We become acquainted with Armida, the beautiful enchantress, first in the guise of a forlorn damsel, who implores succour from the Christian heroes; and this is perhaps the most successful portion of the rôle assigned to her. Then she appears as the Circe of her own gardens: then she is a Dido without an Æneas, for the escape of Rinaldo from the disgraceful servitude into which she had inveigled him bears no resemblance to the fond and deep passion of the Carthaginian queen, which grew out of an honourable hospitality afforded to the Trojans in distress. With a disagreeable amount of likeness in detail, the copy still misses the original, and loses all that force and majesty of intense passion to which here, and here alone, Virgil has been enabled to ascend. Then instead of that tragic end of Dido, in which, though with an attitude somewhat theatrical, softness and fierceness are so wonderfully blended, so that she does not forfeit sympathy even in her keenest longings for revenge, Armida has recourse to an expedient which is wholly debased and vulgar. She simply offers herself for sale, promising to be the prize of any warrior of the Egyptian camp, who shall execute her vengeance on Rinaldo for the offence of having escaped out of her toils.
Nor have we yet done with the doublings of her tortuous path. She sees Rinaldo pass her in the battle; and, not without infinite doubting, shoots an arrow at him. It is perhaps difficult to define in language what it is, that constitutes the difference between the mental struggles of genuine passion, and mere incongruous vacillation. We see the former in Dido; and one sign of it is a certain progression. Where the law of nature is followed, perpetual fluctuation is not allowed; by degrees, though they may be slow and many, the mind is worked up to a strong resolve, where it abides: its agitation and seeming reflux is but the receding wave of the advancing tide; and when once a strong purpose is full-formed after struggle in a truly powerful nature, whether of man or woman, it must not be changed. Now this is what we miss in Armida. She is ever playing at backwards and forwards. Thrice she draws the bow, thrice she relaxes it: at last she discharges the arrow, but with it a wish that it may miss:
Lo stral volò; ma con lo strale un voto
Subito uscì, che vada il colpo a voto[964].
Not unnaturally, this unsatisfactory passage leads us to one of the worst of all the provoking conceits that disfigure from time to time the beautiful pages of this poem:
Tanto poteva in lei, benchè perdente,
(Or che potria vittorioso?) amore[965].
Yet, after all this, revenge again gets the upper hand, and her eye follows the arrow with avidity, hoping it may strike. She then repeats the shot again and again, and while doing it is again herself shot in return by love:
E mentre ella saetta, Amor lei piaga[966].
Again the same alternation is reiterated; but her champions fail. She flies. She resumes the part of Dido; apostrophizes her own weapons in a speech of near thirty lines, entreating them to despatch her. Rinaldo then arrests her arm; and yet once more, in stanzas replete with beauty of diction, we have the same unsatisfactory and indecisive mixture of ill-assorted emotions, without the strength either of harmony or of contrast, founded on no natural law, connected by no moral or mental tie, ordered to no end or consummation. However, he vows himself her adorer, and she gives herself up to his disposal: