Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 - Leigh Hunt
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His great poem, however, proceeded. It was probably begun before he
entered the cardinal's service; certainly was in progress during the
early part of his engagement. This appears from a letter written to
Ippolito by his sister the Marchioness of Mantua, to whom he had sent
Ariosto at the beginning of the year 1509 to congratulate her on the
birth of a child. She gives her brother special thanks for sending his
message to her by "Messer Ludovico Ariosto," who had made her, she says,
pass two delightful days, with giving her an account of the poem he was
writing.[10] Isabella was the name of this princess; and the grateful
poet did not forget to embalm it in his verse.[11]
Ariosto's latest biographer, Panizzi, thinks he never served under any
other leader than the cardinal; but I cannot help being of opinion with a
former one, whom he quotes, that he once took arms under a captain of the
name of Pio, probably a kinsman of his friend Alberto Pio, to whom he
addresses a Latin poem. It was probably on occasion of some early disgust
with the cardinal; but I am at a loss to discover at what period of time.
Perhaps, indeed, he had the cardinal's permission, both to quit his
service, and return to it. Possibly he was not to quit it at all, except
according to events; but merely had leave given him to join a party in
arms, who were furthering Ippolito's own objects. Italy was full of
captains in arms and conflicting interests. The poet might even, at some
period of his life, have headed a troop under another cardinal, his
friend Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo the Tenth. He had certainly
been with him in various parts of Italy; and might have taken part in
some of his bloodless, if not his most military, equitations.
Be this as it may, it is understood that Ariosto was present at the
repulse given to the Venetians by Ippolito, when they came up the river
Po against Ferrara towards the close of the year 1509; though he was away
from the scene of action at his subsequent capture of their flotilla, the
poet having been despatched between the two events to Pope Julius the
Second on the delicate business of at once appeasing his anger with the
duke for resisting his allies, and requesting his help to a feudatary of
the church. Julius was in one of his towering passions at first, but
gave way before the address of the envoy, and did what he desired. But
Ariosto's success in this mission was nearly being the death of him in
another; for Alfonso having accompanied the French the year following
in their attack on Vicenza, where they committed cruelties of the same
horrible kind as have shocked Europe within a few months past,[12] the
poet's tongue, it was thought, might be equally efficacious a second
time; but Julius, worn out of patience with his too independent vassal,
who maintained an alliance with the French when the pope had ceased to
desire it, was to be appeased no longer. He excommunicated Alfonso, and
threatened to pitch his envoy into the Tiber; so that the poet was fain
to run for it, as the duke himself was afterwards, when he visited Rome
to be absolved. Would Julius have thus treated Ariosto, could he have
foreseen his renown? Probably he would. The greater the opposition to the
will, the greater the will itself. To chuck an accomplished envoy into
the river would have been much; but to chuck the immortal poet there,
laurels and all, in the teeth of the amazement of posterity, would have
been a temptation irresistible.
It was on this occasion that Ariosto, probably from inability to choose
his times or anodes of returning home, contracted a cough, which is
understood to have shortened his existence; so that Julius may have
killed him after all. But the pope had a worse enemy in his own
bosom--his violence--which killed himself in a much shorter period. He
died in little more than two years afterwards; and the poet's prospects
were all now of a very different sort--at least he thought so; for in
March 1513, his friend Giovanni de' Medici succeeded to the papacy, under
the title of Leo the Tenth.
Ariosto hastened to Rome, among a shoal of visitants, to congratulate the
new pope, perhaps not without a commission from Alfonso to see what he
could do for his native country, on which the rival Medici family never
ceased to have designs. The poet was full of hope, for he had known Leo
under various fortunes; had been styled by him not only a friend, but a
brother; and promised all sorts of participations of his prosperity. Not
one of them came. The visitor was cordially received. Leo stooped from
his throne, squeezed his hand, and kissed him on both his cheeks; but "at
night," says Ariosto, "I went all the way to the Sheep to get my supper,
wet through." All that Leo gave him was a "bull," probably the one
securing to him the profits of his _Orlando;_ and the poet's friend
Bibbiena--wit, cardinal, and kinsman of Berni--facilitated the bull, but
the receiver discharged the fees. He did not get one penny by promise,
pope, or friend.[13] He complains a little, but all in good humour; and
good-naturedly asks what he was to expect, when so many hungry kinsmen
and partisans were to be served first. Well and wisely asked too, and
with a superiority to his fortunes which Leo and Bibbiena might have
envied.
It is thought probable, however, that if the poet had been less a friend
to the house of Este, Leo would have kept his word with him, for their
intimacy had undoubtedly been of the most cordial description. But it is
supposed that Leo was afraid he should have a Ferrarese envoy constantly
about him, had he detained Ariosto in Rome. The poet, however, it is
admitted, was not a good hunter of preferment. He could not play the
assenter, and bow and importune: and sovereigns, however friendly they
may have been before their elevation, go the way of most princely flesh
when they have attained it. They like to take out a man's gratitude
beforehand, perhaps because they feel little security in it afterwards.
The elevation to the papacy of the cheerful and indulgent son of Lorenzo
de' Medici, after the troublous reign of Julius, was hailed with delight
by all Christendom, and nowhere more so than in the pope's native place,
Florence. Ariosto went there to see the spectacles; and there, in the
midst of them, he found himself robbed of his heart by the lady whom he
afterwards married. Her name was Alessandra Benucci. She was the widow of
one of the Strozzi family, whom he had known in Ferrara, and he had long
admired her. The poet, who, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, has recorded the
day on which he fell in love, which was that of St. John the Baptist (the
showy saint-days of the south offer special temptations to that effect),
dwells with minute fondness on the particulars of the lady's appearance.
Her dress was black silk, embroidered with two grape-bearing vines
intertwisted; and "between her serene forehead and the path that went
dividing in two her rich and golden tresses," was a sprig of laurel in
bud. Her observer, probably her welcome if not yet accepted lover, beheld
something very significant in this attire; and a mysterious poem, in
which he records a device of a black pen feathered with gold, which he
wore embroidered on a gown of his own, has been supposed to allude to it.
As every body is tempted to make his guess on such occasions, I take the
pen to have been the black-haired poet himself, and the golden feather
the tresses of the lady. Beautiful as he describes her, with a face full
of sweetness, and manners noble and engaging, he speaks most of the
charms of her golden locks. The black gown could hardly have implied her
widowhood: the allusion would not have been delicate. The vine belongs to
dramatic poets, among whom the lover was at that time to be classed, the
_Orlando_ not having appeared. Its duplification intimated another self;
and the crowning laurel was the success that awaited the heroic poet and
the conqueror of the lady's heart.[14]
The marriage was never acknowledged. The husband was in the receipt of
profits arising from church-offices, which put him into the condition of
the fellow of a college with us, who cannot marry so long as he retains
his fellowship: but it is proved to have taken place, though the date of
it is uncertain. Ariosto, in a satire written three or four years after
his falling in love, says he never intends either to marry or to take
orders; because, if he takes orders, he cannot marry; and if he marries,
he cannot take orders--that is to say, must give up his semi-priestly
emoluments. This is one of the falsehoods which the Roman Catholic
religion thinks itself warranted in tempting honest men to fall into;
thus perplexing their faith as to the very roots of all faith, and
tending to maintain a sensual hypocrisy, which can do no good to the
strongest minds, and must terribly injure the weak.
Ariosto's love for this lady I take to have been one of the causes of
dissatisfaction between him and the cardinal. "Fortunately for the poet,"
as Panizzi observes, Ippolito was not always in Ferrara. He travelled
in Italy, and he had an archbishopric in Hungary, the tenure of which
compelled occasional residence. His company was not desired in Rome, so
that he was seldom there. Ariosto, however, was an amusing companion; and
the cardinal seems not to have liked to go anywhere without him. In the
year 1515 he was attended by the poet part of the way on a journey to
Rome and Urbino; but Ariosto fell ill, and had leave to return. He
confesses that his illness was owing to an anxiety of love; and he even
makes an appeal to the cardinal's experience of such feelings; so that it
might seem he was not afraid of Ippolito's displeasure in that direction.
But the weakness which selfish people excuse in themselves becomes a
"very different thing" (as they phrase it) in another. The appeal to the
cardinal's experience might only have exasperated him, in its assumption
of the identity of the case. However, the poet was, at all events, left
this time to the indulgence of his love and his poetry; and in the
course of the ensuing year, a copy of the first edition of the _Orlando
Furioso_, in forty cantos, was put into the hands of the illustrious
person to whom it was dedicated.
The words in which the cardinal was pleased to express himself on this
occasion have become memorable. "Where the devil, Master Lodovick," said
the reverend personage, "have you picked up such a parcel of trumpery?"
The original term is much stronger, aggravating the insult with
indecency. There is no equivalent for it in English; and I shall not
repeat it in Italian. "It is as low and indecent," says Panizzi, "as
any in the language." Suffice it to say that, although the age was not
scrupulous in such matters, it was one of the last words befitting the
lips of the reverend Catholic; and that, when Ippolito of Este
(as Ginguene observes) made that speech to the great poet, "he
uttered--prince, cardinal, and mathematician as he was--an
impertinence."[15]
Was the cardinal put out of temper by a device which appeared in this
book? On the leaf succeeding the title-page was the privilege for its
publication, granted by Leo in terms of the most flattering personal
recognition.[16] So far so good; unless the unpoetical Este patron was
not pleased to see such interest taken in the book by the tasteful Medici
patron. But on the back of this leaf was a device of a hive, with the
bees burnt out of it for their honey, and the motto, "Evil for good"
(_Pro bono malum_). Most biographers are of opinion that this device was
aimed at the cardinal's ill return for all the sweet words lavished on
him and his house. If so, and supposing Ariosto to have presented the
dedication-copy in person, it would have been curious to see the faces of
the two men while his Eminence was looking at it. Some will think that
the good-natured poet could hardly have taken such an occasion of
displaying his resentment. But the device did not express at whom it was
aimed: the cardinal need not have applied it to himself if he did not
choose, especially as the book was full of his praises; and good-natured
people will not always miss an opportunity of covertly inflicting a
sting. The device, at all events, shewed that the honey-maker had got
worse than nothing by his honey; and the house of Este could not say they
had done any thing to contradict it.
I think it probable that neither the poet's device nor the cardinal's
speech were forgotten, when, in the course of the next year, the parties
came to a rupture in consequence of the servant's refusing to attend his
master into Hungary. Ariosto excused himself on account of the state of
his health and of his family. He said that a cold climate did not agree
with him; that his chest was affected, and could not bear even the stoves
of Hungary; and that he could not, in common decency and humanity, leave
his mother in her old age, especially as all the rest of the family were
away but his youngest sister, whose interests he had also to take care
of. But Ippolito was not to be appeased. The public have seen, in a late
female biography, a deplorable instance of the unfeelingness with which
even a princess with a reputation for religion could treat the declining
health and unwilling retirement of a poor slave in her service, fifty
times her superior in every thing but servility. Greater delicacy was
not to be expected of the military priest. The nobler the servant, the
greater the desire to trample upon him and keep him at a disadvantage. It
is a grudge which rank owes to genius, and which it can only wave when
its possessor is himself "one of God Almighty's gentlemen." I do not mean
in point of genius, which is by no means the highest thing in the world,
whatever its owners may think of it; but in point of the highest of all
things, which is nobleness of heart. I confess I think Ariosto was wrong
in expecting what he did of a man he must have known so well, and in
complaining so much of courts, however good-humouredly. A prince occupies
the station he does, to avert the perils of disputed successions, and
not to be what his birth cannot make him--if nature has not supplied the
materials. Besides, the cardinal, in his quality of a mechanical-minded
man with no taste, might with reason have complained of his servant's
attending to poetry when it was "not in his bond;" when it diverted
him from the only attentions which his employer understood or desired.
Ippolito candidly confessed, as Ariosto himself tells us, that he not
only did not care for poetry, but never gave his attendant one stiver in
patronage of it, or for any thing whatsoever but going his journeys and
doing as he was bidden.[17] On the other hand, the cardinal's payments
were sorry ones; and the poet might with justice have thought, that he
was not bound to consider them an equivalent for the time be was expected
to give up. The only thing to have been desired in this case was, that he
should have said so; and, in truth, at the close of the explanation which
he gave on the subject to his friends at court, he did--boldly desiring
them, as became him, to tell the cardinal, that if his eminence expected
him to be a "serf" for what he received, he should decline the bargain;
and that he preferred the humblest freedom and his studies to a slavery
so preposterous.[18] The truth is, the poet should have attached himself
wholly to the Medici. Had he not adhered to the duller house, he might
have led as happy a life with the pope as Pulci did with the pope's
father; perhaps have been made a cardinal, like his friends Bembo and
Sadolet. But then we might have lost the _Orlando_.
The only sinecure which the poet is now supposed to have retained, was a
grant of twenty-five crowns every four months on the episcopal chancery
of Milan: so, to help out his petty income, he proceeded to enter into
the service of Alfonso, which shews that both the brothers were not angry
with him. He tells us, that he would gladly have had no new master, could
he have helped it; but that, if he must needs serve, he would rather
serve the master of every body else than a subordinate one. At this
juncture he had a brief prospect of being as free as he wished; for an
uncle died leaving a large landed property still known as the Ariosto
lands (_Le Arioste_); but a convent demanded it on the part of one of
their brotherhood, who was a natural son of this gentleman; and a more
formidable and ultimately successful claim was advanced in a court of
law by the Chamber of the Duchy of Ferrara, the first judge in the cause
being the duke's own steward and a personal enemy of the poet's. Ariosto,
therefore, while the suit was going on, was obliged to content himself
with his fees from Milan and a monthly allowance which he received from
the duke of "about thirty-eight shillings," together with provisions
for three servants and two horses. He entered the duke's service in the
spring of 1518, and remained in it for the rest of his life. But it was
not so burden-some as that of the cardinal; and the consequence of the
poet's greater leisure was a second edition of the _Furioso_, in the year
1521, with additions and corrections; still, however, in forty cantos
only. It appears, by a deed of agreement,[19] that the work was printed
at the author's expense; that he was to sell the bookseller one hundred
copies for sixty livres (about 5_l_. 12_s_.) on condition of the book's
not being sold at the rate of more than sixteen sous (1_s_. 8_d_.); that
the author was not to give, sell, or allow to be sold, any copy of the
book at Ferrara, except by the bookseller; that the bookseller, after
disposing of the hundred copies, was to have as many more as he chose on
the same terms; and that, on his failing to require a further supply,
Ariosto was to be at liberty to sell his volumes to whom he pleased.
"With such profits," observes Panizzi, "it was not likely that the poet
would soon become independent;" and it may be added, that he certainly
got nothing by the first edition, whatever he may have done by the
second. He expressly tells us, in the satire which he wrote on declining
to go abroad with Ippolito, that all his poetry had not procured him
money enough to purchase a cloak.[20] Twenty years afterwards, when he
was dead, the poem was in such request, that, between 1542 and 1551,
Panizzi calculates there must have been a sale of it in Europe to the
amount of a hundred thousand copies.[21]
The second edition of the _Furioso_ did not extricate the author from
very serious difficulties; for the next year he was compelled to apply
to either to relieve him from his necessities, or permit him to look for
some employment more profitable than the ducal service. The answer of
this prince, who was now rich, but had always been penurious, and who
never laid out a farthing, if he could help it, except in defence of his
capital, was an appointment of Ariosto to the government of a district in
a state of anarchy, called Garfagnana, which had nominally returned to
his rule in consequence of the death of Leo, who had wrested it from him.
It was a wild spot in the Apennines, on the borders of the Ferrarese and
papal territories. Ariosto was there three years, and is said to have
reduced it to order; but, according to his own account, he had very
doubtful work of it. The place was overrun with banditti, including the
troops commissioned to suppress them. It required a severer governor than
he was inclined to be; and Alfonso did not attend to his requisitions for
supplies. The candid and good-natured poet intimates that the duke might
have given him the appointment rather for the governor's sake than the
people's; and the cold, the loneliness and barrenness of the place, and,
above all, his absence from the object of his affections, oppressed him.
He did not write a verse for twelve months: he says he felt like a bird
moulting[22]. The best thing got out of it was an anecdote for posterity.
The poet was riding out one day with a few attendants--some say walking
out in a fit of absence of mind--when he found himself in the midst of
a band of outlaws, who, in a suspicious manner, barely suffered him
to pass. A reader of Mrs. Radcliffe might suppose them a band of
_condottieri_, under the command of some profligate desperado; and such
perhaps they were. The governor had scarcely gone by, when the leader of
the band, discovering who he was, came riding back with much earnestness,
and making his obeisance to the poet, said, that he never should have
allowed him to pass in that manner had he known him to be the Signor
Ludovico Ariosto, author of the _Orlando Furioso_; that his own name was
Filippo Pacchione (a celebrated personage of his order); and that his men
and himself, so far from doing the Signor displeasure, would have the
honour of conducting him back to his castle. "And so they did," says
Baretti, "entertaining him all along the way with the various excellences
they had discerned in his poem, and bestowing upon it the most rapturous
praises[23]."
On his return from Garfagnana, Ariosto is understood to have made several
journeys in Italy, either with or without the duke his master; some of
them to Mantua, where it has been said that he was crowned with laurel by
the Emperor Charles the Fifth. But the truth seems to be, that he only
received a laureate diploma: it does not appear that Charles made him any
other gift. His majesty, and the whole house of Este, and the pope, and
all the other Italian princes, left that to be done by the imperial
general, the celebrated Alfonso Davallos, Marquess of Vasto, to whom he
was sent on some mission by the Duke of Ferrara, and who settled on him
an annuity of a hundred golden ducats; "the only reward," says Panizzi,
"which we find to have been conferred on Ariosto expressly as a
poet."[24] Davallos was one of the conquerors of Francis the First,
young and handsome, and himself a writer of verses. The grateful poet
accordingly availed himself of his benefactor's accomplishments to make
him, in turn, a present of every virtue under the sun. Caesar was not so
liberal, Nestor so wise, Achilles so potent, Nireus so beautiful, nor
even Ladas, Alexander's messenger, so swift.[25] Ariosto was now verging
towards the grave; and he probably saw in the hundred ducats a golden
sunset of his cares.
Meantime, however, the poet had built a house, which, although small, was
raised with his own money; so that the second edition of the _Orlando_
may have realised some profits at last. He recorded the pleasant fact in
an inscription over the door, which has become celebrated:
"Parva, sed apta mihi; sed nulli obnoxia; sed non
Sordida; parta meo sed tamen acre domus."
Small, yet it suits me; is of no offence;
Was built, not meanly, at my own expense.
What a pity (to compare great things with small) that he had not as long
a life before him to enjoy it, as Gil Blas had with his own comfortable
quotation over his retreat at Lirias![26]
The house still remains; but the inscription unfortunately became
effaced; though the following one remains, which was added by his son
Virginio:
"Sic domus haec Areostea
Propitios habeat deos, olim ut Pindarica."
Dear to the gods, whatever come to pass,
Be Ariosto's house, as Pindar's was.
This was an anticipation--perhaps the origin--of Milton's sonnet about
his own house, addressed to "Captains and Collonels," during the civil
war.[27]
Davallos made the poet his generous present in the October of the year
1513; and in the same month of the year following the _Orlando_ was
published as it now stands, with various insertions throughout, chiefly
stories, and six additional cantos. Cardinal Ippolito had been dead some
time; and the device of the beehive was exchanged for one of two vipers,
with a hand and pair of shears cutting out their tongues, and the motto,
"Thou hast preferred ill-will to good" (_Dilexisti malitiam super
benignitatem_). The allusion is understood to have been to certain
critics whose names have all perished, unless Sperone (of whom we shall
hear more by and by) was one of them. The appearance of this edition was
eagerly looked for; but the trouble of correcting the press, and the
destruction of a theatre by fire which had been built under the poet's
direction, did his health no good in its rapidly declining condition; and
after suffering greatly from an obstruction, he died, much attenuated, on
the sixth day of June, 1533. His decease, his fond biographers have
told us, took place "about three in the afternoon;" and he was "aged
fifty-eight years, eight months, and twenty-eight days." His body,
according to his direction, was taken to the church of the Benedictines
during the night by four men, with only two tapers, and in the most
private and simple manner. The monks followed it to the grave out of
respect, contrary to their usual custom.