Chapter V

ROMANCE

Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Vergil did, indeed, guide the narrative sequence of Tasso; but narrative sequence is not a general Renaissance concern. Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, seek other narrative values. What they have in common preoccupation and common achievement is romance. Romance in a period of classicism, romance written in spite of humanism and sometimes by humanists—what should it be? It was response to the special audience of the courts; for, whatever humanism might say, the courts liked romances. It was response also to the wider audience steadily increased by printing. The response, both in medieval continuance and in distinctive Renaissance direction, constitutes an important chapter in literary history.

1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST

The good old times recreated by poetry for refuge and inspiration were found by Malory and Spenser at the court of Arthur; by the Italian romancers, at the court of Charlemagne. These, of course, are the two main medieval fields of romance, _matière de Bretagne and matière du roi_; and into either of them may enter incidentally the matter of Troy with the progeny of Aeneas or “Hector’s arms.” Though the Charlemagne tradition may be somewhat more distinct with its twelve paladins and its one traitor, the two are essentially alike in being, for the actual world out of joint, kingdoms of chivalry. Thither the Renaissance turned from the Wars of the Roses or the hired soldiers of Italy. Gunpowder had abolished single combat; feudalism was gone; chivalry had been reduced to ceremony. Therefore romance was out of date. No; the fact that romance survived the Renaissance shows that it has no date. The romantic _therefore_ is that poetry must once more revive ideals. Sinister violence in Warwickshire or Ferrara denies chivalry; romance revives it.

This fundamental motive strikingly unites the two fifteenth-century soldier romancers Malory and Boiardo.

Sir Thomas Malory (1394?-1471) was attached in his young manhood to the retinue of the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, widely celebrated as a pattern of chivalry. After much military service he sat in the Parliament of 1445. Arraigned in 1451 before a local court at Nuneaton on the charge of breaking into the abbey of St Mary at Coombe and robbing it, and further of ambushing the Duke of Buckingham, he was remanded to the King’s Bench and imprisoned for most of his last twenty years. In Newgate Jail he finished his _Morte d’Arthur_ (1469-1470). These few facts, opening much inference, tell us surely that he was imprisoned for violence in a time of violence. The chivalry that he celebrates in the greatest English literary work of a sterile period has the relief of contrast.

Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), usually called “the Count,” was brought up at the brilliant ducal court of Ferrara. He was sent on embassies, married a Gonzaga, was gentleman of honor to Eleonora, and governor (_Capitano_), first (1480) of Modena, and then (1487, the year in which he published the first two books of his _Orlando innamorato_) of Reggio. Tradition has him genial and easy-going, and adds picturesquely that when he found a sonorous name for one of his Carolingian heroes he volleyed his castle bells.

His writing was abundant, various, characteristic of his time: ten Latin eclogues and several Latin epigrams; many Petrarchan sonnets, with _canzoni_ and madrigals; ten Italian eclogues; _capitoli_ on fear, jealousy, hope, love, and excellence (_virtù_); a five-act comedy, _Timone_, drawn from Lucian; translations from Herodotus, Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, and the _Lives_ of Cornelius Nepos.

Different enough in fortune, the two had the same experience of actual war, and turned from it with the same literary motive, a wistful and generous desire to animate the dislocated and groping present with the courage and devotion of an idealized great past. Poetry of escape, this is also poetry of faith. It lifts Symphorien Champier’s clumsy _Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard_ (1525) with the ideal of a knight “sans peur et sans reproche.” It will seize upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney as romantic. It will survive the allegorizing of Spenser. It is the refuge from the industrial age in Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_. If fighting and politics remain as ugly as in the fifteenth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson will not be the last poet of romance.

Boiardo makes the contrast very explicit.

[The robber replied] “What I am doing every great lord does in your upper world. They make havoc of their enemies in war for aggrandizement and to cut a bigger figure. A single man like me makes trouble for seven, perhaps ten; they rage against ten thousand. And they do still worse than I in that they take what they do not need.” [Said Brandimarte] “It is indeed a sin to take from one’s neighbor as my world does; but when it is done only for the state, it is not evil; it is at least pardonable.” [The robber replied] “A man is more easily pardoned when he frames the charge himself. And I tell you, and make full confession, that I take what I can from any one who can less” (II. xix. 40).

O Fame, attendant of emperors, nymph so singing great deeds in sweet verse that thou bringest men honor even after death and makest them eternal, where art thou fallen? To sing ancient loves and tell the battles of giants. For the world of this thy time cares no longer for fame or for excellence (II. xxii. 2).

Then with choice rhymes and better verse shall I make combats and loves all of fire. Not always shall the time be so out of joint as to drag my mind from its seat. But now my songs are lost. Of little avail to give them a thought while I feel Italy so full of woe that I cannot sing, and hardly can I sigh. To you, light lovers and damsels, who have at heart your noble loves, are written these fair stories flowering from courtesy and valor. They are not heard by those fell souls who make their wars for despite and rage (II. xxxi. 49-50).

The distinctive difference between the two fifteenth-century romancers is that Malory translates; Boiardo rewrites. Malory may contract or expand, adapt or add; but in general he follows what he calls “the French book.” Boiardo, finding the Italian versions vulgarized (_tra villani_, II. xii. 3), wishes to make the old tradition once more literary. To restore their dignity, he gives the paladins more than verse. So romance throughout the Renaissance, as before and since, both survived and was changed. It was rehearsed, translated, printed in its medieval forms; and it was shaped to a distinctive Renaissance pattern.

2. SEPARATE ROMANCES

What the presses most readily carried on from the Middle Age was the separate romances that had not been merged in one of the cycles. The old fairy-mistress story told by Jean d’Arras as _Mélusine_ (1387) was printed at Geneva in 1468. _Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_, translated into German in 1468, was printed in French at Lyon in 1484 and in German at Augsburg in 1548. _Amadis of Gaul_ traveled from Brittany to Spain and Portugal and back to France. The French prose version printed in 1540 and again in 1548,[33] typically romantic in love, adventure, and chivalry, deserved its popularity also by narrative skill. With some lyric dilation of love and an occasional allusion to classical mythology, the style is generally restrained to the narrative purpose. Description, rarely dilated, is often cleverly inwoven. Dialogue adds not only liveliness, but some characterization. Though the simple transitions sound like Malory’s (“Now the author leaves this and returns to the treatment of the child”), this shifting is not frequent; often it does not really interrupt; and generally the composition has distinct narrative sequence. The knighting of Amadis is not merely a scene in a series; it is a situation, prepared and pointed as at once fulfillment and promise. So the complication of the rings (Chapter XI) is carried out before our eyes through suspense to solution.

In such separate romances the Middle Age had advanced the art of verse narrative. Not only in Chaucer’s masterpiece _Troilus and Criseyde_, but also in the contemporary _Gawain and the Green Knight_, the story is carried forward in consistent sequence to a distinct issue of character. The Renaissance, though generally it had other preoccupations, caught some of this vigor in the telling of single romances. One of these, loosely related to the Arthurian cycle without ever being embodied, is of Giron; and this was put into Italian stanzas by Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556). An industrious and capable man of letters,[34] who spent much of his life in France, he was a convinced classicist. His _Gyrone il cortese_ (Paris, 1548; Venice, 1549), though it was written long after Ariosto had secured fame by quite other methods, shows that he felt the obligation of a single story, distinct from a cycle, to keep narrative sequence.

Alamanni’s Dedicatory Epistle, after relating the Arthur stories to history, and mentioning some dozen of the Arthurian heroes, expounds tournaments and the quests of errant knights, and offers his Gyrone, as Caxton offers his Malory, to educate toward true valor. Confessing that he has not always followed his source in detail, he promises later “another new work of poetry ... made in the ancient style and order and imitating Homer and Vergil.” [This was fulfilled in the last years of his life by his _Avarchide_.]

The first five books proceed as follows. After preliminary adventures, Gyrone goes to his bosom friend Danain at Malahalto. On news of a tournament they decide to go disguised in black arms (II). But Danain’s wife languishes for love of Gyrone and gains permission to go thither also under escort while the two friends lodge with a hermit. After combats on the way, they arrive at the tournament as Sagramor is victorious in the first jousts. The beauty of Danain’s wife arouses the jealousy of the other ladies and the passion of the Greek king Laco. His ardor and his threats to seize her are overheard by Gyrone, who courteously rebukes him in a lecture.

Further description of the combats at the tournament (III) leads to the final victory of Gyrone and Danain. While Laco still yearns (IV) toward Danain’s wife, a messenger arrives to conduct her to a neighboring castle. Laco parts from Meliadus, as Gyrone from Danain. Thus Laco and Gyrone are left sighing for the same lady in the same forest. They meet, express their admiration of each other, and sleep side by side in the wood.

In the morning Laco routs single-handed the lady’s whole escort (V). The lady appealing eloquently to his honor in vain, Gyrone arrives and fells him. While the lady debates with herself whether to reveal her love, and Gyrone is torn by the conflict of his own with his loyalty to Danain, they are irresistibly drawn together. In a flowery mead by a spring they prepare for love. But Gyrone’s lance falling knocks his sword into the spring. When he has retrieved it, he reads as never before its inscription summoning to honor, and turns it in shame on himself. A peasant supervening betrays their sad plight to Laco.

Thus the story is brought definitely to a situation of character. Obvious as the Renaissance manipulation is in the space given to love, the handling makes this not merely lyric interlude, but story motive. Though Alamanni is unwilling, or unable, to carry this through the 28,000 lines of his twenty-four books, though he often fails to give that salience to critical situations which is evident here, he nevertheless achieves what the Renaissance cyclical romances generally ignored, narrative sequence. All he needed to make his _Gyrone_ shorter, tighter, more compelling, was firmer control of fourteenth-century narrative art.

For a classicist Alamanni is remarkably sparing of the fashionable Renaissance allusions. He does, indeed, use that paganizing phrase which was satirized by Erasmus. “In the consecrated temples, devoutly about the sacrifices in accordance with true example, they listened, adored, and besought the immortal Father”; when Malory would say, “They heard their Mass and brake their fast.” But in spite of many Vergilian similes and of occasional orations to troops, Alamanni’s classicism is not intrusive. Apparently he thought it had small place in romance.

3. THE ARTHURIAN CYCLE IN MALORY

Among Renaissance romances presenting a traditional cycle in medieval form the most distinguished is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_. Caxton’s preface is a manifesto of romance; and his table of contents displays most of the stories that had gradually been brought together by the Middle Age at the Round Table. Between the “_enfances_” of the first book and the last great battle in the west are Balin and Tristan; that Percival, here called Gareth or Beaumains, who was reared apart in the wildwood; the mighty Lancelot, his mistress the Queen, and Elaine who died for love of him; the quest of the Grail; the traitor Modred. They are not composed in a narrative sequence. Balin, Gareth, Tristan, for instance, remain separate stories. For there is no real connection in Balin’s glimpse of an earlier Grail story not used in Malory’s Grail books, or in Gareth’s coming to Camelot and his knighting by Lancelot. But there is no confusion. The separate stories are told straightforwardly; the main persons become familiar; and the exposure of Guinevere makes a crisis contributing to the subsequent ruin of the goodly fellowship. The _Morte d’Arthur_ is not merely a series. But its distinction is in style. Malory’s prose follows that medieval habit which may be called pure narrative, the telling of a story singly for its story values. It was not the only medieval narrative habit; nor is he the only fifteenth-century author to follow it; but it stands out both in contrast to classicism conceived as ornamental dilation and in his own quiet mastery. Without parade, without pause for ornament, he maintains a grave simplicity that ranges from homeliness to eloquence. His rhythm—he has little other sentence art—lingers or quickens with the action, and answers the emotion.

Is that knyght that oweth this shelde your love? Yea truly, said she, my love he is. God wold I were his love (XVIII. xiv).

Than syr Bedwere cryed: “Ah! my lord Arthur, what shal become of me now ye go from me and leve me here allone emonge myn enemyes?” “Comfort thy self,” sayd the kyng, “and doo as wel as thou mayst; for in me is no truste for to truste in. For I wyl in to the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde” (XXI. v).

4. THE CAROLINGIAN CYCLE ON THE STREET

The other cycle, the Carolingian, was popularized in Italy by street story-tellers, who seem to have been, on the piazza before audiences of artisans and shopkeepers, somewhat like the medieval _jongleurs_ before their successive groups of pilgrims. Their narrative art can be only guessed; for it was oral. But the guess is helped by the persistence, even to the present time, of the Carlomagno marionettes. The recital animated by these large puppets—for it is recital, not drama—is of a traditional version called _I paladini di Francia_, and goes on day after day by mere aggregation, and with many tirades.

5. PULCI

Italian literary manipulation of the Carolingian cycle in verse romances began with Luigi Pulci (1432-1484). His _Morgante maggiore_ (1481, though largely written by 1470)[35] is selective. Though it bulks large with more than 30,000 lines of verse, it does not rehearse the deeds of the paladins by the serial method of installments. At the end of Canto 5 two main stories, Orlando’s and Rinaldo’s, are brought together. At the end of Canto IX, having meantime moved together, the two arrive, with the other persons whom they have picked up on the way, for the relief of Montauban and of Carlomagno at Paris. There is narrative progress from salience to salience. The dialogue is lively. Though it does not amount to characterization, it suffices for speed and for mood.

Said Rinaldo, “Wilt thou be so obtuse as not to look at that damsel? Thou wouldst not be acceptable as a lover....” Said Oliver, “Thou art ever for thy jokes. Yonder is something more serious than word-play” (IV. 61).

Oliver looked at Rinaldo, hardly able to hold his gaze for weeping, and said: “’Tis true that man cannot hide love and coughing. As thou seest, dear brother, love has caught me at last with his claws. I can no longer hide this desire. I know not what to do, what to decide. Cursed be the day on which I saw her. What am I to do? What dost thou advise?” Said Rinaldo, “Believe me, thou wilt leave this place. Leave the lady, marquis Oliver. Our intention was not to yearn, but to find Orlando” (IV. 88-90).

The naughty machinations of Malagigi are, indeed, comic interpolations; nothing comes of them; but the machinations of Gano have narrative function. There is hardly any separable description. Love laments are sketched, not dilated. Pulci is interested, and interests us, in his story as a story. To this end he takes a free hand with events. We have the usual paynim siege of Paris or of Montauban, but no attempt to include all the items of tradition. Pulci takes what he wishes and puts it where he wishes.

To call the poem a burlesque is misleading. The incidental farce, as in Boiardo and Ariosto, is rather appeal to Renaissance fondness for the grotesque as contrast. Though Pulci may have wished to pierce the inflation of the Carolingian street tirades, he was too clever to think of holding parody through 30,000 lines. Reducing the medieval aggregation to an intelligible story, he also, with an art more delicate than burlesque, reduced the style. Turning from both medieval gravity and Renaissance luster, he brought romance down to earth. Oliver falls in love promptly, utterly, and successively. The humor of this in real life Pulci frankly seeks. When two knights dare each other, he renders their speech not as oration, but as homely flyting. He is irreverent in the way of fashionable conversation. But his main object and achievement, as it is not parody, so it is not satire. It is pleasant, often humorous story of familiar antiquated persons in traditional events and setting, but in daylight.

6. BOIARDO

Boiardo, indignant at the degradation of the Carolingian heroes among the vulgar—how did he proceed toward elevation?

Who will give me the voice and the words, and utterance magnanimous and profound? (I. xxvii. 1).

Till now my song has not ventured far from shore. Now I must enter upon the great deep, to open immeasurable war. All Africa lies beyond that sea; and all the world flashes with men in arms (II. xvii. 2).

The poet seems to nerve himself, as Vergil at the opening of _Aeneid_ VII, for loftier diction. The average Renaissance poet of the next century would invoke the Muses for that “high style” which had come down from classical through medieval rhetoric. But the words of Boiardo’s invocation are not heightened thus; nor is his diction generally. He not only omits the Muses here; he is very sparing with classical allusion throughout.

Book I mentions the Cyclops, Circe, Thyestes, Medusa, the Centaurs, Vulcan, Atalanta, the dragon’s teeth, and Hercules; Book II, a faun, the easy descent to Hades, the god of love, Pasithea, Narcissus, the Laestrigonians and Anthropophagi, the goddess Fame, Arion, and the Sibyl. Hector’s arms are brought in as a piece of medieval derivation from Troy. Classical similes are inserted here and there, as if conscientiously: the meeting of two winds, fire in grain, a boar or bear at bay, two bulls or two lions. Nor does Boiardo strive for other ornament. His heightening is rather the sheer extravagance of epic brag.

Their blows were heard nearly a mile in the wood (I. iii. 59).

They came with such a battle-cry as made earth tremble, and sky and sea (I. iv. 51).

The moat brimmed with the blood of the slain (I. xi. 32).

Fire came to his heart and his face, and flamed from his helmet. He ground his teeth. His knees so clamped Brigliadoro that the mighty steed sank in the path (I. xv. 19).

The grinding of his teeth could be heard more than a bow-shot (I. xv. 33).

Otherwise his words are usually as simple as Malory’s. So far, classicism has made no headway in Renaissance verse narrative.

Boiardo’s sentences, as Malory’s, are typically aggregative, sometimes even crude. Instead of tightening a sentence or a stanza, he remains frankly diffuse. Fluent, sometimes slack, he runs on as if orally. His verse is pleasantly varied. Though he hardly ever lets a line end with a down-beat, he freely begins either up or down, or shifts to a dactyl. A stanza rarely runs over; but it is often linked with the next by refrain, as in popular poetry. Here and there the closing line of his octave sounds like an experiment in the direction followed later by Spenser. Inferior in stanza control to Boccaccio and to Ariosto, diffuse, somewhat careless, he is always agreeably and sometimes charmingly fluent.

Yet description, which became a regular Renaissance cue for dilation, Boiardo handles economically. Even where he is conventional he does not dilate; and usually he is both distinct and concise.

That spring was all adorned with white and polished alabaster, and so richly with gold that it shone in the flowery mead (I. iii. 33).

A fair rich palace made of marble polished so smooth as to mirror the whole garden (I. viii. 2).

Secret gardens of fresh verdure are above on the roofs and hidden on the ground. Gems and gold pattern all these noble and joyous places. Clear springs unstintingly fresh are surrounded by shady thickets. Above all, the place has an odor to give oppressed hearts their joy again (I. viii. 5).

His stories pictured on walls (_depintura istoriata_) whether fresco or mosaic, have a literary source. They are from the Troy stories pictured on the walls of Dido’s palace in _Aeneid_ II. Boiardo’s briefer rendering may have been suggested by the “epigrams” of the Greek _Anthology_, or by survivals in southern Italy of such pictures with verse inscriptions. Certainly his palaces and gardens often recall the Norman-Arab art of Sicily. For it is art that he pauses to note oftener than scenery. In all this his classicism is both discreet and artistic. He does not borrow; he adapts.

The larger scene, the field of the traditional struggle of East with West, receives more definite geography. The haze over medieval Ermonie had been often pierced by merchant voyagers. Though there are still the Isole Felice or Lontane, we read now of Aragon and Barcelona, Granada, Toledo, Seville, Valencia, and Gibraltar; of Agrigentum and Mongibello as well as of Sicily at large; of Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes; of Aigues Mortes, Bordeaux, Gascony, Languedoc, Perpignan, and Roussillon; of Damascus, Niniveh, Trebizond, and Tripoli.

The traditional chivalric equality of Saracen knights with Christian, as in Malory, is emphasized.

King Charles the Great with genial face had seated himself among his paladins at the round table. Before him were also Saracens, who would not use chair nor bench, but lay like mastiffs on their rugs, scorning the usage of the Franks (I. i. 12-13).

The paynim king Balugante, divining Rinaldo’s irritation at some of his fellow Christians, sends him a courteous and discerning message. Saracen knights are armed, titled, respected as are Christian, and mingle with them freely. Their bravery is not merely admitted; Rodomonte is a legendary demon of force, and Ruggiero in his pagan days is a pattern of both force and courtesy.

The traditional echoes of folklore are repeated. Feraguto’s strength revives when he touches earth. A child stolen in infancy is recognized. Herbs are gathered under a new moon. Ruggiero, as Percival, is brought up beyond sight of arms. There are waters of forgetfulness, a loathly lady waiting to be restored by a kiss, a magic steed, a white hart, a monster adversary transformed, and a retreat under water.

Grotesque interludes, barely touched by Malory, found occasionally elsewhere, and quite regular in Italian popular versions, are not only admitted by Boiardo; they are dwelt upon with evident relish. Thus Rinaldo fights with a giant.

Of no avail the furious assault; of no avail the baron’s nimble skill. He could not reach so high. Suddenly Rinaldo dismounted and with one bound leapt upon the giant’s croup when he was not looking. He knocked his helm and his steel cap to pieces and, redoubling his strokes as if he were hammering iron at the furnace, he split the great head in two. Fell the giant with a rush that made the earth shake (I. iv. 64-65).

Orlando leapt even higher, so that again and again he met his giant face to face—in the air. Angelica threw into a monster’s mouth a cake that stuck his teeth together, so that Rinaldo might safely, though with enormous effort, strangle him. Rodomonte bare-headed at sea hears his hair rattle with ice. Astolfo is beguiled to board a whale, and Rinaldo follows, both on horseback.

On Bayard he plunged into the sea after the great fish in desperation. That whale went slowly, slowly; for it is very large and by nature grave (II. xiii. 65).

Marfisa, the woman knight, had her horse stolen and pursued the thief long in vain. The conception is grotesque; the execution, pure farce.

A fortnight had she followed him, nor was fed meantime on aught but leaves. The false thief, who was most astute, sped his flight with quite different food. For he was so quick and so bold that every tavern he saw he would enter and fall to eating, and then flee without paying his shot. And although the taverners and their waiters were after him with their pitchers and jugs in their hands, off he was, wiping his mouth and grinning (II. xv. 68-69).

Love, announced in the title _Orlando innamorato_ and frequently asserted, has little more scope in Boiardo than in Malory. Whether the title expresses an original intention abandoned, or an appeal to court ladies, or merely a certain period in the hero’s life, Boiardo’s interest was elsewhere.

Long time Morgan, Alcina, and their magic wiles have kept me waiting; nor have I shown you a good sword-stroke (II. xiv. 1).

The good sword-stroke is what he gives with both hands, even as Malory.

Since the main interest is single combat, and all the fighters, even the Saracens, are memorable, there is a long roll of persons. Of the hundred mentioned in the first five cantos about a third never reappear; few are characterized consecutively; none is consecutively in action for any considerable period. The long poem is frankly a series, not a sequence. Boiardo’s usual method is to carry one of his stories to a crisis, leave it to pick up another, and so on.

Let us now return to Astolfo, who remained, you know, alone at the fountain (I. ii. 17).[36]

As the Carolingian recitals on the piazza, or behind the marionettes, the _Orlando innamorato_ may be entered at almost any point. What is there heard or read is interesting mainly for itself, very little as arising from previous action and characterization or as preparing for what follows. To say, then, that it fuses the two cycles is quite misleading. Boiardo brings in an Arthurian name, Tristan or Lancelot, as simply as he adds another Carolingian. He puts Merlin’s well in the forest of Ardenne. He interpolates Morgan le Fay among the Orlando stories. But fusion, whether of these Arthurians or of his own Carolingians, is not in all his thoughts. He is engaged not in composing the Carolingian story, but in rehearsing the Carolingian stories.

Boiardo’s _Orlando_, then, is a collection of heroes fighting in the struggle between East and West. Within that frame, as within the frame of Arthur’s Round Table, tradition had collected many stories. Boiardo finds room for them, and even for others quite unrelated. Those of the greatest knights, Orlando, Rinaldo, Oliver, and their ladies and friends, the obligatory stories, he can tell by installments because they are familiar and have been already connected. The others he inserts here and there for variety. Not only does he accept the medieval cyclical aggregation, he ignores the later medieval achievement of narrative sequence in smaller scope through characterization.

A certain Tisbina, who has nothing to do with Charlemagne, is in much the same dilemma as Chaucer’s Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale; and her Iroldo’s response is much the same as that of Dorigen’s Arveragus. Chaucer’s solution is convincing, in spite of impossible marvels, because it is motivated by Dorigen’s character. Boiardo’s solution is inferior because it is quite extraneous and casual. His Tisbina is not characterized sufficiently to motivate the story toward any convincing issue.

Much less is Boiardo concerned to motivate his whole story. His Orlando in love is even removed for long stretches from the great struggle; and Boiardo interrupts both the love and the struggle to tell of Tisbina and Iroldo or insert a _fabliau_.[37] True, his poem remained unfinished; but evidently he had no idea of making it a coherent whole. His Latin and Greek did not suggest to him the shaping of verse narrative. Discernible in his style, though never intrusive, they do not move his composition; for composition was not his concern. Ignoring alike the medieval progress and Pulci’s narrative cleverness with his own material, he was content with abundant activity, variety, and fluency.

But in another use of the classics he forecast the Renaissance habit of encomium. Ruggiero, legendary ancestor of his Ferrara patrons, brought up in paganism and remote from deeds of arms, is sought by Agramante for his great expedition against the Christian West. Ruggiero’s aged tutor warns Agramante against the ultimate consequences of taking the marvelous youth into France. Charlemagne, he says, may be defeated, and our pride and courage enhanced;

... but afterward the youth will become Christian, and—ah! traitress house of Maganza, which heaven should not tolerate on earth—in the end Ruggiero shall have through thee his death.

Would that were the final grief! But his descendants shall remain Christian, and come to honor as great as any the world knows today. They shall keep all, all generosity, all courtesy, sweet love and joyous state in a house the flower of the world.

I see Hugo Alberto di Sansogna descend to the Paduan plain, expert in arms, in intellect, in all the ways of glory, generous, noble, and above all humane. Hear, ye Italians: I warrant you. He who comes with that standard in hand brings with him all your redemption. Through him shall Italy be filled with prowess.

I see Azzo I and Aldobrandino III, nor know which to call the greater; for the one has killed the traitor Anzolino; the other has broken the Emperor Henry. Behold another Rinaldo paladin. I say no more of him than Lord of Vicenza, of Treviso, of Verona, who strikes the crown from Frederick.

Nature shows forth her treasure. Lo! the marquis who lacks no point of honor. Blest the age, and happy they who shall live in a world so free! In his time the golden lilies shall be joined to that white eagle whose home is in heaven; and his domain shall be the flower of Italy from the one fair seacoast to the other.

And if the other son of Amphitryon, who there appears in habit of a duke, has as much mind to seize dominion as he has to follow good and flee evil, all the birds—not to say the men who act in this great play—would flock to obey him. But why should I gaze further into the future? Thou destroyest Africa, King Agramante (II. xxi. 54-59).

With reminiscence, perhaps, of Dante, this is obviously patterned on Vergil. The historical vision of the house of Este has its model in the vision of the Augustans. Encomium with Boiardo is neither so frequent nor so fulsome as it was to become with Ariosto and with Spenser. Was that, perhaps, one reason for his double eclipse? He was first superseded by Ariosto and then rewritten by Berni.

7. ARIOSTO

The brilliant _Orlando furioso_ (1516) of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) is one of the most typical verse narratives of the Renaissance, as it was the most popular. More accomplished than Boiardo in diction, verse, and composition, and more responsive to the Renaissance, Ariosto still follows the same serial plan. The two poets differ more in degree than in kind. Both were trained in the classics; both began by writing Latin; both offer romance as inspiring contrast with actuality.

O great hearts of those ancient knights! They were rivals; they differed in religion; they still felt the rude and wicked strokes aching throughout their bodies; and yet through dark woods and crooked paths they went together without distrust (i. 22).

[War has been debased through the diabolical invention of artillery (xi. 22-25)]. How foundest thou ever place in human hearts, O invention criminal and ugly! Through thee military glory has been destroyed, through thee the craft of arms dishonored, through thee valor and prowess so diminished that oft the knave seems better than the good soldier.

And though Rinaldo was not very rich in cities or treasure, he was so affable and genial and so prompt to share with them whatever he had that not one of his meinie was drawn away by offer of more gold. A man of Montauban never forsakes it unless great need constrains him elsewhere (xxxi. 57).

O famished, deformed, fierce Harpies, who in blinded and misguided Italy, perhaps as punishment of ancient sins, bring to every table divine judgment! Innocent children and faithful mothers drop with hunger while they see one feast of these foul monsters devour what might have kept them alive.... [Italy cries] Is there no one of you ... to free your tables from the filth and the claws ... as the paladin freed that of the Ethiop king? (xxxvi. 1-3).

Encomium with Ariosto becomes pervasive. Animated of course by the personal ends of a court poet, it serves also the literary end of magnificence, the first aspect in which the Renaissance viewed epic.

Who will give me the voice and the words fit for a subject so noble? Who will lend me wings strong enough to attain my lofty conception? Far greater than its customery heat must be the poetic furor in my breast. For this part I owe my lord, since it sings of the noble line from which he sprang.

Among the illustrious lords issued from heaven to govern the earth, never seest thou, O Phoebus who surveyest the wide earth, a race more glorious in peace or in war, nor any whose nobility has been kept longer, and shall be kept, if that prophetic light which inspires me errs not, so long as the heavens revolve about the pole (iii. 1-2).

The Vergilian vision of Augustan Rome is heard again in Merlin’s prophecy. Epic rolls of honor muster the English warriors, the women of Este, even the painters. Besides these are many incidental references, especially at canto openings.

Of courtesy, of nobility, examples among the ancient warriors were many, and few are there among the moderns. But of impious ways enough was seen and heard in that war, Hippolito, whose captured standards thou hast used to adorn our temples, as thou broughtest to thy ancestral shores their captive galleys laden with prey (xxxvi. 2).

The mission of the poet to confer fame, proclaimed by Ariosto and repeated by Ronsard, is also seen in bitter contrast. The speaker is St John the Evangelist.

So worthy men are snatched from oblivion worse than death by poets. O intelligent and wise princes who follow the example of Augustus in making writers your friends, and thus need not fear the waves of Lethe. Poets, as singing swans, are rare, poets not unworthy of the name; for heaven prevents too great abundance of famous ones by the great fault of stingy lords, who by oppressing excellence and exalting vice banish the noble arts. We may suppose that God has deprived these ignorant men of their wits and darkens their light of reason in making them shy of poetry, that death may quite consume them. For wicked as their ways might be, if only they knew how to win the friendship of Apollo they might rise from their graves in sweeter odor than nard or myrrh.

Aeneas was not so pious, nor Achilles so mighty, as their fame, nor Hector so brave. There have been thousands and thousands who might with truth have been put before them; but the palaces or great villas bestowed by their descendants have given them sublime honors without end at the honored hands of writers. Augustus was neither so holy nor so benign as sounds the trumpet of Vergil; but his having good taste in poetry brings him pardon for his unjust proscription. Nor would he who had against him earth and hell have the less fame, perhaps, if he knew how to keep the writers his friends.

Homer made Agamemnon victorious, the Trojans cowardly and dull, and Penelope constant to her husband through the thousand persecutions of the suitors. If you wish to uncover the truth, convert the story to its contrary; that the Greeks were routed, Troy the victor, and Penelope a harlot. On the other hand hear how fame leaves Dido, whose heart was so chaste, to be reputed a baggage, only because Vergil was not her friend. Wonder not that I am oppressed thereat, and that I speak of it at such length. I love writers and pay them what I owe; for in your world I too was a writer (xxxv. 22-28).

This strange parenthesis of satire, dubious in its humor, shocking in its irreverence, sounds today like encomium reduced to advertisement. It sounds also like the bitter retort of realism to that fiction of the courtier which was to have literary vogue through Castiglione. Bitter and foul the actual wars of Italy in contrast to old chivalry; but bitter also the trade of those who sing them.

Though often oratorical, Ariosto rarely seeks his magnificence by elaboration of style. He has too much taste, too much concern for popular appeal. He even admits the appeal of the traditional epic brag. Rodomonte alone sacks a city; Grifone throws a knight over the wall; great rocks are hurled from ships; and—triumph of rodomontade—the fragments of a combat fly up to the sphere of fire and come down lighted.

There are a few reminiscences of the _Aeneid_, fewer of Horace, fewest of Dante and Petrarch. Classical allusion has become a common decoration. Aurora is already obligatory for dawn. Occasionally a classical periphrasis (“Hardly had the Licaonian seed turned her plow through the furrows of heaven” xx. 82) is obscure; or there is incongruity in combining Avernus and the Sibyl with Merlin’s grotto, or the Fates with Death, Nature, and St John. But allusion is neither paraded nor often intruded. Classical similes, much more frequent than with Boiardo, are evidently sought for decoration. They are one of the signs that Ariosto’s time thought of epic in terms of style. But they are used also for vividness; and they range widely. Besides those drawn conventionally from beasts of prey or from storm, there are many quite sharply individual: wood steaming in a fire, grass ebbing and flowing in the wind, a pile-driver, and a mine cave-in. Ariosto’s decoration is rarely a hindrance, rarely even elaborate. He is easy to read. The bearing of a passage here and there may be dubious because of looseness in the narrative, but never its meaning. He has reconciled dignity with popularity. Instead of posing as literary, he makes his readers feel literary themselves. He puts them at ease in fine company.

In sentence and stanza movement Ariosto has made his poem easy to read by diffuse and various fluency. Writing for entertainment, he uses balance or other word-play only as occasional means of variety. He is neither sententious nor pretentious. His metrical skill, remarkable in range and control, is not put forward for exhibition; it is an accompaniment so flexible to mood as constantly to enhance the connotation. Rarely lengthening the final line of the stanza often using refrain to link stanzas, and sometimes within stanzas, he is most characteristic in making the _ottava rima_ run on not only from line to line, but from stanza to stanza. This fluent ease is by no means impromptu spontaneity. It is the work of ten years. His diffuseness, then, is not carelessness; it is adjustment alike to the immediate audience of the court and to the increasing readers of the press.

Especially significant, therefore, is his handling of description. His landscape is often both brief and conventional.

Winsome thickets of pleasant laurel, of palms and gayest myrtle, of cedar, of orange with fruit and flowers woven in forms most various and all beautiful, make a refuge from the fervid heat of summer days with their thick parasols; and among these branches in safe flight nightingales go singing.

Among the purpled roses and the white lilies, which the warm air keeps ever fresh, rabbits and hares are seen at peace, and deer, heads high and proud, without fear that any one may kill or take them, feed or chew their cud at rest. Swift and nimble leap the harts and goats that abound in those country places (vi. 21-2).

But he has a way of animating convention with a sharp word of his own.

When the trembling brooks (_trepidi ruscelli_) began to loosen the cold ice in their warm waves (xii. 72).

Architecture and decoration often remain generalized, or offer few details. Ampler is pageantry.

With triumphal pomp and great festivity they return together into the city, which is green with branches and garlands. All the streets are hung with tapestries. A shower of herbs and flowers spreads from above and falls upon and around the victors, cast in handfuls from loggias and fair windows by ladies and damsels.

In various places where they turn a corner they find improvised arches and trophies displaying pictures of the ruins and fires of Biserta and other worthy deeds; elsewhere, balconies with divers games and spectacles and mimes and plays; and at every corner is inscribed the true title: To the Liberators of the Empire.

With sound of shrill trumpets and mellow clarinets, with harmony of every instrument, mid laughter and applause, joy and favor of the people, who could hardly come close enough, the great Emperor dismounted at the palace, where several days that company stayed to enjoy itself with tournaments, _personnages_ and farces, dances and banquets (xliv. 32-34).

This is a preciously distinct picture of actual Renaissance pageantry. More vividly detailed is the funeral of Brandimarte. Even these, however, are not dilated. They are appropriate to their narrative function. The long descriptive summary of Astolfo’s journey through the Valley of the Moon is an interlude of satire; and Orlando’s battle with the monster Orc is pure grotesque. He rows into the Orc’s mouth, casts anchor there, and, when the monster plunges, tows him ashore. Moreover, both these are narrated; neither is a descriptive pause.

Ariosto does pause, however, to dilate description of the beauty of women. Seven stanzas enumerate the charms of the enchantress Alcina (vii. 10-16).

The fair palace excelled not so much in surpassing the richness of every other as in having the most delightful folk in the world and the noblest. Little did one differ from another in flowered age and in beauty; only Alcina was most beautiful of all, as the sun is more beautiful than any star.

In person she was as well formed as the industry of painters can imagine: her blond hair long and tressed; gold is not more splendid and lustrous. Rose mingled with hawthorn white spread over her delicate cheek. Of polished ivory was her joyous forehead, and of just proportion.

Beneath two black and fine-spun brows are two black eyes, as two clear suns, sympathetic in gaze, frugal in movement, about which Love seems to sport and fly, and from which he empties his quiver and visibly steals hearts. Thence descends a nose in which Envy herself could find no fault.

Beneath this, as between two valleys, the mouth besprent with native cinnabar, wherein are two rows of choice pearls, enclosed or opened by fair, sweet lips, whence issues speech of courtesy fit to soften even a base heart, and whence rises the winsome laughter that brings paradise to its place on earth [and so on for three more stanzas].

This is the conventional description called by the Middle Age _blason_. It is used again for Olimpia bound to the rock, where the situation itself is conventional. A bit of very old folklore, and coming down also through classical mythology as Perseus and Andromeda, it was a commonplace for dilation.

But what Ariosto dilates oftenest is emotion. His characteristic pauses are lyric. Thus he interpolates the medieval _compleint d’amour_ not only again and again, but for long exhalations. Bradamante alone utters a whole series of these laments. The second begins as follows:

Then shall it be true (said she) that I must seek him who flees me and hides? Then must I prize him who scorns me? Must I implore him who never answers me? Shall I endure to hold at heart him who hates me, who thinks his qualities so rare that an immortal goddess must descend from heaven to kindle his heart with love?

In his pride he knows that I love him, that I adore him; nor will he of me for lover nor for slave. In his cruelty he knows that I yearn and die for him; and he waits till after death to give me help. And lest I tell him of my martyrdom, fit to move even his stubborn will, he hides himself from me, as the asp who to keep her venom refuses to hear the charm.

Ah! Love, stay him who hastes so free beyond my slow running, or restore me to the state whence thou hast taken me, when I was subject neither to thee nor to any other. Alas! how deceitful and foolish is my hope that ever prayers should move thee to pity! For thou delightest to draw streams of tears from our eyes; nay, thereon thou feedest and livest (xxxii. 18-20).

Substantially the same is the famous madness of Orlando. Though Ariosto cleverly gives it narrative enough to relieve its prolongation through twenty-five stanzas, it is a dilated lyric interlude.

The art that dilates these lyrics is rhetoric. Thus they answer not only the learning, but the taste of the Renaissance. With Alcina’s charms and Olimpia’s, they were the favorite passages of the Pléiade. Ronsard, using them often, was especially fond of Orlando’s madness. Beyond the Pléiade, they open a long vista toward Italian opera. To look the other way, back to the Middle Age, is to meet the sharp contradiction of Dante. Paolo and Francesca, or Ugolino, is the poetic antithesis to Bradamante and Orlando.

Such dilated interludes would interrupt any progress of the whole story; and they are not the only interpolations. Traditionally the cyclical romances might pause to add incidental stories, usually told by errant damsels seeking help. Ariosto inserts these freely, and quite as freely others having even less relevance. The story of Ginevra, Ariodante, and Polinesso (Canto V), for instance, though it falls among Rinaldo’s adventures, has its own intrigue and motivation. Equally separable, the _fabliau_ of Fiammetta is told for sex, and prolonged by appended dialogue and comment. “Ladies,” it begins, “and you who hold ladies in esteem, for heaven’s sake give no ear to this story.... Omit this canto; for my story needs it not and will be no less clear without it.” Evidently Ariosto has not planned his cantos as chapters.

A mere glance through the summaries prefixed to each canto will show that the many interruptions are not breaks in the sequence of the whole. There is no such sequence. The poem is a collection of parallel stories taken up in turn, and only thus combined, not integrated in a single scheme. Accepting Boiardo’s method, he uses the same frank transitions.

But to another time I will defer the story of what ensued from this. I must return to the good King Charles, against whom Rodomonte was coming in haste and whose folk he was killing (xviii. 8).

He even turns them to humor.

I am reminded that I ought to tell you (I promised to, and then I forgot) of a suspicion that the fair lady of the grieving Ruggiero had concerning the other lady less pleasing and more wicked and of sharper and more venomous tooth, so that through what she heard from Ricciardetto it devoured the heart in her breast.

I should have told you, and I began something else because Rinaldo intervened; and then Guidone gave me enough to do, so that he held me off a bit on the way. From one thing to another I became so involved that I hardly remembered Bradamante. I remember her now, and I am going to go on with her story before I tell of Rinaldo and Gradasso.

Before I speak of her, need is that I speak a bit of Agramante (xxxii. 1-3).

Such narrative art as Ariosto exhibits is in detail, not in the onwardness of the whole story. The close is both interrupted and delayed.

Canto XXXVI, which finally brings Ruggiero and Bradamante together, ends without their actual reunion. There is no meeting, no dialogue. Canto XXXVIII takes Ruggiero from her, to support his honor; “and that, ladies, is strange.” Canto XLIV still postpones, as lesser issues have been postponed, _the_ issue, their marriage. Canto XLVI ends characteristically on description of the wedding and encomium of Ariosto’s patron Ippolito; but that the poem may conclude as the _Aeneid_ with the defeat of Turnus, it gives Ruggiero one more victory. Boccaccio’s art of the long narrative poem, to say nothing of Chaucer’s, is ignored.

This is not careless; it is intentional. Some of the delay at the close was added in the final revision of 1532. Ariosto designed not sequence, but abundance and variety. His opening _Arma virumque cano_ is: “I sing the ladies, the loves, the courtesies, the bold emprise of the time when the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and did such harm in France.... Of Orlando too will I tell, how for love he went mad.” These loves, traditional in still subscribing to _amour courtois_, are more various than Boiardo’s. But though much of the appeal is by amorous descant, the staple of this Carolingian romance is still single combat. As for Orlando’s love madness, announced in the title and in the opening lines, it is not reached till Canto XXIII; and once his fury is spent, he disappears once more for some six cantos. He is hardly even a leading character. The principal role, for encomium of the house of Este, belongs to Ruggiero. Stories of the other paladins are often brought into connection, sometimes skillfully, sometimes ingeniously, rarely to the extent of making a situation, never in such an onward scheme as Chaucer’s _Troilus and Criseyde_. For that demands what Ariosto never sought, consistent motivation by progressive characterization from scene to scene. Such characterization as Ariosto offers remains separate. Zerbino has more space than is warranted by any distinct function. Oliver, coming in casually, is less a person than a great traditional name. Astolfo’s miraculous journey, with its interesting geographical list has so little visible function that it might as well have been made somewhere else, or by some one else. Leone, one of the most distinct characterizations, comes in only toward the end. Even Ruggiero meets Bradamante when he least expects or deserves her.

Ariosto is a typical example of the popular poet gauging and answering his public. His elegant ease is flattering. His decoration is distinct. His diffuseness relieves us of all coöperative thinking. A scene is dilated through every phase of its emotion, and then discharged as finished in and for itself. The next will be pleasantly different, or, if unpleasantly, may be skipped. The dilation, the variety, that Vergil turned his back upon, and after him Tasso, Ariosto frankly sought. He has no care for poetic sequence beyond neat transitions, no poetic austerity of sustained single purpose. Renaissance poets, for all the cult of classicism, often revived the ancient world in Alexandrian decadence, saw in Vergil only his high style, conceived poetic as rhetoric, and ran after the “Greek Romances.” Ariosto was one of these Alexandrians.

8. TASSO AND SPENSER

The contrast between Tasso and Spenser is heightened by the fact that they were closely contemporary. Spenser’s birth was eight years after Tasso’s; his death, but three years. Tasso began his _Gerusalemme liberata_ in his twenties, published it at thirty-one, kept it on his mind throughout his working life, and finally rewrote it. Spenser published three books of his _Faerie Queene_ at thirty-eight, three more at forty-three, and left it unfinished. Tasso’s is the shortest of the Renaissance verse romances; Spenser’s was to be the longest. Tasso turned away from Ariosto toward Vergil; Spenser moved even farther than Ariosto from epic sequence. Allegory, hardly more than a figure of speech with Tasso, is announced by Spenser as his plan. Religion having more place in these two romances than in any of the others, Tasso’s is conceived as uniting western Europe, Spenser’s as nationalistic. Tasso’s poem is one of the greater European books, and has been widely read in England; Spenser’s great reputation has been very slow to cross the Channel. The latter years of the sixteenth century, then, carried on verse romance in two distinct directions: the classical direction from Aristotelian theory and Vergilian practice toward narrative singleness and sequence; the allegorizing of the medieval cycles toward a series of counsels for individual and social conduct.

(_a_) _Tasso_

Tasso’s is the only one of the Renaissance romances of chivalry whose title is its subject. Malory’s subject is far more than the death of Arthur, Pulci’s than Morgante. Boiardo’s subject is not Orlando in love, nor Ariosto’s Orlando mad for love. Spenser’s title merely makes his encomium part of his allegory. But Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_ exactly sums up his scope and his theme. The Carolingian tradition, still furnishing the scene and the persons, no longer furnishes the pattern. The persons are fewer; and they are recreated to function in a continuous story. Thus Soliman and Peter the Hermit have definite roles; and Godfrey becomes the protagonist. The time is idealized to assemble the heroic past about the medieval enterprise of deliverance, to bring into one sequence the _chansons de geste_, the Carolingian cycle of romance, and several crusades. The struggle of the West with the East, no longer background or setting, is brought forward. It appears much less as the exploits of individuals, much more as an enterprise in common. Further it is an enterprise of religion, to rescue the holy places from unbelievers, to restore them to Christendom as a shrine of pilgrimage. It is animated by _pietas_, the Vergilian motive Christianized, the sense of mission. The individual warriors, no longer adventurers, are soldiers of the Cross. Though the actual crusades were medieval, they were still in men’s minds as unfinished. Boiardo laments the postponement of a recent proposal to revive them. Tasso writes not to further this, or any other present movement, but to present crusade as historic. He focuses all crusades in one historic action. His narrative of Godfrey and the paladins is controlled by the idea of crusade as deliverance.

Such singleness of purpose naturally reduces encomium. The expected rolls of honor celebrating the house of Este, are fewer and more detached.[38] Reduced also, with one important exception, are lyric interludes. Turning conventional themes to beauty, Tasso pauses less often to dilate emotion with Ariosto than to interpose reflection or the escape of pastoral.

[In the garden of Armida] See how the rose pricks modest and virgin from the green. Half-open yet, half-closed, the less she shows herself the fairer she. Lo! bold already, she reveals her breast naked; lo! again it droops and is not seen. It is not seen which had been desired by a thousand maids and a thousand lovers.

So passes, at the passing of a day, Of mortal life the flower and the green. April cannot be halted nor return To flower again, to green a second spring. Gather we roses handsome as the morn Of this our day, which soon will lose its calm, Roses of love. Ah! let us love betimes, When loving we may still be loved again (xvi. 14-15).[39]

Scenery, handled with the usual Italian restraint, is often woven expertly into the narrative. We are made to feel Jerusalem before it is described; and the grave and restrained description of the great Mass is inseparable from the action. Tasso’s subordination of literary means to literary function dominates his style. The frequency of his classical similes is apparent only on review; it does not challenge attention, much less interrupt. His classical allusions are not extraneous decoration, much less parade. His word-play is used oftenest to mark the close of a stanza. His verse is harmonized. These are various aspects of artistic conscience. Tasso never plays the virtuoso; he is too great an artist.

The onwardness of the whole story, which is most distinctive in this achievement, could hardly be carried out in Tasso’s time with entire consistency. Though there is none of the former easy shifting from tale to tale, though tactics and strategy are made to control and subordinate the traditional single combats, there are a few interpolated tales: Sofronia and Olindo in Canto II; Sven, isolated and picturesque in Canto VIII; Clorinda’s origin in Canto XII. Canto X is less a stage than a pause to tell what was said and thought on one side and on the other. The enchantment of the wood in Canto XIII is a parenthesis in the siege. The most serious deviation is for Rinaldo and Armida. Armida has too much stage—as Dido has in the _Aeneid_, yes, but with less warrant. While the siege waits, Cantos XIV and XV detail the infatuation of Rinaldo and linger over the journey for his recall. Nothing of this counts for the sequence of the poem but his defection at a critical point and his return. The rest is dilated for its own picturesqueness and passion. But the flaw is conspicuous only because Tasso’s sequence is beyond any previous attempt. The Rinaldo episode could be added without disturbance, here or there, in Boiardo’s poem, Ariosto’s, or Spenser’s. Tasso has taught us to expect more.

To a degree hitherto unattained in the romances, and rarely even attempted, his persons are characterized for their function. Even Armida thus functions early (Canto V) in the whole scheme as disintegrating. She is more than a type of enchantress, more than a personification of lust. Though toward the end her despair at losing Rinaldo may be too oratorical and too much like Dido’s, her revenge breaks down for love. In other cases, too, magic and demons are more acceptable because the visible human motives and action reduce them almost to figures of speech. For instance, the magic borrowed from the _Aeneid_ in Canto X is merely a device for having Soliman present, acting in his own fate. Personifications are rare; and even the stock hermit has more distinct function. Godfrey is much more than Arthur or Charlemagne. His largeness of view is at once intelligence and faith. A cardinal example of Tasso’s art is the creative use of the archangel St Michael. He comes as light and allies the heavenly host to the earthly. _Jerusalem Delivered_ is not only the integration of the traditional hero stories; it is also the realization of the Renaissance dream of epic.

(_b_) _Spenser_

Spenser’s most obvious peculiarity of style is archaism. Some of the _arts poétiques_ repeat perfunctorily the rhetorical advice to revive old words; but none of the other romancers follows it with conviction. Though archaism is historically one of the habits of sophistic oratory, with Spenser it was animated rather by the desire to revive the English poetic tradition. Failing in this through ignorance of language, he but made his diction more difficult.

The style of the _Faerie Queene_ is of its time in decorative classical similes. In classical allusions Spenser leans more heavily on legend and mythology. Sometimes he inserts lore gratuitously. Throughout he throws together classical and medieval, Christian, and pagan.[40] Occasionally mythology is made a vehicle for contemporary politics and religion. Usually decorative, his mythology is generally incidental, not functional. Thus his angels, too, are disappointing beside Tasso’s.

Following thus generally the Renaissance habit of learned elegance, Spenser shows his own hand in concreteness. He is less often content with mere epithet. He specifies even the details of a kitchen; and he specifies habitually in abundant sensory images, even of ugliness.

Therewith she spewd out of her filthie maw A floud of poyson horrible and blacke, Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunck so vildly that it forst him slacke His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe: Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke, And creeping sought way in the weedy grass. Her filthie parbreake all the place defiled has (I. i. 20).

Oftener picturesque, such vividness decorates even the traditional extravagance.

Thus long they trac’d and traverst to and fro, And tryde all waies, how each mote entrance make Into the life of his malignant foe; They hew’d their helmes, and plates asunder brake, As they had potshares bene; for nought mote slake Their greedy vengeaunces but goary blood, That at the last like to a purple lake Of bloudy gore congeal’d about them stood, Which from their riven sides forth gushed like a flood (VI. i. 37)

For Spenser’s diction is habitually overloaded.

The verse is surcharged with alliteration.

O how great _s_orrow my _s_ad _s_oule a_ss_aid (I. ii. 24).

Sometimes her head she fondly would a_g_uize With _g_audy _g_irlonds or _f_resh _f_lowers dight About her necke, or _r_ings of _r_ushes plight (II. vi. 7).

Day and night keeping _w_ary _w_atch and _w_ard For _f_eare least _F_orce or _F_raud should unaware Breake in (II. vii. 25).

That her _b_road _b_eauties _b_eam great _b_rightness threw (II. vii. 45).

Spenser’s metric, often obscured by fanciful spelling or uncertain pronunciation, is expertly varied. The Spenserian stanza, undoubtedly skillful, is nevertheless inferior to the Italian octave for narrative. It carries on with less ease. The sheer metrical task of the six completed books (3,732 stanzas, or 33,588 lines) was beyond Spenser’s revision. Some rhymes remain forced by stilted transposition, or upon insignificant words, as in the last line of the first example above, and in:

And henceforth ever wish that like succeed it may (I. i. 27).

And each the other from to rise restraine (II. ii. 64).

Though he uses expertly the variation of throwing together two stresses, he has also left many lines clogged with more than can be uttered without scanting or even stumbling. Thus in the second canto of the first book:

And to him calls “Rise, rise! unhappy swaine” (l. 4).

He could not rest; but did his stout heart eat (l. 6).

Did search, sore grieved in her gentle brest (l. 8).

O too deare love, love bought with death too deare! (l. 31).

In both style and verse the _Faerie Queene_ is the least facile of the chivalric romances.

For the composition of the whole, Spenser’s scheme is not narrative. The most descriptive of all the romancers, he has made his total effect not merely abundant separable ecphrasis but pageantry. For holding the pageantry together he proposes in his preface moral allegory, “fashioning a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This end, Caxton’s preface to Malory proclaims, is attained without allegory, by the romances themselves as stories. But now romance, having been first rewritten in Renaissance style, and then recomposed as Vergilian epic, is to be moralized. Further, the allegory is political. Artegall is Lord Grey de Wilton; Duessa and Radegund, Mary Queen of Scots; Archimago, the Pope. The poem is anti-Catholic with the Elizabethan political bias. Its attacks on abuses of the Church, no louder than those of _Piers Plowman_, are essentially different in that Elizabethan England has broken with the medieval vision of unity. Spenser speaks for the most self-sufficient of the rising nations, and makes its national mission his own. For the divine mission of the poet in Renaissance classical phrase means practically the claim of the poet to support by the court. The new nationalism but intensifies encomium. Spenser was a court poet in the same way as Ariosto, and to an even greater degree. He celebrates not only England, but the Queen and his immediate patrons. He prefixes a letter to Raleigh and seventeen poems to lords and ladies; and he interposes the usual references and allusions. None of the chivalric romances is more devoted to encomium than the _Faerie Queene_.

To weave all these strands into any large single sequence is probably beyond the capacity of allegory, and certainly beyond Spenser’s achievement. The legendary history of Britain in Book II has little enough to do with the theme of constancy; the long pastoral in Book VI with the theme of courtesy. Even single books, then, do not always hold together. Within a single virtue we have at most a medieval series of _exempla_. Even if Spenser had lived to subsume all his virtues in Magnificence, the Renaissance _virtù_, he would have achieved only the summary of a series. The earlier critics of the _Faerie Queene_ were embarrassed by their obligation to consider it as epic. Spenser’s quoting of the Horatian _in mediis rebus_ “A poet thrusteth into the middest” in his preface, and his beginning thus “A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine” are merely superficial. No long poem is farther removed from epic than the _Faerie Queene_. Dryden, in a digression of his _Essay on Satire_ (1693), said more significantly: “There is no uniformity of design in Spenser.”

Instead of being ruled out as merely Dryden’s preoccupation with French seventeenth-century “regularity,” this may well be pondered. Later criticism of the romantic period, indeed, was inclined to reply: “What of it? The _Faerie Queene_ offers so much else that we are content to dispense with uniformity of design.” But still later criticism has not been so sure; and, what is more important, many readers have balked. The poem does not carry through. Today those who have read the six books are inclined to boast. Doubtless the forming of a gentleman has less appeal as an idea than Tasso’s common enterprise of deliverance. Certainly the poetic machinery of knight errantry allegorized as the triumphs of virtues over vices has less appeal than crusade. Motive and method are insufficient to integrate the _Faerie Queene_ and carry it forward. Its very timeliness has faded into insularity. _Don Quixote_, full of seventeenth-century Spain, is significant to the whole western world; the _Faerie Queene_ is sometimes significant only in terms of Tudor politics. But probably the main reason for the waning of the _Faerie Queene_ is the insufficiency of the conception to animate a long poem and of the composition to carry it forward. Beside _Paradise Lost_, to say nothing of the _Divina Commedia_, it is seen to have “no uniformity of design” in the sense of lacking effective integration.