After the more finished portrait of Bradamante, we find in Isabella and Fiordeligi, the lovers of Zerbino and Brandimarte, Ariosto's purest types of feminine affection. The cardinal virtue of woman in his eyes was self-devotion—loyalty to the death, unhesitating sacrifice of wealth, ease, reputation, life, to the one object of passionate attachment. And this self-devotion he has painted in Olimpia no less romantically than in Isabella and Fiordeligi. Still it must be remembered that Isabella had eloped with Zerbino from her father's palace, that Fiordeligi was only a wife in name, and that Olimpia murdered her first husband and consoled herself very rapidly for Bireno's loss in the arms of Oberto. The poet has not cared to interweave with either portrait such threads of piety and purity as harmonize the self-abandonment of Juliet. Fiordespina's ready credence of the absurd story by which Ricciardetto persuades her that he is Bradamante metamorphosed by a water-fairy to a man, and her love longings, so frankly confessed, so unblushingly indulged, illustrate the passion Ariosto delighted to describe. He feels a tender sympathy for feminine frailty, and in more than one exquisitely written passage claims for women a similar license in love to that of men.[32] Indeed, he never judges a woman severely, unless she adds to her want of chastity the spitefulness of Gabrina or the treachery of Orrigille or the cupidity of Argia or the heartlessness of Angelica. Angelica, who in the Innamorato touches our feelings by her tenderness for Rinaldo, in the Furioso becomes a mere coquette, and is well punished by her insane passion for the first pretty fellow that takes her fancy. The common faults for which Ariosto taxes women are cupidity, infidelity, and fraud.[33] The indulgence due to them from men is almost cynically illustrated by the story of Adonio and the magic virtues of Merlin's goblet.[34] In the preface to the fifth canto he condemns the brutality of husbands, and in the tenth he recommends ladies to be free of their favors to none but middle-aged lovers.[35]
Ariosto's morality was clearly on a level with that of the novelists from Boccaccio to Bandello; and his apology is that he was not inferior to the standard of his age. Still it is not much to his credit to plead that his cantos are less impure than the Capitoli of Monsignore La Casa or the prurient comedies of Aretino. Even allowing for the laxity of Renaissance manners, it must be conceded that he combined vulgar emotions and a coarse-fibered nature with the most refined artistic genius.[36] Our Elizabethan drama, in spite of moral crudity, contains nothing so cynical as Ariosto's novel of Jocondo. The beauty of its style, the absence of tragedy in its situations or of passion in its characters, and the humorous smile with which the poet acts as showman to the secrets of the alcove, render this tale one of the most licentious in literature. Nor is this licentiousness balanced by any sublimer spiritual quality. His ideal of manliness is physical force and animal courage. Cruelty and bloodshed for the sake of slaughter stain his heroes.[37] The noblest conflict of emotion he portrays is the struggle between love and honor in Ruggiero,[38] and the contest of courtesy between Ruggiero and Leone.[39] In the few passages where he celebrates the chivalrous ideal, he dwells chiefly on the scorn of gain and the contempt for ease which characterized the errant knighthood.[40]
The style of the Furioso is said to have taught Galileo how to write Italian. This style won from him for Ariosto the title of divine. As the luminous and flowing octave stanzas pass before us, we are almost tempted to forget that they are products of deliberate art. The beauty of their form consists in its limpidity and naturalness. Ariosto has no mannerism. He always finds exactly the expression needed to give clearness to the object he presents. Whether the mood be elegiac or satiric, humorous or heroic, idyllic or rhetorical, this absolute sincerity and directness of language maintains him at an even level. In each case he has given the right, the best, the natural investiture to thought, and his phrases have the self-evidence of crystals. Just as he collected the materials of his poem from all sources, so he appropriated every word that seemed to serve his need. The vocabulary of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the racy terms of popular poetry, together with Latinisms and Lombardisms, were alike laid under contribution. Yet these diverse elements were so fused together and brought into a common toning by his taste that, though the language of his poem was new, it was at once accepted as classical. When we remember the difficulties which in his days beset Italian composition, when we call to mind the frigid experiments of Bembo in Tuscan diction, the meticulous proprieties of critics like Speron Speroni, and the warfare waged around the Gerusalemme Liberata, we know not whether to wonder at Ariosto's happy audacities in language or at their still happier success. His triumph was not won without severe labor. He spent ten years in the composition of the Furioso and sixteen in its polishing. The autograph at Ferrara shows page upon page of alteration, transposition, and refinement on the first draught, proving that the Homeric limpidity and ease we now admire, were gained by assiduous self-criticism. The result of this long toil is that there cannot be found a rough or languid or inharmonious passage in an epic of 50,000 lines. If we do not discern in Ariosto the inexhaustible freshness of Homer, the sublime music of Milton, the sculpturesque brevity of Dante, the purity of Petrarch, or the majestic sweetness of Virgilian cadences, it can fairly be said that no other poet is so varied. None mingles strength, sweetness, subtlety, rapidity, rhetoric, breadth of effect and delicacy of suggestion, in a harmony so perfect. None combines workmanship so artistic with a facility that precludes all weariness. Whether we read him simply to enjoy his story or to taste the most exquisite flavors of poetic diction, we shall be equally satisfied. Language in his hands is like a soft and yielding paste, which takes all forms beneath the molder's hand, and then, when it has hardened, stays for ever sharp in outline, glittering as adamant.
While following the romantic method of Boiardo and borrowing the polished numbers of Poliziano, Ariosto refined the stanzas of the former poet without losing rapidity, and avoided the stationary pomp of the latter without sacrificing richness. He thus effected a combination of the two chief currents of Italian versification, and brought the octave to its final perfection. When we study the passage which describes the entrance of Ruggiero into the island home of Alcina, we feel the advance in melody and movement that he made. We are reminded of the gardens of Morgana and Venus; but both are surpassed in their own qualities of beauty, while the fluidity that springs from complete command of the material, is added. Such touches as the following:[41]
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Pensier canuto nè molto nè poco Si può quivi albergare in alcun core: |
are wholly beyond the scope of Boiardo's style. Again, this stanza, without the brocaded splendor of Poliziano, contains all that he derived from Claudian:[42]
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Per le cime dei pini e degli allori, Degli alti faggi e degli irsuti abeti, Volan scherzando i pargoletti Amori; Di lor vittorie altri godendo lieti, Altri pigliando a saettare i cori La mira quindi, altri tendendo reti: Chi tempra dardi ad un ruscel più basso, E chi gli aguzza ad un volubil sasso. |
Raphael, Correggio and Titian have succeeded to Botticelli and Mantegna; and as those supreme painters fused the several excellences of their predecessors in a fully-developed work of art, so has Ariosto passed beyond his masters in the art of poetry. Nor was the process one of mere eclecticism. Intent upon similar aims, the final artists of the early sixteenth century brought the same profound sentiment for reality, the same firm grasp on truth, the same vivid imagination as their precursors to the task. But they possessed surer hands and a more accomplished method. They stood above their subject and surveyed it from the height of conscious power.
After the island of Alcina, it only remained for Tasso to produce novelty in his description of Armida's gardens by pushing one of Ariosto's qualities to exaggeration. The dolcezza, which in Tasso is too sugared, has in Ariosto the fine flavor of wild honeycombs. In the tropical magnificence of Tasso's stanzas there is a sultry stupor which the fresh sunlight of the Furioso never sheds. This wilding grace of the Ferrarese Homer is due to the lightness of his touch—to the blending of humorous with luxurious images in a style that passes swiftly over all it paints.[43] After a like fashion, the idyl of Angelica among the shepherds surpasses the celebrated episode of Erminia in the Gerusalemme. It is not that Tasso has not invented a new music and wrung a novel effect from the situation by the impassioned fervor of his sympathy and by the majestic languor of his cadences. But we feel that what Tasso relies on for his main effect, Ariosto had already suggested in combination with other and still subtler qualities. The one has the overpowering perfume of a hothouse jasmine; the other has the mingled scents of a garden where roses and carnations are in bloom.