frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court
lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste
things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without
prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, _gentili_, as Ariosto calls
them; prudent also, according to the notions of the day, in limiting
their imprudence. The adventure of Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would
have branded an English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of
Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the sea-monster would
have blushingly been attributed by Spenser to one of his satyrs; but
these were escapades quite within Ariosto's notions of what was
permitted to a _gentil cavaliero_ and a _nobil donzella_; and if
Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir Calidore, still
less do they in the faintest degree resemble Tourneur and Marston's
Levidulcias and Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception
perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find any very great
harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen: we may, indeed, feel indignant
when we think that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities of
earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the Beatrices and Lauras of
the past; when we consider that they represent for Ariosto, not the
bespattered but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this may
awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we consider these figures in
themselves as realities, and compare them with the evil figures of our
drama, we find that they are mere venial sinners--light, fickle,
amorous, fibbing--very human in their faults; human, trifling, mild, not
at all monstrous, like all the art products of the Renaissance.[1]

[1] The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, part i, canto 8, a
story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a monster born of
Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which forms a strange exception
to my rule, even as does, for instance, Matteo di Giovanni's massacre of
the Innocents. Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare,
by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona,
which was current in Boiardo's day?

A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always
cheerful, rational, civilized--this is what the Italian Renaissance
displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope
de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for