"His long-spun allegories tiresome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below."
The moral may be there, but it would require a diviner's rod to detect its presence, and the skill of him who set himself to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, to draw it thence.
The "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto is a continuation of the "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo, lord of Scandiano, his contemporary, but elder, the latter having died in the year 1494. The relative circumstances of the two poems form one of the most curious chapters in the history of literature. Boiardo's work, in the original, is comparatively little known, and less read, even in Italy; but it has been made famous throughout the world, by having given birth to its more illustrious successor. Whatever were the defects of the one author, or the excellences of the other, Ariosto was undoubtedly indebted to his forerunner, not only for many of the most powerful and captivating fictions of his poem, but for its intelligibility and popularity from the beginning. The latter was an immense advantage: half of the success in a race depends upon a good start; the eagle himself cannot rise from flat ground as from the rock, whence he launches at once into mid-air. By the "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci, the legends and songs of the Provençals, and the pretended chronicle of archbishop Turpin, the public mind had been familiarised with the traditions concerning Arthur and his knights of the round table; of Merlin the British enchanter, and the Lady of the Lake; and of Charlemagne and his peers. Yet it was the intense interest and curiosity excited by Boiardo's magnificent but uncompleted plot, which (so far as the principal personages are concerned), like
"The story of a bear and fiddle,
Begins, but breaks off in the middle"—
it was these which had prepared the eager and delighted multitude of readers, or rather listeners, for any sequel to his "tales of wonder," which should keep up the spirit of the original, and bring it to a crowning conclusion. These, therefore, with transport proportioned to their surprise, hailed the appearance of Ariosto's production, when, after having been long promised, they found that it not only exceeded their expectations, but eclipsed in splendour, beauty, and variety, the prototype itself. This was so remarkably the case, that one of the wittiest and most ingenious of his contemporaries recomposed the whole of Boiardo's poem; imitating, with farcical extravagance, the fine raillery and unapproachable humour of Ariosto; and falling in the same ratio beneath him in elegance, majesty, and grace, when the themes admitted or required adornment. Thus, by an unexampled fatality, the "Orlando Innamorato" was outshone by a sequel, and superseded by a rifacimento (we have no English word to express the renovating process). Authors themselves have almost universally failed in second parts to their most successful performances; and as rarely have they re-written such works, so as to take place of the first form in which they obtained public favour[110]; yet here, on the one hand, is a second part, by an imitator, that leaves the original in obscurity, yet covers it with glory—like Butler's description of die moon's veil—
"Mysterious veil! of brightness made,
At once her lustre and her shade;"
while, on the other hand, we have the example of a new gloss of that original, by a meddler becoming the substitute for it, like the new skin of a serpent when the old slough is cast aside.
The mischances of Boiardo's poem ended not here. It was not published during the author's life, except by oral communication among his friends; what he had composed, had not received the corrections due to its worth and his own talents; and the work itself being left imperfect at the ninth canto, one Nicolo degli Agostini took up the strain there, and added so much matter as brought the various subjects involved in it to a consistent termination. A fourth experiment was made upon this polypus production, which multiplied its vitality the more, the more it was mangled. Ludovico Dominici recomposed the whole, and printed the metamorphosis at Venice in 1545: of this, several editions appeared; but it neither supplanted Berni's, nor even rivalled the original in popularity. Thus the love and madness of Orlando was conceived, and partly executed, by one mind; continued to a certain point by another; new-modelled and incorporated with his own inventions by a third; re-written by a fourth; but, above all, imitated, completed, and excelled by a fifth.
The felicity of fortune which distinguished Ariosto's poem, was not less rare than the eccentric transmigrations to which Boiardo's was condemned. The "Orlando Furioso" was both an imitation and a sequel of the "Orlando Innamorato;" yet, contrary to all precedent, and without example in subsequent literature, the imitation surpassed the original, and the sequel the first draught. It was the offspring of one mind; it was produced entire by the inventor, and never altered by any hand but his own. Yet, after its first completion, it underwent a process of revisal nearly as long and laborious as that of composition; like a bird, it arrived not at the perfection of its song, or the full glory of its plumage, in the breeding season, nor till after its first moulting. It is strange, that, with all these advantages, there should still remain several glaring inconsistencies, which one hour's pains would have removed, had the author been aware of what any ordinary reader might detect.
The poem consists of the contemporaneous adventures of many knights, ladies, and other personages, travelling in all lands, known and unknown, of the old continent, the moon, hell, and purgatory; those of each individual, in fact, forming a distinct story, begun, dropped, renewed, or concluded according to the pleasure of the narrator, who excites and keeps up, by every species of provoking artifice, the tortured yet unwearying curiosity of his hearers. And these materials, anomalous as they may seem, and as they are, he moulds and mixes with inimitable skill, and bodies them forth, as by magic, into such captivating forms, by varying, interweaving, disentangling, and cutting short the numberless threads of his many-coloured web, that he fails not to produce a present effect in every passage, with little recollection on the reader's part of its agreement with the past, as little regard to its connection with any thing but itself, and no care whatever about its future influence on the issue of the whole. The fable is a hydra, of which the Orlando, whose name it bears, is only one of the heads; and no otherwise entitled to pre-eminence, than as the hero of some of the most stupendous, amusing, and puerile events in a series not less heterogeneous or tragi-comic than the changes and chances of a holiday pantomime. It cannot be denied that the poem has a beginning and an end, with a prodigious quantity of action between, as the succession of pages, and the number of cantos, evince; but to prove that it has a necessary beginning, a decided progress, and a satisfactory end, would be a task which the author himself would have laughed to see a critic employed upon.