Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. Benedetto Croce
in his eyes, her whose fair, dense hair, as it shaded her cheeks and neck and fell upon her shoulders, whose rich silken robe adorned with scarlet and gold, became part of his soul; and the elegy which is an outburst of joy upon having attained the desired felicity; and that other which records the lovers' meeting at night; then too the chapter upon the visit to Florence, where all the attractions of the sweet city failed to secure fer him a moment's respite, eager as he was to return to the longed-for presence of the loved one, whom he describes poetically in her absence as a fair magician:
"Oltra acque, monti, a ripa l'onda vaga
Del re de' fiumi, in bianca e pura stola,
Cantando ferma il sol la bella maga,
Che con sua vista può sanarmi sola."
and in the sonnet which ends:
"Ma benigne accoglienze, ma complessi
Licenziosi, ma parole sciolte
D'ogni freno, ma risi, vezzi e giuochi."
They are often echoes of the erotic Latin poets, refreshed by the true condition of his own spirit which, in the passion of love, never went beyond a tender and somewhat slight degree of sensuality. It would be vain to seek in him what he does not possess—that suave imagining, those cosmical analogies, those moral finesses and lofty thoughts, which are to be found in other poets of love.
For this reason, reflections upon himself and upon the society in which it was his fate to live, confidences about his own various ways of feeling and the recital of his adventures, follow and accompany the brief lyrical effusions of this eroticism. When Ariosto limits himself to the thoughts and happenings of his daily life, it is rather a question of narrating than creating, and the culmination of the minor works are known as the Satires, which must not be limited to the seven which bear this title in the printed editions, but should be extended to include other compositions of like tone and content, to be found among the elegies and the capitals, and even among the odes, such as the elegy De diversis amoribus. In all of these, Ariosto is writing his autobiography in fragments, or rather as a series of confidential letters to his friends, such as he did not write in prose, at least none are to be found among those of his that remain. These are all connected with business, dry, summary, and written in haste, only here and there revealing the personality of the writer; whereas, when he expressed himself in verse, he made his own soul the subject, paying attention to the vivacity of the representation and the precise accuracy of what he said. This is a most pleasing versified correspondence, where we hear him lamenting, losing patience, telling us what he wants, forming projects, refusing, begging a favour, candidly laying bare for us his true disposition, his lack of docility, his volubility and his caprices, discussing life and the world, smiling at others and at himself; we converse with an Ariosto in his dressing-gown, who experiences great pleasure and has no compunction about showing us himself as he is, and we know how he abhorred any sort of restraint. But these letters in verse, although perfect in quality, vivacious and eloquent as only the writings of a man who speaks of things that concern himself can be, yet are letters, confessions, autobiography: they are not pure poetry; their metrical form is to them something of a delicate pleasing whim, in harmony with such a definition of the soul. In saying this, we do not wish to detract in any way from their value, which is great, but only to prevent their true character from escaping us.
It is no marvel then if a connection, such as prevails between hills and valleys, seems to run between these lesser works, the odes, the verses of the satires, and the Furioso. It is sufficient to read an octave or two of the poem to discover at once the difference in altitude separating it from the most delicious of the love-songs, from the most nimble and picturesque of the satires, which express the feelings of the author far more directly than does the Furioso. It is further to be noted that Ariosto never wished to publish, and certainly never would have had published a great number of them, with the exception of the comedies, even after his death, except perhaps the satires; but since the minor works are nevertheless the expression of his feelings in real and ordinary life, it follows that if we wish to discover the inspiration of the Furioso, the passion which informed and gave to it its proper content, we must seek for this beyond his ordinary life, not in the heart which we know as that of a son, a brother, a poor man, a lover: it is something hidden yet more deeply within him, the heart of his heart.
That there really was a hidden affection; that Ariosto really had a heart of his heart shut up within himself; that beyond and above the beloved woman he worshipped another woman or goddess, with whom he daily held religious converse, is apparent from his whole habit of life. Why had he so lofty a disdain for practical ambitions, why was life at court and business so wearisome to him, why did he renounce so much, sigh so often and so often pray for leisure and rest and freedom, save to celebrate that cult, to give himself over to that converse, to work upon the Furioso, which was its altar, or the statue which he had sculptured for it and was perfecting with his chisel? What was the origin of his well-known "distraction," that mind of his so aloof from his surroundings, ever dwelling upon something else, which his contemporaries observe and about which curious anecdotes are preserved? His need of love and of feminine caresses did not present itself to him as a supreme end, as with people desirous of ease and pleasure, but seemed to him to be rather a means to an end: as though it were the surrounding of serene joy, of tumult appeased, which he prepared for himself and for that other more lofty love. Carducci has successfully defined this psychological situation in his sonnet on the portrait of Ariosto, where he says that the only longed for and accepted "prize for his poems" was for the great dreamer "a lovely mouth—which should appease the burning of his Apollonian brow—with kisses … "
The proof of the scrupulous attention which he devoted to the Furioso, is to be found in the twelve years, during which he worked upon it in the flower of his age, "with long vigils and labours," as he wrote to the Doge of Venice, when requesting the privilege of printing the first edition of 1516; and in his having always returned to it, to chisel smooth and to soften it in innumerable delicate details, or to amplify it, or in the throwing away of five cantos, which he had written by way of amplification, but which did not go well with the general design, and finally failed to content him. For these he substituted as many more, and personally superintended the edition of 1532, which also failed to content him altogether, so that he began to work upon it again during the few months which separated him from death. His son Virginio attests that he "was never satisfied with his verses, that he kept changing them again and again, and for this reason never remembered any of them … "; and contemporaries never cease marvelling at his diligence as a corrector and a maker of perfect things: Giraldi Cinzio, to mention but one witness, says that after the first edition, "not a single day passed," during sixteen years, "that he was not occupied upon it with pen and with thought," and that he was also desirous of obtaining the opinions and impressions of the greatest men of letters and humanists in Italy as to every part of it, men such as Bembo, Molza, Navagero; and as Apelles with his paintings, Ariosto kept his work for two years "in the hall of his house, leaving it there that it might be criticised by everyone"; and he particularly said that he wished his critics merely to mark with a stroke of the pen those parts which did not please them, without giving any reason for so doing, that he might find it out for himself, and then discuss it with them, and so arrive at a decision and a solution in his own way. He pushed his minute delicacy of taste so far as to be preoccupied about the choice of modes of spelling, refusing, for instance, to remove the "h" from those words which possessed it by tradition, thus opposing the suggestion of Tolomei and the new fashion of the illiterate crowd, by jocosely replying that "He who removes the h from Huomo, does not know Huomo (man), and he who removes it from Honore, is not worthy of honour."
What then was the passion which he thus expressed, who was the goddess, for whom, since he could not raise a temple and a marble statue in the little house which he longed for and built in the Via Mirasole, he constructed the architecture, the forms and the poetical adornments of the Furioso? He never uttered her name, because none of the other great Italian poets was so little a theorist or critic as Ariosto. He never discussed his art or art in general, limiting himself to saying very simply, and indeed very inadequately, that what he meant by art was "A work containing pleasing and delightful things"; nor, as we have seen, have the critics told us who