Natura il fece, e poi ruppe la stampa.
He is killed by the Tartar Mandricardo before his lady Isabella's eyes:[24]
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A questo la mestissima Isabella, Declinando la faccia lacrimosa, E congiungendo la sua bocca a quella Di Zerbin, languidetta, come rosa, Rosa non colta in sua stagion, sì ch'ella Impallidisca in su la siepe ombrosa, Disse: Non vi pensate già, mia vita, Far senza me quest'ultima partita. |
With stanzas like this the poet cheats the sorrow he has stirred in us. Their imagery is too beautiful to admit of painful feeling while we read; and thus, though the passion of the scene is tragic, its anguish is brought by touches of pure art into harmony with the romantic tone of the whole poem. So also when Isabella, kneeling before Rodomonte's sword, like S. Catherine in Luini's fresco at Milan, has met her own death, Ariosto heals the wound he has inflicted on our sensibility by lines of exquisitely cadenced melody:[25]
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Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella. Così i miei versi avesson forza, come Ben m'affaticherei con tutta quella Arte che tanto il parlar orna e come, Perchè mille e mill'anni, e più, novella Sentisse il mondo del tuo chiaro nome. Vattene in pace alla superna sede, E lascia all'altre esempio di tua fede. |
But it is in the situations, the elegiac lamentations, the unexpected vicissitudes, and the strong pictorial beauties of Olimpia's novel, that Ariosto strains his power over pathos to the utmost. Olimpia has lost her kingdom and spent her substance for her husband, Bireno. Orlando aids her in her sore distress, and frees Bireno from his prison. Bireno proves faithless, and deserts her on an island. She is taken by corsairs, exposed like Andromeda on a rock to a sea-monster, and is finally rescued by Orlando. Each of these touching incidents is developed with consummate skill; and the pathos reaches its height when Olimpia, who had risked all for her husband, wakes at dawn to find herself abandoned by him on a desolate sea-beach.[26] In this passage Ariosto comes into competition with two poets of a different stamp—with Catullus, who thus describes Ariadne:
Saxea ut effigies Bacchantis prospicit:
and with Fletcher, who makes Aspatia in the Maid's Tragedy dramatize the situation. Catullus in a single felicitous simile, Fletcher by the agony of passionate declamation, surpass Ariosto's detailed picture. The one is more restrained, the other more tragic. But Ariosto goes straight to our heart by the natural touch of Olimpia feeling for Bireno in the darkness, and by the suggestion of pallid moonlight and a shivering dawn. The numerous prosaic details with which he has charged his picture, add to its reality, and enhance the Euripidean quality we admire in it.
In the case of a poet whose imagination was invariably balanced by practical sound sense, the personal experience he acquired of the female sex could not fail to influence his delineation of women. He was not a man to cherish illusion or to romance in verse about perfection he had never found in fact. He did not place a Beatrice or Laura on the pedestal of his heart; nor was it till he reached the age of forty-seven, when the Furioso had lain for six years finished on his desk, that he married Alessandra Strozzi. His great poem, completed in 1515, must have been written under the influence of those more volatile amours he celebrated in his Latin verses. Therefore we are not surprised to find that the female characters of the Orlando illustrate his epistle on the choice of a wife.[27] His highest ideal of woman is presented to us in Bradamante, whose virtues are a loyal attachment to Ruggiero and a modest submission to the will of her parents. Yet even in Bradamante he has painted a virago from whom the more delicate humanity of Shakspere would have recoiled. The scene in which she quarrels with Marfisa about Ruggiero degrades her in our eyes, and makes us feel that such a termagant might prove a sorry wife.[28] It was almost impossible to combine true feminine qualities with the blood-thirst of an Amazon. Consequently when, just before her marriage, she snuffs the carnage of the Saracens from afar, and regrets that she must withhold her hand from "such rich spoil of slaughter in a spacious field," a painful sense of incongruity is left upon our mind.[29] Marfisa, who remains a warrior to the last, and who in her first girlhood had preserved her virginity by slaughtering a palace-full of Pagans,[30] is artistically justified as a romantic heroine. But Bradamante, destined to become a mother, gentle in her home affections, obedient to her father's wishes, tremulous in her attachment to Ruggiero, cannot with any propriety be compared to a leopard loosed from the leash upon defenseless gazelles.[31] Between the Amazonian virgin and the mother of a race of kings to be, the outline of her character wavers.