But we must not think that the ‘Orlando Furioso’ has one definite plot.  At first reading we are confused by the multiplicity of incident, by the constant change of scene, and by the breaking off of one story to make place for another.  In a single canto the scene changes from France to Africa, and by means of winged horses tremendous distances are traveled over in a day.  On closer examination we find that this confusion is only apparent.  The poet himself is never confused, but with sure hand he manipulates the many-colored threads which are wrought into the fabric of the poem.  The war between the Saracens and the Christians is a sort of background or stage; a rallying point for the characters.  In reality it attracts but slightly our attention or interest.  Again, Orlando’s love for Angelica, and his madness,—­although the latter gave the title to the book, and both afford some of the finest episodes,—­have no organic connection with the whole.  The real subject, if any there be, is the loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante.  These are the supposed ancestors of the house of Este, and it is with their final union, after many vicissitudes, that the poem ends.

But the real purpose of Ariosto was to amuse the reader by countless stories of romantic adventure.  It was not as a great creative genius, as the inventor of new characters, as the earnest and philosophical reformer, that he appears to mankind, but as the supreme artist.  Ariosto represents in its highest development that love for form, that perfection of style, which is characteristic of the Latin races as distinguished from the Teutonic.  It is this that makes the ’Orlando Furioso’ the great epic of the Renaissance, and that caused Galileo to bestow upon the poet the epithet “divine.”

For nearly thirty years Ariosto changed and polished these lines, so that the edition of 1532 is quite different from that of 1516.  The stanzas in which the poem is written are smooth and musical, the language is so chosen as always to express the exact shade of thought, the interest never flags.  What seems the arbitrary breaking off of a story before its close is really the art of the poet; for he knows, were each episode to be told by itself, we should have only a string of novelle, and not the picture he desired to paint,—­that of the world of chivalry, with its knights-errant in search of adventures, its damsels in distress, its beautiful gardens and lordly palaces, its hermits and magicians, its hippogriffs and dragons, and all the paraphernalia of magic art.

Ariosto’s treatment of chivalry is peculiar to himself.  Spenser in the sixteenth century, and Lord Tennyson in our own day, pictured its virtues and noble aspirations.  In his immortal ‘Don Quixote,’ Cervantes held its extravagances up to ridicule.  In Ariosto’s day no one believed any longer in the heroes or the ideals of chivalry, nor did the poet himself; hence there is an air of unreality about the poem.  The figures that pass