The reigns of Hercules and Alphonso are signalised as the golden age of chivalrous poetry.
The chivalrous romances of Northern France, no less than the amatory verses of the Provencal troubadours, had, as I have mentioned elsewhere, made their way into Italy from their earliest origin. The frequent allusions to some of the most famous heroes of the round table and the paladins of Charlemagne, occurring in the Divine Comedy, are more than sufficient to show that such subjects were quite familiar in Italy in the age of Dante. During the following period the prevalence of democratic ideas, and the study of the works of antiquity, had thrown those rude legends into comparative insignificance. Still what remains in our days of some of them, such as " I reali di Francia," "La Spagna," " Buovo d'Antona," etc., probably written towards the beginning of the fifteenth century, are an irrefragable proof that such performances still found favour in the eyes of the multitude, when Pulci first conceived the idea of introducing a composition of a similar nature to the attention of Lorenzo de Medici and Lucretia Tornabuoni, his mother, to enliven their guests at the close of their sumptuous banquets.
The scene of "Morgante Maggiore" is laid at the court of Charlemagne, and the main catastrophe consists of that famous rout of Roncevalles, where Orlando and the flower of the French paladins found their death.
But neither the poet nor his audience were calculated to enter into the true spirit of chivalrous poetry. At the close of the fifteenth century the belief in the marvellous had considerably abated. The long extinction of the feudal orders, the long prevalence of burgherish habits, the active pursuits of commerce and industry, had, especially in Florence, extinguished those lofty ideas of devotion and loyalty which were, in fact, the soul and breath of chivalry.
A warlike spirit had indeed been revived in Italy by the establishment of bands of national militia, and the Italian condottieri, or soldiers of fortune, wandered like the ancient knights all over Europe, though rather in search of plunder than in quest of adventure. Tilts and tournaments were not unfrequent, and Lorenzo de Medici and his brother, Julian, had in their youth distinguished themselves in similar feats of arms in the eyes of their countrymen. But the general corruption of manners had long since undermined all noble feelings of honour, faith and loyalty; and hearts beat now cold and base under their corslets of steel. Those adventures which the ancient romancers related with imperturbable gravity would have sounded no less tedious than strange to the ears of men whose faith was languid and sceptic, whose valour was wily and mercenary.
Hence Pulci wrote a heroi-comic poem. He gave us a parody of those chivalrous legends from which his subject was drawn. He attempted in Italy, though rather clumsily, that revolution which Cervantes accomplished one hundred years later in Spain. His choice of the vulgar tongue — as the language of Dante was then blasphemously called — already announced a gay subject, for whoever had any serious object in view must necessarily have written in Latin.
The example of Pulci, however, soon engendered, or rather increased a taste for that style of poetry. The courts of Mantua and Ferrara were soon seized with emulous ambition. Francesco Bello, or il Cieco di Ferrara, sung his "Mambriano" at the court of the Gonzaga, probably at the same time that Boiardo read the cantos of his "Orlando Innamorato" before Hercules of Este.
Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, a man of refined taste and high feelings, versified an old chronicle of Charlemagne, by a rather strange anachronism, attributed to Turpin, Archbishop of Paris and contemporary with the French emperor, but for the authenticity of which we must rest satisfied with the authority of Pope Calixtus II., who, in 1122, published a bull to the effect of sanctioning its validity.
It seems quite evident that Boiardo set about his task in a sportive humour, and the greatest part of his poem is filled up with half-comic adventures; but the poet's heart warms with his subject, it sympathises with the feelings of his imaginary heroes, it suffers itself to be taken by surprise, and carried off by his enthusiasm to the fairy-land of his fictions.
Few poets ever displayed such a wonderful power of invention. Out of those sterile absurdities of the poor French archbishop, the Italian poet has drawn an inextricable web, in which the reader's mind is lost in amazement. It seems as if even the minstrel's fancy was bewildered in that boundless labyrinth. After having gone through fifty long cantos, the poem was left unfinished, whether in consequence of the invasion of Charles VIII. and of the poet's death, which took place late in the same year, or because he began to despair of drawing that widespread plan to a close, it would now be difficult to decide *. The achievement of Boiardo's work was left for the still wider fancy of Ariosto.
This poet issued from a noble house which had, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, been allied by marriage to the reigning family of Este. His father was governor of Reggio in 1474, when Ludovico was born. Ariosto came young and friendless to the court of Ferrara, accompanied by his widowed mother, and nine brothers and sisters, who, after his father's death, depended on him, as the eldest, for their subsistence.
Nearly all that is known of his life is to be gathered from his Satires, in which, with great ingenuousness and singleness of heart, he communicates with his friends on many topics of domestic affliction.
The life of Ariosto is not much of a romance, nor was there any thing in the outward man that betrayed the poet. To an upright, cheerful disposition he added a latent feeling of independence, a defensive pride, which was put to sore trials during his intercourse with the great, whose favour he was, on account of his needy family, compelled to solicit.
At first he attached himself to Cardinal Hippolito, by whom he was hard worked and poorly paid. Ariosto followed the fortunes of his patron during the wars of the League of Cambray, and fought with distinguished valour at that naval battle on the Po, where the blue eagle of Este prevailed over the winged lion of St. Mark. He was repeatedly sent as an ambassador to the court of Julius II., and on one occasion, when none else volunteered to brave the resentment of the incensed pontiff. Ariosto was received at the Vatican with frowns and menaces; according to his biographer he even ran the greatest risk of being thrown into the Tiber, by the order of Julius, whose very dying words breathed fire and vengeance against Alphonso of Este.
The services of Ariosto were unhandsomely rewarded. Cardinal Hippolito, in whose pay the poet had spent fourteen years of his life—whose name he bad transmitted to immortality in his poem, never allowed him a moment of rest. To escort the vain prelate in all solemn occurrences, to attend his levees, and follow him in his journeys, lost in the crowd of his minions, was more than the novice in courtly arts could learn to endure: so that, being at last invited to travel with him beyond the Alps, where the cardinal had been promoted to a distant archbishopric, Ariosto did not hesitate to purchase his beloved independence by the loss of his scanty emolument.
Deprived of the cardinal's support, and harassed by poverty, the poet was reminded of a friendly intimacy that had existed between him and Giovanni de Medici long before his exaltation to the pontifical see. Every day tidings were brought to him of the magnificent style, of the profuse liberality of Leo X. at Rome. To Rome the poet resolved to remove; and, having gained an easy access, he offered to throw himself on his knees before the pope; but Leo would not allow his old friend to stoop to kiss his pontifical foot. He rose from the chair of St. Peter, and kissed his forehead—a mark of favour for which the proudest monarch would have sued in vain.
Ariosto thought that brighter days had finally dawned. Full of the most sanguine expectations, but bespattered with rain and mud, he made his way back to his inn, where he waited in vain for the shower of bounties which the sunshine of papal favour had given him reason to look forward to. But whether the ill-starred poet was lost sight of in the crowd of flatterers by which the throne of Leo was besieged, or whether the hatred, which that pope had inherited from his predecessor, Julius, against Alphonso of Este, was indiscriminately extended to all his subjects and dependants, it would be no easy task to determine. All that is well known is, that that benign accolade is all that Ariosto ever received at the hands of Leo ; and that, profiting by the lessons of experience, he refused to undertake a new journey to Rome, when, later in life, his friends wished to appoint him ambassador of Alphonso to the court of Clement VII.
At last, Duke Alphonso himself — of whom, if we except his inhuman severity against his nearest relatives, it must be said that he was a generous prince — proved a better friend and supporter to the bard who had so loftily heralded the glories of his house. But by that strange misapplication of talent, so common in that age, which destined the dreaming poet, or the absent-minded scholar, to the discharge of arduous political and diplomatic offices, Ariosto was appointed by his patron to the government of Garfagnana, a wild district in the Apennines, for which the Este had to endure the most serious struggles against the republic of Lucca, and which they had recently secured, all riotous and rebellious, in their grasp.
This troublesome and dangerous dignity, which one of Ariosto's biographers very aptly compares to Sancho Panza's government of the isle Barattaria, the poet filled for three years; during which his mildness and amiability, his disinterestedness and impartiality, got the better of the stubborn race he had been sent to subdue. The fame of his genius had established his popularity even among those lawless bandits of the forest, in whose hands he had more than once the ill luck to fall, but by whom he was not only allowed to pass unmolested, but even cordially received, and escorted with every mark of honour and regard.
At the expiration of the third year of his reign, he was allowed to enjoy the peace of his humble but comfortable retirement at Ferrara, where his time was chiefly employed in the direction of the theatre, opened by the munificence of Alphonso, and on which he gave his four comedies in verse.
He died in 1533, about a twelvemonth after the ceremony of his coronation by the hand of the emperor
Charles V. had, according to a somewhat vague tradition, taken place in Mantua.
Ariosto grew up among the general admiration of all Italy, but especially of the court of Ferrara, for the work of Boiardo. And yet, notwithstanding this unanimous suffrage, the " Orlando Innamorato " was neither a correct nor a finished work. The style was thought to be harsh and uncouth; the language full of Lombard provincialisms. Soon after the author's death, obscure poets had either continued or re-written nearly every stanza of the poem; but Berni, a Florentine of unequalled wit, and rare fertility of poetical vein, the inventor of a new style of buffoon poetry, that received its name from him, undertook the remoulding of the whole poem.
The work of Berni was, however, only published in 1541, when the poem of Ariosto had mainly contributed to recall the public attention to the original source from which it was avowedly derived.
No poem ever opened with a wider and loftier commencement than that of Boiardo. The production of an immense host of kings and queens, sultans and sultanesses, warriors and warrioresses, and the descriptions of their horses, armour, and pageantry, did not offer a sufficient scope for the poet's fancy. Not satisfied with the wide regions of the gloomy North, and of the golden East, nor with the ample resources of the kingdom of nature, he went beyond all mortal limits, and crowded the air, the waters, and woods, with most heterogeneous spirits, benevolent, malevolent, from the abyss, from the sea, from the grave; all the visible and invisible became the domain of chivalrous poetry.
The hyppogriffs, winged horses, were seen soaring with their knights above the region of the storms ; whales swam across the main, nourishing in their bosom churches, steeples, and inhabited convents. Castles arose in one night, with walls of steel and roofs of adamant, with enchanted gardens and labyrinths, speaking statues, spellbound horses, and souls prophesying from their mouldering graves; with fountains of love, of hatred, of oblivion, springing from the neighbouring forest; with ruthless giants, tamed lions, men turned into birds or brutes — all moving as if in a vast magic circle around. Life was multiplied by a thousand supernatural contrivances, and communicated to the most unyielding or uncorporeal substances. If there could be any thing more difficult for a human mind than to lay down the plan for so vast a conception, it must have been to take up its various threads, where they had been broken up by the mighty weaver, and lead them to an easy and gradual conclusion.
This was the work of Ariosto.
The poem of Boiardo was left interrupted at the moment in which, at the landing of the Saracen monarchs of Africa and Asia, and the irruption of the Moors of Spain, the great struggle between the cross and the crescent, the great anti-crusade, commenced ; that of Ariosto ended with the final dispersion of the followers of the prophet.
But this main story was only a diminutive part of that immense romance. The ladies and knights, the arms and loves, the courtesies and daring achievements, which form its theme, give origin to a thousand new episodes, eternally diverging, converging, but always strictly, inseparably belonging to the subject. The heroes, led astray with so much apparent freedom and wantonness, roaming by land and sea, to heaven, hell, and purgatory—bewildered, enamoured, vow-bound, spell-bound, wounded, or prisoners, are always sure to reappear, dead or alive, at the best opportunity. All those natural or supernatural agents are moved without the slightest appearance of effort, like men on a chess-board by the hand of a skilful player—like spirits subservient to the wand of an enchanter.
In the midst of that vast confusion, it is not difficult to feel the influence of that art, admirably enhanced by a careful
concealment of art, that sovereign mind presiding over the whole, that unity which has power to subject immensity to its laws, that sovereign mind always serene, always at ease, while it grants us no rest; and we delight in the contemplation of its vastness, we like to run after its boldest flight, to abandon ourselves to its playful humour, in the same manner as one of the knights of those fables, in his hour of perplexity, lets the reins loose on the neck of his charger, to be led by the instinct of the sagacious animal.
So much for the work of imagination. But when, after making a sport of himself and his readers, the poet ventures on a sudden appeal to our sympathies; when he paints man abandoned to himself, grappling with superhuman difficulties, with no tutelar genius but his steady will, no enchanted shield but his undaunted virtue — the world of fiction suddenly disappears from our eyes, and there we stand, as if suddenly converted to the belief of those fables which had been woven in a spirit of jest and raillery.
Be it remarked, that a reaction in favour of chivalry had taken place in Lombardy at least, if not in Florence, in the times of Ariosto. The restoration of monarchical and feudal orders at Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara, the frequent intercourse with French and Spaniards, the most chivalrous nations of Europe ; the example of the brilliant court of Francis I., le roi chevalier, who revived the manners of ancient paladins; the rare exploits, and the noble character of the preux Bayard, from whose hands the French king was proud of receiving the order of knighthood, after the battle of Marignano—a state of continual warfare, especially in the south of Italy, where it assumed altogether a chivalrous aspect; the frequent recurrence of private engagements, such as the duel between Bayard and Sotomayor; the combat between ten French and ten Spanish knights, at Irani, and the other between thirteen French
and thirteen Italian men-at-arms at Barletta—all these contemporaneous events contributed to reawaken a warlike ardour, a spirit of chivalrous extravagance, which wonderfully increased during the whole of the sixteenth century, miserably contrasting with the general corruption and degeneracy of an enslaved race.
Boiardo and Ariosto both belonged by birth to noble, and, to a certain extent, feudal families. Both had borne arms in signal encounters; and the court of a prince for so many years engaged in the most disastrous campaigns, must, by necessity, have been wrought up to a feverish mood of warlike excitement. There are epochs in history in which men's minds run into opposite extremes with
gigantic strides. During the interval between Lorenzo de Medici and Alphonso of Ferrara, the whole country had undergone as rapid and as complete a revolution as it did afterwards, during nearly an equal number of years, in the age of Napoleon.
Hence Boiardo's work was not, like that of Pulci, altogether meant for a burlesque work, till it appeared under the disguise of Berni's parody ; and, although the livelier fancy of Ariosto often led him into fits of jocose extravagance, still there are frequent passages in which he is evidently in earnest.
Such are, for instance, the outbursts of noble disdain with which his favourite hero, Euggiero, throws away his enchanted shield, and Orlando the arquebuss of King Cimosco, scorning the idea of owing their victory to unnatural advantages. Such is the invective of the poet against that German contrivance which so powerfully contributed to eclipse the splendour of chivalry by neutralising the
main advantages of personal strength and prowess — the invention of gunpowder. Such his appeals to all the powers of Europe to put an end to their fraternal dissensions, and join in a common league against the threatening power of the Infidels.
Such, in short, are the characters of Ruggiero, Brandimarte, Zerbino, and other Christian knights, all alive to the noblest feelings, and not less admirable for loyalty, honour, and courtesy, than for headlong impetuosity of valour. It was thus that chivalrous poetry was called back to its primitive grandeur, and prepared to assume the majestic dignity of the genius of Tasso.
Every one is well aware that Ariosto is a descriptive rather than a sentimental writer ; rather the poet of imagination than the heart. But, although the natural buoyancy of his mind did not suffer him to dwell on melancholy subjects, yet he breaks forth in a few short and fugitive, but highly pathetic episodes, the more impressive, perhaps, and irresistible as they are unexpected. It seems as if, almost unawares, his fingers had fallen on the softest strings of his harp, and the tear lingered faint and reluctant on his unconscious eyes.
But Ariosto's peculiar charm lies in the grace, ease, and elegance of his — by turns grave or pathetic, sublime or sportive, and sometimes even designedly neglected, but — always fresh, fertile, inimitable style. In imitation of the minstrels from which his subject is taken, he displays that rare spontaneousness which was in him the result of long, arduous labour and care, but which has all the appearance of extemporaneous effusion. He will at times repeat the last words of one stanza as the beginning of the next, like the narrator of a tale who, by such repetitions, seems to stop to take breath and collect his ideas.
Ariosto is the poet of youth, as Dante is the friend and companion of mature age. So far as the office of poetry - can be merely to afford an easy and — with the exception of a few cantos—innocent delight; so far as it can have no other aim than to give rise to a rapid succession of infinitely varied and always pleasing emotions, without pointing to any determined object, without proving or illustrating any important truth—Ariosto fulfilled a poet's mission.
As such, indeed, he has no parallel in any age or country — none, except perhaps that modern enchanter who dared to revive chivalry in this our sober, positive age ; and even he, whose genius seemed above all titles, was proud of the appellation of "the Ariosto of the North".
... oh, Michael .... the translations are already nearly two years old, similar old as Tarotpedia.