These abstracts of Ariosto's so-called Satires will not be reckoned superfluous when we consider the clear light they cast upon his personal character and philosophy. The note of sincerity throughout is unmistakable. No one can read the pure and simple language of the poet without feeling that his mind was as transparent as his style, his character as ingenuous as his diction was perspicuous. When he tells us, for example, that he does not care for honors, that he prefers his study to the halls of princes, and that a turnip in his own house tastes better than the pheasants of a ducal table, we believe him. His confession of unseasonable love, and his acknowledgment that he has none of the qualities of judge or ruler, are a security for equal frankness when he professes himself free from avarice and the common vices of his age. His satire upon women, his picture of the Roman prelates, his portraits of great men, and his condemnation of the humanists are convincing by their very moderation. Like Horace, he plays about the heart instead of wielding the whip of Lucilius. This parsimony of expression adds weight to his censure, and renders these epistles more decisive than the invectives in which contemporary authors indulged. We doubt the calumnies of Poggio and Filelfo until we read the well-considered passage of the seventh Epistle, which includes them all.[624] In like manner the last lines of the fourth Epistle confirm the Diaries of Burchard and Infessura, while the first contains an epitome of all that could be said of Alexander's nepotism. These familiar poems have, therefore, a singular value for the illustration of the Italian Renaissance in general no less than for that of Ariosto's own life. Furthermore, they are unique in the annals of Italian literature. The terza rima of Dante's vision has here become a vehicle for poetry separated by the narrowest interval from prose. It no longer lends itself to parody, as in the Beoni of Lorenzo de' Medici. It is not contaminated by the foul frivolities of the Bernesque Capitoli. It takes with accuracy the impress of the writer's common thought and feeling. The meter designed to express a sublime belief, adapts itself to the discursive utterance of a man of sense and culture in a disillusioned age; and thus we might use the varying fortunes of terza rima to symbolize the passage from the trecento to the cinque cento, from Dante to Ariosto, from faith and inspiration to art and reflection.
Ariosto's minor poems, with but one or two exceptions, have direct reference to the circumstances of his life. They consist of Elegies, Capitoli, and an Eclogue composed in terza rima, with Canzoni, Sonnets, and Madrigals of the type made obligatory by Petrarch. The poet of the Orlando was not great in lyric verse. These lesser compositions show his mastery of simple and perspicuous style; but the specific qualities of his best work, its color and imagery and pointed humor, are absent. The language is sometimes pedestrian in directness, sometimes encumbered with conceits that anticipate the taste of the seventeenth century.[625] Where it is plainest, we lack the seasoning of epigram and illustration which enlivens the Satires; and though the sincere feeling and Ovidian fluency of the more ambitious lyrics render them delightful reading, we acknowledge that a wider channel of description or narrative or reflection was needed for the full tide of the poet's eloquence. The purely subjective style was hardly suited to his genius.
Only three Canzoni are admitted into the canon of Ariosto's works. The first relates the origin of his love for Alessandra Benucci, wife of Tito Strozzi, whom he admired as wife and married as widow. It was on S. John's Day in the year 1513 that he saw her at Florence among the gay crowd of the midsummer festival. She was dressed in black silk embroidered with two vines, her golden hair twisted into heavy braids, and her forehead overshadowed with a jeweled laurel-wreath. The brightness of the scene was blotted out for the poet, and swallowed in the intense luster of her beauty:
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D'altro ch'io vidi, tenni Poco ricordo, e poco me ne cale: Sol mi restò immortale Memoria, ch'io non vidi in tutta quella Bella città, di voi cosa più bella. |
How much he admired Florence, he tells us in the fourteenth elegy, where this famous compliment occurs:
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Se dentro un mur, sotto un medesmo nome Fosser raccolti i tuoi palazzi sparsi, Non ti sarian da pareggiar due Rome. |
The second Canzone is supposed to be spoken by the soul of Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, to his widow, Filiberta of Savoy. Elevation of conception raises the language of this poem to occasional sublimity, as in the passage where he speaks of immortality:
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Di me t'incresca, ma non altrimente Che, s'io vivessi ancor, t'incresceria D'una partita mia Che tu avessi a seguir fra pochi giorni: E se qualche e qualch'anno anco soggiorni Col tuo mortale a patir caldo e verno, Lo dêi stimar per un momento breve, Verso quel altro, che mai non riceve Nè termine nè fin, viver eterno. |
The undulation of rhythm obeying the thought renders these lines in a high sense musical.
Some of the Elegies have been already used in illustration of other poems. There remain a group apart, which seem to have been directly modeled upon Ovid. Of these the sixth, describing a night of love, and the seventh, when the lover dares not enter his lady's door in moonlight lest he should be seen, are among the finest. The ninth, upon fidelity in love, contains these noble lines: