Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. Benedetto Croce

or by means of external and accidental attributes, often by their names alone; in like manner the women are either amorous or perfidious, virtuous and content with one love, or dissolute and perverse, often distinguished merely by their different adventures or the names that adorn them. The same is to be said of the narratives and descriptions (typical and non-individual, or but little individual, is the madness of Orlando, to compare which with Lear's is a rhetorician's fancy), and of natural objects, landscapes, palaces, gardens, and all else. Reserves have been and can with justice even be made as to the coherence of the characters taken as a whole and forming part of a general scheme, for Ariosto's personages take many liberties with themselves, according to the course of the events with which they find themselves connected, or rather according to the services which the author asks of them.

      Such warnings as these are indispensable, because, if some readers realise their expectation of finding objectively described and coherent characters in Ariosto and consequently praise him for creating them, others with like expectations equally unfounded are disappointed and consequently blame him. Thus for De Sanctis Ariosto's feminine characters have seemed to be inferior to those of Dante, of Shakespeare and of Goethe: but this is an impossible comparison, because Angelica, Olympia, and Isabella, although they certainly lack the passionate intensity of Francesca, Desdemona and Margaret, yet the latter for their part lack the harmonious octaves in which the first trio lives and has its being, consisting of just these octaves. And what is more, neither trio suffers from the imperfections, which are imperfections only in the light of imperfect critical knowledge and consequent prejudice, but not real imperfections and poetical contradictions in themselves. De Sanctis also blamed Ariosto for his lack of sentiment for nature, as though it were a defect; but what is called sentiment for nature (as for that matter the great master De Sanctis himself taught) does not depend upon nature, but rather upon the attitude of the human spirit, upon the feelings of comfort, of melancholy or of religious terror, with which man invests nature and finds them where he has placed them; but this attitude was foreign to the fundamental attitude of Ariosto, and were there to be by chance some reference to it in the poem, were some note of sentiment to sound there, we should immediately be sensible of the discord and impropriety. To Lessing, another objective critic, the portrayal of the beauties of Alcina seemed to be a mistake and to exceed the limit of poetry, to which De Sanctis replied that this materiality which Lessing blamed was the secret of the poetry, because the beauty of the magician Alcina required a material description, since it was fictitious in its nature. This blame was unjust, and although the answer to it was ingenious, yet it was perhaps not perfectly correct, for we have already seen that Ariosto always described thus both true and imaginary beauties, Olympias and Alcinas. The true answer seems to be the one already given, that it would be useless to seek for features of energy in Ariosto, lively portraits dashed off in a couple of brush strokes, for these things presuppose a mode of feeling that he lacked altogether or, at any rate suppressed. Those "laughing fleeting" eyes, which are all Sylvia, "le doux sourire amoureux et souffrant," which are the whole of the spiritual sister-soul of the Maison du Berger, do not belong to Ariosto, but to Leopardi and to De Vigny.

      There are two ways in which the Furioso should not be read: the first is the way in which one reads a work of rhythmic and lofty moral inspiration, like the Promessi Sposi, tracing, that is to say, the development of a serious human affection, which circulates in and determines every part alike, even to the smallest detail; the second is that suitable for such works as Faust, where the general composition, which is more or less guided by mental concepts, does not at all coincide with the poetical inspiration of the separate parts. Here the poetical should be separated from the unpoetical parts, and the poetically endowed reader will neglect the one to enjoy the other. In the Furioso, this inequality of work is absent or only present to a very slight extent (that is to say, to the extent that imperfection must ever be present in the most perfect work of man) and it is as equally harmonious as the Promessi Sposi; but it lacks that particular form of passionate seriousness, to be found throughout Manzoni's work and in stray passages of Goethe's. The Furioso should therefore be read in a third manner, namely by following a content which is ever the same, yet ever expressed in new forms, whose attraction consists in the magic of this ever-identical yet inexhaustible variety of appearances, without paying attention to the material element of the narratives and descriptions.

      As we see, this too amounts to accepting with a rectification a common judgment on the Furioso, which may be said to have accompanied the poem from the moment of its first appearance: namely, that it is a work devoid of seriousness, being of a light, burlesque, pleasing and frivolous sort. It was described as "ludicro more" by Cardinal Sadoleto, when according the license for printing the edition of 1516 in the name of Leo X, although he added to this, perhaps translating the declaration of the poet himself, "longo tamen studio et cogitatione, multisque vigiliis confectum." Bernardo Tasso, Trissino and Speroni, and other suchlike grave pedantic personages, did not fail to blame Ariosto for having dedicated his poem to the sole end of pleasing. Boileau looked upon it simply as a collection of fables comiques, and Sulzer called it a "poem with the sole end of pleasing, not directed by the reason"; and even to-day are to be found its merits and defects noted down to credit and debit account in many a scholastic manual; on the credit side stand the perfection of the octave, the vivacity of the narrative, the graceful style, to the debit account lack of profound sentiment, light which shines but does not warm and failure to touch the heart. We accept and rectify this judgment with the simple observation that those who regard the poem thus see clearly enough everything that is on a level with their own eyes, but do not raise them to regard what is above their heads and is the principal quality of the Furioso, owing to which the frivolity of Ariosto reveals itself as profound seriousness of rare quality, profound emotion of the heart, but of a noble and exquisite heart, equally remote from the emotions of what is generally looked upon as life and reality.

      Apart, but not separated from, nor alien to, nor indifferent: and in respect to this we must resume and develop the analysis already begun by setting readers on their guard against the easy misunderstanding of the "destruction," which we have already spoken of as brought about by the tone and the irony of Ariosto. This must not be looked upon as total destruction and annihilation, but as destruction in the philosophic sense of the word, which is also conservation. Were this otherwise, what could be the function of the varied material or emotional content, which we have examined in the poem? Are the stars stuck into the sky like pin-heads in a pin-cushion (Don Ferrante would sarcastically enquire)? The eloquence of other's but not Ariosto's poetry, arises from a total indifference of sentiment and an absence of content: theirs is the rouge on the corpse, not the rosy cloud that enfolds and adorns the living. Such eloquence produces soft and superficially musical versification of the Adone, not the octave of the Furioso; and to quote Giraldi Cinzio once more, the lover of Ariosto (who gave the advice to readers not to confuse the "facility" of the Furioso with verses "of sweet sound but no feeling"), the eight hundred "stanzas," by one of the composers of that time, which Giraldi once had to read, "which seemed to be collections made among the flowery gardens of poetry, so full were they of beauty from stanza to stanza, but put together, were vain things, seeming, so far as sense is concerned, to have been born of the soil of childishness," because their author was "intent only upon the pleasure that comes from the splendour and choice of words, and had altogether neglected the dignity and assistance afforded by sensibility."

      Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought, the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was the case, as it seems to me, with the Cinque Canti, which he excluded from the Furioso and for which he substituted others. In them the cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious