He displayed, indeed, marvelous ingenuity and art in so connecting the two strains of his subject, the stately Virgilian history and the glowing modern romance, that they should contribute to the working of a single plot. Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures. No one who has studied the Gerusalemme returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired. He skips canto after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia's pastoral idyl, of Armida's sensuous charms, of Clorinda's dying words, of the Siren's song and the music of the magic bird: of all, in fact, which is not pious in the poem.
Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the other beloved by him—the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Tasso's own soul's image—is the veritable hero of the Gerusalemme; and by a curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the close, without a word. The force of the poem is spiritualized and concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of sublimity in pathos. It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden. Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever. Argante, Solimano, Tisaferno, excite our interest, and win the sympathy we cannot spare the saintly hero; and in the death of Solimano Tasso's style, for once, verges upon tragic sublimity.
What Tasso aimed at in the Gerusalemme was nobility. This quality had not been prominent in Ariosto's art. If he could attain it, his ambition to rival the Orlando Furioso would be satisfied. One main condition of success Tasso brought to the achievement. His mind itself was eminently noble, incapable of baseness, fixed on fair and worthy objects of contemplation. Yet the personal nobility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature. His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency of the Classical Revival; but since the subject to be dignified by epic style was Christian and mediaeval, a discord between matter and manner amounting almost to insincerity resulted. Some examples will make the meaning of this criticism more apparent. When Goffredo rejects the embassy of Atlete and Argante, he declares his firm intention of delivering Jerusalem in spite of overwhelming perils. The crusaders can but perish:
Noi morirem, ma non morremo inulti. (i. 86.)
This of course is a reminiscence of Dido's last words, and the difference between the two situations creates a disagreeable incongruity. The nod of Jove upon Olympus is translated to express the fiat of the Almighty (xiii. 74); Gabriel is tricked out in the plumes and colors of Mercury (i. 13-15); the very angels sinning round the throne become 'dive sirene' (xiv. 9); the armory of heaven is described in terms which reduce Michael's spear and the arrows of pestilence to ordinary weapons (vii. 81); Hell is filled with harpies, centaurs, hydras, pythons, the com mon lumber of classical Tartarus (iv. 5); the angel sent to cure Goffredo's wound culls dittany on Ida (xi. 72); the heralds, interposing between Tancredi and Argante, hold pacific scepters and have naught of chivalry (vi. 51). It may be said that both Dante before Tasso, and Milton after him, employed similar classical language in dealing with Christian and mediaeval motives. But this will hardly serve as an excuse; for Dante and Milton communicate so intense a conviction of religious earnestness that their Latinisms, even though incongruous, are recognized as the mere clothing of profoundly felt ideas. The sublimity, the seriousness, the spiritual dignity is in their thought, not in its expression; whereas Tasso too frequently leaves us with the certainty that he has sought by ceremonious language to realize more than he could grasp with the imagination. In his council of the powers of hell, for instance, he creates monsters of huge dimensions and statuesque distinctness; but these are neither grotesquely horrible like Dante's, nor are they spirits with incalculable capacity for evil like Milton's.
Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme,
E in fronte umana ban chiome d'angui attorte;
E lor s'aggira dietro immensa coda,
Che quasi sferza si ripiega e snoda.
Against this we have to place the dreadful scene of Satan with his angels transformed to snakes (Par. Lost, x. 508-584), and the Dantesque horror of the 'vermo reo che 'l mondo fora' (Inf. xxxiv. 108). Again when Dante cries—
O Sommo Giove,
Che fosti in terra per noi crocifisso!
we feel that the Latin phrase is accidental. The spirit of the poet remains profoundly Christian. Tasso's Jehovah-Jupiter is always 'il Re del Ciel'; and the court of blessed spirits which surrounds his 'gran seggio,' though described with solemn pomp of phrase, cannot be compared with the Mystic Rose of Paradise (ix. 55-60). What Tasso lacks is authenticity of vision; and his heightened style only renders this imaginative poverty, this want of spiritual conviction, more apparent.
His frequent borrowings from Virgil are less unsuccessful when the matter to be illustrated is not of this exalted order. Many similes (vii. 55, vii. 76, viii. 74) have been transplanted with nice propriety. Many descriptions, like that of the approach of night (ii-96), of the nightingale mourning for her young (xii. 90), of the flying dream (xiv. 6), have been translated with exquisite taste. Dido's impassioned apostrophe to Aeneas reappears appropriately upon Armida's lips (xvi. 56). We welcome such culled phrases as the following:
l'orticel dispensa
Cibi non compri alia mia parca mensa (vii. 10).
Premer gli alteri, e sollevar gl'imbelli (x. 76).
E Tisaferno, il folgore di Marte (xvii. 31).
Va, vedi, e vinci (xvii. 38).
Ma mentre dolce parla e dolce ride (iv. 92).
Chè vinta la materia è dal lavoro (xvi. 2).
Non temo io te, nè tuoi gran vanti, o fero:
Ma il Cielo e il mio nemico amor pavento (xix. 73).
It may, however, be observed that in the last of these passages Tasso does not show a just discriminative faculty. Turnus said:
Non me tua fervida terrent
Dicta, ferox: Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis.
From Jupiter to Amor is a descent from sublimity to pathos. In like manner when Hector's ghost reappears in the ghost of Armida's mother,
Quanto diversa, oimè, da quel che pria
Visto altrove (iv. 49),
the reminiscence suggests ideas that are unfavorable to the modern version.
In his description of battles, the mustering of armies, and military operations, Tasso neither draws from mediaeval sources nor from experience, but imitates the battle-pieces of Virgil and Lucan, sometimes with fine rhetorical effect and sometimes with wearisome frigidity. The death of Latino and his five sons is both touching in itself, and a good example of this Virgilian mannerism (ix. 35). The death of Dudone is justly celebrated as a sample of successful imitation (iii. 45):
Cade; e gli occhi, ch'appena aprir si ponno,
Dura quiete preme e ferreo sonno.
The wound of Gerniero, on the contrary, illustrates the peril of seeking after conceits in the inferior manner of the master (ix. 69):
La destra di Gerniero, onde ferita
Ella fu pria, manda recisa al piano;
Tratto anco il ferro, e con tremanti dita
Semiviva nel suol guizza la mano.
The same may be said about the wound of Algazèl (ix. 78) and the death of Ardonio (xx. 39). In the description of the felling of the forest (iii. 75, 76) and of the mustering of the Egyptian army (xvii. 1-36) Tasso's Virgilian style attains real grandeur and poetic beauty.
Tasso was nothing if not a learned poet. It would be easy to illustrate what he has borrowed from Lucretius, or to point out that the pathos of Clorinda's apparition to Tancredi after death is a debt to Petrarch. It may, however, suffice here to indicate six phrases taken straight from Dante; since the Divine Comedy was little studied in Tasso's age, and his selection of these lines reflects credit on his taste. These are:
Onorate l'altissimo campione! (iii. 73: Inf. iv.)
Goffredo intorno gli occhi gravi e tardi (vii. 58: Inf.. iv.).
a riveder le stelle (iv. 18: Inf. xxxiv.).
Ond' è ch'or tanto ardire in voi s'alletti? (ix. 76: Inf. ix.)
A guisa di leon quando si posa (x. 56: Purg. vi.)
e guardi e passi (xx. 43: Inf. in.)
As in the Rinaldo, so also in the Gerusalemme, Tasso's classical proclivities betrayed him into vio lation of the clear Italian language. Afraid of what is natural and common, he produced what is artificial and conceited. Hence came involved octaves like the following (vi. 109):
Siccome cerva, ch'assetata il passo
Mova a cercar d'acque lucenti e vive,
Ove un bel fonte distillar da un sasso
O vide un fiume tra frondose rive,
Se incontra i cani allor che il corpo lasso
Ristorar crede all'onde, all'ombre estive,
Volge indietro fuggendo, e la paura
La stanchezza obbliar face e l'arsura.
The image is beautiful; but the diction is elaborately intricate, rhetorically indistinct. We find the same stylistic involution in these lines (xii. 6):
Ma s'egli avverrà pur che mia ventura
Nel mio ritorno mi rinchiuda il passo,
D'uom che in amor m'è padre a te la cura
E delle fide mie donzelle io lasso.
The limpid well of native utterance is troubled at its source by scholastic artifices in these as in so many other passages of Tasso's masterpiece. Nor was he yet emancipated from the weakness of Rinaldo. Trying to soar upon the borrowed plumes of pseudo-classical sublimity, he often fell back wearied by this uncongenial effort into prose. Lame endings to stanzas, sudden descents from highly-wrought to pedestrian diction, are not uncommon in the Gerusalemme. The poet, diffident of his own inspiration, sought inspiration from books. In the magnificence of single lines again, the Gerusalemme reminds us of Rinaldo. Tasso gained dignity of rhythm by choos ing Latin adjectives and adverbs with pompous cadences. No versifier before his date had consciously employed the sonorous music of such lines as the following:—
Foro, tentando inaccessibil via (ii. 29).
Ond' Amor l'arco inevitabil tende (iii. 24).
Questa muraglia impenetrabil fosse (iii. 51).
Furon vedute fiammeggiare insieme (v. 28).
Qual capitan ch'inespugnabil terra (v. 64).
Sotto l'inevitabile tua spada (xvi. 33).
Immense solitudini d'arena (xvii. I).
The last of these lines presents an impressive landscape in three melodious words.
These verbal and stylistic criticisms are not meant to cast reproach on Tasso as a poet. If they have any value, it is the light they throw upon conditions under which the poet was constrained to work. Humanism and the Catholic Revival reduced this greatest genius of his age to the necessity of clothing religious sentiments in scholastic phraseology, with the view of attaining to epic grandeur. But the Catholic Revival was no regeneration of Christianity from living sources; and humanism had run its course in Italy, and was ending in the sands of critical self-consciousness. Thus piety in Tasso appears superficial and conventional rather than profoundly felt or originally vigorous; while the scholarship which supplied his epic style is scrupulous and timid.
The enduring qualities of Tasso as a modern poet have still to be indicated; and to this more grateful portion of my argument I now address myself. Much might be said in the first place about his rhetorical dexterity—the flexibility of language in his hands, and the copiousness of thought, whereby he was able to adorn varied situations and depict diversity of passions with appropriate diction. Whether Alete is subtly pleading a seductive cause, or Goffredo is answering his sophistries with well-weighed arguments; whether Pluto addresses the potentates of hell, or Erminia wavers between love and honor; whether Tancredi pours forth the extremity of his despair, or Armida heaps reproaches on Rinaldo in his flight; the musical and luminously polished stanzas lend themselves without change of style to every gradation of the speaker's mood. In this art of rhetoric, Tasso seems to have taken Livy for his model; and many of his speeches which adorn the graver portions of his poem are noticeable for compact sententious wisdom.
In fancy Tasso was not so naturally rich and inventive as the author of Orlando Furioso. Yet a gallery of highly-finished pictures might be collected from his similes and metaphors. What pride and swiftness mark this vision of a thunderbolt:
Grande ma breve fulmine il diresti,
Che inaspettato sopraggiunga e passi;
Ma del suo corso momentaneo resti
Vestigio eterno in dirupati sassi (xx. 93).
How delicately touched is this uprising of the morning star from ocean:
Qual mattutina Stella esce dell'onde
Rugiadosa e stillante; o come fuore
Spuntò nascendo già dalle feconde
Spume dell'ocean la Dea d'amore (xv. 60).
Here is an image executed in the style of Ariosto. Clorinda has received a wound on her uncovered head:
Fu levissima piaga, e i biondi crini
Rosseggiaron così d'alquante stille,
Come rosseggia l'or che di rubini
Per man d'illustre artefice sfaville (iii. 30).
Flowers furnish the poet with exquisite suggestions of color:
D'un bel pallor ha il bianco volto asperso,
Come a gigli sarian miste viole (xii. 69).
Quale a pioggia d'argento e mattutina
Si rabbellisce scolorita rosa (xx. 129).
Sometimes the painting is minutely finished like a miniature:
Così piuma talor, che di gentile
Amorosa colomba il collo cinge,
Mai non sì scorge a sè stessa simile,
Ma in diversi colori al sol si tinge:
Or d'accesi rubin sembra un monile,
Or di verdi smeraldi il lume finge,
Or insieme li mesce, e varia e vaga
In cento modi i riguardanti appaga (xv. 5).
Sometimes the style is broad, the touch vigorous:
Qual feroce destrier, ch'al faticoso
Onor dell'arme vincitor sia tolto,
E lascivo marito in vil riposo
Fra gli armenti e ne'paschi erri dìsciolto,
Se il desta o suon di tromba, o luminoso
Acciar, cola tosto annitrendo è volto;
Già già brama l'arringo, el'uom sul dorso
Portando, urtato riurtar nel corso (xvi. 28).
I will content myself with referring to the admirably conceived simile of a bulky galleon at sea attacked by a swifter and more agile vessel (xix. 13), which may perhaps have suggested to Fuller his famous comparison of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in their wit encounters.
But Tasso was really himself, incomparable and unapproachable, when he wrote in what musicians would call the largo e maestoso mood.
Giace l'alta Cartago; appena i segni
Dell'alte sue ruine il lido serba.
Muoino le città, muoino i regni;
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba;
E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni!
Oh nostra mente cupida e superba! (xv. 20).
This is perfect in its measured melancholy, the liquid flow of its majestic simplicity. The same musical breadth, the same noble sweetness, pervade a passage on the eternal beauty of the heavens compared with the brief brightness of a woman's eyes:
oh quante belle
Luci il tempio celeste in sè raguna!
Ha il suo gran carro il di; le aurate stelle
Spiega la notte e l'argentata luna;
Ma non è chi vagheggi o questa o quelle;
E miriam noi torbida luce e bruna,
Che un girar d'occhi, un balenar di riso
Scopre in breve confin di fragil viso (xviii. 15).
This verbal music culminates in the two songs of earthly joy, the chants d'amour, or hymns to pleas ure, sung by Armida's ministers (xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13). Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty, and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights. It remained for Tasso to give that magic of the senses vocal utterance. From the myrtle groves of Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with their penetrative sweetness, their lingering regret, pass into the silence of the soul. It is eminently characteristic of Tasso's mood and age that the melody of both these honeyed songs should thrill with sadness. Nature is at war with honor; youth passes like a flower away; therefore let us love and yield our hearts to pleasure while we can. Sehnsucht, the soul of modern sentiment, the inner core of modern music, makes its entrance into the sphere of art with these two hymns. The division of the mind, wavering between natural impulse and acquired morality, gives the tone of melancholy to the one chant. In the other, the invitation to self-abandonment is mingled with a forecast of old age and death. Only Catullus, in his song to Lesbia, among the ancients touched this note; only Villon, perhaps, in his Ballade of Dead Ladies, touched it among the moderns before Tasso. But it has gone on sounding ever since through centuries which have enjoyed the luxury of grief in music.
If Tancredi be the real hero of the Gerusalemme, Armida is the heroine. The action of the epic follows her movements. She combines the parts of Angelica and Alcina in one that is original and novel. A sorceress, deputed by the powers of hell to defeat the arms of the crusaders, Armida falls herself in love with a Christian champion. Love changes her from a beautiful white witch into a woman.[76] When she meets Rinaldo in the battle, she discharges all her arrows vainly at the man who has deserted her. One by one, they fly and fall; and as they wing their flight, Love wounds her own heart with his shafts:
Scocca I' arco più volte, e non fa piaga
E, mentre ella saetta, amor lei piaga (xx. 65).
Then she turns to die in solitude. Rinaldo follows, and stays her in the suicidal act. Despised and rejected as she is, she cannot hate him. The man she had entangled in her wiles has conquered and subdued her nature. To the now repentant minister of hell he proposes baptism; and Armida consents:
Sì parla, e prega; e i preghi bagna e scalda
Or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri:
Onde, siccome suol nevosa falda
Dov'arde il sole, o tepid' aura spiri,
Così l'ira che in lei parea sì salda,
Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri.
Ecco l'ancilla tua; d'essa a tuo senno
Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).
This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the climax of the Gerusalemme. It is also the climax and conclusion of Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into the truths of human affection. Notice, too, with what audacity Tasso has placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress! Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he assigns the spoils of conquered hell to love triumphant in a woman's breast. Beauty, which in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to apotheosis through affection. In Armida we already surmise das ewig Weibliche of Goethe's Faust, Gretchen saving her lover's soul before Madonna's throne in glory.
What was it, then, that Tasso, this 'child of a later and a colder age,' as Shelley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature? We have seen that the Gerusalemme did not fulfill the promise of heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period. We know that neither the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the interest of posterity. We feel that religious emotion is feeble here, and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and evanescent—un non so che, to use the poet's favorite phrase—which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty. Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment. Unknown to the ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that non so che of modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso's work. The phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere of European feeling. Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase un non so che leaves definition to the instinct of those who feel, but will not risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words. Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind. Classical literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images and conscious thoughts. The mediaeval art of Dante, precisely, mathematically measured, had not felt the need of it. Boccaccio's clear-cut intaglios from life and nature, Petrarch's compassed melodies, Poliziano's polished arabesques, Ariosto's bright and many colored pencilings, were all of them, in all their varied phases of Renaissance expression, distinguished by decision and firmness of drawing. Vagueness, therefore, had hitherto found no place in European poetry or plastic art. But music, the supreme symbol of spiritual infinity in art, was now about to be developed; and the specific touch of Tasso, the musician-poet, upon portraiture and feeling, called forth this quality of vagueness, a vagueness that demanded melody to give what it refused from language to accept. Mendelssohn when some one asked him what is meant by music, replied that it had meanings for his mind more unmistakable than those which words convey; but what these meanings were, he did not or he could not make clear. This certainty of sentiment, seeming vague only because it floats beyond the scope of language in regions of tone and color and emotion, is what Tasso's non so che suggests to those who comprehend. And Tasso, by his frequent appeal to it, by his migration from the plastic into the melodic realm of the poetic art, proved himself the first genuinely sentimental artist of the modern age. It is just this which gave him a wider and more lasting empire over the heart through the next two centuries than that claimed by Ariosto.
It may not be unprofitable to examine in detail Tasso's use of the phrase to which so much importance has been assigned in the foregoing paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia. Sofronia, of all the heroines of the Gerusalemme, is the least interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity and Jesuitical acceptance of martyrdom. Olindo touches the weaker fibers of our sympathy by his feminine devotion to a woman placed above him in the moral scale, whose love he wins by splendid falsehood equal to her own. The episode, entirely idle in the action of the poem, has little to recommend it, if we exclude the traditionally accepted reference to Tasso's love for Leonora d'Este. But when Olindo and Sofronia are standing, back to back, against the stake, Aladino, who has decreed their death by burning, feels his rude bosom touched with sudden pity:
Un non so che d'inusitato e molle
Par che nel duro petto al re trapasse:
Ei presentillo, e si sdegnò; nè voile
Piegarsi, e gli occhi torse, e si ritrasse (ii. 37).
The intrusion of a lyrical emotion, unknown before in the tyrant's breast, against which he contends with anger, and before the force of which he bends, prepares us for the happy dénouement brought about by Clorinda. This vague stirring of the soul, this non so che, this sentiment, is the real agent in Sofronia's release and Olindo's beatification.
Clorinda is about to march upon her doom. She is inflamed with the ambition to destroy the engines of the Christian host by fire at night; and she calls Argante to her counsels:
Buona pezza è, signor, che in sè raggira
Un non so che d'insolito e d'audace
La mia mente inquieta; o Dio l'inspira,
O l'uom del suo voler suo Dio si face (xii. 5).
Thus at this solemn point of time, when death is certainly in front, when she knows not whether God has inspired her or whether she has made of her own wish a deity, Clorinda utters the mystic word of vague compulsive feeling.
Erminia, taken captive by Tancredi after the siege of Antioch, is brought into her master's tent. He treats her with chivalrous courtesy, and offers her a knight's protection:
Allora un non so che soave e piano
Sentii, ch'al cor mi scese, e vi s'affisse,
Che, serpendomi poi per l'alma vaga,
Non so come, divenne incendio e piaga (xix. 94).
At that moment, by the distillation of that vague emotion into vein and marrow, Erminia becomes Tancredi's slave, and her future is determined.
These examples are, perhaps, sufficient to show how Tasso, at the turning-points of destiny for his most cherished personages, invoked indefinite emotion to adumbrate the forces with which will contends in vain. But the master phrase rings even yet more tyrannously in the passage of Clorinda's death, which sums up all of sentiment included in romance. Long had Tancredi loved Clorinda. Meeting her in battle, he stood her blows defenseless; for Clorinda was an Amazon, reduced by Tasso's gentle genius to womanhood from the proportions of Marfisa. Finally, with heart surcharged with love for her, he has to cross his sword in deadly duel with this lady. Malign stars rule the hour: he knows not who she is: misadventure makes her, instead of him, the victim of their encounter. With her last breath she demands baptism—the good Tasso, so it seems, could not send so fair a creature of his fancy as Clorinda to the shades without viaticum; and his poetry rises to the sublime of pathos in this stanza:
Amico, hai vinto: io ti perdon: perdona
Tu ancora: al corpo no, che nulla pave;
All'alma sì: deh! per lei prega; e dona
Battesmo a me ch'ogni mia colpa lave.
In queste voci languide risuona
Un non so che di flebile e soave
Ch'al cor gli serpe, ed ogni sdegno ammorza,
E gli occhi a lagrimar gl'invoglia e sforza (xii. 66).
Here the vague emotion, the non so che, distils itself through Clorinda's voice into Tancredi's being. Afterwards it thrills there like moaning winds in an Aeolian lyre, reducing him to despair upon his bed of sickness, and reasserting its lyrical charm in the vision which he has of Clorinda among the trees of the enchanted forest. He stands before the cypress where the soul of his dead lady seems to his misguided fancy prisoned; and the branches murmur in his ears:
Fremere intanto udia continuo il vento
Tra le frondi del bosco e tra i virgulti,
E trarne un suon che flebile concento
Par d'umani sospiri e di singulti;
E un non so che confuso instilla al core
Di pietà, di spavento e di dolore (xiii. 40).
The master word, the magic word of Tasso's sentiment, is uttered at this moment of illusion. The poet has no key to mysteries locked up within the human breast more powerful than this indefinite un non so che.
Enough has been said to show how Tasso used the potent spell of vagueness, when he found himself in front of supreme situations. This is in truth the secret of his mastery over sentiment, the spell whereby he brings nature and night, the immense solitudes of deserts, the darkness of forests, the wailings of the winds and the plangent litanies of sea-waves into accord with overstrained humanity. It was a great discovery; by right of it Tasso proved himself the poet of the coming age.
When the Gerusalemme was completed, Tasso had done his best work as a poet. The misfortunes which began to gather round him in his thirty-first year, made him well-nigh indifferent to the fate of the poem which had drained his life-force, and from which he had expected so much glory. It was published without his permission or supervision. He, meanwhile, in the prison of S. Anna, turned his attention to prose composition. The long series of dialogues, with which he occupied the irksome leisure of seven years, interesting as they are in matter and genial in style, indicate that the poet was now in abeyance. It remained to be seen whether inspiration would revive with freedom. No sooner were the bolts withdrawn than his genius essayed a fresh flight. He had long meditated the composition of a tragedy, and had already written some scenes. At Mantua in 1586-7 this work took the form of Torrismondo. It cannot be called a great drama, for it belongs to the rigid declamatory species of Italian tragedy; and Tasso's genius was romantic, idyllic, elegiac, anything but genuinely tragic. Yet the style is eminent for no bility and purity. Just as the Aminta showed how unaffected Tasso could be when writing without preconceived theories of heightened diction, so the Torrismondo displays an unstrained dignity of simple dialogue. It testifies to the plasticity of language in the hands of a master, who deliberately chose and sustained different styles in different species of poetry, and makes us regret that he should have formed his epic manner upon so artificial a type. The last chorus of Torrismondo deserves to be mentioned as a perfect example of Tasso's melancholy elegiac pathos.
Meanwhile he began to be dissatisfied with the Gerusalemme, and in 1588 he resolved upon remodeling his masterpiece. The real vitality of that poem was, as we have seen, in its romance. But Tasso thought otherwise. During the fourteen years which elapsed since its completion, the poet's youthful fervor had been gradually fading out. Inspiration yielded to criticism; piety succeeded to sentiment and enthusiasm for art. Therefore, in this later phase of his maturity, with powers impaired by prolonged sufferings and wretched health, tormented by religious scruples and vague persistent fear, he determined to eliminate the romance from the epic, to render its unity of theme more rigorous, and to concentrate attention upon the serious aspects of the subject. The result of this plan, pursued through five years of wandering, was the Gerusalemme Conquistata, a poem which the world has willingly let die, in which the style of the Gerusalemme Liberata is worsened, and which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what was immortal in Tasso's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out. A further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem upon the Creation of the World, called Le Sette Giornate. Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of Tasso, it would not be mentioned by posterity.
Tasso has already occupied us through two chapters. Before passing onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repetition, some of the salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his personal appearance nothing has hitherto been said. 'Tasso was tall, well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard were of a light-brown color. His head was large, forehead broad and square, eyebrows dark, eyes large, lively and blue, nose large and curved toward the mouth, lips thin and pale.' So writes Manso, the poet's friend and biographer, adding: 'His voice was clear and sonorous; but he read his poems badly, because of a slight impediment in his speech, and because he was short-sighted.' I know not whether I am justified in drawing from this description the conclusion that Tasso was, physically, a man of mixed lymphatic and melancholic temperament, of more than ordinary sensitiveness. Imperfection, at any rate, is indicated by the thin pale lips, the incoherent utterance and the uncertain vision to which his friend in faithfulness bears witness. Of painted portraits representing Tasso in later life there are many; but most of these seem to be based upon the mask taken from his face after death, which still exists at S. Onofrio. Twenty-one years ago I gazed upon this mask, before I knew then more than every schoolboy knows of Tasso's life and writings. This is what I wrote about it in my Roman diary: 'The face is mild and weak, especially in the thin short chin and feeble mouth.[77] The forehead round, and ample in proportion to the other features. The eyes are small, but this may be due to the contraction of death. The mouth is almost vulgar, very flat in the upper lip; but this also ought perhaps to be attributed to the relaxation of tissue by death.
Tasso was constitutionally inclined to pensive moods. His outlook over life was melancholy.[78]
The tone of his literary work, whether in prose or poetry, is elegiac—musically, often querulously plaintive. There rests a shadow of dejection over all he wrote and thought and acted. Yet he was finely sensitive to pleasure, thrillingly alive to sentimental beauty.[79] Though the man lived purely, untainted by the license of the age, his genius soared highest when he sang some soft luxurious strain of love. He was wholly deficient in humor. Taking himself and the world of men and things too much in earnest, he weighed heavily alike on art and life. The smallest trifles, if they touched him, seemed to him important.[80] Before imaginary terrors he shook like an aspen. The slightest provocation roused his momentary resentment. The most insignificant sign of neglect or coldness wounded his self-esteem. Plaintive, sensitive to beauty, sentimental, tender, touchy, self-engrossed, devoid of humor—what a sentient instrument was this for uttering Aeolian melodies, and straining discords through storm-jangled strings!
From the Jesuits, in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature. As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its substance. Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither impassioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood, cannot now be fancied. If he contained the stuff of saint or simple Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in their school at Naples.
During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither as a thinker, nor as a Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, did this noble and ingenuous, but weakly nature attain to thoroughness.
Tasso's mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for forming original or comprehensive views. He lived for no great object, whether political, moral, religious, or scientific. He committed himself to no vice. He obeyed no absorbing passion of love or hatred. In his misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a prostrate human being. The poet who complained so querulously, who wept so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command admiration.
There is nothing sublimely tragic in Tasso's suffering. The sentiment inspired by it is that at best of pathos. An almost childish self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects—the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance—in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer on the highroads of a world he never understood! Shelley's phrase, 'the world's rejected guest' exactly seems to suit him.
And yet he allowed himself to become the spoiled child of his misfortunes. Without them, largely self-created as they were, Tasso could not now appeal to our hearts. Nor does he appeal to us as Dante, eating the salt bread of patrons' tables, does; as Milton, blind and fallen on evil days; as Chatterton, perishing in pride and silence; as Johnson, turning from the stairs of Chesterfield; as Bruno, averting stern eyes from the crucifix; as Leopardi, infusing the virus of his suffering into the veins of humanity; as Heine, motionless upon his mattress grave. These more potent personalities, bequeathing to the world examples of endurance, have won the wreath of never-blasted bays which shall not be set on Tasso's forehead. We crown him with frailer leaves, bedewed with tears tender as his own sentiment, and aureoled with the light that emanates from pure and delicate creations of his fancy.
Though Tasso does not command admiration by heroism, he wins compassion as a beautiful and finely-gifted nature inadequate to cope with the conditions of his century. For a poet to be independent in that age of intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible. To be light-hearted and ironically indifferent lay not in Tasso's temperament. It was no less difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, classical culture and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. He belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his epoch. One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic poet of the Catholic Revival.[83]
Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second chapter of this work. By natural inclination he belonged to the line of artists which began with Boccaccio and culminated in Ariosto. But his training and the bias of the times in which he lived, made him break with Boccaccio's tradition. He tried to be the poet of the Council of Trent, without having assimilated hypocrisy or acquired false taste, without comprehending the essentially prosaic and worldly nature of that religious revolution. He therefore lived and worked in a continual discord. This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his reason. I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked from infancy. But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered, and the internal perplexity to which he was habitually subject.
When Tasso first saw the light, the Italians had rejected the Reformation and consented to stifle free thought. The culture of the Renaissance had been condemned; the Spanish hegemony had been accepted. Of this new attitude the concordat between Charles and Clement, the Tridentine Council, the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus were external signs. But these potent agencies had not accomplished their work in Tasso's lifetime. He was rent in twain because he could not react against them as Bruno did, and could not identify himself with them as Loyola was doing. As an artist he belonged to the old order which was passing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging. His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his difficulties. While accepting service in the modern spirit of subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of equality with princes.
We therefore see in Tasso one who obeyed influences to which his real self never wholly or consciously submitted. He was not so much out of harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized contradictions. The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the classical lumber absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous; the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius. It is in the Aminta, in the episodes of the Gerusalemme, in a small percentage of the Rime, that we find the true Tasso. For the rest, he had not the advantages enjoyed by Boiardo and Ariosto in a less self-conscious age, of yielding to natural impulse after a full and sympathetic study of classical and mediaeval sources. The analytical labors of the previous century hampered his creativeness. He brought to his task preoccupations of divers and self-contradictory pedantries—pedantries of Catholicism, pedantries of scholasticism, pedantries of humanism in its exhausted phase, pedantries of criticism refined and subtilized within a narrow range of problems. He had, moreover, weighing on his native genius the fears which brooded like feverish exhalations over the evil days in which he lived—fears of Church-censure, fears of despotic princes, fears of the Inquisition, fears of hell, fears of the judgment of academies, fears of social custom and courtly conventionalities. Neither as poet nor as man had he the courage of originality. What he lacked was character. He obeyed the spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline Saul's armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his sling and stone of native force alone. Yet that native force was so vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of the cumbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb freedom. In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene of Clorinda, the pastoral of Aminta and Silvia—episodes which created the music and the painting of two centuries, and which still live upon the lips of the people. But inasmuch as his genius labored beneath the superincumbent weight of precedents and deferences, the poet's nature was strained to the uttermost and his nervous elasticity was overtaxed. No sooner had he poured forth freely what flowed freely from his soul, than he returned on it with scrupulous analysis. The product of his spirit stood before him as a thing to be submitted to opinion, as a substance subject to the test of all those pedantries and fears. We cannot wonder that the subsequent conflict perplexed his reason and sterilized his creative faculty to such an extent that he spent the second half of his life in attempting to undo the great work of his prime. The Gerusalemme Conquistata and the Sette Giornate are thus the splendid triumph achieved by the feebler over the stronger portions of his nature, the golden tribute paid by his genius to the evil genius of the age controlling him. He was a poet who, had he lived in the days of Ariosto, would have created in all senses spontaneously, producing works of Virgilian beauty and divine melancholy to match the Homeric beauty and the divine irony of his great peer. But this was not to be. The spirit of the times which governed his education, with which he was not revolutionary enough to break, which he strove as a critic to assimilate and as a social being to obey, destroyed his independence, perplexed his judgment, and impaired his nervous energy. His best work was consequently of unequal value; pure and base metal mingled in its composition. His worst was a barren and lifeless failure.
