now scattered in
little groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures in the style
of Sir Launcelot or Amadis; now gathered into a compact army to crash
upon each other as at Roncevaux; or else wildly flung up by the poet to
alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns of Jamschid, in
the isles where Oberon's mother kept Caesar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in
the boats, entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and Huon of
Bordeaux; a constant alternation of individual adventure and wholesale
organized campaigns, conceived and carried out with admirable ingenuity.
So much for the deeds of arms. The deeds of love are also compounded of
Carolingian and Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance
feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making between too gallant
knights and too impressionable ladies; licentious amours which we
moderns lay at the door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the
licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins and Huons of
mediaeval poetry, of the sentimental Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of
the fourteenth century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in Rogers
and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many degrees worse. A moral
improvement also (for all the immorality of the Renaissance) in the
eschewing of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian romances, and
the appropriation to legitimately faithful love of the poetical devotion
which Tristram and Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are
added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two essentially Italian
elements: something of the nobility of passion of the Platonic
sonneteers; and a good dose of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing
immoral anecdote gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the
stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and sometimes _bond fide_
serious, is never earnest. All this is a purely artistic world, a world
of decorative arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever to
move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian tale of Isabella and
the Basil Plant, or Constance and Martuccio. On the other hand, there is
none of the grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto are not
in earnest; they are well aware that their heroes and heroines are mere
modern men and women tricked out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven
wildly about from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys--on
Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother round and round the
garden p