ARIOSTO, SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE

BY

BENEDETTO CROCE

TRANSLATED BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

"RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.I
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.

1920

[TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE]

Evviva L'Italia! Italy, Britain's ancient friend and loyal ally, has been an important factor both in winning the war and in bringing it to an earlier conclusion. The War! That greatest practical effort that the world has ever made is now over and we must all work to make it a better place for all to live in.

Now at the hands of her philosopher-critic, Italy offers us a first effort at reconstruction of our world-view with this masterly treatise on the greatest poet of the English-speaking world, so original and so profound that it will serve as guide to generations yet unborn. And it will not be only the critics of Shakespeare who should benefit by this treatise, but all critics and lovers of poetry—including prose—who go beyond the passive stage of mere admiration. The essays on Ariosto and Corneille are also unique and the three together should inaugurate everywhere a new era in literary criticism.

These are the first of Benedetto Croce's literary criticisms to see the light in English.

They are profound and suggestive, because based upon theory, the Theory of Aesthetic, with which some readers will be acquainted in the original, others in the version by the present translator. These will not need to be told that Croce's theory of the independence and autonomy of the aesthetic fact, which is intuition-expression, and of the essentially lyrical character of all art, is the only one that completely and satisfactorily explains the problem of poetry and the fine arts.

But this is not the place for philosophical discussion, although it is important to stress the point, that all criticism is based upon philosophy, and that therefore if the philosophy upon which it is based is unsound, the criticism suffers accordingly. Croce has elsewhere shown that the shortcomings of such critics as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Lemaître and Brunetière are due to incorrect or insufficient philosophical knowledge and a similar criterion can be applied at home with equal truth.

The translator will be satisfied if the present version receives equal praise from the author with that accorded to the four translations of the Philosophy into English, which Croce has often declared to come more near to his spirit than those in any other language—and he has been translated into all the great European languages—the Aesthetic even into Japanese. The object adhered to in this translation has been as close a cleaving as possible to the original, while preserving a completely idiomatic style and remaining free from all pedantry.

A translation should not in any case be taken as a pouring from the golden into the silver vessel, as used to be erroneously supposed, for Croce has proved that in so far as the translator rethinks the original he is himself a creator. This explains why so many writers have been addicted to translation—in English we have Pope, Fitzgerald, Rossetti, to name but three of many—and the author of the Philosophy of the Spirit, Croce himself, has published a splendid Italian version of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

The Athenaeum,
Pall Mall, London,
October, 1920.

CONTENTS

[PART I]

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

[CHAPTER I]

A CRITICAL PROBLEM[1]

The fortune of the Orlando Furioso may be compared to that of a graceful, smiling woman, whom all look upon with pleasure, without experiencing any intellectual embarrassment or perplexity, since it suffices to have eyes and to direct them to the pleasing object, in order to admire. Crystal clear as is the poem, polished in every particular, easily to be understood by whomsoever possesses general culture, it has never presented serious difficulties of interpretation, and for that reason has not needed the industry of the commentators, and has not been injured by their quarrelsome subtleties; nor has it been subject, more than to a very slight extent, to the intermittences from which other notable poetical works have suffered, owing to the varying conditions of culture at different times. Great men and ordinary readers have been in as complete agreement about it, as, for instance, about the beauty, let us say, of a Madame Récamier; and the list of great men, who have experienced its fascination, goes from Machiavelli and the Galilei, to Voltaire and to Goethe, without mentioning names more near to our own time.

Yet, however unanimous, simple and unrestrainable be the aesthetic approbation accorded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judgments delivered upon it are just as discordant, complicated and laboured; and indeed this is one of those cases where the difference of the two spiritual moments, intuitive or aesthetic, the apprehension or tasting of the work of art, and intellective, the critical and historical judgment,—a difference wrongly disputed from one point of view by sensationalists and from another by intellectualists,—stands out so clearly as to seem to be almost spatially divided, so that one can touch it with one's hand. Anyone can easily read and live again the octaves of Ariosto, caressing them with voice and imagination, as though passionately in love; but to say whence comes that particular form of enchantment, to determine that is to say, the character of the inspiration that moved Ariosto, his dominant poetical motive, the peculiar effect which became poetry in him, is a very different undertaking and one of no small difficulty.

The question has tormented the critics from the time when literary and historical criticism acquired individual prominence and energy, that is to say at the origin of romantic aestheticism, when works of art were no longer examined in parts separated from the whole, or in their external outline, but in the spirit that animated them. Yet we must not think that earlier times were without all suspicion of this, for an uncertain suggestion of it is to be found even in the eccentric enquiries, as to whether the Furioso be a moral poem or not, or whether it should be looked upon as serious or playful. But intellects such as Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt and Schelling, Hegel, Ranke, Gioberti, Quinet and De Sanctis, treated or touched upon it in the last century, and very many others during and after their times, and the theme has again been taken up with renewed keenness, in dissertations, memoirs and articles, some of them foreign, but mostly Italian.

Many of the problems or formulas of problems, which one at one time critically discussed have been allowed to disappear, like cast-off clothes as the results of the new conception of art: that is to say, not only those we have mentioned, as to whether the Furioso were or were not an epic, whether it were serious or comic, but also a throng of other problems, such as whether it possessed unity of action, a protagonist or hero, whether its episodes were linked to the action, whether it maintained the dignity of history, whether it afforded an allegory, and if so, of what sort, whether it obeyed the laws of modesty and morality, or followed good examples, whether it could be credited with invention, and if so in what measure, whether it were finer than the Gerusalemme or less fine, and as to what it was finer or less fine; and so on. All these problems have become obsolete, because they have been solved in the only suitable way, that is to say, they have been shown to be fallacious in their theoretical terms; and to say that they are obsolete does not mean that there have not been some, both in the nineteenth century and at the present time, who have set to work to solve them, and have arrived at unfortunate conclusions in different ways. The unity of action of the Furioso has also been investigated and determined (by Panizzi, for example, and by Carducci); its immorality has also been blamed (by Cantù, for instance); the book of the debts of Ariosto to his predecessors has been re-opened and charged with so very many figures on the debit side that the final balance-sheet of credit and debit presents an enormous deficit (Rajna); the comparison with examples from prototypes under the name of "Evolutionary History of Romantic Chivalry," in which the Furioso according to some, does not represent the summit, but rather a deviation and decadence from the ideal prototype (Rajna again); according to others, the Furioso gave final and perfect form to "The French Epic of Germanic Heroes" (Morf); allegory, contained in a moral judgment as to Italian life at the time of the Renaissance, lost in its pursuit of love, like the Christian and Saracen knights in their pursuit of Angelica (Canello). But whether in their primitive or in their more modern forms these problems are obsolete, for us who are aware of the mistakes and errors in aesthetic, from which they arise; and others of more recent date must also be held obsolete with these, such theories as these for instance (to quote one of them) which undertake to study the Furioso in its "formation," understanding by formation the literary presuppositions of its various parts, beginning with the title. Decorated with the name of Scientific Study, this is mere inconclusive or ill-conclusive philology.

The work of modern criticism does not restrict itself to the clearing away of these idle and unnecessary enquiries, but also includes a varied and thorough investigation into the poetry of Ariosto, whose every aspect we may claim to have illuminated in turn, and to have given all the solutions as to the true character of the problem that can be suggested. And it almost seems now that anyone who wishes to form an idea upon the subject needs but select from the various existing solutions, that one which shows itself to be clearly superior to all others, owing to its being supported by the most valid arguments, after he has possessed himself of the critical literature relating to Ariosto. It seems impossible to suggest a new solution, and as though the argument were one of those of which it may be said that "there is no hope of finding anything new in connection with it."

And this is very nearly true, but only very nearly, for a non-superficial examination of those various solutions leads to the result that none of them is valid in the way it is presented, that is to say, with the arguments that support it. It is therefore advisable to indicate some of these arguments, which have already been given, and to deduce from them other consequences, though we may not succeed in framing others which shall shine with amazing novelty. But upon consideration, this will be nothing less than providing a new solution, just because the problem has been differently presented and differently argued: a novelty of that serious sort which is a step forward upon what has already been observed and acquired, not that sort of extravagant novelty agreeable to false originality and to sterile subtlety.

There are two fundamental types of reply to the question as to the character of Ariosto's poetry; of these the more important is the first, either because, as will be seen, really here near to the truth, or because supported with the supreme authority of De Sanctis. Prior to De Sanctis, it is only to be vaguely discerned as suggested by the eighteenth century writer, Sulzer, and more clearly in the German aesthetic writer, Vischer; it was afterwards repeated, prevailed and was accepted, among others by Carducci. According to De Sanctis and to his precursors and followers, in the Furioso Ariosto has no subjective content to express, no sentimental or passionate motive, no idea become sentiment or passion, but pursues the sole end of art, singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake, elaborating pure form, and satisfying the one end of realising his own dreams.

This affirmation is not to be taken in a general sense, the words in which it is formulated must not be construed literally, for in that case it would be easy to raise the reasonable objection, that not only Ariosto, but every artist, just because he is an artist, never has any end but that of art, of singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake, of elaborating pure form, and of satisfying the need that he feels to realise his own dreams: woe to the artist, who has an eye to any other ends, and tries to teach, to persuade, to shock, to move, to make a hit or an effect, or anything else extraneous to art. The theory of art for art, opposed by many, is incontestable from this point of view, it is indeed indubitable and altogether obvious. The critics who attribute that end as a character of Ariosto's poetry, mean rather to affirm, that the author of the Furioso proceeded in his own individual proper manner with respect to other poets; and they then proceed to determine their thoughts upon the subject in two ways, differing somewhat from one another. Both of these are to be found mingled and confused in the pages of De Sanctis. Ariosto is held to have allowed to pass in defile within him the chain of romantic figures of knights and ladies and the stories of their arms and audacious undertakings, of their loves and their love-making, with the one object of delighting the imagination. Ariosto is held to have depicted that various human world without interposing anything between himself and things, without reflecting himself in things, without sinking them in himself or in his own feelings. He is held to have been solely an objective observer. Now, taking the first case, that is to say, if the work of Ariosto be really resolved into a plaything of the imagination, although he might have pleased himself by doing something agreeable to himself and to others, yet he would not have been a poet, "the divine Ariosto," because the pleasure of the fancy belongs to the order of practical acts, to what are called games or diversion. And in the second case, when he has been praised for being perfectly objective, this is not only at variance with the actual creation of the poet, but is also in contradiction to it—and indeed in contradiction to every form of spiritual production. As though things existed outside the spirit and it were possible to take them up in their supposed objectivity and to externalise them by putting them on paper or canvas. The theory of art for art, when taken as a theory of merely fanciful pleasure or of indifferent objective reproduction of things, should be firmly rejected, because it is at variance with and contradicts the nature of art and of the universal spirit. At the most, these two paradigms,—art as mere fancy and art as extrinsic objectivity,—might be of avail as designating two artistic forms of deficiency and ugliness, futile art and material art, that is to say, in both cases, non-art; and in like manner the theory of art for art's sake would in those cases be the definition of one or more forms of artistic perversion.

Owing to the impossibility of denying to Ariosto any content, and at the same time of enjoying him and of acclaiming him a poet,—an impossibility more or less obscurely felt by some, although without discovering and demonstrating it as has been done above,—it has come about that not only other critics, but those very critics who, like De Sanctis, had described him as a poet of pure fancy or pure objectivity, have been led to recognise in him a content, and sometimes several contents, one upon the top of the other, in a heap. One of such contents, perhaps that most generally admitted, is without doubt the dissolution of the world of chivalry, brought about by Ariosto through irony: a historical position conferred upon him by Hegel, and amply illustrated by De Sanctis. But what do they mean by saying that Ariosto expresses the dissolution of the world of chivalry? Certainly not simply that in his poem are to be found documents concerning the passing of the ideals of chivalry, because whether this be true or not, it does not concern the concrete artistic form, but its abstract material, considered and treated as a source of historical documentation. Nor can it mean that he was inspired with aversion to the ideals of chivalry and in favour of new ideals, because polemic and criticism, negation and affirmation, are not art. So what was really meant was (although those who maintain this interpretation often understand it in one or other of those meanings, which are external to art), that Ariosto was animated with a true and real feeling toward the ideals of the life of chivalry, and that this feeling supplied the lyrical motive for his poem. This motive has been disputed in its details in various ways, some holding it to have been aversion, others a mixture of aversion and of love, others of admiration and of pleasure; but before we engage in further investigation, we must first ascertain if there exist, that is to say, if Ariosto really endowed with his own feeling—whatever it be, prevailing aversion or prevailing inclination or a prevalent alternation of the two,—the material of chivalry, rendering it serious and emotional, through the seriousness and emotion of his own feeling. And this does not exist at all, for what all feel and see as chivalry in Ariosto's mode of treatment, is on the contrary a sort of aloofness and superiority, owing to which he never engages himself up to the hilt in admiration or in scorn or in passionate disagreement with one or the other; and this impression which his narratives of sieges and combats, of duels and feats of arms produce upon us, has afforded the ground for the above-mentioned opposed theories as to his objective attitude and as to his cultivation of a mere pastime of the imagination. Had Ariosto really aimed, as is said, at an exaltation or a semi-exaltation or at an ironisation of chivalry, he would clearly have missed the mark, and this failure would have been the failure of his art.

What has been remarked concerning the content of chivalry is to be repeated for all the other contents which have been proposed in turn, each one or all of them together as the true and proper leading motive; and of these (leaving out the least likely, because we are not here concerned with collecting curious trifles of Ariostesque criticism, but are resuming the essential lines of this criticism with the intention of cutting into it more deeply and with greater certainty), the next thing to mention, immediately after chivalrous ideality or anti-ideality, is the philosophy of life, the wisdom, which Ariosto is supposed to have administered and counselled. This wisdom is supposed to have embraced love, friendship, politics, religion, public and private life, and to have been directed with great moderation and good sense, noble without fanaticism, courageous and patient, dignified and modest. We admit that these things are to be found in the Furioso, just as chivalrous things are to be found there also; but they are there in almost the same way, that is to say, with the not doubtful accent of aloofness and remoteness, which at once places a great chasm between Ariosto and the true poets of wisdom, such as were for instance, Manzoni and Goethe. The latter of these, in the fine verses (of the Tasso) in praise of Ariosto,—who is held to have there draped in the garb of fable all that can render man dear and honoured, to have exhibited experience, intelligence, good taste, the pure sense of good, as living persons, crowned with roses and surrounded with a magic winged presence of Amorini,—somewhat transfigured the subject of his eulogy, by approaching him to himself: although, as we perceive from the images that he employed, it did not escape him that in the case of the lovable singer of the Furioso, the wisdom was covered, and as it were smothered beneath a cloud of many coloured flowers. Thus the two principal solutions hitherto given of the critical problem presented by Ariosto, the only two which appear thinkable,—that the Furioso has no content; that it has this or that content,—each finds countenance in the other and arguments in its favour. This means that they confute one another in turn. And since it is impossible that there should be no content in Ariosto, and on the other hand, since all those to which attention was first directed (admiration or contempt of chivalry, wisdom of life) turn out to be without existence, it is clear that there is no way out of the difficulty, save that of seeking another content, and such an one as shall show how the truth has been improperly symbolised in the formulas of "mere imagination," of "indifferent objectivity" and of "art for art's sake."

[1] In the preparation of this essay, I believe that I have examined all, or almost all, the literature of erudition and criticism, old and new, in connection with Ariosto; this will not escape the expert reader, although particular discussions and quotation of titles and pages of books have seemed to me to be superfluous on this occasion. But in judging this work, the reader should have present in his mind above all the chapter of De Sanctis on the Furioso (illustrated with fragments from his lectures at Zurich upon the poetry of chivalry), which forms the point of departure for these later investigations and conclusions.

[CHAPTER II]

THE LIFE OF THE AFFECTIONS IN ARIOSTO,
AND THE HEART OF HIS HEART

Ariosto had ordinary emotional experiences in life, and this has been shown to be true, not so much through the biographies of his contemporaries and documents which have later come to light, as through his own words, because he took great pleasure, if not exactly in confessing himself, at any rate in giving vent to his feelings. It is well known that he was without profound intellectual passions, religious or political, free from longing for riches and honours, simple and frugal in his mode of life, seeking above all things peace and tranquillity and freedom to follow his own imagination, to give himself over to the studies that he loved. Rarely or only for brief spaces of time was it given to him to live in his own way, owing to the necessity, always on his shoulders, for providing for his younger brothers and sisters and for his mother, and also the necessity of obtaining bread for himself. All these circumstances together constrained him to undertake the hard work and the annoyances of a court life. He was admirable in the fulfilment of family duties, perfectly honest and reliable on every occasion, full of good, just and generous sentiments, and therefore the recipient of universal esteem and confidence. Owing to reasons connected with his office, he was obliged to associate with greedy, violent, unscrupulous men, but he did not allow himself to be stained by their contact, preserving the attitude of an honest employee towards his patrons, attentive to the formal duties with which he was charged. He is discreet, but pure and dignified, refraining from taking part whatever in the secret plots and machinations of those whose orders he obeys. He was thus enabled to carry out the instructions of his superiors, whom he regarded solely as filling a certain lofty rank, idealising them in conformity with their rank, praising them, that is to say, for their attainments, their ability and their noble undertakings, either because they really possessed them and really accomplished the things for which he praised them, or because they should have possessed them and accomplished the feats in question, as attributes inherent to their social station.

Among these duties and labours one single passion ran like an ever warm stream through his brain: love, or rather the need of woman's society, to have with him a beloved woman, to enjoy her beauty, her laughter, her speech: and although he frequently alludes to this passion, it is as one ashamed of a weakness, but aware that he can by no means dispense with the sweetness that it procures for him and which is a vital element of his being. But even his love for woman, however strong it may have been, found its correct framework in his idyllic ideal and in his reflective and temperate spirit: it contained nothing of the fantastic, the adventurous, the Donjuanesque; and after the customary evil and evanescent adventures of youth, he took refuge in her "for whom he trembled with amorous zeal" and (as his friend Hercules Bentivoglio tells us in verse): in that Alexandra, who was his friend for twenty years, and finally his more or less legal wife. United to his desire for quietude, there was thus a potent stimulus not to remove himself at all, or if at all, then as little as possible, from her who was warmth and comfort for him, and to whom he clung like a child to the bosom of its mother. His latter years, in which, recalled from his severe sojourn at Garfagnana, he occupied himself with correcting his poems at Ferrara, with the woman he loved at his side, were perhaps the happiest he knew; and he passed away in that peace for which he had sighed, ere attaining to old age.

Such tendencies of soul and the life which resulted from them, have sometimes been admired and envied, as for instance by the sixteenth century English translator of the Furioso, Harrington. After having described them, and having disclaimed certain sins, indeed as he said, the single pecadillo of love, he concludes with a sigh: "Sic me contingat vivere, Sicque mori." Sometimes too they have been looked upon from above and almost with compassion, as by De Sanctis and others, who have insisted upon the negative aspects of the character of Ariosto. These negative aspects are however nothing but the limits, which are found in everyone, for we are not all capable of everything; and really Italian critics, especially in the period of the Risorgimento, were often wrong in laying down as a single measure for everyone, civil, political, patriotic, religious, excellence, forgetful that judgment of an individual's character should depend upon his natural disposition, his temperament. Certainly, the life of Ariosto was not rich and intense, nor does it present important problems in respect of social and moral history; and the industry of the learned, although it has been able to increase its collections and conjectures as to his economic and family conditions, as to his official duties as courtier, as ambassador and administrator for the Duke of Ferrara, as to his loves and as to the names and persons of the women whom he loved, as to the house which he built and inhabited, and other similar particulars, anecdotes and curiosities concerning him (the collection of which shows with how much religion or superstition a great man is surrounded, and also sometimes the futility of the searcher), has not added anything substantial to what the poet tells us himself, far less has been able to furnish materials for a really new biography, which should be at once profound and dramatic.

Nevertheless, such as it was, the life of a good and of a poor man, of one tenaciously devoted to love and poetry, it found literary expression in the minor works of the author: in the Latin songs, in the Italian verses, and in the satires.

In saying this, we shall set aside the comedies, which seem to be the most important of those minor works and are notwithstanding the least significant, so that they might be almost excluded from the history of his poetical development, connected rather with his doings as a courtier, as an arranger of spectacles and plays, for which purpose he decided to imitate the Latin comedy, for he did not believe there was anything new to be done in that field, since the Latins had already imitated the Greeks. No doubt Ariosto's comedies stand for an important date in the history of the Italian theatre and of the Latin imitation which prevailed there, that is to say, the history of culture, but not in that of poetry. There they are mute. They are works of adaptation and combination, and therefore executed with effort; there is nothing new, even about their form, and a proof of this is that Ariosto, after he had made a first attempt to write them in prose, finally put them into monotonous and tiresome ante-penultimate hendecasyllabics, which have never pleased anyone's ear, because they were not born, but constructed according to design, with evident artifice and with a view to giving to Italy the metre of comedy, analogous to the Roman iambic. Whoever (to cite an instance from the same period and "style") calls to memory the Mandragola of Machiavelli, instinct with the energetic spirit, the bitter disdain of the great thinker, or even the sketches thrown upon paper anyhow by the ne'er-do-well Pietro Aretino, is at once sensible of the difference between dead ability and living force, or at any rate careless vigour. Nor does the dead material come alive, as some easily contented critics maintain, from the fact that Ariosto introduced, especially into the later of those comedies, allusions to persons, places and customs of Ferrara, or satirical gibes at the vices of the time; all these things are light as straws and quite indifferent when original inspiration lacks, as in the present case.

On the other hand, there are many pure and spontaneous parts in the minor works: even the imitations of Horace, of Catullus, of Tibullus in the Latin poems, do not produce a sense of coldness, because we feel that they are inspired with devotion of the humanists for the Latins, for "my Latins," as he affectionately called them; and the heart of the poet often beats with theirs, whether he be lamenting the death of a friend and companion, or drawing the portrait of some fair lady, or describing the delights of the country, or inveighing against some treacherous and venal woman. In like manner, we observe some fine traits of lofty emotion among the Italian poems, such as the two songs for Philiberta of Savoy; and the true accents of his love find their way to utterance among the Petrarchan, the madrigalesque and the courtly qualities of others. Such is the song celebrating their first meeting, in which he records the Florentine festa, where he saw her who was to become his mistress, and who immediately occupied a place above all other women in his eyes, her whose fair, dense hair, as it shaded her cheeks and neck and fell upon her shoulders, whose rich silken robe adorned with scarlet and gold, became part of his soul; and the elegy which is an outburst of joy upon having attained the desired felicity; and that other which records the lovers' meeting at night; then too the chapter upon the visit to Florence, where all the attractions of the sweet city failed to secure fer him a moment's respite, eager as he was to return to the longed-for presence of the loved one, whom he describes poetically in her absence as a fair magician:

"Oltra acque, monti, a ripa l'onda vaga
Del re de' fiumi, in bianca e pura stola,
Cantando ferma il sol la bella maga,
Che con sua vista può sanarmi sola."

and in the sonnet which ends:

"Ma benigne accoglienze, ma complessi
Licenziosi, ma parole sciolte
D'ogni freno, ma risi, vezzi e giuochi."

They are often echoes of the erotic Latin poets, refreshed by the true condition of his own spirit which, in the passion of love, never went beyond a tender and somewhat slight degree of sensuality. It would be vain to seek in him what he does not possess—that suave imagining, those cosmical analogies, those moral finesses and lofty thoughts, which are to be found in other poets of love.

For this reason, reflections upon himself and upon the society in which it was his fate to live, confidences about his own various ways of feeling and the recital of his adventures, follow and accompany the brief lyrical effusions of this eroticism. When Ariosto limits himself to the thoughts and happenings of his daily life, it is rather a question of narrating than creating, and the culmination of the minor works are known as the Satires, which must not be limited to the seven which bear this title in the printed editions, but should be extended to include other compositions of like tone and content, to be found among the elegies and the capitals, and even among the odes, such as the elegy De diversis amoribus. In all of these, Ariosto is writing his autobiography in fragments, or rather as a series of confidential letters to his friends, such as he did not write in prose, at least none are to be found among those of his that remain. These are all connected with business, dry, summary, and written in haste, only here and there revealing the personality of the writer; whereas, when he expressed himself in verse, he made his own soul the subject, paying attention to the vivacity of the representation and the precise accuracy of what he said. This is a most pleasing versified correspondence, where we hear him lamenting, losing patience, telling us what he wants, forming projects, refusing, begging a favour, candidly laying bare for us his true disposition, his lack of docility, his volubility and his caprices, discussing life and the world, smiling at others and at himself; we converse with an Ariosto in his dressing-gown, who experiences great pleasure and has no compunction about showing us himself as he is, and we know how he abhorred any sort of restraint. But these letters in verse, although perfect in quality, vivacious and eloquent as only the writings of a man who speaks of things that concern himself can be, yet are letters, confessions, autobiography: they are not pure poetry; their metrical form is to them something of a delicate pleasing whim, in harmony with such a definition of the soul. In saying this, we do not wish to detract in any way from their value, which is great, but only to prevent their true character from escaping us.

It is no marvel then if a connection, such as prevails between hills and valleys, seems to run between these lesser works, the odes, the verses of the satires, and the Furioso. It is sufficient to read an octave or two of the poem to discover at once the difference in altitude separating it from the most delicious of the love-songs, from the most nimble and picturesque of the satires, which express the feelings of the author far more directly than does the Furioso. It is further to be noted that Ariosto never wished to publish, and certainly never would have had published a great number of them, with the exception of the comedies, even after his death, except perhaps the satires; but since the minor works are nevertheless the expression of his feelings in real and ordinary life, it follows that if we wish to discover the inspiration of the Furioso, the passion which informed and gave to it its proper content, we must seek for this beyond his ordinary life, not in the heart which we know as that of a son, a brother, a poor man, a lover: it is something hidden yet more deeply within him, the heart of his heart.

That there really was a hidden affection; that Ariosto really had a heart of his heart shut up within himself; that beyond and above the beloved woman he worshipped another woman or goddess, with whom he daily held religious converse, is apparent from his whole habit of life. Why had he so lofty a disdain for practical ambitions, why was life at court and business so wearisome to him, why did he renounce so much, sigh so often and so often pray for leisure and rest and freedom, save to celebrate that cult, to give himself over to that converse, to work upon the Furioso, which was its altar, or the statue which he had sculptured for it and was perfecting with his chisel? What was the origin of his well-known "distraction," that mind of his so aloof from his surroundings, ever dwelling upon something else, which his contemporaries observe and about which curious anecdotes are preserved? His need of love and of feminine caresses did not present itself to him as a supreme end, as with people desirous of ease and pleasure, but seemed to him to be rather a means to an end: as though it were the surrounding of serene joy, of tumult appeased, which he prepared for himself and for that other more lofty love. Carducci has successfully defined this psychological situation in his sonnet on the portrait of Ariosto, where he says that the only longed for and accepted "prize for his poems" was for the great dreamer "a lovely mouth—which should appease the burning of his Apollonian brow—with kisses ..."

The proof of the scrupulous attention which he devoted to the Furioso, is to be found in the twelve years, during which he worked upon it in the flower of his age, "with long vigils and labours," as he wrote to the Doge of Venice, when requesting the privilege of printing the first edition of 1516; and in his having always returned to it, to chisel smooth and to soften it in innumerable delicate details, or to amplify it, or in the throwing away of five cantos, which he had written by way of amplification, but which did not go well with the general design, and finally failed to content him. For these he substituted as many more, and personally superintended the edition of 1532, which also failed to content him altogether, so that he began to work upon it again during the few months which separated him from death. His son Virginio attests that he "was never satisfied with his verses, that he kept changing them again and again, and for this reason never remembered any of them ..."; and contemporaries never cease marvelling at his diligence as a corrector and a maker of perfect things: Giraldi Cinzio, to mention but one witness, says that after the first edition, "not a single day passed," during sixteen years, "that he was not occupied upon it with pen and with thought," and that he was also desirous of obtaining the opinions and impressions of the greatest men of letters and humanists in Italy as to every part of it, men such as Bembo, Molza, Navagero; and as Apelles with his paintings, Ariosto kept his work for two years "in the hall of his house, leaving it there that it might be criticised by everyone"; and he particularly said that he wished his critics merely to mark with a stroke of the pen those parts which did not please them, without giving any reason for so doing, that he might find it out for himself, and then discuss it with them, and so arrive at a decision and a solution in his own way. He pushed his minute delicacy of taste so far as to be preoccupied about the choice of modes of spelling, refusing, for instance, to remove the "h" from those words which possessed it by tradition, thus opposing the suggestion of Tolomei and the new fashion of the illiterate crowd, by jocosely replying that "He who removes the h from Huomo, does not know Huomo (man), and he who removes it from Honore, is not worthy of honour."

What then was the passion which he thus expressed, who was the goddess, for whom, since he could not raise a temple and a marble statue in the little house which he longed for and built in the Via Mirasole, he constructed the architecture, the forms and the poetical adornments of the Furioso? He never uttered her name, because none of the other great Italian poets was so little a theorist or critic as Ariosto. He never discussed his art or art in general, limiting himself to saying very simply, and indeed very inadequately, that what he meant by art was "A work containing pleasing and delightful things"; nor, as we have seen, have the critics told us who she was, since they have at the most indicated vaguely and indirectly in their illogical formula that "his Goddess was Art."

[CHAPTER III]

THE HIGHEST LOVE: HARMONY

But we on the other hand shall name her, and we shall call her Harmony, and we shall prove that those who assign a simple aim to Ariosto in the Furioso, Art or Pure Form, were gazing at her and seeing her as it were through a veil of clouds. In doing this, we shall at the same time define the concept of Harmony. We cannot avoid entering upon certain theoretical explanations in relation to this matter; but it would be wrong to look upon them as digressions, since it is only by their means that the way can be cleared to the understanding of the spirit which animates the Furioso. There is something comic or at least ironic in this necessity in which we find ourselves, of weighting with philosophy a discourse relating to so transparent a poet as Ariosto; but we have already warned the reader at the beginning that it is one thing to read and let sing to him the verses of a poet, and another to understand him, and that what is easy to learn may sometimes be very difficult to understand.

It is therefore without doubt contradictory to state that an artist has for his special and particular end or content, art itself, art which is the general end of every artist: as contradictory as to say that an individual has for his concrete and proper end, not this or that work and profession, but life. And there is also no doubt that since every error contains in it an element of truth, those erroneous theories aimed at something effectively existing: a particular content, which they were not able to define, and which could never be in any case art for art. Two sorts of judgments of that formula have nevertheless been expressed in relation to two different groups of works of art: those relating to works which seemed to be inspired by a particular form of art, and those which seem to be inspired by the idea of Art itself, by Art in universal; and for this reason our rapid investigation must be divided and directed first to the one and then to the other case.

The first case includes the poetry which may be called "humanistic" or "classicistic": not the classicism and humanism of pedants without talent or taste, but that lively humanism and classicism which we are wont to admire and enjoy in several poets of our Renaissance in the Latin language, such as Sannazaro, Politian and Pontano, and also in later times those extremely lettered writers in Italian, of whom Monti, in his best work, may be said to be the greatest representative and we might add to him Canova, although he has not poetised in verse. What is there that pleases us in them, in their imitations, their re-writing, their cantos of classical phrases and measures? And what was it that warmed and carried them away, so that they were able to transmit their emotion to us and obtain our delighted sympathy? It has been answered that this was due to their remaining faithful to the already sacred traditions of beautiful form, handed down by the school; but this answer is not satisfactory, because pedants also can be mechanically faithful in repeating; we have alluded to these and shown that on the contrary they weary and annoy us. The truth is that the former hold to those forms of art, because they are the suitable symbol, the satisfactory expression of their feeling, which is one of affection for the past, as being venerable, glorious, decorous, national or super-national and cultural; and their content is not literary form by itself, but love for that past, love for some one or other historical age of art. And if this be true, we must place those romantic archaisers in the same class of art with the humanists or classicists, when considering the substantial nature of things. For the former nourish the same feeling and employ the same procedure, not in relation to the Greek and Roman past, but in relation to the Christian and medieval past, particularly in Germany, where they let us hear again the rude accent of the medieval epic, and represent the ingenuous forms of pious legends and sacred dramatic representations, and make themselves the echo of ancient popular songs: this re-writing has often something in it of the pastiche (as the humanists and classicists also have something of the pastiche, which with them is pedantry), yet sometimes produce passages of delicate art, which if not profound, were certainly agreeable to the heart that remembers, to the eternal heart of childhood which is in us.

Ariosto was also a more or less successful humanist in certain of his minor works, as we have said, but in the Furioso, although he took many schemes and details from Latin poets, he stands essentially outside their line of inspiration, for instead of directing his spirit towards the past, he always draws the past towards his spirit, and there is no observable trace in it of Latin-Augustan archaism, or of the archaism of medieval chivalry. For this reason, the view that he had Art itself as his content must be taken as applicable without doubt in the other sense to him and to certain other artists: as devotion to Art as universal, to Art in its Idea, a devotion which is bodied forth in his narratives, his figures and his verse.

Now it must be remembered that Art in its Idea is nothing but expression or—representation of the real,—of the real which is conflict and strife, but a conflict and a strife that are always being settled; that it is multiplicity and diversity, but at the same time unity, dialectic and development, and also and through that, cosmos and Harmony. And since Art cannot be the content of Art, that is to say, it is impossible to represent representation (as it is impossible to think thought, so that if thought is made the object of thought, it is always itself and the other, that is to say, the whole), by eliding the term which is superfluous and has been unduly retained, we obtain the result that when it is stated of Ariosto or of other artists that they have for content pure Art or pure Form, it is really to be understood that they have for content devotion to the pure rhythm of the universe, for the dialectic which is unity, for the development which is Harmony. Thus, if humanistic or otherwise archaistic artists do not as is generally believed love beautiful forms, but rather the past and history, it may be said of those others that they do not love pure Art, but the pure and universal content of Art, not this or that particular strife and Harmony (erotic, political, moral, religious, and so on), but strife and Harmony in idea and eternal.

The concept of cosmic Harmony, which has also been called pure Beauty or absolute Beauty, and indeed God, has been much employed in old philosophy, and notably in the old aesthetic (old always being understood in its logical-historical sense, which is still tenacious of life and reappears in our own day, where it might be least expected), and has made an elaboration of the new theory, which conceives of art as lyrical intuition or expression, very laborious. For many reasons that it would occupy too much time and be out of place to detail here, Harmony or Beauty came to be considered as the true essence of Art; hence the impossibility of accounting, not only for many works of art, but for art in general, and the artificial attempts made by the upholders of this doctrine and by criticism to pervert facts in support of a partial and incorrect principle. For the reasons given above, it is easy for us to discern the origin of the error, which lay in transferring one of the classes of particular contents which Art is able to elaborate, to serve as the end and essence of Art. And the one selected was precisely that which owing to its religious and philosophical dignity, appeared to have the power to absorb Art into itself together with everything else and to dissolve the whole in a sort of mysticism. This is confirmed by the historical course of the doctrine, the first conspicuous form of which was Neoplatonism, which reappeared on several occasions in the Middle Ages, at the time of the Renaissance and during the Romantic period. De Sanctis himself, owing to the romantic origins of his thought, was never altogether free from it; and his judgment upon Ariosto bears traces of the transcendental conception of Art as an actualisation of pure Beauty.

Similar traces are to be found in another& doctrine to which De Sanctis held and formulated as the distinction and opposition between the poet and the artist: a doctrine which it is desirable to make clear, not only with a view of strengthening the concept to which we have had recourse, but also because Ariosto himself is numbered among the poets to whom the distinction has been chiefly applied, as he has been held to be distinct and opposed, along with Politian and Petrarch, and perhaps others, as artists, to Dante or to Shakespeare, as poets. The doctrine appears to be endorsed by facts, and therefore looks plausible and is readily accepted and continually reproduced, as on several occasions in the history of aesthetic ideas. It was not altogether unknown in the days of Ariosto himself, if Giraldo Cinzio can be held to have suggested it, when in his description of an allegorical picture, in which were to be seen the two great Tuscans "in a green and flowery meadow upon a hill of Helicon," Dante, with his robe fastened at the knees, "manipulated the circular scythe, cutting all the grass that his scythe met with," while Petrarch, "robed in senatorial robe, lay there selecting among the noble herbs and the delicate flowers." In spite of this, it is altogether unsustainable as an exact theory, because it introduces an unjustified and unjustifiable dualism, which it is altogether impossible to mediate, since each of the two distinct terms contains in itself the other and nothing else, thus demonstrating their identity: the poet is poet because he is an artist, that is to say, he gives artistic form to feeling, and the artist would not be an artist, if he were not a poet, that is to say, if he had not a feeling to elaborate. The apparent confirmation of this theory by facts arises from this, that there are as we know, artists who have a devotion for cosmic Harmony as their chief content, and others who have other devotions: and this proves that it is advisable to make a very moderate and restrained use of the distinction between poets and artists, between those who represent the beautiful and those who represent the real, as is the case with all empirical distinctions. Sometimes the same distinction, taken from the bosom of poetry or of some other special art, has been thrown into the midst of the series of the so-called arts, severing those arts which have cosmic Harmony, absolute Beauty, ideal Beauty, the rhythm of the Universe for their object, from others which have for their object individual feelings and life. Among the former were numbered (as in the school of Winckelmann) the art of sculpture and certain sorts of painting at least, and among the latter, poetry; or (according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) bestowing upon music alone the whole of the first field. Music would thus be opposed to the other arts and would possess the value of an unconscious Metaphysic, in so far as it directly portrayed the rhythm of the Universe itself. A clumsy doctrine, which we only mention here, because Ariosto would furnish the best example of all among the poets, against the exclusion of poetry from among the arts which alone were able to portray the rhythm of the Universe or Harmony: Ariosto, who, if he had seemed to an Italian philologist to be nothing less than "a poet who was an excellent observer and reasoner," has yet appeared to Humboldt, whose ear was more sensitive to the especially "musical" musikalisch, and to Vischer more especially as one who developed his fables of chivalry 41 in a melodious labyrinth of images, which produced in its sensual serenity the same enjoyment as the rocking and dying of the Italian "canzone," thus giving the reader "the pure pleasure of moving without matter." When empirical classifications are not handled with caution and with a consciousness of their limits, not only do they deprive the principles of science of their rigour and vigour, but also carry with them the unfortunate result of making it seem possible to distinguish concretely what has been roughly divided for the purpose of aiding the creation of images. The double class of poets and of artists, the one moved by particular affections, the other by universal Harmony, does not hold as a logical duality, because the love of Harmony is itself one of many particular affections, and forms part of the series comprising the comic, tragic, humorous, melancholy, jocose, pessimistic, passionate, realistic, classicistic poets, and so on. But even when it has been reduced to the level of the others, there is no necessity, either in its case or in that of the others, to fall into the illusion that there really exist poets who are only tragic or only comic, only realistic or only classicistic, singers only of Harmony, without the other passions, or solely passionate without the passion for Harmony. The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every poet, for the reason that every poet employs, re-lives and renews the words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical meaning. And the love of Harmony exists also in every poet worthy of the name, since he cannot represent his drama of the affections, save as a particular mode of drama and of the dramatic or dialectic cosmic Harmony, which is therefore contained and dwells in it as the universal in the particular.

Are we ourselves overthrowing our own distinctions, immediately after asserting them? We are not overthrowing the principles which we had established in connection with the nature of Art, and with the nature of Harmony and Beauty in the super-aesthetic and cosmical sense; but it was necessary clearly to state and to overthrow the definition of Ariosto as poet of Harmony, because in doing so, we cease to preserve it in its abstractness, but make use of it as a living principle. In other words, by thus defining him, we have attained the first object of our quest, which was no longer to leave him hidden beneath the nebulous description of a poet of art for art's sake, nor beneath that other equally fallacious description of him as a satirical and ironical poet, or as a poet of prudence and wisdom, and so on; and we have pointed out where the principal accent of his art falls. Passing now to other determinations, in order to show in what matter and in what way or tone that accent is realised, maintained and developed, even when it happens that we can do this in the best possible manner, we shall not allow ourselves to be ensnared by the fatuous belief, in vogue with certain critics of the day, that we have supplied an equivalent to Ariosto's poetry with our aesthetic formulas: such an equivalent would not only be an arrogance, but it would also be useless, because Ariosto's poetry is there, and anyone can see it for himself. The new determinations must however also be asserted and refuted, only the new results being preserved, analogous to those already obtained, by means of which we shall dispose of other false ideas circulated by the critics concerning Ariosto and point out the salient characteristics of the material which he selected for treatment, together with the mode and the tone of his poem. The poetry of the Furioso, as for that matter all poetry, is an individuum ineffabile, and Ariosto, the poet of Harmony, limited in this direction and that, never at any time exactly coincides with Ariosto, the Ariostesque poet, the poet of Harmony, and not only of Harmony as denned in the way we have defined it, but also in other ways understood or indefinable. We do not propose to exhaust or to take the place of the concrete living Ariosto; he is indeed present to the imagination of our readers as to our own and forms the perpetual criterion of our critical explanations, which without this criterion would be unintelligible.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY

Had Ariosto been a philosopher or a poet-philosopher, he would have given us a hymn to Harmony, similar to a good many others which are to be found in the history of literature, celebrating that lofty Idea, which enabled him to understand the discordant concord of things and while satisfying his intellect, filled his soul with peace and joy. But Ariosto was the opposite of a philosopher, and certainly, were he able to read what we are now investigating and discovering in him, first he would be astonished, then he would smile and finally he would comment upon our work with some good-natured jest.

His love for Harmony never took the form of a concept, it was not love of the concept and of the intelligence, that is to say of things answering to a need which he did not experience: it was love for Harmony directly and ingenuously perceived, for sensible Harmony: a harmony, therefore, which did not arise from a loss of his humanity and an abandonment of all particular sentiments, a religious mounting up to the world of the ideas, but existed for him rather as a sentiment among sentiments, a dominant sentiment, surrounding all the others and assigning to each its place. In this respect, he really belonged to one of the chief spiritual currents of the period of the Renaissance, or more accurately, of the early Cinquecento: to the period, that is to say, when Leonardo, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, with their beautiful, harmonious decorum and majestic forms, had succeeded to Ghirlandaio, to Botticelli, to Lippi, when it seemed (in the words of Wölfflin, a historian of art) "as though new bodies had suddenly grown up in Italy," a new and magnificent population, resplendent in painting and sculpture, which was indeed the reflection of a new psychical attitude, of a different direction and of a new centre of interest.

Now if we undertake to consider the sentiments which form part of the Furioso, if we disassociate them from the connection established among them by the harmonising sentiment of Harmony, and therefore in their particularity, disaggregation and materiality, we shall have before us the material of the Furioso. For the "material" of Art is nothing but this, when ideally distinguished from the content, in which the sentiments themselves are fused in the dominant sentiment, whether it be called the leading motive or the lyrical motive: a content which in its turn can be only ideally distinguished from the form, in which it expresses itself or is possessed and present in the spirit. Philological criticism, deprived of philosophical enlightenment, philology in its bad sense or philologism, means rather by "material" or "sources," as they are also called, external things, such as the books which the poet had read or the stories that he had heard told, and on the pretext of supplying in this way the genesis of a work of art ab ovo, it penetrates to the sources of the sources, let us say to the origins of warrior women, of the ogress and the hippogryph of Ariosto. Their procedure suggests that of one who when asked what language a poet found in circulation in his time, should open for that purpose an etymological dictionary of the Italian language, or of the romance languages, or of Indo-European languages, which expound formative ideological processes, either forgotten or thrown into the background of the speaker's consciousness when engaged in speaking. But even if we do not lose our way in such learned and interminable dissertations, if we escape the error referred to above, of forming judgments as to merit upon them, philologistic search for sources and for material becomes capricious and ends by being impossible; because it takes as sources only certain literary lumber scattered here and there, and were we to unite this with the whole of the rest of literature, with the figurative and musical arts, and with other external things which actually surround the poet, public and private events, scientific teachings and disputes, beliefs, customs, and so on, we should find ourselves involved in all endless and infinite enumeration, convincing proof of the illogical nature of such an inquiry. Nor do we make any progress in the determination of the material by limiting it to more modest terms, that is to say, only to certain things which the poet had before him (even if they be documents and information, not without use for certain ends), because the true material of art, as has been said, is not things but the sentiments of the poet, which determine and explain one another, why and for what reason he turns to certain things and not to others, to these things rather than to those. Since we have already described Ariosto's character and shown its reflection in his minor works, now that we are examining the material of the Furioso, we shall find the same character, that is to say, the same complex of sentiments which it will be desirable to illustrate and to distinguish in a somewhat different manner, with an eye no longer directed to the psychology of the man or to the minor works, but just to the Furioso.

And we shall find above all an amorous Ariosto, Ariosto perpetually in love, whom we already know: an Ariosto for whom love and woman are an important affair, a great pleasure which he is not able to renounce, a great torment from which he cannot set himself free. That love is always altogether sensual, love for a beautiful bodily form, shining forth in the luminous eyes, seductive, charming; virtuous too, but relatively virtuous, just as much as avails to prevent too much poison entering into the delicate linked tenderness of love; and for this reason, all ethical or speculative idealisation, in the new or Platonic style, is excluded "Not love of a lady of theology ...": here too, Carducci saw clearly and spoke well. Absent too or extraneous are the consecration and purification of love in "matrimony"; the choice of a wife, the treatment of a wife, are for Ariosto, things differing but slightly from the choice and the breaking in of a horse, and matrimony in its noble ethical sense belongs at the most to his intellect, and to his intellect in so far as it is passive: in the Furioso are to be found the politics and not the poetry of matrimony, and among innumerable ties of free love, the chaste sighing of Bradamante alone aims at "the conjugal tie" with Ruggiero. But the love of Ariosto is healthy and natural in its warm sensuality; it is not sophisticated with luxurious images, it is conscious of its own limits; nor does it suffer from mad or inextinguishable desires, but only from that which was known in the language of the time as the "cruelty" of woman, her refusal or her coldness; but it tortures itself yet more with jealousy and the anxious working of the imagination. The Ferrarese Garofalo, a contemporary biographer, bears witness to the very lively jealousy of Ariosto, saying that since he loved "with a great vehemence," he was "above measure jealous," and "always carried on his love affairs in secret and with great solicitude, accompanied with much modesty"; but this is evident in the matter of the poem itself, being exhibited in many of his personages, descriptions and situations, and finding complete expression in the verse which closes on so pathetic a note: "believe one who has had experience of it." Cruelty on the one side and jealousy on the other, although they torture, do not make him sad or cause him to give vent to desperate utterances, because, since he had not too lofty nor too madly an intransigent idea of love, although it greatly delighted him, he is not apt to expect too much from it, and knowing the infidelity and the fragility of man, a sort of sense of justice forbids him from bringing his hand down too heavily upon the infidelity and the fragility of woman. Hence comes, not forgiveness, but resignation and indulgence. "My lady is a lady, and every lady is weak"; remarks Rinaldo wisely. Ariosto's is an indulgence without moral elevation, but also without cynicism and inspired with a certain element of goodness and humanity. Reciprocal deception and illusion are inherent to love affairs; but how can they be done away with, without also doing away at the same time with the charm of that bitter but amiable sport? The lover takes care to preserve the illusion by his very passion, which blinds him to what is visible and makes the invisible visible, leading him to believe what he desires, to believe the person who fascinates him, as does Brandimarte with his Fiordiligi, wandering about the world and returning to him uncontaminated: "To fair Fiordiligi, of whom I had believed greater things." Thus the imagination of Ariosto, as these various equal and conflicting sentiments wove their own images, became quite filled with marvellous seductive beauties, perfect of limb, and with voluptuous forms and scenes (Alcina and her arts, Angelica in the arms of Ruggiero who had set her free, Fiordispina); of others which oscillate between the passionate and the comic (Gicondo and Fiametta, the knight who tests the wife he loves too much, the judge Anselmo and his Argia): of others whose love was unworthy or criminal (Origille, whom Griffone strives to save from the punishment that she deserves, notwithstanding her wickedness proved on several occasions and her known treachery; the sons of King Marganorre; Gabrina, who did receive punishment, perhaps because her depraved old age was so repulsive); and above all of the woman who symbolises Woman, for whom the bravest knights sustain every sort of labour and danger, and because of whom a big strong man loses control of himself, and who, herself slave of a love which owns no law outside itself, ends by bestowing her hand upon a "poor servant" (Angelica, Orlando and Medoro). These are but a few instances of the many places in the Furioso, bearing upon love in its various modes of presentation, in addition to the introductions to the cantos and the digressions into which Ariosto pours his whole store of feeling or sets forth his reflections. And the love matter is of so great a volume as to dominate all the rest, possibly in extent, certainly in relief and intensity; so much so, that it is a marvel that among the many attempts to establish the true motive and argument of the poem, by abstracting it from its subject matter, and to determine its design and unity in the same way, no one has yet insisted upon considering it, or has been able to consider it as "the poem of love," of the casuistry of love, to which knightly and warlike life should but provide the decorative background. This theory would certainly seem to be less unlikely than the other, which assigns to it as its end and unity the war between Carlo and Agramante. In any case, this motive is placed second in the protasis to the Furioso, where the first word is not by chance "women," and the first verse ends with "loves" (and in the first edition we even read: "The ancient loves of ladies and of knights"); and the scene with which the poem opens is the flight of Angelica, who is immediately met by Sacripante and Rinaldo who are in love with her, and that with which it concludes is the marriage feast of Ruggiero and Bradamante, disturbed yet heightened in its solemnity of celebration by the incident of the duel with Rodomonte.

Love matter dominates in the Furioso, because it dominated in the heart of Ariosto, where it easily passed over into more noble feelings, into piety that goes beyond the tomb, into justice rendered to calumniated innocence, into kindness ill-recompensed, into admiration for the sacred tie of friendship. Hence, in marked contrast to the beautiful Doralice, so crudely sensual, that when her lover's body is still warm, she is capable of looking with desire upon his slayer, the valiant Ruggiero, Isabella deliberately decides upon putting herself to death that she may keep faith with her dead lover; and Fiordiligi, whose pretty little face, upon which still flitters something of the impudence attributed to her by Boiardo, becomes furrowed with anguish and sublime with sorrow, when she apprehends the loss of Brandimarte. And Olympia stands by the side of Ginevra, trapped and drawn to the brink of ruin by a wicked man, and is rescued by Rinaldo, the righter of wrongs, Olympia whom Orlando twice saves, the second time not only from death, but from desperation at the desertion of her most thankless husband. Zerbino, brother of Ginevra and lover of Isabella, is a flower of nobility among the knights. He alone understands and pities the affectionate deed of Medoro, careless of his own life and absorbed in the anxiety to obtain burial for the body of his lord. When his former friend who has shown himself to be a most infamous traitor, is dragged before him in chains, he cannot find it in him to inflict upon him the death he deserves, for he remembers their long and close friendship. Devoted to the greatness of Orlando and in gratitude for what he had done in saving and taking care of Isabella, he collects the arms of the Paladin, scattered at the outbreak of his madness, and sustains a combat with Mandricardo for these arms, dying rather for sorrow at not having been able to defend them than from his wound. Cloridano and Medoro, Orlando and Brandimarte, are other idealisations of a friendship which lasts beyond the tomb; and anyone searching the poem for motives of commiseration and indignation for oppressed virtue, for unhappy peoples trodden beneath the heel of the tyrant, robbed, tortured and allowed to perish like cattle and goats, would find other instances of the goodness and generosity which burned in the mild Ariosto.

Goodness and generosity were also the substance of his political sentiment, which was that of the honest man of all times, who laments the misfortunes of his country, loathes the domination of foreigners, judges the oppression of the nobles with severity, is scandalised by the corruption and hypocrisy of the priests and of the Church, regrets that the united arms of Europe cannot prevail against the Turks, that barbarian "of ill omen"; but it does not go beyond this superficial impressionability, and ends by accepting his own times and respecting the powerful personages who have finally prevailed. For this reason there is but slight interest in noting (and it can be noted in the Furioso itself) the variety of the political ideas of Ariosto, first hostile to the Spaniards, as we see from several references to them, and from certain attributes given to the Spaniard Ferraù, and finally to the French, who had lost the game in Italy, and we find him extolling the Spanish-Imperial Carlo V., and those who maintain his cause in Italy, whether they were Andrea Doria or the Avalos. But on the other hand, as Ave have already said, it is unjust to reprove him for not having been a champion of italianity and of rebellion against tyrants and foreigners,—such existed in those days, although they were rare—or a passionate political thinker and prophet, like Machiavelli. The famous invective against firearms suffices to indicate the quality of Ariosto's politics: for him politics were morality, private morality, a morality but little combative and very idyllic, although not vulgar, disdainful indeed of the vulgar of all sorts, however fortunate and highly placed. Thus it was not such as to create figures and scenes in the poem, like love and human piety; suffice that if it insinuated itself here and there among the reflective, exclamatory and hortatory octaves.

His feeling towards his own sovereign lords, the Estes, has not, as we have suggested, either in his soul or in the Furioso, anything in it of the specifically political, although he admired them for the splendour of art and letters, which they and their predecessors had conferred upon the country, and for the strength of their rule. And he praised them with words and comparisons, which he introduced into his poem on a large scale, and into the general scheme itself. These have at times been held to be base adulation or a subtle form of irony almost amounting to sarcasm; they were however neither, being serious celebrations of glorious military enterprises and of magnanimous acts (it does not matter whether they really were so or seemed so and were bound to seem so to him); and for the rest, and especially as far as concerned Cardinal Hippolyto, they resemble the madrigals addressed to ladies or their attendants, which always contain a vein of mockery mingled with the hyperbole of their compliments. In fact he treated this material as an imaginative theme, now decorous and grave, now elegant and polished as by a courtier; and he would have been still more inclined to treat the Estes in this way, had they in return for his words and "works of ink" dispensed him from the duties of his post, and particularly from those which obliged him to run hither and thither, to behave like a "teamster." Like many peaceful individuals, who have no taste for finding themselves in the midst of battles, or for changing the place of their abode, or for travelling to see foreign races, or for voyages, or for rapid ups and downs and adventures, or for anything of an upsetting and extraordinary nature that happens unexpectedly, he was quite ready to accept all these things in his imagination, where he preserved, caressed and made idols of them. His inclination imaginatively to decorate the Estes, the nobles of Italy, great ladies, artists, good or bad men of letters of any sort, to make radiant statues of them, had the same root as his inclination for stories of knightly romance.

These stories were the favourite reading, the "pleasant literature" of good society, especially in Ferrara, where the Estes possessed a fine collection in their library, whence had come the majority of Italian poets, who had versified them during the previous century, setting them free from plebeian prose and verse. Ariosto must have read very many of these in his youth, and must have delighted in them, and we know that he himself translated some from French and Spanish. Here were to be found terrible and tremendous battles, duels of hard knocks and of masterly blows, combats with giants and monsters, tragical situations, magnanimous deeds, proofs of steadfast faith, a vying together of loyalty and courtesy, persecutions and favours and aid afforded by prodigious beings, by fairies and magicians, travels in distant lands, by sea or by flight, enchanted gardens and palaces, knights of immense strength, Christian and Saracen, warlike women and women who were women, royally: all this gave him the desirable and agreeable pleasure of one who looks on at a variously coloured exhibition of fireworks, and owing to this pleasure they gave, he incorporated a great number of them in the Furioso. It is superfluous to inquire whether the material of chivalry appeared to him to be serious or burlesque, when we have understood the feeling which led him in that direction: it was beyond all judgment of that sort, because we do not judge rockets or fireworks morally or economically, with approval or reproof. It can of course be remarked that knightly tales had henceforth been reduced to such an extent in Italy and in the spirit of Ariosto that they were not only without the religious and national feeling of the ancient epic, but even without what is still to be found in certain popular Italian compilations, such as the Monarchs of France; but this observation, though correct and important enough in the history of culture, has no meaning whatever as regards Ariosto's poetry. The fact that Ariosto was sometimes entranced and carried away as it were by the spectacles which his fancy presented to him, and sometimes kept aloof from them, with a smile for commentary, or turned away towards the real world that surrounded him, goes without saying, and does not appear to demand the discussions and the intellectual efforts which have been devoted to it.

His was on the other hand a distinctly jesting outlook upon religious beliefs, God, Christ, Paradise, angels and saints; and Charlemagne's prayer to God, the vision of the angel Michael upon earth and the voyage of Astolfo to the world of the Moon, his conversations with John the Evangelist, the deeds and words of the hermit with whom Angelica and Isabella find themselves, and finally those of the saintly hermit who baptises Ruggiero, accord with this laughing and almost mocking spirit. Here we do not find even the seriousness of the game and in the game, with which he treats of knightly doings; nor could there be, because relation towards religion admits only of complete reverence or complete irreverence. And Ariosto was irreverent, or what comes to the same thing, indifferent; his spirit was as areligious as it was aphilosophical, untormented with doubts, not concerned with human destiny, incurious as to the meaning and value of this world, which he saw and touched, and in which he loved and suffered. He was altogether outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every sort of philosophy. This limits and as it were deprives of importance his mockeries and to salute him as some have done "the Voltaire of the Renaissance" or as a precursor of Voltaire, and Voltaire himself who so much enjoyed Ariosto's profanations of sacred things, maliciously underlining the witticism that escapes from the lips of St. John about "my much-praised Christ" (after having said that writers turn the true into the false, and the false into the true, and that he also had been a "writer" in the world), has given Ariosto a place which does not belong to him at all. Voltaire was not areligious or indifferent, and was only irreligious in so far as he attacked all historical religions with a religion of his own, which was deism or the religion of the reason; and for this reason his satires and his lampoons possess a polemical value, which is not to be found in the jests of Ariosto.

Presented in its outstanding features, and to the extent which suits our purpose, such is the complex of sentiments which flowed together to form the Furioso and to produce the images of which it consists. They produced them all the same, where he seems to have taken them from other poems or books, from Virgil or from Ovid, from French or Spanish romances, because in the taking and with the taking of them, he made them images of his own sentiment, that is to say, he breathed into them a new life and poetically created them in so doing. But although this material of the poem may seem to us who have considered it to be anterior and external to the poem itself and owing to our analysis, disaggregated, it must not be supposed that those sentiments ever existed in the spirit of Ariosto as mere matter or in an amorphous condition, because there is nothing in the spirit without some form and without its own form. Indeed, we have seen a great part of it take form in the minor works, while some dwelt in his mind, expressed and realised in their own way, even if unfulfilled or if we lack written record of their existence. But they possessed a different aspect in this anterior form, differing therefore from that which they assumed in the poem. In the lyrics and satires, words of love and nostalgia, of friendship and complaint, of anger and indignation against princes who take little interest in poets, of impatience and contempt for the ambitious throng, and the like, are more lively and direct; and it would be easy to find parallels for identical thoughts appearing with different intonations in the two different places. Had Ariosto always accorded artistic treatment to those sentiments at the moment of experiencing them, he would have continued to write songs, sonnets, epistles and satires, and would not have set to work upon the Furioso. An examination of the poem upon Obizzo D'Este as to the material of chivalry, or if we like the sound of it better, as to feats of arms and of daring, will at least yield us a glimpse of what it would have become, had it received immediate treatment, whether this poem belongs to the early years of Ariosto, prior to the composition of the Furioso, or whether (as is more probable), it be later than the composition of the poem and the appearance of the first edition. The fragment is notable for its great limpidity and narrative fluency, but one sees that if the poet had continued in this direction, the poem would have been nothing but an elegant book of songs; Ariosto did not wish to be a song-writer, so he ceased the work which had been begun. Had he versified his mockeries of sacred things, he would have become a wit, a collector of burlesque surprises, capable of arousing laughter about friars and saints; but Ariosto disdained such a trade, Ariosto whose many grandiose distractions are on record, but no witticisms or smart sayings: he was too much of a dreamer, too fine an artist to take pleasure in such things. His sentiment for Harmony aided him to turn the pleasant stories of chivalry and capricious jesting into poetry, and lesser erotic or narrative and argumentative poetry into more complex poetry, to accomplish the passage and ascent from the minor works to that which is truly great, to mediate the immediate, by transforming his various sentiments in the manner that we are about to consider.

[CHAPTER V]

THE REALISATION OF HARMONY

The first change to manifest itself in them so soon as they were touched by the Harmony which sang at the bottom of the poet's heart, was their loss of autonomy, their submission to a single lord, their descent from being the whole to becoming a part, their becoming occasions rather than motives, instruments rather than ends, their common death for the benefit of the new life.

The magical power which accomplished this prodigy was the tone of the expression, that self-possessed, lightness of tone, capable of adopting a thousand forms and remaining ever graceful, known to the old school of critics as "the confidential air," and remembered among the other "properties" of the "style" of Ariosto. But not only does his whole style consist of this, but since style is nothing but the expression of the poet and of his soul, this was all Ariosto himself and his harmonious singing.

This work of disvaluation and destruction is to be detected in the expressive tone in the proems to the separate cantos, in the digressive argumentations, in the observations interjected, in the repetitions, in the use of vocables, in the phrasing and the arrangement of periods, and above all in the frequent comparisons that form pictures which rather than intensifying the emotion, cause it to take a different path, in the interruptions to the narrative, sometimes occurring at their most dramatic point, in the nimble passage to other narratives of a different and often opposite nature. Yet the palpable part of this whole, what it is possible to segregate and to analyse as elements of style, forms but a small part of the impalpable whole, which flows along like a tenuous fluid, and since it is soul, we feel it with our soul, though we cannot touch it with our hands, even though they be armed with scholastic pincers.

And this tone is the often noted and named, but never clearly defined irony of Ariosto; it has not been well-defined, because described as a kind of jesting or mockery, similar or coincident with what Ariosto sometimes employed in his descriptions of knightly personages and their adventures. It has thus been both restricted and materialised, but what we must not lose sight of is that the irony is not restricted to one order of sentiments, as for instance those of knighthood or religion, and so spares the rest, but encompasses them all, and thus is no futile jesting, but something far more lofty, more purely artistic and poetical, the victory of the dominant sentiment over all the others.

All the sentiments, sublime and mirthful, tender and strong, the effusions of the heart and the workings of the intellect, from the pleadings of love to the laudatory lists of names, from representations of battles to witticisms, are alike levelled by the irony and find themselves uplifted in it. The marvellous Ariostesque octave rises above them all as they fall before it, the octave which has a life of its own. To describe the octave as smiling, would be an insufficient qualification unless the smile be understood in the ideal sense, as a manifestation of free and harmonious life, poised and energetic, throbbing in veins rich with good blood and satisfied in this incessant throbbing. The octaves sometimes have the quality of radiant maidens, sometimes of shapely youths, with limbs lithe from exercise of the muscles, careless of exhibiting their prowess, because it is revealed in their every gesture and attitude.—Olympia comes ashore with her lover on a desolate and deserted island, after many misfortunes, and a long, tempestuous sea voyage:

Il travaglio del mare e la paura,
che tenuta alcun di l'aveano desta;
Il ritrovarsi al lito ora sicura,
lontana da rumor, nella foresta:
e che nessun pensier, nessuna cura,
poi che'l suo amante ha seco, la molesta;
fûr cagion ch'ebbe Olimpia si gran sonno
che gli orsi e i ghiri aver maggior nol ponno.[1]

Here we have the complete analysis of the reasons why Olympia fell into the deep sleep, expressed with precision; but all this is clearly secondary to the intimate sentiment expressed by the octave, which seems to enjoy itself, and certainly does so in describing a motion, a becoming, which attain completion.—Bradamante and Marfisa vainly pursue King Agramante, to put him to death:

Come due belle e generose parde
che fuor del lascio sien di pari uscite,
poscia ch' i cervi o le capre gagliarde
indarno aver si veggano seguite,
vergognandosi quasi che fûr tarde,
sdegnose se ne tornano e pentite;
così tornâr le due donzelle, quando
videro il Pagan salvo, sospirando.[2]

Here we find a like process and a like result, but we observe a like process and result where there appears to be nothing whatever of intrinsic interest in the subject, that is to say, where the thought is merely conventional, a complimentary expression of courtly homage or an expression of friendship and esteem. To say of a fair lady: "She seemed in every act of hers to be a Goddess descended from heaven," is not a subtle figure, but it is so turned and so inspired with rhythm by Ariosto that we assist at the manifestation of the Goddess as she moves majestically along, witnessing the astonishment of those present and seeing them kneel devoutly down, as the little drama unrolls itself:

Julia Gonzaga, che dovunque il piede
volge e dovunque i sereni occhi gira,
non pur ogn' altra di beltà le cede,
ma, come scesa dal ciel Dea, l'ammira.[3] ...

To rattle off a list of mere names with a view to affording honourable mention, and without varying any of them beyond the addition of some slight word-play, is an exercise even less subtle; but Ariosto arranges the names of contemporary painters as though upon a Parnassus, according to the greatest among them the most lofty place, in such a manner that those bare names each of them resound (owing to the mastery of the many stresses in the verse), so as to seem alive and endowed with sensation:

E quei che fùro a' nostri di, o sono ora,
Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Gian Bellino,
duo Dossi, e quel ch' a par sculpe e colora,
Michel, più che mortale, Angel divino ...[4]

The "reflections" of Ariosto, which were held to be "commonplaces" by De Sanctis, "not profound and original observations," have by others been described as "banal" and "contradictory." But they are reflections of Ariosto, which should not be meditated upon but sung:

Oh gran contrasto in giovanil pensiero,
desir di laude, ed impeto d' Amore!
Nè, chi più vaglia, ancor si trova il vero,
che resta or questo or quello superiore....[5]

It could be said of the irony of Ariosto, that it is like the eye of God, who looks upon the movement of creation, of all creation, loving all things equally, good and evil, the very great and the very small in man and in the grain of sand, because he has made it all, and finds in it nought but motion itself, eternal dialectic, rhythm and harmony. From the ordinary meaning of the word "irony" has been accomplished the passage to the metaphysical meaning assumed by it among Fichtians and Romantics. We should be ready to apply their theory to the inspiration of Ariosto, save that these critics and thinkers confused with irony what is called humour, strangeness and extravagance, that is to say, extra-aesthetic facts, which contaminate and dissolve art. Our theory on the contrary is less pretentious and exaggerated, confining itself rigorously within the bounds of art, as Ariosto confined himself within the bounds of art, never diverging into the clumsy or humouristic, which is a sign of weakness: his irony was the irony of an artist, sure of his own strength. This perhaps is the reason or one of the reasons why Ariosto did not suit the taste of the dishevelled Romantics, who were inclined to prefer Rabelais to him and even Carlo Gozzi.

To weaken all orders of sentiment, to render them all equal in their abasement, to deprive beings of their autonomy, to remove from them their own particular soul, amounts to converting the world of spirit into the world of nature: an unreal world, which has no existence save when we perform upon it this act of conversion, and in certain respects, the whole world becomes nature for Ariosto, a surface drawn and coloured, shining, but without substance. Hence his seeing of objects in their every detail, as a naturalist making minute observations, his description that is not satisfied with a single trait which suffices as inspiration for other artists, hence his lack of passionate impatience with its inherent objections to certain material. It may seem that the figure of St. John is drawn in the way it is, as a jest:

Nel lucente vestibulo di quella
felice casa un Vecchio al Duca occorre,
Che'l manto ha rosso e bianca la gonnella,
che l'un più al latte, l'altro al minio opporre;
i crini ha bianchi e bianca la mascella
di folta barba ch'al petto discorre ...[6]

But the beauty of Olympia is portrayed in a like manner, forgetful of the chastity of the lady, which might have seemed to ask a different sort of description or rather veiling:

Le bellezze d' Olimpia eran di quelle
che son più rare; e non la fronte sola,
gli occhi e le guancie, e le chiome avea belle,
la bocca, il naso, gli omeri e la gola....[7]

Finally, Medoro is described in the same way, Medoro whose brave and devoted heart and youthful heroism might seem to ask in its turn a less attentive observation of its fresh youthfulness:

Medoro avea la guancia colorita,
e bianca e grata ne la età novella.[8] ...

The very numerous similes between the personages and the situations in which they find themselves and the spectacles afforded by the life of animals or the phenomena of nature, also form an almost prehensible and palpable part of this conversion of the human world into the world of nature. We shall not give details of it, for this has already been done in an irritatingly patient manner by a German philologist, whose cumbrous compilation effectually precludes one from desiring to dwell even for a moment upon Ariosto's similes, comparisons and metaphors.

This apparent naturalism, this objectivism, of which we have demonstrated the profoundly subjective character, has led to the erroneous statement, already met with, as to Ariosto's form consisting of indifference and chilly observation, directed to the external world. He has been coupled with his contemporary Machiavelli in this respect. Machiavelli examined history and politics with a sagacious eye, describing—as they say—their mode of procedure and formulating their laws, to which he gave expression in his prose with analogously inexorable objectivity and scientific coldness. It is true that both did in a certain but in a very remote sense, destroy a prior spiritual content and naturalised in different fields and with different ends (Machiavelli destroyed the mediaeval religious conception of history and politics). But this judgment of Machiavelli amounts to nothing more than a brilliant or principal remark, for Machiavelli, as a thinker, developed and explained facts with his new vigorous thought, and as a writer gave an apparently cold form to his severe passion. Ariosto's naturalistic and objective tendency is also to be regarded as nothing more than a metaphor, because Ariosto reduced his material to nature, in order to spiritualise it in a new way, by creating spiritual forms of Harmony.

From the opposite point of view and arising out of what we have just said, we must refrain from praising Ariosto for his "epicity," for the epic nobility and decorum which Galilei praised so much in him, or for the force and coherence of his personages, so much admired by the old as well as by new and even recent critics. How could there be epicity in the Furioso, when the author not only lacked the ethical sentiments of the epos and when even that small amount, which he might be said to have inherited, was dissolved with all the rest in harmony and irony? And how could there be true and proper characters in the poem, if characters and personages in art are nothing but the notes of the soul of the poet themselves, in their diversity and opposition? These become embodied in beings who certainly seem to live their own proper and particular lives, but really live, all of them, the same life variously distributed and are sparks of the same central power. One of the worst of critical prejudices is to suppose that characters live on their own account and can almost continue living outside the works of art of which they form a part and in which they in no wise differ nor can be disassociated from the strophes, the verses and the words. Since there is no free energy of passionate sentiments in the Furioso, we do not find there characters, but figures, drawn and painted certainly, but without relief or density, portrayed rather as general or typical than individual beings. The knights resemble and mingle with one another, though differentiated by their goodness or wickedness, their greater polish or greater rudeness, or by means of external and accidental attributes, often by their names alone; in like manner the women are either amorous or perfidious, virtuous and content with one love, or dissolute and perverse, often distinguished merely by their different adventures or the names that adorn them. The same is to be said of the narratives and descriptions (typical and non-individual, or but little individual, is the madness of Orlando, to compare which with Lear's is a rhetorician's fancy), and of natural objects, landscapes, palaces, gardens, and all else. Reserves have been and can with justice even be made as to the coherence of the characters taken as a whole and forming part of a general scheme, for Ariosto's personages take many liberties with themselves, according to the course of the events with which they find themselves connected, or rather according to the services which the author asks of them.

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

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

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

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

Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought, the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was the case, as it seems to me, with the Cinque Canti, which he excluded from the Furioso and for which he substituted others. In them the cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious moral and political reflections (on jealousy, ambition, wicked men, mercenary soldiers); yet we feel nevertheless that Ariosto wrote them in an unhappy moment, when Minerva was reluctant or averse: the poet did not take sufficient interest and lacked the necessary heat. And is there no part of the Furioso itself that languishes? It would seem so, not indeed in the forty cantos of the first edition, which originated in his twelve-year-old poetical springtime, but in the parts which were added later, all of them (as could be shown) more or less intellectualiste of origin, and therefore (save the episode of Olympia) not among the most read and most popular. The most intellectualistic of all is the long delay introduced toward the end of the poem, the double betrothal of Bradamante and the contest in courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero, where the tone becomes here and there altogether pedestrian. It is true that philologists who have given themselves to art have discovered progress in Ariosto in just these languid parts, and above all in the Cinque Canti, where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here they suppose him to have become "serious," to join hands with no less a personage than Torquato Tasso.

The process of "destruction" effected upon the material may possibly be rendered clear to those who do not appreciate philosophical formulas or find them too difficult, by means of the comparison with what in the technique of painting is called "concealing a colour," which does not mean its cancellation, but its toning down. In such an equally distributed toning down, all the sentiments which go to form the web of the poem, not only preserve their own physiognomy, but their reciprocal proportions and connections; so that although they certainly appear in the "transparent polished glasses" and in the "smooth shining waters" of the octaves, pale as "pearls on a white forehead" to the sight, yet they retain their distinctness and are more or less strong according to the greater or less strength which they possessed in the soul of the poet. The comic, at once lowered and raised, nevertheless remains comical, the sublime remains sublime, the voluptuous voluptuous, the reflective reflective, and so on. And sometimes it happens that Ariosto reaches the boundary, which if he were to pass, he would abandon his own tone, but he never does abandon it, because he always refrains from passing the boundary. Everyone remembers the most emotional words and passages of the Furioso: Medoro, who, when surrounded and surprised by his enemies, makes a sort of tower of himself, using the trees as a shield, and never abandoning the body of his lord, Zerbino, who feels penetrated with pity and stays his hand as he looks on his beautiful countenance, when on the point of slaying him; Zerbino, who when about to die, is desperate at leaving his Isabella alone, the prey of unknown men, while she bursts into tears and speaks sweet words of eternal faithfulness; Fiordiligi, who hears the news, or rather divines the death of her husband ... We always catch our breath, and something—I know not what—comes into our eyes, as we repeat these and similar verses. Here is Fiordiligi, who shudders as she feels the presentiment:

E questa novità d' aver timore
le fa tremar di doppia tema il core.[9]

The fatal news comes to hand: Astolfo and Sansonetto, the two friends who happen to be where she has remained, hide it from her for an hour or so, and then decide to betake themselves to her that they may prepare her for the misfortune that has befallen:

Tosto ch'entrano, e ch'ella loro il viso
Vide di gaudio in tal vittoria privo,
Senz' altro annunzio sa, senz' altro avviso,
Che Brandimarte suo non è più vivo....[10]

Another moment of the same narrative, where suffering appears to resume its strength and to grow upon itself, is that in which Orlando, who is awaited, enters the temple where the funeral of Brandimarte is being celebrated: Orlando, the friend, the companion, the witness of his death:

Levossi, al ritornar del Paladino,
Maggiore il grido e raddoppiossi il pianto.[11]

Before such words and images as these, De Sanctis used to say to his pupils, when explaining to them the Furioso: "See how much heart Ariosto had!" But he always kept telling them this truth also: that "Ariosto never pushes situations to the point of painfulness," forbidden to him by the tone of his poetry; and he used to show them how Ariosto used sometimes to make use of interruptions, sometimes of graceful similitudes, or reflections, or devices of style, in order to restrain the painfulness ready to break through. Those critics who for instance are shocked by the octaves on the name of "Isabella" are too exigent, or ask too much, and what they ought not to ask (this name of Isabella was destined by God to adorn beautiful, noble, courteous, chaste and wise women from this time forth, and was originally intended as homage from Ariosto to the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella of Este). With these octaves he concludes the narrative of the sacrifice of her life made by Isabella to keep faith with Zerbino; they do not understand that those octaves and the Proficiscere which precedes them ("Go thou in peace, thou blessed soul") and the very account of the drunken bestiality of Rodomonte, and prior to that, the semi-comic scene of the saintly hermit who presides over the virtue of Isabella, "like a practised mariner and is quite prepared to offer her speedily a sumptuous meal of spiritual food," the hermit whom Rodomonte seizes by the neck and throws three miles into the sea, are all words and representations so accentuated as to produce the effect of allowing Isabella to die without plunging the Furioso into tragedy with its correspondingly tragical catharsis; for the Furioso has its own general and perpetually harmonious catharsis, which we have now made sufficiently clear.

It is precisely owing to the action of this sentimental and passionate material, in spite of and through its effectual surpassing, that the varied colouring arising from it enters the poem and confers upon it that character of humanity, which led us to declare at the outset of our analysis that when we define Ariosto as the Poet of Harmony, we proposed only to indicate where the accent of his work falls, but that he is the poet of Harmony and also of something else, of harmony developed in a particular world of sentiments, and in fact that the harmony to which Ariosto attains, is not harmony in general, but an altogether Ariostesque Harmony.

[1] Tempestuous seas and haunting fear which had kept her waking for days now gave place to a feeling of security: deep in the forest and removed from care and noise, Olympia clasped her lover to her breast and fell into sleep as deep as that of bears and dormice.

[2] As two fair generous leopards issuing simultaneouly from the slips return full of shame and repentance as though weighed down by the disgrace of having vainly pursued the lusty goats or stags which had tempted them to the chase: So returned the two damsels sighing when they saw the Pagan was saved.

[3] Wherever Julia Gonzaga sets her foot or turns her serene gaze, not only does she excel all in beauty but compels adoration like a Goddess.

[4] And the painters who lived in former days as well as those still with us:—Leonardo, A. Mantegna, Gian Bellino, the two Dossi and Michael who sculptures and portrays with more than mortal skill.

[5] Oh powerful contrast in the breast of youth aflame with desire for valorous renown and the passion of love; nor can one say which is the more delectable, since each lays claim alternately to superiority.

[6] An aged man goes to encounter the Duke along the bright vestibule of that fortunate house: the sage is clad in red cloak and white robe, the former white as milk, the latter vermilion, vivid as a rose. His hair is white and his chin snowy with the thick beard flowing over his chest.

[7] Olympia's loveliness was of rarest excellence: not only was she fair of face with forehead, eyes, cheeks glowing amidst the hair which waved over her shoulders: all else was perfection.

[8] Medoro's cheek showed white and red in the fresh flourish of youth.

[9] The novel feeling of fear caused her heart to tremble, doubly terrified.

[10] As she saw them enter without joyous exultation over so great a victory, with no announcement or any direct word of it, she was aware her Brandimarte had been slain.

[11] On the return of the Paladin, the cry arose more loudly and the wail redoubled.

[CHAPTER VI]

HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS

From these last words, there can be no difficulty in seeing what must be our opinion as to the confrontations and comparative judgments instituted between Ariosto and Pulci or Boiardo, and even Cieco da Ferrara, and all the other Italian poets of chivalry. These have sometimes been extended so as to include poetical humourists, such as Folengo and Rabelais, or burlesque writers like Berni, Tassoni, Forteguerri, or neo-epical poets, like Tasso and Camoens, and finally to Cervantes, that direct and fully conscious ironist of chivalry. This is as perfectly admissible as it is natural that classes of "poems of chivalry" or "narrative poems" or "romances," should be formed, when once rhetoricians and writers of treatises have invented the genus and that these should be disposed in a series under such headings, thus forming a sort of artificial history, with no real foundation beyond the accidents of certain abstract literary forms, which are really representative of certain social tendencies and institutions. And it is equally, indeed more admissible, because relating to more nearly connected problems, that these documents afforded by poems of chivalry should be made use of among other documents in the investigation of the gradual dissolution of the ideal of chivalry in the first period of modern society. Salvemini has not neglected to do this in a temperate manner, in his monograph relating to "knightly dignity" in the commune of Florence. But the aesthetic judgment, which they strive to deduce from these comparisons, is inadmissible and illegitimate: when for instance they bestow the palm on this or that poet for having better observed than others the "genus" or a particular "species" and "variety" of the genus; or because chivalry or anti-chivalry has been better represented by one than by another. We can explain the fact that De Sanctis was sometimes entangled in this sociological net, in spite of his exquisite sense of individuality and poetry, when we consider the condition of studies in his time and his philosophical origins; but it is none the less true that the judgments which he pronounced upon this matter, deviate from true and proper aesthetic criticism, and carry with them the bad effects of every deviation.

Having ourselves refused to be among those whose feet are caught in the insidious net of Caligorante, we shall have nothing further to say as to comparisons with Ariosto, because the poet of the Furioso has always come out of those maladroit confrontations and the arbitrary judgments of merit which result from them, crowned above all others with the sign of victory, or at least unconquered by any other, and admitting but a very few as his equals. The preference accorded by romantic German men of letters to Boiardo (recently revived to some extent in Italy, by Panzini) belongs rather to the domain of anecdote than to the history of criticism: Boiardo is looked upon by them as the poet of grand heroic dreams, while Ariosto is a mere citizen poet; or Boiardo again is lauded for having better represented the logical form of the Italian poem of chivalry, prescribed according to a chemical combination drawn up in the philological laboratory of the anti-Ariostesque Professor Rajna, who is in other respects a most worthy and well-deserving person. But there is no denying that the peculiar beauty of Ariosto has often injured Boiardo, Pulci, Tasso and other poets, who have been illegitimately compared with him; and therefore, without talking of Tasso—who has now won his case, although he numbered a Galilei among the ranks of those who under-estimated him when making the above-mentioned confrontation,—it will not be inopportune to cast a rapid glance upon Pulci and Boiardo.

Looking at Pulci in Pulci and not at Ariosto, since to place one physiognomy on the top of another is not a good way of seeing, what do we find? What is the Morgante? It is above all a whimsicality, one of those works, born of a caprice or a bet, to which the author neither devotes himself after the necessary previous meditations, nor works at with the scrupulosity of the artist, who expends his powers and employs his utmost endeavour to do the best he can everywhere. But the occasion or the inspiration is never the substance of a work, which on the contrary always consists of what the author really brings to it in the course of his labour; and the mention of the occasional origin of the Morgante only avails here to account for its ill-digested and undoubtedly chaotic nature. Nor is it to the purpose to recall what certainly seems to have been Pulci's intention, namely, to satisfy in his own way a wish of the pious Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by composing or re-writing a Christian poem of chivalry, for this in its turn only explains certain superficialities and extrinsicalities, such as the general plan of the poem and the parts of it possessing religious tone, which are successful to the extent that they could be successful with such a brain as Pulci's. A commencement will have been made towards a proper understanding of the substance of the Morgante, its proper and intrinsic inspiration, by referring it first to the curiosity with which educated Florentine citizens observed and reproduced the customs and the psychology of the people of the city and the surrounding districts, productive of the poetry of Politian, of Lorenzo and of Pulci himself, author of the Beca di Dicomano, each with its various popular appeal. That inspiration contains something both of the sympathetic and of the ironical, as we observe in all poetry based upon popular themes and use of dialect, in the German romantic Lieder and Balladen and in the dialect literature of the Italy of to-day (one feels inclined to call the Morgante "dialect" and not "Italian"): and in Pulci there vibrated a sympathetic-ironic chord, peculiar to himself and therefore naturally not exactly the same as in Lorenzo, or still less in Politian. But it did not vibrate pure and clear, being prevented from doing so, not so much owing to initial eccentricity and to the intention above-mentioned, as to the accumulation of other inspirations, arising in the fertile spirit of Pulci. For Pulci had in mind, in addition to the reconstruction of a sympathetic-ironic popular poem of the popular story-tellers, something that might be called a "Picaresque romance," understanding thereby not only tales of the sort to be found in Spanish literature, but also certain other tales of Boccaccio and a great part of Folengo's Baldus. Picaresque romance asked in its turn sympathy and irony, but of a different sort to the preceding, no longer sympathy for popular ingenuity, but for cleverness, trickiness, for an irony, which should no longer be simply that of superior culture, but also of superior morality; and this too was in some measure and in his own way in Pulci; but he often spoilt this disposition of mind by inadvertently passing, like a person lacking refinement of education, from Picaresque romance to Picaresque intonation, from the representation of a blackguard to the blackguard himself. And there is something else also in the Morgante: the imaginings and caprices of Pulci himself, his own personal moral opinions, religious or philosophical; things that are sometimes thought about even by those who do not think much about them, and which, owing to this casual hasty thinking, become nevertheless opinions or semi-opinions. Finally the Morgante is a skein formed of strands of different colour and make, some of them thicker or thinner than others: it is a poem that is not in tune with a single dominant inspiration, and if we take one of those elements that we have described and transport it to the principal place, we immediately have the feeling that we are depriving the complex nature of the work of its vigour. Nevertheless the Morgante must be looked upon as one of the most richly endowed works of our literature, where we meet at every step with delightful figures and traits of expression: Morgante, Margutte, Fiorinetta, Astarotte, Farfarello, Archbishop Turpin, certain touches of character in Orlando, and especially in Rinaldo, and also in Antea, together with certain descriptions, anecdotes and acute remarks. Margutte, plunged deep in vice, but quite shameless and aware that he cannot be other than what nature made him, is also human, incapable of treachery, capable of affection for Morgante and of enduring his all-consuming voracity; so that when his companion dies, he never ceases recalling him to mind, and talking about him even with Orlando:

E conta d'ogni sua piacevolezza,
E lacrimava ancor di tenerezza.[1]

Rinaldo, ardent and furious for revenge, seeks to slay Carlo Magno, who has been hidden from him; but after a few days Orlando leads him to believe that the Emperor has died of desperation, and tells him that he has appeared to him in vision, whereupon Rinaldo changes countenance and begins to wish him alive again, to feel pity for him, to repent him of his fury, so that in this way peace and reconciliation are effected. After a great battle, the conquered as they leave the field, recognise their dead ones where they lie, and we hear them lamenting a father, a brother or a friend:

Eravi alcun che cavava l'elmetto
al suo figliolo, al suo cognato, o padre;
poi lo baciava con pietoso affetto,
E dicea: "Lasso, fra le nostre squadre
non tornerai in Soria più, poveretto;
che dirén noî alla tua afflitta madre,
o chi sarà più quel che la conforti?
Tu ti riman cogli altri al campo morti."[2]

And this is an apology, by means of which Orlando explains to Rinaldo that he has remarked his new affection, and that it is of no use that he should try to deceive him with words:

Rispose Orlando:—Noi sarem que' frati
che mangiando il migliaccio, l'un si cosse;
l'altro gli vede gli occhi imbambolati,
e domando quel che la cagion fosse.
Colui rispose: "Noi sián due restati
a mensa, e gli altri sono or per le fosse,
ché trentatré fummo e tu lo sia:
Quand' io vi penso, io piango sempre mai."
Quell' altro, che vedea che lo 'ngannava,
finse di pianger, mostrando dolore;
e disse a quel che di ciò domandava:
"E anco io piango, anzi mi scoppia il core,
che noi sián due restati"; e sospirava,
"Ed è già l'uno all' altro traditore."
Cosi mi par che faccian noi, Rinaldo:
"che nol di tu che'l migliaccio era caldo?"[3]

And here is an octave in which Pulci makes it psychologically clear why King Carlo allowed himself to be led astray and deceived by Gano:

Molte volte, anzi spesso, c'interviene
che tu t'arrecchi un amico e fratello,
e ciò che fa ti par che facci bene,
dipinto e colorito col pennallo.
Questo primo legame tanto tiene,
che, s' altra volta ti dispiace quello,
e qualcha cosa ti parà molesta,
sempre la prima impression pur resta.[4]

"These are not the octaves of Ariosto ": we have said as much. Certainly they are not, just as the octaves of Ariosto are not those of Pulci, and Ariosto, whatever trouble he might have taken, could never have attained to the inventions, the emotions, the clevernesses and the accents of the Morgante, which are just as inimitable in their way as are the graces of the Furioso. And it is really unjust and almost odious that the reader, face to face with the treasures of fresh and original poetry, which Pulci throws without counting into his lap, should pull a wry face and ungratefully remark that Pulci's poetry is not that other poetry which he is now thinking about, and that it should be abolished, or made perfect by the other poetry!

Almost the same thing is to be repeated about the author of the Innamorato, who has also been tormented, condemned and executed by means of a comparison with the author of the Furioso, sometimes conducted with such a refinement of cruelty that the strophes of the one are printed facing the strophes of the other, and selected as bearing upon similar situations, so that every word and syllable may be weighed; as though the strophes of a poet are not to be considered solely in themselves and in the poem of which they form part, and to be condemned, if occasion arise for condemnation, within that circle to which are confined the real conditions of judgment. Boiardo, to one who reads him without any sort of preconception and abandons himself to the simple impressions of reading, immediately shows himself to be altogether different from what some critics maintain, the pedantic singer of chivalry taken seriously, who gives way now and then to involuntary laughter and to a harsh intonation which should be toned down and softened by the skill of an Ariosto. He is quite other also than the epic bard, which some people have imagined him to be; he could not be epic, because he had no national sentiment, no feeling for class or religion, and the marvellous in him is all fancy, a marvel of the fairies; nor was he a pedant, for he obviously follows his own spontaneous inclinations, without any secondary purpose. No, Boiardo was on the contrary a soul passionately devoted to the primitive and the energetic, his was the energy of the lance-thrust, of the brand wielded, but also the energy of a proud will, of ferocious courage, of intransigent honour, of marvellous devices. And it is owing just to this energy, which has a value of its own, that he lives to unite poetically the cycles of Charlemagne and of Arthur, the Carlovingian and the Breton traditions, arms and adventures and love, both of them primitive cycles, the second being remarkable for the extraordinary nature of its adventures and the violence of its loves; whereas, if that heroism had continued to be full and substantial, it would have been difficult to make it a theme for erotic treatment, representing a different and opposed sentiment. To ask of him delicacy of treatment in the representation of his knights, or delicacy of thoughts and words in his treatment of women and love, and in general, beauty of sentiment, is to ask of him what is external to his fundamental motive. To be astonished that he sometimes laughs or smiles, is to be astonished at what happens every day among the people (and there are traces of it in the ingenuous epic) when they are listening to the recital of great deeds, which do not forbid an occasional comic remark. To lament his supposed neglect of art, his lack of polish of language and versification, is to censure him as a grammarian who employs pre-established models or dwells upon minute details to which he attributes sovereign importance. How on the other hand can it be forgotten, when praise of his rich fancy and robust frankness of style and composition is opposed to censures or interlarded among them, that we must explain whence came to him these merits, for they are not to be snatched, but are born only of the soul. Whence came they, if not from true poetical inspiration and from his already mentioned passion for the energetic and the primitive? Hence the admiration aroused by his vast canvases, his vivid narratives:—Angelica, who by merely appearing at Carlo's banquet, makes everyone fall in love with her, and whom even the Emperor himself cannot refrain from admiring, though with discretion, lest he should compromise his gravity, Angelica, whom the greatest champions of Christianity and Paganism follow with admiration, refusing herself to all and loving only him who alone abhors her;—the solemn council of war, held by Agramante previous to entering France, with the speeches of the kings who surround him, courageous or prudent, the sudden appearance of the youthful Rodomonte, who dominates all with his tremendous energy;—the joyful courage of Astolfo, never disconcerted by headlong mishaps, whom fortune succours by furnishing him with a lance, by means of which, to the astonishment of all, he accomplishes prodigies, while he himself remains unastonished;—Brunello, as to whose doings one would like to apply Vico's phrase about "heroic thieving," Brunello, who wanders about the earth, stealing the most carefully guarded objects, with an audacious dexterity and so comic an imagination, Brunello, revelling in his joyous virtuosity and vainly-pursued over the whole world by Marfisa of the viper's eye, which spirts venom, Marfisa who wishes to put him to death; but he flies from her, turning from time to time in his flight to laugh in her face and make gestures of mockery;—Then again there are the colloquies of Orlando and Agricane, during the pauses in their bitter duel, which must end in the death of one of them; Rinaldo's caustic reply to Orlando, who has reproved him for wishing to carry away the golden couch from the fairy's garden; and that other no less caustic repartee of the courageous highway robber to Brandimarte; and many and many another most beautiful passage?—Yet the Innamorato, notwithstanding its poetical abundance, has never been numbered among really classical works, so that after the vogue which for ephemeral reasons it enjoyed in its own day, it has not received and does not receive the affection and homage of any but those who love what is little loved and prize what is pure, spontaneous and rude. The poem does not conclude in itself; it is not satisfied with itself: there is a break somewhere in the circle: the representation of the energetic and primitive, which is a sort of formal epicity, has something in it of the monotonous and arid, and the pleasure derived from it has something of the solitary and sterile. Like the charger that sniffs the battle, so says Boiardo:

Ad ogni atto degno e signorile,
Quai se raconti di cavalleria,
sempre se allegra l'animo gentile,
come nel fatto fusse tuttavia,
manifestando fuore il cor virile....[5]

That is well, but the manly heart is not slow to express a certain feeling of delusion, when it recognises that the images in question are all body, without depth of soul, and without the guidance and inspiration of a superior spirit. He says somewhere else:

Già molto tempo m'han tenuto a bada
Morgana, Alcina e le incantazioni,
Nè ve ho mostrato un bel colpo di spada,
E pieno il cel de lancie e de tronconi....[6]

But there are too many lances that meet and clash, too many limbs flying about without our ever seeing the cause, the meaning or the justification of all that fighting—even Boiardo himself becomes melancholy, when he thinks of those blows exchanged in a spiritual void, exclaiming in one of those frequent purely spontaneous epigrams, which invest his noble person with sympathy:

Fama, seguace degli imperatori,
Ninfa, che e' gesti a' dolci versi canti,
che dopo morte ancor gli uomini onori,
e fai coloro eterni, che tu vanti,
ove sei giunta? a dir gli antichi amori,
e a narrar battaglie de' giganti;
mercè del mondo, che al tuo tempo è tale,
che più di fama o di virtù non cale.
Lascia a Parnaso quella verde pianta,
che da salvivi ormai perso è il cammino,
e meco al basso questa istoria canta
del re Agramante, il forte Saracino....[7]

Pulci and Boiardo then, not to mention others, are to be placed neither above nor below Ariosto, for they are not even related to him. Proof of this is to be found in the fact that thought has gone to other artists, to Ovid for example, in the search for his parallel in literature among the Latins, to Petrarch and to Politian among Italians, or to architects like Bramante and Leon Baptista Alberti, and yet more to painters, like Raphael, Correggio and Titian, comparisons having been instituted with all of these and with others whom it is unnecessary to mention. Now as regards quality of artistic inspiration, affinity is certainly more intrinsic than are relations established from the use of similar abstract material; yet it is itself abstract and extrinsic, because it always accepts one or certain aspects of inspiration, not the full inspiration. Thus, for example, when a comparison is drawn between Ariosto and Ovid, who was a story-teller, lacking altogether in religious feeling for mythological fables and attracted to them solely by their beauty and variety, we must immediately hasten to add that with the exception of this side, which they share in common, Ariosto is different and superior to the Latin poet in every other, for Ovid had not a delicate taste in art, being merged altogether in his pleasing and delightful themes. He improvised and overflowed, owing to his incapacity for firm design and lack of control: he would be better described as the model of the luxurious Italian versifiers of the seventeenth century than as the model of Ariosto, whose art was most chaste. If again he be superficially compared with Politian, the comparison breaks up immediately, because the Stanze are inspired by the voluptuousness of the sensible world, contemplated in all its fugitive brilliance and with that trembling accompaniment of anxiety and suffering, inseparable from it, while Ariosto soars above the pathos of voluptuousness. To note affinities is of avail in a work introductory to the general study of literature, and to draw comparisons and point out contrasts and successive approximations may also serve as a useful aid to the accurate description of an artist's special character. But we do not propose to supply here such a didactic introduction, for the use of such a method is superfluous, as we have already described Ariosto's characteristics in the manner proposed. We shall not therefore form a group of artists, as related to him in this or that respect, for such cannot be expected of us, nor has it for us any special attraction.

Observations as to affinities have another use also, as providing a basis for sparkling and resonant metaphors, as when it is observed of an artist that he is the "Raphael of poetry," of another that he is "the Dante of sculpture," or of a third that he is "the Michael Angelo of sound," or as was said (by Torquato Tasso, perhaps as a witticism, and certainly with little truth), that Ariosto is "the Ferrarese Homer." We already possess many pages of magnificent metaphors to the honour and glory of the author of the Furioso, nor do we intend to depreciate their merit; but the present writer begs to be excused from the labour of increasing their number, since he is in general little disposed to oratory and has allowed what slight gift of the sort he might have possessed to flow away and lose itself, while conversing with so unrhetorical and so conversational a poet as was Ludovico Ariosto.

[1] Saying how delightful he was and still weeping for tender recollection.

[2] Sometimes one would remove the helmet from his son, his cousin, or his father, kissing him with pious affection, and saying "alas, poor fellow, never again will he return to our ranks in Soria; what shall we say to his afflicted mother, who among us can comfort her? But thou remainest with the others who lie dead on the field."

[3] Orlando answered:—We shall be like the friars one of whom burnt himself in eating his gruel; the other seeing his eyes watering asked the reason. His neighbour replied: "Here we are, two of us remained sitting at table, while the others are in the tomb; well thou knowest that we were thirty-three; it always makes me weep to think of it." The other, who saw the deception, in his turn made belief to lament and grieve and when asked the reason: "Yea, I also weep; my heart indeed is bursting to think that we two remain"; then sighing he continued, "And that one of us two is betraying the other. We seem to be doing much the same thing, Rinaldo: why won't you confess that the gruel was hot?"

[4] It often happens that a friend becomes like a brother to you, and whatever he does seems to be so well done as to deserve being made a picture. This first bond holds so firmly that when he finally does something you do not like—injures you in some way—nevertheless the first impression remains the same.

[5] The gentle soul rejoices at every worthy, noble deed recounted of knighthood, as it does when the deed was accomplished, which revealed the manly heart.

[6] Morgana, Alcina and their incantations have long held me in their chains, so that I have been unable to show you aught of fine sword play, the sky full of lances and limbs....

[7] Where art thou gone, O fame that followest emperors and singest their brave deeds in gentle verse, thou that honorest men after death and conferrest eternity upon those thou vauntest? This is the fault of the world. Thou art gone to sing of ancient loves and to tell of the battles of the giants, thanks to this world of ours that cares no longer for courage or for fame. Leave upon Parnassus that growth of green, since none knows now the upward path that leadeth thither, and sing here below with me this history of King Agramante, the mighty Saracen....

[PART II]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

[CHAPTER VII]

THE PRACTICAL PERSONALITY AND THE POETICAL PERSONALITY

To state at the outset, that the practical personality of Shakespeare is not the object of study for the critic and historian of art, but his poetical personality; not the character and development of his life, but the character and development of his art, will perhaps seem to be superfluous, but as a matter of fact it will aid us in proceeding more rapidly.

We do not aim at forbidding the natural curiosity, which leads to the enquiry as to what sort of men in practical life were those whom we admire as poets, thinkers and scientists. This curiosity often leads to delusion, because there is nothing to be found behind the poet, the philosopher, or the man of science, which can arouse interest, though it is sometimes fruitful. It would certainly be agreeable to raise that sort of mysterious veil that surrounds Shakespeare. We should like to know what sort of passions, what ethical, philosophical and mental experiences were his, and above all what he thought about himself—whether, as appeared to those who rediscovered him a century or so later, he were really without feeling the greatness of his genius and of his own work. For what reason, too, if there were a special reason, did he not take the trouble to have his plays printed, but exposed them to the risk of being lost to posterity? Was it due to the ingenuousness and innocence of the poet, or to proud indifference on the part of a man, who disdains the world's applause and the mirage of glory, because he is completely satisfied with the greatness of his work? Or was it due to simple indolence, or to a settled plan, or to the web of events? Did he suppose, as has been suggested, that those plays, written for the theatre, would have continued ever to live in the theatre, under the care of his companions in art, in accordance with his intentions and in a manner suitable to their merit? But it is clear that these and such like questions concern the biography, rather than the artistic history of Shakespeare, which gives rise to an altogether different series of researches.

We do not however wish to assert that these two series of different questions are without relation: even different things have some relation to one another, which resides in their diversity itself and is connected above them. The critic and historian of art would certainly find it advantageous for the studies that he was about to undertake, to know the chronology, the circumstances, the details, the compositions, the recompositions, the recastings and the collaborations of the Shakespearean drama. He would thus avoid the obligation of vexing his mind as to certain interpretations, and of remaining more or less perplexed for a greater or lesser space of time, before certain peculiarities, discordances and inequalities, doubtful, that is to say, as to whether they be errors in art, or art forms of which it is difficult to seize the hidden connection. But he would gain nothing more from this advantage (with the conjoined admonition, to beware of the prejudices that such information is apt to cause). His judgment would of necessity be founded, in final analysis, upon intrinsic reasons of an artistic nature, arising from an examination of the works before him. The chronology that he will succeed in fixing, will not be a real or material chronology, but an ideal and an aesthetic one, for these are two forms of chronology which only coincide approximately and sometimes altogether diverge from one another. Were the authenticity of the works all clearly settled, the critic would be preserved from proclaiming that certain works or parts of works are Shakespeare's, when they are really, say, Greene's or Marlowe's, which is an inexactitude of nomenclature, as also is the treating of Shakespeare's work as being by someone else or anonymous. But this onomastic inexactitude is already corrected by the presumption that the critic has his eye fixed, not on the biographical and practical personage of Shakespeare, but on the poetical personage. He is thus able to face with calmness the danger, which is not a danger and is extremely improbable, of allowing to pass under the colours of Shakespeare a work drawn from the same or a similar source of inspiration, which stands at an equal altitude with others, or of adding another work to those of inferior quality and declining value assigned to the same name, because he is differentiating aesthetic values and not title-deeds to legal property.

As we have said, it has not seemed superfluous to repeat these statements, because in the first place, the silent and tenacious, though erroneous conviction, as to the unity and identity of the two histories, the practical and the poetical, or at least the obscurity as to their true relation, is the hidden source of the vast and to a large extent useless labours, which form the great body of Shakespearean philology. This in common with the philology of the nineteenth century in general, is unconsciously dominated by romantic ideas of mystical and naturalistic unity, whence it is not by accident that Emerson is found among the precursors of hybrid biographical aesthetic, and the romanticizing Brandes among its most conspicuous supporters. These labours are animated with the hope of obtaining knowledge of the poetry of Shakespeare in its full reality, by means of the discovery of the complete chronology, of biographical incidents, of allusions, and of the origin of his themes. The ranks of the seekers are also swollen by those who are animated with like hopes and wish to exhibit their cleverness in the solution of enigmas, or are urged by the professional necessity of producing dissertations and theses. Unfortunately, the documents and traditions relating to the life of Shakespeare are very few. All or nearly all, relate to external and insignificant details. We are without letters, confessions or memoirs by the author, and also without authentic and abundant collections of facts relating to him. Although almost every year there appears some new Life of Shakespeare, it is now time to recognise with resignation and clearly to declare that it is not possible to write a biography of Shakespeare. At the most, an arid and faulty biographical chronicle can be composed, rather as proof of the devotion of posterity, longing to possess even a shadow of that biography, than as genuinely satisfying a desire for knowledge. Owing to this lack of documents, the above-mentioned philological literature consists, almost altogether, of an enormous and ever increasing number of conjectures, of which the one contests, impugns, or varies the other, and all are equally incapable of nourishing the mind. It suffices to glance through a few pages of a Shakespearean annual or handbook, to hear of the "Southampton theory," the "Pembroke theory," and of other theories, in relation to the Sonnets; that is to say, whether the person concealed beneath the initials W. H. in the printer's dedication, is the Earl of Southampton, or the Earl of Pembroke, or a musician of the name of Hughes, or even William Harvey, the third husband of Southampton's mother, or the retail bookseller, William Hell, or an invention of the printer, or a joke of the poet, who should thus indicate himself (William Himself); and so on, with the "Fitton theory," the "Davenant theory," and the like, that is to say, whether the "dark lady," celebrated in some of the sonnets, be a court lady of the name of Mary Fitton, or the hostess by whom Shakespeare is said to have become the father of the poet Davenant (and one of the critics has dared admit that he spent fifteen years in research and meditation on this point alone), or the French wife of the printer Field, or finally a conventional and imaginary personage of Elizabethan sonneteering, which was based upon the manner of Petrarch. And in the same way as with the Sonnets, there have been conjectures of the most varied sorts as to Shakespeare's marriage, his relations with his wife, the incidents of his family and of his profession. Passing to the plays, there are and have been discussions without apparent end, as to whether Titus Andronicus be an original work, or has been patched up by him; as to whether Henry VI be all of it his, or only a part, or revised and enlarged by him; as to which portions of Henry VIII and of Pericles are his and which Fletcher's, or whether by other hands; as to whether Timon be a sketch finished by others or a sketch by others finished by Shakespeare; whether and to what extent there persists in Hamlet a previous Hamlet by Kyd or by another author; whether certain of the so-called "apocryphas," such as Arden of Feversham and Edward III, are on the contrary to be held to be authentic. In like manner, the difficulties connected with the chronology are great and conjectures numerous. The Dream, for instance, is by some placed in the year 1590, by others in 1595, Julius Caesar now in 1606, now in 1599, Cymbeline in 1605 and 1611, Troilus and Cressida, by some in 1599, by others in 1603, by others still in 1609, by yet others resolved into three parts or strata, form 1592 to 1606, and 1607, with additions by other hands. For the majority, the Tempest belongs to the year 1611, but is by others dated earlier, and as regards Hamlet again, in its first form, there are some who believe that it was composed, not by any means in 1602, but between 1592 and 1594. And so on, without advantage being taken of the few sure aids offered by stylistic or metrical measurements, as one may prefer to call them. Now conjectures are of use as heuristic instruments, only in so far as it is hoped to convert them into certainties, by means of the documents of which they aid in the search and the interpretation. But when this is not possible, they are altogether vain and vacuous, and consequently, were they convertible into certainties, would not give the solution or the criterion of solution of the critical problems relating to the poetry of Shakespeare. When they are not to be so converted and remain mere vague imagining, they do not even supply the practical and biographical history, which others delude themselves with the belief that they can construct piecemeal by means of them. Hence it has happened that careful writers, who have wished to give the character and life of Shakespeare, as far as possible without hypotheses and fancies, have been obliged to retail a series of general assertions, in which all individualisation is lost, even if Shakespeare be pronounced good, honest, gentle, serviceable, prudent, laborious, frank, gay, and the like.

But the majority convert the less probable conjectures into certainties, and proceed from conjecture to conjecture and from assertion to assertion, finally producing, under the title, Life of Shakespeare, nothing but a romance, which, however, always turns out to be too colourless to be called artistic. A rapacious hand is stretched out to seize the poetical works themselves, with the view of writing this sort of fiction since (to quote the author of one of these unamusing fictions, Brandes) it cannot be admitted that it is impossible to know by deducing them from his writings, the life, the adventures, and the person of a man who has left about forty plays and poems. And it is certainly possible to deduce all these things from the poetical writings, but the life, and the poetical adventures and personages, not the practical and biographical; save in the case (which is not that of Shakespeare,) where definitely informative, autobiographical statements and excursions are to be found among the poems, that is to say, passages that are not poetical, but prosaic. In every other instance, the poetical emotion does not lead to the practical, because the relation between the two is not deterministic, from effect to cause, but creative, from material to form, and therefore incommensurable. The moment it is raised to the sphere of poetry, a sentiment that has really been experienced is plucked from its practical and realistic soil, and made the motive of composition for a world of dreams, one of the infinite possible worlds, in which it is as useless to seek any longer the reality of that sentiment, as it is vain to seek a drop of water poured into the ocean, and transformed from what it was previously by ocean's vast embrace. One feels almost inclined to repeat as warning that strophe from the Sonnets, where the poet said of his mistress to his friend:

"Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe."

For this reason, when we read in Brandes's book (which we select for quotation here, because it has been widely circulated), such statements as that Richard III, the deformed dwarf, whom we feel to be superior in intellect, adumbrates Shakespeare himself, obliged to adopt the despised profession of the actor, but full of the pride of genius, it is not a case of rejecting or accepting his statements, but of simply looking upon them as so many conjectures founded upon air and as such, devoid of interest. This criterion can also be applied in the following cases: that the pitiful death of the youthful Prince Arthur, in King John, shows traces of the loss of one of his sons, sustained by the author at the moment when he was composing that drama; that the riotous youth of Henry V is a symbol of the youth of Shakespeare during his first years in London; that Brutus, in Julius Caesar, has reference to the persons of Essex and Southampton, protectors of the poet and unsuccessful conspirators against the queen; that Coriolanus, disdainful of praise, is Shakespeare in the attitude that it suited him to take up towards the public and the critics; that the feeling of King Lear, appalled with ingratitude, is that of the poet, appalled at the ingratitude he experienced at the hands of his colleagues, of the impresarii and of his pupils; and finally that Shakespeare must have written those terrible dramas in the nocturnal hours, although he most probably worked as a rule in the early morning; together with many other fancies of a similar sort; it is not a case of accepting or of confuting them, but of just taking them for what they are, conjectures based upon air, and as such of no interest.

The like may be said of another volume, which has also been much discussed, that of Harris. Here, in a view based upon the inspection of his lyrics and dramas, he is represented as sensual and neuropathic, almost affected with erotic mania, weak of will, attracted and tyrannised over during almost the whole of his life, by a fascinating and faithless dark lady, named Mary Fitton. Hence the origin of his most poignant tragedies, and the mystery that conceals his last years, when he withdrew to Stratford, by no means with the intention of there enjoying the peace of the country as a foenerator Appuis, but because, ruined in body and soul, he wished there to nurse his ills, or rather to die there, as soon afterwards he did.

The period of the great tragedies, especially, has been connected with circumstances in the private life of the author and with events in English public life. This too may or may not be true: Shakespeare may or may not have been extremely excitable, both in personal and practical matters; he may on the other hand have remained perfectly calm and watched the tossing sea from the shore, with that tone of feeling proper to artists, described by psychologists as Scheingefühle, a feeling of appearance and dream. No value also is to be attributed to conjectures as to the models that Shakespeare sometimes had before him: for Shylock in the shape of some adventurer of his time, or for Prospero in the person of the Emperor Rudolph II, who was interested in science and magic, and the like, because the relation between art and its model is incommensurable. In reading the works of Shakespeare, one is sometimes inclined to think (as for that matter in the case of other poets), that some affection or incident of the life of the author is to be found in the words of this or that character, as for example in Cymbeline, where Posthumus says,

"Could I find out
The woman's part in me! But there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part!"

or in those others of Troilus and Cressida:

"Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing
else holds fashions: a burning devil take them!"

in the same way as some have suspected a personal memory in the case of Dante, in the Francesca episode of the reading and inebriation. But there is nothing to be done with this suspicion and the thought that suggested it. Nor is there anything to be built upon in those rare passages, where it may seem that the poet breaks the coherence and aesthetic level of his work, in order to lay stress upon some real or practical feeling of his own, by over-accentuation; because, even if we admit that there are such passages in Shakespeare, it always remains doubtful whether for him, as for other poets, the true motive for this inopportune emphasis, is to be found in the eruption of his own powerful feelings, or rather in some other accidental motive.

We may also save ourselves from wonder and invective of the "Baconian hypothesis," by means of this indifference of the poetical work towards biography. This hypothesis maintains that the real author of the plays, which pass under the name of Shakespeare, was Francis Bacon. We are likewise preserved from those others of more recent date and vogue, which maintain that the author was Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, or that Rutland collaborated with Southampton, or that there really existed a society of dramatic authors, (Chettle, Heywood, Webster, etc.) with the final revision entrusted to Bacon, or finally (the latest discovery of the sort) that he was William Stanley, sixth Earl >of Derby. A thousand or more volumes, opuscules and articles have been printed to deal with these conjectures, and although—to the severe eye of the trained philologist—they may justly seem to be extravagant, yet they retain the merit of being a sort of involuntarily ironic treatment of the purely philological method and of its abuse of conjecture.

But even if we grant the unlikely contention that in the not very great brain of the philosopher Bacon, there lodged the brain of a very great poet, from which proceeded the Shakespearean drama, nothing would thereby have been discovered or proved, save a singular marvel, a joke, a monstrosity of nature. The artistic problem would remain untouched, because that drama remains always the same; Lear laments and imprecates in the same manner, Othello struggles furiously, Hamlet meditates and wavers before the problem of humanity and the action that he is called upon to take, and in the same manner, all are enwrapped in the veil of Eternity, It is a good thing to shake off this weight of erroneous philology (another philology exists alongside of it, which is not erroneous, since it preserves the probably genuine text, and interprets the vocabulary and the historical references with a genuine feeling for art), not only because, whether or no it attain the end of biography, it distracts attention from the right and proper object of artistic criticism, but also because it employs the biography, true or false, for the purpose of clouding and changing the artistic vision. Confounding art and document, it transports into art whatever it has discovered or believes itself to have discovered by means of research, turning the serene compositions of the poet into a series of shudders, cries, restless motions, convulsions, ferocious springs, manifestations, now of sentimental rapture, now of furious desire.

We know that it is necessary to make an effort of abstraction, to forget biographical details concerning the poets, in those cases where they abound, if we wish to enjoy their art, in what it possesses of ideality, which is truth. We know, too, that poets and artists have always experienced dislike and contempt for those gossip-mongers, who investigate and record the private occurrences of their lives, in order to extract from them the elements of artistic judgment. This is the reason why a poet's contemporaries and his fellow-countrymen and fellow-townsmen are said not to be good judges and that no one is a poet or prophet among his familiars and in the place of his birth.

The advantage of the lack of a bar to artistic contemplation, one of the good consequences of this lack of biographical detail relating to Shakespeare, is thrown away by these conjecturers, who, like the mule of Galeazzo Florimonte, bring stones to birth that they may stumble upon them.

We can observe the re-immersion of Shakespearean poetry in psychological materiality in the already mentioned book of Brandes (and also to some extent in the more subtle and ingenious work of Frank Harris) and in the case of Brandes, the readjustment of values that is its consequence, as with King Lear and Timon, both documents of misanthropy induced by ingratitude; and even the sinking of values into non-values, when he fails to effect his psychological reduction, even by means of those extravagant methods, as in the case of Macbeth, where he declares that this play, which is one of the dramatic masterpieces, appears to him to possess but "slight interest," because he does not feel "the heart of Shakespeare beating there," that is to say, of the Shakespeare endowed with certain practical objects and interests by his imagination.

This error is also to be found in the so-called "pictures of the society of the time," by means of which another group has striven to interpret the art of Shakespeare. These are not less extrinsic and disturbing than the others, assuming that they are composed with like historical ignorance. Taine, for instance, having got it into his head that the English of the time of Elizabeth were "des bêtes sauvages," describes the drama of the time as a reproduction "sans choix" of all "les laideurs, les bassesses, les horreurs, les détails crus, les mœurs déréglées et féroces" of that time, and the style of Shakespeare as "un composé d'expressions forcenées," in such wise that when one reads the famous Histoire de la littérature anglaise, it is difficult to say whether poets or assassins are passing across the stage, whether these be artistic and harmonious contests, or dagger-thrust struggles. The opinion of Goethe is opposed to all these deformations, to the Shakespeare who moans and shrieks on the wind of the wild passions of his time, to that other Shakespeare who reveals the wounds of his own sickly soul with bitter sarcasm and disgust. In the conversations with Eckermann, he gives as his impression that the plays of Shakespeare were the work "of a man in perfect health and strength, both in body and spirit"; he must indeed have been healthy and strong and free, when he created something so free, so healthy and so strong as his poetry.

In a calmer sphere of considerations, those who make the personages and the action of the plays depend upon the political and social events of the time commit a similar deterministic error—upon the victory over the Armada, the conspiracy of Essex, the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, the geographical discoveries and colonisation of the day, the contests with the Puritans, and the like.

Others err in tracing the different forms of the poetry to the course of his reading, to the Chronicle of Holinshed, to Italian novels, to the Lives of Plutarch, and especially to the Essais of Montaigne (where Chasles and others of more recent date have placed the origin of the new great period of his poetical work); others again have found it in the circumstances of the English stage of the time, and in the various tastes of the "reserved" and "pit" seats, as in the so-called "realistic" criticism of Rümelin.

The poetry, then, should certainly be interpreted historically, but in the proper sense, disconnected, that is to say from a history that is foreign to it and with which its only connection is that prevailing between a man and what he disregards, puts away from him and rejects, because it either injures him or is of no use, or, which comes to the same thing, because he has already made sufficient use of it.

[CHAPTER VIII]

SHAKESPEAREAN SENTIMENT

Everyone possesses at the bottom of his heart, as it were, a synthetic or compendious image of a poet like Shakespeare, who belongs to the common patrimony of culture, and in his memory the definitions of him that have been given and have become current formulae. It is well to fix the mind upon that image, to remember these formulae, and to extract from them their principal meanings, with the view of obtaining, at least in a preliminary and provisory manner, the characteristic spiritual attitude of Shakespeare, his poetical sentiment.

The first observation leaps to the eye and is generally admitted: namely, that no particular feeling or order of feelings prevails in him; it cannot be said of him that he is an amorous poet, like Petrarch, a desperately sad poet like Leopardi, or heroic, as Homer. His name is adorned rather with such epithets as universal poet, as perfectly objective, entirely impersonal, extraordinarily impartial. Sometimes even his coldness has been remarked—a coldness certainly sublime, "that of a sovran spirit, which has described the complete curve of human existence and has survived all sentiment" (Schlegel).

Nor is he a poet of ideals, as they are called, whether they be religious, ethical, political, or social. This explains the antipathy frequently manifested towards him by apostles of various sorts, of whom the last was Tolstoi, and the unsatisfied desires that take fire in the minds of the right thinking, urging them always to ask of any very great man for something more, for a supplement. They conclude their admiration with a sigh that there should really be something missing in him—he is not to be numbered along those who strive for more liberal political forms and for a more equable social balance, nor has he had bowels of compassion for the humble and the plebeian. A certain school of German critics (Ulrici, Gervinus, Kreyssig, Vischer, etc.), perhaps as an act of opposition to such apparent accusations (I would not recommend the reading of these authors, whom I have felt obliged to peruse owing to the nature of my task) began to represent Shakespeare as a lofty master of morality, a casuist most acute and reliable, who never fails to solve an ethical problem in the correct way, a prudent and austere counsellor in politics, and above all, an infallible judge of actions, a distributor of rewards and punishments, graduated according to merit and demerit, paying special attention that not even the slightest fault should go unpunished. Now setting aside the fact that the ends attributed to him were not in accordance with his character as a poet and bore evidence only to the lack of taste of those critics; setting aside that the design of distributing rewards and punishments according to a moral scale, which they imagine to exist and praise in him, was altogether impossible of accomplishment by any man or even by any God, since rewards and punishments are thoughts altogether foreign to the moral consciousness and of a purely practical and judicial nature; setting aside these facts, which are generally considered unworthy of discussion and jeered at in the most recent criticism, as the ridiculous survivals of a bygone age, even if we make the attempt to translate these statements into a less illogical form, and assume that there really existed in Shakespeare an inclination for problems of that sort, they shew themselves to be at variance with simple reality. Shakespeare caressed no ideals of any sort and least of all political ideals; and although he magnificently represents political struggles also, he always went beyond their specific character and object, attaining through them to the only thing that really attracted him; life.

This sense of life is also extolled in his work, which for that reason is held to be eminently dramatic, that is to say, animated with a sense of life considered in itself, in its eternal discord, its eternal harshness, its bitter-sweet, in all its complexity.

To feel life potently, without the determination of a passion or an ideal, implies feeling it unilluminated by faith, undisciplined by any law of goodness, not to be corrected by the human will, not to be reduced to the enjoyment of idyllic calm, or to the inebriation of joy; and Shakespeare has indeed been judged in turn not religious, not moral, no assertor of the freedom of the will, and no optimist. But no one has yet dared to judge him to be irreligious, immoral, a fatalist, or a pessimist, for these adjectives are seen not to suit him, as soon as they are pronounced.

And here too were required the strange aberration of fancy of a Taine, his singular incapacity for receiving clear impressions of the truth, in order to portray the feeling of Shakespeare towards man and life as being fundamentally irrational, based on blind deception, a sequence of hasty impulses and swarming images, without an autonomous centre, where truth and wisdom are accidental and unstable effects, or appearances without substance. These are simply exercises in style, repeated with variants from other writers; they do not even present a caricature of the art of Shakespeare, since even for this, some connection with fact is necessary. Shakespeare, who has so strong a feeling for the bounds set to the human will, in relation to the Whole, which stands above it, possesses the feeling for the power of human liberty in equal degree. As Hazlitt says, he, who in some respects is "the least moral of poets," is in others "the greatest of moralists." He who beholds the unremovable presence of evil and sorrow, has his eye open and intent in an equal degree upon the shining forth of the good, the smile of joy, and is healthy and virile as no pessimist ever was. He who nowhere in his works refers directly to a God, has ever present within him the obscure consciousness of a divinity, of an unknown divinity, and the spectacle of the world, taken by itself, seems to him to be without significance, men and their passions a dream, a dream that has for intrinsic and correlative end a reality which, though hidden, is more solid and perhaps more lofty.

But we must be careful not to insist too much upon these positive definitions and represent his sentiment as though it were one in which negative elements were altogether overcome. The good, virtue, is without doubt stronger in Shakespeare than evil and vice, not because it overcomes and resolves the other term in itself, but simply because it is light opposed to darkness, because it is the good, because it is virtue. This is because of its special quality, which the poet discerns and seizes in its original purity and truth, without sophisticating or weakening it. Positive and negative elements do really become interlaced or run into one another, in his mode of feeling, without becoming reconciled in a superior harmony. Their natural logic can be expressed in terms of rectitude, justice and sincerity; but their logic and natural character also finds its expression in terms of ambition, cupidity, egoism and satanic wickedness. The will is accurately aimed at the target, but also, it is sometimes diverted from it by a power, which it does not recognise, although it obeys it, as though under a spell. The sky becomes serene after the devastating hurricane, honourable men occupy the thrones from which the wicked have fallen, the conquerors pity and praise the conquered. But the desolation of faith betrayed, of goodness trampled upon, of innocent creatures destroyed, of noble hearts broken, remains. The God that should pacify hearts is invoked, his presence may even be felt, but he never appears.

The poet does not stand beyond these struggling passions, attraction and repugnance, love and hate, hope and despair, joy and sorrow; but he is beyond being on the side of one or the other. He receives them all in himself, not that he may feel them all, and pour tears of blood around them, but that he may make of them his unique world, the Shakespearean world, which is the world of those undecided conflicts.

What poets appear at first sight more different than Shakespeare and Ariosto? Yet they have this in common, that both look upon something that is beyond particular emotions, and for this reason it has been said of both of them, more than once, that "they speak but little to the heart." They are certainly sentimental and agitated by the passions to a very slight degree; the "humour" of both has been referred to, a word that we avoid here, because it is so uncertain of meaning and of such little use in determining profound emotions of the spirit. Ariosto veils and shades all the particular feelings that he represents, by means of his divine irony; and Shakespeare, in a different way, by endowing all with equal vigour and relief, succeeds in creating a sort of equilibrium, by means of reciprocal tension, which, owing to its mode of genesis, differs in every other respect from the harmony in which the singer of the Furioso delights. Ariosto surpasses good and evil, retaining interest in them only on account of the rhythm of life, so constant and yet so various, which arises, expands, becomes extinguished and is reborn, to grow and again to become extinguished. Shakespeare surpasses all individual emotions, but he does not surpass, on the contrary, he strengthens our interest in good and evil, in sorrow and joy, in destiny and necessity, in appearance and reality, and the vision of this strife is his poetry. Thus the one has been metaphorically called "imaginative"; the other "realistic," and the one has been opposed to the other. They are opposed to one another, yet they meet at one point, not at the general one of both being poets, but at the specific point of being cosmic poets, not only in the sense in which every poet is cosmical, but in the particular sense above explained. Let us hope that it is not necessary to recommend that this should be understood with the necessary reservations, that is to say, as the trait that dominates the two poets in a different way and does not exclude the other individual traits of feature, above all not that which belongs to all poetry whatsoever. The limits set to every critical study, which should henceforth be known to all, are laid down by the impossibility of ever rendering in logical terms the full effect of any poetry or of other artistic work, since it is clear that if such a translation were possible, art would be impossible, that is to say, superfluous, because admitting of a substitute. Criticism, nevertheless, within those limits, performs its own office, which is to discern and to point out exactly where lies the poetical motive and to formulate the divisions which aid in distinguishing what is proper to every work.

For the rest, if Ariosto has often been compared to contemporary painters, with the object of drawing attention to his harmonic inspiration, Ludwig has been unable to abstain from making similar comparisons for Shakespeare. He found the most adequate image for his dramas in the portraits and landscapes of Titian, of Giorgione, of Paul Veronese, as contrasting with the amiability of Correggio, the insipidity of the Caracci, the affected manner of Guido and of Carlo Dolce, the crudity of the naturalists Caravaggio and Ribera. In Shakespeare, as in those great Venetians, there is everywhere "existence," life upon earth, transfigured perhaps, but devoid of restlessness, of aureoles and of sentimentalisms, serene even where tragic.

This sense of strife in vital unity, this profound sense of life, prevents the vision from becoming simplified and superficialised in the antitheses of good and evil, of elect and reprobate beings, and causes the introduction of conflict, in varying measure and degree, in every being. Thus the battle is fought at the very heart of things. Hence the aspect of mystery that surrounds the actions and events portrayed by Shakespeare, which is not to be understood in the general sense that every vision of art is a mystery, but rather in the special sense of a course of events of which the poet not only does not possess (and could not possess) the philosophical explanation, but never discovers the reposeful term, peace after war, the acceptance of war as a means to a more lofty peace. For this reason is everywhere diffused the terror of the Unknown, which surrounds on every side and conceals a countenance that may be more terrible than terrible life itself, in the development of which human beings are involved—a countenance terrible for what it will reveal, and perhaps sublime and ecstatic, giving in its very terribleness, terror and rapture together. The mystery lies not only in the occasional appearance of spectres, demons, witches, in the poetry, but in the whole atmosphere of which they form only a part, assisting by their presence in a more direct determination. This mystery was well expressed by the first great critics who penetrated into the world of Shakespearean poetry, Herder and Goethe, to the second of whom belongs the simile of the Shakespearean drama as "open books of Destiny, in which blows the wind of emotional life here and there stripping their leaves in its violence." In Shakespeare's musicality we are everywhere sensible of a voluptuous palpitation before the mystery which at times reflects upon itself and supplies the link between music and love, music and sadness, music and unknown Godhead.

We must insist upon the word "sentiment," which we have adopted for the description of this spiritual condition, in order that it may not be mistaken for a concept or mode of thought Or philosopheme, which occurs when the word "conception" or "mode of conceiving life" is taken in a literal and material manner as applied to Shakespeare and in general to the poets—when, for instance, it is asked by what special quality does Shakespeare's "conception of tragedy" differ from Greek and French tragedy, and the like, as though in such a case, it were a question of concepts and systems. Shakespeare is not a philosopher: his spiritual tendency is altogether opposed to the philosophic, which dominates both sentiment and the spectacle of life with thought that understands and explains it, reconciling conflicts under a single principle of dialectic. Shakespeare, on the contrary, takes both and renders them in their vital mobility—they know nothing of criticism or theory—and he does not offer any solution other than the evidence of visible representation. For this reason, when he is characterised and receives praises for his "objectivity," his "impersonality," his "universality," and those who do this are not satisfied even with their incorrect description of the real psychological differences noted above, but proceed to claim a philosophical character for his spiritual attitude, it is advisable to reject them all, confronting his objectivity with his poetic subjectivity, his impersonality with his personality, his universality with his individual mode of feeling. The cosmic oppositions, in imagining which he symbolises reality and life, not only are not philosophical solutions for him in his plays, but they are not even problems of thought; only rarely do they tend to take the form of bitter interrogations, which remain without answer. Equally fantastic and arbitrary are the attempts to compose a philosophical theory from the work of Shakespeare who is alternately, theistic, pantheistic, dualistic, deterministic, pessimistic and optimistic, by extracting it from his plays in the same manner as that employed in the case of the philosophy implied in a historical or political treatise; because there is certainly a philosophy implied in these latter cases, embodied in the historical and political judgments which they contain. In the case of Shakespeare, however, which is that of poets in general, to extract it means to place it there, that is, to think and to draw conclusions ourselves under the imaginative stimulus of the poet, and to place in his mouth, through a psychological illusion, our own questions and answers. It would only be possible to discuss a philosophy of Shakespeare if, like Dante, he had developed one in certain philosophical sections of his poems; but this is not so, because the thoughts that he utters fulfil no other function than that of poetical expressions, and when they are taken from their contexts, where they sound so powerful and so profound, they lose their virtue and appear to be indeterminate, contradictory or fallacious.

It is quite another question as to whether his sentiment was based upon what are called mental or philosophical presumptions and as to what these, properly speaking, were; because, as regards the first point, it must be at once admitted that a sentiment does not appear without a basis of certain mental presumptions or concepts, that is to say, of certain convictions, affirmations, negations and doubts. As regards the second point, the legitimacy of the enquiry will be admitted, and it will also be noted that this forms one of several historical enquiries, relating to Shakespeare in his poetry, to which belongs the place unduly usurped by ineptitudes and superficialities on the theme of his private affairs; his domestic relations, his business transactions, and his pretended love intrigues with Mary Fitton and the hostess Madam Davenant.

It is also true that the researches into the mental presumptions of Shakespeare have often strayed into the external and the anecdotic, as is the case with such problems as the religion that he followed and his political opinions. Stated in this way, they likewise sink to the level of biographical problems, indifferent to art. That Shakespeare belonged to the Anglican and not to the Catholic confession (as some still maintain, and in 1864 Rio wrote a whole book on the subject), and opposed Puritanism in one quality or the other; that he supported Essex in his conspiracy, or on the contrary was on the side of Queen Elizabeth, has nothing to do with the mental presuppositions immanent in his poetry. He may have been impious and profane in active practical life as a Greene or a Marlowe, or a devout papist, worshipping with secret superstition, like an adept of Mary Stuart, and nevertheless he may have composed poetry with different presuppositions, upon thoughts that had entered his mind and had there become formed and dominated in his spirit, without for that reason having changed the faith previously selected and observed. The research of which we speak does not concern the superficial, but the profound character of the man; it is not concerned with the congealed and solidified stratum, but with the tide that flows beneath it, which others would call the unconscious in relation to the conscious, whereas, it would be more exact to invert the two qualifications. Presuppositions are the philosophemes that everyone carries with him, gathering them from the times and from tradition, or forming them anew by means of his own observations and rapid reflections. In poetical works, they form the condition remote from the psychological attitude, which generates poetical visions.

In this depth of consciousness, Shakespeare shows himself clearly to be outside, not only Catholicism, but also Protestantism, not only Christianity, but every religious, or rather every transcendental and theological conception. Here he also resembles the Italian poet of the Renaissance, Ariosto, though reaching the position by different ways and with different results. His sentiment would have appeared in an altogether different guise, if a theological conception, such as the belief in an eternal life, in a judging God, in rewards and punishments beyond this world, in the view that earthly life is a trial and a pilgrimage, had been lively and active in him. He knows no other than the vigorous passionate life upon earth, divided between joy and sorrow, with around and above it, the shadow of a mystery.

It is with natural wonder, then, that we read of Shakespeare, especially among German authors, as a spirit altogether dominated by the Christian ideas proper to the Reformation, whereas, with regard to Christianity, he was altogether lacking, both in the theology of Judaic-Hellenic origin and in the tendency to asceticism and mysticism. On the other hand we cannot admit the opposite statement that he was a pagan, in the somewhat popular sense of self-satisfied hedonism, because it is not less evident that his moral discernment, his sense of what is sinful, his delicacy of conscience, his humanity, bear a strong imprint of Christian ethics. Indeed, it is precisely owing to this lofty and exquisite ethical judgment, united to the vision of a world, which moves by its own power or anyhow by some mysterious power, frequently opposing or overthrowing or perverting the forces directed to the good, that this tragic conflict arises in him. To this double presupposition must be added, as inference, a third, the negation, the scepticism, or the ignorance of the conception of a rational course of events and of a Providence that governs it. Not even does he accept inexorable Fate as sole master of men and Gods; nor the determinism of individual character as another kind of Fate, a naturalistic Fate, as some of his interpreters have believed; he remains unaffected by the hard Asiatic or African dualistic idea of predestination; on the contrary, he recognizes human spontaneity and liberty, as forces that prove their own reality in the fact itself, though he nevertheless permits liberty and necessity to clash and the one sometimes to overpower the other, without establishing a relation between the two, without suspecting their identity in opposition, without discovering that the two elements at strife form the single river of the real, and therefore failing to rise to the level of the modern theodicy, which is History. Our wonderment bursts forth anew, in observing the emphatic and insistent statements of such writers as for instance Ulrici as to the historicity of the thought and of the tragedies of Shakespeare, where just what is altogether absent is the historical conception of life, which was possessed by Dante, though in the form of the mediaeval philosophy of history. And since historicity is both political and social ideality, Shakespeare must have been and is wanting, as has been said, in true political faith and passion. He has however been credited with this by publicists and political polemists like Gervinus, who have desired to count so great a name among their number, have imagined him possessed with the passion for it and even believed that it was crowned in him with doctrinal wisdom.

It is difficult to decide by what ways and means these presuppositions were formed in his inmost soul, for with this question we reenter the biographical problem as to his education, the company he kept, his reading, his experiences; and upon all these subjects little or no exact information is available. Did he observe the fervour of life which prevailed in the England of his day with sympathetic soul and vigilant eye? Did he lend an ear to discussions upon theological and metaphysical questions and carry away from them a sense of their emptiness? Did he frequent the youth of the universities, which just at that time gave several university wits to literature and to the drama? Did he read the Laus Stultitiae of Erasmus, moral and religious dialogues and treatises, the English humanists, the Platonicians, the ancient and modern historians, as he certainly read Montaigne at a later date? Did he read Machiavelli and the other political writers of Italy, and those who had begun to sketch the doctrine of the temperament and the passions, such as Huarte and Charron, did he know Bruno, or had he heard of him and of his doctrines? Or did the influence of these men and books reach him by various indirect paths, at second or third hand, through conversation, or as by a figure of speech we say, from his environment? And what part of those doubts, negations and beliefs of his, was due to his vivacity and certainty of intuition, or to his own continuous and steady rumination in himself, rather than to the course of his studies? But even if we possessed abundant notes on this subject, we should still remain without much information, because the processes of the formation of the individual escape for the most part the observation of others and frequently even the memory of him in whom they have actually occurred, and the facility with which they are forgotten proves that what is really important to preserve, is not these, but their result.

And what is here of importance is the relation of these mental presuppositions with the life of the time, with the general culture of the period, with the historical phase through which the human spirit was then passing. In these respects, Shakespeare was truly, as he has appeared to those who have best understood him, a man of the Renaissance, of that age, which, with its navigation, its commerce, its philosophies, its religious strifes, its natural science, its poems, its pictures, its statues, its graceful architecture, had set earthly life in full relief, and no longer permitted it to lose its colours, become pallid and dissolve in the rays of another world external to it, as had happened through the long period of the Middle Ages. But Shakespeare did not belong to the pleasure-seeking, joyous and pagan Renaissance, which is but a small aspect of the great movement, but rather to that side of it which was animated with new wants, with new religious tendencies, with the spirit of new philosophical research, full of doubts, permeated with flashes from the future. These flashes, which appeared only in the great thinkers, who were not yet able to arrest them and make of them distributors of a calm and equable light, were also irreducible to a radiant centre in its greatest poet, in whom philosophy served as a presupposition and did not form the essence of his mental life. It is therefore vain to seek in Shakespeare for what neither Bruno nor Campanella attained, nor even Descartes and Spinoza at a later date, namely the historical concept, of which we have already spoken, and it is also vain to talk of his Spinozistic or Shellingian pantheism.

Shakespeare nevertheless has assumed in the past and sometimes assumes even in our eyes, the appearance of a philosopher and of a master, or a precursor of the loftiest truths, which have since come to light. It is a fact that modern idealistic and historical philosophy has not experienced equal attraction towards any other poet, recognising in him the soul of a brother. How can this be? The answer is contained in what we have been noting and establishing. Shakespeare's mental presuppositions, which rejected the Middle Ages and were on a level with the new times, seeking and failing to find unity and harmony and above all that vigorous feeling of his for the cosmic strifes, breaking out from them and rising to the sphere of poetry, seems to offer material already prepared and to some extent also shaped to the dialectician, for he sometimes almost suggests the right word to the moralist, the politician, the philosopher of art. He might also be called a "pre-philosopher," owing to this power of stimulation that he possesses, and this appellation would have the further advantage of making it well understood that there is no use attempting to make of him a philosopher. And precisely because it is impossible to extract a definite and particular doctrine from his pre-philosophy and poetry, can many of different kinds be extracted, according to diversity of minds and the progress of the times. Hence, if some have maintained that the logical complement of that poetical vision is speculative idealism, dialectic, anti-ascetic morality, romantic aesthetic, realistic politics, the historical conception of the real, and have maintained this with reason, basing their views upon doctrines which they believed to be true, and have justly thought that the logical complement of beauty is truth; others have possibly arrived at pessimistic conclusions from that vision and assertion of conflicts; and others have striven and are striving to effect the restauration of some of the presumptions that are negated or are absent, such as faith in another world and in divine and transcendental justice. This latter position has been maintained as well as it possibly could have been, with the aid of much research, by an Italian mind of the first order, Manzoni, who was both a severe Catholic and a fervent Shakespearean. He found in the profundity of Shakespeare the profoundest morality, and remarked that "the representation of profound sorrows and indeterminate terrors," as given by Shakespeare, "comes near to virtue," because "when man comes inquisitively forth from the beaten path of things known and from the accidents that he is accustomed to combat, and finds himself in the infinite region of possible evils, he feels his weakness, the cheerful ideas of defence and of vigour abandon him. Then he thinks that virtue only, a clear conscience, and the help of God alone can be of some succour to his mind in that condition." And thus he concluded with characteristic certainty: "Let everyone look into himself after reading a tragedy of Shakespeare, and observe whether he does not experience a similar emotion in his own soul."

[CHAPTER IX]

MOTIVES AND DEVELOPMENT OF SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY

I

THE "COMEDY OF LOVE"

What we have hitherto described as the sentiment of Shakespeare corresponds to the Shakespeare carven in the general consciousness, that which is Shakespeare in an eminent degree, almost, we might say, a symbol of his greater self, the poet of the great tragedies (Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet) and of the tragic portions of those that are less intense and less perfect. But the work that bears his name is far more varied in tones and personalities and in order to prepare the way for the passage of more particular characteristics, we must distinguish (and here the students of Shakespeare have always been industrious) the various configurations and degrees, or sources of inspiration of the poet, and make of them groups, which may then be arranged in a series of relations, an ideal succession.

On casting the eye over the rich extent of his works, the attention is at once drawn to certain of them, whose fresh, smiling colours indicate that their principal and proper theme is love. Not the love that becomes joined to other graver passions and unified with them, forms a complex, as in the Othello, or in Antony and Cleopatra, thus acquiring a profoundly tragic quality, but love and love alone, love considered in itself. These passions then are to be found rather in the comedy of love than in the tragedies or dramas: in love, regarded certainly with affectionate sympathy, but also with curiosity, instinct with softness and tenderness, indeed, one might almost say, with the superiority of an expert mind and thus with delicate irony. The mind that accompanies this amorous heart, observes the caprices and illusions, recognising their inevitability and their necessity, but yet knowing them for what they are, imaginings, however irresistible and delicious they be, caprices, though noble and beautiful, weaknesses, deserving of indulgence and of gentle treatment, because human, and belonging to man as he passes through the happy and stormy season of youth. This mode of experiencing love is something that manifests itself only episodically in the Greek, Latin and medieval poets. With them we find love represented, sometimes as a pleasant, a sensual strife, or as a furious blind passion, fearless of death, or as a spiritual cult of lofty and superhuman beauty. Sometimes indeed, as in the comedy of Menander and its long suite of descendants and posterity among the Latins and the Italians, it gives rise to a general and rather cold psychological simplification, in which love is not found to differ much from any other passion or desire, such as avarice, courage or greed. In the form we have described, it belongs entirely to the mode of feeling of the Renaissance, to one of those attitudes which the anti-ascetic and realistic view of human affairs developed and bequeathed in a perfected form to modern times. Here we must again note the similarity between Shakespeare and Ariosto, for both painted the eternal comedy of love in the same manner.

That love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself to be firm and constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting; it claims to be founded upon a dispassionate judgment of the mind and upon luminous moral choice, whereas, on the contrary, it is guided in an altogether irrational manner by impressions and fancies, fluctuating with these. Sometimes, too, it is represented as repugnance and aversion, whereas it is really irresistible attraction; it is content to suppress itself with deliberate humbleness before works and thoughts that are more austere, but reappears on the first occasion, more vehement, tenacious and indomitable than ever.

"In his men, as in his women," says Heine, with his accustomed grace, when talking of the Shakespearean comedy, "passion is altogether without that fearful seriousness, that fatalistic necessity, which it manifests in the tragedies. Love does in truth wear there, as ever, a bandage over his eyes and bears a quiver full of darts. But these darts are rather winged than sharpened to a deadly point, and the little god sometimes stealthily and maliciously peeps out, removing the bandage. Their flames too rather shine than burn; but they are always flames, and in the comedies of Shakespeare, love always preserves the character of truth." Of truth, and for this reason, none of these comedies descends altogether to the level of farce, not even those that most nearly approach it, such as Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, nor even The Comedy of Errors, where some element of human truth always leads us back to the seriousness of art. Still less is there satire there, intellectual and angular satire, constructor of types, exaggerates in the interest of polemic; always we find there suavity of outline, the soft veil of poetry. Even in the most feeble, as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we enjoy the fresh love scenes, mingled with the saltatory course of the narrative, the abundant dialogues, the misunderstandings and the verbal witticisms. Even in those that are developed in a somewhat mechanical and superficial manner, which we should now describe as being à thèse, there is vivacity, joking, festivity, and an eloquence so flowery (for instance in the scene where Biron defends the rights of youth and of love) that it has almost lyrical quality.

In this last comedy there is a king and his three gentlemen, who, in order to devote themselves to study and to attain to fame and immortality, have sworn to one another that they will not see a woman for three years. All three of them fail of this and fall in love almost as soon as the Princess of France arrives with her three ladies. These ladies, when they have received the most solemn declarations of love from the four of them, each one faithless to himself, punish them in their turn for their levity by condemning them to wait for a certain period, before receiving a reply to their offers. Thus it was that Angelica, in the Italian poems of chivalry, succeeded in setting the hearts of the most obdurate cavaliers aflame with love, even of those who held severest discourse. She made them all follow the queen of love, whom no mortal could resist.

In the Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio the male, who knows what he wants and wants his own ease and comfort, hits immediately upon the right line of conduct, a line that is, however, altogether spiritual, because based upon psychological knowledge and volitional resolve. He espouses the terrible Catherine and reduces her to lamblike obedience, afraid of her husband, no longer able not only to say, but even to think, anything save what he has forced her to think. Yet who can tell that she does not love him who maltreats and tyrannises over her?

In Twelfth Night, we behold the Duke vainly sighing for the beautiful widow Olivia, and the love that suddenly blossoms in her for the intermediary sent by the Duke, a woman dressed as a man; while the steward Malvolio, the Puritan, the pedantic Malvolio, is urged on to the most ridiculous acts, by hope and the illusion of being loved. Finally, fortune in this case making the single beloved into two, a man and a woman (in a more modest but identical manner to that in the adventure of Fiordispina with Bradamante and Ricciardetto) brings about a happy ending for all.

In All's Welly the Countess of Roussillon, receives the discovery that poor Helena, the orphan child of the family doctor, is in love with her son, rather with benevolence than with hostility and reflects:

"Even so it was with me when I was young:
If we are nature's, these are ours;...
By our remembrance of days foregone,
Such were our faults though then we thought them none."

The amorous couples of princesses, exiles or fugitives, and of exile and fugitive gentlemen, wander about the forest of Arden, in As You Like It, alternating and mingling with the couples of rustic lovers.

Perhaps the best example of this "comedy of love" is the fencing of the two unconscious lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing. This young couple seek one another only to measure weapons, to sneer and to fence, with the fine-pointed swords of biting jest and disdain, they believe themselves to be antipathetic, disbelieve one another; yet the simplest little intrigue of their friends suffices to reveal each to each as whole-heartedly loving and desiring the adversary. The union of the two is sealed, when they find themselves united in the same sentiment to defend their friend, who has been calumniated and rejected, thus discovering that their perpetual following of one another to engage in strife, had not concealed the struggle, which implies affinity of sex, but the spiritual affinity of two generous hearts.

Benedick. And, I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad faults didst thou first fall in love with me?...

And the other, speaking with tenderness and ceasing to carry on the pinpricking:

"Suffer love,—a good epithet!
I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will."

A light touch permeates the treatment of these characters and suffices to animate them and make them act. The dramatic or indeed tragic situations, which at times arise, are treated as it were with the implied consciousness of their slight gravity and danger, which shall soon be evident and dispel all the apprehensions of those who doubt. They sometimes consist of nothing but an external action or occurrence, suited to the theatre, and more frequently a decorative background. Parallelism of personages and symmetry of events also abound in these plays, suitable to the merry teaching that pervades them.

The quintessence of all these comedies (as we may say of Hamlet in respect of the great tragedies) is the Midsummer Night's Dream. Here the quick ardours, the inconstancies, the caprices, the illusions, the delusions, every sort of love folly, become embodied and weave a world of their own, as living and as real as that of those who are visited by these affections, tormented or rendered ecstatic, raised on high or hurled downward by them, in such a way that everything is equally real or equally fantastic, as you may please to call it. The sense of dream, of a dream-reality, persists and prevents our feeling the chilly sense of allegory or of apology. The little drama seems born of a smile, so delicate, refined and ethereal it is. Graceful and delicate to a degree is also the setting of the dream, the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the theatrical performance of the artisans, for these are not merely ridiculous in their clumsiness; they are also childlike and ingenuous, arousing a sort of gay pity: we do not laugh at them: we smile. Oberon and Titania are at variance owing to reciprocal wrongs, and trouble has arisen in the world. Puck obeys the command of Oberon and sets to work, teasing, punishing and correcting. But in performing this duty of punishing and correcting, he too makes mistakes, and the love intrigue becomes more complicated and active. Here we find a resemblance to the rapid passage into opposite states and the strange complications that arose in Italian knightly romances, as the result of drinking the water from one of two opposite fountains whereof one filled the heart with amorous desires, the other turned first ardours to ice. In Titania, who embraces the Ass's head and raves about him, caressing and looking upon him as a graceful and gracious creature, the comedy creates a symbol so ample and so efficacious as rightly to have become proverbial. Puck meanwhile, astonished at the effect upon men of the subtle intoxication that he has been himself distributing, exclaims in his surprise "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"; and Lysander, one of the madmen who are constantly passing from one love to another, from one thing to its opposite, is nevertheless perfectly convinced that

"The will of man is by his reason sway'd;
And reason says you are the worthier maid."

Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together:

"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school:
And though she be but little she is fierce."

When we read Romeo and Juliet, after the Dream, we seem not to have left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and metaphor, when speaking of Romeo and Juliet. For Schlegel it was scented with "the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales, the freshness of a newly budded rose." Hegel too found himself face to face with that rose: "sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane." Coleridge too speaks of that sense of spring: "The spring with its odours, its flowers and its fleetingness." All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms of love poetry, "the epithalamium," "the dawn." This play is not only closely connected with the Dream, but also with the other comedies of love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet. At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then loves for the first time:

"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."

Saintly Friar Laurence, a mixture of astonishment, of being scandalised and of good nature, sometimes almost plays there the part of Puck. When he learns that Romeo no longer loves Rosalind, about whom he had been so crazy; he says:

"So soon forsaken! Young men's love there lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria!"

When Juliet enters her cell, the friar remarks with admiration her lightsome tread, which will never wear out the pavement, and reflects that a lover "may bestride the gossamer that idles in the wanton summer air, and yet not fall; so light is vanity." Is it tragedy or comedy? It is another situation of the eternal comedy: the love of two young people, almost children, which surmounts all social obstacles, including the hardest of all, family hatred and party feud, and goes on its way, careless of these obstacles and as though they had no importance for their hearts, no existence in reality. And in truth those obstacles seem to yield before their advance, or rather their winged flight, like soft clouds. Certainly, those obstacles reappear solidly enough later on, asserting their value and taking their revenge, so much so, that the young lovers are obliged to separate and Romeo goes into exile. But it will be only for a little while, for Friar Laurence has promised to interest himself in their affairs, to obtain the pardon of the Prince, to reconcile the parents and the other relations, and to obtain sanction for their secret marriage. And if nothing of all this happens, if the subtle previsions and the acuteness of Friar Laurence turn out to be fallacious, if a sequence of misunderstandings makes them lose their way and take a wrong turning, if the two young lovers perish, it is the result of chance, and the sentiment that arises from it is one of compassion, of compassion not divorced from envy, a sorrow, which, as Hegel said, is "a dolorous reconciliation and an unhappy beatitude in unhappiness." This too then is tragedy, but tragedy in a minor key, what one might call the tragedy of a comedy.

"A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents."

But that power is not the mysterious power, something between destiny and providence and moral necessity, which weighs upon the great tragedies; rather is it Chance, which Friar Laurence hardly succeeds in dignifying with the words of religion:

"So hath willed it God."

There is a metaphor which is repeated in the terrible accents of King Lear, and which is itself able to reveal the difference between the two tragedies. Romeo, whose life has been spared and who has been sent into exile, thinks that what has been done for him, is torture rather than pardon, because Paradise is only where Juliet lives:

"And every cat, and dog,
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven, and may look on her;
But Romeo may not!"

Juliet, who is preparing to drink the medicine that may be poisonous, is the shy and timid young girl of Leopardi's Amore e Morte, who "feels her hair stand on end at the very name of death," but when she has fallen in love "dares meditate at length on steel and on poison." The very sepulchral cave shines, and Romeo after having stabbed Paris at the feet of Juliet, whom he believes to be dead, feels that he is a companion in misfortune and wishes to bury him there "In a triumphant grave."

"A grave, O no, a lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light."

Such words of admiration for love and for the youthful lovers are found in other poets, for instance in Dante's words for Beatrice: "Death, I hold thee very sweet: Thou must ever after be a noble thing, since thou hast been in my lady."

If we find love in rather piteous guise in Romeo and Juliet, comedy reappears in the wise Portia, bound to the promise of allowing, her fate to be decided by means of a guess, because although she submits to selection by chance, she has already chosen in her heart, not among the dukes and princes of the various nationalities, indeed of various continents, who are competing for her hand, but a youthful Venetian, something between a student and a soldier, half an adventurer, but courteous and pleasing in address, who has contrived to please, not only mistress, but maid, which shows, in this agreement of feminine choice, where feminine taste really lies. "By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world" (she sighs, with gentle coquettishness toward herself), perhaps with that languor, which is the desire of loving and of being loved, the budding of love; weary, as those amorous souls feel, weary, who vibrate with an exquisite sensibility. And indeed she is most sensible to music and to the spectacles of nature; and the music that she hears in the night causes her to stay and listen to it, and it seems to her far sweeter than when heard in the daytime. Nocturnal moonlight gives her the impression of a day that is ailing, of a rather pallid day when the sun is hidden.

In the Merchant of Venice, there is also the couple of Jessica and Lorenzo, those two lovers who do not feel the want of moral idealisation, nor, one would be inclined to say, any solicitude for the esteem of others. The man steals without scruple from the old Jew his daughter and his jewels, and the girl has not even a slight feeling of pity for the father, both alike plunged in the happy egotism of their pleasure. Jessica is unperturbed, sustaining and exchanging epigrams with her husband and the salacious jesting and somewhat insolent familiarity of the servant Lancellotto, though abandoning herself all the time to ecstasy, a sensual ecstasy, for she too is sensible to music and attains by means of it to a melancholy of the only sort that she is capable of experiencing, namely, the sensual.

There is malice, almost mockery, though tempered with other elements, in the portrayal of these loves of the daughter of Shylock. But in those of Troilus and Cressida, we meet at once with sarcasm, a bitter sarcasm. The same background, the doings of the Trojan war, which in other comedies has the superficial charm of a decoration, is here also a decoration, but treated with sarcasm and bitterness. Thersites fills the part of the cynic among the Greek warriors, in the relations between Troilus and Cressida, as does Pandarus in Troy. The hastening of the last scenes should be noted, the large amount of fighting, the tumult: the world is dancing as in a puppet show, while the story of Troilus and Cressida is drawing to its close, amid the imprecations of the nauseated Troilus and the grotesquely burlesque lamentations of Pandarus. Another great artist of the Renaissance comes to mind, in relation to this play: not Ariosto, but Rabelais. The theme is still, however, the comedy of love, but a comedy bordering on the faunesque, the immoral, the baser instinct, upon lust and feminine faithlessness. Pandarus is ever the go-between; he laughs and enjoys himself, for he is an expert at this sort of business, a battle-stained warrior, as it were, bearing traces of that long amorous warfare, if not in his soul, in his old bones; he is the living destruction of love, of the credulous, sensual cupidity of man and of the non-credulous, frivolous vanity of woman. His too is the obsession of love-making: he is unable to extricate himself from it, taking an almost devilish delight in involving those who have recourse to him. Troilus does not displease Cressida, on the contrary, he pleases her greatly, yet she fences with him, because she is already in full possession of feminine wisdom and philosophy. She knows that women are admired, sighed after and desired as angels, while being courted, but once they have said yes, all is over. She knows that the true pleasure lies in the doing, in the act and not in the fact, in the becoming, not in the become. She knows that in yielding, she is committing a folly, by breaking the law, which is known to her, but she puts everything she now undertakes upon Pandarus: "Well, uncle, what folly I commit, I dedicate to you." How different is her union with her lover, to that of Romeo and Juliet! There is an ironic-comic solemnity in the rite performed by the pander uncle and in the oaths of constancy and loyalty, which all three of them exchange, while the uncle intones: "Say amen," and the two reply, "Amen," and are then pushed into the nuptial chamber by the profane priest. How different too is "the dawn," their separation in the morning!

"But that the busy day,
Waked by the lark, hath raised the ribald crows
And dreaming night will hide our joys no longer,
I would not from thee."

Whereupon the uncle begins to utter improper epigrams and plays upon words, which the impatient Cressida repays, by sending him to the devil. Cressida begins the new intrigue with Diomede, as soon as she is face to face with him alone, in spite of this scene and the numerous oaths that preceded and followed it. She is perfectly aware that she is betraying her love for Troilus and that she has no excuse for doing so. She gives to Diomede the gift of Troilus and when he asks her to whom it belongs, she replies:

"'Twas one that lov'd me better than you will,
But now you have it, take it."

Here we find consciousness of her own feminine levity, looked upon not merely as a natural force dragging her after it, but almost as a right, as the exercise of a mission or vocation. Cressida can even be sentimental, as she abandons herself to another!

"Troilus farewell, one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex!"

Troilus is meanwhile indignant, not from a sense of injured morality, for that sort of love does not admit of such a thing: he is mad with masculine jealousy. "Was Cressida here?" ... and further on: "Nothing at all, unless that they were she ..."

The figures of Ferdinand and Miranda bring us back to love, youthful and pure, all the more pure, because it reveals itself, not in the midst of a great court or city, but in a desert island. The young man comes there ship-wrecked, cut off from the world that once was his, born as it were anew; the maiden has been brought up in solitude. Yet her love is awakened at first sight, in the beautiful phrase of Marlowe, which Shakespeare was so fond of quoting: "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" It is love, law of beings as of things, which returns eternally new and fresh as the dawn, making his Goddess appear to the youth, her God to the maiden, each to each as beings without their equal upon earth:

"I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble." "Most sure, the goddess,
On whom these airs attend," says Ferdinand.

The choice is soon made, firm, resolute and determined. When Prospero tells her that there are men in the world, compared with whom, the youth she admires would seem a monster, Miranda replies:

"My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man."

All noble things that can be imagined surround and elevate their loves: misfortune, compassion, chaste desire, virginal respect. These things, though infinitely repeated in the world's history seem new, as the two live through them, "surprised withal," surprised and ravished at the mystery, which in them is celebrated once more.

2

THE LONGING FOR ROMANCE

Another motive, related to the preceding, may be described as the longing for romance, but this expression must be taken with all due limitations.

Amorous damsels don the travesty of masculine attire, in order to follow their faithless or cruel lovers, to escape persecution, or to perform wondrous deeds; brothers, or brothers and sisters, who resemble one another, are taken for one another, and thus form a centre for the most curious adventures; with like objects in view, princes travesty themselves as shepherds; gentlemen are discovered in forests with bandits and are themselves bandits; children of royal blood, ignorant of their origin, live like peasants, yet are moved by inclinations, which make them impatient of their quiet, humble lives, urging them on to great adventures; sovereigns move, disguised and unknown, among their subjects, listening to the free speech around them and observant of everything; rustic or city maidens become queens and countesses, or are discovered to be of royal stock; brothers, who are enemies, become reconciled; those who are innocent and having been wrongfully accused and condemned, are believed to have died or been put to death, survive, to reappear at the right moment, thus gratifying the long-cherished hopes of those who had once believed them guilty and had mourned their loss.

Strange rules and compacts are imposed, strange understandings come to, such as the winning of husband or wife upon the solution of an enigma, or upon the discovery of some object; then there is the bet as to the virtue of a woman, won with a trick by the punster or by the perfidious accuser; the betrothed or unwilling husband, finally obtained by the substitution of another person; there are miraculous events, dreams, magical arts, work of spirits of earth and sky ... Men and women are tossed from land to sea, from city to forest and desert, from court to country, from a civil and cultured, to a rustic and simple life. These latter situations are peculiar to romance in the form of the idyll, which is really the most romantic of romanticisms, though it may seem to be the opposite. This is so true that even Don Quixote, when he saw the way closed for the time being to the performance of chivalrous feats of knight errantry, thought of retiring to the country, there to pasture herds and to pipe songs to the beloved, in the company of Sancho Panza.

Several of Shakespeare's plays derive both plot and material from suchlike things and persons, as for instance, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure. These plays may be said to be altogether or in part, of literary origin, or suggested by books, in a sense different from that in which Shakespeare treated the other plays, where, although not bookish, he gathered his raw materials from the English chroniclers, from ancient historians, or Italian novelists, breathing upon it a new spirit and thus making of it something altogether new to the world. Here on the other hand, he found the spirit itself, the general sentiment, in the literature of his time. Italy had worked upon the ancient poetry of Greece and Rome, upon Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, upon mediaeval romances, upon poems and plays, novels and comedies, and with Italy was also Spain, whose Amadigi and Diane were known throughout Europe. The genesis of these themes and of his attraction towards them, is to be sought, therefore, rather in the times than in Shakespeare himself, and for this reason we shall not delay our progress, to show how the play of sentiment within made dear to him that wandering away in imagination to the idyllic life of the country, far from pomp and artifice, the deceits and the delusions of courts; though this idyllic life itself became in its turn refined and artificial at his hand, a pastoral theme. It is important to note, too, that all the above-mentioned material of situations and adventures had already been fashioned and arranged for the theatre, in the course of the second half of the century. This was especially due to the Italian theatre of improvisation or of "art," as it was called. This literature, so often of a most romantic and imaginative kind, has had but little attention at the hand of investigators into Shakespeare's sources of inspiration.

Both material derived from books and literary inspiration combine to throw light upon certain of Shakespeare's works, which have given great trouble to the historians of his art. It is quite natural that writers should draw upon what they have done before and should execute variations upon it, particularly in their earlier years, but also later in the course of their lives, when they have afforded far greater proofs of their capacity. Shakespeare was no exception to this, any more than the great contemporary poet of Don Quixote, who was also the author of the Galatea and of Persiles y Sigismunda. The Comedy of Errors, as we know, consists of a motive from Plautus, repeated and rearranged innumerable times by the dramatists of the Renaissance. In treating this theme, Shakespeare rendered it on the one hand yet more artificial, while on the other, he endowed it with a more marked tendency towards the romantic, and notwithstanding the frivolity and frigidity of misunderstandings arising from identity of appearance, he yet revived them here and there according to his wont with a touch of the reality of life. The intrigue of the Menecmi, or of very close resemblance, pleased him so much that he introduced it in Twelfth Night, where the pair are of different sex. This variation was first employed by Cardinal Bibbiena in his Calandria, but the Cardinal made use of it to increase the lubricity of the intrigue, while Shakespeare drew from it a theme for most graceful poetic inspiration.

One would think that the tragic theme of Titus Andronicus (which many critics would like to say was not by Shakespeare, but dare not, because here the proofs of authenticity are very strong), was also born of a love for literary models, for the tragedy of horrors, so common in Italy in those days of the Canaci and the Orbecchi, which were rather imitations of Seneca than of Sophocles and Euripides, and had already inspired plays to the predecessors of Shakespeare, with slaughter for their theme. What more natural then, than that Shakespeare as a young man should strike this note? The splendid eloquence with which he adorned the horrible tale is Shakespearean.