It is supposed that the character of Ashtaroth, which is a very new and extraordinary one, and does great honour to the daring goodness of Pulci's imagination, was not lost upon Milton, who was not only acquainted with the poem, but expressly intimates the pleasure he took in it.[11] Rinaldo advises this devil, as Burns did Lucifer, to "take a thought and mend." Ashtaroth, who had been a seraph, takes no notice of the advice, except with a waving of the recollection of happier times. He bids the hero farewell, and says he has only to summon him in order to receive his aid. This retention of a sense of his former angelical dignity has been noticed by Foscolo and Panizzi, the two best writers on these Italian poems.[12] A Calvinist would call the expression of the sympathy "hardened." A humanist knows it to be the result of a spirit exquisitely softened. An unbounded tenderness is the secret of all that is beautiful in the serious portion of our author's genius. Orlando's good-natured giant weeps even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte; and the awful hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the heavens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has wronged it.
A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, perhaps, owing the best part of its charmingness to its being connected with the same feeling, is his wit. Foscolo, it is true, says it is, in general, more severe than refined; and it is perilous to differ with such a critic on such a point; for much of it, unfortunately, is lost to a foreign reader, in consequence of its dependance on the piquant old Tuscan idiom, and on popular sayings and allusions. Yet I should think it impossible for Pulci in general to be severe at the expense of some more agreeable quality; and I am sure that the portion of his wit most obvious to a foreigner may claim, if not to have originated, at least to have been very like the style of one who was among its declared admirers,—and who was a very polished writer,—Voltaire. It consists in treating an absurdity with an air as if it were none; or as if it had been a pure matter of course, erroneously mistaken for an absurdity. Thus the good abbot, whose monastery is blockaded by the giants (for the virtue and simplicity of his character must be borne in mind), after observing that the ancient fathers in the desert had not only locusts to eat, but manna, which he has no doubt was rained down on purpose from heaven, laments that the "relishes" provided for himself and his brethren should have consisted of "showers of stones." The stones, while the abbot is speaking, come thundering down, and he exclaims, "For God's sake, knight, come in, for the manna is falling!" This is exactly in the style of the Dictionnaire Philosophique. So when Margutte is asked what he believes in, and says he believes in "neither black nor blue," but in a good capon, "whether roast or boiled," the reader is forcibly reminded of Voltaire's Traveller, Scarmentado, who, when he is desired by the Tartars to declare which of their two parties he is for, the party of the black-mutton or the white-mutton, answers, that the dish is "equally indifferent to him, provided it is tender." Voltaire, however, does injustice to Pulci, when he pretends that in matters of belief he is like himself,—a mere scoffer. The friend of Lucrezia Tornabuoni has evidently the tenderest veneration for all that is good and lovely in the Catholic faith; and whatever liberties he might have allowed himself in professed extravaganzas, when an age without Church-authority encouraged them, and a reverend canon could take part in those (it must be acknowledged) unseemly "high jinks," he never, in the Morgante, when speaking in his own person, and not in that of the worst characters, intimates disrespect towards any opinion which he did not hold to be irrelevant to a right faith. It is observable that his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, and a most extraordinary personage. He is the first unmitigated blackguard in fiction, and is the greatest as well as first. Pulci is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his consideration, nevertheless, towards the poor selfish wretch who had had no better training.
To this wit and this pathos let the reader add a style of singular ease and fluency,—rhymes often the most unexpected, but never at a loss,—a purity of Tuscan acknowledged by every body, and ranking him among the authorities of the language,—and a modesty in speaking of his own pretensions equalled only by his enthusiastic extolments of genius in others; and the reader has before him the lively and affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci, the precursor, and in some respects exemplar, of Ariosto, and, in Milton's opinion, a poet worth reading for the "good use" that may be made of him. It has been strangely supposed that his friend Politian, and Ficino the Platonist, not merely helped him with their books (as he takes a pride in telling us), but wrote a good deal of the latter part of the Morgante, particularly the speculations in matters of opinion. As if (to say nothing of the difference of style) a man of genius, however lively, did not go through the gravest reflections in the course of his life, or could not enter into any theological or metaphysical question, to which he chose to direct his attention. Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or even the disciple of Plato.
[Footnote 1: Literature of the South of Europe, Thomas Roscoe's Translation, vol. ii. p.54. For the opinions of other writers, here and elsewhere alluded to, see Tiraboschi (who is quite frightened at him), Storia della Poesia Italiana, cap. v. sect. 25; Gravina, who is more so, Della Ragion Poetica (quoted in Ginguéné, as below); Crescimbeni, Commentari Intorno all' Istoria della Poesia, &c. lib. vi. cap. 3 (Mathias's edition), and the biographical additions to the same work, 4to, Rome, 1710, vol. ii. part ii. p. 151, where he says that Pulci was perhaps the "modestest sad most temperate writer" of his age ("il pin modesto e moderato"); Ginguéné, Histoire Littéraire d'Italie, tom. iv. p. 214; Foscolo, in the Quarterly Review, as further on; Panizzi on the Romantic Poetry of the Italians, ditto; Stebbing, Lives of the Italian Poets, second edition, vol, i.; and the first volume of Lives of Literary and Scientific Men, in Lardner's Cyclopædia.]
[Footnote 2: Canto xxv. The passage will be found in the present volume.]
[Footnote 3: Id. And this also.]
[Footnote 4: Canto xxvii. stanza 2.
"S' altro ajuto qui non si dimostra,
Sarà pur tragedía la istoria nostra.
Ed io pur commedía pensato avea
Iscriver del mio Carlo finalmente,
Ed Alcuin così mi promettea," &c. ]
[Footnote 5: