CHAPTER VII. PULCI AND BOIARDO.

The Romantic Epic—Its Plebeian Origin—The Popular Poet's Standpoint—The Pulci Family—The Carolingian Cycle—Turpin—Chanson de Roland—Historical Basis—Growth of the Myth of Roland—Causes of its Popularity in Italy—Burlesque Elements—The Morgante Maggiore—Adventures in Paynimry—Roncesvalles—Episodes introduced by the Poet—Sources in older Poems—The Treason of Gano—Pulci's Characters—His Artistic Purpose—His Levity and Humor—Margutte—Astarotte—Pulci's bourgeois Spirit—Boiardo—His Life—Feudalism in Italy—Boiardo's Humor—His Enthusiasm for Knighthood—His Relation to Renaissance Art—Plot of the Orlando Innamorato—Angelica—Mechanism of the Poem—Creation of Characters—Orlando and Rinaldo—Ruggiero—Lesser Heroes—The Women—Love—Friendship—Courtesy—Orlando and Agricane at Albracca—Natural Delineation of Passions—Speed of Narration—Style of Versification—Classical and Medieval Legends—The Punishment of Rinaldo—The Tale of Narcissus—Treatment of Mythology—Treatment of Magic—Fate of the Orlando Innamorato.

Lorenzo de’ Medici and Angelo Poliziano reunited the two currents of Italian literature, plebeian and cultivated, by giving the form of refined art to popular lyrics of divers kinds, to the rustic idyll, and to the sacred drama. Another member of the Medicean circle, Luigi Pulci, aided the same work of restoration by taking up the rude tales of the Cantori da Piazza and producing the first romantic poem of the Renaissance.

Of all the numerous forms of literature, three seem to have been specially adapted to the Italians of this Period. They were the Novella, the Romantic Epic, and the Idyll. With regard to the Novella and the Idyll, it is enough in this place to say that we may reckon them indigenous to modern Italy. They suited the temper of the people and the age; the Novella furnishing the fit artistic vehicle for Italian realism and objectivity; the Idyll presenting a point of contact with the literature of antiquity, and expressing that calm sensibility to natural beauty which was so marked a feature of the national character amid the distractions of the sixteenth century. The Idyll and the Novella formed, moreover, the most precious portion of Boccaccio's legacy.

Concerning the Romantic Epic it is necessary to speak at greater length. At first sight the material of the Carolingian Cycle, which formed the basis of the most considerable narrative poems of the Renaissance, seems uncongenial to the Italians. Feudalism had never taken a firm hold on the country. Chivalry was more a pastime of the upper classes, more consciously artificial than it had been in France or even England. The interest of the Italians in the Crusades was rather commercial than religious, and the people were not stirred to their center by the impulse to recover the Holy Sepulcher. The enthusiasm of piety which animated the Northern myth of Charlemagne, was not characteristic of the race that earlier than the rest of Europe had indulged in speculative skepticism and sarcastic raillery; nor were the marvels of the legend congenial to their positive and practical imagination, turned ever to the beauties of the plastic arts. Charlemagne, again, was not a national hero. It seemed as though the great foreign epics, which had been transported into Italy during the thirteenth century, would find no permanent place in Southern literature after the close of the fourteenth. The cultivated classes in their eagerness to discover and appropriate the ancient authors lost sight of peer and paladin. Even Boccaccio alluded contemptuously to chivalrous romance, as fit reading only for idle women; and when he attempted an epical poem in octave stanzas, he chose a tale of ancient Greece. Still, in spite of these apparent drawbacks, in spite of learned scorn and polished indifference, the Carolingian Cycle had taken a firm hold upon the popular fancy. We have seen how a special class of literary craftsmen reproduced its principal episodes in prose and verse for the multitudes gathered on the squares to hear their recitations, or for readers in the workshop and the country farm. Now, in the renascence of the native literature, poets of the highest rank were destined to receive the same material from the people and to give it a form appropriate to their own culture. This fact must not be forgotten by the student of Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. The romantic epics of the golden age had a plebeian origin; and the masters of verse who devoted their best energies to that brilliant series of poems, were dealing with legends which had taken shape in the imagination of the people, before they applied their own inventive faculties to the task of beautifying them with art unrivaled for splendor and variety of fancy. This, and this alone, explains the anomalies of the Italian romantic epic—the mixture of burlesque with seriousness, the irony and sarcasm alternating with gravity and pathos, the wealth of comic episodes, the interweaving of extraneous incidents, the antithesis between the professed importance of the subject-matter and the spirit of the poet who plays with it as though he felt its puerility—all the startling contrasts, in a word, which have made this glittering Harlequin of art in the Renaissance so puzzling to modern critics. If we remember that the poets of the sixteenth century adopted their subjects from the people, finding them already impregnated with the plebeian instincts of improvisatori, who felt no real sympathy with knighthood, and whose one aim was to amuse and gratify an audience eager for excitement; if we further recollect that these poets approached their own task in the same spirit, adding yet another element of irony proper to men who stood aloof and laughed, and who desired to entertain the Courts of Italy with masterpieces of humor and fantastic beauty; we shall succeed in comprehending the peculiarities of their productions.

The romances of Orlando must be regarded as works of pure art, wrought by courtly singers from a previously existing popular literature, which in its turn had been fashioned from the Frankish legends to suit the tastes of a non-chivalrous, but humorous and marvel-loving multitude. In passing from the Song of Roland or Turpin's Chronicle to the Orlando Furioso we can trace two separate processes of transmutation. By the earlier process the materia di Francia was adapted to the Italian people; by the second the new material thus obtained was reconstructed for the Italian Courts. The final product is a masterpiece of refined art, retaining something of the French originals, something of the popular Italian rifacimento, but superadding the wisdom, the irony, and the poetry of one of the world's brightest geniuses. We might compare the growth of a romantic epic of the sixteenth century to the art of Calimala, whereby the rough stuffs of Flanders were wrought at Florence into finer cloths, and the finished fabric was tinted with the choicest dyes, and made fit for a king's chamber.

Hitherto I have spoken as though Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Berni, and the lesser writers of romantic epics could be classed together in one sentence. The justification of so broad a treatment at the outset lies in this, that their relation to the popular romances they rehandled was substantially the same. But it will be the special purpose of the following pages to point out their essential differences, not only as poets, but also with regard to the spirit in which they viewed their common subject-matter.

Boccaccio, in his desire to fuse the classic and the medieval modes of thought and style, not merely adapted the periods of Latin to Italian prose, but also sought to treat an antique subject in the popular measure of the octave stanza. His Teseide is a narrative poem in which the Greek hero plays a prominent part, while all the chiefs of Theban and Athenian legend are brought upon the scene. Yet the main motive is a tale of love, and the language is as modern as need be. Writing to please the mistress of his heart, and emulous of epic fame, Boccaccio rejected the usual apostrophes and envoys of the Cantori da Banca, and constructed a poem divided into books. Poliziano approached the problem of fusing the antique and modern from a different point of view. He adorned a courtly theme of his own day with phrases and decorative details borrowed from the classic authors, presenting in a series of brilliant pictures an epitome of ancient art. It remained for Pulci to develop, without classical admixture, the elements of poetry existing in the popular Italian romances. The Morgante Maggiore is therefore more thoroughly and purely Tuscan than any work of equal magnitude that had preceded it. This is its great merit, and this gives it a place apart among the hybrid productions of the Renaissance.

The Pulci were a noble family, reduced in circumstances and attached to the Casa Medici by ties of political and domestic dependency. Bernardo, the eldest of three brothers, distinguished himself in literature by his translations of Virgil's Eclogues, by his elegies on Cosimo de' Medici, by a Sacra Rappresentazione on the tale of Barlaam, and by a poem on the Passion of Christ which he composed at the instance of a devout nun. Luca wrote the stanzas on the Tournament of Lorenzo de' Medici above mentioned,[512] and took some part at least in the composition of an obscure poem called the Ciriffo Calvaneo.[513] But the most famous of the brothers was Luigi, whose correspondence with Lorenzo de' Medici proves him to have been a kind of Court-poet in the Palace of the Via Larga, while the sonnets he exchanged with Matteo Franco breathe Burchiello's plebeian spirit.[514] He had a wild fantastic temperament, inclining to bold speculations on religious topics; tinctured with curiosity that took the form of magic art; bizarre in expression, yet withal so purely Florentine that his prose and verse are a precious mine of quattrocento idioms gathered from the jargon of the streets and squares. Of humanistic culture he seems to have possessed but little. Still the terms of familiar intercourse on which he lived with Angelo Poliziano, Matteo Palmieri, and Paolo Toscanelli enabled him to gather much of the learning then in vogue. The theological and scientific speculations of the age are transmitted to us in his comic stanzas with a vernacular raciness that renders them doubly precious.[515]

Before engaging with the Morgante Maggiore, it is needful to inquire into the source of this and all the other Italian romantic poems, and to account for the fact that they were confined, so far as their subject went, within the circle of the Carolingian epic. In 1122 a prose history in monkish Latin, purporting to be the Chronicle of the last years of the reign of Charles the Great written by Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, was admitted among the canonical books by Calixtus II., who in his Bull cursed those who should thenceforward listen to the "lying songs of Jongleurs." This Chronicle was merely a sanctimonious and prosaic version of the Songs of Roland and of Roncesvalles.[516] The object of the scribe who compiled it, and of the Pope who canonized it, was to give an ecclesiastical complexion to the martial chants which already possessed the ear of the public.[517] Accordingly, while he left untouched the tales of magic, the monstrous marvels and the unchristian ethics of the elder fable, this pseudo-Turpin interspersed prayers, confessions, vows, miracles, homilies, and pulpit admonitions. In order to secure verisimilitude for his narrative, he reversed the old account of Roncesvalles, according to which Turpin perished on the field, anathematized all previous poets, and pretended that his Chronicle was written by the hands of the Archbishop.[518] What he effected for the Song of Roland, Geoffrey of Monmouth did, without a sacerdotal bias, for the romance of Arthur.

We possess a MS. of the Chanson de Roland in Norman French. It was discovered in the Bodleian Library and published first in 1837 by M. Michel, afterwards in 1851 by M. Génin. The date of the MS. has been fixed by some critics as early as the eleventh, by others as late as the thirteenth, century. Purporting to be the work of one Turold, its most enthusiastic admirers claim it as the genuine production of Théroulde, tutor to William the Conqueror, which, after passing through the hands of Taillefer, the knightly bard of Senlac field, was deposited in his MS. chest by a second Théroulde, abbot of Peterborough.[519] Be that as it may, we can assume that the Bodleian MS. presents the ancient battle-song in nearly the same form as when the Normans followed Taillefer at Hastings, and heard him chanting of "Charlemain and Roland and Oliver who died in Roncesvalles." This song reverberated throughout medieval Europe. Poggio in the Facetiæ compares a man who weeps over the fall of Rome, to one who in Milan shed tears over Roland's death at Roncesvalles. Dante may have heard it on the lips of the Cantores Francigenarum in Lombard towns, or in the halls of Fosdinovo above the Tyrrhene Sea; for he writes with an energy of style scarcely inspired by the pseudo-Turpin:

Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quando Carlo Magno perdè la santa gesta, Non sonò si terribilmente Orlando.

Orlando and Oliver (or Ogier) are carved upon the façade of the Duomo at Verona—Dietrich's town of Bern, where Northern traditions of chivalry long lingered.[520] Like the Spanish legend of the Cid, or the climax of the Niebelungenlied, this Song of Roland, in dignity and strength of style, in tragic heroism and passionate simplicity, is worthy to be ranked with a Canto of the Iliad. Like all medieval romantic poetry, it is but a fragment—the portion of a cycle never wrought by intervention of a Homer into epical completeness. But its superiority over Turpin's Chronicle in all the qualities that could inspire a singer is immeasurable.

Two questions have now to be asked. What historical basis can be found for the Carolingian myth? and how did it happen that the Italians preferred this legend of French Paladins to any other of the feudal romances? The history of Charlemagne and his peers—of Roland, Oliver, Ogier, Turpin, Ganilo the traitor, Pinabel, Marsilius the Moorish king of Spain, and all the rest, of whom we read in the Norman Song, and who receive numerous additions from the Italian romancers—must not be sought in Eginhard. It is a Myth. But like all myths, it has some nucleus of reality, round which have crystallized the enthusiasms of a semi-barbarous age, the passionate memories of the people looking back to bygone greatness, the glowing fancies of poets intent on visions of the future. This nucleus of fact is little more than the name of Charles the Frankish Emperor. All the legends of the cycle represent him as conducting a crusade, defeating the Saracens in mighty battles, besieged by them in Paris, betrayed by his own subject Ganilo, and bereft of his noblest paladins in the Pass of Roncesvalles. History knows nothing of these events. Nor can history account for the traditional character of the Emperor, who is feeble, credulous, browbeaten by lawless vassals, incapable of strenuous action, and yet respected as the conqueror of the world and the anointed of the Lord.[521] It is therefore clear that the myth has blent together divers incongruous elements, and that the spirit of the crusades has been at work, giving a kind of unity to scarce remembered acts of the chief of Christendom. We hear from Eginhard that Charlemagne in 778 advanced as far as Saragossa into Spain, and during his retreat had his rearguard cut off by the Basques.[522] Among the slain was "Roland, prefect of the Breton Marches." We read again in Eginhard (anno 824) how Louis le Debonair lost two of his counts, who were returning from Spain through the Pass of Roncesvalles. Furthermore, the Merovingian Chronicles tell us of a Pyrenean battle in the days of Dagobert, when twelve Frankish chiefs were surrounded in those passes and slain. These are sufficient data to account for the Pass of Roncesvalles becoming a valley dolorous, the vale of the great woe. For the crusading exploits of Charlemagne we have to look to his predecessor, Charles Martel, who defeated the Saracens at Tours and stemmed the tide of Mussulman invasion. His successors, the feeble monarchs of the Frankish line, several of whom bore the name of Charles, explain the transformation of the Emperor into a vacillating monarch, infirm of purpose and incapable of keeping his peers in order; for the distinguishing surnames of history are later additions, and Chronicles, though written, were not popularly read. The bard, therefore, mixed his materials without care for criticism, and the myth produced a hybrid Charlemagne composed of many royal Karls. As for the traitor Gano, we hear of Lupus, Duke of Gascony, who dealt treasonably with Charlemagne, and of one Ganilo, Ganelon, or Wenelon, Archbishop of Sens, who played the same part toward Charles the Bald in 864.[523] This portion of the myth may possibly be referred to these dim facts. Yet it would be wiser not to insist upon them; for the endeavor to rationalize an entire legend is always hazardous, and it is enough to say that a traitor was needed for the fight of Roncesvalles no less than Mordred for the death of Arthur in the plain of Glastonbury. To explain the legendary siege of Paris by the Saracens, so important an incident in the Italian romances, it has been ingeniously remarked that, though the Moors never menaced the French capital, the Normans did so repeatedly, while both Saracens and Normans were Pagans.[524] It may also be remembered that Saracens had pillaged Rome, and the Saracen forays were a common incident of Italian experience. The gathering of great armies from the far East and the incursions of hideous barbarian hordes, which form an integral element of Boiardo's and Ariosto's scheme, can be referred to the memory of Tartar, Hun, and Turk; while the episodes of Christian knights enamored of Pagan damsels are incidents drawn from actual history in the intercourse of Italy with the Levant. Allowing for this slight framework of fact, but not pressing even the few points that have been gathered by antiquarian research, it may be briefly said that the bulk of the Carolingian romance, with its numerous subordinate legends of knights and ladies, is purely mythical.

In the next place we have to consider what led the Italians to select the romances of Charlemagne for special development rather than those of Arthur, with which they were no less familiar.[525] We have seen that on the first introduction of the materia di Francia into Italy, the Arthurian Cycle became the property of the nobles, who found in it a mirror of the feudal manners they affected, whereas the people listened to Chansons de Geste upon the market-place.[526] When, therefore, the polite poets of the fifteenth century adopted the romantic epic from the popular rhymers, they found a mass of Carolingian tales in vogue, to which they had themselves from infancy been used. But this preference of the multitude for Charlemagne and Roland requires further explanation. It must be remarked in the first place that the Empire exercised a fascination over the Italians in the middle ages, paralleled by no other power except the Papacy. They regarded it as their own, as their glory in the past, as their pride in the future, if only the inheritor of the Cæsars would do his duty and rule the world from Rome with equal justice. The pedigree of the Christian Emperors from Constantine to Charles the Great formed an integral part of the Carolingian romance as it took form in Italy.[527] It was something for the Italians that Charles had been crowned at Rome, a ceremony from time to time repeated by his German successors during the centuries which made his legend famous. Nor, though the people were but little influenced by the crusading fanaticism, was it of no importance that in the person of this Emperor Christendom had been imperiled by the infidels, and Christendom through him had triumphed. The Chronicle of Turpin, again, had received authoritative sanction. Add to it as the romancers chose, attribute nonsense to the Archbishop as they pleased, they always relied, in show at least, on his canonical veracity. Pulci, Bello, Boiardo, and Ariosto appeal to his authority with mock seriousness; and even the burlesque Berni, while turning Turpin into ridicule, adopts the style:

Perchè egli era Arcivescovo, bisogna Credergli, ancor che dica la menzogna.[528]

The fashion lasted till the days of Folengo and Fortiguerra. It may further be mentioned that Orlando at an early date had been made a Roman by the popular Italian mythologists. They said that he was born at Sutri, and that Oliver was the son of the Roman prefect for the Pope. The sentiment of the people for this strange Senator Romanus expressed itself touchingly and pithily in his supposed epitaph: "One God, One Rome, One Roland."[529] Orlando was so rooted in the popular consciousness as a hero, that to have substituted for him another epical character would have been impossible.

When we further investigate the naturalization of Orlando in Italy, we find that all the romantic poems written on his legend inclined to the burlesque. The chivalrous element of love which pervades the Arthurian Cycle, had been extracted and treated after their own fashion by the lyrists of the fourteenth century. That was no immediate concern of the people, nor had the citizens any sympathy with the chivalry of arms. To deal as solemnly with medieval romance as the Northern bards had done, was quite beside the purpose of the improvisatori who refashioned the Chansons de Geste for Italian townsfolk. When, therefore, Pulci undertook to amuse Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, with a tale of Roland, he found his material already stripped of epical sobriety; nor was it hard for him to handle his theme in the spirit of Boccaccio, bent on exhausting every motive of amusement which it might suggest. He assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each canto with the customary invocation to Madonna or a paraphrase of some Church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful thanks or brief good wishes. But Pulci was no mere Cantastorie. The popular style served but for a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire and his mocking levity. Sarcastic Tuscan humor keeps up an obbligato accompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humor is in harmony with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading the Morgante, we must bear in mind that it was written, canto by canto, to be recited in the Palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture of Margutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who listened to it laughing. The Morgante is no naïve production of a simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some for their beauty's sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense for pure mirth.

A careful study of the Morgante Maggiore reveals to the critic three separate strains of style. To begin with, it is clear that we are dealing with two poems fused in one—the first ending with the twenty-third canto, the second consisting of the last five cantos. Between these two divisions a considerable period of time is supposed to have elapsed. The first poem consists of a series of romantic adventures in strange countries, whither Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Astolfo have been driven by the craft of Gano, and where they fight giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with Pagan damsels, after the jovial fashion of knights errant. The second assumes a more heroic tone, and tells in truly thrilling verse the tale of Roncesvalles. But over and above this double material, different in matter and in manner, we trace throughout the whole romance a third element, which seems to be more essentially the poet's own than either his fantastic tissue of adventures or his serious narrative of Roland's death. This third element consists of half-ironical half-sober dissertations, reflective digressions, and brilliant interpolated incidents, among which we have to reckon the splendid episodes of Astarotte and Margutte. So much was clear to my mind when I first read the Morgante, and attempted to comprehend the difficulties it presented to critics like Ginguené and Hallam. Since then the truth of this view has been substantiated by the eminent Italian scholar, Pio Rajna, who has proved that the Morgante is the rifacimento of two earlier popular poems, the first existing in MS. in the Laurentian library, the second entitled La Spagna.[530] Pulci availed himself freely of his popular models, at times repeating the old stanzas with no alteration, but oftener rehandling them and adding to their comic spirit, and interpolating passages of his own invention. Since the two originals differed in character, his rifacimento retained their divers peculiarities, notwithstanding those master-touches which betray the same hand in both of its main sections. But the most precious part of the poem remains Pulci's own. Nothing can deprive him of Margutte and Astarotte; nor without his clever transmutation of the old material would the bulk of the Morgante Maggiore deserve more attention than many similar romances buried in condign oblivion. Between the two parts we may notice a considerable difference of literary merit. The second and shorter is by far the finer in poetic quality, earnestness, and power of treatment. The first is tedious to read. The second inthralls and carries us along.[531]

The poem takes its title from the comic hero Morgante, a giant captured and converted by Orlando in the first Canto.[532] He dies, however, in the twentieth, and the narrative proceeds with no interruption. If we seek for epical unity, in a romance so loosely put together from so many divers sources, we can find it in the treason of Gano. The action turns decisively and frequently upon this single point, returns to it from time to time for fresh motives, and reaches its conclusion in the execution of the traitor after the great deed of crime has been accomplished in the valley dolorous. An Italian of the fifteenth century could not have chosen a motive more suited to the temper and experience of his age, when conspiracies like that of the Pazzi at Florence and the Baglioni at Perugia were frightfully frequent, and when the successful massacre of Sinigaglia made Cesare Borgia the hero of historical romance. Il tradimento, il traditore, the kiss of Judas, the simile of the fox, recur with fatal resonance through all the Cantos of the poem. The style assumes a rugged grandeur of tragic realism, not unworthy of poets of the stamp of our own Webster or Marston, in the passage which describes the tempest by the well at Saragossa, where Gano met Marsilio to plan their fraud, and where the locust-tree let fall its fruit upon the traitor's head.[533] The Morgante is, in truth, the epic of treason, and the character of Gano, as an accomplished yet not utterly abandoned Judas, is admirably sustained throughout. The powerful impression of his perversity is heightened by contrast with the loyalty of his son Baldovino. In the fight at Roncesvalles Baldovino carries a mantle given to Gano by the Saracen king, without knowing for what purpose his father made him wear it; and wherever he charges through the press of men, the foes avoid him. Orlando learns that he is protected by this ensign of fraud, and accuses him of partaking in Gano's treason. Then the youth flings the cloak from his shoulders, and plunges into the fight with an indignant repudiation of this shame upon his lips. The scene is not unworthy of the Iliad;[534] and his last words, as he falls pierced in the breast with two lances, Or non son io più traditiore! are dramatic.

Pulci deserves credit for strong delineation of character. Through all the apish tricks and fantastic arabesque-work of his style, the chief personages retain firmly-marked types. Never since the Chanson de Roland was first sung, has a more heroic portrait of Orlando, the God-fearing knight, obedient to his liege-lord, serene in his courage and gentle in his strength, courteous, pious and affectionate, been painted.[535] Close adherence to the popular conception of Orlando's character here stood Pulci in good stead; nor was he hampered with the difficulties which beset Boiardo and Ariosto, when they showed the champion of Christianity subdued to madness and to love. Thus one work at least of the Renaissance maintained for the Italians an ideal of chivalrous heroism, first conceived by Franco-Norman bards, and afterwards transmitted through the fancy of the people, who are ever ready to discern and to preserve the lineaments of greatness. Oliver the true friend and doughty warrior, Rinaldo the fiery foe and reckless lover, to whom the press of men was Paradise,[536] and Malagigi the magician, are drawn with no less skill. Charles is such as the traditions of the myth and the requirements of the plot obliged Pulci to make him. Yet in spite of the feebleness which exposes him to the treasonable arts of Gano, he is not deficient in a certain nobility. In the conduct of these characters, amid the windings of the poet's freakish fancy, we trace the solidity of his plan, his faculty for earnest art. But should there still be found critics who, after a careful study of Gano, Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Carlo, think that Pulci meant his poem for a mere burlesque, this opinion cannot but be shaken by a perusal of the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh Cantos. The refusal of Orlando to blow his horn:

Non sonerò perchè e' m'aiuti Carlo, Chè per viltà mai non volli sonarlo:

his address to the knights when rushing into desperate battle at impossible odds[537]; the scene of his death, so tender in its pathos, so quaint in its piety; the agony of Charles when he comes, too late, to find him slain, and receives his sword from the Paladin's dead hands; these passages must surely be enough to convince the most incredulous of doctrinaires.

It has been customary to explain the apparent contradictions of the Morgante Maggiore—Pulci's brusque transitions from piety to ribaldry, from pathos to satire—by reference to the circumstances of Florence at the date of its composition. The republic was at war with Sixtus IV., who had taken part in the Pazzi conspiracy. To his Bull of excommunication the Signoria had retorted by terming it "maledictam maledictionem damnatissimi judicis," and had described the Pope himself as "delirum senem," "leno matris suæ, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius." It was not to be expected that even an orthodox Christian should be tender toward the vices of the clergy or careful in guarding his religious utterances at such a moment. Yet we need not go far afield to account for Pulci's profanity. The Italians of the age in which he lived, were freethinkers without ceasing to be Catholics. To begin a Canto with a prayer, and to end it with speculations on the destiny of the soul after death, was consistent with their intellectual temper. The schools and private coteries of Florence were the arena in which Platonism and Averroism waged war with orthodoxy, where questions of freewill and creation, the relation of man to God, and the essence of the human spirit, were being discussed with a philosophic indifference and warmth of curiosity that prepared the way for Pomponazzi's materialism. Criticism, the modern Hercules, was already in its cradle, strangling the serpents of sacerdotal authority: and as yet the Inquisition had not become a power of terror; the Council of Trent and the Spanish tyranny had not turned Italians into trembling bigots or sleek hypocrites. Externally they remained tenacious of their old beliefs; and from the point of view of art at least, they were desirous of adhering to tradition. For Pulci to have celebrated Orlando without assuming the customary style of the cantastorie, would have been beside his purpose. Therefore, the mixture of magic, theology, impiety, speculation and religious fervor which perplexes a reader of the present day in the Morgante, corresponded to the mental attitude of the educated majority at Pulci's date. On the border-land between the middle ages and the modern world the keen Italian intellect loved to entertain itself with a perpetual perhaps, impartially including in the sphere of doubt old dogmas and novel hypotheses, and finding satisfaction in an insecurity that flattered it with the sense of disengagement from formulæ.[538] With some minds this volatile questioning was serious; with others it assumed a Rabelaisian joviality. Pulci ranked with those who made the problems of the world material for humorous debate.

A few instances of Pulci's peculiar levity might be selected from the last Cantos of the Morgante, where no one can maintain that his intention was burlesque. We have just heard from the minstrel's lips how Roland died, recommending his soul to God and delivering his glove in sign of feudal fealty to Gabriel. The sound of his horn has startled Charlemagne from the sleep of false tranquillity, and the Emperor is on his way to Roncesvalles. But time is short. He prays Christ that as of old for Joshua, so now for him in his sore need, the sun may be stayed and the day be prolonged[539]:

O crucifisso, il qual, già sendo in croce, Oscurasti quel sol contra natura; Io ti priego, Signor, con umil voce Infin ch'io giunga in quella valle oscura, Che tu raffreni il suo corso veloce.

The prayer is worthy, in its solemn tone, of this exordium; and the desired effect soon follows. But now Pulci changes his note from grave to gay[540]:

E disse: Pazienzia, come Giobbe; Or oltre in Roncisvalle andar si vuole. Chè come savio il partito conobbe, Per non tenere in disagio più il sole.

A few lines further he describes the carnage in the dolorous valley, and finds this comic phrase to express the confusion of the field[541]:

Chi mostra sanguinosa la percossa, Chi il capo avea quattro braccia discosto, Da non trovarli in Giusaffà si tosto.

Pulci's grotesque humor gives an air of false absurdity to many incidents which, together with his hearers, he undoubtedly took in good faith. During the slaughter of the Christians he wishes to impress the audience with the multitude of souls who crowded into Paradise. S. Peter is tired to death with opening the door for them and deafened with their jubilations[542]:

E così in ciel si faceva apparecchio D'ambrosia e nettar con celeste manna, E perchè Pietro alla porta è pur vecchio, Credo che molto quel giorno s'affanna; E converrà ch'egli abbi buono orecchio, Tanto gridavan quelle anime Osanna Ch'eran portate dagli angeli in cielo; Sicchè la barba gli sudava e 'l pelo.

In the same spirit is the picture of the fiends seated like hawks upon the bell-towers of a little chapel, waiting to pounce upon the souls of Pagans.[543]

Sometimes a flash of purely Bernesque humor appears in Pulci; as when he says that the Saracens:

Bestemmiavano Dio divotamente,

or when Oliver, after a pathetic love-lament, complains that it is impossible:

Celar per certo l'amore e la tossa.

According to modern notions his jokes not unfrequently savor of profanity. Rinaldo and Ricciardetto are feasting upon ortolans, and give this punning reason for their excellence[544]:

Cioè che Cristo a Maddalena apparve In ortolan, che buon sozio gli parve.

On the same occasion Rinaldo is so pleased with his fare that he exclaims:

Questi mi paion miracoli; Facciam qui sei non che tre tabernacoli.

Such expressions flash forth from mere Florentine sense of fun in passages by no means deliberately comic.

The most diverting character of the Morgante is Margutte, an eccentric heteroclite creature, the prototype of Folengo's Cingar and Rabelais' Panurge, whom the giant met upon his wanderings and adopted for a comrade. It has been supposed with some reason that Pulci here intended to satirize the Greeks who flocked to Florence after the fall of Constantinople, and that either Marullo, the personal enemy of Poliziano, or Demetrius Chalcondylas, his rival in erudition, sat for Margutte's portrait. The character of the rogue, described by himself in thirty stanzas of fantastic humor, contains a complete epitome of the abuse which the scholars of those days used to vomit forth in their reciprocal invectives.[545] Part of the comic effect produced by his speech is due to this self-attribution of qualities which supplied the arsenals of humanistic combatants with poisoned arrows. But Margutte has far more than a merely illustrative or temporary value. He is the first finished humoristic portrait sketched in modern literature, the first broadly-conceived and jovially-executed Rabelaisian study. Though it is very improbable that Pulci had any knowledge of Aristophanes, though he died eight years or thereabouts before the Curé of Meudon was born, his Margutte is cousin-german of the Sausage-seller and Panurge.[546] Margutte takes an impish pride in reckoning up his villanies and vices. When Morgante asks him whether he believes in Christ or Appollino, he replies:

A dirtel tosto, Io non credo più al nero ch' all'azzurro, Ma nel cappone, o lesso, o vuogli arrosto ... E credo nella torta e nel tortello, L'una è la madre, e l'altro è il suo figliuolo; Il vero paternostro è il fegatello, E possono esser tre, e due, ed un solo, E diriva dal fegato almen quello.

He explains his disengagement from all creeds by referring to his parentage:

Che nato son d'una monaca greca, E d'un papasso in Bursia là in Turchia.

Beginning life by murdering his father, he next set out to seek adventures in the world:

E per compagni ne menai con meco Tutt'i peccati o di turco o di greco, Anzi quanti ne son giù nell'inferno: Io n'ho settanta e sette de' mortali, Che non mi lascian mai la state o 'l verno; Pensa quanti io n'ho poi de' veniali!

Margutte's humor consists in the baboon-like self-contentment of his infamous confessions, and in the effect they produce upon Morgante, who feels that he has found in him a finished gentleman. After amusing his audience with this puppet for a while, Pulci flings him aside. Margutte, like Pietro Aretino, dies at last of immoderate laughter.[547]

Another of Pulci's own creations is Astarotte, the proud and courteous fiend, summoned by Malagigi to bring Rinaldo from Egypt to Roncesvalles. This feat he accomplishes in a few hours by entering the body of the horse Baiardo. The journey consists of a series of splendid leaps, across lakes, rivers, mountains, seas and cities; and when the paladin hungers, Astarotte spreads a table for him in the wilderness or introduces him invisible into the company of queens at banquet in fair Saragossa. The humor and the fancy of this magic journey are both of a high order.[548] Yet Astarotte is made to serve a second purpose. Into his mouth Pulci places all his theological speculations, and makes him reason learnedly like Mephistophilis:

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

He is introduced in these lines[549]:

Uno spirto chiamato è Astarotte, Molto savio, terribil, molto fero, Questo si sta giù nell'infernal grotte; Non è spirto folletto, egli è più nero.

Of his noble descent from the highest of created intelligences Astarotte is well aware[550]:

Io era Serafin de' principali ... Io fui già Serafin più di te degno.

He is in earnest to prove that courtesy exists in Hell[551]:

Chè gentilezza è bene anche in inferno ... Non creder, nello inferno anche fra noi Gentilezza non sia.

When Malagigi questions him concerning divine foreknowledge and his own state in Hell, he replies with a complete theory of sin and punishment founded upon the doctrine of freewill.[552] The angels sinned with knowledge. Therefore for them there is no redemption. Adam sinned in ignorance. Therefore there is hope for all men, and a probability of final restitution for the whole human race[553]:

Forse che 'l vero dopo lungo errore Adorerete tutti di concordia. E troverete ognun misericordia.

Astarotte's own torment in Hell causes him bitter anguish; but he recognizes the justice of God; and knowing that the sentence of damnation cannot be canceled, he is too courageous to complain. When Rinaldo offers to intercede for him, he answers[554]:

Il buon volere accetto; Per noi fien sempre perdute le chiavi, Maestà lesa, infinito è il difetto: O felici Cristian, voi par che lavi Una lacrima sol col pugno al petto, E dir; Signor, tibi soli peccavi; Noi peccammo una volta, e in sempiterno Rilegati siam tutti nello inferno. Chè pur se dopo un milione e mille Di secol noi sperassim rivedere Di quell'Amor le minime faville, Ancor sarebbe ogni peso leggiere: Ma che bisogna far queste postille? Se non si può, non si debbe volere; Ond'io ti priego, che tu sia contento Che noi mutiamo altro ragionamento.

There is great refinement in this momentary sadness of Astarotte, followed by his return to more cheerful topics. He is the Italian counterpart of Marlowe's fiend, that melancholy demon of the North, who tempts his victim by the fascination of mere horror.[555] Like Mephistophilis, again, Astarotte is ready to satisfy the curiosity of mortals, and condescends to amuse them with elfish tricks.[556] He explains to Rinaldo that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are no inhabited lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The earth, he says, is round, and can be circumnavigated; and cities full of people, worshiping our planets and our sun, are found in the antipodes. Hercules ought to blush for having fixed his pillars where he did.[557] The good understanding established between Astarotte and Rinaldo on their journey is one of the prettiest incidents of this strange poem. When they part, the fiend and the paladin have become firm friends. Astarotte vows henceforth to serve Rinaldo for love; and Rinaldo promises to free him from Malagigi's power.[558]

Pulci dealt with the Carolingian Cycle in what may be termed a bourgeois spirit. Whether humorous or earnest, he maintained the tone of Florentine society: and his Morgante reflects the peculiar conditions of the Medicean circle at the date of its composition. The second great poem on the same group of legends, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, transports us into a very different social and intellectual atmosphere. The highborn Count of Scandiano, reciting his cantos in the huge square castle surrounded by its moat, which still survives to speak of medieval Italy in the midst of Ferrara, had but little in common with Luigi Pulci, whose Tuscan fun and satire amused the merchant-princes of the Via Larga. The value of the Orlando Innamorato for the student of Italian development is principally this, that it is the most purely chivalrous poem of the Renaissance. Composed before the French invasion, and while the classical Revival was still unaccomplished, we find in it an echo of an earlier semi-feudal civility. Unlike the other literary performances of that age, which were produced for the most part by professional humanists, it was the work of a nobleman to whom feats of arms and the chase were familiar, who disdained the common folk (popolaccio, canaglia, as he always calls them), and whose ideal both of life and of art was contained in this couplet[559]:

E raccontare il pregio e 'l grande onore Che donan l'armi giunte con l'amore.

Matteo Maria Boiardo was almost an exact contemporary of Pulci. He was born about 1434 at his hereditary fief of Scandiano, a village seven miles from Reggio, at the foot of the Apennines, celebrated for its excellent vineyards. His mother was Lucia Strozzi, a member of the Ferrarese house, connected by descent with the Strozzi of Florence. At the age of twenty-eight he married Taddea Gonzaga, daughter of the Count of Novellara. He lived until 1494, when he died at the same time as Pico and Poliziano, in the year of Charles VIII.'s invasion, two years after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, and four years before Ficino. These dates are not unimportant as fixing the exact epoch of Boiardo's literary activity. At the Court of Ferrara, where the Count of Scandiano enjoyed the friendship of Duke Borso and Duke Ercole, this bard of chivalry held a position worthy of his noble rank and his great talents. The princes of the House of Este employed him as embassador in diplomatic missions of high trust and honor. He also administered for them the government of Reggio and Modena, their two chief subject cities. As a ruler, he was celebrated for his clemency and for his indifference to legal formalities. An enemy, Panciroli, wrote of him: "He was a man of excessive kindness, more fit for writing poems than for punishing crimes." He is even reported to have held that no offense deserved capital punishment—an opinion which at that period could only have been seriously entertained in Italy, and which even there was strangely at variance with the temper of the petty tyrants. Well versed in Greek and Latin literature, he translated Herodotus, parts of Xenophon, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the Ass of Lucian into Italian. He also versified Lucian's Timon for the stage, and wrote Latin poems of fair merit. His lyrics addressed to Antonia Caprara prove that, like Lorenzo de' Medici, he was capable of following the path of Petrarch without falling into Petrarchistic mannerism.[560] But his literary fame depends less upon these minor works than on the Orlando Innamorato, a masterpiece of inventive genius, which furnished Ariosto with the theme of the Orlando Furioso. Without the Innamorato the Furioso is meaningless. The handling and structure of the romance, the characters of the heroes and heroines, the conception of Love and Arms as the double theme of romantic poetry, the interpolation of novelle in the manner of Boccaccio, and the magic machinery by which the poem is conducted, are due to the originality of Boiardo. Ariosto adopted his plot, continued the story where he left it, and brought it to a close; so that, taken together, both poems form one gigantic narrative, of about 100,000 lines, which has for its main subject the love and the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante, mythical progenitors of the Estensi. Yet because the style of Boiardo is rough and provincial, while that of Ariosto is by all consent "divine," Boiardo has been almost forgotten by posterity.

Chivalry at no time took firm root in Italy, where the first act of the Communes upon their achievement of independence had been to suppress feudalism by forcing the nobles to reside as burghers within their walls. The true centers of national vitality were the towns. Here the Latin race assimilated to itself the Teutonic elements which might, if left to flourish in the country, have given a different direction to Italian development. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the immense extension of mercantile activity, the formation of tyrannies, the secular importance of the Papacy, and the absorption of the cultivated classes in humanistic studies, removed the people ever further from feudal traditions. Even the new system of warfare, whereby the scions of noble families took pay from citizens and priests for the conduct of military enterprises, tended to destroy the stronghold of chivalrous feeling in a nation that grew to regard the profession of arms as another branch of commerce. Still Italy could not wholly separate herself from the rest of Europe, and there remained provinces where a kind of semi-feudalism flourished. The most important of these undoubtedly was the kingdom of Naples, subject to alternate influence from France and Spain, and governed by monarchs at frequent warfare with their barons. The second was Ferrara, where the House of Este had maintained unbroken lordship from the period when still the Empire was a power in Italy. Here the ancient Lombard traditions of chivalry, the customs of the Marca Amorosa, and the literature of the troubadours still lingered.[561] Externally at least, the manners of the Court were feudal, however far removed its princes may have been in spirit from the ideal of knighthood. In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign, the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of old romance.[562]

Boiardo did not disdain to assume the style of a minstrel addressing his courtly audience with compliments and congés at the beginning and ending of each canto. The first opens with these words:

Signori e cavalieri che v'adunati Per odir cose dilettose e nuove, State attenti, quieti, ed ascoltati La bella istoria che 'l mio canto muove.

But his spirit is always knightly, and he refrains from the quaint pietism of Pulci's preambles. He is no mere jongleur or Cantatore da Banca, but a new Sir Tristram, celebrating in heroic verse the valorous deeds and amorous emotions of which he had himself partaken. Nor does he, like Ariosto, appear before us as a courtier accomplished in the arts of flattery, or as a man of letters anxious above all things to refine his style. Neither the Court-life of Italy nor the humanism of the revival had destroyed in him the spirit of old-world freedom and noble courtesy. At the same time he was so far imbued with the culture of the Renaissance as to appreciate the value of poetic unity and to combine certain elements of classic learning with the material of romance. Setting out with the aim of connecting all the Frankish legends in one poem, he made Orlando his hero; but he perceived that the element of love, which added so great a charm to the Arthurian Cycle, had hitherto been neglected by the minstrels of Charlemagne. He therefore resolved to tell a new tale of the mighty Roland; and the originality of his poem consisted in the fact that he treated the material of the Chansons de Geste in the spirit of the Breton legends.[563] Turpin, he asserts with a grave irony, had hidden away the secret of Orlando's love; but he will unfold the truth, believing that no knight was ever the less noble for his love. Accordingly the passion of Orlando for "the fairest of her sex, Angelica," like the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad, is the mainspring of Boiardo's poem. To his genius we owe the creation of that fascinating princess of the East, as well as the invention of the fountains of Cupid and Merlin, which cause the alternate loves and hates of his heroes and heroines—the whole of that closely-woven mesh of sentiment in which the adventures and the warlike achievements of Paladins and Saracens alike are involved.

In dealing with his subject Boiardo is serious—as serious, that is to say, as a writer of romance can be.[564] His belief in chivalry itself is earnest, though the presentation of knightly prowess runs into intentional extravagance. A dash of Italian merriment mingles with his enthusiasm; but he has none of Pulci's skeptical satiric humor, none of Ariosto's all-pervasive irony. The second thoughts of the burlesque poet or of the humorous philosopher do not cross the warp of his conception, and his exaggerations are romantic. Such a poem as the Orlando Innamorato could not have been planned or executed in Italy at any other period or under any other circumstances. A few years after Boiardo's death Italy was plunged into the wars that led to her enslavement. Charles V. was born and Luther was beginning to shake Germany. The forces of the Renaissance were in full operation, destroying the faiths and fervors of the medieval world, closing the old æon with laughter and lamentation, raising new ideals as yet imperfectly apprehended. Meanwhile Boiardo, whose life coincided with the final period of Italian independence, uttered the last note of the bygone age. His poem, chivalrous, free, joyous, with not one stain of Ariosto's servility or of Tasso's melancholy, corresponded to a brief and passing moment in the evolution of the national art. In the pure and vivid beauty which distinguish it, the sunset of chivalry and the sunrise of modern culture blend their colors, as in some far northern twilight of midsummer night. Joyousness pervades its cantos and is elemental to its inspiration—the joy of open nature, of sensual though steadfast love, of strong limbs and eventful living, of restless activity, of childlike security. Boiardo's style reminds us somewhat of Benozzo Gozzoli in painting, or of Piero di Cosimo, who used the skill of the Renaissance to express the cheerful naïveté of a less self-conscious time. It is sad to read the last stanza of the Innamorato, cut short ere it was half completed by the entry of the French into Italy, and to know that so free and freshly-tuned a "native wood-note wild" would never sound again.[565] When Ariosto repieced the broken thread, the spirit of the times was changed. Servitude, adulation, irony, and the meridian splendor of Renaissance art had succeeded to independence, frankness, enthusiasm and the poetry of natural enjoyment. Far more magnificent is Ariosto's Muse; but we lack the spontaneity of the elder poet. And as the years advance, the change is more apparent toward decay. The genius of Boiardo might be compared to some high-born lad, bred in the country, pure-hearted, muscular, brave, fair to look upon. That of Ariosto is studious and accomplished with the smile of worldly sarcasm upon his lips. The elegances of Bembo and the Petrarchisti remind one of a hectic scented fop, emasculate and artificial. Aretino resembles his own bardassonacci, paggi da taverna, flaunting meretricious charms with brazen impudence. Tasso in the distance wears a hair shirt beneath his armor of parade; he is a Jesuit's pupil, crossing himself when he awakes from love-dreams and reveries of pleasure. It was probably the discord between Boiardo's spirit and the prevailing temper of the sixteenth century, far more than the roughness of his verse or the provinciality of his language, that caused him to be so strangely and completely forgotten. In the Italy of Machiavelli and the Borgias, of Michelangelo and Julius II., his aims, enthusiasms and artistic ideals found alike no sympathy. To class him with his own kind, we must go beyond the Alps and seek his brethren in France or England.

Boiardo's merit as a constructive artist can best be measured by the analysis of his plot. Crowded as the Orlando Innamorato is with incidents and episodes, and inexhaustible as may be the luxuriance of the poet's fancy, the unity of his romance is complete. From the moment of Angelica's appearance in the first canto, the whole action depends upon her movements. She withdraws the Paladins to Albracca, and forces Charlemagne to bear the brunt of Marsilio's invasion alone. She restores Orlando to the French host before Montalbano. It is her ring which frees the fated Ruggiero from Atlante's charms. The nations of the earth are in motion. East, West, and South and North send forth their countless hordes to combat; but these vast forces are controlled by one woman's caprice, and events are so handled by the poet as to make the fate of myriads waver in the balance of her passions. We might compare Boiardo's romance to an immense web, in which a variety of scenes and figures are depicted by the constant addition of new threads. None of the old threads are wasted; not one is merely superfluous. If one is dropped for a moment and lost to sight, it reappears again. The slightest incidents lead to the gravest results. Narratives of widely different character are so interwoven as to aid each other, introducing fresh agents, combining these with those whom we have learned to know, but leaving the grand outlines of the main design untouched.

The miscellaneous details which enliven a tale of chivalry, are grouped round four chief centers—Paris, where the poem opens with the tournament that introduces Angelica, and where, at the end of the second book, all the actors are assembled for the supreme struggle between Christendom and Islam; Albracca, where Angelica is besieged in the far East; Biserta, where the hosts of pagan Agramante muster, and the hero Ruggiero is brought upon the scene; Montalbano, where Charlemagne sustains defeat at the hands of Agramante, Rodamonte, Marsilio, and Ruggiero. In order to combine such distant places in one action, Boiardo was obliged to set geography and time at defiance. Between Tartary and Circassia, France and Spain, Africa and Hungary, the knights make marches and countermarches within the space of a few weeks or even days. All arrive at the same dangerous gates and passes, the same seductive lakes and gardens; for the magical machinery of the romance was more important to the poet's scheme than cosmographical conditions. His more than dramatic contempt for distance was indispensable in the conduct of a romance which admitted of no pause in the succession of attractive incidents, and was also pardonable in an age devoid of accurate geography. His chief aim was to secure novelty, excitement, variety, ideal unity.

Boiardo further showed his grasp of art by the emphatic presentation of the chief personages, whose action determined the salient features of his tale. It is impossible to forget Angelica after her first entrance on the scene at Paris. In like manner Marfisa at Albracca, Rodamonte in the council-chamber at Biserta, Ruggiero on the heights of Mount Carena, Orlando entering the combat before Albracca, Mandricardo passing forth unarmed and unattended to avenge his father's death, are brought so vividly before our eyes, that the earliest impression of each character remains with us in all their subsequent appearances. The inferior actors are introduced with less preparation and diminished emphasis, because they have to occupy subordinate positions, and to group themselves around the heroes; and thus the whole vast poem is like a piece of arras-work, where the strongest definition of form, and the most striking colors, serve to throw into relief the principal figures amid a multitude of minor shapes. Not less skill is manifested in the preservation of the types of character outlined in these first descriptions. To vary the specific qualities of all those knights engaged in the same pursuit of love and arms, was extremely difficult. Yet Boiardo, sometimes working on the lines laid down by earlier romancers, sometimes inventing wholly new conceptions (as in the case of Rodamonte, Ruggiero, Marfisa, Brandiamante), may be said to have succeeded in this master-stroke of art. The Homeric heroes are scarcely less firmly and subtly differentiated than his champions of chivalry.

Orlando is the ideal of Christian knighthood, fearless, indifferent to wealth, chaste, religious, respectful in his love, courteous toward women, swift to wrath, but generous even in his rage, exerting his strength only when the occasion is worthy of him.[566] His one weakness is the passion for Angelica. Twice he refuses for her sake to accompany Dudone to the help of his liege-lord, and in the fight at Montalbano he is careless of Christendom so long as he can win his lady.[567] Studying Boiardo's delineation of love-lunacy in Orlando, we understand how Ariosto was led by it to the conception of the Furioso. Rinaldo is cast in a somewhat inferior mold. Lion-hearted, fierce, rebellious against Charles, prone to love and hate excessively, he is the type of the feudal baron, turbulent and troublesome to his suzerain. Astolfo, slight, vain, garrulous, fond of finery and flirting, boastful, yet as fearless as the leopards on his shield, and winning hearts by his courtesy and grace, offers a spirited contrast to the massive vigor of Rinaldo. It was a master-stroke of humor to have provided this fop of a Paladin with the lance of Argalia, whereby his physical weakness is supplemented and his bravery becomes a match for the muscles of the doughtiest champions.[568] Brandimarte presents another aspect of the chivalrous ideal. Fidelity is his chief virtue—loyalty to his love, Fiordelisa, and his hero, Orlando, combined with a delightful frankness and the freshness of untainted youth. He is not wise, but boyish, amorous, of a simple, trustful soul; a kind of Italian Sir Bors. Ferraguto, on the contrary, is all fire and fury, as petulantly fierce in love as in arms, so hot in his temerity that even at times he can forget the laws of honor.[569] Mandricardo's distinctive quality (beside that of generous daring, displayed in his solitary and unarmed quest of Orlando, and in the achievement of Hector's armor) is singular good fortune. Ruggiero has for his special mark victorious beauty, blent with a courtesy and loftiness of soul, that opens his heart to romantic love, and renders him peerless among youthful warriors. Boiardo has spared no pains to impress our imagination with the potency of his unrivaled comeliness.[570] He moves before our eyes like the angelic knight in Mantegna's Madonna of the Victory, or like Giorgione's picture of the fair-haired and mail-clad donzel, born to conquer by the might of beauty. Agramante, the Eastern Emperor, whose council is composed of thirty-two crowned heads, enhances by his arrogance of youth the world-worn prudence of old Charlemagne. Marfisa, the Amazonian Indian queen, who has the force of twenty knights, and is as cruel in her courage as a famished tigress, sets off the gentler prowess of Brandiamante, Rinaldo's heroic sister. Rodamonte is the blustering, atheistic, insolent young Ajax, standing alone against armies, and hurling defiance at heaven from the midst of a sinking navy.[571] Agricane is distinguished as the knight who loves fighting for its own sake, and disdains culture; Sacripante, as the gentle and fearless suitor of Angelica; Gradasso, as the hyperbolical champion of the Orient, inflamed with a romantic desire to gain Durlindana and Baiardo, the enchanted sword and horse. Gano and Truffaldino, among these paragons of honor, are notable traitors, the one brave when he chooses to abandon craft, the other cowardly. Brunello is the Thersites of the company, a perfect thief, misshapen, mischievous, consummate in his guile.[572] Malagise deals in magic, and has a swarm of demons at his back for all exigences. Turpin's chivalry is tempered with a subtle flavor of the priest, exposing him to Boiardo's mockery. Of Oliver and Ogier we hear, accidentally perhaps, but little. Such are some of Boiardo's personages. Not a few were given to him by the old romancers; but these he has new-fashioned to his needs.[573] Others he has molded from his own imagination with such plastic force that they fall short in no respect of the time-honored standard. It is no slight tribute to his creative power that we recognize a real fraternity between these puppets of his fancy and the mythic heroes with whom they are associated. As Boiardo left the actors in his drama, so Ariosto took them up and with but slight change treated them in his continuation of the tale.

Women, with the exception of Marfisa and Brandiamante, fare but ill at Boiardo's hands. He seems to have conceived of female character as a compound of fickleness, infidelity, malice, falsehood, and light love. Angelica is little better than a seductive witch, who dotes on Rinaldo, and yet contrives to make use of Orlando, luring him to do her purpose by false promises.[574] Falerina and Dragontina are sorceresses, apt for all iniquity and guile. Morgana and Alcina display the capricious loves and inhuman spites of fairies. Origille is a subtle traitress, beautiful enough to deceive Orlando, but as poisonous as a serpent. Even the ladies who are intended to be amiable, show but a low standard of morality.[575] Leodilla, princess of the Far Isles, glories in adultery, and hates Orlando for his constancy to Angelica in absence.[576] Fiordelisa is false in thought to Brandimarte, when she sees Rinaldo sleeping in the twilight. The picture, however, of the slumbering warrior and the watchful maiden is so fresh and true to Boiardo's genius that it deserves quotation[577]:

Upon his steed forthwith hath sprung the knight, And with the damsel rideth fast away; Not far they fared, when slowly waned the light, And forced them to dismount and there to stay. Rinaldo 'neath a tree slept all the night; Close at his side the lovely lady lay: But the strong magic of wise Merlin's well Had on the baron's temper cast a spell. He now can sleep anigh that beauteous dame; Nor of her neighborhood have any care; Erewhile a sea, a flood, a raging flame Would not have stayed his quick desire, I swear: To clasp so fair a creature without shame, Walls, mountains, he'd have laid in ruins there; Now side by side they sleep, and naught he recks; While her, methinks, far other thoughts perplex. The air, meanwhile, was growing bright around, Although not yet the sun his face had shown; Some stars the tranquil brows of heaven still crowned; The birds upon the trees sang one by one: Dark night had flown; bright day was not yet found: Then toward Rinaldo turned the maid alone; For she with morning light had cast off sleep, While he upon the grass still slumbered deep. Beauteous he was, and but a stripling then; Strong-thewed and lithe, and with a lively face; Broad in the chest, but in the haunches thin; The lady gazed, smit with his manly grace: His beard scarce budded upon cheek and chin: Gazing, she almost fainted in that place, And took such pleasure in so sweet a sight That naught she heeds beyond this one delight.

Love, as conceived by Boiardo, though a powerful and steadfast passion, is not spiritual. The knights love like centaurs, and fight like bulls for the privilege of paying suit to their ladies. Rinaldo and Orlando meet in deadly duel for Angelica; Rodamonte and Ferraguto dispute Doralice, though the latter does not care for her, and only asserts his right to dwell in thought upon her charms. Orlando and Agricane break their courteous discourse outside Albracca to fight till one of them is killed, merely because the name of Angelica has intervened. For Boiardo's descriptions of love returned, and crowned with full fruition, the reader may be referred to two magnificent passages in the episodes of Leodilla and Fiordelisa.[578] Poetically noble in spite of their indelicacy, these pictures of sensuous and natural enjoyment might be paralleled with the grand frankness of Venetian painting. It is to be regretted for Boiardo's credit as an artist in expression, that more than a bare reference to them is here impossible.

Boiardo's conception of friendship or fraternity in arms is finer. The delineation of affection generated by mutual courtesy under the most trying conditions of intercourse, which binds together the old rivals Iroldo and Prasildo, has something in it truly touching.[579] The same passion of comradeship finds noble expression in the stanzas uttered by Orlando, when he recognizes Rinaldo's shield suspended by Aridano near Morgana's Lake.[580] It must be remembered that the cousins had recently parted as foes, after a fierce battle for Angelica before Albracca:

Hearing these dulcet words, the Count began Little by little of his will to yield; Backward already he withdrew a span, When, gazing on the bridge and guarded field, Force was that he the armor bright should scan Which erst Rinaldo bore—broad sword and shield: Then weeping, "Who hath done me this despite?" He cried: "Oh, who hath slain my perfect knight? "Here wast thou killed by foulest treachery Of that false robber on this slippery bridge; For all the world could not have conquered thee In fair fight, front to front, and edge to edge: Cousin, from heaven incline thine ear to me! Where now thou reignest, list thy lord and liege! Me who so loved thee, though my brief misprision, Through too much love, wrought 'twixt our lives division. "I crave thy pardon: pardon me, I pray, If e'er I did thee wrong, sweet cousin mine! I was thine ever, as I am alway, Though false suspicion, or vain love malign, And jealous blindness, on an evil day, Brought me to cross my furious brand with thine: Yet all the while I loved thee—love thee now; Mine was the fault, and only mine, I vow. "What traitorous wolf ravening for blood was he Who thus debarred us twain from kind return To concord sweet and sweet tranquillity, Sweet kisses, and sweet tears of souls that yearn? This is the anguish keen that conquers me, That now I may not to thy bosom turn, And speak, and beg for pardon, ere I part; This is the grief, the dole that breaks my heart!"

Scarcely less beautiful is the feeling which binds Brandimarte to the great Count, the inferior to the superior hero, making him ready to release his master from Manodante's prison at the price of his own liberty.[581] Boiardo devotes the exordium of the seventh Canto of the third Book to a panegyric of chivalrous friendship:

Far more than health, far more than strength is worth, Nay more than pleasure, more than honor vain, Is friendship tried alike in dole and mirth: For when one love doth join the hearts of twain, Their woes are halved, their joys give double birth To joy, by interchange of grief and pain; And when doubts rise, with free and open heart Each calls his friend, who gladly bears a part. What profit is there in much pearls and gold, Or power, or proud estate, or royal reign? Lacking a friend, mere wealth is frosty cold: He who loves not, and is not loved again, From him true joys their perfect grace withhold: And this I say, since now across the main Brave Brandimarte drives his flying ship To help Orlando, drawn by comradeship.

Next to bravery the poet's favorite virtue is courtesy. It is enough to mention Orlando's gentle forbearance with Agricane at Albracca, their evening conversation in the midst of a bloody duel, and the hero's sorrow when he has wounded his opponent to the death.[582] Of the same quality is the courteous behavior of Rinaldo and Gradasso before a deadly encounter, the aid afforded to Marfisa by Rinaldo in the midst of their duel, and the graceful sympathy of Astolfo for Brandimarte, whom he has unhorsed.[583] But the two passages which illustrate Boiardo's ideal of the chivalrous character, as blent of bravery and courtesy, of intelligence and love, are Orlando's discourse with Agricane and his speech to Morgana's maiden. In the first of these the Count and King had fought till nightfall. Then they agree to sleep together side by side, and to resume the combat at daybreak. Before they settle for the night, they talk[584]:

After the sun below the hills was laid, And with bright stars the sky began to glow, Unto the King these words Orlando said: "What shall we do, now that the day is low?" Then Agrican made answer, "Make our bed Together here, amid the herbs that grow; And then to-morrow with the dawn of light We can return and recommence the fight." No sooner said, than straight they were agreed: Each tied his horse to trees that near them grew; Then down they lay upon the grassy mead— You might have thought they were old friends and true, So close and careless couched they in the reed. Orlando nigh unto the fountain drew, And Agrican hard by the forest laid His length beneath a mighty pine-tree's shade. Herewith the twain began to hold debate Of fitting things and meet for noble knights. The Count looked up to heaven and cried, "How great And fair is yonder frame of glittering lights, Which God, the mighty monarch, did create; The silvery moon, and stars that gem our nights, The light of day, yea, and the lustrous sun, For us poor men God made them every one!" But Agrican: "Full well I apprehend It is your wish toward faith our talk to turn: Of science less than naught I comprehend; Nay, when I was a boy, I would not learn, But broke my master's head to make amend For his much prating; no one since did yearn To teach me book or writing, such the dread Wherewith I filled them for my hardihead. "And so I let my boyish days flow by, In hunting, feats of arms, and horsemanship; Nor is it meet, meseems, for chivalry To pore the livelong day on scholarship. True knights should strive to prove their skill, say I, And strength of limb in noble fellowship; Leave priests and teaching men from books to learn. I know enough, thank God, to serve my turn." Then spake the Count: "Thus far we both agree; Arms are the chief prime honor of a knight. Yet knowledge brings no shame that I can see, But rather fame, as fields with flowers are bright; More like an ox, a stock, a stone is he Who never thinks of God's eternal light; Nor without learning can we rightly dwell On his high majesty adorable." Then Agrican, "Small courtesy it were, War with advantage so complete to wage! My nature I have laid before you bare; I know full well that you are learned and sage; Therefore to answer you I do not care. Sleep if you like; in sleep your soul assuage; Or if you choose with me to hold discourse, I look for talk of love, and deeds of force. "Now, I beseech you, answer me the truth Of what I ask, upon a brave man's faith: Are you the great Orlando, in good sooth, Whose name and fame the whole world echoeth? Whence are you come, and why? And since your youth Were you by love inthralled? For story saith That any knight who loves not, though he seem To sight alive, yet lives but in a dream." Then spake the Count: "Orlando sure am I Who both Almonte and his brother slew. Imperious love hath lost me utterly, And made me journey to strange lands and new; And, for I fain would thus in amity Prolong discourse, therefore I tell you true, She who now lies within Albracca's wall, Gallafron's daughter, holds my heart in thrall."

This unlucky mention of Angelica stirs the rage of Agricane, and the two men fight in the moonlight beneath the forest-trees till the young King is wounded to the death—a splendid subject for some imaginative painter's pencil. We may notice in this dialogue the modification of chivalry occasioned by Italian respect for culture. Boiardo exalts the courage of the educated gentleman above the valor of a man-at-arms. In the conversation between Orlando and Morgana's maiden he depicts another aspect of the knightly ideal. The fairy has made Orlando offer of inestimable treasures, but he answers that indifference to riches is the sign of a noble heart[585]:

Orlando smiling heard what she would say, But scarce allowed her time her speech to end, Seeing toward riches of the sort the fay Proffered, his haughty soul he would not bend; Wherefore he spake: "It irked me not to-day My very life unto the death to spend; For only perils and great toils sustain Honor of chivalry without a stain. "But for the sake of gold or silver gear, I would not once have drawn my brand so bright; For he who holds mere gain of money dear Hath set himself to labor infinite; The more he gets the less his gains appear; Nor can he ever sate his appetite; They who most have, still care for more to spend, Wherefore this way of life hath ne'er an end."

Having seen the knights in their more generous moments, we ought to bear in mind that they are capable of blustering, boasting, and exchanging foul abuse like humanists. One reference will suffice. Orlando and Rinaldo quarrel at Albracca and defy each other to combat. Before fighting they indulge in elaborate caricatures and vilifications, from which it would appear, to say the least, that these champions of Christendom were the subject of much scandalous gossip.[586]

Human nature, unsophisticated and unqualified, with the crude impulses and the contradictions proper to an unreflective age, has been studied by Boiardo for his men and women. His power of expressing the passions by natural signs might win for him the title of the Homer of Chivalry. The love lamentations of Prasildo, the love-languors of Angelica, the frenzy of Marfisa, the wrath of Ferraguto, the truculency of Rodamonte, the impish craft of Brunello, Origille's cunning, Brandimarte's fervor, Ruggiero's impatience to try his strength in the tournament, and his sudden ecstasy of love for Brandiamante—these and a hundred other instances of vigorous dramatic presentation could be mentioned. In his pictures of scenery and descriptions Boiardo follows nature no less faithfully—and this, be it remembered, in an age which refined on nature and admitted into art only certain chosen phases of her loveliness. Of affectation and elaboration he has none. The freshness of authentic vision gives peculiar vividness to the storm that overtakes Rodamonte in mid-channel; to the garden of Falerina, where Orlando stuffs his cask with roses in order to stop his ears against a Siren's song; to the picture of Morgana combing Ziliante's hair in the midst of her enchanted meadows, and to the scene in which Angelica greets Orlando with a perfumed bath after the battle.[587] The charm of Boiardo's poetry consists in its firm grasp on truth and nature, the spontaneity and immediateness of its painting. He has none of Poliziano's richness, no Virgilian dignity or sweetness, no smooth and sparkling fluency like that of Ariosto. But all that he writes has in it the perfume of the soil, the freedom of the open air; the spirits of the woods and sea and stars are in it. Of his style the most striking merit is rapidity. Almost always unpolished, sometimes even coarse, but invariably spirited and masculine, his verse leaps onward like a grayhound in its swiftness. Story succeeds story with extraordinary speed; and whether of love or arms, they are equally well told. The pathetic novel of Tisbina, Rinaldo's wondrous combat with the griffins and the giants, the lion-hunt at Biserta, the mustering of Agramante's lieges, and the flux and reflux of battle before Montalbano tax the vivid and elastic vigor of Boiardo in five distinct species of rapid narration; and in all of them he proves himself more than adequate to the strain. For ornaments he cared but little, nor did he wait to elaborate similes. A lion at bay, a furious bull, a river foaming to the sea, a swollen torrent, two battling winds, a storm of hail, the clash of thunderclouds, an earthquake, are the figures he is apt to use. The descriptions of Rinaldo, Marfisa and Orlando, may be cited as favorable specimens of his illustrative metaphors.[588] Short phrases like a guisa di leone, a guisa di colomba, a guisa di serpente, a guisa d'uno drago, a guisa di castello, indicate in outline images that aid the poet's thought. But nothing like the polish or minuteness of Ariosto's highly-wrought comparisons can be found in the Innamorato. Boiardo's study of the classics had not roused him to the emulation of their decorative beauties. Nor, again, did he attend to cadence in his versification. He would have wondered at the limæ labor of the poets who came after him. His own stanzas are forcible, swift, fiery, never pompous or voluptuous, liquid or sonorous. The changes wrought by Poliziano in the structure of ottava rima, his majesty and "linked sweetness long drawn out," were unknown to Boiardo. Yet those rugged octaves, in spite of their halting pauses at the end of the fifth line, in spite of their frequent repetitions and inequalities of volume, are better adapted to the spirit of his medieval subject-matter than the sumptuous splendor of more polished versifiers. His diction, in like manner, judged by the standard of the cinque cento, is far from choice—loaded with Lombardisms, gaining energy and vividness at the expense of refinement and precision. Thus style and spirit alike removed him from the sympathies of the correct and classic age that followed.

For the student of the earlier Renaissance Boiardo's art has one commanding point of interest. In the romantic treatment of antique motives he is unique. It was the aim of Italian poets after Boccaccio to effect a fusion between the classical and modern styles, and to ingraft the beauties of antique literature upon their own language. Boiardo, far more a child of nature than either Boccaccio or Poliziano, with deeper sympathy for feudal traditions and chivalrous modes of feeling, attacked this problem from a point of view directly opposite to theirs. His comprehensive study of Greek and Roman authors had stored his mind with legends which gave an impulse to the freedom of his own imagination. He did not imitate the ancients; but used the myths with so much novelty and delicate perception of their charm, that beneath his touch they assumed a fresh and fascinating quality. There is nothing grotesque in his presentation of Hellenic fancy, nothing corresponding to the medieval transformation of deities into devils; and yet his spirit is not classical. His Sphinx, his Cyclops, and his Circe-Dragontina, his Medusa, his Pegasus, his Centaur, his Atalanta, his Satyr, are living creatures of romantic wonderland, with just enough of classic gracefulness to remove them from the murky atmosphere of medieval superstition into the serene ether of a neo-pagan mythology. Nothing can be more dissimilar from Ovid, more unlike the forms of Græco-Roman sculpture. With his firm grasp upon reality, Boiardo succeeded in naturalizing these classic fancies. They are not copied, but drawn from the life of the poet's imagination. A good instance of this creative faculty is the description of the Faun, who haunts the woodland in the shade of leaves, and lives on fruits and drinks the stream, and weeps when the sky is fair, because he then fears bad weather, but laughs when it rains, because he knows the sun will shine again.[589] It is not easy to find an exact analogue in the sister arts to this poetry, though some points in the work of Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo, some early engravings by Robeta and the Master of the Caduceus, some bass-reliefs of Amadeo or incrustations on the chapel-walls of S. Francesco at Rimini, a Circe by Dosso Dossi in the Borghese palace at Rome, an etching of Mantegna here or there, might be quoted in illustration of its spirit.[590] Better justice can be done to Boiardo's achievement by citation than by critical description. The following stanzas are a picture of Love attended by the Graces, punishing Rinaldo for his rudeness near the Font of Merlin[591]:

When to the leafy wood his feet were brought, Towards Merlin's Font at once he took his way; Unto the font that changes amorous thought Journeyed the Paladin without delay; But a new sight, the which he had not sought, Caused him upon the path his feet to stay. Within the wood there is a little close Full of pink flowers, and white, and various: And in the midst thereof a naked boy, Singing, took solace with surpassing cheer; Three ladies round him, as around their joy, Danced naked in the light so soft and clear. No sword, no shield, hath been his wonted toy; Brown are his eyes; yellow his curls appear; His downy beard hath scarce begun to grow: One saith 'tis there, and one might answer, No! With violets, roses, flowers of every dye, Baskets they filled and eke their beauteous hands: Then as they dance in joy and amity, The Lord of Montalbano near them stands: Whereat, "Behold the traitor!" loud they cry, Soon as they mark the foe within their bands; "Behold the thief, the scorner of delight, Caught in the trap at last in sorry plight!" Then with their baskets all with one consent Upon Rinaldo like a tempest bore: One flings red roses, one with violets blent Showers lilies, hyacinths, fast as she can pour: Each flower in falling with strange pain hath rent His heart and pricked his marrow to the core, Lighting a flame in every smitten part, As though the flowers concealed a fiery dart. The boy who, naked, coursed along the sod, Emptied his basket first, and then began, Wielding a long-grown leafy lily rod, To scourge the helmet of the tortured man: No aid Rinaldo found against the god, But fell to earth as helpless children can; The youth who saw him fallen, by the feet Seized him, and dragged him through the meadow sweet. And those three dames had each a garland rare Of roses; one was red and one was white: These from their snowy brows and foreheads fair They tore in haste, to beat the writhing knight: In vain he cried and raised his hands in prayer; For still they struck till they were tired quite: And round about him on the sward they went, Nor ceased from striking till the morn was spent. Nor massy cuirass, nor stout plate of steel, Could yield defense against those bitter blows: His flesh was swollen with many a livid weal Beneath his mail, and with such fiery woes Inflamed as spirits damned in hell may feel; Yet theirs, upon my troth, are fainter throes: Wherefore that Baron, sore, and scant of breath, For pain and fear was well-nigh brought to death. Nor whether they were gods or men he knew; Nor prayer, nor courage, nor defense availed, Till suddenly upon their shoulders grew And budded wings with gleaming gold engrailed, Radiant with crimson, white, and azure blue; And with a living-eye each plume was tailed, Not like a peacock's or a bird's, but bright And tender as a girl's with love's delight. Then after small delay their flight they took, And one by one soared upward to the sky, Leaving Rinaldo sole beside the brook. Full bitterly that Baron 'gan to cry, For grief and dole so great his bosom shook That still it seemed that he must surely die; And in the end so fiercely raged his pain That like a corpse he fell along the plain.

This is a fine painting in the style I have attempted to characterize—the imagery of the Greek mythology taking a new and natural form of fanciful romance. It is alien to anything in antique poetry or sculpture. Yet the poet's imagination had been touched to finest issues by the spirit of the Greeks before he wrote it. Incapable of transplanting the flowers of antiquity like delicate exotics into the conservatory of studied art, he acclimatized them to the air of thought and feeling in which his own romantic spirit breathed. This distinguishes him from Poliziano, whose stately poem, like the palm-house in Kew Gardens, contains specimens of all the fairest species gathered from the art of Greece and Rome. Even more exquisitely instinct with the first April freshness of Renaissance feeling is another episode, where Boiardo presents the old tale of Narcissus under a wholly new and original aspect. By what strange freak of fancy has he converted Echo into an Empress of the East and added the pathos of the fairy Silvanella, whose petulance amid her hopeless love throws magic on the well! We are far away indeed from the Pompeian frescoes here[592]:

Beyond the bridge there was a little close All round the marble of that fountain fair; And in the midst a sepulcher arose, Not made by mortal art, however rare: Above in golden letters ran the gloss, Which said, "That soul is vain beyond compare That falls a-doting on his own sweet eyes. Here in the tomb the boy Narcissus lies." Erewhile Narcissus was a damozel So graceful, and of beauty so complete, That no fair painted form adorable Might with his perfect loveliness compete; Yet not less fair than proud, as poets tell, Seeing that arrogance and beauty meet Most times, and thus full well with mickle woe The laity of love is taught to know. So that the Empress of the Orient Doting upon Narcissus beyond measure, And finding him on love so little bent, So cruel and so careless of all pleasure, Poor wretch, her dolorous days in weeping spent, Craving from morn till eve of love the treasure, Praying vain prayers of power from Heaven to turn The very sun, and make him cease to burn. Yet all these words she cast upon the wind; For he, heart-hardened, would not hear her moan, More than the asp, both deaf to charms and blind. Wherefore by slow degrees more feeble grown, Toward death she daily dwindling sank and pined; But ere she died, to Love she cried alone, Pouring sad sighs forth with her latest breath, For vengeance for her undeservéd death. And this Love granted: for beside the stream Of which I spoke, Narcissus happed to stray While hunting, and perceived its silvery gleam; Then having chased the deer a weary way, He leaned to drink, and saw as though in dream, His face, ne'er seen by him until that day; And as he gazed, such madness round him floated, That with fond love on his fair self he doted. Whoever heard so strange a story told? Justice of Love! how true, how strong it is! Now he stands sighing by the fountain cold For what he hath, yet never can be his! He that was erst so hard as stone of old, Whom ladies like a god on bended knees Devoutly wooed, imploring him for grace, Now dies of vain desire for his own face. Poring upon his perfect countenance, Which on this earth hath ne'er a paragon, He pined in deep desire's extravagance, Little by little, like a lily blown, Or like a cropped rose; till, poor boy, the glance, Of his black eyes, his cheek's vermilion, His snowy whiteness, and his gleeful mirth Death froze who freezes all things upon earth. Then by sad misadventure through the glade The fairy Silvanella took her way; And on the spot where now this tomb is made, Mid flowers the dead youth very beauteous lay: She, marveling at his fair face, wept and stayed In sore discomfiture and cold dismay; Nor could she quit the place, but slowly came To pine and waste for him with amorous flame. Yea, though the boy was dead, for him she burned: Pity and grief her gentle soul o'erspread: Beside him on the grass she lay and mourned, Kissing his clay-cold lips and mouth and head. But at the last her madness she discerned, To love a corpse wherefrom the soul had fled: Yet knows she not, poor wretch, her doom to shun; She fain would love not, yet she must love on. When all the night and all the following day Were wasted in the torrent of her woes, A comely tomb of marble fair the Fay Built by enchantment in the flowery close; Nor ever from that station would she stray, But wept and mourned; till worn by weary throes, Beside the font within a little space Like snow before the sun she pined apace. Yet for relief, or that she might not rue Alone the luckless doom which made her die, E'en mid the pangs of love such charms she threw Upon the font in her malignity, That all who passing toward the water drew And gazed thereon, perchance with listless eye, Must in the depth see maiden faces fair, Graceful and soul-inthralling mirrored there. They in their brows have beauty so entire That he who gazes cannot turn to fly, But in the end must fade of mere desire, And in that field lay himself down to die. Now it so chanced that by misfortune dire A king, wise, gentle, ardent, passed thereby, Together with his true and loving dame; Larbin and Calidora, such their name.

In these stanzas the old vain passion of Narcissus for his own beauty lives again a new life of romantic poetry. That the enchantment of the boy's fascination, prolonged through Silvanella's mourning for his death, should linger for ever after in the font that was his tomb, is a peculiarly modern touch of mysterious fancy. This part of the romance has little in common with the classic tale of Salmacis; it is far more fragile and refined. The Greeks did not carry their human sympathy with nature, deep and loyal as indeed it was, so far into the border-land of sensual and spiritual things. Haunted hills, like the Venusberg of Tannhäuser's legend; haunted waters, like Morgana's lake in Boiardo's poem; the charmed rivers and fountains of naiads, where knights lose their memory and are inclosed in crystal prison-caves; these are essentially modern, the final flower and blossom of the medieval fancy, unfolding stores of old mythology and half-forgotten emblems to the light of day in art.[593] For their perfection it was needful that the gods of Hellas should have died, and that the phantoms of old-world divinities should linger in dreams and reveries about the shores of young romance.

Boiardo's treatment of magic is complementary to his use of classical mythology. He does not employ this important element of medieval art in its simplicity, but adapts it to the nature of his own imagination, adding, as it were, a new quality by the process of assimilation. Some of his machinery belongs, indeed, to the poems of his predecessors, or is framed in harmony with their spirit. The enchantment of Durlindana and Baiardo; the invulnerability of Orlando, Ferraguto, and other heroes; the wizardry of Malagise, Mambrino's helmet, Morgana's stag, the horse Rabicano, Argalia's lance, Angelica's ring, and the countless dragons and giants which Boiardo creates at pleasure, may be mentioned in this category. But it is otherwise with the gardens of Falerina and Dragontina, the sublacustrine domain of Fata Morgana, and the caverns of the Naiades. These, however much they may have once belonged to medieval tradition, have been alchemized by the imagination of the poet of the Renaissance. They are glimpses into ideal fairyland, which Ariosto and Tasso could but refine upon and vary in their famous gardens of Alcina and Armida. Boiardo's use of the old tradition of Merlin's fountain, and the other well of Cupid feigned by him beside it, might again be chosen to illustrate his free poetic treatment of magical motives. When he trespasses on these enchanted regions, then and then only does he approach allegory. The quest of the tree guarded by Medusa in Tisbina's story; the achievement by Orlando of Morgana's garden, where Penitence and Fortune play their parts; and Rinaldo's encounter with Cupid in the forest of Ardennes, have obviously allegorical elements. Yet the hidden meaning is in each case less important than the adventure; and the same may be said about the highly tragic symbolism of the monster in the Rocca Crudele.[594] Boiardo had too vivid a sympathy with nature and humanity to appreciate the mysteries which allured the Northern poets of Parzival, the Sangraal, and the Faery Queen. When he lapses into allegory, it is with him a sign of weakness. Akin, perhaps, to this disregard for parable is the freedom of his spirit from all superstition. The religion of his knights is bluff, simple, and sincere, in no sense savoring of the cloister and the cowl. A high sense of truth and personal honor, indifference to life for life's sake, profound humility in danger, charity impelling men of power to succor the oppressed and feeble, are the fruits of their piety. But of penance for sins of the flesh, of ceremonial observances, of visions and fasts, of ascetic discipline and wonder-working images, of all the ecclesiastical trumpery with which the pseudo-Turpin is filled, and which contaminates even the Mort d'Arthur of our heroic Mallory, we read nothing.

In taking up the thread of Boiardo's narrative, Ariosto made use of all his predecessor had invented. He adopted the machinery of the two fountains, the lance of Argalia, Angelica's ring, Rabicane, and the magic arts of Atalante. The characters of the Innamorato reappear with slight but subtle changes and with somewhat softened names in the Furioso.[595] Ariosto, again, followed Boiardo closely in his peculiar method of interweaving novelle with the main narrative; of suspending one story to resume another at a critical moment; of prefacing his cantos with reflections, and of concluding them with a courteous license.[596] Lastly, Ariosto is at great pains, while connecting his poem with the Innamorato, to make it intelligible by giving short abstracts at intervals of the previous action. Yet throughout this long laborious work of continuation he preserves a studied silence respecting the poet to whom he owed so much. Was this due to the desire of burying Boiardo's fame beneath his own? Did he so contrive that the contemporary repute of the Innamorato should serve to float his Furioso and then be forgotten by posterity? If so, he calculated wisely; for this is what almost immediately happened. Though the Orlando Innamorato was printed four times before 1513—once at Venice in 1486, once at Scandiano in 1495, and again at Venice in 1506, 1511, and 1513—and though it continued to be reprinted at Venice through the first half of the sixteenth century, yet the sudden silence of the press after this period shows that the Furioso had eclipsed Boiardo's fame. Still the integral connection between the two poems could not be overlooked; and just about the period of Ariosto's death, Francesco Berni conceived the notion of rewriting Boiardo's epic with the expressed intention of correcting its diction and rendering it more equal in style to the Orlando Furioso. This rifacimento was published in 1541, after his death. The mysterious circumstances that attended its publication, and the nature of the changes introduced by Berni into the substance of Boiardo's poem, will be touched upon when we arrive at this illustrious writer of burlesque verse. It is enough to mention here that Berni's version was printed twice between 1541 and 1545, and that then, like the original, it fell into comparative oblivion till the end of the last century. Meanwhile the second rifacimento by Domenichi appeared in 1545; and though this new issue was a mere piece of impudent book-making, it superseded Berni's masterpiece during the next two hundred years. The critics of the last century rediscovered Berni's rifacimento, and began to quote Boiardo's poem under his name, treating the real author as an ignorant and uncouth writer of a barbarous dialect. Thus one of the most original poets of the fifteenth century, to whom Italy owes the form and substance of the Furioso, has been thrust aside and covered with contempt, by a curious irony of fortune, owing to the very qualities that ought to have insured his immortality. Used by Ariosto as the ladder for ascending to Parnassus; by Berni as an exercising ground for the display of style; by Domenichi as the means of getting his name widely known, the Orlando Innamorato served any purposes but that of its great author's fame. Panizzi, by reprinting the original poem along with the Orlando Furioso, restored Boiardo at length to his right place in Italian literature. From that time forward it has been impossible to overlook his merits or to underestimate Ariosto's obligations to so gifted and original a master.