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Dovunque drizza Michelangel l'ale, Fuggon le nubi, e torna il ciel sereno; Gli gira intorno un aureo cerchio, quale Veggiam di notte lampeggiar baleno. |
He flies straight to a monastery, expecting to find Silence there. The choir, the parlor, the dormitory, the refectory are searched. Wherever he goes, he sees Silenzio written up: but Silence cannot be found. Instead of him, Discord presents herself, and is recognized by her robe of many-colored fluttering ribbons, disheveled hair, and an armful of law-papers. Fraud, too, accosts the angel with a gentle face like Gabriel's when he said Ave! To Michael's question after Silence, Fraud replies: he used to live in convents and the cells of sages; but now he goes by night with thieves, false coiners and lovers, and you may find him in the houses of treason and homicide. Yet if you are very anxious to lay hands on him at once, haste to the haunt of Sleep. This cavern is described in stanzas that undoubtedly suggested Spenser's; but Ariosto has nothing so delicate as:
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A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down, And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sown Of swarming bees. |
Instead, he paints in his peculiar style of realistic imagery, the corpulent form of Ease, Sloth that cannot walk and scarce can stand, Forgetfulness who bars the door to messengers, and Silence walking round the cave with slippers of felt. Silence, summoned by the archangel, sets forth to meet Rinaldo. Discord also quits the convent with her comrade Pride, leaving Fraud and Hypocrisy to keep their places warm till they return. But Discord does her work inadequately; and the cries of Rodomonte's victims rise to heaven. This rouses Michael from his slumber of beatitude. He blushes, plumes his pinions, and shoots down again to earth in search of Discord among the monks. He finds her sitting in a chapter convened for the election of officers, and makes her in a moment feel his presence:[16]
This is a good specimen both of Ariosto's peculiar levity and of the romantic style which in the most serious portion of his poem permitted such extravagance. The robust archangel tearing Discord's disheveled hair, kicking her, pounding her with his fists, breaking a cross upon her back, and sending her about her business with a bee in her bonnet, presents a picture of drollery which is exceedingly absurd. Nor is there any impropriety in the picture from the poet's point of view. Michael and the Evangelist are scarcely serious beings. They both form part of his machinery and help to make the action move.
Broad fun, untinctured by irony, seasons the Furioso—as when Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into the sea, and mounts his Ethiopian cavalry on horses made of stone, and catches the wind in a bladder; all of which burlesque miracles are told with that keen relish of their practical utility which formed an element of Ariosto's sprightliness.[17] Ruggiero's pleasure-trip on Rabicane; Orlando's achievement of spitting six fat Dutchmen like frogs upon one spear; the index to Astolfo's magic book; the conceit of the knights who jousted with the golden lance and ascribed its success to their own valor; Orlando's feats of prowess with the table in the robber's den; are other instances of Ariosto's lightheartedness, when he banters with his subject and takes his readers into confidence with his own sense of drollery.[18] The donkey race in armor between Marfisa and Zerbino for a cantankerous old hag, with its courteous ceremonies and chivalrous conclusion, might be cited as an example of more sustained humor.[19] And such, too, though in another region, is the novel of Jocondo.
Ariosto's irony, no less than his romantic method, deprived the Furioso of that sublimity which only belongs to works of greater seriousness and deeper conviction. Yet he sometimes touches the sublime by force of dramatic description or by pathetic intensity. The climax of Orlando's madness has commonly been cited as an instance of poetic grandeur. Yet I should be inclined to prefer the gathering of the storm of discord in Agramante's camp.[20] The whole of this elaborate scene, where the fiery characters and tempestuous passions of the Moslem chiefs, of Ruggiero, Rodomonte, Gradasso, Mandricardo, and Marfisa, are brought successively into play by impulses and motives natural to each and powerful to produce a clash of adverse claims and interests, is not only conceived and executed in a truly dramatic spirit, but is eminently important for the action of the poem. The thunder-clouds which had been mustering to break in ruin upon Christendom, rush together and spend their fury in mid air. Thus the moment is decisive, and nothing has been spared to dignify the passions that provoke the final crash. They go on accumulating in complexity, like a fugue of discords, till at last the hyperbole of this sonorous stanza that seems justified:[21]
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Tremò Parigi, e turbidossi Senna All'alta voce, a quell'orribil grido; Rimbombò il suon fin alla selva Ardenna Sì che lasciâr tutte le fiere il nido. Udiron l'Alpi e il monte di Gebenna, Di Blaia e d'Arli e di Roano il lido; Rodano e Sonna udì, Garonna e il Reno: Si strinsero le madri i figli al seno. |
His pathos also has its own sublimity. Imogen stretched lifeless on the corpse of Cloten; the Duchess of Malfi telling Cariola to see that her daughter says her prayers; Bellario describing his own sacrifice as a mere piece of boyhood flung away—these are instances from our own drama, in which the pathetic is sublime. Ariosto's method is different, and the effect is more rhetorical. Yet he can produce passages of almost equal poignancy, prolonged situations of overmastering emotion, worthy to be set side by side with the Euripidean pictures of Polyxena, Alcestis, or Iphigenia.[22] The death of Zerbino; the death of Brandimarte with half of Fiordeligi's name upon his lips; the constancy of Isabella offering her neck to Rodomonte's sword; the anguish of Olimpia upon the desert island; are instances of sublime poetry wrung from pathos by the force of highly-wrought impassioned oratory. Zerbino is one of the most sympathetic creations of the poet's fancy. Of him Ariosto wrote the famous line:[23]