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to place a variety of stirring episodes in a tale that would not prove too boring to the public.
We the anti-literary faction, enter today into the views of Messer Ludovic who, although a great literary man, owed nothing to literature. What does it matter to us if Agramante symbolises the innocence of youth and Angelica, the beauty and vanity of women, that Bradamante personifies true friendship, Fleur d'Aubepine, shameless passion — that Sacripante represents blind love and Hippogrippa, natural appetite ? Of Horace Toscanella's explanations we should only accept that which would make of Malagigi the personification of magic. Not being literary men we see things from the angle of our own aesthetic preferences, which of course make literary men of us, but in their own way. If we too choose to give ourselves up for a moment to the game of interpretations we can make some that will be starthngly new. We may well maintain that Merlin, the Magician, symbolises the Cinema, whose soul is precisely the magic lantern, which is magic because Merlin would have is so.
We can also very well maintain that Ariosto was a poet who has to have recourse to words through lack of the necessary trick apparatus to produce those effects which in literature are called prodigies and which are ordinarily attributed to fairies.
In the whirlwind of suppositions, spiritual and moral problems without number that critics attempt to exact from Orlando, one fact endures, that the magic lantern in incontestably the device of Merlin the Magician ! The magic lantern, that mechanical abuse of the marvelously theatrical, divine gift to men which procures for them a sort of daily bread of poetry. This tenth Muse is descended from Merlin the Magician who lived in a cave, like Vulcan from whom Venus is descended, the other divinity who holds a high place in the works of Ariosto.
Instead of losing ourselves in idle speculation or in search of allegories, hidden meanings, or veiled ideas, let us consider the poem as we see it.
grasped it should be respected and that in any case deformations should not be increased by the addition of purely fantastic matter.
But it is a fact that from Dumas Pere to Michel Zevaco, from Ponson du Terrail to Paul Feval, not to speak of the fictitious biographies so fashionable today, historic truth has been outraged without such violent protest as has been directed against the historical liberties taken by the cinema.
These different treatments have undoubtedly their respective reasons, but today we wish only to state the problem and to invite those who have something of interest to say on the subject to avail themselves of the hospitality willingly offered them in the pages of this Review.