an epic of 100,000 lines. The fascinations of Angelica, the achievements of Orlando and Rinaldo, the barbaric chivalry of Rodomonte and Marfisa, even the shock of Christian and Pagan armies, sink into insignificance before the interest that environs Bradamante toward the poem's ending. Victorious art was needed for the achievement of this success. Like a pyramid, upon the top of which a sculptor places a gilded statue, up grows this voluminous romance, covering acres of the plain at first, but narrowing to a point whereon the poet sets his heroes of the House of Este.[5]

Though the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante forms the consummation of the Furioso, it would show want of sympathy with Ariosto's intention to imagine that he wrote his poem for this incident alone. The opening lines of the first canto are explicit:

"The ladies, the knights, the feats of arms, the loves, the courtesies, the bold adventures are my theme." In one word, his purpose was to paint the world of chivalry. Agramante's expedition into France gives him the time; Orlando's madness is an episode; Ruggiero's marriage forms a fitting climax. But his true subject-matter is chivalry—the dream-world of love, honor, magic, marvel, courtesy, adventure, that afforded to his fancy scope for its most brilliant imaginings. In Ariosto's age chivalry was a thing of the past, even among the nations of the North. It is true that Francis I. was kneeling on the battlefield before Bayard to receive the honor of knighthood in the names of Oliver and Roland. It is true that Henry VIII. was challenging his Most Christian cousin to a kingly settlement of their disputed claims in a pitched field. But the spirit of the times was not in these picturesque incidents. Charles V., who incarnated modern diplomacy, dynastic despotism, and autocratic statecraft, was deciding the destinies of Europe. Gunpowder had already revolutionized the art of feudal war.[6] The order of the Golden Fleece, monarchical and pompous, had eclipsed the orders of the Temple and S. John. What remained of chivalry formed a splendid adjunct to Court-equipage; and the knight errant, if he ever existed, was merged in the modern gentleman. Far less of real vitality had chivalry among the cities of the South, in the land of Popes like Sixtus, adventurers like Cesare Borgia, princes like Lodovico Sforza, commercial aristocracies like the Republic of S. Mark. A certain ideal of life, summed up in the word cortesia, existed in Italy; where numerous petty Courts had become the school of refined sentiment and manners. But this was not what we mean by chivalry, and even this was daily falsified by the cynicism and corruption of the princes and their servants.[7] Castiglione's Cortegiano, the handbook of that new ideal, must be read by the light of the Roman diaries and Machiavelli's speculative essays. The Renaissance was rapidly destroying the feudal fabric of ideas throughout Europe. Those ideas were always weak in Italy, and it was in Italy that the modern intellect first attained to self-consciousness. Therefore the magic and marvels of romance, the restless movement of knight-errantry, the love of peril and adventure for their own sake, the insane appetite for combat, the unpractical virtues no less than the capricious willfulness of Paladins and Saracens, presented to the age and race of men like Guicciardini nothing but a mad unprofitable medley. Dove avete trovato, messer Lodovico, tante minchionerie? was no unpardonable question for a Cardinal to make, when he opened the Furioso in the Pontificate of Clement VII. Of all this Ariosto was doubtless well aware. Yet he recognized in the Orlando a fit framework for the exercise of his unrivaled painter's power. He knew that the magic world he had evoked was but a plaything of the fancy, a glittering bubble blown by the imagination. This did not suggest an afterthought of hesitation or regret: for he could make the plaything beautiful. The serious problem of his life was to construct a miracle of art, organically complete, harmonious as a whole and lovely in the slightest details. Yet he never forgot that chivalry was a dream; and thus there is an airy unsubstantiality in his romantic world. His characters, though they are so much closer to us in time and sympathy, lack the real humanity of Achilles in the Iliad or of Penelope in the Odyssey. They do not live for us, because they were not living for the poet, but painted with perfection from an image in his brain. He stood aloof from the work of his own hands, and turned it round for his recreation, viewing it with a smile of conscious and delighted irony. Nowhere did he suffer himself to be immersed in his own visionary universe. That wonderland of love and laughter, magic and adventure, which so amused his fancy that once he walked from Carpi to Ferrara in slippers dreaming of it, was to him no more solid than the shapes of clouds we form, no more durable than the rime that melts before the sun to nothing. The smile with which he contemplates this fleeting image, is both tender and ironical. Sarcasm and pathos mingle on his lips and in his eyes; for while he knows it to be but a vision, he has used it as the form of all his thought and feeling, making of this dream a mirror for the world in which his days were spent.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of precisely ascertaining the main subject of the Orlando Furioso, the unity of the poem is close, subtle, serried. But it is the unity of a vast piece of tapestry rather than of architecture. There is nothing massive in its structure, no simple and yet colossal design like that which forms the strength of the Iliad or the Divine Comedy. The delicacy of its connecting links, and the perpetual shifting of its scene distinguish it as a romantic poem from the true epic. The threads by which the scheme is held together, are slight as gossamer; the principal figures are confounded with a multitude of subordinate characters; the interest is divided between a succession of episodical narratives. At no point are we aroused by the shock of a supreme sensation, such as that which the death of Patroclus in the Iliad communicates. The rage of Rodomonte inside the walls of Paris has been cited as an instance of heroic grandeur. But the effect is exaggerated. Ariosto is too much amused with the extravagant situation for the blustering of his Pagan to arouse either terror or surprise. When we compare this episode with the appearance of Achilles in the trench, the elaborate similes and prolonged description of the Italian poet are as nothing side by side with the terrific shout of the Greek hero stung at last into activity. And what is true of Rodomonte may be said of all the studied situations in the Furioso. Ariosto pushes every motive to the verge of the burlesque, heightening the passion of love till it becomes insanity, and the sense of honor till it passes over