‘This poem,’ says our author, ‘which is at present known only from the more modern edition of Berni, who revised it sixty years after, is superior to that of Pulci, in the variety and novelty of the adventures, the richness of the colouring, and in the interest it excites. The women here appear, what they ought to be in a romance, the soul of the work; Angelica here shows herself in all her charms, and with all her power over the bravest knights. All those warriors, whether Moors or Christians, whose names have become almost historical, received from Boyardo their existence, and the characters which they have preserved ever since. We are told that he took the names of several, as Gradasso, Sacripant, Agramant, Mandiscardo, from those of his vassals at his estate of Scandiano, where these families still remain: but it seems he wished for a still more sounding name for the most redoubtable of his Moorish chiefs. While on a hunting party, that of Rodomont came into his mind. On the instant he returned full gallop to his chateau, and had the bells rung and the cannon fired in sign of a fete, to the great astonishment of the peasants, to whom this new saint was quite unknown. The style of Boyardo did not correspond with the vivacity of his imagination: It is little laboured; the verse is harsh and tedious; and it was not without reason that in the following age it was judged proper to give a new form to his work.’
The account given of Ariosto and Tasso is in general correct as to the classification of their different styles, and the enumeration of their particular excellences or defects; but we should be inclined to give the preference in the contrary way. Ariosto’s excellence is (what it is here described) infinite grace and gaiety. He has fine animal spirits, an heroic disposition, sensibility mixed with vivacity, an eye for nature, great rapidity of narration and facility of style, and, above all, a genius buoyant, and with wings like the Griffin-horse of Rogero, which he turns and winds at pleasure. He never labours under his subject; never pauses; but is always setting out on fresh exploits. Indeed, his excessive desire not to overdo any thing, has led him to resort to the unnecessary expedient of constantly breaking off in the middle of his story, and going on to something else. His work is in this respect worse than Tristram Shandy; for there the progress of the narrative is interrupted by some incident, in a dramatic or humorous shape; but here the whole fault lies with the author. The Orlando Furioso is a tissue of these separate stories, crossing and jostling one another; and is therefore very inferior, in the general construction of the plot, to the Jerusalem Delivered. But the incidents in Ariosto are more lively, the characters more real, the language purer, the colouring more natural: even the sentiments show at least as much feeling, with less appearance of affectation. There is less effort, less display, a less imposing use made of the common ornaments of style and artifices of composition. Tasso was the more accomplished writer, Ariosto the greater genius. There is nothing in Tasso which is not to be found, in the same or a higher degree, in others: Ariosto’s merits were his own. The perusal of the one leaves a peculiar and very high relish behind it; there is a vapidness in the other, which palls at the time, and goes off sooner afterwards. Tasso indeed sets before us a dessert of melons, mingled with roses:—but it is not the first time of its being served up:—the flowers are rather faded, and the fruit has lost its freshness. Ariosto writes on as it happens, from the interest of his subject, or the impulse of his own mind. He is intent only on the adventure he has in hand,—the circumstances which might be supposed to attend it, the feelings which would naturally arise out of it. He attaches himself to his characters for their own sakes; and relates their achievements for the mere pleasure he has in telling them. This method is certainly liable to great disadvantages; but we on the whole prefer it to the obtrusive artifices of style shown in the Jerusalem,—where the author seems never to introduce any character but as a foil to some other,—makes one situation a contrast to the preceding, and his whole poem a continued antithesis in style, action, sentiment, and imagery. A fierce is opposed to a tender, a blasphemous to a pious character. A lover kills his mistress in disguise, and a husband and wife are represented defending their lives, by a pretty ambiguity of situation and sentiment, warding off the blows which are aimed, not at their own breasts, but at each other’s. The same love of violent effect sometimes produces grossness of character, as in Armida, who is tricked out with all the ostentatious trappings of a prostitute. Tasso has more of what is usually called poetry than Ariosto—that is, more tropes and ornaments, and a more splendid and elaborate diction. The latter is deficient in all these:—the figures and comparisons he introduces do not elevate or adorn that which they are brought to illustrate: they are, for the most part, mere parallel cases; and his direct description, simple and striking as it uniformly is, seems to us of a far higher order of merit than the ingenious allusions of his rival. We cannot, however, agree with M. Sismondi, that there is a want of sentiment in Ariosto, or that he excels only as a painter of objects, or a narrator of events. The instance which he gives from the story of Isabella, is an exception to his general power. The episodes of Herminia, and of Tancred and Clorinda, in Tasso, are exquisitely beautiful; but they do not come up, in romantic interest or real passion, to the loves of Angelica and Medoro. We might instance, to the same purpose, the character of Bradamante;—the spirited apostrophe to knighthood, ‘Oh ancient knights of true and noble heart;’—that to Orlando, Sacripant, and the other lovers of Angelica—or the triumph of Medoro—the whole progress of Orlando’s passion, and the still more impressive description of his sudden recovery from his fatal infatuation, after the restoration of his senses. Perhaps the finest thing in Tasso is the famous description of Carthage, as the warriors pass by it in the enchanted bark. ‘Giace l’alta Cartago,’ &c. This passage, however, belongs properly to the class of lofty philosophical eloquence; it owes its impressiveness to the grandeur of the general ideas, and not to the force of individual feeling, or immediate passion. The speech of Satan to his companions is said to have suggested the tone of Milton’s character of the Devil. But we see nothing in common in the fiend of the two poets. Tasso describes his as a mere deformed monster. Milton was the first poet who had the magnanimity to paint the devil without horns and a tail; to give him personal beauty and intellectual grandeur, with only moral deformity.
The life of Tasso is one of the most interesting in the world. Its last unfortunate events are related thus by our author.—
‘Tasso, admitted into the society of the great, thought himself sufficiently their equal, to fall in love with women of rank; and found himself sufficiently their inferior, to suffer from the consequences of his passion. His writings inform us, that he was attached to a lady of the name of Leonora: but it would seem that he was alternately in love with Leonora of Este, sister to the Duke Alphonso; with Leonora of San Vitale, wife of Julius of Tiena; and with Lucretia Bendidio, one of the maids of honour to the princess.... It is said, that one day being at court with the Duke and the Princess Leonora, he was so struck with the beauty of the lady, that, in a transport of love, he approached her suddenly, and embraced her in the eyes of the whole assembly. The Duke, turning coldly to his courtiers, said to them—“What a pity that so great a man should have gone mad!” and on this pretence, had him confined in the hospital of St. Anne, a receptacle for lunatics at Ferrara. His confinement disordered his imagination. His body was enfeebled by the agitation of his mind; he believed himself by turns poisoned, or tormented by witchcraft; he fancied that he saw dreadful apparitions, and passed whole nights in painful watchfulness. He addressed letters of complaint to all his friends, to all the princes of Italy, to the city of Bergamo his native place, to the emperor, to the holy office at Rome, imploring their pity and his liberty. To add to his misfortunes, his poem was published without his permission, from an imperfect copy. He remained confined in the hospital seven years; during which, the numerous writings that proceeded from his pen, could not convince Alphonso II. that he was in his senses. The princes of Italy in vain interposed for his release, which the Duke refused to grant, chiefly to mortify his rivals, the Medici. At length, he was released from his captivity at the instance of Vincent de Gonzago, Prince of Mantua, on the occasion of the marriage of the sister of this nobleman with the unrelenting Alphonso.’
It was during this melancholy interval, that he was seen by Montaigne in his confinement, who, after some striking reflections on the vicissitudes of genius, says,—‘I rather envied than pitied him, when I saw him at Ferrara in so piteous a plight, that he survived himself; misacknowledging both himself and his labours, which, unwitting to him, and even to his face, have been published both uncorrected and maimed!’—Tasso died at Rome in 1599, when he was fifty-one years old. After the Jerusalem, the most celebrated of his works, is his pastoral poem of Aminta, on which the Pastor Fido of Guarini is considered by M. Sismondi as an improvement. He published both comedies and tragedies. He composed a tragedy, called Il Torrismondo, while in prison, and dedicated it to his liberator, the Prince of Mantua. The concluding chorus of this tragedy possesses the most profound pathos; and the poet, in writing it, had evidently an eye to his own misfortunes and his glory, which he saw, or thought he saw, vanishing from him—‘Like the swift Alpine torrent, like the sudden lightning in the calm night, like the passing wind, the melting vapour, or the winged arrow, so vanishes our fame; and all our glory is but a fading flower. What then can we hope, or what expect more? After triumphs and palms, all that remains for the soul, is strife and lamentation, and regret; neither love nor friendship can avail us aught, but only tears and grief!’
We have thus gone through M. Sismondi’s account of the great Italian poets; and should now proceed to the consideration of their more modern brethren of the drama, and of the Spanish and Portuguese writers in general: But we cannot go on with this splendid catalogue of foreigners, without feeling ourselves drawn to the native glories of two of our own writers, who were certainly indebted in a great degree to the early poets of Italy, and must be considered as belonging to the same school.—We mean Chaucer and Spenser—who are now, we are afraid, as little known to the ordinary run of English readers as their tuneful contemporaries in the South. To those among our own countrymen who agree with M. Sismondi in considering the reign of Queen Anne as the golden period of English poetry, it may afford some amusement at least to accompany us for a little in these antiquarian researches.
Though Spenser was much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding poets were less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer.—Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter. There is a richness and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendour of the ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser’s poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough; in Spenser, we wander in another world among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills, and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the deluding promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment,—and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction, seem poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas indeed seem always more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid, the god of love ‘claps on high his coloured winges twain;’ and it is said of Gluttony in the procession of the Passions,—
‘In green vine-leaves he was right fitly clad.’
At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as, where he compares Prince Arthur’s crest to the appearance of the almond-tree. The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and his delineations are guided by no principle but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence, or the still solitude of a hermit’s cell—in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. With all this, he neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegory. But he has been falsely charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is the dramatic; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance,—all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not coarse and palpable,—but it assumes the character of vastness and sublimity, seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with all the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We will only refer to the Cave of Mammon, and to the description of Celleno in the Cave of Despair. The three first books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the others. It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakespeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus. There is only one book of this allegorical kind which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination); and that is the Pilgrim’s Progress.
It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite than Spenser and Chaucer. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment;—Chaucer in severe activity of mind. Spenser was, perhaps, the most visionary of all the poets;—Chaucer the most a man of observation and of the world. He appealed directly to the bosoms and business of men. He dealt only in realities; and, relying throughout on facts or common tradition, could always produce his vouchers in nature. His sentiment is not the voluntary indulgence of the poet’s fancy, but is founded on the habitual prejudices and passions of the very characters he introduces. His poetry, therefore, is essentially picturesque and dramatic: In this he chiefly differs from Boccacio, whose power was that of sentiment. The picturesque and the dramatic in Chaucer, are in a great measure the same thing; for he only describes external objects as connected with character,—as the symbols of internal passion. The costume and dress of the Canterbury pilgrims,—of the knight,—the ‘squire,—the gap-toothed wife of Bath, speak for themselves. Again, the description of the equipage and accoutrements of the two Kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight’s Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural. His descriptions of natural scenery are in the same style of excellence;—their beauty consists in their truth and characteristic propriety. They have a local freshness about them, which renders them almost tangible; which gives the very feeling of the air, the coldness or moisture of the ground. In other words, he describes inanimate objects from the effect which they have on the mind of the spectator, and as they have a reference to the interest of the story. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is in the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrouded in her bower, and listening in the morning of the year to the singing of the nightingale, while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour,—its retirement,—the early time of the day,—the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes—the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole seem like the recollection of an actual scene. Whoever compares this beautiful and simple passage with Rousseau’s description of the Elisée in the New Eloise, will be able to see the difference between good writing and fine writing, or between the actual appearances of nature, and the progress of the feelings they excite in us, and a parcel of words, images and sentiments thrown together without meaning or coherence. We do not say this from any feeling of disrespect to Rousseau, for whom we have a great affection; but his imagination was not that of the poet or the painter. Severity and boldness are the characteristics of the natural style: the artificial is equally servile and ostentatious. Nature, after all, is the soul of art:—and there is a strength in the imagination which reposes immediately on nature, which nothing else can supply. It was this trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda,—the faith of Constance,—and the heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry,