Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers Volume I Part 20

Where now are all the woods and forests drear, Wolves, tigers, bears, and dragons? Alas, here!

These are all very natural thoughts, and such, no doubt, as would actually pa.s.s through the mind of the young lady, in the candour of desolation; but the mechanical iteration of her mode of putting them renders them irresistibly ludicrous. It reminds us of the wager laid by the poor queen in the play of _Richard the Second_, when she overhears the discourse of the gardener:

"My wretchedness _unto a roar of pins_, They'll talk of state."

Did Pulci expect his friend Lorenzo to keep a grave face during the recital of these pa.s.sages? Or did he flatter himself, that the comprehensive mind of his hearer could at one and the same time be amused with the banter of some old song and the pathos of the new one?[9]

The want both of good love-episodes and of descriptions of external nature, in the _Morgante_, is remarkable; for Pulci's tenderness of heart is constantly manifest, and he describes himself as being almost absorbed in his woods. That he understood love well in all its force and delicacy is apparent from a pa.s.sage connected with this pavilion. The fair embroiderer, in presenting it to her idol Rinaldo, undervalues it as a gift which his great heart, nevertheless, will not disdain to accept; adding, with the true lavishment of the pa.s.sion, that "she wishes she could give him the sun;" and that if she were to say, after all, that it was her own hands which had worked the pavilion, she should be wrong, for Love himself did it. Rinaldo wishes to thank her, but is so struck with her magnificence and affection, that the words die on his lips. The way also in which another of these loving admirers of Paladins conceives her affection for one of them, and persuades a vehemently hostile suitor quietly to withdraw his claims by presenting him with a ring and a graceful speech, is in a taste as high as any thing in Boiardo, and superior to the more animal pa.s.sion of the love in their great successor.[10] Yet the tenderness of Pulci rather shews itself in the friendship of the Paladins for one another, and in perpetual little escapes of generous and affectionate impulse. This is one of the great charms of the _Morgante_. The first adventure in the book is Orlando's encounter with three giants in behalf of a good abbot, in whom he discovers a kinsman; and this goodness and relationship combined move the Achilles of Christendom to tears. Morgante, one of these giants, who is converted, becomes a sort of squire to his conqueror, and takes such a liking to him, that, seeing him one day deliver himself not without peril out of the clutches of a devil, he longs to go and set free the whole of the other world from devils. Indeed there is no end to his affection for him. Rinaldo and other Paladins, meantime, cannot rest till they have set out in search of Orlando. They never meet or part with him without manifesting a tenderness proportionate to their valour,--the old Homeric candour of emotion. The devil Ashtaroth himself, who is a great and proud devil, a.s.sures Rinaldo, for whom he has conceived a regard, that there is good feeling (_gentilezza_) even in h.e.l.l; and Rinaldo, not to hurt the feeling, answers that he has no doubt of it, or of the capability of "friendship" in that quarter; and he says he is as "sorry to part with him as with a brother." The pa.s.sage will be found in our abstract. There are no such devils as these in Dante; though Milton has something like them:

"Devil with devil d.a.m.n'd Firm concord holds: men only disagree."

It is supposed that the character of Ashtaroth, which is a very new and extraordinary one, and does great honour to the daring goodness of Pulci's imagination, was not lost upon Milton, who was not only acquainted with the poem, but expressly intimates the pleasure he took in it.[11] Rinaldo advises this devil, as Burns did Lucifer, to "take a thought and mend." Ashtaroth, who had been a seraph, takes no notice of the advice, except with a waving of the recollection of happier times.

He bids the hero farewell, and says he has only to summon him in order to receive his aid. This retention of a sense of his former angelical dignity has been noticed by Foscolo and Panizzi, the two best writers on these Italian poems.[12] A Calvinist would call the expression of the sympathy "hardened." A humanist knows it to be the result of a spirit exquisitely softened. An unbounded tenderness is the secret of all that is beautiful in the serious portion of our author's genius. Orlando's good-natured giant weeps even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte; and the awful hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the heavens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has wronged it.

A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, perhaps, owing the best part of its charmingness to its being connected with the same feeling, is his wit. Foscolo, it is true, says it is, in general, more severe than refined; and it is perilous to differ with such a critic on such a point; for much of it, unfortunately, is lost to a foreign reader, in consequence of its dependance on the piquant old Tuscan idiom, and on popular sayings and allusions. Yet I should think it impossible for Pulci in general to be severe at the expense of some more agreeable quality; and I am sure that the portion of his wit most obvious to a foreigner may claim, if not to have originated, at least to have been very like the style of one who was among its declared admirers,--and who was a very polished writer,--Voltaire. It consists in treating an absurdity with an air as if it were none; or as if it had been a pure matter of course, erroneously mistaken for an absurdity.

Thus the good abbot, whose monastery is blockaded by the giants (for the virtue and simplicity of his character must be borne in mind), after observing that the ancient fathers in the desert had not only locusts to eat, but manna, which he has no doubt was rained down on purpose from heaven, laments that the "relishes" provided for himself and his brethren should have consisted of "showers of stones." The stones, while the abbot is speaking, come thundering down, and he exclaims, "For G.o.d's sake, knight, come in, for the manna is falling!" This is exactly in the style of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_. So when Margutte is asked what he believes in, and says he believes in "neither black nor blue,"

but in a good capon, "whether roast or boiled," the reader is forcibly reminded of Voltaire's Traveller, _Scarmentado_, who, when he is desired by the Tartars to declare which of their two parties he is for, the party of the black-mutton or the white-mutton, answers, that the dish is "equally indifferent to him, provided it is tender." Voltaire, however, does injustice to Pulci, when he pretends that in matters of belief he is like himself,--a mere scoffer. The friend of Lucrezia Tornabuoni has evidently the tenderest veneration for all that is good and lovely in the Catholic faith; and whatever liberties he might have allowed himself in professed _extravaganzas_, when an age without Church-authority encouraged them, and a reverend canon could take part in those (it must be acknowledged) unseemly "high jinks," he never, in the _Morgante_, when speaking in his own person, and not in that of the worst characters, intimates disrespect towards any opinion which he did not hold to be irrelevant to a right faith. It is observable that his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, and a most extraordinary personage. He is the first unmitigated blackguard in fiction, and is the greatest as well as first. Pulci is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes it for his amus.e.m.e.nt, he gives him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his consideration, nevertheless, towards the poor selfish wretch who had had no better training.

To this wit and this pathos let the reader add a style of singular ease and fluency,--rhymes often the most unexpected, but never at a loss,--a purity of Tuscan acknowledged by every body, and ranking him among the authorities of the language,--and a modesty in speaking of his own pretensions equalled only by his enthusiastic extolments of genius in others; and the reader has before him the lively and affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci, the precursor, and in some respects exemplar, of Ariosto, and, in Milton's opinion, a poet worth reading for the "good use" that may be made of him. It has been strangely supposed that his friend Politian, and Ficino the Platonist, not merely helped him with their books (as he takes a pride in telling us), but wrote a good deal of the latter part of the Morgante, particularly the speculations in matters of opinion. As if (to say nothing of the difference of style) a man of genius, however lively, did not go through the gravest reflections in the course of his life, or could not enter into any theological or metaphysical question, to which he chose to direct his attention. Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or even the disciple of Plato.

[Footnote 1: _Literature of the South of Europe_, Thomas Roscoe's Translation, vol. ii. p.54. For the opinions of other writers, here and elsewhere alluded to, see Tiraboschi (who is quite frightened at him), _Storia della Poesia Italiana_, cap. v. sect. 25; Gravina, who is more so, _Della Ragion Poetica_ (quoted in Ginguene, as below); Crescimbeni, _Commentari Intorno all' Istoria della Poesia_, &c. lib. vi. cap. 3 (Mathias's edition), and the biographical additions to the same work, 4to, Rome, 1710, vol. ii. part ii. p. 151, where he says that Pulci was perhaps the "modestest sad most temperate writer" of his age ("il pin modesto e moderato"); Ginguene, _Histoire Litteraire d'Italie_, tom. iv.

p. 214; Foscolo, in the _Quarterly Review_, as further on; Panizzi on the _Romantic Poetry of the Italians_, ditto; Stebbing, _Lives of the Italian Poets_, second edition, vol, i.; and the first volume of _Lives of Literary and Scientific Men_, in _Lardner's Cyclopaedia_.]

[Footnote 2: Canto xxv. The pa.s.sage will be found in the present volume.]

[Footnote 3: Id. And this also.]

[Footnote 4: Canto xxvii. stanza 2.

"S' altro ajuto qui non si dimostra, Sara pur tragedia la istoria nostra.

Ed io pur commedia pensato avea Iscriver del mio Carlo finalmente, Ed _Alcuin_ cos mi promettea," &c. ]

[Footnote 5:

"In fine to adorerai l'Ariosto, tu ammirerei il Ta.s.so, ma tu amerai il Pulci."--_Parn. Ital_. vol. ix. p. 344.]

[Footnote 6: Ellis's _Specimens of Early English Poetical Romances_, vol. ii. p. 287; and Panizzi's _Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians_; in his edition of Boiardo and Ariosto, vol. i. p.

113.]

[Footnote 7: _De Vita Caroli Magni et Rolandi Historia_, &c. cap. xviii.

p. 39 (Ciampi's edition). The giant in Turpin is named Ferracutus, or Fergus. He was of the race of Goliath, had the strength of forty men, and was twenty cubits high. During the suspension of a mortal combat with Orlando, they discuss the mysteries of the Christian faith, which its champion explains by a variety of similes and the most beautiful beggings of the question; after which the giant stakes the credit of their respective beliefs on the event of their encounter.]

[Footnote 8: Canto xix. st. 21.]

[Footnote 9: When a proper name happens to be a part of the tautology, the look is still more extraordinary. Orlando is remonstrating with Rinaldo on his being unseasonably in love:

"Ov' e, Rinaldo, la tua gagliardia?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo sommo potere?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo senno di pria?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo antivedere?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, la tua fantasia?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, l' arme e 'l tuo destriere?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, la tua gloria e fama?

Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo core? a la dama."

Canto xvi. st. 50.

Oh where, Rinaldo, is thy gagliardize?

Oh where, Rinaldo, is thy might indeed?

Oh where, Rinaldo, thy repute for wise?

Oh where, Rinaldo, thy sagacious heed?

Oh where, Rinaldo, thy free-thoughted eyes?

Oh where, Rinaldo, thy good arms and steed?

Oh where, Rinaldo, thy renown and glory?

Oh where, Rinaldo, _thou?_--In a love-story.

The incessant repet.i.tion of the names in the burdens of modern songs is hardly so bad as this. The single line questions and answers in the Greek drama were nothing to it. Yet there is a still more extraordinary play upon words in canto xxiii. st. 49, consisting of the description of a hermitage. It is the only one of the kind which I remember in the poem, and would have driven some of our old hunters after alliteration mad with envy:--

"La _casa cosa_ parea _bretta_ e _brutta_, _Vinta_ dal _vento_; e la _notta_ e la _notte_ _Stilla_ le _stelle_, ch' a _tetto_ era _tutto_: Del _pane appena_ ne _dette_ ta' _dotte_.

_Pere_ avea _pure_, e qualche _fratta frutta_; E _svina_ e _svena_ di _botto_ una _botte_ _Poscia_ per _pesci lasche_ prese a _l'esca_; Ma il _letto allotta_ a la _frasca_ fu _fresca_."

This _holy hole_ was a vile _thin_-built _thing_, _Blown_ by the _blast_; the _night nought_ else o'erhead But _staring stars_ the _rude roof_ entering; Their _sup_ of _supper_ was no _splendid spread_; _Poor pears_ their fare, and such-_like libelling_ Of quantum suff;--their _b.u.t.t_ all _but_;--_bad bread_;-- A _flash_ of _fish_ instead of _flush_ of _flesh_; Their bed a _frisk al-fresco_, _freezing fresh_.

Really, if Sir Philip Sidney and other serious and exquisite gentlemen had not sometimes taken a positively grave interest in the like pastimes of paronomasia, one should hardly conceive it possible to meet with them even in tragi-comedy. Did Pulci find these also in his ballad-authorities? If his Greek-loving critics made objections here, they had the advantage of him: unless indeed they too, in their Alexandrian predilections, had a sneaking regard for certain shapings of verse into altars and hatchets, such as have been charged upon Theocritus himself, and which might be supposed to warrant any other conceit on occasion.]

[Footnote 10: See, in the original, the story of Meridiana, canto vii.

King Manfredonio has come in loving hostility against her to endeavour to win her affection by his prowess. He finds her a.s.sisted by the Paladins, and engaged by her own heart to Uliviero; and in he despair of his discomfiture, expresses a wish to die by her hand. Meridiana, with graceful pity, begs his acceptance of a jewel, and recommends him to go home with his army; to which he grievingly consents. This indeed is beautiful; and perhaps I ought to have given an abstract of it, as a specimen of what Pulci could have done in this way, had he chosen.]

[Footnote 11: "Perhaps it was from that same politic drift that the devil whipt St. Jerome in a lenten dream for reading Cicero; or else it was a fantasm bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading and not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurrile Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next, to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?"--_Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, Prose Works, folio, 1697, p. 378. I quote the pa.s.sage as extracted by Mr. Merivale in the preface to his "Orlando in Roncesvalles,"--_Poems_, vol. ii. p. 41.]

[Footnote 12: Ut sup. p. 222. Foscolo's remark is to be found in his admirable article on the _Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians_, in the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xxi. p. 525.]

HUMOURS OF GIANTS

Twelve Paladins had the Emperor Charlemagne in his court; and the most wise and famous of them was Orlando. It is of him I am about to speak, and of his friend Morgante, and of Gan the traitor, who beguiled him to his death in Roncesvalles, where he sounded his horn so mightily after the dolorous rout.

It was Easter, and Charles had all his court with him in Paris, making high feast and triumph. There was Orlando, the first among them, and Ogier the Dane, and Astolfo the Englishman, and Ansuigi; and there came Angiolin of Bayonne, and Uliviero, and the gentle Berlinghieri; and there was also Avolio and Avino, and Otho of Normandy, and Richard, and the wise Namo, and the aged Salamon, and Walter of Monlione, and Baldwin who was the son of the wretched Gan. The good emperor was too happy, and oftentimes fairly groaned for joy at seeing all his Paladins together.

Now Morgante, the only surviving brother, had a palace made, after giant's fashion, of earth, and boughs, and shingles, in which he shut himself up at night. Orlando knocked, and disturbed him from his sleep, so that he came staring to the door like a madman, for he had had a bewildering dream.

"Who knocks there?" quoth he.

"You will know too soon," answered Orlando; "I am come to make you do penance for your sins, like your brothers. Divine Providence has sent me to avenge the wrongs of the monks upon the whole set of you. Doubt it not; for Pa.s.samonte and Alabastro are already as cold as a couple of pilasters.".