Each of those poems hit some one great point of universal attraction,
at least in their respective countries, and among the givers of fame in
others.
at least in their respective countries, and among the givers of fame in
others.
Stories from the Italian Poets
In the conclusion of his fragment, "O del
grand' Apennino," he affectingly begs pardon of his blessed spirit for
troubling him with his earthly griefs. [28]
But, alas, what had been an indulgence of self-esteem had now become the
habit of a disease; and in the course of a few months the restless poet
began to make his old discovery, that he was not sufficiently cared for.
The prince had no leisure to attend to him; the nobility did not "yield
him the first place," or at least (he adds) they did not allow him to be
treated "externally as their equal;" and he candidly confessed that he
could not live in a place where such was the custom. [29] He felt also,
naturally enough, however well it might have been intended, that it was
not pleasant to be confined to the range of the city of Mantua, attended
by a servant, even though he confessed that he was now subject to
"frenzy. " He contrived to stay another half-year by help of a brilliant
carnival and of the select society of the prince's court, who were
evidently most kind to him; but at the end of the twelvemonth he was in
Bergamo among his relations. The prince gave him leave to go; and the
Cavaliere Tasso, his kinsman, sent his chariot on purpose to fetch him.
Here again he found himself at a beautiful country-seat, which the family
of Tasso still possesses near that city; and here again, in the house of
his father, he proposed to be happy, "having never desired," he says,
"any journey more earnestly than this. " He left it in the course of a
month, to return to Mantua.
And it was only to wander still. Mantua he quitted in less than two
months to go to Rome, in spite of the advice of his best friends.
He vindicated the proceeding by a hope of obtaining some permanent
settlement from the Pope. He took Loretto by the way, to refresh himself
with devotion; arrived in a transport at Rome; got nothing from the Pope
(the hard-minded Sixtus the Fifth); and in the spring of the next year,
in the triple hope of again embracing his sister, and recovering the
dowry of his mother and the confiscated property of his father, he
proceeded to Naples.
Naples was in its most beautiful vernal condition, and the Neapolitans
welcomed the poet with all honour and glory; but his sister, alas, was
dead; he got none of his father's property, nor (till too late) any of
his mother's; and before the year was out, he was again in Rome. He
acquired in Naples, however, another friend, as attached to him and
as constant in his attentions as his beloved Constantini, to wit,
Giambattista Manso, Marquis of Villa, who became his biographer, and who
was visited and praised for his good offices by Milton. In the society of
this gentleman he seemed for a short while to have become a new man. He
entered into field-sports, listened to songs and music, nay, danced, says
Manso, with "the girls. " (One fancies a poetical Dr. Johnson with the two
country damsels on his knees. ) In short, good air and freedom, and no
medicine, had conspired with the lessons of disappointment to give him,
before he died, a glimpse of the power to be pleased. He had not got rid
of all his spiritual illusions, even those of a melancholy nature; but he
took the latter more quietly, and had grown so comfortable with the race
in general, that he encouraged them. He was so entirely freed from his
fears of the Inquisition and of charges of magic, that whereas he had
formerly been anxious to shew that he meant nothing but a poetical fancy
by the spirit which he introduced as communing with him in his dialogue
entitled the _Messenger_, he now maintained its reality against the
arguments of his friend Manso; and these arguments gave rise to the most
poetical scene in his history. He told Manso that he should have ocular
testimony of the spirit's existence; and accordingly one day while they
were sitting together at the marquis's fireside, "he turned his eyes,"
says Manso, "towards a window, and held them a long time so intensely on
it, that, when I called him, he did not answer. At last, 'Behold,' said
he, 'the friendly spirit which has courteously come to talk with me. Lift
up your eyes, and see the truth. ' I turned my eyes thither immediately
(continues the marquis); but though I endeavoured to look as keenly as I
could, I beheld nothing but the rays of the sun, which streamed through
the panes of the window into the chamber. Whilst I still looked around,
without beholding any object, Torquato began to hold, with this unknown
something, a most lofty converse. I heard, indeed, and saw nothing but
himself; nevertheless his words, at one time questioning, at another
replying, were such as take place between those who reason strictly on
some important subject. And from what was said by the one, the reply of
the other might be easily comprehended by the intellect, although it was
not heard by the ear. The discourses were so lofty and marvellous,
both by the sublimity of their topics and a certain unwonted manner of
talking, that, exalted above myself in a kind of ecstasy, I did not dare
to interrupt them, nor ask Tasso about the spirit, which he had announced
to me, but which I did not see. In this way, while I listened between
stupefaction and rapture, a considerable time had elapsed; till at last
the spirit departed, as I learned from the words of Torquato; who,
turning to me, said, 'From this day forward all your doubts will have
vanished from your mind. ' 'Nay,' said I, 'they are rather increased;
since, though I have heard many things worthy of marvel, I have seen
nothing of what you promised to shew me to dispel them. ' He smiled, and
said, 'You have seen and heard more of him than perhaps --,' and here
he paused. Fearful of importuning him with new questions, the discourse
ended; and the only conclusion I can draw is, what I before said, that
it is more likely his visions or frenzies will disorder my own mind than
that I shall extirpate his true or imaginary opinion. "[30]
Did the "smile" of Tasso at the close of this extraordinary scene, and
the words which he omitted to add, signify that his friend had seen and
heard more, perhaps, than the poet _would have liked_ to explain? Did he
mean that he himself alone had been seen and heard, and was author of the
whole dialogue? Perhaps he did; for credulity itself can impose;--can
take pleasure in seeing others as credulous as itself. On the other
hand, enough has become known in our days of the phenomena of morbid
perception, to render Tasso's actual belief in such visions not at
all surprising. It is not uncommon for the sanest people of delicate
organisation to see faces before them while going to sleep, sometimes
in fantastical succession. A stronger exercise of this disposition in
temperaments more delicate will enlarge the face to figure; and there can
be no question that an imagination so heated as Tasso's, so full of the
speculations of the later Platonists, and accompanied by a state of body
so "nervous," and a will so bent on its fancies, might embody whatever
he chose to behold. The dialogue he could as easily read in the vision's
looks, whether he heard it or not with ears. If Nicholay, the Prussian
bookseller, who saw crowds of spiritual people go through his rooms, had
been a poet, and possessed of as wilful an imagination as Tasso, he might
have gifted them all with _speaking countenances_ as easily as with coats
and waistcoats. Swedenborg founded a religion on this morbid faculty; and
the Catholics worship a hundred stories of the like sort in the Lives of
the Saints, many of which are equally true and false; false in reality,
though true in supposition. Luther himself wrote and studied till he
saw the Devil; only the great reformer retained enough of his naturally
sturdy health and judgment to throw an inkstand at Satan's head,--a thing
that philosophy has been doing ever since.
Tasso's principal residence while at Naples had been in the beautiful
monastery of Mount Olivet, on which the good monks begged he would write
them a poem; which he did. A cold reception at Rome, and perhaps the
difference of the air, brought back his old lamentations; but here again
a monastery gave him refuge, and he set himself down to correct his
former works and compose new ones. He missed, however, the comforts of
society and amusement which he had experienced at Naples. Nevertheless,
he did not return thither. He persuaded himself that it was necessary to
be in Rome in order to expedite the receipt of some books and manuscripts
from Bergamo and other places; but his restlessness desired novelty. He
thus slipped back from the neighbourhood of Rome to the city itself, and
from the city back to the monastery, his friends in both places being
probably tired of his instability. He thought of returning to Mantua; but
a present from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, accompanied by an invitation to
his court, drew him, in one of his short-lived transports, to Florence.
He returned, in spite of the best and most generous reception, to Rome;
then left Rome for Mantua, on invitation from his ever-kind deliverer
from prison, now the reigning duke; tired again, even of him; returned to
Rome; then once more to Naples, where the Prince of Conca, Grand Admiral
of the kingdom, lodged and treated him like an equal; but he grew
suspicious of the admiral, and went to live with his friend Manso;
quitted Manso for Rome again; was treated with reverence on the way, like
Ariosto, by a famous leader of banditti; was received at Rome into the
Vatican itself, in the apartments of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino,
nephew of the new pope Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to
be raised at once to their highest and most reasonable pitch; but fell
ill, and was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air.
A life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was
approaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and
might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man than Tasso;
but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all his weaknesses, and
notwithstanding the enemies they provoked and the friends they cooled,
was really almost adored for his genius in his own time, and instead
of refusing jewels one day and soliciting a ducat the next, might have
settled down almost any where in quiet and glory, if he had but possessed
the patience to do so, it becomes an association of weakness with power,
and of adversity with the means of prosperity, the absurdity of which
admiration itself can only drown in pity.
He now took up his abode in another monastery, that of San Severino,
where he was comforted by the visits of his friend Manso, to whom he had
lately inscribed a dialogue on _Friendship_; for he continued writing
to the last. He had also the consolation, such as it was, of having the
law-suit for his mother's dowry settled in his favour, though under
circumstances that rendered it of little importance, and only three
months before his death. So strangely did Fortune seem to take delight in
sporting with a man of genius, who had thought both too much of her and
too little; too much for pomp's sake, and too little in prudence. Among
his new acquaintances were the young Marino, afterwards the corrupter of
Italian poetry, and the Prince of Venosa, an amateur composer of music.
The dying poet wrote madrigals for him so much to his satisfaction, that,
being about to marry into the house of Este, he wished to reconcile him
with the Duke of Ferrara; and Tasso, who to the last moment of his life
seems never to have been able to resist the chance of resuming old
quarters, apparently from the double temptation of renouncing them, wrote
his old master a letter full of respects and regrets. But the duke, who
himself died in the course of the year, was not to be moved from his
silence. The poet had given him the last possible offence by recasting
his _Jerusalem_, omitting the glories of the house of Este, and
dedicating it to another patron. Alfonso, who had been extravagantly
magnificent, though not to poets, had so weakened his government, that
the Pope wrested Ferrara from the hands of his successor, and reduced
the Este family to the possession of Modena, which it still holds and
dishonours. The duke and the poet were thus fading away at the same time;
they never met again in this world; and a new Dante would have divided
them far enough in the next. [31]
The last glimpse of honour and glory was now opening in a very grand
manner on the poet--the last and the greatest, as if on purpose to give
the climax to his disappointments. Cardinal Cintio requested the Pope to
give him the honour of a coronation. It had been desired by the poet, it
seems, three years before. He was disappointed of it at that time; and
now that it was granted, he was disappointed of the ceremony. Manso says
he no longer cared for it; and, as he felt himself dying, this is not
improbable. Nevertheless he went to Rome for the purpose; and though the
severity of the winter there delayed the intention till spring, wealth
and honours seemed determined to come in floods upon the poor expiring
great man, in order to take away the breath which they had refused to
support. The Pope assigned him a yearly pension of a hundred scudi; and
the withholders of his mother's dowry came to an accommodation by which
he was to have an annuity of a hundred ducats, and a considerable sum
in hand. His hand was losing strength enough to close upon the money.
Scarcely was the day for the coronation about to dawn, when the poet felt
his dissolution approaching. Alfonso's doctors had killed him at last by
superinducing a habit of medicine-taking, which defeated its purpose.
He requested leave to return to the monastery of St. Onofrio--wrote a
farewell letter to Constantini--received the distinguished honour of a
plenary indulgence from the Pope--said (in terms very like what Milton
might have used, had he died a Catholic), that "this was the chariot upon
which he hoped to go crowned, not with laurel as a poet into the capitol,
but with glory as a saint to heaven"--and expired on the 25th of April,
1575, and the fifty-first year of his age, closely embracing the
crucifix, and imperfectly uttering the sentence beginning, "Into thy
hands, O Lord! "[32]
Even after death, success mocked him; for the coronation took place on
the senseless dead body. The head was wreathed with laurel; a magnificent
toga delayed for a while the shroud; and a procession took place through
the city by torchlight, all the inhabitants pouring forth to behold it,
and painters crowding over the bier to gaze on the poet's lineaments,
from which they produced a multitude of portraits. The corpse was then
buried in the church of St. Onofrio; and magnificent monuments talked of,
which never appeared. Manso, however, obtained leave to set up a modest
tablet; and eight years afterwards a Ferrarese cardinal (Bevilacqua) made
what amends he could for his countrymen, by erecting the stately memorial
which is still to be seen.
Poor, illustrious Tasso! weak enough to warrant pity from his
inferiors--great enough to overshadow in death his once-fancied
superiors. He has been a by-word for the misfortunes of genius: but
genius was not his misfortune; it was his only good, and might have
brought him all happiness. It is the want of genius, as far as it
goes, and apart from martyrdoms for conscience' sake, which produces
misfortunes even to genius itself--the want of as much wit and balance
on the common side of things, as genius is supposed to confine to the
uncommon.
Manso has left a minute account of his friend's person and manners. He
was tall even among the tall; had a pale complexion, sunken cheeks,
lightish brown hair, head bald at the top, large blue eyes, square
forehead, big nose inclining towards the mouth, lips pale and thin, white
teeth, delicate white hands, long arms, broad chest and shoulders, legs
rather strong than fleshy, and the body altogether better proportioned
than in good condition; the result, nevertheless, being an aspect of
manly beauty and expression, particularly in the countenance, the dignity
of which marked him for an extraordinary person even to those who did not
know him. His demeanour was grave and deliberate; he laughed seldom;
and though his tongue was prompt, his delivery was slow; and he was
accustomed to repeat his last words. He was expert in all manly
exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his
otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight
the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that
there went about in his honour a popular couplet
"Colla penna e colla spada
Nessun val quanto Torquato. "
For the sword as well as pen
Tasso is the man of men.
He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as
combined piquancy with sweetness; and he always dressed in black. Manso's
account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell all; for Tasso
himself informs us that he stammered, and was near-sighted;[33] and a
Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to the near-sightedness some visible
defect in the eyes. [34] I should doubt, from what Tasso says in his
letters, whether he was fond of speaking in public, notwithstanding his
_début_ in that line with the _Fifty Amorous Conclusions_. Nor does he
appear to have been remarkable for his conversation. Manso has left a
collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings--a suspicious amount, and
unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of
them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin
philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus. The two following have the
greatest appearance of being genuine:
A Greek, complaining that he had spoken ill of his country, and
maintaining that all the virtues in the world had issued out of it, the
poet assented; with the addition, that they had not left one behind them.
A foolish young fellow, garnished with a number of golden chains, coming
into a room where he was, and being overheard by him exclaiming, "Is this
the great man that was mad? " Tasso said, "Yes; but that people had never
put on him more than one chain at a time. "
His character may be gathered, but not perhaps entirely, from what has
been written of his life; for some of his earlier letters shew him to
have been not quite so grave and refined in his way of talking as readers
of the _Jerusalem_ might suppose. He was probably at that time of life
not so scrupulous in his morals as he professed to be during the greater
part of it. His mother is thought to have died of chagrin and impatience
at being separated so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do
to save her dowry from her brothers; and I take her son to have combined
his mother's ultra-sensitive organisation with his father's worldly
imprudence and unequal spirits. The addition of the nervous temperament
of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other gave rise to the poet's
trembling eagerness for distinction; and Torquato's very love for them
both hindered him from seeing what should have been corrected in the
infirmities which he inherited. Falling from the highest hopes of
prosperity into the most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid
principles of action to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an
excess of self-esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and
his naturally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend
to almost every species of inconsistency. The Duke of Ferrara, he
complains, did not believe a word he said;[35] and the fact is, that,
partly from disease, and partly from a want of courage to look his
defects in the face, he beheld the same things in so many different
lights, and according as it suited him at the moment, that, without
intending falsehood, his statements are really not to be relied on. He
degraded even his verses, sometimes with panegyrics for interest's sake,
sometimes out of weak wishes to oblige, of which he was afterwards
ashamed; and, with the exception of Constantini, we cannot be sure that
any one person praised in them retained his regard in his last days. His
suspicion made him a kind of Rousseau; but he was more amiable than
the Genevese, and far from being in the habit of talking against old
acquaintances, whatever he might have thought of them. It is observable,
not only that he never married, but he told Manso he had led a life of
entire continence ever since he entered the walls of his prison, being
then in his thirty-fifth year. [36] Was this out of fidelity to some
mistress? or the consequence of a previous life the reverse of continent?
or was it from some principle of superstition? He had become a devotee,
apparently out of a dread of disbelief; and he remained extremely
religious for the rest of his days. The two unhappiest of Italian poets,
Tasso and Dante, were the two most superstitious.
As for the once formidable question concerning the comparative merits
of this poet and Ariosto, which anticipated the modern quarrels of the
classical and romantic schools, some idea of the treatment which Tasso
experienced may be conceived by supposing all that used to be sarcastic
and bitter in the periodical party-criticism among ourselves some thirty
years back, collected into one huge vial of wrath, and poured upon the
new poet's head. Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up
in the pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolator
of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a "review" of the _Jerusalem
Delivered_, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and
contemptuous. [37] But now that the only final arbiter, posterity, has
accepted both the poets, the dispute is surely the easiest thing in the
world to settle; not, indeed, with prejudices of creeds or temperaments,
but before any judges thoroughly sympathising with the two claimants. Its
solution is the principle of the greater including the less. For Ariosto
errs only by having an unbounded circle to move in. His sympathies are
unlimited; and those who think him inferior to Tasso, only do so in
consequence of their own want of sympathy with the vivacities that
degrade him in their eyes. Ariosto can be as grave and exalted as Tasso
when he pleases, and he could do a hundred things which Tasso never
attempted. He is as different in this respect as Shakspeare from Milton.
He had far more knowledge of mankind than Tasso, and he was superior in
point of taste. But it is painful to make disadvantageous comparisons of
one great poet with another. Let us be thankful for Tasso's enchanted
gardens, without being forced to vindicate the universal world of his
predecessor. Suffice it to bear in mind, that the grave poet himself
agreed with the rest of the Italians in calling the Ferrarese the "divine
Ariosto;" a title which has never been popularly given to his rival.
The _Jerusalem Delivered_ is the history of a Crusade, related with
poetic license. The Infidels are assisted by unlawful arts; and the
libertinism that brought scandal on the Christians, is converted into
youthful susceptibility, led away by enchantment. The author proposed
to combine the ancient epic poets with Ariosto, or a simple plot, and
uniformly dignified style, with romantic varieties of adventure, and
the luxuriance of fairy-land. He did what he proposed to do, but with a
judgment inferior to Virgil's; nay, in point of the interdependence of
the adventures, to Ariosto, and with far less general vigour. The mixture
of affectation with his dignity is so frequent, that, whether Boileau's
famous line about Tasso's tinsel and Virgil's gold did or did not mean to
imply that the _Jerusalem_ was nothing but tinsel, and the _Æneid_ all
gold, it is certain that the tinsel is so interwoven with the gold, as to
render it more of a rule than an exception, and put a provoking distance
between Tasso's epic pretensions and those of the greatest masters of the
art. People who take for granted the conceits because of the "wildness"
of Ariosto, and the good taste because of the "regularity" of Tasso, just
assume the reverse of the fact. It is a rare thing to find a conceit in
Ariosto; and, where it does exist, it is most likely defensible on some
Shakspearian ground of subtle propriety. Open Tasso in almost any part,
particularly the love-scenes, and it is marvellous if, before long, you
do not see the conceits vexatiously interfering with the beauties.
"Oh maraviglia! Amor, the appena è nato,
Già grande vola, e già trionfa armato. " Canto i. St. 47.
Oh, miracle! Love is scarce born, when, lo,
He flies full wing'd, and lords it with his bow!
"Se 'l miri fulminar ne l'arme avvolto,
Marte lo stimi; Amor, se scopre il volto. " St. 58.
Mars you would think him, when his thund'ring race
In arms he ran; Love, when he shew'd his face.
Which is as little true to reason as to taste; for no god of war could
look like a god of love. The habit of mind would render it impossible.
But the poet found the prettiness of the Greek Anthology irresistible.
Olindo, tied to the stake amidst the flames of martyrdom, can say to his
mistress
"Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise. " Canto ii. st. 34.
Other flames, other bonds than these, love promised.
The sentiment is natural, but the double use of the "flames" on such an
occasion, miserable.
In the third canto the fair Amazon Clorinda challenges her love to single
combat.
"E di due morti in un punto lo sfida. " St. 23.
"And so at once she threats to kill him twice. " _Fairfax_.
That is to say, with her valour and beauty.
Another twofold employment of flame, with an exclamation to secure our
astonishment, makes its appearance in the fourth canto
"Oh miracol d'amor! che le faville
Tragge del pianto, e'i cor' ne l'acqua accende. " St. 76.
Oh, miracle of love! that draweth sparks
Of fire from tears, and kindlest hearts in water!
This puerile antithesis of _fire_ and _water, fire_ and _ice, light_
in _darkness, silence_ in _speech_, together with such pretty turns as
_wounding one's-self in wounding others_, and the worse sacrifice of
consistency and truth of feeling,--lovers making long speeches on the
least fitting occasions, and ladies retaining their rosy cheeks in the
midst of fears of death,--is to be met with, more or less, throughout
the poem. I have no doubt they were the proximate cause of that general
corruption of taste which was afterwards completed by Marino, the
acquaintance and ardent admirer of Tasso when a boy. They have been laid
to the charge of Petrarch; but, without entering into the question, how
far and in what instances conceits may not be natural to lovers haunted,
as Petrarch was, with one idea, and seeing it in every thing they behold,
what had the great epic poet to do with the faults of the lyrical? And
what is to be said for his standing in need of the excuse of bad example?
Homer and Milton were in no such want. Virgil would not have copied the
tricks of Ovid. There is an effeminacy and self-reflection in Tasso,
analogous to his Rinaldo, in the enchanted garden; where the hero wore
a looking-glass by his side, in which he contemplated his sophisticated
self, and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress. [38] Agreeably to
this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, when not supported by
great occasions (and even the occasion itself sometimes fails him), is
too apt to fall into tameness and common-place,--to want movement and
picture; while, at the same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it
does not possess the music which might be expected from a lyrical and
voluptuous poet. Bernardo prophesied of his son, that, however he might
surpass him in other respects, he would never equal him in sweetness;
and he seems to have judged him rightly. I have met with a passage in
Torquato's prose writings (but I cannot lay my hands on it), in which he
expresses a singular predilection for verses full of the same vowel.
He seems, if I remember rightly, to have regarded it, not merely as a
pleasing variety, which it is on occasion, but as a reigning principle.
Voltaire (I think, in his treatise on _Epic Poetry_) has noticed the
multitude of _o_'s in the exordium of the _Jerusalem_. This apparent
negligence seems to have been intentional.
"Cantò l'armi pietòse e 'l capitanò
Che 'l gran Sepòlerò liberò di Cristò;
Mòltò egli òprò còl sennò e còn la manò,
Mòltò sòffri nel glòriòsò acquistò;
E invan l'infernò a lui s'òppòse; e invanò
S'armò d'Asia e di Libia il pòpòl mistò;
Che il ciel gli diè favòre, e sòttò ai santi
Segni ridusse i suòi còmpagni erranti. "
The reader will not be surprised to find, that he who could thus confound
monotony with music, and commence his greatest poem with it, is too often
discordant in the rest of his versification. It has been thought, that
Milton might have taken from the Italians the grand musical account to
which he turns a list of proper names, as in his enumerations of realms
and deities; but I have been surprised to find how little the most
musical of languages appears to have suggested to its poets anything of
the sort. I am not aware of it, indeed, in any poets but our own. All
others, from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to
Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have overlooked
this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, where they had no
other theme on which to modulate. Its inventor, as far as I am aware, is
that great poet, Marlowe. [39]
There are faults of invention as well as style in the _Jerusalem_. The
Talking Bird, or bird that sings with a human voice (canto iv. 13), is a
piece of inverisimilitude, which the author, perhaps, thought justifiable
by the speaking horses of the ancients. But the latter were moved
supernaturally for the occasion, and for a very fine occasion. Tasso's
bird is a mere born contradiction to nature and for no necessity. The
vulgar idea of the devil with horns and a tail (though the retention
of it argued a genius in Tasso very inferior to that of Milton) is
defensible, I think, on the plea of the German critics, that malignity
should be made a thing low and deformed; but as much cannot be said for
the storehouse in heaven, where St. Michael's spear is kept with which
he slew the dragon, and the trident which is used for making earthquakes
(canto vii. st. 81). The tomb which supernaturally comes out of the
ground, inscribed with the name and virtues of Sueno (canto viii. st.
39), is worthy only of a pantomime; and the wizard in robes, with
beech-leaves on his head, who walks dry-shod on water, and superfluously
helps the knights on their way to Armida's retirement (xiv. 33), is
almost as ludicrous as the burlesque of the river-god in the _Voyage_ of
Bachaumont and Chapelle.
But let us not wonder, nevertheless, at the effect which the _Jerusalem_
has had upon the world. It could not have had it without great nature and
power. Rinaldo, in spite of his aberrations with Armida, knew the path
to renown, and so did his poet. Tasso's epic, with all its faults, is a
noble production, and justly considered one of the poems of the world.
Each of those poems hit some one great point of universal attraction,
at least in their respective countries, and among the givers of fame in
others. Homer's poem is that of action; Dante's, of passion; Virgil's, of
judgment; Milton's, of religion; Spenser's, of poetry itself; Ariosto's,
of animal spirits (I do not mean as respects gaiety only, but in strength
and readiness of accord with the whole play of nature); Tasso looked
round with an ultra-sensitive temperament, and an ambition which required
encouragement, and his poem is that of tenderness. Every thing inclines
to this point in his circle, with the tremulousness of the needle. Love
is its all in all, even to the design of the religious war which is
to rescue the sepulchre of the God of Charity from the hands of the
unloving. His heroes are all in love, at least those on the right side;
his leader, Godfrey, notwithstanding his prudence, narrowly escapes the
passion, and is full of a loving consideration; his amazon, Clorinda,
inspires the truest passion, and dies taking her lover's hand; his
Erminia is all love for an enemy; his enchantress Armida falls from
pretended love into real, and forsakes her religion for its sake. An old
father (canto ix. ) loses his five sons in battle, and dies on their
dead bodies of a wound which he has provoked on purpose. Tancred cannot
achieve the enterprise of the Enchanted Forest, because his dead mistress
seems to come out of one of the trees. Olindo thinks it happiness to be
martyred at the same stake with Sophronia. The reconciliation of Rinaldo
with his enchantress takes place within a few stanzas of the close of
the poem, as if contesting its interest with religion. The _Jerusalem
Delivered_, in short, is the favourite epic of the young: all the lovers
in Europe have loved it. The French have forgiven the author his conceits
for the sake of his gallantry: he is the poet of the gondoliers; and
Spenser, the most luxurious of his brethren, plundered his bowers of
bliss. Read Tasso's poem by this gentle light of his genius, and you pity
him twentyfold, and know not what excuse to find for his jailer.
The stories translated in the present volume, though including war and
magic, are all love-stories. They were not selected on that account. They
suggested themselves for selection, as containing most of the finest
things in the poem. They are conducted with great art, and the characters
and affections happily varied. The first (_Olindo and Sophronia_) is
perhaps unique for the hopelessness of its commencement (I mean with
regard to the lovers), and the perfect, and at the same time quite
probable, felicity of the conclusion. There is no reason to believe that
the staid and devout Sophronia would have loved her adorer at all, but
for the circumstance that first dooms them both to a shocking death,
and then sends them, with perfect warrant, from the stake to the altar.
Clorinda is an Amazon, the idea of whom, as such, it is impossible for
us to separate from very repulsive and unfeminine images; yet, under the
circumstances of the story, we call to mind in her behalf the possibility
of a Joan of Arc's having loved and been beloved; and her death is a
surprising and most affecting variation upon that of Agrican in Boiardo.
Tasso's enchantress Armida is a variation of the Angelica of the same
poet, combined with Ariosto's Alcina; but her passionate voluptuousness
makes her quite a new character in regard to the one; and she is as
different from the painted hag of the _Orlando_ as youth, beauty, and
patriotic intention can make her. She is not very sentimental; but all
the passion in the world has sympathised with her; and it was manly and
honest in the poet not to let her Paganism and vehemence hinder him from
doing justice to her claims as a human being and a deserted woman. Her
fate is left in so pleasing a state of doubt, that we gladly avail
ourselves of it to suppose her married to Rinaldo, and becoming the
mother of a line of Christian princes. I wish they had treated her poet
half so well as she would infallibly have treated him herself.
But the singer of the Crusades can be strong as well as gentle. You
discern in his battles and single combats the poet ambitious of renown,
and the accomplished swordsman. The duel of Tancred and Argantes, in
which the latter is slain, is as earnest and fiery writing throughout as
truth and passion could desire; that of Tancred and Clorinda is also
very powerful as well as affecting; and the whole siege of Jerusalem is
admirable for the strength of its interest. Every body knows the grand
verse (not, however, quite original) that summons the devils to council,
"Chiama gli abitator," &c. ; and the still grander, though less original
one, describing the desolations of time, "Giace l'alta Cartago. "[40] The
forest filled with supernatural terrors by a magician, in order that the
Christians may not cut wood from it to make their engines of war, is one
of the happiest pieces of invention in romance. It is founded in as true
human feeling as those of Ariosto, and is made an admirable instrument
for the aggrandizement of the character of Rinaldo. Godfrey's attestation
of all time, and of the host of heaven, when he addresses his army in the
first canto, is in the highest spirit of epic magnificence. So is the
appearance of the celestial armies, together with that of the souls of
the slain Christian warriors, in the last canto, where they issue forth
in the air to assist the entrance into the conquered city. The classical
poets are turned to great and frequent account throughout the poem;
and yet the work has a strong air of originality, partly owing to the
subject, partly to the abundance of love-scenes, and to a certain
compactness in the treatment of the main story, notwithstanding the
luxuriance of the episodes. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ is stately,
well-ordered, full of action and character, sometimes sublime, always
elegant, and very interesting-more so, I think, as a whole, and in
a popular sense, than any other story in verse, not excepting the
_Odyssey_. For the exquisite domestic attractiveness of the second
Homeric poem is injured, like the hero himself, by too many diversions
from the main point. There is an interest, it is true, in that very
delay; but we become too much used to the disappointment. In the epic
of Tasso the reader constantly desires to learn how the success of the
enterprise is to be brought about; and he scarcely loses sight of any of
the persons but he wishes to see them again. Even in the love-scenes,
tender and absorbed as they are, we feel that the heroes are fighters, or
going to fight. When you are introduced to Armida in the Bower of Bliss,
it is by warriors who come to take her lover away to battle.
One of the reasons why Tasso hurt the style of his poem by a manner too
lyrical was, that notwithstanding its deficiency in sweetness, he was one
of the profusest lyrical writers of his nation, and always having his
feelings turned in upon himself. I am not sufficiently acquainted with
his odes and sonnets to speak of them in the gross; but I may be allowed
to express my belief that they possess a great deal of fancy and feeling.
It has been wondered how he could write so many, considering the troubles
he went through; but the experience was the reason. The constant
succession of hopes, fears, wants, gratitudes, loves, and the necessity
of employing his imagination, accounts for all. Some of his sonnets, such
as those on the Countess of Scandiano's lip ("Quel labbro," &c. ); the one
to Stigliano, concluding with the affecting mention of himself and his
lost harp; that beginning
"Io veggio in cielo scintillar le stelle,"
recur to my mind oftener than any others except Dante's "Tanto gentile"
and Filicaia's _Lament on Italy_; and, with the exception of a few of the
more famous odes of Petrarch, and one or two of Filicaia's and Guidi's, I
know of none in Italian like several of Tasso's, including his fragment
"O del grand' Apennino," and the exquisite chorus on the _Golden Age_,
which struck a note in the hearts of the world.
His _Aminta_, the chief pastoral poem of Italy, though, with the
exception of that ode, not equal in passages to the _Faithful
Shepherdess_ (which is a Pan to it compared with a beardless shepherd),
is elegant, interesting, and as superior to Guarini's more sophisticate
yet still beautiful _Pastor Fido_ as a first thought may be supposed to
be to its emulator. The objection of its being too elegant for shepherds
he anticipated and nullified by making Love himself account for it in a
charming prologue, of which the god is the speaker:
"Queste selve oggi ragionar d'Amore
S'udranno in nuova guisa; e ben parassi,
Che la mia Deità sia quì presente
In se medesma, e non ne' suoi ministri.
Spirerò nobil sensi à rozzi petti;
Raddolcirò nelle lor lingue il suono:
Perchè, ovunque i' mi sia, io sono Amore
Ne' pastori non men che negli eroi;
E la disagguaglianza de' soggetti,
Come a me piace, agguaglio: e questa è pure
Suprema gloria, e gran miracol mio,
Render simili alle più dotte cetre
Le rustiche sampogne. "
After new fashion shall these woods to-day
Hear love discoursed; and it shall well be seen
That my divinity is present here
In its own person, not its ministers.
I will inbreathe high fancies in rude hearts;
I will refine and render dulcet sweet
Their tongues; because, wherever I may be,
Whether with rustic or heroic men,
There am I Love; and inequality,
As it may please me, do I equalise;
And 'tis my crowning glory and great miracle
To make the rural pipe as eloquent
Even as the subtlest harp.
I ought not to speak of Tasso's other poetry, or of his prose, for I
have read little of either; though, as they are not popular with his
countrymen, a foreigner may be pardoned for thinking his classical
tragedy, _Torrismondo_, not attractive--his _Sette Giornate_ (Seven
Days of the Creation) still less so--and his platonical and critical
discourses better filled with authorities than reasons. Tasso was a
lesser kind of Milton, enchanted by the Sirens. We discern the weak parts
of his character, more or less, in all his writings; but we see also the
irrepressible elegance and superiority of the mind, which, in spite of
all weakness, was felt to tower above its age, and to draw to it the
homage as well as the resentment of princes.
[Footnote 1: My authorities for this notice are, Black's _Life of Tasso_
(2 vols. 4to, 1810), his original, Serassi, _Vita di Torquato Tasso_ (do.
1790), and the works of the poet in the Pisan edition of Professor Rosini
(33 vols. 8vo, 1332). I have been indebted to nothing in Black which I
have not ascertained by reference to the Italian biographer, and quoted
nothing stated by Tasso himself but from the works. Black's Life, which
is a free version of Serassi's, modified by the translator's own opinions
and criticism, is elegant, industrious, and interesting. Serassi's was
the first copious biography of the poet founded on original documents;
and it deserved to be translated by Mr. Black, though servile to
the house of Este, and, as might be expected, far from being always
ingenuous. Among other instances of this writer's want of candour is the
fact of his having been the discoverer and suppresser of the manuscript
review of Tasso by Galileo. The best summary account of the poet's life
and writings which I have met with is Ginguéné's, in the fifth volume
of his _Histoire Littéraire_, &c. It is written with his usual grace,
vivacity, and acuteness, and contains a good notice of the Tasso
controversy. As to the Pisan edition of the works, it is the completest,
I believe, in point of contents ever published, comprises all the
controversial criticism, and is, of course, very useful; but it contains
no life except Manso's (now known to be very inconclusive), has got a
heap of feeble variorum comments on the _Jerusalem_, no notes worth
speaking of to the rest of the works, and, notwithstanding the claim
in the title-page to the merit of a "better order," has left the
correspondence in a deplorable state of irregularity, as well as totally
without elucidation. The learned Professor is an agreeable writer, and, I
believe, a very pleasant man, but he certainly is a provoking editor. ]
[Footnote 2: In the beautiful fragment beginning, _O del grand'Apennino:_
"Me dal sen della madre empia fortuna
Pargoletto divelse. Ah! di que' baci,
Ch'ella bagnò di lagrime dolenti,
Con sospir mi rimembra, e degli ardenti
Preghi, che sen portár l'aure fugaci,
Ch'io giunger non dovea più volto a volto
Fra quelle braccia accolto
Con nodi così stretti e sì tenaci.
Lasso! e seguii con mal sicure piante,
Qual Ascanio, o Camilla, il padre errante. "
Me from my mother's bosom my hard lot
Took when a child. Alas! though all these years
I have been used to sorrow,
I sigh to think upon the floods of tears
which bathed her kisses on that doleful morrow:
I sigh to think of all the prayers and cries
She wasted, straining me with lifted eyes:
For never more on one another's face
was it our lot to gaze and to embrace!
Her little stumbling boy,
Like to the child of Troy,
Or like to one doomed to no haven rather,
Followed the footsteps of his wandering father. ]
[Footnote 3: Rosini, _Saggio sugli Amori di Torquato Tasso_, &c. , in the
Professor's edition of his works, vol. xxxiii. ]
[Footnote 4: _Lettere Inedite_, p. 33, in the _Opere_, vol. xvii. ]
[Footnote 5: _Entretiens_, 1663, p. 169 quoted by Scrassi, pp. 175, 182. ]
[Footnote 6: Suggested by Ariosto's furniture in the Moon. ]
[Footnote 7: This was a trick which he afterwards thought he had reason
to complain of in a style very different from pleasantry. ]
[Footnote 8: Alfonso. The word for "leader" in the original, _duce_, made
the allusion more obvious. The epithet "royal," in the next sentence,
conveyed a welcome intimation to the ducal car, the house of Este being
very proud of its connexion with the sovereigns of Europe, and very
desirous of becoming royal itself. ]
[Footnote 9: Serassi, vol i. p. 210. ]
(Footnote 10: "Alla lor magnanimità è convenevole il mostrar, ch'amor
delle virtù, non odio verso altri, gli abbia già mossi ad invitarmi con
invito così largo. " _Opere_, vol. xv. p. 94. ]
[Footnote 11: The application is the conjecture of Black, vol. i. p. 317.
Serassi suppressed the whole passage. The indecent word would have been
known but for the delicacy or courtliness of Muratori, who substituted an
_et-cetera_ in its place, observing, that he had "covered" with it "an
indecent word not fit to be printed" ("sotto quell'_et-cetera_ ho io
coperta un'indecente parola, che non era lecito di lasciar correre alle
stampe. " _Opere del Tasso,_ vol. xvi. p. 114). By "covered" he seems to
have meant blotted out; for in the latest edition of Tasso the _et-cetera
is_ retained. ]
[Footnote 12: Black's version (vol. ii. p. 58) is not strong enough. The
words in Serassi are "una ciurma di poltroni, ingrati, e ribaldi. " ii. p.
33. ]
[Footnote 13: _Opere_, vol xiv. pp. 158, 174, &c. ]
[Footnote 14: "Prego V. Signoria the si contenti, se piace al Serenissimo
Signor Duca, Clementissimo ed Invitissimo, the io stia in prigione, di
farmi dar le poche robicciole mie, the S. A. Invitissima, Clementissima,
Serenissima m' ha promesse tante volte," &c. _Opere_, vol. xiv. p. 6. ]
[Footnote 15: "Altera Torquatum cepit Leonora poetam," &c. ]
[Footnote 16: _Vie du Tasse,_ 1695, p. 51. ]
[Footnote 17: In the Apology _for Raimond de Sebonde_; Essays,
vol. ii. ch. 12. ]
[Footnote 18: In his _Letter to Zeno,--Opere del
Tasso_, xvi. p. 118. ]
[Footnote 19: _Storia della Poesia Italiana_ (Mathias's edition), vol.
iii. part i. p 236. ]
[Footnote 20: Serassi is very peremptory, and even abusive. He charges
every body who has said any thing to the contrary with imposture. "Egli
non v' ha dubbio, che le troppe imprudenti e temerarie parole, che il
Tasso si lasciò uscir di bocca in questo incontro, furone la sola cagione
della sua prigionia, e ch' è mera favola ed _impostura_ tutto ciò, che
diversamente è stato affermato e scritto da altri in tale proposito. "
Vol. ii. p. 33. But we have seen that the good Abbè could practise a
little imposition himself. ]
[Footnote 21: Black, ii. 88. ]
[Footnote 22: _Hist. Litt. d'Italie_, v. 243, &c. ]
[Footnote 23: Vol. ii. p. 89. ]
[Footnote 24: Such at least is my impression; but I cannot call the
evidence to mind. ]
[Footnote 25: _Literature of the South of Europe_ (Roscoe's translation),
vol. ii. p. 165. To shew the loose way in which the conclusions of a
man's own mind are presented as facts admitted by others, Sismondi says,
that Tasso's "passion" was the cause of his return to Ferrara. There is
not a tittle of evidence to shew for it. ]
[Footnote 26: _Saggio sugli Amori_, &c. ut sup p. 84, and passim. As
specimens of the learned professor's reasoning, it may be observed that
whenever the words _humble, daring, high, noble_, and _royal_, occur in
the poet's love-verses, he thinks they _must_ allude to the Princess
Leonora; and he argues, that Alfonso never could have been so angry with
any "versi lascivi," if they had not had the same direction. ]
[Footnote 27: _Opere_, vol. xvii. p. 32. ]
[Footnote 28:
"Padre, o buon padre, che dal ciel rimiri,
Egro e morto ti piansi, e ben tu il sai;
E gemendo scaldai
La tomba e il letto. Or che negli altri giri
Tu godi, a te si deve onor, non lutto:
A me versato il mio dolor sia tutto. "
O father, my good father, looking now
On thy poor son from heaven, well knowest thou
What scalding tears I shed
Upon thy grave, upon thy dying bed;
But since thou dwellest in the happy skies,
'Tis fit I raise to thee no sorrowing eyes
Be all my grief on my own head. ]
[Footnote 29:
" Non posso viver in città, ove tutti i nobili, o non mi
concedano i primi luoghi, o almeno non si contentino the la cosa in
quel the appartiene a queste esteriori dimostrazioni, vada del pari. "
_Opere,_, vol. xiii. p. 153. ]
[Footnote 30: Black, vol. ii. p. 240. ]
[Footnote 31: The world in general have taken no notice of Tasso's
reconstruction of his _Jerusalem_, which he called the _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_. It never "obtained," as the phrase is. It was the mere
tribute of his declining years to bigotry and new acquaintances; and
therefore I say no more of it. ]
[Footnote 32: _In manus tuas, Domine_. One likes to know the actual
words; at least so it appears to me. ]
[Footnote 33: Serassi, ii. 276. ]
[Footnote 34: "Quem _cernis_, quisquis es, procera statura virum,
_luscis_ oculis, &c. hic Torquatus est. "--Cappacio, _Illustrium Literis
Virorum Elogia et Judici_, quoted by Serassi, ut sup. The Latin word
_luscus_, as well as the Italian _losco_, means, I believe, near-sighted;
but it certainly means also a great deal more; and unless the word
_cernis_ (thou beholdest) is a mere form of speech implying a foregone
conclusion, it shews that the defect was obvious to the spectator. ]
[Footnote 35: "Il Signor Duca non crede ad alcuna mia parola. "
_Opere_, xiv. 161.
grand' Apennino," he affectingly begs pardon of his blessed spirit for
troubling him with his earthly griefs. [28]
But, alas, what had been an indulgence of self-esteem had now become the
habit of a disease; and in the course of a few months the restless poet
began to make his old discovery, that he was not sufficiently cared for.
The prince had no leisure to attend to him; the nobility did not "yield
him the first place," or at least (he adds) they did not allow him to be
treated "externally as their equal;" and he candidly confessed that he
could not live in a place where such was the custom. [29] He felt also,
naturally enough, however well it might have been intended, that it was
not pleasant to be confined to the range of the city of Mantua, attended
by a servant, even though he confessed that he was now subject to
"frenzy. " He contrived to stay another half-year by help of a brilliant
carnival and of the select society of the prince's court, who were
evidently most kind to him; but at the end of the twelvemonth he was in
Bergamo among his relations. The prince gave him leave to go; and the
Cavaliere Tasso, his kinsman, sent his chariot on purpose to fetch him.
Here again he found himself at a beautiful country-seat, which the family
of Tasso still possesses near that city; and here again, in the house of
his father, he proposed to be happy, "having never desired," he says,
"any journey more earnestly than this. " He left it in the course of a
month, to return to Mantua.
And it was only to wander still. Mantua he quitted in less than two
months to go to Rome, in spite of the advice of his best friends.
He vindicated the proceeding by a hope of obtaining some permanent
settlement from the Pope. He took Loretto by the way, to refresh himself
with devotion; arrived in a transport at Rome; got nothing from the Pope
(the hard-minded Sixtus the Fifth); and in the spring of the next year,
in the triple hope of again embracing his sister, and recovering the
dowry of his mother and the confiscated property of his father, he
proceeded to Naples.
Naples was in its most beautiful vernal condition, and the Neapolitans
welcomed the poet with all honour and glory; but his sister, alas, was
dead; he got none of his father's property, nor (till too late) any of
his mother's; and before the year was out, he was again in Rome. He
acquired in Naples, however, another friend, as attached to him and
as constant in his attentions as his beloved Constantini, to wit,
Giambattista Manso, Marquis of Villa, who became his biographer, and who
was visited and praised for his good offices by Milton. In the society of
this gentleman he seemed for a short while to have become a new man. He
entered into field-sports, listened to songs and music, nay, danced, says
Manso, with "the girls. " (One fancies a poetical Dr. Johnson with the two
country damsels on his knees. ) In short, good air and freedom, and no
medicine, had conspired with the lessons of disappointment to give him,
before he died, a glimpse of the power to be pleased. He had not got rid
of all his spiritual illusions, even those of a melancholy nature; but he
took the latter more quietly, and had grown so comfortable with the race
in general, that he encouraged them. He was so entirely freed from his
fears of the Inquisition and of charges of magic, that whereas he had
formerly been anxious to shew that he meant nothing but a poetical fancy
by the spirit which he introduced as communing with him in his dialogue
entitled the _Messenger_, he now maintained its reality against the
arguments of his friend Manso; and these arguments gave rise to the most
poetical scene in his history. He told Manso that he should have ocular
testimony of the spirit's existence; and accordingly one day while they
were sitting together at the marquis's fireside, "he turned his eyes,"
says Manso, "towards a window, and held them a long time so intensely on
it, that, when I called him, he did not answer. At last, 'Behold,' said
he, 'the friendly spirit which has courteously come to talk with me. Lift
up your eyes, and see the truth. ' I turned my eyes thither immediately
(continues the marquis); but though I endeavoured to look as keenly as I
could, I beheld nothing but the rays of the sun, which streamed through
the panes of the window into the chamber. Whilst I still looked around,
without beholding any object, Torquato began to hold, with this unknown
something, a most lofty converse. I heard, indeed, and saw nothing but
himself; nevertheless his words, at one time questioning, at another
replying, were such as take place between those who reason strictly on
some important subject. And from what was said by the one, the reply of
the other might be easily comprehended by the intellect, although it was
not heard by the ear. The discourses were so lofty and marvellous,
both by the sublimity of their topics and a certain unwonted manner of
talking, that, exalted above myself in a kind of ecstasy, I did not dare
to interrupt them, nor ask Tasso about the spirit, which he had announced
to me, but which I did not see. In this way, while I listened between
stupefaction and rapture, a considerable time had elapsed; till at last
the spirit departed, as I learned from the words of Torquato; who,
turning to me, said, 'From this day forward all your doubts will have
vanished from your mind. ' 'Nay,' said I, 'they are rather increased;
since, though I have heard many things worthy of marvel, I have seen
nothing of what you promised to shew me to dispel them. ' He smiled, and
said, 'You have seen and heard more of him than perhaps --,' and here
he paused. Fearful of importuning him with new questions, the discourse
ended; and the only conclusion I can draw is, what I before said, that
it is more likely his visions or frenzies will disorder my own mind than
that I shall extirpate his true or imaginary opinion. "[30]
Did the "smile" of Tasso at the close of this extraordinary scene, and
the words which he omitted to add, signify that his friend had seen and
heard more, perhaps, than the poet _would have liked_ to explain? Did he
mean that he himself alone had been seen and heard, and was author of the
whole dialogue? Perhaps he did; for credulity itself can impose;--can
take pleasure in seeing others as credulous as itself. On the other
hand, enough has become known in our days of the phenomena of morbid
perception, to render Tasso's actual belief in such visions not at
all surprising. It is not uncommon for the sanest people of delicate
organisation to see faces before them while going to sleep, sometimes
in fantastical succession. A stronger exercise of this disposition in
temperaments more delicate will enlarge the face to figure; and there can
be no question that an imagination so heated as Tasso's, so full of the
speculations of the later Platonists, and accompanied by a state of body
so "nervous," and a will so bent on its fancies, might embody whatever
he chose to behold. The dialogue he could as easily read in the vision's
looks, whether he heard it or not with ears. If Nicholay, the Prussian
bookseller, who saw crowds of spiritual people go through his rooms, had
been a poet, and possessed of as wilful an imagination as Tasso, he might
have gifted them all with _speaking countenances_ as easily as with coats
and waistcoats. Swedenborg founded a religion on this morbid faculty; and
the Catholics worship a hundred stories of the like sort in the Lives of
the Saints, many of which are equally true and false; false in reality,
though true in supposition. Luther himself wrote and studied till he
saw the Devil; only the great reformer retained enough of his naturally
sturdy health and judgment to throw an inkstand at Satan's head,--a thing
that philosophy has been doing ever since.
Tasso's principal residence while at Naples had been in the beautiful
monastery of Mount Olivet, on which the good monks begged he would write
them a poem; which he did. A cold reception at Rome, and perhaps the
difference of the air, brought back his old lamentations; but here again
a monastery gave him refuge, and he set himself down to correct his
former works and compose new ones. He missed, however, the comforts of
society and amusement which he had experienced at Naples. Nevertheless,
he did not return thither. He persuaded himself that it was necessary to
be in Rome in order to expedite the receipt of some books and manuscripts
from Bergamo and other places; but his restlessness desired novelty. He
thus slipped back from the neighbourhood of Rome to the city itself, and
from the city back to the monastery, his friends in both places being
probably tired of his instability. He thought of returning to Mantua; but
a present from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, accompanied by an invitation to
his court, drew him, in one of his short-lived transports, to Florence.
He returned, in spite of the best and most generous reception, to Rome;
then left Rome for Mantua, on invitation from his ever-kind deliverer
from prison, now the reigning duke; tired again, even of him; returned to
Rome; then once more to Naples, where the Prince of Conca, Grand Admiral
of the kingdom, lodged and treated him like an equal; but he grew
suspicious of the admiral, and went to live with his friend Manso;
quitted Manso for Rome again; was treated with reverence on the way, like
Ariosto, by a famous leader of banditti; was received at Rome into the
Vatican itself, in the apartments of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino,
nephew of the new pope Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to
be raised at once to their highest and most reasonable pitch; but fell
ill, and was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air.
A life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was
approaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and
might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man than Tasso;
but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all his weaknesses, and
notwithstanding the enemies they provoked and the friends they cooled,
was really almost adored for his genius in his own time, and instead
of refusing jewels one day and soliciting a ducat the next, might have
settled down almost any where in quiet and glory, if he had but possessed
the patience to do so, it becomes an association of weakness with power,
and of adversity with the means of prosperity, the absurdity of which
admiration itself can only drown in pity.
He now took up his abode in another monastery, that of San Severino,
where he was comforted by the visits of his friend Manso, to whom he had
lately inscribed a dialogue on _Friendship_; for he continued writing
to the last. He had also the consolation, such as it was, of having the
law-suit for his mother's dowry settled in his favour, though under
circumstances that rendered it of little importance, and only three
months before his death. So strangely did Fortune seem to take delight in
sporting with a man of genius, who had thought both too much of her and
too little; too much for pomp's sake, and too little in prudence. Among
his new acquaintances were the young Marino, afterwards the corrupter of
Italian poetry, and the Prince of Venosa, an amateur composer of music.
The dying poet wrote madrigals for him so much to his satisfaction, that,
being about to marry into the house of Este, he wished to reconcile him
with the Duke of Ferrara; and Tasso, who to the last moment of his life
seems never to have been able to resist the chance of resuming old
quarters, apparently from the double temptation of renouncing them, wrote
his old master a letter full of respects and regrets. But the duke, who
himself died in the course of the year, was not to be moved from his
silence. The poet had given him the last possible offence by recasting
his _Jerusalem_, omitting the glories of the house of Este, and
dedicating it to another patron. Alfonso, who had been extravagantly
magnificent, though not to poets, had so weakened his government, that
the Pope wrested Ferrara from the hands of his successor, and reduced
the Este family to the possession of Modena, which it still holds and
dishonours. The duke and the poet were thus fading away at the same time;
they never met again in this world; and a new Dante would have divided
them far enough in the next. [31]
The last glimpse of honour and glory was now opening in a very grand
manner on the poet--the last and the greatest, as if on purpose to give
the climax to his disappointments. Cardinal Cintio requested the Pope to
give him the honour of a coronation. It had been desired by the poet, it
seems, three years before. He was disappointed of it at that time; and
now that it was granted, he was disappointed of the ceremony. Manso says
he no longer cared for it; and, as he felt himself dying, this is not
improbable. Nevertheless he went to Rome for the purpose; and though the
severity of the winter there delayed the intention till spring, wealth
and honours seemed determined to come in floods upon the poor expiring
great man, in order to take away the breath which they had refused to
support. The Pope assigned him a yearly pension of a hundred scudi; and
the withholders of his mother's dowry came to an accommodation by which
he was to have an annuity of a hundred ducats, and a considerable sum
in hand. His hand was losing strength enough to close upon the money.
Scarcely was the day for the coronation about to dawn, when the poet felt
his dissolution approaching. Alfonso's doctors had killed him at last by
superinducing a habit of medicine-taking, which defeated its purpose.
He requested leave to return to the monastery of St. Onofrio--wrote a
farewell letter to Constantini--received the distinguished honour of a
plenary indulgence from the Pope--said (in terms very like what Milton
might have used, had he died a Catholic), that "this was the chariot upon
which he hoped to go crowned, not with laurel as a poet into the capitol,
but with glory as a saint to heaven"--and expired on the 25th of April,
1575, and the fifty-first year of his age, closely embracing the
crucifix, and imperfectly uttering the sentence beginning, "Into thy
hands, O Lord! "[32]
Even after death, success mocked him; for the coronation took place on
the senseless dead body. The head was wreathed with laurel; a magnificent
toga delayed for a while the shroud; and a procession took place through
the city by torchlight, all the inhabitants pouring forth to behold it,
and painters crowding over the bier to gaze on the poet's lineaments,
from which they produced a multitude of portraits. The corpse was then
buried in the church of St. Onofrio; and magnificent monuments talked of,
which never appeared. Manso, however, obtained leave to set up a modest
tablet; and eight years afterwards a Ferrarese cardinal (Bevilacqua) made
what amends he could for his countrymen, by erecting the stately memorial
which is still to be seen.
Poor, illustrious Tasso! weak enough to warrant pity from his
inferiors--great enough to overshadow in death his once-fancied
superiors. He has been a by-word for the misfortunes of genius: but
genius was not his misfortune; it was his only good, and might have
brought him all happiness. It is the want of genius, as far as it
goes, and apart from martyrdoms for conscience' sake, which produces
misfortunes even to genius itself--the want of as much wit and balance
on the common side of things, as genius is supposed to confine to the
uncommon.
Manso has left a minute account of his friend's person and manners. He
was tall even among the tall; had a pale complexion, sunken cheeks,
lightish brown hair, head bald at the top, large blue eyes, square
forehead, big nose inclining towards the mouth, lips pale and thin, white
teeth, delicate white hands, long arms, broad chest and shoulders, legs
rather strong than fleshy, and the body altogether better proportioned
than in good condition; the result, nevertheless, being an aspect of
manly beauty and expression, particularly in the countenance, the dignity
of which marked him for an extraordinary person even to those who did not
know him. His demeanour was grave and deliberate; he laughed seldom;
and though his tongue was prompt, his delivery was slow; and he was
accustomed to repeat his last words. He was expert in all manly
exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his
otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight
the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that
there went about in his honour a popular couplet
"Colla penna e colla spada
Nessun val quanto Torquato. "
For the sword as well as pen
Tasso is the man of men.
He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as
combined piquancy with sweetness; and he always dressed in black. Manso's
account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell all; for Tasso
himself informs us that he stammered, and was near-sighted;[33] and a
Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to the near-sightedness some visible
defect in the eyes. [34] I should doubt, from what Tasso says in his
letters, whether he was fond of speaking in public, notwithstanding his
_début_ in that line with the _Fifty Amorous Conclusions_. Nor does he
appear to have been remarkable for his conversation. Manso has left a
collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings--a suspicious amount, and
unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of
them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin
philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus. The two following have the
greatest appearance of being genuine:
A Greek, complaining that he had spoken ill of his country, and
maintaining that all the virtues in the world had issued out of it, the
poet assented; with the addition, that they had not left one behind them.
A foolish young fellow, garnished with a number of golden chains, coming
into a room where he was, and being overheard by him exclaiming, "Is this
the great man that was mad? " Tasso said, "Yes; but that people had never
put on him more than one chain at a time. "
His character may be gathered, but not perhaps entirely, from what has
been written of his life; for some of his earlier letters shew him to
have been not quite so grave and refined in his way of talking as readers
of the _Jerusalem_ might suppose. He was probably at that time of life
not so scrupulous in his morals as he professed to be during the greater
part of it. His mother is thought to have died of chagrin and impatience
at being separated so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do
to save her dowry from her brothers; and I take her son to have combined
his mother's ultra-sensitive organisation with his father's worldly
imprudence and unequal spirits. The addition of the nervous temperament
of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other gave rise to the poet's
trembling eagerness for distinction; and Torquato's very love for them
both hindered him from seeing what should have been corrected in the
infirmities which he inherited. Falling from the highest hopes of
prosperity into the most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid
principles of action to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an
excess of self-esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and
his naturally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend
to almost every species of inconsistency. The Duke of Ferrara, he
complains, did not believe a word he said;[35] and the fact is, that,
partly from disease, and partly from a want of courage to look his
defects in the face, he beheld the same things in so many different
lights, and according as it suited him at the moment, that, without
intending falsehood, his statements are really not to be relied on. He
degraded even his verses, sometimes with panegyrics for interest's sake,
sometimes out of weak wishes to oblige, of which he was afterwards
ashamed; and, with the exception of Constantini, we cannot be sure that
any one person praised in them retained his regard in his last days. His
suspicion made him a kind of Rousseau; but he was more amiable than
the Genevese, and far from being in the habit of talking against old
acquaintances, whatever he might have thought of them. It is observable,
not only that he never married, but he told Manso he had led a life of
entire continence ever since he entered the walls of his prison, being
then in his thirty-fifth year. [36] Was this out of fidelity to some
mistress? or the consequence of a previous life the reverse of continent?
or was it from some principle of superstition? He had become a devotee,
apparently out of a dread of disbelief; and he remained extremely
religious for the rest of his days. The two unhappiest of Italian poets,
Tasso and Dante, were the two most superstitious.
As for the once formidable question concerning the comparative merits
of this poet and Ariosto, which anticipated the modern quarrels of the
classical and romantic schools, some idea of the treatment which Tasso
experienced may be conceived by supposing all that used to be sarcastic
and bitter in the periodical party-criticism among ourselves some thirty
years back, collected into one huge vial of wrath, and poured upon the
new poet's head. Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up
in the pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolator
of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a "review" of the _Jerusalem
Delivered_, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and
contemptuous. [37] But now that the only final arbiter, posterity, has
accepted both the poets, the dispute is surely the easiest thing in the
world to settle; not, indeed, with prejudices of creeds or temperaments,
but before any judges thoroughly sympathising with the two claimants. Its
solution is the principle of the greater including the less. For Ariosto
errs only by having an unbounded circle to move in. His sympathies are
unlimited; and those who think him inferior to Tasso, only do so in
consequence of their own want of sympathy with the vivacities that
degrade him in their eyes. Ariosto can be as grave and exalted as Tasso
when he pleases, and he could do a hundred things which Tasso never
attempted. He is as different in this respect as Shakspeare from Milton.
He had far more knowledge of mankind than Tasso, and he was superior in
point of taste. But it is painful to make disadvantageous comparisons of
one great poet with another. Let us be thankful for Tasso's enchanted
gardens, without being forced to vindicate the universal world of his
predecessor. Suffice it to bear in mind, that the grave poet himself
agreed with the rest of the Italians in calling the Ferrarese the "divine
Ariosto;" a title which has never been popularly given to his rival.
The _Jerusalem Delivered_ is the history of a Crusade, related with
poetic license. The Infidels are assisted by unlawful arts; and the
libertinism that brought scandal on the Christians, is converted into
youthful susceptibility, led away by enchantment. The author proposed
to combine the ancient epic poets with Ariosto, or a simple plot, and
uniformly dignified style, with romantic varieties of adventure, and
the luxuriance of fairy-land. He did what he proposed to do, but with a
judgment inferior to Virgil's; nay, in point of the interdependence of
the adventures, to Ariosto, and with far less general vigour. The mixture
of affectation with his dignity is so frequent, that, whether Boileau's
famous line about Tasso's tinsel and Virgil's gold did or did not mean to
imply that the _Jerusalem_ was nothing but tinsel, and the _Æneid_ all
gold, it is certain that the tinsel is so interwoven with the gold, as to
render it more of a rule than an exception, and put a provoking distance
between Tasso's epic pretensions and those of the greatest masters of the
art. People who take for granted the conceits because of the "wildness"
of Ariosto, and the good taste because of the "regularity" of Tasso, just
assume the reverse of the fact. It is a rare thing to find a conceit in
Ariosto; and, where it does exist, it is most likely defensible on some
Shakspearian ground of subtle propriety. Open Tasso in almost any part,
particularly the love-scenes, and it is marvellous if, before long, you
do not see the conceits vexatiously interfering with the beauties.
"Oh maraviglia! Amor, the appena è nato,
Già grande vola, e già trionfa armato. " Canto i. St. 47.
Oh, miracle! Love is scarce born, when, lo,
He flies full wing'd, and lords it with his bow!
"Se 'l miri fulminar ne l'arme avvolto,
Marte lo stimi; Amor, se scopre il volto. " St. 58.
Mars you would think him, when his thund'ring race
In arms he ran; Love, when he shew'd his face.
Which is as little true to reason as to taste; for no god of war could
look like a god of love. The habit of mind would render it impossible.
But the poet found the prettiness of the Greek Anthology irresistible.
Olindo, tied to the stake amidst the flames of martyrdom, can say to his
mistress
"Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise. " Canto ii. st. 34.
Other flames, other bonds than these, love promised.
The sentiment is natural, but the double use of the "flames" on such an
occasion, miserable.
In the third canto the fair Amazon Clorinda challenges her love to single
combat.
"E di due morti in un punto lo sfida. " St. 23.
"And so at once she threats to kill him twice. " _Fairfax_.
That is to say, with her valour and beauty.
Another twofold employment of flame, with an exclamation to secure our
astonishment, makes its appearance in the fourth canto
"Oh miracol d'amor! che le faville
Tragge del pianto, e'i cor' ne l'acqua accende. " St. 76.
Oh, miracle of love! that draweth sparks
Of fire from tears, and kindlest hearts in water!
This puerile antithesis of _fire_ and _water, fire_ and _ice, light_
in _darkness, silence_ in _speech_, together with such pretty turns as
_wounding one's-self in wounding others_, and the worse sacrifice of
consistency and truth of feeling,--lovers making long speeches on the
least fitting occasions, and ladies retaining their rosy cheeks in the
midst of fears of death,--is to be met with, more or less, throughout
the poem. I have no doubt they were the proximate cause of that general
corruption of taste which was afterwards completed by Marino, the
acquaintance and ardent admirer of Tasso when a boy. They have been laid
to the charge of Petrarch; but, without entering into the question, how
far and in what instances conceits may not be natural to lovers haunted,
as Petrarch was, with one idea, and seeing it in every thing they behold,
what had the great epic poet to do with the faults of the lyrical? And
what is to be said for his standing in need of the excuse of bad example?
Homer and Milton were in no such want. Virgil would not have copied the
tricks of Ovid. There is an effeminacy and self-reflection in Tasso,
analogous to his Rinaldo, in the enchanted garden; where the hero wore
a looking-glass by his side, in which he contemplated his sophisticated
self, and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress. [38] Agreeably to
this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, when not supported by
great occasions (and even the occasion itself sometimes fails him), is
too apt to fall into tameness and common-place,--to want movement and
picture; while, at the same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it
does not possess the music which might be expected from a lyrical and
voluptuous poet. Bernardo prophesied of his son, that, however he might
surpass him in other respects, he would never equal him in sweetness;
and he seems to have judged him rightly. I have met with a passage in
Torquato's prose writings (but I cannot lay my hands on it), in which he
expresses a singular predilection for verses full of the same vowel.
He seems, if I remember rightly, to have regarded it, not merely as a
pleasing variety, which it is on occasion, but as a reigning principle.
Voltaire (I think, in his treatise on _Epic Poetry_) has noticed the
multitude of _o_'s in the exordium of the _Jerusalem_. This apparent
negligence seems to have been intentional.
"Cantò l'armi pietòse e 'l capitanò
Che 'l gran Sepòlerò liberò di Cristò;
Mòltò egli òprò còl sennò e còn la manò,
Mòltò sòffri nel glòriòsò acquistò;
E invan l'infernò a lui s'òppòse; e invanò
S'armò d'Asia e di Libia il pòpòl mistò;
Che il ciel gli diè favòre, e sòttò ai santi
Segni ridusse i suòi còmpagni erranti. "
The reader will not be surprised to find, that he who could thus confound
monotony with music, and commence his greatest poem with it, is too often
discordant in the rest of his versification. It has been thought, that
Milton might have taken from the Italians the grand musical account to
which he turns a list of proper names, as in his enumerations of realms
and deities; but I have been surprised to find how little the most
musical of languages appears to have suggested to its poets anything of
the sort. I am not aware of it, indeed, in any poets but our own. All
others, from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to
Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have overlooked
this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, where they had no
other theme on which to modulate. Its inventor, as far as I am aware, is
that great poet, Marlowe. [39]
There are faults of invention as well as style in the _Jerusalem_. The
Talking Bird, or bird that sings with a human voice (canto iv. 13), is a
piece of inverisimilitude, which the author, perhaps, thought justifiable
by the speaking horses of the ancients. But the latter were moved
supernaturally for the occasion, and for a very fine occasion. Tasso's
bird is a mere born contradiction to nature and for no necessity. The
vulgar idea of the devil with horns and a tail (though the retention
of it argued a genius in Tasso very inferior to that of Milton) is
defensible, I think, on the plea of the German critics, that malignity
should be made a thing low and deformed; but as much cannot be said for
the storehouse in heaven, where St. Michael's spear is kept with which
he slew the dragon, and the trident which is used for making earthquakes
(canto vii. st. 81). The tomb which supernaturally comes out of the
ground, inscribed with the name and virtues of Sueno (canto viii. st.
39), is worthy only of a pantomime; and the wizard in robes, with
beech-leaves on his head, who walks dry-shod on water, and superfluously
helps the knights on their way to Armida's retirement (xiv. 33), is
almost as ludicrous as the burlesque of the river-god in the _Voyage_ of
Bachaumont and Chapelle.
But let us not wonder, nevertheless, at the effect which the _Jerusalem_
has had upon the world. It could not have had it without great nature and
power. Rinaldo, in spite of his aberrations with Armida, knew the path
to renown, and so did his poet. Tasso's epic, with all its faults, is a
noble production, and justly considered one of the poems of the world.
Each of those poems hit some one great point of universal attraction,
at least in their respective countries, and among the givers of fame in
others. Homer's poem is that of action; Dante's, of passion; Virgil's, of
judgment; Milton's, of religion; Spenser's, of poetry itself; Ariosto's,
of animal spirits (I do not mean as respects gaiety only, but in strength
and readiness of accord with the whole play of nature); Tasso looked
round with an ultra-sensitive temperament, and an ambition which required
encouragement, and his poem is that of tenderness. Every thing inclines
to this point in his circle, with the tremulousness of the needle. Love
is its all in all, even to the design of the religious war which is
to rescue the sepulchre of the God of Charity from the hands of the
unloving. His heroes are all in love, at least those on the right side;
his leader, Godfrey, notwithstanding his prudence, narrowly escapes the
passion, and is full of a loving consideration; his amazon, Clorinda,
inspires the truest passion, and dies taking her lover's hand; his
Erminia is all love for an enemy; his enchantress Armida falls from
pretended love into real, and forsakes her religion for its sake. An old
father (canto ix. ) loses his five sons in battle, and dies on their
dead bodies of a wound which he has provoked on purpose. Tancred cannot
achieve the enterprise of the Enchanted Forest, because his dead mistress
seems to come out of one of the trees. Olindo thinks it happiness to be
martyred at the same stake with Sophronia. The reconciliation of Rinaldo
with his enchantress takes place within a few stanzas of the close of
the poem, as if contesting its interest with religion. The _Jerusalem
Delivered_, in short, is the favourite epic of the young: all the lovers
in Europe have loved it. The French have forgiven the author his conceits
for the sake of his gallantry: he is the poet of the gondoliers; and
Spenser, the most luxurious of his brethren, plundered his bowers of
bliss. Read Tasso's poem by this gentle light of his genius, and you pity
him twentyfold, and know not what excuse to find for his jailer.
The stories translated in the present volume, though including war and
magic, are all love-stories. They were not selected on that account. They
suggested themselves for selection, as containing most of the finest
things in the poem. They are conducted with great art, and the characters
and affections happily varied. The first (_Olindo and Sophronia_) is
perhaps unique for the hopelessness of its commencement (I mean with
regard to the lovers), and the perfect, and at the same time quite
probable, felicity of the conclusion. There is no reason to believe that
the staid and devout Sophronia would have loved her adorer at all, but
for the circumstance that first dooms them both to a shocking death,
and then sends them, with perfect warrant, from the stake to the altar.
Clorinda is an Amazon, the idea of whom, as such, it is impossible for
us to separate from very repulsive and unfeminine images; yet, under the
circumstances of the story, we call to mind in her behalf the possibility
of a Joan of Arc's having loved and been beloved; and her death is a
surprising and most affecting variation upon that of Agrican in Boiardo.
Tasso's enchantress Armida is a variation of the Angelica of the same
poet, combined with Ariosto's Alcina; but her passionate voluptuousness
makes her quite a new character in regard to the one; and she is as
different from the painted hag of the _Orlando_ as youth, beauty, and
patriotic intention can make her. She is not very sentimental; but all
the passion in the world has sympathised with her; and it was manly and
honest in the poet not to let her Paganism and vehemence hinder him from
doing justice to her claims as a human being and a deserted woman. Her
fate is left in so pleasing a state of doubt, that we gladly avail
ourselves of it to suppose her married to Rinaldo, and becoming the
mother of a line of Christian princes. I wish they had treated her poet
half so well as she would infallibly have treated him herself.
But the singer of the Crusades can be strong as well as gentle. You
discern in his battles and single combats the poet ambitious of renown,
and the accomplished swordsman. The duel of Tancred and Argantes, in
which the latter is slain, is as earnest and fiery writing throughout as
truth and passion could desire; that of Tancred and Clorinda is also
very powerful as well as affecting; and the whole siege of Jerusalem is
admirable for the strength of its interest. Every body knows the grand
verse (not, however, quite original) that summons the devils to council,
"Chiama gli abitator," &c. ; and the still grander, though less original
one, describing the desolations of time, "Giace l'alta Cartago. "[40] The
forest filled with supernatural terrors by a magician, in order that the
Christians may not cut wood from it to make their engines of war, is one
of the happiest pieces of invention in romance. It is founded in as true
human feeling as those of Ariosto, and is made an admirable instrument
for the aggrandizement of the character of Rinaldo. Godfrey's attestation
of all time, and of the host of heaven, when he addresses his army in the
first canto, is in the highest spirit of epic magnificence. So is the
appearance of the celestial armies, together with that of the souls of
the slain Christian warriors, in the last canto, where they issue forth
in the air to assist the entrance into the conquered city. The classical
poets are turned to great and frequent account throughout the poem;
and yet the work has a strong air of originality, partly owing to the
subject, partly to the abundance of love-scenes, and to a certain
compactness in the treatment of the main story, notwithstanding the
luxuriance of the episodes. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ is stately,
well-ordered, full of action and character, sometimes sublime, always
elegant, and very interesting-more so, I think, as a whole, and in
a popular sense, than any other story in verse, not excepting the
_Odyssey_. For the exquisite domestic attractiveness of the second
Homeric poem is injured, like the hero himself, by too many diversions
from the main point. There is an interest, it is true, in that very
delay; but we become too much used to the disappointment. In the epic
of Tasso the reader constantly desires to learn how the success of the
enterprise is to be brought about; and he scarcely loses sight of any of
the persons but he wishes to see them again. Even in the love-scenes,
tender and absorbed as they are, we feel that the heroes are fighters, or
going to fight. When you are introduced to Armida in the Bower of Bliss,
it is by warriors who come to take her lover away to battle.
One of the reasons why Tasso hurt the style of his poem by a manner too
lyrical was, that notwithstanding its deficiency in sweetness, he was one
of the profusest lyrical writers of his nation, and always having his
feelings turned in upon himself. I am not sufficiently acquainted with
his odes and sonnets to speak of them in the gross; but I may be allowed
to express my belief that they possess a great deal of fancy and feeling.
It has been wondered how he could write so many, considering the troubles
he went through; but the experience was the reason. The constant
succession of hopes, fears, wants, gratitudes, loves, and the necessity
of employing his imagination, accounts for all. Some of his sonnets, such
as those on the Countess of Scandiano's lip ("Quel labbro," &c. ); the one
to Stigliano, concluding with the affecting mention of himself and his
lost harp; that beginning
"Io veggio in cielo scintillar le stelle,"
recur to my mind oftener than any others except Dante's "Tanto gentile"
and Filicaia's _Lament on Italy_; and, with the exception of a few of the
more famous odes of Petrarch, and one or two of Filicaia's and Guidi's, I
know of none in Italian like several of Tasso's, including his fragment
"O del grand' Apennino," and the exquisite chorus on the _Golden Age_,
which struck a note in the hearts of the world.
His _Aminta_, the chief pastoral poem of Italy, though, with the
exception of that ode, not equal in passages to the _Faithful
Shepherdess_ (which is a Pan to it compared with a beardless shepherd),
is elegant, interesting, and as superior to Guarini's more sophisticate
yet still beautiful _Pastor Fido_ as a first thought may be supposed to
be to its emulator. The objection of its being too elegant for shepherds
he anticipated and nullified by making Love himself account for it in a
charming prologue, of which the god is the speaker:
"Queste selve oggi ragionar d'Amore
S'udranno in nuova guisa; e ben parassi,
Che la mia Deità sia quì presente
In se medesma, e non ne' suoi ministri.
Spirerò nobil sensi à rozzi petti;
Raddolcirò nelle lor lingue il suono:
Perchè, ovunque i' mi sia, io sono Amore
Ne' pastori non men che negli eroi;
E la disagguaglianza de' soggetti,
Come a me piace, agguaglio: e questa è pure
Suprema gloria, e gran miracol mio,
Render simili alle più dotte cetre
Le rustiche sampogne. "
After new fashion shall these woods to-day
Hear love discoursed; and it shall well be seen
That my divinity is present here
In its own person, not its ministers.
I will inbreathe high fancies in rude hearts;
I will refine and render dulcet sweet
Their tongues; because, wherever I may be,
Whether with rustic or heroic men,
There am I Love; and inequality,
As it may please me, do I equalise;
And 'tis my crowning glory and great miracle
To make the rural pipe as eloquent
Even as the subtlest harp.
I ought not to speak of Tasso's other poetry, or of his prose, for I
have read little of either; though, as they are not popular with his
countrymen, a foreigner may be pardoned for thinking his classical
tragedy, _Torrismondo_, not attractive--his _Sette Giornate_ (Seven
Days of the Creation) still less so--and his platonical and critical
discourses better filled with authorities than reasons. Tasso was a
lesser kind of Milton, enchanted by the Sirens. We discern the weak parts
of his character, more or less, in all his writings; but we see also the
irrepressible elegance and superiority of the mind, which, in spite of
all weakness, was felt to tower above its age, and to draw to it the
homage as well as the resentment of princes.
[Footnote 1: My authorities for this notice are, Black's _Life of Tasso_
(2 vols. 4to, 1810), his original, Serassi, _Vita di Torquato Tasso_ (do.
1790), and the works of the poet in the Pisan edition of Professor Rosini
(33 vols. 8vo, 1332). I have been indebted to nothing in Black which I
have not ascertained by reference to the Italian biographer, and quoted
nothing stated by Tasso himself but from the works. Black's Life, which
is a free version of Serassi's, modified by the translator's own opinions
and criticism, is elegant, industrious, and interesting. Serassi's was
the first copious biography of the poet founded on original documents;
and it deserved to be translated by Mr. Black, though servile to
the house of Este, and, as might be expected, far from being always
ingenuous. Among other instances of this writer's want of candour is the
fact of his having been the discoverer and suppresser of the manuscript
review of Tasso by Galileo. The best summary account of the poet's life
and writings which I have met with is Ginguéné's, in the fifth volume
of his _Histoire Littéraire_, &c. It is written with his usual grace,
vivacity, and acuteness, and contains a good notice of the Tasso
controversy. As to the Pisan edition of the works, it is the completest,
I believe, in point of contents ever published, comprises all the
controversial criticism, and is, of course, very useful; but it contains
no life except Manso's (now known to be very inconclusive), has got a
heap of feeble variorum comments on the _Jerusalem_, no notes worth
speaking of to the rest of the works, and, notwithstanding the claim
in the title-page to the merit of a "better order," has left the
correspondence in a deplorable state of irregularity, as well as totally
without elucidation. The learned Professor is an agreeable writer, and, I
believe, a very pleasant man, but he certainly is a provoking editor. ]
[Footnote 2: In the beautiful fragment beginning, _O del grand'Apennino:_
"Me dal sen della madre empia fortuna
Pargoletto divelse. Ah! di que' baci,
Ch'ella bagnò di lagrime dolenti,
Con sospir mi rimembra, e degli ardenti
Preghi, che sen portár l'aure fugaci,
Ch'io giunger non dovea più volto a volto
Fra quelle braccia accolto
Con nodi così stretti e sì tenaci.
Lasso! e seguii con mal sicure piante,
Qual Ascanio, o Camilla, il padre errante. "
Me from my mother's bosom my hard lot
Took when a child. Alas! though all these years
I have been used to sorrow,
I sigh to think upon the floods of tears
which bathed her kisses on that doleful morrow:
I sigh to think of all the prayers and cries
She wasted, straining me with lifted eyes:
For never more on one another's face
was it our lot to gaze and to embrace!
Her little stumbling boy,
Like to the child of Troy,
Or like to one doomed to no haven rather,
Followed the footsteps of his wandering father. ]
[Footnote 3: Rosini, _Saggio sugli Amori di Torquato Tasso_, &c. , in the
Professor's edition of his works, vol. xxxiii. ]
[Footnote 4: _Lettere Inedite_, p. 33, in the _Opere_, vol. xvii. ]
[Footnote 5: _Entretiens_, 1663, p. 169 quoted by Scrassi, pp. 175, 182. ]
[Footnote 6: Suggested by Ariosto's furniture in the Moon. ]
[Footnote 7: This was a trick which he afterwards thought he had reason
to complain of in a style very different from pleasantry. ]
[Footnote 8: Alfonso. The word for "leader" in the original, _duce_, made
the allusion more obvious. The epithet "royal," in the next sentence,
conveyed a welcome intimation to the ducal car, the house of Este being
very proud of its connexion with the sovereigns of Europe, and very
desirous of becoming royal itself. ]
[Footnote 9: Serassi, vol i. p. 210. ]
(Footnote 10: "Alla lor magnanimità è convenevole il mostrar, ch'amor
delle virtù, non odio verso altri, gli abbia già mossi ad invitarmi con
invito così largo. " _Opere_, vol. xv. p. 94. ]
[Footnote 11: The application is the conjecture of Black, vol. i. p. 317.
Serassi suppressed the whole passage. The indecent word would have been
known but for the delicacy or courtliness of Muratori, who substituted an
_et-cetera_ in its place, observing, that he had "covered" with it "an
indecent word not fit to be printed" ("sotto quell'_et-cetera_ ho io
coperta un'indecente parola, che non era lecito di lasciar correre alle
stampe. " _Opere del Tasso,_ vol. xvi. p. 114). By "covered" he seems to
have meant blotted out; for in the latest edition of Tasso the _et-cetera
is_ retained. ]
[Footnote 12: Black's version (vol. ii. p. 58) is not strong enough. The
words in Serassi are "una ciurma di poltroni, ingrati, e ribaldi. " ii. p.
33. ]
[Footnote 13: _Opere_, vol xiv. pp. 158, 174, &c. ]
[Footnote 14: "Prego V. Signoria the si contenti, se piace al Serenissimo
Signor Duca, Clementissimo ed Invitissimo, the io stia in prigione, di
farmi dar le poche robicciole mie, the S. A. Invitissima, Clementissima,
Serenissima m' ha promesse tante volte," &c. _Opere_, vol. xiv. p. 6. ]
[Footnote 15: "Altera Torquatum cepit Leonora poetam," &c. ]
[Footnote 16: _Vie du Tasse,_ 1695, p. 51. ]
[Footnote 17: In the Apology _for Raimond de Sebonde_; Essays,
vol. ii. ch. 12. ]
[Footnote 18: In his _Letter to Zeno,--Opere del
Tasso_, xvi. p. 118. ]
[Footnote 19: _Storia della Poesia Italiana_ (Mathias's edition), vol.
iii. part i. p 236. ]
[Footnote 20: Serassi is very peremptory, and even abusive. He charges
every body who has said any thing to the contrary with imposture. "Egli
non v' ha dubbio, che le troppe imprudenti e temerarie parole, che il
Tasso si lasciò uscir di bocca in questo incontro, furone la sola cagione
della sua prigionia, e ch' è mera favola ed _impostura_ tutto ciò, che
diversamente è stato affermato e scritto da altri in tale proposito. "
Vol. ii. p. 33. But we have seen that the good Abbè could practise a
little imposition himself. ]
[Footnote 21: Black, ii. 88. ]
[Footnote 22: _Hist. Litt. d'Italie_, v. 243, &c. ]
[Footnote 23: Vol. ii. p. 89. ]
[Footnote 24: Such at least is my impression; but I cannot call the
evidence to mind. ]
[Footnote 25: _Literature of the South of Europe_ (Roscoe's translation),
vol. ii. p. 165. To shew the loose way in which the conclusions of a
man's own mind are presented as facts admitted by others, Sismondi says,
that Tasso's "passion" was the cause of his return to Ferrara. There is
not a tittle of evidence to shew for it. ]
[Footnote 26: _Saggio sugli Amori_, &c. ut sup p. 84, and passim. As
specimens of the learned professor's reasoning, it may be observed that
whenever the words _humble, daring, high, noble_, and _royal_, occur in
the poet's love-verses, he thinks they _must_ allude to the Princess
Leonora; and he argues, that Alfonso never could have been so angry with
any "versi lascivi," if they had not had the same direction. ]
[Footnote 27: _Opere_, vol. xvii. p. 32. ]
[Footnote 28:
"Padre, o buon padre, che dal ciel rimiri,
Egro e morto ti piansi, e ben tu il sai;
E gemendo scaldai
La tomba e il letto. Or che negli altri giri
Tu godi, a te si deve onor, non lutto:
A me versato il mio dolor sia tutto. "
O father, my good father, looking now
On thy poor son from heaven, well knowest thou
What scalding tears I shed
Upon thy grave, upon thy dying bed;
But since thou dwellest in the happy skies,
'Tis fit I raise to thee no sorrowing eyes
Be all my grief on my own head. ]
[Footnote 29:
" Non posso viver in città, ove tutti i nobili, o non mi
concedano i primi luoghi, o almeno non si contentino the la cosa in
quel the appartiene a queste esteriori dimostrazioni, vada del pari. "
_Opere,_, vol. xiii. p. 153. ]
[Footnote 30: Black, vol. ii. p. 240. ]
[Footnote 31: The world in general have taken no notice of Tasso's
reconstruction of his _Jerusalem_, which he called the _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_. It never "obtained," as the phrase is. It was the mere
tribute of his declining years to bigotry and new acquaintances; and
therefore I say no more of it. ]
[Footnote 32: _In manus tuas, Domine_. One likes to know the actual
words; at least so it appears to me. ]
[Footnote 33: Serassi, ii. 276. ]
[Footnote 34: "Quem _cernis_, quisquis es, procera statura virum,
_luscis_ oculis, &c. hic Torquatus est. "--Cappacio, _Illustrium Literis
Virorum Elogia et Judici_, quoted by Serassi, ut sup. The Latin word
_luscus_, as well as the Italian _losco_, means, I believe, near-sighted;
but it certainly means also a great deal more; and unless the word
_cernis_ (thou beholdest) is a mere form of speech implying a foregone
conclusion, it shews that the defect was obvious to the spectator. ]
[Footnote 35: "Il Signor Duca non crede ad alcuna mia parola. "
_Opere_, xiv. 161.
