[10] As she saw them enter without joyous exultation over so great a victory, with no announcement or any direct word of it, she was aware her Brandimarte had been slain.
[11] On the return of the Paladin, the cry arose more loudly and the wail redoubled.
[CHAPTER VI]
HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS
From these last words, there can be no difficulty in seeing what must be our opinion as to the confrontations and comparative judgments instituted between Ariosto and Pulci or Boiardo, and even Cieco da Ferrara, and all the other Italian poets of chivalry. These have sometimes been extended so as to include poetical humourists, such as Folengo and Rabelais, or burlesque writers like Berni, Tassoni, Forteguerri, or neo-epical poets, like Tasso and Camoens, and finally to Cervantes, that direct and fully conscious ironist of chivalry. This is as perfectly admissible as it is natural that classes of "poems of chivalry" or "narrative poems" or "romances," should be formed, when once rhetoricians and writers of treatises have invented the genus and that these should be disposed in a series under such headings, thus forming a sort of artificial history, with no real foundation beyond the accidents of certain abstract literary forms, which are really representative of certain social tendencies and institutions. And it is equally, indeed more admissible, because relating to more nearly connected problems, that these documents afforded by poems of chivalry should be made use of among other documents in the investigation of the gradual dissolution of the ideal of chivalry in the first period of modern society. Salvemini has not neglected to do this in a temperate manner, in his monograph relating to "knightly dignity" in the commune of Florence. But the aesthetic judgment, which they strive to deduce from these comparisons, is inadmissible and illegitimate: when for instance they bestow the palm on this or that poet for having better observed than others the "genus" or a particular "species" and "variety" of the genus; or because chivalry or anti-chivalry has been better represented by one than by another. We can explain the fact that De Sanctis was sometimes entangled in this sociological net, in spite of his exquisite sense of individuality and poetry, when we consider the condition of studies in his time and his philosophical origins; but it is none the less true that the judgments which he pronounced upon this matter, deviate from true and proper aesthetic criticism, and carry with them the bad effects of every deviation.
Having ourselves refused to be among those whose feet are caught in the insidious net of Caligorante, we shall have nothing further to say as to comparisons with Ariosto, because the poet of the Furioso has always come out of those maladroit confrontations and the arbitrary judgments of merit which result from them, crowned above all others with the sign of victory, or at least unconquered by any other, and admitting but a very few as his equals. The preference accorded by romantic German men of letters to Boiardo (recently revived to some extent in Italy, by Panzini) belongs rather to the domain of anecdote than to the history of criticism: Boiardo is looked upon by them as the poet of grand heroic dreams, while Ariosto is a mere citizen poet; or Boiardo again is lauded for having better represented the logical form of the Italian poem of chivalry, prescribed according to a chemical combination drawn up in the philological laboratory of the anti-Ariostesque Professor Rajna, who is in other respects a most worthy and well-deserving person. But there is no denying that the peculiar beauty of Ariosto has often injured Boiardo, Pulci, Tasso and other poets, who have been illegitimately compared with him; and therefore, without talking of Tasso—who has now won his case, although he numbered a Galilei among the ranks of those who under-estimated him when making the above-mentioned confrontation,—it will not be inopportune to cast a rapid glance upon Pulci and Boiardo.
Looking at Pulci in Pulci and not at Ariosto, since to place one physiognomy on the top of another is not a good way of seeing, what do we find? What is the Morgante? It is above all a whimsicality, one of those works, born of a caprice or a bet, to which the author neither devotes himself after the necessary previous meditations, nor works at with the scrupulosity of the artist, who expends his powers and employs his utmost endeavour to do the best he can everywhere. But the occasion or the inspiration is never the substance of a work, which on the contrary always consists of what the author really brings to it in the course of his labour; and the mention of the occasional origin of the Morgante only avails here to account for its ill-digested and undoubtedly chaotic nature. Nor is it to the purpose to recall what certainly seems to have been Pulci's intention, namely, to satisfy in his own way a wish of the pious Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by composing or re-writing a Christian poem of chivalry, for this in its turn only explains certain superficialities and extrinsicalities, such as the general plan of the poem and the parts of it possessing religious tone, which are successful to the extent that they could be successful with such a brain as Pulci's. A commencement will have been made towards a proper understanding of the substance of the Morgante, its proper and intrinsic inspiration, by referring it first to the curiosity with which educated Florentine citizens observed and reproduced the customs and the psychology of the people of the city and the surrounding districts, productive of the poetry of Politian, of Lorenzo and of Pulci himself, author of the Beca di Dicomano, each with its various popular appeal. That inspiration contains something both of the sympathetic and of the ironical, as we observe in all poetry based upon popular themes and use of dialect, in the German romantic Lieder and Balladen and in the dialect literature of the Italy of to-day (one feels inclined to call the Morgante "dialect" and not "Italian"): and in Pulci there vibrated a sympathetic-ironic chord, peculiar to himself and therefore naturally not exactly the same as in Lorenzo, or still less in Politian. But it did not vibrate pure and clear, being prevented from doing so, not so much owing to initial eccentricity and to the intention above-mentioned, as to the accumulation of other inspirations, arising in the fertile spirit of Pulci. For Pulci had in mind, in addition to the reconstruction of a sympathetic-ironic popular poem of the popular story-tellers, something that might be called a "Picaresque romance," understanding thereby not only tales of the sort to be found in Spanish literature, but also certain other tales of Boccaccio and a great part of Folengo's Baldus. Picaresque romance asked in its turn sympathy and irony, but of a different sort to the preceding, no longer sympathy for popular ingenuity, but for cleverness, trickiness, for an irony, which should no longer be simply that of superior culture, but also of superior morality; and this too was in some measure and in his own way in Pulci; but he often spoilt this disposition of mind by inadvertently passing, like a person lacking refinement of education, from Picaresque romance to Picaresque intonation, from the representation of a blackguard to the blackguard himself. And there is something else also in the Morgante: the imaginings and caprices of Pulci himself, his own personal moral opinions, religious or philosophical; things that are sometimes thought about even by those who do not think much about them, and which, owing to this casual hasty thinking, become nevertheless opinions or semi-opinions. Finally the Morgante is a skein formed of strands of different colour and make, some of them thicker or thinner than others: it is a poem that is not in tune with a single dominant inspiration, and if we take one of those elements that we have described and transport it to the principal place, we immediately have the feeling that we are depriving the complex nature of the work of its vigour. Nevertheless the Morgante must be looked upon as one of the most richly endowed works of our literature, where we meet at every step with delightful figures and traits of expression: Morgante, Margutte, Fiorinetta, Astarotte, Farfarello, Archbishop Turpin, certain touches of character in Orlando, and especially in Rinaldo, and also in Antea, together with certain descriptions, anecdotes and acute remarks. Margutte, plunged deep in vice, but quite shameless and aware that he cannot be other than what nature made him, is also human, incapable of treachery, capable of affection for Morgante and of enduring his all-consuming voracity; so that when his companion dies, he never ceases recalling him to mind, and talking about him even with Orlando: