[APPENDICES.]
| [No. I.]—Italian Comic Prologues | [533] |
| [No. II.]—Passages Translated from Folengo and Berni, which Illustrate the Lutheran Opinions of the Burlesque Poets | [536] |
| [No. III.]—On Palmieri's "Città di Vita" | [548] |
| [INDEX] | [555] |
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ORLANDO FURIOSO.
Orlando Furioso and Divina Commedia—Ariosto expresses the Renaissance as Dante the Middle Ages—Definition of Romantic, Heroic, Burlesque, Heroic-comic, and Satiric Poems—Ariosto's Bias toward Romance—Sense of Beauty in the Cinque Cento—Choice of Boiardo's unfinished Theme—The Propriety of this Choice—Ariosto's Irony and Humor—The Subject of the Furioso—Siege of Paris—Orlando's Madness—Loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante—Flattery of the House of Este—The World of Chivalry—Ariosto's Delight in the Creatures of his Fancy—Close Structure of the Poem—Exaggeration of Motives—Power of Picture-painting—Faculty of Vision—Minute Description—Rhetorical Amplification—Rapidity of Movement—Solidity—Nicety of Ethical Analysis—The Introductions to the Cantos—Episodes and Novelle—Imitations of the Classics—Power of Appropriation and Transmutation—Irony—Astolfo's Journey to the Moon—Ariosto's Portrait—S. Michael in the Monastery—The Cave of Sleep—Humor—Pathos and Sublimity—Olimpia and Bireno—Conception of Female Character—The Heroines—Passion and Love—Ariosto's Morality—His Style—The Epithet of Divine—Exquisite Finish—Ariosto and Tasso—Little Landscape-Painting—Similes—Realism—Adaptation of Homeric Images—Ariosto's Relation to his Age.
Ariosto's Satires make us know the man intus et in cute—to the very core. The lyrics have a breadth and amplitude of style that mark no common master of the poet's craft. Yet neither the Satires nor the Lyrics reveal the author of the Furioso. The artist in Ariosto was greater than the man; and the Furioso, conceived and executed with no reference to the poet's personal experience, enthroned him as the Orpheus of his age. The Orlando Furioso gave full and final expression to the cinque cento, just as the Divina Commedia uttered the last word of the middle ages. The two supreme Italian singers stood in the same relation to their several epochs. Dante immortalized medieval thoughts and aspirations at the moment when they were already losing their reality for the Italian people. Separated from him by a short interval of time, came Petrarch, who substituted the art of poetry for the prophetic inspiration; and while Petrarch was yet singing, Boccaccio anticipated in his multifarious literature the age of the Renaissance. Then the evolution of Italian literature was interrupted by the classical revival; and when Ariosto appeared, it was his duty to close the epoch which Petrarch had inaugurated and Boccaccio had determined, by a poem investing Boccaccio's world, the sensuous world of the Renaissance, with the refined artistic form of Petrarch. This he accomplished. But even while he was at work, Italy underwent those political and mental changes, in the wars of invasion, in the sack of Rome, in the siege of Florence, in the Spanish occupation, in the reconstruction of the Papacy beneath the pressure of Luther's schism, which ended the Renaissance and opened a new age with Tasso for its poet. Those, therefore, who would comprehend the spirit of Italy upon the point of transition from the middle ages, must study the Divine Comedy. Those who would contemplate the genius of the Renaissance, consummated and conscious of its aim, upon the very verge of transmutation and eventual ruin, must turn to the Orlando Furioso. It seems to be a law of intellectual development that the highest works of art can only be achieved when the forces which produced them are already doomed and in the act of disappearance.[1]