Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/17

INTRODUCTION part rogues—even Charlemagne is a besotted old dotard—and its events have no dramatic sequence. The importance of the Morgante lies in the fact that it is the first document in the long proof that the romance of Chivalry, as Germanic nations understand it, did not exist for the Italian. These ponderous and unique Italian poems are packed with all the paraphernalia of romance, enchanted islands, magicians, devils and hippogriffs—and in spite of it all there is not a single note of mystery, of the vague terror of the unseen, of the pathos of man's struggle with supernatural elements, from the first line to the last. The realization of this defect need not make us blind to the frequent beauty of description which adorns both the Morgante and the Orlando Innamorato especially the latter. The Court of Ercole d'Este at Ferrara was a more favourable field for the growth of the chivalrous epic than the democratic piazzas of Florence; and though Boiardo is concerned with events rather than with character, the personages of his poem are real knights-errant, not ruffians and imbeciles. Throughout the poem, however, we are conscious that he never takes them seriously; the whole work is a pleasant fairy tale which he has constructed without any larger aim than the amusement of an indolent audience and the glorification of the House of Este. This ironical treatment of the heroes of the old French epics is a most remarkable development in the Italian genius; we find it a short time later rising to the utmost limit of art in the Furioso.

The Innamorato was never finished; and the last lines of its 79th canto have a strange pathos for the student of Italian history:— 17