Conforming to the spurious piety of this monkish taste, a voluminous commentary expounded the morality of the ravishing versatilities of Ariosto. Berni gravely assured us that all the marvels of enchanted gardens, voluminous dragons, sylvan savages, and monsters with human faces, were only thrown out for the amusement of the ignorant; and concludes with these memorable lines, which he freely borrowed from the father of Italian poesy—
| Ma voi ch’avete gl’intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde, Sotto queste coperte alte e profonde![2] |
“But ye of sounder intellect admire the wisdom hidden under these coverings, high and profound!” A strain so solemn and melodious was not the least exquisite pleasantry from a burlesque satirist!
Camoens having adopted the Grecian mythology in his Christian epic, recourse was had to a mystic allegory to defend the incongruity; when Vasco de Gama and his companions sport with Thetis and her nymphs, allegorically, though in good earnest, some Portuguese commentator has explained how “these phantastic amours signify the wild sects of different enthusiasts in the most rational institutions, which, however contrary to each other, all agree in deriving their authority from the same source.” To such ineptitudes are the allegorists sometimes driven, from the sickly taste of gratifying the infirmity of readers by cloaking their freest inventions in the garb of piety and morality. Thus the popular literature of Europe was overrun by these adumbrations. Even Milton echoed the occult doctrine which he had caught from the seers of the old Romanzatori—those Gothic Homers in whose spells he had been bound:—
| Forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear. |
While this mania of allegorising fictitious narratives was in vogue, a remarkable occurrence, had it been publicly known, might have let the initiated into a secret more “high and profound” than any of their esoteric revelations, and might have exposed the imposture which had been so long practised on their simplicity. The hapless Tasso was harassed by a most “stiff-necked” generation of “the learned Romans,” as he calls the Classicists—a mob of signori, of mechanical critics, protesting against his potent inventions.
| Magnanima Mensogna, hor quando è il vero Si bello che si posse à te preporre. |
The forest incantations of Ismen, and the enchantments of Armida, those true creations of Gothic romance, were on the point of utter perdition. In this extremity the poet decided to have recourse to the prevalent folly of fitting an allegory to his epic. He acknowledges to his confidential friend that the whole was only designed to humour the times, and begs that he may not be laughed at. “I will act the profound, and show that I have a deep political purpose;” and he might have added a whole system of ethics which has been extorted from the presumed allegory. “Under this shield,” he proceeds, “I shall endeavour to protect the loves and the enchantments”—those golden leaves which the furious classicists would have torn out of his romantic epic. By this singular fact we are led to this important discovery, that to allegorise is no difficult affair, for the present allegory was “the work of a single morning!”[3]
Tasso’s confession is a perpetual demonstration of the fallacies of allegory. We must wholly rid ourselves of “gl’ intelletti sani,” if we doubt that the original writers who have been so largely allegorised ever composed an extended fictitious narrative but in all the freedom of invention, in open daylight, and never seeking to hide nature in secret coverts.