It remains to point out specific qualities in manner and style which link the two poets together.[243] Towards the narrative portion of the Morgante, Byron seems to have been indifferent. In Don Juan there is but one clear allusion to the Carolingian legend:
“Just now, enough; but bye and bye I’ll prattle
Like Roland’s horn in Roncesvalles’ battle.”[244]
There is a fairly close parallel already pointed out between the response of a servant to Lambro in Don Juan, III, 45, and Margutte’s speech in the Morgante, XVIII, 115. There are, however, no other incidents in Don Juan which resemble any part of the earlier poem.
Pulci’s realism, a quality which is usually in itself burlesque when it is applied to a romantic subject, is shown in his fondness for homely touches and minute details, in his use of words out of the street and proverbs from the lips of the populace. The interjection of the lower-class spirit into the poem helped to make the Morgante in actuality what Frere had tried to produce in The Monks, and the Giants—a treatment of heroic characters and deeds by a bourgeois mind. The spectacle of the common vulgar details in the every-day life of men supposedly great naturally somewhat degrades the heroes. When Byron portrays General Suwarrow as
“Hero, buffoon, half-demon, and half-dirt,”[245]
he is following the methods of Pulci, who made his giants gluttons and his Rinaldo a master of Billingsgate.[246] In the Morgante warriors are continually being put into ludicrous situations: Morgante fights his battles with a bell-clapper; Rinaldo knocks a Saracen into a bowl of soup[247]; and the same noble, turned robber, threatens to steal from St. Peter and to seize the mantles of St. Ursula and the Angel Gabriel.[248] Pulci compares Roncesvalles to a pot in much the same spirit that Byron likens a rainbow to a black eye.[249] Pulci is fond of cataloguing objects, especially the varieties of food served at banquets; and Byron shows the same propensity in describing in detail the viands provided for the feast of Haidée and Juan, and the dinner at Norman Abbey. Pulci’s realism is also manifest in his use of slang and the language of low life. In this respect, too, Byron is little behind him: Juan fires his pistol “into one assailant’s pudding”; slang phrases are frequently introduced into Don Juan, and elevated poetic style is made more vivid by contrast with intentionally prosaic passages.
Another peculiarity of Pulci is his tendency to make use of many Tuscan proverbs and to coin sententious apothegms of his own. The framework of the octave lends itself easily to compact maxims in the final couplet, and perhaps it is due to this fact that Don Juan and the Morgante are both crammed with epigrams. In Pulci’s poetry one meets on nearly every page with such apt sayings as
“La fede è fatta, come fa il solletico”[250]
and