Ariosto was more of a courtier than a knight, and thought more of the house of Este than of the paladins of Charlemagne. He wrought upon Boiardo in the spirit of Dryden adapting Chaucer; while his predecessor, though himself courtly, may rather be likened to William Morris. Boiardo, though also purposing the panegyric of the house of Este, sings for the delight of singing, and introduces no incongruous fifteenth-century figures into his romantic pageant. Ariosto mars his epic by contemporary allusions, as Spenser and Tennyson marred theirs by far-fetched allegory. It must be remembered, in justice to him, that his perpetual adulation of the court of Ferrara seemed less extravagant then than now. To us the importance attached to a family which would be forgotten if Ariosto and Tasso had not swelled its retinue, and if Lucrezia Borgia had not married into it, borders on the absurd. It seems preposterous that hosts should be equipped, and giants and dragons and enchanters set in motion, and paladins despatched on errands to the moon, that Ariosto may compliment a cardinal whose want of culture rather than his penetration led him to rate these compliments at their worth. But in Ariosto’s day that court was a bright and dazzling reality, and almost every member of his immediate circle depended upon it for his bread.
If we can forget his servility, or persuade ourselves to deem it loyalty, we shall find little to censure in Ariosto. Shelley’s assertion that he is only sometimes a poet implies a narrow conception of the nature of poetry. Rather may it be said that he is always a poet, always fanciful, always musical, always elevated, though not always to a very great altitude, above the level of the choicest prose. It is true that he has nothing of the seer in his composition, that his perfect technical mastery is rarely either exalted or disturbed by any gleam of the light that never was on sea or land, that his poem is destitute of moral or patriotic purpose, and that his standard in all things is that of his age. This merely proves that he is not in the rank of supremely great poets—a position which he would not have claimed for himself; nor have his countrymen paralleled him with Dante. He is hardly to be called Homeric, though endowed with the Homeric rapidity, directness, conciseness, and, except when he voluntarily turns to humour and burlesque, much of the Homeric nobility.
Perhaps the nearest literary analogy to theOrlando Furioso in another language is theMetamorphoses of Ovid. In both poems appear the same perspicuity and facility of narration, the same sweetness of versification, the same art of interweaving episodes into a whole. Ariosto’s vigour and directness, nevertheless, are wanting to Ovid, and the palm of invention and of the delineation of character undoubtedly belongs to him, for Ovid was forbidden to introduce a new incident, or vary any of the personages afforded by his mythological repertory. The fact that theOrlando is not, like theJerusalem, a newÆneid, but a newMetamorphoses, entirely justifies the introduction of such burlesque satire as the abode of Discord among the monks, or such delightful extravagance as Astolfo’s flight to the moon in quest of Orlando’s brains, resulting in the recovery of no inconsiderable portion of his own. Such episodes are, indeed, the most characteristic passages of theFurioso; yet in others, such as the siege of Paris and the madness of Orlando, Ariosto shows himself capable of rising to epical dignity, which he could have assumed more frequently if it had entered into his plan. This rather required the gifts of the painter, whether of natural scenery or of human emotion, which he possessed in the most eminent degree; and of the ironic but kindly observer of human life, which he exhibited so fully that even his descriptions are less popular and admired than the reflective and moralising introductions to his cantos. Never was such wildness of imagination ballasted with such solid good sense. Yet, when all is said, his most distinctive merit remains his unsurpassed talent of exposition, his unfaltering flow of energetic, perspicuous, melodious narrative; excellence apparently spontaneous and unstudied, but in truth due to the strenuous revision of one who judged himself severely, and deemed with Michael Angelo that trifles made perfection, and perfection was no trifle. Mr. Courthope, in an admirable parallel, has pointed out his great superiority as a narrator to his disciple Spenser, whose pictures, nevertheless, glow with deeper and softer tints, and whose voluminous melody tills the ear more perfectly than Ariosto’s ringing stanza.
The controversy whether Ariosto or Tasso’s poem is the greater epic, as it was one of the most obstinately interminable ever raised by academic pedantry, is also one of the idlest. They belong to different departments of art; it would be as reasonable to compare a picture with a statue. The question, nevertheless, which of the men was the greater poet, does admit of profitable discussion, though it may be difficult to establish any but a subjective criterion. If endowment with the poetical temperament is to be taken as the test, the palm certainly belongs to Tasso, whose actions, thoughts, and misfortunes are invariably those of a poet, and whose inward music is constantly finding expression in lyrical verse. Ariosto’s comparatively few lyrics generally wear a less spontaneous aspect than Tasso’s; the incidents of his life rather bespeak the man of affairs than the man of books; and if hisOrlando had perished, we should hardly have surmised how great a poet had been lost in him.
If, on the other hand, the palm should be bestowed for mastery of art, it seems rather due to Ariosto, who handles his theme with more vigour, and has it more thoroughly under control. He is not obliged, like Tasso, to embellish his poem with episodes which, by their superior attractiveness, almost eclipse the main action: the few passages of the kind in theOrlando are strictly subordinate, and not among its principal ornaments. The chief artistic blots upon his poem could not well have been avoided. So completely, though unjustly, has he overshadowed his predecessor Boiardo, that we are apt to forget that his work is an example, unique in literature, of the successful continuation of another’s. The adulation of the house of Este was an inheritance from his precursor; it is only to be regretted that, contrary to the example of Boiardo and the subsequent practice of Tasso, he should have given it disproportionate prominence. The incurable defect of the action of theFurioso is also a legacy from the Innamorato. Ruggiero, the real hero of Ariosto’s part of the poem, wins the hand of Bradamante, and becomes the ancestor of the house of Este, by apostasy. The poem finds him a pagan, and leaves him a Christian. All that ingenuity can effect is employed to extenuate his desertion; nevertheless, the sympathies of every reader must be with the Saracen Rodomonte when he appears in the last canto to tax Ruggiero with his change of sides, and necessarily (for otherwise what would have become of the house of Este?) is slain for his loyalty, to the scandal of poetical justice.
That Ariosto, apart from his boundless invention and command of language and narrative, was a true poet, is shown by the extreme beauty of the majority of the introductions to his cantos, where he appears even more at home than in the descriptions of the deeds of prowess of which he was at bottom so sceptical. Another strong point is the number, vividness, and originality of his similes, not in general copied from ancient poets, but peculiar to himself, and perfectly descriptive of the object designed to be illustrated. One of the most apparently characteristic similes of a great master of quaint comparison, the late Coventry Patmore, is borrowed from him.[15]
The sense of Ariosto is easily represented in English, but it is another matter to reproduce his felicity of phrase. The following stanzas in Miss Ellen Clerke’s version are from the description of Angelica’s flight from Rinaldo:
Through dark and fearsome woods she takes her flight,
By desert places wild, and lonely ways.
The stirring of the leaves and foliage light
Of oak, or elm, or beech that softly sways,
Doth startle her aside in sudden fright,
To wander here and there as in a maze;
While every shadow seen on hill or hollow
Seems to her fear Rinaldo’s who doth follow.
As baby fawn, or tender bleating goat,
Which from its leafy cradle hath espied
Its hapless dam seized by the quivering throat,
By leopard fierce, and oped her breast or side,
Flees from the brute to sylvan depths remote,
Trembling with fears by fancy multiplied,
And at each stump that she in passing touches,
Deems that the monster grasps her in its clutches.