Chapter IX: The Orlando Furioso (2)

Instead, he paints in his peculiar style of realistic imagery, the corpulent form of Ease, Sloth that cannot walk and scarce can stand, Forgetfulness who bars the door to messengers, and Silence walking round the cave with slippers of felt. Silence, summoned by the archangel, sets forth to meet Rinaldo. Discord also quits the convent with her comrade Pride, leaving Fraud and Hypocrisy to keep their places warm till they return. But Discord does her work inadequately; and the cries of Rodomonte's victims rise to heaven. This rouses Michael from his slumber of beatitude. He blushes, plumes his pinions, and shoots down again to earth in search of Discord among the monks. He finds her sitting in a chapter convened for the election of officers, and makes her in a moment feel his presence:[16]

Le man le pose l'Angelo nel crine,
E pugna e calci le die senza fine.
Indi le roppe un manico di croce
Per la testa, pel dosso e per le braccia.
Merce grida la misera a gran voce,
E le ginocchia al divin nunzio abbraccia.

[Footnote 16: Canto xxvii. 37.]

This is a good specimen both of Ariosto's peculiar levity and of the romantic style which in the most serious portion of his poem permitted such extravagance. The robust archangel tearing Discord's disheveled hair, kicking her, pounding her with his fists, breaking a cross upon her back, and sending her about her business with a bee in her bonnet, presents a picture of drollery which is exceedingly absurd. Nor is there any impropriety in the picture from the poet's point of view. Michael and the Evangelist are scarcely serious beings. They both form part of his machinery and help to make the action move.

Broad fun, untinctured by irony, seasons the _Furioso_--as when Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into the sea, and mounts his Ethiopian cavalry on horses made of stone, and catches the wind in a bladder; all of which burlesque miracles are told with that keen relish of their practical utility which formed an element of Ariosto's sprightliness.[17] Ruggiero's pleasure-trip on Rabicane; Orlando's achievement of spitting six fat Dutchmen like frogs upon one spear; the index to Astolfo's magic book; the conceit of the knights who jousted with the golden lance and ascribed its success to their own valor; Orlando's feats of prowess with the table in the robber's den; are other instances of Ariosto's lightheartedness, when he banters with his subject and takes his readers into confidence with his own sense of drollery.[18] The donkey race in armor between Marfisa and Zerbino for a cantankerous old hag, with its courteous ceremonies and chivalrous conclusion, might be cited as an example of more sustained humor.[19] And such, too, though in another region, is the novel of Jocondo.

[Footnote 17: Canto xxxviii. 30, 33, 26. [Transcriber's Note: last reference should be Canto xxxix. 26.]]

[Footnote 18: Canto x. 72; ix. 68; xxii. 16; xlv. 65; xiii. 36.]

[Footnote 19: Canto xx. 122.]

Ariosto's irony, no less than his romantic method, deprived the _Furioso_ of that sublimity which only belongs to works of greater seriousness and deeper conviction. Yet he sometimes touches the sublime by force of dramatic description or by pathetic intensity. The climax of Orlando's madness has commonly been cited as an instance of poetic grandeur. Yet I should be inclined to prefer the gathering of the storm of discord in Agramante's camp.[20] The whole of this elaborate scene, where the fiery characters and tempestuous passions of the Moslem chiefs, of Ruggiero, Rodomonte, Gradasso, Mandricardo, and Marfisa, are brought successively into play by impulses and motives natural to each and powerful to produce a clash of adverse claims and interests, is not only conceived and executed in a truly dramatic spirit, but is eminently important for the action of the poem. The thunder-clouds which had been mustering to break in ruin upon Christendom, rush together and spend their fury in mid air. Thus the moment is decisive, and nothing has been spared to dignify the passions that provoke the final crash. They go on accumulating in complexity, like a fugue of discords, till at last the hyperbole of this sonorous stanza that seems justified:[21]

Tremo Parigi, e turbidossi Senna
All'alta voce, a quell'orribil grido;
Rimbombo il suon fin alla selva Ardenna
Si che lasciar tutte le fiere il nido.
Udiron l'Alpi e il monte di Gebenna,
Di Blaia e d'Arli e di Roano il lido;
Rodano e Sonna udi, Garonna e il Reno:
Si strinsero le madri i figli al seno.

[Footnote 20: Canto xxvii.]

[Footnote 21: _Ibid._ 101.]

His pathos also has its own sublimity. Imogen stretched lifeless on the corpse of Cloten; the Duchess of Malfi telling Cariola to see that her daughter says her prayers; Bellario describing his own sacrifice as a mere piece of boyhood flung away--these are instances from our own drama, in which the pathetic is sublime. Ariosto's method is different, and the effect is more rhetorical. Yet he can produce passages of almost equal poignancy, prolonged situations of overmastering emotion, worthy to be set side by side with the Euripidean pictures of Polyxena, Alcestis, or Iphigenia.[22] The death of Zerbino; the death of Brandimarte with half of Fiordeligi's name upon his lips; the constancy of Isabella offering her neck to Rodomonte's sword; the anguish of Olimpia upon the desert island; are instances of sublime poetry wrung from pathos by the force of highly-wrought impassioned oratory. Zerbino is one of the most sympathetic creations of the poet's fancy. Of him Ariosto wrote the famous line:[23]

Natura il fece, e poi ruppe la stampa.

[Footnote 22: The comparison of Ariosto and Euripides is not wholly fanciful. Both were supreme artists in an age of incipient decadence, lacking the convictions of their predecessors, and depending for effect upon rhetorical devices. Both were [Greek: tragikotatoi] in Aristotle's sense of the phrase, and both were romantic rather than heroic poets.]

[Footnote 23: Canto x. 84.]

He is killed by the Tartar Mandricardo before his lady Isabella's eyes:[24]

A questo la mestissima Isabella,
Declinando la faccia lacrimosa,
E congiungendo la sua bocca a quella
Di Zerbin, languidetta, come rosa,
Rosa non colta in sua stagion, si ch'ella
Impallidisca in su la siepe ombrosa,
Disse: Non vi pensate gia, mia vita,
Far senza me quest'ultima partita.

[Footnote 24: The whole scene, with all its gradations of emotion, is too long to quote. But see xxiv. 74-87.]

With stanzas like this the poet cheats the sorrow he has stirred in us. Their imagery is too beautiful to admit of painful feeling while we read; and thus, though the passion of the scene is tragic, its anguish is brought by touches of pure art into harmony with the romantic tone of the whole poem. So also when Isabella, kneeling before Rodomonte's sword, like S. Catherine in Luini's fresco at Milan, has met her own death, Ariosto heals the wound he has inflicted on our sensibility by lines of exquisitely cadenced melody:[25]

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella.
Cosi i miei versi avesson forza, come
Ben m'affaticherei con tutta quella
Arte che tanto il parlar orna e come,
Perche mille e mill'anni, e piu, novella
Sentisse il mondo del tuo chiaro nome.
Vattene in pace alla superna sede,
E lascia all'altre esempio di tua fede.

[Footnote 25: Canto xxix. 27.]

But it is in the situations, the elegiac lamentations, the unexpected vicissitudes, and the strong pictorial beauties of Olimpia's novel, that Ariosto strains his power over pathos to the utmost. Olimpia has lost her kingdom and spent her substance for her husband, Bireno. Orlando aids her in her sore distress, and frees Bireno from his prison. Bireno proves faithless, and deserts her on an island. She is taken by corsairs, exposed like Andromeda on a rock to a sea-monster, and is finally rescued by Orlando. Each of these touching incidents is developed with consummate skill; and the pathos reaches its height when Olimpia, who had risked all for her husband, wakes at dawn to find herself abandoned by him on a desolate sea-beach.[26] In this passage Ariosto comes into competition with two poets of a different stamp--with Catullus, who thus describes Ariadne:

Saxea ut effigies Bacchantis prospicit:

and with Fletcher, who makes Aspatia in the _Maid's Tragedy_ dramatize the situation. Catullus in a single felicitous simile, Fletcher by the agony of passionate declamation, surpass Ariosto's detailed picture. The one is more restrained, the other more tragic. But Ariosto goes straight to our heart by the natural touch of Olimpia feeling for Bireno in the darkness, and by the suggestion of pallid moonlight and a shivering dawn. The numerous prosaic details with which he has charged his picture, add to its reality, and enhance the Euripidean quality we admire in it.

[Footnote 26: Canto x. 20-34.]

In the case of a poet whose imagination was invariably balanced by practical sound sense, the personal experience he acquired of the female sex could not fail to influence his delineation of women. He was not a man to cherish illusion or to romance in verse about perfection he had never found in fact. He did not place a Beatrice or Laura on the pedestal of his heart; nor was it till he reached the age of forty-seven, when the _Furioso_ had lain for six years finished on his desk, that he married Alessandra Strozzi. His great poem, completed in 1515, must have been written under the influence of those more volatile amours he celebrated in his Latin verses. Therefore we are not surprised to find that the female characters of the _Orlando_ illustrate his epistle on the choice of a wife.[27] His highest ideal of woman is presented to us in Bradamante, whose virtues are a loyal attachment to Ruggiero and a modest submission to the will of her parents. Yet even in Bradamante he has painted a virago from whom the more delicate humanity of Shakspere would have recoiled. The scene in which she quarrels with Marfisa about Ruggiero degrades her in our eyes, and makes us feel that such a termagant might prove a sorry wife.[28] It was almost impossible to combine true feminine qualities with the blood-thirst of an Amazon. Consequently when, just before her marriage, she snuffs the carnage of the Saracens from afar, and regrets that she must withhold her hand from "such rich spoil of slaughter in a spacious field," a painful sense of incongruity is left upon our mind.[29] Marfisa, who remains a warrior to the last, and who in her first girlhood had preserved her virginity by slaughtering a palace-full of Pagans,[30] is artistically justified as a romantic heroine. But Bradamante, destined to become a mother, gentle in her home affections, obedient to her father's wishes, tremulous in her attachment to Ruggiero, cannot with any propriety be compared to a leopard loosed from the leash upon defenseless gazelles.[31] Between the Amazonian virgin and the mother of a race of kings to be, the outline of her character wavers.

[Footnote 27: See above, Part i. p. 510.]

[Footnote 28: Canto xxxvi., especially stanza 50.]

[Footnote 29: Canto xxxix. 10-15; cp. _ib._ 67-72.]

[Footnote 30: Canto xxxvii. 15.]

[Footnote 31: Canto xxxix. 69.]

After the more finished portrait of Bradamante, we find in Isabella and Fiordeligi, the lovers of Zerbino and Brandimarte, Ariosto's purest types of feminine affection. The cardinal virtue of woman in his eyes was self-devotion--loyalty to the death, unhesitating sacrifice of wealth, ease, reputation, life, to the one object of passionate attachment. And this self-devotion he has painted in Olimpia no less romantically than in Isabella and Fiordeligi. Still it must be remembered that Isabella had eloped with Zerbino from her father's palace, that Fiordeligi was only a wife in name, and that Olimpia murdered her first husband and consoled herself very rapidly for Bireno's loss in the arms of Oberto. The poet has not cared to interweave with either portrait such threads of piety and purity as harmonize the self-abandonment of Juliet. Fiordespina's ready credence of the absurd story by which Ricciardetto persuades her that he is Bradamante metamorphosed by a water-fairy to a man, and her love longings, so frankly confessed, so unblushingly indulged, illustrate the passion Ariosto delighted to describe. He feels a tender sympathy for feminine frailty, and in more than one exquisitely written passage claims for women a similar license in love to that of men.[32] Indeed, he never judges a woman severely, unless she adds to her want of chastity the spitefulness of Gabrina or the treachery of Orrigille or the cupidity of Argia or the heartlessness of Angelica. Angelica, who in the _Innamorato_ touches our feelings by her tenderness for Rinaldo, in the _Furioso_ becomes a mere coquette, and is well punished by her insane passion for the first pretty fellow that takes her fancy. The common faults for which Ariosto taxes women are cupidity, infidelity, and fraud.[33] The indulgence due to them from men is almost cynically illustrated by the story of Adonio and the magic virtues of Merlin's goblet.[34] In the preface to the fifth canto he condemns the brutality of husbands, and in the tenth he recommends ladies to be free of their favors to none but middle-aged lovers.[35]

[Footnote 32: See especially iv. 63-67.]

[Footnote 33: Introductions to cantos xliii. xxviii. xxix. xxii. xxvi.; cp. xxvii. 123.]

[Footnote 34: Canto xlii.]

[Footnote 35: Stanzas 6-9.]

Ariosto's morality was clearly on a level with that of the novelists from Boccaccio to Bandello; and his apology is that he was not inferior to the standard of his age. Still it is not much to his credit to plead that his cantos are less impure than the _Capitoli_ of Monsignore La Casa or the prurient comedies of Aretino. Even allowing for the laxity of Renaissance manners, it must be conceded that he combined vulgar emotions and a coarse-fibered nature with the most refined artistic genius.[36] Our Elizabethan drama, in spite of moral crudity, contains nothing so cynical as Ariosto's novel of Jocondo. The beauty of its style, the absence of tragedy in its situations or of passion in its characters, and the humorous smile with which the poet acts as showman to the secrets of the alcove, render this tale one of the most licentious in literature. Nor is this licentiousness balanced by any sublimer spiritual quality. His ideal of manliness is physical force and animal courage. Cruelty and bloodshed for the sake of slaughter stain his heroes.[37] The noblest conflict of emotion he portrays is the struggle between love and honor in Ruggiero,[38] and the contest of courtesy between Ruggiero and Leone.[39] In the few passages where he celebrates the chivalrous ideal, he dwells chiefly on the scorn of gain and the contempt for ease which characterized the errant knighthood.[40]

[Footnote 36: If this seems over-stated, I might refer the reader to the prologue of the _Suppositi_, where the worst vice of the Renaissance is treated with a flippant relish; or, again, to the prologue of the _Lena_, where the _double entendre_ is worthy of the grossest _Capitolo_. The plots of all Ariosto's comedies are of a vulgar, obscene, _bourgeois_ type.]

[Footnote 37: See xxxix. 10-72, xx. 113, xlvi. 137, and _passim_, for the carnage wrought by knights cased in enchanted armor with invulnerable bodies upon defenseless Saracens or unarmed peasants. It was partly this that made Shelley shrink with loathing from the _Furioso_.]

[Footnote 38: Cantos xxi. 1-3, xx. 143, xxxviii. introduction, xlv. 57, xxv. introduction.]

[Footnote 39: Cantos xliv. xlv.]

[Footnote 40: Canto vi. 80, vii. 41-44. The sentiments, though superficial, are exquisitely uttered.]

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. Whether the mood be elegiac or satiric, humorous or heroic, idyllic or rhetorical, this absolute sincerity and directness of language maintains him at an even level. In each case he has given the right, the best, the natural investiture to thought, and his phrases have the self-evidence of crystals. Just as he collected the materials of his poem from all sources, so he appropriated every word that seemed to serve his need. The vocabulary of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the racy terms of popular poetry, together with Latinisms and Lombardisms, were alike laid under contribution. Yet these diverse elements were so fused together and brought into a common toning by his taste that, though the language of his poem was new, it was at once accepted as classical. When we remember the difficulties which in his days beset Italian composition, when we call to mind the frigid experiments of Bembo in Tuscan diction, the meticulous proprieties of critics like Speron Speroni, and the warfare waged around the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, we know not whether to wonder at Ariosto's happy audacities in language or at their still happier success. His triumph was not won without severe labor. He spent ten years in the composition of the _Furioso_ and sixteen in its polishing. The autograph at Ferrara shows page upon page of alteration, transposition, and refinement on the first draught, proving that the Homeric limpidity and ease we now admire, were gained by assiduous self-criticism. The result of this long toil is that there cannot be found a rough or languid or inharmonious passage in an epic of 50,000 lines. If we do not discern in Ariosto the inexhaustible freshness of Homer, the sublime music of Milton, the sculpturesque brevity of Dante, the purity of Petrarch, or the majestic sweetness of Virgilian cadences, it can fairly be said that no other poet is so varied. None mingles strength, sweetness, subtlety, rapidity, rhetoric, breadth of effect and delicacy of suggestion, in a harmony so perfect. None combines workmanship so artistic with a facility that precludes all weariness. Whether we read him simply to enjoy his story or to taste the most exquisite flavors of poetic diction, we shall be equally satisfied. Language in his hands is like a soft and yielding paste, which takes all forms beneath the molder's hand, and then, when it has hardened, stays for ever sharp in outline, glittering as adamant.

While following the romantic method of Boiardo and borrowing the polished numbers of Poliziano, Ariosto refined the stanzas of the former poet without losing rapidity, and avoided the stationary pomp of the latter without sacrificing richness. He thus effected a combination of the two chief currents of Italian versification, and brought the octave to its final perfection. When we study the passage which describes the entrance of Ruggiero into the island home of Alcina, we feel the advance in melody and movement that he made. We are reminded of the gardens of Morgana and Venus; but both are surpassed in their own qualities of beauty, while the fluidity that springs from complete command of the material, is added. Such touches as the following:[41]

Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco
Si puo quivi albergare in alcun core:

are wholly beyond the scope of Boiardo's style. Again, this stanza, without the brocaded splendor of Poliziano, contains all that he derived from Claudian:[42]

Per le cime dei pini e degli allori,
Degli alti faggi e degli irsuti abeti,
Volan scherzando i pargoletti Amori;
Di lor vittorie altri godendo lieti,
Altri pigliando a saettare i cori
La mira quindi, altri tendendo reti:
Chi tempra dardi ad un ruscel piu basso,
E chi gli aguzza ad un volubil sasso.

[Footnote 41: Canto vi. 73.]

[Footnote 42: Canto vi. 75.]

Raphael, Correggio and Titian have succeeded to Botticelli and Mantegna; and as those supreme painters fused the several excellences of their predecessors in a fully-developed work of art, so has Ariosto passed beyond his masters in the art of poetry. Nor was the process one of mere eclecticism. Intent upon similar aims, the final artists of the early sixteenth century brought the same profound sentiment for reality, the same firm grasp on truth, the same vivid imagination as their precursors to the task. But they possessed surer hands and a more accomplished method. They stood above their subject and surveyed it from the height of conscious power.

After the island of Alcina, it only remained for Tasso to produce novelty in his description of Armida's gardens by pushing one of Ariosto's qualities to exaggeration. The _dolcezza_, which in Tasso is too sugared, has in Ariosto the fine flavor of wild honeycombs. In the tropical magnificence of Tasso's stanzas there is a sultry stupor which the fresh sunlight of the _Furioso_ never sheds. This wilding grace of the Ferrarese Homer is due to the lightness of his touch--to the blending of humorous with luxurious images in a style that passes swiftly over all it paints.[43] After a like fashion, the idyl of Angelica among the shepherds surpasses the celebrated episode of Erminia in the _Gerusalemme_. It is not that Tasso has not invented a new music and wrung a novel effect from the situation by the impassioned fervor of his sympathy and by the majestic languor of his cadences. But we feel that what Tasso relies on for his main effect, Ariosto had already suggested in combination with other and still subtler qualities. The one has the overpowering perfume of a hothouse jasmine; the other has the mingled scents of a garden where roses and carnations are in bloom.

[Footnote 43: Notice, for example, the irony of the seventh line in vi. 71, and of the third and fourth in the next stanza.]

Ariosto's pictorial faculty has already formed the topic of a paragraph, nor is it necessary to adduce instances of what determines the whole character of the _Orlando Furioso_. Otherwise it would be easy to form a gallery of portraits and landscapes; to compare the double treatment of Andromeda exposed to the sea monster in the tenth and eleventh cantos,[44] to set a pageant in the style of Mantegna by the side of a Correggiesque vignette,[45] or to enlarge upon the beauty of those magical Renaissance buildings which the poet dreamed of in the midst of verdant lawns and flowery wildernesses.[46] True to the spirit of Italian art, he had no strong sentiment for nature except in connection with humanity. Therefore we find but little of landscape-painting for its own sake and small sympathy with the wilder and uncultivated beauties of the world. His scenery recalls the backgrounds to Carpaccio's pictures or the idyllic gardens of the Giorgionesque school. Sometimes there is a magnificent drawing in the style of Titian's purple mountain ranges, and here and there we come upon minutely finished studies that imply deep feeling for the moods of nature. Of this sort is the description of autumn[47];

Tra il fin d'ottobre e il capo di novembre,
Nella stagion che la frondosa vesta
Vede levarsi, e discoprir le membre,
Trepida pianta, finche nuda resta,
E van gli augelli a strette schiere insembre.

[Footnote 44: Canto x. 95, 96, xi. 65, 66. The one is Angelica, the other Olimpia.]

[Footnote 45: Canto vi. 62, 63, 75.]

[Footnote 46: Canto vi. 71, xxxiv. 51-53.]

[Footnote 47: Canto ix. 7.]

The illuminative force of his similes is quite extraordinary. He uses them not only as occasions for painting cabinet pictures of exquisite richness, but also for casting strong imaginative light upon the object under treatment. In the earlier part of the _Furioso_ he describes two battles with a huge sea monster. The Orc is a kind of romantic whale, such as Piero di Cosimo painted in his tale of Andromeda; and Ruggiero has to fight it first, while riding on the Hippogriff. It is therefore necessary for Ariosto to image forth a battle between behemoth and a mighty bird. He does so by elaborately painting the more familiar struggles of an eagle who has caught a snake, and of a mastiff snapping at a fly.[48] At the same time he adds realistic touches like the following:

L'orca, che vede sotto le grandi ale
L'ombra di qua e di la correr su l'onda,
Lascia la preda certa littorale,
E quella vana segue furibonda.

[Footnote 48: Canto x. 102-106.]

Or, again, when Ruggiero is afraid of wetting his aerial courser's wings:

Che se lo sprazzo in tal modo ha a durare,
Teme si l'ale innaffi all'Ippogrifo,
Che brami invano avere o zucca o schifo.

The mixture of imagery with prosaic detail brings the whole scene distinctly before our eyes. When Orlando engages the same monster, he is in a boat, and the conditions of the contest are altered. Accordingly we have a different set of similes. A cloud that fills a valley, rolling to and fro between the mountain sides, describes the movement of the Orc upon the waters; and when Orlando thrusts his anchor in between its jaws to keep them open, he is compared to miners propping up their galleries with beams in order that they may pursue their work in safety.[49] In this way we realize the formidable nature of the beast, and comprehend the stratagem that tames it to Orlando's will.

[Footnote 49: Canto xi. 34-38.]

The same nice adaptation of images may be noticed in the similes showered on Rodomonte. The giant is alone inside the walls of Paris, and the poet is bound to make us feel that a whole city may have cause to tremble before a single man. Therefore he never leaves our fancy for a moment in repose. At one time it is a castle shaken by a storm; at another a lion retreating before the hunters; again, a tigress deprived of her cubs, or a bull that has broken from the baiting-pole, or the whelps of a lioness attacking a fierce young steer.[50] Image succeeds image with dazzling rapidity, all tending to render a strained situation possible.

[Footnote 50: Canto xviii. 11, 14, 19, 22, 35.]

Some of Ariosto's illustrations--like the plowman and the thunderbolt, the two dogs fighting, the powder magazine struck by lightning, the house on fire at night, the leaves of autumn, the pine that braves a tempest, the forest bending beneath mighty winds, the April avalanche of suddenly dissolving snow--though wrought with energy and spirit, have not more than the usual excellences of carefully developed Homeric imitation.[51] Framed in single octave stanzas, they are pictures for the mind to rest on. Others illuminate the matter they are used to illustrate, with the radiance of subtle and remote fancy. Of this sort is the brief image by which the Paladins in Charlemagne's army are likened to jewels in a cloth of gold:[52]

Ed hanno i paladin sparsi tra loro,
Come le gemme in un ricamo d'oro.

[Footnote 51: Canto i. 65, ii. 5, ix. 78, xx. 89, xxi. 15, 16, xxiv. 63, xxxvi. 40.]

[Footnote 52: Canto xxxix. 17.]

A common metaphor takes new beauty by its handling in this simile[53];

Pallido come colto al mattutino
E da sera il ligustro o il molle acanto.

[Footnote 53: Canto xliii. 169.]

Homer had compared the wound of Menelaus to ivory stained by a Maeonian woman with crimson.[54] Ariosto refines on this conceit:[55]

Cosi talora un bel purpureo nastro
Ho veduto partir tela d'argento
Da quella bianca man piu ch'alabastro.
Da cui partire il cor spesso mi sento.

[Footnote 54: _Iliad_, iv. 140.]

[Footnote 55: Canto xxiv. 66.]

Both Homer and Virgil likened their dying heroes to flowers cut down by the tempest or the plow. The following passage will bear comparison even with the death of Euphorbus:[56]

Come purpureo fior languendo muore,
Che 'l vomere al passar tagliato lassa,
O come carco di superchio umore
Il papaver nell'orto il capo abbassa:
Cosi, giu della faccia ogni colore
Cadendo, Dardinel di vita passa;
Passa di vita, e fa passar con lui
L'ardire e la virtu di tutti i sui.

[Footnote 56: Canto xviii. 153.]

One more example may be chosen where Ariosto has borrowed nothing from any model. He uses the perfume that clings to the hair or dress of youth or maiden, as a metaphor for the aroma of noble ancestry:[57]

L'odor ch'e sparso in ben notrita e bella
O chioma o barba o delicata vesta
Di giovene leggiadro o di donzella,
Ch'amor sovente sospirando desta;
Se spira, e fa sentir di se novella,
E dopo molti giorni ancora resta,
Mostra con chiaro ed evidente effetto,
Come a principio buono era e perfetto.

[Footnote 57: Canto xli. 1.]

The unique importance of Ariosto in the history of Renaissance poetry justifies a lengthy examination of his masterpiece. In him the chief artistic forces of the age were so combined that he remains its best interpreter. Painting, the cardinal art of Italy, determined his method; and the tide of his narrative carried with it the idyl, the elegy, and the _novella_. In these forms the genius of the Renaissance found fittest literary expression; for the epic and the drama lay beyond the scope of the Italians at this period. 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. But he also embodied the strong points of his epoch--especially that sustained pursuit of beauty in form, that width of intellectual sympathy, that urbanity of tone and delicacy of perception, which rendered Italy the mistress of the arts, the propagator of culture for the rest of Europe.