Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

When we further investigate the naturalization of Orlando in Italy, we find that all the romantic poems written on his legend inclined to the burlesque. The chivalrous element of love which pervades the Arthurian Cycle, had been extracted and treated after their own fashion by the lyrists of the fourteenth century. That was no immediate concern of the people, nor had the citizens any sympathy with the chivalry of arms. To deal as solemnly with medieval romance as the Northern bards had done, was quite beside the purpose of the improvisatori who refashioned the Chansons de Geste for Italian townsfolk. When, therefore, Pulci undertook to amuse Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, with a tale of Roland, he found his material already stripped of epical sobriety; nor was it hard for him to handle his theme in the spirit of Boccaccio, bent on exhausting every motive of amusement which it might suggest. He assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each canto with the customary invocation to Madonna or a paraphrase of some Church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful thanks or brief good wishes. But Pulci was no mere Cantastorie. The popular style served but for a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire and his mocking levity. Sarcastic Tuscan humor keeps up an obbligato accompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humor is in harmony with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading the Morgante, we must bear in mind that it was written, canto by canto, to be recited in the Palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture of Margutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who listened to it laughing. The Morgante is no naïve production of a simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some for their beauty's sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense for pure mirth.

A careful study of the Morgante Maggiore reveals to the critic three separate strains of style. To begin with, it is clear that we are dealing with two poems fused in one—the first ending with the twenty-third canto, the second consisting of the last five cantos. Between these two divisions a considerable period of time is supposed to have elapsed. The first poem consists of a series of romantic adventures in strange countries, whither Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Astolfo have been driven by the craft of Gano, and where they fight giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with Pagan damsels, after the jovial fashion of knights errant. The second assumes a more heroic tone, and tells in truly thrilling verse the tale of Roncesvalles. But over and above this double material, different in matter and in manner, we trace throughout the whole romance a third element, which seems to be more essentially the poet's own than either his fantastic tissue of adventures or his serious narrative of Roland's death. This third element consists of half-ironical half-sober dissertations, reflective digressions, and brilliant interpolated incidents, among which we have to reckon the splendid episodes of Astarotte and Margutte. So much was clear to my mind when I first read the Morgante, and attempted to comprehend the difficulties it presented to critics like Ginguené and Hallam. Since then the truth of this view has been substantiated by the eminent Italian scholar, Pio Rajna, who has proved that the Morgante is the rifacimento of two earlier popular poems, the first existing in MS. in the Laurentian library, the second entitled La Spagna.[530] Pulci availed himself freely of his popular models, at times repeating the old stanzas with no alteration, but oftener rehandling them and adding to their comic spirit, and interpolating passages of his own invention. Since the two originals differed in character, his rifacimento retained their divers peculiarities, notwithstanding those master-touches which betray the same hand in both of its main sections. But the most precious part of the poem remains Pulci's own. Nothing can deprive him of Margutte and Astarotte; nor without his clever transmutation of the old material would the bulk of the Morgante Maggiore deserve more attention than many similar romances buried in condign oblivion. Between the two parts we may notice a considerable difference of literary merit. The second and shorter is by far the finer in poetic quality, earnestness, and power of treatment. The first is tedious to read. The second inthralls and carries us along.[531]

The poem takes its title from the comic hero Morgante, a giant captured and converted by Orlando in the first Canto.[532] He dies, however, in the twentieth, and the narrative proceeds with no interruption. If we seek for epical unity, in a romance so loosely put together from so many divers sources, we can find it in the treason of Gano. The action turns decisively and frequently upon this single point, returns to it from time to time for fresh motives, and reaches its conclusion in the execution of the traitor after the great deed of crime has been accomplished in the valley dolorous. An Italian of the fifteenth century could not have chosen a motive more suited to the temper and experience of his age, when conspiracies like that of the Pazzi at Florence and the Baglioni at Perugia were frightfully frequent, and when the successful massacre of Sinigaglia made Cesare Borgia the hero of historical romance. Il tradimento, il traditore, the kiss of Judas, the simile of the fox, recur with fatal resonance through all the Cantos of the poem. The style assumes a rugged grandeur of tragic realism, not unworthy of poets of the stamp of our own Webster or Marston, in the passage which describes the tempest by the well at Saragossa, where Gano met Marsilio to plan their fraud, and where the locust-tree let fall its fruit upon the traitor's head.[533] The Morgante is, in truth, the epic of treason, and the character of Gano, as an accomplished yet not utterly abandoned Judas, is admirably sustained throughout. The powerful impression of his perversity is heightened by contrast with the loyalty of his son Baldovino. In the fight at Roncesvalles Baldovino carries a mantle given to Gano by the Saracen king, without knowing for what purpose his father made him wear it; and wherever he charges through the press of men, the foes avoid him. Orlando learns that he is protected by this ensign of fraud, and accuses him of partaking in Gano's treason. Then the youth flings the cloak from his shoulders, and plunges into the fight with an indignant repudiation of this shame upon his lips. The scene is not unworthy of the Iliad;[534] and his last words, as he falls pierced in the breast with two lances, Or non son io più traditiore! are dramatic.

Pulci deserves credit for strong delineation of character. Through all the apish tricks and fantastic arabesque-work of his style, the chief personages retain firmly-marked types. Never since the Chanson de Roland was first sung, has a more heroic portrait of Orlando, the God-fearing knight, obedient to his liege-lord, serene in his courage and gentle in his strength, courteous, pious and affectionate, been painted.[535] Close adherence to the popular conception of Orlando's character here stood Pulci in good stead; nor was he hampered with the difficulties which beset Boiardo and Ariosto, when they showed the champion of Christianity subdued to madness and to love. Thus one work at least of the Renaissance maintained for the Italians an ideal of chivalrous heroism, first conceived by Franco-Norman bards, and afterwards transmitted through the fancy of the people, who are ever ready to discern and to preserve the lineaments of greatness. Oliver the true friend and doughty warrior, Rinaldo the fiery foe and reckless lover, to whom the press of men was Paradise,[536] and Malagigi the magician, are drawn with no less skill. Charles is such as the traditions of the myth and the requirements of the plot obliged Pulci to make him. Yet in spite of the feebleness which exposes him to the treasonable arts of Gano, he is not deficient in a certain nobility. In the conduct of these characters, amid the windings of the poet's freakish fancy, we trace the solidity of his plan, his faculty for earnest art. But should there still be found critics who, after a careful study of Gano, Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Carlo, think that Pulci meant his poem for a mere burlesque, this opinion cannot but be shaken by a perusal of the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh Cantos. The refusal of Orlando to blow his horn:

Non sonerò perchè e' m'aiuti Carlo, Chè per viltà mai non volli sonarlo:

his address to the knights when rushing into desperate battle at impossible odds[537]; the scene of his death, so tender in its pathos, so quaint in its piety; the agony of Charles when he comes, too late, to find him slain, and receives his sword from the Paladin's dead hands; these passages must surely be enough to convince the most incredulous of doctrinaires.

It has been customary to explain the apparent contradictions of the Morgante Maggiore—Pulci's brusque transitions from piety to ribaldry, from pathos to satire—by reference to the circumstances of Florence at the date of its composition. The republic was at war with Sixtus IV., who had taken part in the Pazzi conspiracy. To his Bull of excommunication the Signoria had retorted by terming it "maledictam maledictionem damnatissimi judicis," and had described the Pope himself as "delirum senem," "leno matris suæ, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius." It was not to be expected that even an orthodox Christian should be tender toward the vices of the clergy or careful in guarding his religious utterances at such a moment. Yet we need not go far afield to account for Pulci's profanity. The Italians of the age in which he lived, were freethinkers without ceasing to be Catholics. To begin a Canto with a prayer, and to end it with speculations on the destiny of the soul after death, was consistent with their intellectual temper. The schools and private coteries of Florence were the arena in which Platonism and Averroism waged war with orthodoxy, where questions of freewill and creation, the relation of man to God, and the essence of the human spirit, were being discussed with a philosophic indifference and warmth of curiosity that prepared the way for Pomponazzi's materialism. Criticism, the modern Hercules, was already in its cradle, strangling the serpents of sacerdotal authority: and as yet the Inquisition had not become a power of terror; the Council of Trent and the Spanish tyranny had not turned Italians into trembling bigots or sleek hypocrites. Externally they remained tenacious of their old beliefs; and from the point of view of art at least, they were desirous of adhering to tradition. For Pulci to have celebrated Orlando without assuming the customary style of the cantastorie, would have been beside his purpose. Therefore, the mixture of magic, theology, impiety, speculation and religious fervor which perplexes a reader of the present day in the Morgante, corresponded to the mental attitude of the educated majority at Pulci's date. On the border-land between the middle ages and the modern world the keen Italian intellect loved to entertain itself with a perpetual perhaps, impartially including in the sphere of doubt old dogmas and novel hypotheses, and finding satisfaction in an insecurity that flattered it with the sense of disengagement from formulæ.[538] With some minds this volatile questioning was serious; with others it assumed a Rabelaisian joviality. Pulci ranked with those who made the problems of the world material for humorous debate.

A few instances of Pulci's peculiar levity might be selected from the last Cantos of the Morgante, where no one can maintain that his intention was burlesque. We have just heard from the minstrel's lips how Roland died, recommending his soul to God and delivering his glove in sign of feudal fealty to Gabriel. The sound of his horn has startled Charlemagne from the sleep of false tranquillity, and the Emperor is on his way to Roncesvalles. But time is short. He prays Christ that as of old for Joshua, so now for him in his sore need, the sun may be stayed and the day be prolonged[539]:

O crucifisso, il qual, già sendo in croce, Oscurasti quel sol contra natura; Io ti priego, Signor, con umil voce Infin ch'io giunga in quella valle oscura, Che tu raffreni il suo corso veloce.