A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

The Sixteenth Century had not seen many years before the world was presented with one of the most celebrated works in the Italian Language, a poem destined to acquire a reputation hardly inferior to that of Dante's great work, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto.

Ludovico Ariosto was born at Reggio in Lombardy on the eighth of September, 1474. His father was attached to the Court of Ferrara, and he himself entered the services of Cardinal Ippolito d'Esté, brother to the Duke, but in what capacity is not accurately known. To the Cardinal he dedicated his great work, but received no thanks for the homage. He fell into complete disgrace by refusing to accompany his patron to Hungary. He then tried his luck with the reigning Duke, who was more generous than his kinsman, and who appointed the poet Governor of Garfagnana, a remote province of the Duchy, infested by brigands. He retained this post for three years, and brought the province into such excellent order that he acquired the love and esteem of the whole district.

When he returned to Ferrara, he enjoyed the highest consideration and favour of the Duke, who took great pleasure in the representation of his comedies. He was clandestinely married to a Florentine lady, by whom, however, he had no children. It is supposed that secrecy was kept in order to preserve some ecclesiastical revenues assigned to his share by the Cardinal. From previous connections he had two sons, on whom the Duke conferred patents of legitimacy. His descendants acquired considerable opulence, and became one of the first families of Ferrara. His son Orazio made himself remarkable by declaring, when the question of Torquato Tasso's superior genius roused the attention of Italy, that both poets had their particular beauties, for which opinion he was fiercely attacked by the zealots in his father's cause. In the Eighteenth Century, a Marquis Ariosto was intimate with Voltaire at Brussels. The last descendant of the poet, the Countess Ariosto, died at Ferrara in 1878, at the age of ninety years.

Ariosto gives us in his Satires with rare candour a picture of his mind and of the vicissitudes of his life. He was of a buoyant and open disposition, fond of pleasure and susceptible to the attractions of love, but faithful and sincere to his friends, and very generous to his numerous brothers and sisters. Titian was among his friends, and the great painter has preserved for us the features of the great poet. Curious anecdotes are told of his absence of mind when plunged in thought. Once he went through the streets of Ferrara in his dressing-gown, and was not aware of his apparel until an acquaintance accosted him and told him of the fact. He built himself a little house, and placed a Latin inscription over the entrance, and when someone remarked that it was very small for one who had described such splendid edifices in his verses, he made answer that fabrics of the imagination are erected with little, and those of stone and mortar, with great, cost. His death, the result of indigestion, owing to the rapidity with which he took his meals in order to return to his studies, took place in 1533.

Fully to appreciate the genius of Ariosto we must understand the spirit of his age, for in him were developed, more fully than in any other writer of the period, the qualities, moral and intellectual, that gave their stamp to the memorable epoch of the Renaissance. The taste, the love of beauty, the classical simplicity, the vivid imagination, the ethereal lightness of touch characterising the productions of the great contemporary painters, are united in as high perfection in the verse of Ariosto as on their canvas and frescoes. He had, with the merits of his age, also its shortcomings: the want of moral elevation, the frivolity, and the absence of religious enthusiasm.

He was, therefore, unfitted to be an heroic poet in the stiff old conventional style, and it was not until he had tried and abandoned many subjects chat he discovered himself to be something infinitely more striking and original. At last he discovered in the subject that inspired Pulci and Bojardo, an inexhaustible mine of poetry, and he took up the thread of narrative where Bojardo's unfinished poem had left it, and produced one of the greatest masterpieces in the whole range of literature.

He is matchless in the ease and clearness of his style, which never flags for one moment in the forty-six cantos of the work. He is said to have written with the greatest care, and to have corrected much and erased not a little. The stanza in the first canto:

"La verginella è simile alla rosa,"

he wrote nine times before he was satisfied. Galileo confessed that he owed the lucidity of his style to the assiduous study of Ariosto, but accused him of introducing verses for the sake of the rhyme; but we may pardon an occasional blemish in a work of such immense length.

He tells us himself that he saturated his mind with the spirit of the Latin poets, especially with Catullus, and in his works we find the urbanity of the Augustan age united to a strength and vivacity of imagination unknown to the Romans. With great judgement he improved on the hints they gave him, and the graceful manner in which he occasionally introduces mythological allusions seems to have been Milton's model when he did the same. Although he rates Virgil's flattery of Augustus at its proper value when he says: