THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY--TORQUATO TASSO--HIS WORK--THE
‘GERUSALEMME LIBERATA’--GIORDANO BRUNO--LITERARY CHARACTER OF HIS
WORK--GIAMBATTISTA GUARINI.
The Later Renaissance, which was so great in Spain and in England,
and in France was important, was elsewhere a time of decline, of
silence, or of very faint beginnings. The literature of Germany has
been broken into periods of vigour, with long intervals of silence
between. The second half of the sixteenth century was one of these.
Among the smaller peoples, with Holland at their head, there was as yet
little more than the attempt to produce literature. [SN: _The Later
Renaissance in Italy._] The case of Italy was more fortunate than that
of Germany. She at least can count two of her most interesting sons
among the men of letters of this time, Tasso and Bruno. But here the
decadence had begun, and had made no small progress towards the sheer
dexterous futility which was to be personified in Marini. The spirit of
the Renaissance was worn out, and was replaced by mere accomplishment,
and by the nervous fear which is visible all through the life of
Tasso. The Roman Catholic reaction was not favourable to literature.
It brought with it the tyranny, or at least the predominance, of
a religion which could no longer inspire. The Popes of the time
endeavoured to make Rome moral by methods which might have commended
themselves to the strictest sect of the Puritans; and commendable as
this effort to restrain the licence of the earlier Renaissance and
the period of the Italian wars may have been, still it was an example
of the attempt to repress which was being made everywhere in Italy,
and which succeeded, since it had only to deal with men of a weak
generation. Giordano Bruno was, indeed, indisciplined enough; but he
spent the active part of his life out of Italy, and when he did return,
his fate was a severe warning against independence of character.
[SN: _Torquato Tasso._]
The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to show under what a
gloomy cloud literature had to work in Italy all through the later
sixteenth century. It was a life of dependence, and was dominated by
fear--fear of rivals, of envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of
murder. That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso’s case is true; but
though his contemporaries saw it to be unfounded, they do not seem to
have thought it absurd. He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo
Tasso of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of
Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Rossi, a lady of a distinguished
Neapolitan family. Bernardo Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer,
and who gained some fame in his time as the author of a long epic
founded on the _Amadis of Gaul_, was compelled to fly when his patron
was driven from his principality of Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was
detained in Naples by her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay
her dowry. She died without again seeing her husband, but the young
Torquato was allowed to return to his father. Bernardo, who found a
refuge in the service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the
famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato read, but not at the
law, and wrote his epic poem the _Rinaldo_--little to the satisfaction
of his father, who, though a verse-writer himself, wished his son to
qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was resolved to be a poet,
and not a lawyer, which decision brought with it the absolute necessity
of finding a patron. The Cardinal Luigi d’Este introduced him to the
Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his _Jerusalem Delivered_
and his play of _Torrismondo_, and had written his _Discourses on Epic
Poetry_. Alphonso II. d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and
seems to have treated him in the main with great kindness. The story
of Tasso’s stay at this typical Italian Court, of his passion for
Leonora d’Este, of the Duke’s discovery, and of the false accusation
of madness, on which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the
best known romances of literary history; but that it is a romance there
can be no doubt. From his early years Tasso seems to have suffered
from a continual fear of persecution and the plots of enemies. When he
accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d’Este to Paris, he imagined that some
treason was being plotted against him at home. Later he thought he had
been accused of heresy, and refused to be pacified by the assurances
of the Duke and the head of the Inquisition, to whom he subjected his
writings. He fled twice from Ferrara, and twice came back. He began to
accuse the Duke of intending to have him murdered, and finally drew his
dagger in the Palace on a servant whom he suspected of trying to poison
him. Duke Alphonso vindicated his own character, and also gave the
exact measure of the morality of the time by saying that it was absurd
to suppose that he thought of killing “il Signor Tasso,” since if he
wished to do so he had only to give the order. At last, and not until
the Duke had displayed a patience which is sufficient evidence that
he had no animosity against his servant, Tasso in 1579 was imprisoned
as mad in the hospital of Saint Anne. The treatment of the mad was
everywhere harsh at that time, but the poet appears to have received
exceptional kindness. Friends exerted themselves for him, some from
pity, others moved by the desire to be thought patrons of literature.
In 1586 he was released, on condition that he would not return to
Ferrara. During the last years of his life he wandered from one Italian
Court to another, always quarrelling with his patrons, but always
finding protectors. He died at Rome in 1595, when he was about to be
crowned as Poet Laureate on the Capitol. His _Jerusalem Delivered_ was
printed in a pirated edition during his imprisonment.[117]
[SN: _His work._]
The bulk of Tasso’s work is very great. In addition to the _Rinaldo_,
and two forms of the _Jerusalem_, he wrote the pastoral play _Aminta_,
the tragedy of _Torrismondo_, much minor verse, many sonnets, and many
treatises in prose. A large number of his letters have been preserved.
In his latter years, and in the undeniable decadence of his powers, he
wrote a long poem in blank verse on the _Seven Days of Creation_.
Tasso’s minor work is no doubt of value for the study of his genius.
His philosophic treatises, mostly in dialogue, would, I presume, for
I cannot profess to speak of them with knowledge, be useful to the
student of Italian thought under the Roman Catholic reaction. Even
his play of _Torrismondo_, begun in his youth, and finished after
his imprisonment in the hospital of Saint Anne, has a place in the
history of the “classic” drama. In itself it is not attractive. It
is an unpleasant, and even rather commonplace, story of suicide and
accidental incest, frigidly told, with all the Senecan apparatus.
The pastoral poem of _Aminta_ is of more historical importance, and
has some biographical interest, while the subject suited Tasso’s
faculty for tender images and luscious verse. But he owes his place in
literature to his _Jerusalem Delivered_.
Something has been said of the history of this poem. It was begun
in his youth, was continued during his stay at the Court of Ferrara,
was read in parts to his patrons, and subjected to the criticism of
friends. The desire to secure the honour of the dedication for the
house of Este, which had already patronised Ariosto, is said, very
plausibly, to have had a good deal to do with the Duke’s long-suffering
towards the author. When published it was made the excuse for a
dispute between the Academies which overran all Italy in the sixteenth
century, and were already become the homes of mere word-splitting. The
_Jerusalem_ in fact became almost an affair of State at Ferrara. Its
publication in a very inaccurate form in a pirated edition during his
imprisonment was one of the most bitter, and certainly not the least
genuine, of the grievances of a poet who had an artistic care about the
execution of the work he published. The pirated edition bore the name
which Tasso had chosen, _Godfrey of Boulogne_, but which he changed
for _Gerusalemme Liberata_ in the first authorised edition of 1581.
Under the influence of the fretful piety of his later years he made
his ill-advised recension, to which he gave the name of _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_.
[SN: _The_ Gerusalemme Liberata.]
The enduring popularity of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ in Italy has been
vouched for by such well-known stories as that which tells how it was
sung by gondoliers and country people even into this century. Ugo
Foscolo has recorded that he heard a passage chanted by galley-slaves.
Its acceptance among poets and men of letters, both in the sixteenth
century and since, is not a matter of legend. Milton admired Tasso,
and Spenser did him the signal honour of direct imitation. Acrasia’s
Bower of Bliss, and indeed the final adventure of Sir Guyon and the
Palmer in the Second Book of the _Faërie Queen_, are modelled on, and
in some passages are taken directly from, the description of the garden
of Armida, and the rescue of Rinaldo in the fifteenth and sixteenth
cantos of the _Jerusalem_. The poem was three times translated in
whole or in part into English before 1600, and one of these versions,
Fairfax’s, has been given rank as a classic.[118]
The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would
inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the
admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well
justified, though for different reasons. The _Jerusalem Delivered_
has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real
love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are
attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great
or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded
at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the
fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey
and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted
telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into the distance,
the life-large figures compressed into brilliant miniatures, so
clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified as well as lessened,
their colours being now closer and brighter, the shadows and trivial
features no longer visible.” Carlyle was kinder and less critical
than when he classed the _Jerusalem Delivered_ with the _Nibelungen
Lied_--for Dresden china shepherdesses are not more unlike the statues
of Michelangelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriemhilda or Hagen
von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up the general impression left by the
poem, as of a small, graceful, and, in spite of its great historical
original, unimportant series of events transacting itself without
passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines. We never
hear the “dreadful clamour” of battle, and the duels of the champions
smack of the school of arms, for Tasso, though no fighter, was an
accomplished swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty, and the
tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet and the man of letters,
though his fame is less in the world than it was, Tasso must always
be admirable, because he was a thorough workman. He was the poet of a
decline. The choice of words, the use of the file, the avoidance of
improprieties of metre, are more with him than inspiration. But he did
at least reap the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for the
language, and he left a finished example of the “learned” poetry of
Southern Europe in the later sixteenth century.
[SN: _Giordano Bruno._]
It would tax the power of the greatest creative dramatist to draw two
conceivable human beings who should differ so widely as Tasso and his
only Italian contemporary who can be said to stand on a corresponding
level of genius--Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title which
he habitually used, was probably the more considerable man of the two
in intrinsic power, while both his life and his character are more
interesting. But then he is incomparably more difficult to understand.
I cannot profess to deal with what, to the majority of those who
have paid much attention to his work, is most valuable in him--his
philosophic ideas, and the influence he may have had on later thinkers.
His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of
the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of
a certain stamp of character.[119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola,
near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German
woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character
brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he
was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of
Genoa. This was in 1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life.
His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons, thence to Toulouse,
Paris, England, once more to Paris, and from thence to Wittenberg,
Prague, and Frankfort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and
he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the authorities. He
defended the doctrines of Copernicus, and he expounded, more or less
obscurely, his doctrines on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had
an “art of memory” which was founded upon, or was an adaptation of,
the curious reasoning machine invented by Raymond Lully, the Catalan
scholastic and mystic of the thirteenth century. Even if I could
profess to understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would not
be the place to expound them. What does appear very clearly is, that
he was a man of extreme and passionate arrogance. The doctrine he
most certainly held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even a
glimpse of the only important truths, and that official teachers who
did not accept him at his own valuation were pigs, dogs, brutes, and
beasts. He poured these epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford,
whither he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was kind to him,
and on whom he may have had some influence. The only place in which he
escaped a violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg. Even there
he could not rest, and he committed himself to a public and sweeping
denunciation of the Papacy. At last he received an invitation from
a Venetian _magnifico_ of the house of Mocenigo to come and be his
teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno’s “art of memory,” and probably
also believed him to be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour
Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on the hopeless
errand of making Mocenigo so wise that the Council of Ten would no
longer be able to treat him as a person of no importance. Within a
very few months this strange bargain bore its fruit. The _magnifico_
discovered that he was no wiser than before, and that so far from being
richer, he had given money to the Nolan for which no equivalent had
been returned. He accused his teacher of being a cheat; and Bruno,
whose temper had never been under restraint, answered, with more truth
than prudence, that his employer was a fool. Mocenigo denounced him
to the Inquisition. The Pope claimed him, and after some demur he was
surrendered by the Serene Republic. On his trial before the Inquisition
Bruno protested that he was a loyal son of the Church, and that if he
had spoken heresy it was when he was speaking philosophically, and not
theologically. The distinction would not serve, and he was condemned
to death. Whether he was burnt in the body or only in effigy has been
disputed. The balance of evidence is in favour of the contention that
he actually suffered. In that case the date of his death is 1599.
[SN: _Literary character of his work._]
Some anti-clerical writers on the Continent, and a few Englishmen
who sympathise with them, have been attracted to Bruno because they
can use his name as a weapon in their warfare with ecclesiastical
authority. It is needless to add that numbers quote him as an example
of papal tyranny who have never made the certainly not inconsiderable
effort required to read any one of his treatises. We can speak of him
here only as a man of letters, and can put aside his Latin treatises
and purely philosophic work. His wandering life, and perhaps the
restless explosive nature of the man, made it impossible for him to
produce books on a large scale. Bruno was essentially a writer of
pamphlets, which he produced as opportunity served. Three of these may
be mentioned here as especially characteristic of the Nolan’s genius
and spirit--_La Cena del le Ceneri_ (‘The Ash Wednesday Supper’),
dedicated to Castelnau de Mauvissière, French ambassador in London; the
_Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_ (‘The Driving out of the Triumphant
Beast’); and _Gli Eroici Furori_ (‘The Heroic Furies’), the latter two
dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue, and the last-named
contains much verse. Although he excuses himself for part of what
appears in _Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_ by saying that it is the
personages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue form
(the most difficult perhaps of all in literature) does not appear to
me to be well managed. There is too much of the Nolan, and the other
personages are apt to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him,
or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this in itself is typical
of the author. The dialogues are the literary expression of the very
remarkable human being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic and
fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into rockets of rhetoric,
while the epithets fly out in sheets as of sparks from an anvil.
What he means or is endeavouring to prove is far from being always
clear, not because his language is obscure, for on the contrary his
sentences are commonly simple enough, but because there was always far
more passion and emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power. The
title of his dialogues, ‘The Heroic Furies,’ is in a way a description
of his whole work. There is in him a constant heroic fury of effort
towards some vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force and
greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all his smoky obscurity
there is a very real fire in Giordano Bruno, which finds its best
expression in verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps
doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He was a real Faust,
who strove to grasp--
“Was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält;”
who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified an illimitable
intellectual arrogance, often superbly expressed, by his imaginary
discovery.
The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their contemporaries is very
great. There was abundant interest of a kind in literary matters, there
was no want of criticism, and the Academies were active. The long
controversy over the _Jerusalem_ in which Tasso allowed himself to
be entangled is, if valuable for nothing else, at least a proof that
Italians read poetry, and could talk about it.[120] What they could not
at this period do was to produce anything original and valuable--with
the exception of Tasso himself, and of Bruno. The once famous _Pastor
Fido_ of Giambattista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible example
of what may happen to a literature when its writers have become
extremely cultivated in all that is mere matter of language, but have
unfortunately nothing to say--or, if they have something to say, are
cowed into insignificance by the fear of compromising themselves.[121]
Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous, and afflicted by
a vanity which caused him to be for ever comparing himself to Tasso,
and complaining of his contemporary’s greater fame, but by no means
without parts or knowledge. Yet his _Pastor Fido_ is a mere echo of the
_Aminta_. Guarini’s play--if play it can be called--was first acted at
Turin in 1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From the _Aminta_,
and through the _Pastor Fido_, came the line of the Italian literary
opera of later times. The verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat
sensual lusciousness--but withal it is nerveless and imitative.
FOOTNOTES:
[117] _Opere._ Edited by Giov. Rosini. Pisa, 33 vols., 1821-1832.
[118] The _Godfrey of Bulloigne_ of Fairfax has been praised well
beyond the full extent of its merits. The sober fact concerning it is
that though the language has a real interest, the translation has not
the merit of great accuracy, and it is wanting in those flashes of
original power with which Fairfax’s contemporaries seldom failed to
redeem their infidelity to their author. He, on the contrary, is too
often far below Tasso, and he is addicted to the detestable practice of
replacing the simplicity of the Italian by classic commonplaces. Now
and then he is inept, or shirks a difficulty which he ought to have
faced. Examples of all three vices may be found in the beginning of the
fifteenth canto. Tasso opens with the simple and direct words--
“Già richiamava il bel nascente raggio
All’ opere ogni animal che ’n terra alberga.”
For this Fairfax writes--
“The rosy-fingered morn with gladsome ray
Rose to her task from old Tithonus’ lap”--
the commonplace of a boy doing a copy of Latin verse. In the second
stanza, where the Italian has--
“Erano essi già sorti, e l’arme intorno
Alle robuste membra avean già messe”--
Fairfax renders--
“They started up, and every tender limb
In sturdy steel and stubborn plate they dight.”
The _tender_ limbs of two hardened old soldiers is surely weak.
At the end of the next stanza, we have in the Italian--
“E in poppa quella
Che guidar gli dovea, fatal donzella.”
The word “fatal,” an appropriate epithet for Fortune, who sits in
the stern to steer the boat, disappears in Fairfax, and we get the
colourless line--
“Wherein a damsel sate the stern to guide.”
And these are not exceptions. Fairfax constantly gives the inapplicable
adjective, or the vague general term, where Tasso is faultless in his
precision.
[119] _Life of Giordano Bruno_, by Mr L. Frith: London, 1897. _Opere de
Giordano Bruno_, ed. Wagner: Leipzig, 1830.
[120] This controversy has its place in every life of Tasso, and is
told at length by Serassi, _Vita de Tasso_: Bergamo, 1790. My own
trifling acquaintance with it has given me the impression that it can
be profitable to no mortal, except perhaps a historian of criticism.
[121] _Il Pastor Fido._ Verona, 1735.