Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 2

by Leigh Hunt

His outward religion, like the one he ascribed to his friend Cardinal Bembo, was "that of other people." He did not think it of use to disturb their belief; yet excused rather than blamed Luther, attributing his heresy to the necessary consequences of mooting points too subtle for human apprehension[41]. He found it impossible, however, to restrain his contempt of bigotry; and, like most great writers in Catholic countries, was a derider of the pretensions of devotees, and the discords and hypocrisies of the convent. He evidently laughed at Dante's figments about the other world; not at the poetry of them, for that he admired, and sometimes imitated, but at the superstition and presumption. He turned the Florentine's moon into a depository of non-sense; and found no hell so bad as the hearts of tyrants. The only other people he put into the infernal regions are ladies who were cruel to their lovers! He had a noble confidence in the intentions of his Creator; and died ill the expectation of meeting his friends again in a higher state of existence.

Of Ariosto's four brothers, one became a courtier at Naples, another a clergyman, another an envoy to the Emperor Charles the Fifth; and the fourth, who was a cripple and a scholar, lived with Lodovico, and celebrated his memory. His two sons, whose names were Virginio and Gianbattista, and who were illegitimate (the reader is always to bear in mind the more indulgent customs of Italy in matters of this nature, especially in the poet's time), became, the first a canon in the cathedral of Ferrara, and the other an officer in the army. It does not appear that he had any other children.

Ariosto's renown is wholly founded on the Orlando Furioso, though he wrote satires, comedies, and a good deal of miscellaneous poetry, all occasionally exhibiting a master-hand. The comedies, however, were unfortunately modelled on those of the ancients; and the constant termination of the verse with trisyllables contributes to render them tedious. What comedies might he not have written, had he given himself up to existing times and manners[42]!

The satires are rather good-natured epistles to his friends, written with a charming ease and straightforwardness, and containing much exquisite sense and interesting autobiography.

On his lyrical poetry he set little value; and his Latin verse is not of the best order. Critics have expressed their surprise at its inferiority to that of contemporaries inferior to him in genius; but the reason lay in the very circumstance. I mean, that his large and liberal inspiration could only find its proper vent in his own language; he could not be content with potting up little delicacies in old-fashioned vessels.

The Orlando Furioso is, literally, a continuation of the Orlando Innamorato; so much so, that the story is not thoroughly intelligible without it. This was probably the reason of a circumstance that would be otherwise unaccountable, and that was ridiculously charged against him as a proof of despairing envy by the despairing envy of Sperone; namely, his never having once mentioned the name of his predecessor. If Ariosto had despaired of equalling Boiardo, he must have been hopeless of reaching posterity, in which case his silence must have been useless; and, in any case, it is clear that he looked on himself as the continuator of another's narration. But Boiardo was so popular when he wrote, that the very silence shews he must have thought the mention of his name superfluous. Still it is curious that he never should have alluded to it in the course of the poem. It could not have been from any dislike to the name itself, or the family; for in his Latin poems he has eulogised the hospitality of the house of Boiardo[43].

The Furioso continued not only what Boiardo did, but what he intended to do; for as its subject is Orlando's love, and knight-errantry in general, so its object was to extol the house of Este, and deduce it from its fabulous ancestor Ruggiero. Orlando is the open, Ruggiero the covert hero; and almost all the incidents of this supposed irregular poem, which, as Panizzi has shewn, is one of the most regular in the world, go to crown with triumph and wedlock the originator of that unworthy race. This is done on the old groundwork of Charlemagne and his Paladins, of the treacheries of the house of Gan of Maganza, and of the wars of the Saracens against Christendom. Bradamante, the Amazonian intended of Ruggiero, is of the same race as Orlando, and a great overthrower of infidels. Ruggiero begins with being an infidel himself, and is kept from the wars, like a second Achilles, by the devices of an anxious guardian, but ultimately fights, is converted, and marries; and Orlando all the while slays his thousands, as of old, loves, goes mad for jealousy, is the foolishest and wisest of mankind (somewhat like the poet himself); and crowns the glory of Ruggiero, not only by being present at his marriage, but putting on his spurs with his own hand when he goes forth to conclude the war by the death of the king of Algiers.

The great charm, however, of the Orlando Furioso is not in its knight-errantry, or its main plot, or the cunning interweavement of its minor ones, but in its endless variety, truth, force, and animal spirits; in its fidelity to actual nature while it keeps within the bounds of the probable, and its no less enchanting verisimilitude during its wildest sallies of imagination. At one moment we are in the midst of flesh and blood like ourselves; at the next with fairies and goblins; at the next in a tremendous battle or tempest; then in one of the loveliest of solitudes; then hearing a tragedy, then a comedy; then mystified in some enchanted palace; then riding, dancing, dining, looking at pictures; then again descending to the depths of the earth, or soaring to the moon, or seeing lovers in a glade, or witnessing the extravagances of the great jealous hero Orlando; and the music of an enchanting style perpetually attends us, and the sweet face of Angelica glances here and there like a bud: and there are gallantries of all kinds, and stories endless, and honest tears, and joyous bursts of laughter, and beardings for all base opinions, and no bigotry, and reverence for whatsoever is venerable, and candour exquisite, and the happy interwoven names of "Angelica and Medoro," young for ever.

But so great a work is not to be dismissed with a mere rhapsody of panegyric. Ariosto is inferior, in some remarkable respects, to his predecessors Pulci and Boiardo. His characters, for the most part, do not interest us as much as theirs by their variety and good fellowship; he invented none as Boiardo did, with the exception, indeed, of Orlando's, as modified by jealousy; and he has no passage, I thick, equal in pathos to that of the struggle at Roncesvalles; for though Orlando's jealousy is pathetic, as well as appalling, the effects of it are confined to one person, and disputed by his excessive strength. Ariosto has taken all tenderness out of Angelica, except that of a kind of boarding-school first love (which, however, as here-after intimated, may have simplified and improved her general effect), and he has omitted all that was amusing in the character of Astolfo. Knight-errantry has fallen off a little in his hands from its first youthful and trusting freshness; more sophisticate times are opening upon us; and satire more frequently and bitterly interferes. The licentious passages (though never gross in words, like those of his contemporaries,) are not redeemed by sentiment as in Boiardo; and it seems to me, that Ariosto hardly improved so much as he might have done Upon his predecessor's imitations of the classics. I cannot help thinking that, upon the whole, he had better have left them alone, and depended entirely on himself. Shelley says, he has too much fighting and "revenge,"[44]—which is true; but the revenge was only among his knights. He was himself (like my admirable friend) one of the most forgiving of men; and the fighting was the taste of the age, in which chivalry was still flourishing in the shape of such men as Bayard, and ferocity in men like Gaston de Foix. Ariosto certainly did not anticipate, any more than Shakspeare did, that spirit of human amelioration which has ennobled the present age. He thought only of reflecting nature as he found it. He is sometimes even as uninteresting as he found other people; but the tiresome passages, thank God, all belong to the house of Este! His panegyrics of Ippolito and his ancestors recoiled on the poet with a retributive dulness.

But in all the rest there is a wonderful invigoration and enlargement. The genius of romance has increased to an extraordinary degree in power, if not in simplicity. Its shoulders have grown broader, its voice louder and more sustained; and if it has lost a little on the sentimental side, it has gained prodigiously, not only in animal vigour, but, above all, in knowledge of human nature, and a brave and joyous candour in shewing it. The poet takes a universal, an acute, and, upon the whole, a cheerful view, like the sun itself, of all which the sun looks on; and readers are charmed to see a knowledge at once so keen and so happy. Herein lies the secret of Ariosto's greatness; which is great, not because it has the intensity of Dante, or the incessant thought and passion of Shakspeare, or the dignified imagination of Milton, to all of whom he is far inferior in sustained excellence,—but because he is like very Nature herself. Whether great, small, serious, pleasureable, or even indifferent, he still has the life, ease, and beauty of the operations of the daily planet. Even where he seems dull and common-place, his brightness and originality at other times make it look like a good-natured condescension to our own common habits of thought and discourse; as though he did it but on purpose to leave nothing unsaid that could bring him within the category of ourselves. His charming manner intimates that, instead of taking thought, he chooses to take pleasure with us, and compare old notes; and we are delighted that he does us so much honour, and makes, as it were, Ariostos of us all. He is Shakspearian in going all lengths with Nature as he found her, not blinking the fact of evil, yet finding a "soul of goodness" in it, and, at the same time, never compromising the worth of noble and generous qualities. His young and handsome Medoro is a pitiless slayer of his enemies; but they were his master's enemies, and he would have lost his life, even to preserve his dead body. His Orlando, for all his wisdom and greatness, runs mad for love of a coquette, who triumphs over warriors and kings, only to fall in love herself with an obscure lad. His kings laugh with all their hearts, like common people; his mourners weep like such unaffected children of sorrow, that they must needs "swallow some of their tears."[45] His heroes, on the arrival of intelligence that excites them, leap out of bed and write letters before they dress, from natural impatience, thinking nothing of their "dignity." When Astolfo blows the magic horn which drives every body out of the castle of Atlantes, "not a mouse" stays behind;—not, as Hoole and such critics think, because the poet is here writing ludicrously, but because he uses the same image seriously, to give an idea of desolation, as Shakspeare in Hamlet does to give that of silence, when "not a mouse is stirring." Instead of being mere comic writing, such incidents are in the highest epic taste of the meeting of extremes,—of the impartial eye with which Nature regards high and low. So, give Ariosto his hippogriff, and other marvels with which he has enriched the stock of romance, and Nature takes as much care of the verisimilitude of their actions, as if she had made them herself. His hippogriff returns, like a common horse, to the stable to which he has been accustomed. His enchanter, who is gifted with the power of surviving decapitation and pursuing the decapitator so long as a fated hair remains on his head, turns deadly pale in the face when it is scalped, and falls lifeless from his horse. His truth, indeed, is so genuine, and at the same time his style is so unaffected, sometimes so familiar in its grace, and sets us so much at ease in his company, that the familiarity is in danger of bringing him into contempt with the inexperienced, and the truth of being considered old and obvious, because the mode of its introduction makes it seem an old acquaintance. When Voltaire was a young man, and (to Anglicise a favourite Gallic phrase) fancied he had profounded every thing deep and knowing, he thought nothing of Ariosto. Some years afterwards he took him for the first of grotesque writers, but nothing more. At last he pronounced him equally "entertaining and sublime, and humbly apologised for his error." Foscolo quotes this passage from the Dictionnaire Philosophique; and adds another from Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which the painter speaks of a similar inability on his own part, when young, to enjoy the perfect nature of Raphael, and the admiration and astonishment which, in his riper years, he grew to feel for it.[46]