"Methinks that I resemble the Venetian
To whom the king of Portugal presented
A noble steed of Mauritanian blood;
Who, to do justice to the royal gift,
Nor once considering, that to turn a helm,
And draw a bridle, are two different things,
Mounted aloft, and with both hands held fast
As at a rudder; then in either flank
Cast anchor with his spurs, and bravely mutter'd,
'I'll warrant ye don't fling me overboard.'
The horse, thus handled, bolted off full speed;
Whereat the gallant seaman pull'd the harder,
And deeper struck the rowels sharp as spears,
Till mouth and reins were tinged with blood and foam.
The beast, not knowing which to obey—the points
That urged him on, or curb that held him back—
With a few desperate plunges rid himself
Of his strange rider; who, with shatter'd ribs,
Crack'd collar-bone, head broken, all begrimed
With mud and dirt, and pale with fright, crawl'd off
In no good humour with his majesty,
And, far away, bewail'd his horsemanship.
Well had it been for him, and well for me,
If for his charger he, I for my province,
Had said,—'O king! O duke! I am not worthy
Of such high honour; graciously bestow
Your bounty on some other.'"
While he was here, M. Bonaventura Pistolfo, secretary to Alfonso, wrote to invite Ariosto to accept a third embassy to Rome; not on a perilous and temporary errand, but to reside there as the representative of his sovereign, "for a year or two," at the court of Clement VII. The poet, however, had sagacity enough to decline putting himself again in the way of Fortune, where, instead of taking him by the hand, on former occasions, she had only splashed him with the mud from her wheel as it rolled through the streets, encumbered with aspiring asses in every stage of transmigration.[106] His correspondent having intimated that, besides complying with the duke's pleasure at Rome, he might stand a chance of obtaining great and fat preferments by favour of a member of the house of Medici, with which he had been so long and courteously acquainted, then filling the papal chair; since it was more probable that he should catch, if he fished in a great river, than in an ordinary stream; he thus replies, in the seventh Satire:—"I thank you, that the desire is ever fresh with you to promote my interest, and to change me from a plough-ox into a Barbary steed. You might command me with fire and sword to serve the duke, not in Rome only, but in France, Spain, or India; but if you would fain persuade me that honour and riches may be got in the way you propose, you must find a different bait, to lure your bird into that net. As for honour, I have already as much as my heart could wish: it is enough for me that, at home, I can see more then half a dozen of my neighbours doff their caps when they meet me, because they know that I sometimes sit at table with the duke, and obtain a trifling favour which I seek for myself or a friend. Then, if I have honour enough to satisfy me, I should have abundance of wealth also; and my desires, which sometimes wander, would be at rest, if I had just so much that I could live, and be at liberty, without having to ask any thing of any one: more than this I never hope to attain. But, since so many of my friends have had the power to do thus much for me, and I still remain in poverty and dependence, I will not let her[107], who was so backward to fly out of the box of the imprudent Epimeteus, to lead me by the muzzle like a buffalo." Towards the close of this epistle, he intimates that it is some unconfessed affection which draws him so tenderly and irresistibly towards his native nest; and adds—"It is well for me that I can hide myself among these mountains, and that your eyes cannot run a hundred miles after me, to see whether my cheeks be pale or red at this acknowledgment. Certainly, if you saw my face at the moment I am writing, far away as I am, it would appear to you as deeply crimsoned as that of the father canon was, when he let fall, in the market-place, the wine-flask which he had stolen from a brother, besides the two that he had drunk. If I were at your elbow, perhaps you would snatch up a cudgel to bastinado me, for alleging such a crazy reason why I wish not to live at a distance from you."
The attachment insinuated in the enigmatical lines, of which the above is a prose version, is with equal ambiguity alluded to in the fourth Satire, addressed to Annibale Maleguccio, where, excusing himself from going abroad, on the ground that he preferred pursuing his studies at home, and confining his voyages and travels, though they extended all over the world, to the maps and charts of Ptolemy, he breaks off thus:—"Methinks you smile and say, 'Neither the love of country nor study, but of a lady, is the cause why you will not move.' I frankly confess it: now shut your mouth; for I will neither take up sword nor shield to defend a fib." This jest has been taken in earnest, though no man in his senses would swear on the word of a poet so uttered. Be that as it may, it is generally understood that his life was sufficiently dissolute to warrant his correspondent's suspicion; and to require him, when so charged, to escape with a pleasantry, though it were accompanied by a blush.
After three years, being released from the cares of his government, Ariosto returned, with entire devotion of his time and talents, to the "sacred college of the Muses;" perfecting his "Orlando" by almost daily touches, the fruits of habitual meditation upon its multifarious subjects, to the last year of his life. He likewise revised several comedies written in his youth, turning them from prose into metre; and composing others. These were so much admired, that they were often acted in the court of Alfonso; persons of the highest rank representing the characters. His earliest and his latest works, therefore, were dramatic, but certainly not his best: that, indeed, could not be expected; theatrical performances being comparatively new in Italy, and, in general, exceedingly crude or exceedingly pedantic. It is said that Ariosto's plays are yet read with delight by his countrymen: the titles of them are,—the "Menechini," borrowed from Plautus; "La Cassaria," "I Suppositi," "La Lena," "Il Negromante," and "La Scholastica;" of which latter, his brother Gabriele furnished the concluding act, Ludovico having left it incomplete. A curious anecdote is told of him when a youth, which is characteristic at once of his phlegm and his acuteness in the practice of his art.—His father, being displeased by some juvenile inadvertence, very severely reprimanded him in the presence of the rest of the family. Ludovico bore the infliction with perfect composure, neither expressing contrition, nor attempting to justify himself. When Nicolo had retired, his brother Gabriele remonstrated with him, both on the imputed fault, and his apparent insensibility of shame or rebuke. Thereupon the poet so promptly and effectually cleared his conduct, that his brother, in great astonishment, asked him why he had not given the same explanation of it to their father. "Because," said the young dramatist, "I was so busily thinking, all the while, how to make the best use of what my father said, in my new comedy, in which I have just such a scene of an old man scolding his boy, that in the ideal, I forgot the real incident."
His seven Satires were also composed during the latter years of his life; but, on account of their irreverence towards high personages both in church and state, they were not published till a convenient time after his death. They are in the form of epistles; and, in fact, were written as such, on real occasions, to the several friends addressed in them. These pieces allude so much to personal and family circumstances, that Ariosto's biographers are more indebted to them than to any other equally authentic source for their materials; and it has been for the like reason, principally, that such copious extracts have been made from the same valuable documents in the foregoing pages. In these remarkable effusions of spleen and pleasantry, there is nothing gaudy or superficial, to attract ordinary readers; nothing forced or unnatural, to produce ostentatious effect. The thoughts are thick-sown; the diction seems to be without effort (the result, no doubt, of consummate art), being pungent and simple, like the best style of conversation, except when the subject, at rare intervals, becomes poetical—when at once the swan of Castaly launches upon the stream, swells into beauty, and rows in gallant state till the water runs shallow again. There is none of the stern indignation of Juvenal, nor the harshness and obscurity of Persius, in these productions; yet, lively, sarcastic, and urbane as they are, there is almost as little resemblance in them to those fine but high-toned compositions of Horace, which were, unquestionably, our author's models—though less for imitation than for rivalry. Like every other species of literature which Ariosto tried, how much soever he may have adorned all, these bosom-communications to his intimate friends are not exempt from occasional obscenities, so repulsive and abominable, that they cannot be commended and dismissed without this mark of infamy, which no merits can efface.
Whether Ariosto, who, according to all accounts, and the lewdness of his writings, led no very chaste life, were married or not; and, if married, to whom; are questions which have puzzled his biographers, and are now of little moment to be settled: no proof of marriage would redeem his character, or purify his most beautiful poems from the moral defilement that cleaves to them. His Muse had the plague, and all her offspring are diseased. An author is not answerable to posterity for the evil of his mortal life, but for the profligacy of that life which he lives through after ages, contaminating by irrepressible and incurable infection the minds of millions—it may be, till the day of judgment,—he is amenable even in his grave. It is not necessary to enter further into judgment with the offender before us in this place.
Married, or not married, Ariosto had two sons, whom he not only openly avowed as such, but faithfully and affectionately educated them, according to his knowledge and views of what is good and honourable in society, for scholars and gentlemen, as he intended them to be. His epistle to cardinal Bembo (the sixth Satire) is highly creditable to his parental solicitude for the welfare of his children in this respect: indeed, he seems to have been exemplary in every relationship of life, except that which requires personal purity,—a virtue little regarded either by laymen or ecclesiastics in his day; and, judging by the deeper taint of their writings, as well as the evidence of their lives, often held in less esteem by the latter than the former.
Towards the close of the year 1532, Ariosto was seized with illness, brought on, it was said, by agitation, when the sumptuous theatre erected by the duke of Ferrara, for the exhibition of his comedies, was consumed by fire; or, as his physicians, with more probability, conjectured, by indigestion, from the habit of eating fast, and bolting his food almost unmasticated. Whatever might have been the cause, the disorder terminated in his death about the midsummer following.
In the same year that he was thus mortally stricken, he had put his last hand to the "Orlando Furioso," and left the poem in that form in which it appears, in forty-six cantos; the five additional ones, which have always been deemed unworthy of such a connection, having been published for the first time in 1545, twelve years afterwards. Among what may be deemed the apocryphal traditions concerning Ariosto, it has been affirmed and contradicted, with very questionable evidence on either side, that he received the laurel from the hands of the emperor Charles V., in the city of Mantua, twelve months before his death. The very circumstance of a reasonable doubt being raised respecting a fact, which, if it had occurred, must have been known throughout all Italy, Germany, France, and Spain, seems almost sufficient to invalidate the story. One of his biographers (Minchino) says, that when Ariosto felt the crown upon his brows, placed there by so august a personage, he went beside himself for joy; and ran about the streets as much out of his wits, for the time, as his own hero. It may be remarked, that nothing could have been more out of character than such extravagance in a person of Ariosto's temperament, who (whatever licence he granted to his Muse in his writings, or to his passions in secret), in public, always maintained a dignity and manliness of demeanour, which commanded respect, and showed that he never forgot his honourable birth, or waved the consciousness of intellectual superiority; though he was careful that neither of these advantages should encroach upon the jealous or vindictive sensibility of others.
Ariosto in person was tall and strong-boned, but stooping a little, and slow in his gait as well as in all his motions. His countenance, judging from Titian's portrait,—the lofty forehead a little bald, the black curled locks behind, and corresponding beard upon a jutting chin, the elevated brows above the dark bright eyes, the Roman nose, lips eloquently moulded, teeth "passing even and white," thin cheeks, complexion slightly olive, long visage, well-proportioned neck, and shoulders square,—his countenance, with features such as these, might altogether have been deemed the beau idéal which the first painter had conceived of the first poet of the age, had not contemporary testimonies assured us that the whole was not more happily than correctly copied from the living model.