Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. Benedetto Croce
only from death, but from desperation at the desertion of her most thankless husband. Zerbino, brother of Ginevra and lover of Isabella, is a flower of nobility among the knights. He alone understands and pities the affectionate deed of Medoro, careless of his own life and absorbed in the anxiety to obtain burial for the body of his lord. When his former friend who has shown himself to be a most infamous traitor, is dragged before him in chains, he cannot find it in him to inflict upon him the death he deserves, for he remembers their long and close friendship. Devoted to the greatness of Orlando and in gratitude for what he had done in saving and taking care of Isabella, he collects the arms of the Paladin, scattered at the outbreak of his madness, and sustains a combat with Mandricardo for these arms, dying rather for sorrow at not having been able to defend them than from his wound. Cloridano and Medoro, Orlando and Brandimarte, are other idealisations of a friendship which lasts beyond the tomb; and anyone searching the poem for motives of commiseration and indignation for oppressed virtue, for unhappy peoples trodden beneath the heel of the tyrant, robbed, tortured and allowed to perish like cattle and goats, would find other instances of the goodness and generosity which burned in the mild Ariosto.
Goodness and generosity were also the substance of his political sentiment, which was that of the honest man of all times, who laments the misfortunes of his country, loathes the domination of foreigners, judges the oppression of the nobles with severity, is scandalised by the corruption and hypocrisy of the priests and of the Church, regrets that the united arms of Europe cannot prevail against the Turks, that barbarian "of ill omen"; but it does not go beyond this superficial impressionability, and ends by accepting his own times and respecting the powerful personages who have finally prevailed. For this reason there is but slight interest in noting (and it can be noted in the Furioso itself) the variety of the political ideas of Ariosto, first hostile to the Spaniards, as we see from several references to them, and from certain attributes given to the Spaniard Ferraù, and finally to the French, who had lost the game in Italy, and we find him extolling the Spanish-Imperial Carlo V., and those who maintain his cause in Italy, whether they were Andrea Doria or the Avalos. But on the other hand, as Ave have already said, it is unjust to reprove him for not having been a champion of italianity and of rebellion against tyrants and foreigners—such existed in those days, although they were rare—or a passionate political thinker and prophet, like Machiavelli. The famous invective against firearms suffices to indicate the quality of Ariosto's politics: for him politics were morality, private morality, a morality but little combative and very idyllic, although not vulgar, disdainful indeed of the vulgar of all sorts, however fortunate and highly placed. Thus it was not such as to create figures and scenes in the poem, like love and human piety; suffice that if it insinuated itself here and there among the reflective, exclamatory and hortatory octaves.
His feeling towards his own sovereign lords, the Estes, has not, as we have suggested, either in his soul or in the Furioso, anything in it of the specifically political, although he admired them for the splendour of art and letters, which they and their predecessors had conferred upon the country, and for the strength of their rule. And he praised them with words and comparisons, which he introduced into his poem on a large scale, and into the general scheme itself. These have at times been held to be base adulation or a subtle form of irony almost amounting to sarcasm; they were however neither, being serious celebrations of glorious military enterprises and of magnanimous acts (it does not matter whether they really were so or seemed so and were bound to seem so to him); and for the rest, and especially as far as concerned Cardinal Hippolyto, they resemble the madrigals addressed to ladies or their attendants, which always contain a vein of mockery mingled with the hyperbole of their compliments. In fact he treated this material as an imaginative theme, now decorous and grave, now elegant and polished as by a courtier; and he would have been still more inclined to treat the Estes in this way, had they in return for his words and "works of ink" dispensed him from the duties of his post, and particularly from those which obliged him to run hither and thither, to behave like a "teamster." Like many peaceful individuals, who have no taste for finding themselves in the midst of battles, or for changing the place of their abode, or for travelling to see foreign races, or for voyages, or for rapid ups and downs and adventures, or for anything of an upsetting and extraordinary nature that happens unexpectedly, he was quite ready to accept all these things in his imagination, where he preserved, caressed and made idols of them. His inclination imaginatively to decorate the Estes, the nobles of Italy, great ladies, artists, good or bad men of letters of any sort, to make radiant statues of them, had the same root as his inclination for stories of knightly romance.
These stories were the favourite reading, the "pleasant literature" of good society, especially in Ferrara, where the Estes possessed a fine collection in their library, whence had come the majority of Italian poets, who had versified them during the previous century, setting them free from plebeian prose and verse. Ariosto must have read very many of these in his youth, and must have delighted in them, and we know that he himself translated some from French and Spanish. Here were to be found terrible and tremendous battles, duels of hard knocks and of masterly blows, combats with giants and monsters, tragical situations, magnanimous deeds, proofs of steadfast faith, a vying together of loyalty and courtesy, persecutions and favours and aid afforded by prodigious beings, by fairies and magicians, travels in distant lands, by sea or by flight, enchanted gardens and palaces, knights of immense strength, Christian and Saracen, warlike women and women who were women, royally: all this gave him the desirable and agreeable pleasure of one who looks on at a variously coloured exhibition of fireworks, and owing to this pleasure they gave, he incorporated a great number of them in the Furioso. It is superfluous to inquire whether the material of chivalry appeared to him to be serious or burlesque, when we have understood the feeling which led him in that direction: it was beyond all judgment of that sort, because we do not judge rockets or fireworks morally or economically, with approval or reproof. It can of course be remarked that knightly tales had henceforth been reduced to such an extent in Italy and in the spirit of Ariosto that they were not only without the religious and national feeling of the ancient epic, but even without what is still to be found in certain popular Italian compilations, such as the Monarchs of France; but this observation, though correct and important enough in the history of culture, has no meaning whatever as regards Ariosto's poetry. The fact that Ariosto was sometimes entranced and carried away as it were by the spectacles which his fancy presented to him, and sometimes kept aloof from them, with a smile for commentary, or turned away towards the real world that surrounded him, goes without saying, and does not appear to demand the discussions and the intellectual efforts which have been devoted to it.
His was on the other hand a distinctly jesting outlook upon religious beliefs, God, Christ, Paradise, angels and saints; and Charlemagne's prayer to God, the vision of the angel Michael upon earth and the voyage of Astolfo to the world of the Moon, his conversations with John the Evangelist, the deeds and words of the hermit with whom Angelica and Isabella find themselves, and finally those of the saintly hermit who baptises Ruggiero, accord with this laughing and almost mocking spirit. Here we do not find even the seriousness of the game and in the game, with which he treats of knightly doings; nor could there be, because relation towards religion admits only of complete reverence or complete irreverence. And Ariosto was irreverent, or what comes to the same thing, indifferent; his spirit was as areligious as it was aphilosophical, untormented with doubts, not concerned with human destiny, incurious as to the meaning and value of this world, which he saw and touched, and in which he loved and suffered. He was altogether outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every sort of philosophy. This limits and as it were deprives of importance his mockeries and to salute him as some have done "the Voltaire of the Renaissance" or as a precursor of Voltaire, and Voltaire himself who so much enjoyed Ariosto's profanations of sacred things, maliciously underlining the witticism that escapes from the lips of St. John about "my much-praised Christ" (after having said that writers turn the true into the false, and the false into the true, and that he also had been a "writer" in the world), has given Ariosto a place which does not belong to him at all. Voltaire was not areligious or indifferent, and was only irreligious in so far as he attacked all historical religions with a religion of his own, which was deism or the religion of the reason; and for this reason his satires and his lampoons possess a polemical value, which is not to be found in the jests of Ariosto.
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