Ariosto

“ It could be said of the irony of Ariosto, that it is like the eye of God, who looks upon the movement of creation, of all creation, loving all things equally, good and evil, the very great and the very small in man and in the grain of sand, because he has made it all, and finds in it nought but motion itself, eternal dialectic, rhythm and harmony. ”

“ Ariosto derived inspiration from our serene atmosphere, and our delicious climate. He is the rainbow which appeared after our long wars; brilliant and many-hued, like that herald of fine weather, he seems to sport familiarly with life; his light and gentle gaiety is the smile of nature and not the irony of man. ”

“ It was an ample and buoyant subject-matter, from which the great artists of the age, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Rabelais, had hewn their poems. But they belonged too completely to their own time, to admit of their belonging to one which had passed. [360] They created a chivalry afresh, but it was not genuine. The ingenious Ariosto, an ironical epicurean, delights his gaze with it, and grows merry over it, like a man of pleasure, a sceptic who rejoices doubly in his pleasure because it is sweet, and because it is forbidden. ”

“ Nor was it only as a man of science that he claimed the admiration of the world. As a writer, he stands foremost in his age. His prose is clear, unaffected, graceful, and occasionally eloquent and impressive. His scientific treatises are models of lucidity. He himself, when praised for that quality, attributed it in a large measure to his constant perusal of the works of Ariosto. Clearness, indeed, is the especial merit of that great poet. In his youth he wrote an essay to prove the superiority of Ariosto to Tasso. He said Tasso gave us words, and Ariosto, realities. ”

“ The defect of deep passion and serious thought, the absence of enthusiasm, combined with rare analytic powers and an acute insight into human nature, placed Ariosto in close relation to his age. Free from illusions, struggling after no high-set ideal, accepting the world as he found it, without the impulse to affirm or to deny, without hate, scorn, indignation or revolt, he represented the spirit of the sixteenth century in those qualities which were the source of moral and political decay to the Italians. ”

“ CRITICAL NOTICE OF ARIOSTO'S LIFE AND GENIUS. [1] The congenial spirits of Pulci and Boiardo may be said to have attained to their height in the person of Ariosto, upon the principle of a transmigration of souls, or after the fashion of that hero in romance, who was heir to the bodily strengths of all whom he conquered.
Lodovico Giovanni Ariosto was born on the 8th of September, 1474, in the fortress at Reggio, in Lombardy, and was the son of Niccolò Ariosto, captain of that citadel (as Boiardo had been) , and Daria Maleguzzi, whose family still exists. ”

“ Ariosto makes them literally flights—flights on a hippogriff, and to the moon. The moon, it has been said, makes lunatics; he accordingly puts a man's wits into that planet. Vice deforms beauty; therefore his beautiful enchantress turns out to be an old hag. Ancient defeated empires are sounds and emptiness; therefore the Assyrian and Persian monarchies become, in his limbo of vanities, a heap of positive bladders. Youth is headstrong, and kissing goes by favour; so Angelica, queen of Cathay, and beauty of the world, jilts warriors and kings, and marries a common soldier. ”

“ Tasso, Marino, Guarini, Metastasio, and a crowd of writers of inferior merit and celebrity, were spell-bound in the enchanted gardens of a gaudy and meretricious Alcina, who concealed debility and deformity beneath the deceitful semblance of loveliness and health. Ariosto, the great Ariosto himself, like his own Ruggiero, stooped for a time to linger amidst the magic flowers and fountains, and to caress the gay 60and painted sorceress. ”

“ Ariosto does not, like Tasso, convey the impression of a man above his time, and only depressed to its level by unpropitious circumstances. He is the child of his age, at the summit of its average elevation, but not transcending this. Yet it would have been well for Italy if her princes and statesmen had generally acted upon those ideas of honour and loyalty which they found and doubtless admired in their favourite poet. ”

“ On the whole it would be harsh to deny that he has done justice to his subject, and in one respect he deserves the highest praise: he imparts a human interest and an air of reality to his characters that cannot be too highly extolled. Ariosto often treats his characters merely as puppets, and is himself the first to laugh at them. Very different is the attitude of Tasso towards his creations. He believes in them with unshaken sincerity, and he loves them because he believes in them. Erminia, Sophronia, Armida, Rinaldo, Goffredo, Tancredi, all stand before us in the life, moving and breathing. ”

“ Here he also resembles the Italian poet of the Renaissance, Ariosto, though reaching the position by different ways and with different results. His sentiment would have appeared in an altogether different guise, if a theological conception, such as the belief in an eternal life, in a judging God, in rewards and punishments beyond this world, in the view that earthly life is a trial and a pilgrimage, had been lively and active in him. He knows no other than the vigorous passionate life upon earth, divided between joy and sorrow, with around and above it, the shadow of a mystery. ”

“ Only let him be, and give him enough to live upon, and he will trouble no man, dispute no pretender's claims, raise no inconvenient questions of right and wrong, inflame the world with no far-reaching thoughts, but gild the refined gold of his purest phrases and paint the lilies of his loveliest thoughts in placid ease. Italy has grown old, and Ariosto is the genius of a tired, world-weary, disillusioned age. What is there worth a struggle? At the same time he preserves his independence as a private gentleman. He passes free judgment upon society ”

“ Ariosto, in his conduct of these stories, attempts no poetical justice. Virtue in distress, vice triumphant, one pas-25-sion expelling another, nobler motives conquered by baser, loyalty undermined by avarice, feminine frailty made strong to suffer by the force of love; so runs the world, and so the poet paints it.
New and old, false and real, he mixes all together, and by the alchemy of his imagination makes the fusion true. The classics and the Italian poets, writers of history and romance, geographers and chroniclers, have been laid under contribution. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Italians have bestowed on Ariosto the epithet of “the Divine,” and they also call him “the Homer of Ferrara.”
The character of Ariosto may be easily gathered from this brief sketch of his life. He was trustworthy, loyal, and sincere, free from envy or jealousy, and a warm friend; he was fond of meditation and retirement, often absent and absorbed in thought, and yet he could be very pleasant and jovial in company. He was not a great reader, and he selected the Latin classics in preference to other authors. He studied men and nature more than books. ”

“ It is too bad they do not make children’s books for grown people today, delightful, unreal fables for adults, to temper the prosaic duties of living, to make them forget the regrettable, cast off care, and be joyous. There are none who need such books more than grown people. I am thinking of Ariosto, his Orlando Furioso. How long ago Ariosto was born! Before the discovery of America.
I like the name an old Italian historian applied to him in his youth, uno gentiluomo ferrarese. His charm of manner won him appointment as gentleman in waiting at the Court of Cardinal Hippolyte of Este. ”

“ He enjoys a sight much as Ariosto enjoys a story, and displays it in form and colour with a zest like that of Ariosto for language and verse. He was supreme in representing, without huddHng or confusion, numerous figures in a luminous and diffused atmosphere, while in richness of draperies and transparency of shadows he surpassed all the other Venetians or Itahans. ”

“ No poet, perhaps, ever evinced more fastidious taste in adjusting the nicer points that affected the harmony, dignity, and fluency of his composition, yet the whole seems as natural as if it had flowed extemporaneously from his pen. Throughout life it was the lot of Ariosto to struggle against the difficulties inseparable from narrow and precarious circumstances. ”

“ Since then I went almost every morning to the king’s closet, where he was always glad to see his courtiers, but there was no more said about reading Ariosto. He knew Italian, but not enough to speak it, and still less to appreciate the beauties of the great poet. When I think of this worthy prince, and of the great qualities he possessed as a man, I cannot understand how he came to commit so many errors as a king. Perhaps the least of them all was that he allowed himself to survive his country. As he could not find a friend to kill him, I think he should have killed himself. ”

“ Ariosto's own temperament and the conditions of his age alike condemned him to the completion of a romance longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey together, which has for its sole serious aim, if serious aim it has of any sort, the glorification of an obscure family, and which, while it abounds in pathos, wisdom, wit, and poetry of dazzling brilliance, may at the same time be accused of levity, adulation, and licentiousness. ”

“ People who take for granted the conceits because of the "wildness" of Ariosto, and the good taste because of the "regularity" of Tasso, just assume the reverse of the fact. It is a rare thing to find a conceit in Ariosto; and, where it does exist, it is most likely defensible on some Shakspearian ground of subtle propriety. Open Tasso in almost any part, particularly the love-scenes, and it is marvellous if, before long, you do not see the conceits vexatiously interfering with the beauties. ”

“ Ariosto's Orlando Furioso was a revival of the old chivalrous romances in a new and elegant form, adapted to the conditions and taste of his times; a huge fresco, rather than an epic. As we shall see in the next chapter, comedy and tragedy had to wait nearly two hundred years after the death of Ariosto before finding worthy representatives in Alfieri and Goldoni. The regular epic, however, was given to Italy by Tasso at the end of the sixteenth century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The style of the Furioso is said to have taught Galileo how to write Italian. This style won from him for Ariosto the title of divine. As the luminous and flowing octave stanzas pass before us, we are almost tempted to forget that they are products of deliberate art. The beauty of their form consists in its limpidity and naturalness. Ariosto has no mannerism. He always finds exactly the expression needed to give clearness to the object he presents. ”

“ According to De Sanctis and to his precursors and followers, in the Furioso Ariosto has no subjective content to express, no sentimental or passionate motive, no idea become sentiment or passion, but pursues the sole end of art, singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake, elaborating pure form, and satisfying the one end of realising his own dreams. ”

“ Ariosto, however, was an amusing companion; and the cardinal seems not to have liked to go anywhere without him. In the year 1515 he was attended by the poet part of the way on a journey to Rome and Urbino; but Ariosto fell ill, and had leave to return. He confesses that his illness was owing to an anxiety of love; and he even makes an appeal to the cardinal's experience of such feelings; so that it might seem he was not afraid of Ippolito's displeasure in that direction. But the weakness which selfish people excuse in themselves becomes a "very different thing" (as they phrase it) in another. ”

“ Ferrara, all Italy, and even Europe, lamented Ariosto as the first poet of the age, and as worthy of being enrolled in the same chart of fame with the greatest that had ever lived. His funeral was rendered remarkable by the attendance of a large body of monks, who to honour his memory, followed him, contrary to the rules of their order, to the grave. ”