectualistic of all is the long delay introduced toward the end of the poem, the double betrothal of Bradamante and the contest in courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero, where the tone becomes here and there altogether pedestrian. It is true that philologists who have given themselves to art have discovered progress in Ariosto in just these languid parts, and above all in the Cinque Canti, where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here they suppose him to have become "serious," to join hands with no less a personage than Torquato Tasso.
The process of "destruction" effected upon the material may possibly be rendered clear to those who do not appreciate philosophical formulas or find them too difficult, by means of the comparison with what in the technique of painting is called "concealing a colour," which does not mean its cancellation, but its toning down. In such an equally distributed toning down, all the sentiments which go to form the web of the poem, not only preserve their own physiognomy, but their reciprocal proportions and connections; so that although they certainly appear in the "transparent polished glasses" and in the "smooth shining waters" of the octaves, pale as "pearls on a white forehead" to the sight, yet they retain their distinctness and are more or less strong according to the greater or less strength which they possessed in the soul of the poet. The comic, at once lowered and raised, nevertheless remains comical, the sublime remains sublime, the voluptuous voluptuous, the reflective reflective, and so on. And sometimes it happens that Ariosto reaches the boundary, which if he were to pass, he would abandon his own tone, but he never does abandon it, because he always refrains from passing the boundary. Everyone remembers the most emotional words and passages of the Furioso: Medoro, who, when surrounded and surprised by his enemies, makes a sort of tower of himself, using the trees as a shield, and never abandoning the body of his lord, Zerbino, who feels penetrated with pity and stays his hand as he looks on his beautiful countenance, when on the point of slaying him; Zerbino, who when about to die, is desperate at leaving his Isabella alone, the prey of unknown men, while she bursts into tears and speaks sweet words of eternal faithfulness; Fiordiligi, who hears the news, or rather divines the death of her husband ... We always catch our breath, and something—I know not what—comes into our eyes, as we repeat these and similar verses. Here is Fiordiligi, who shudders as she feels the presentiment:
E questa novità d' aver timore
le fa tremar di doppia tema il core.[9]
The fatal news comes to hand: Astolfo and Sansonetto, the two friends who happen to be where she has remained, hide it from her for an hour or so, and then decide to betake themselves to her that they may prepare her for the misfortune that has befallen:
Tosto ch'entrano, e ch'ella loro il viso
Vide di gaudio in tal vittoria privo,
Senz' altro annunzio sa, senz' altro avviso,
Che Brandimarte suo non è più vivo....[10]
Another moment of the same narrative, where suffering appears to resume its strength and to grow upon itself, is that in which Orlando, who is awaited, enters the temple where the funeral of Brandimarte is being celebrated: Orlando, the friend, the companion, the witness of his death:
Levossi, al ritornar del Paladino,
Maggiore il grido e raddoppiossi il pianto.[11]
Before such words and images as these, De Sanctis used to say to his pupils, when explaining to them the Furioso: "See how much heart Ariosto had!" But he always kept telling them this truth also: that "Ariosto never pushes situations to the point of painfulness," forbidden to him by the tone of his poetry; and he used to show them how Ariosto used sometimes to make use of interruptions, sometimes of graceful similitudes, or reflections, or devices of style, in order to restrain the painfulness ready to break through. Those critics who for instance are shocked by the octaves on the name of "Isabella" are too exigent, or ask too much, and what they ought not to ask (this name of Isabella was destined by God to adorn beautiful, noble, courteous, chaste and wise women from this time forth, and was originally intended as homage from Ariosto to the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella of Este). With these octaves he concludes the narrative of the sacrifice of her life made by Isabella to keep faith with Zerbino; they do not understand that those octaves and the Proficiscere which precedes them ("Go thou in peace, thou blessed soul") and the very account of the drunken bestiality of Rodomonte, and prior to that, the semi-comic scene of the saintly hermit who presides over the virtue of Isabella, "like a practised mariner and is quite prepared to offer her speedily a sumptuous meal of spiritual food," the hermit whom Rodomonte seizes by the neck and throws three miles into the sea, are all words and representations so accentuated as to produce the effect of allowing Isabella to die without plunging the Furioso into tragedy with its correspondingly tragical catharsis; for the Furioso has its own general and perpetually harmonious catharsis, which we have now made sufficiently clear.
It is precisely owing to the action of this sentimental and passionate material, in spite of and through its effectual surpassing, that the varied colouring arising from it enters the poem and confers upon it that character of humanity, which led us to declare at the outset of our analysis that when we define Ariosto as the Poet of Harmony, we proposed only to indicate where the accent of his work falls, but that he is the poet of Harmony and also of something else, of harmony developed in a particular world of sentiments, and in fact that the harmony to which Ariosto attains, is not harmony in general, but an altogether Ariostesque Harmony.