Saint Francis believed himself to have divine revelation, that it was
the result of the earthquake at the crucifixion: “quando, secondo che
dice il Vangelista, le pietre si spezzarono.”[366] This, too, is an
inevitable object of the Dantist’s pilgrimage, for he regards it as
extremely probable that the idea of the cloven rocks in the twelfth of
_Inferno_[367] came to Dante from La Verna and Franciscan lore. But
there are other spots untouched by Dante, yet hallowed by memories of
the “poverello di Cristo.” Such is the hollow _grembo_ in the cliff-side
where the rock received the Saint into her maternal bosom, yielding
“like molten wax” to the impress of his form,[368] when the fiend would
have hurled him down the precipice. Such, again, is the grotto where his
hermit-bed is shewn,[369] wherein he passed the first Lent of his sojourn
at La Verna; and such, too, is the stone, self-consecrate, and so used
without further benediction as an altar top, whereon, so legend says, the
Redeemer often-times stood and conversed familiarly with his poor servant
“face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.”[370]
Dante rests under the shadow of Saint Francis—not at La Verna, indeed,
but at Ravenna. The Campanile of the Franciscan church stands sentry over
his tomb. It is known that he was buried in the Franciscan habit: and it
has been justly conjectured that his association with the Order was no
mere thing of sentiment. One of the earliest commentators on the _Divina
Commedia_[371] asserts that for a time he actually joined the Order, to
whose girdle of cord he seems to refer,[372] as worn formerly by him as a
safeguard against youthful lusts—
Io avea una corda intorno cinta
E con essa pensai alcuna volta
Prender la lonza a la pelle dipinta.
And a living Dantist has recently put forth the suggestion that this
connection with the Franciscans began with his boyish studies. Between
his ninth and his eighteenth year, when, according to the _Vita Nuova_, a
something unnamed kept him apart from the lady of his heart, he was, so
it is thought, living under strict rule, studying as a pupil under the
good friars of Santa Croce,[373] and laying the foundations at once of
that theological lore which amazes us to-day, and of that lofty ideal of
virtue of which he sings—
... già m’ avea trafitto
Prima ch’ io fuor di puerizia fosse.[374]
But apart from all conjecture, ancient or modern, the Poet’s admiration
of Saint Francis is so obvious and his appreciation of him so just and
true, that none can read the eleventh canto of _Paradiso_ without feeling
that a Dantist’s pilgrimage to the Casentino culminates not in the
memories of Campaldino or of the meeting of the waters; not even in the
personal reminiscences of the Poet’s exile suggested by the modern tablet
on the ruined walls of Romena, but rather at La Verna—
Nel crudo sasso intra Tevere ed Arno
where the re-discoverer of Christ for the Middle Ages—
Da Cristo preso l’ ultimo sigillo
Che le sue membra due anni portarno.[375]
...
Valour, and sincerity, and simplicity. The Casentino of Dante and St.
Francis recalls to us the golden principles which alone make life worth
living now. Patriotism, keen and fervid as that whose echoes rang just
now thro’ the ancient hall at Poppi: but “Patriotism is not enough.”
Readiness to lay down one’s life for a Cause: that is the temper which
has saved civilisation from utter shipwreck: but is it securely saved?
Purity of purpose, sincerity in speech and conduct—_sancta
simplicitas_—ready to cast away earthly privilege, to face joyfully the
call to “low living and high thinking,” and to find freedom in fewness of
material possessions and richness of moral and spiritual endowment—that
is the temper eagerly embraced by Francis and his followers, loyally
accepted by Dante, exile and pilgrim; and it is the only temper which can
adapt itself to live happily in a denuded world: the temper which, when
saturated with the passion of loving service as was that of “Christ’s
Poor Man” may hope, Franciscan-wise, to heal the world’s wounds, to
assuage its quarrels, and to build up better and more strongly that which
has been broken down.
BEATI MITES; QUONIAM IPSI POSSIDEBUNT TERRAM.
BEATI PACIFICI: QUONIAM FILII DEI VOCABUNTUR.
VIII
THE LAST CRUSADE
Pero ch’ me venia “Resurgi e Vinci.”
—_Par._ xiv. 125.
It is a far cry from Dante Alighieri to Torquato Tasso: from
thirteenth-century Florence to seventeenth-century Ferrara. Yet Tasso is,
poetically, a direct descendant of the great Florentine, down the line
of Petrarca and Ariosto. His Italian represents the utmost legitimate
development of Dante’s language, beyond which lies decadence. The
purity, if not the exuberance, of his style and the grandeur of his epic
treatment flows direct from the fountain-head of _Italianità_—the _Divine
Comedy_; and the great poem has left its clear impress now and again upon
the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, in haunting phrases.
Thus the “fierce Circassian,” in Canto x. 56 of the _Gerusalemme_,
assumes the attitude of Sordello in _Purg._ vi. 66—
A guisa di leon quando si posa;
and two Cantos further on (x. 59) we have a reminiscence of _Purg._ iii.
9, the dignity of Virgil’s sensitive conscience, when Armida’s dupes
stand abashed before Gottofredo—
Vergognando tenean basse le fronti
Ch’ era al cor piccol fallo amaro morso.
Dante and Tasso alike wrote for all time, and wrote in circumstances of
personal straitness and distress: each gave to the world his best, out
of the treasure of a bleeding heart; and if Tasso’s work cannot compare
for grandeur of conception with Dante’s immortal epic of the spiritual
liberty of Man, yet it too has Liberty for its theme, and a background
ideal and spiritual.
Contemporary critics dealt with Tasso more cruelly than ever any dared to
deal with Dante; yet Tasso has outlived his critics. And the sympathy and
admiration bestowed on him by his English contemporaries, and notably by
Edmund Spencer, was well bestowed, and forms a link in that long chain
of intellectual sympathy between England and Italy which we trust to see
strengthened year by year.
Tasso’s great poem may therefore not inappropriately supply an epilogue
to those studies of his greater predecessor which are associated in
different ways with the horrors and splendours of the great World War.
In a recent article in the _Anglo-Italian Review_,[376] an organ whose
special aim has been to foster and develop that intellectual sympathy
between England and Italy of which we have spoken above, Sir Sidney Lee
draws our attention to the _Gerusalemme Liberata_.
“There is some special appropriateness,” he says, “at the moment in
recalling attention to Tasso’s association with English poetry—with
that manifestation of English genius whence Great Britain derives no
inconspicuous part of her renown. For Tasso made his chief bid for
immortality as the poetic chronicler of the First Crusade whereby the
City of Jerusalem was first wrested from the Moslem sway and restored
to Christian rule. The army which achieved the hardly won victory was
drawn from the chivalry of all Western Europe; but the chief command was
in French hands, and Godfrey of Bouillon, a nobleman of France, is the
hero of Tasso’s epic. The Italian poet credits the French generalissimo
with every moral and military virtue. His courage goes hand in hand
with a dignified caution. He is pious, humane, far-seeing in counsel,
resolute in action, modest in bearing. The stirring military adventures
which Tasso narrates with abundance of romantic embellishment and magical
episode end on a strikingly subdued note. The last stanza of the long
poem shows Godfrey with his aides-de-camp, just after the last strenuous
resistance of the enemy had been overcome, reverently walking in the
light of the setting sun through the captured city. Without pausing to
change their war-stained habiliments, Godfrey and his companions enter
the Holy Sepulchre, and there, hanging up their arms, they offer on their
knees humble prayer.”
General Allenby’s ever-memorable entry through the Golden Gate, on foot,
into a Jerusalem freed from an even more blighting and desolating tyranny
than that of the eleventh century, may well form a starting-point for
a comparison of the great movement of the First Crusade with a still
greater movement of to-day.
We might, indeed, concentrate our attention upon the history itself,
rather than upon the Poet’s imaginative presentment of it at a distance
of nearly five centuries; for Tasso was further removed from Godfrey and
his contemporaries than we are from him. We might dwell on the fruitful
analogies between the two Crusades—that earliest of all, and this last
and greatest. We might note the curious resemblances and the curious
differences, and see our own World-War prefigured in that old-time
adventure which, like our own linked together representatives of almost
all the European nations in one great league for an ideal, impelling
them to give up all that the individual life holds dear, to forego all
material hopes and prospects, for the sake of a Cause that offered as
immediate guerdon little but danger and extreme discomfort, wounds and
death, or worse than death.
We might point to striking coincidences in detail, as, for instance, the
original costly and disastrous attempt upon Nicaea—like our tragedy of
Gallipoli in the same region—and the part there played by the treachery
of a Greek King, a perfidy which, even when the place was won, robbed the
Crusaders of the fruits of their victory. We might adduce the importance
of the help rendered in each case by the allied flotilla, and the timely
aid given in Palestine of old, as in Europe to-day, by the “handyman” of
the Marine forces. Or again we might consider the fruits and consequences
of the old Crusades, and see the promise of them on a larger scale
to-day; the first-fruits already harvested even in the midst of the
struggle—the widening of insular minds, the growth of international
comradeship, the manifold educational potencies of an experience that
involves at once the intellectual stimulus of foreign travel, the moral
inspiration of strenuous, exacting and self-reliant effort in entirely
new conditions, the spiritual stimulus of a daily and hourly converse
with Death.
If the Crusades did so much to educate Europe in olden days, what may not
the World-War achieve, if followed by a “brotherly covenant” and a League
of Peoples?
But our present aim is a rather different one; following the lead given
by Sir Sidney Lee to try, so far as we may, to look at our own times
through Tasso’s eyes; to search and see if the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ has
not a direct word to speak to our own generation.
* * * * *
Does Tasso’s own generous use of fancy make such an attempt too fanciful?
We are dealing with hard, stern facts—the hardest and sternest that any
generation has ever had to face; Tasso’s theme had the mellowing light
of intervening centuries playing upon it, and his treatment is frankly
imaginative. He opens his Poem (i. 2) with an apology to the Muse for his
fanciful embroidering of the historical material—
... Tu perdona
S’ intesso fregi al ver, s’ adorno in parte
D’ altri diletti, che de’ tuoi, le carte.
Sometimes his imagination works simply on a gorgeous description, as when
he depicts for us the pageant of the rival armies: the Crusading host
reviewed by Godfrey beneath the walls of Tortosa (i. 36 _sqq._), and the
Egyptian army by the King of Egypt (xvii. 9 _sqq._) in the frontier town
of Gaza, famous—as our own troops realised to their cost in the early
stages of the Palestinian campaign—for its “Immensi solitudini d’ arena,”
(xvii. 1).
Marvellous as are these descriptions, and more full of colour—be it
conceded—than any modern massing of khaki-clad armed men, Tasso would
have had greatly vaster, if not more varied, groups to depict on our
Eastern-European front when the Russian army was still a factor, and
vaster still in these last months on the West. And for picturesqueness
and glamour, our Oriental battlefields and movements of troops offer
scenes which would run even Tasso’s gorgeous pages very close. Take for
instance the picture, drawn by the Australian official correspondent,
of the entry of the allied troops into Damascus on the first days of
October, 1918—
“Past applauding multitudes ... rode the dashing Australian
Light Horsemen, followed by brilliant cavalry from the
Indian Highlands, then by Yeomanry from the English Shires,
black-skinned French Colonials from North Africa on their barb
stallions, sturdy New Zealand machine-gunners and batteries
from England and Scotland.” These, with the “swarthy Hedjaz
Arabs beautifully mounted on black and white horses and on
camels ... formed a magnificent demonstration of the might of
the British and allied forces.”
How well this would look in Tasso’s sonorous verse!
But the characteristic products of Tasso’s fancy are more imaginative
than these, outrageously imaginative, one might call them, though they
have, withal, a dramatic appropriateness, since he is treading on Moslem
soil, and his magicians and fair women, his bejewelled halls beneath the
river-bed, his enchanted forest and spellbound island-mountain give us
the true savour of the Arabian Nights.
But was it ever so true as it is to-day that “truth is stranger than
fiction?” Was ever enchanted forest more repellent in its horrors than
some of those stricken woods on our Western Front? If it had fallen to
Tasso to describe in his verse our modern air-fighting, would it not
have afforded his genius far more scope than was offered even by the
wonderful description of the journey of the enchanted boat in which the
two paladins sail out along the coast of Africa and between the Pillars
of Hercules into the great Ocean to rescue Rinaldo (xv. 6 _sqq._)? Or
Ismeno’s magic car, mist-swathed, and leaving no track upon the sand?
When, in his first Canto (i. 14, 15), he depicts the Angel Gabriel
cutting his way through winds and clouds, hovering over Lebanon, and then
swooping down upon Tortosa—
Pria sul Libano monte ei si ritenne
E si librò su l’ adeguate penne,
E ver le piazze di Tortosa poi
Drizzò precipitando il volo in giuso ...
might it not have been, almost, a literal description of a flight of his
own compatriot and fellow-poet Gabriele d’ Annunzio?
Again, one of the most characteristic of the _fregi_ with which Tasso
adorns the chroniclers’ story is found in the prominence of his
heroines. Doubtless we owe this largely to the brilliant originality of
the Italian ladies of the Renaissance, in which the House of Este, under
his patron Alfonso, was _facile princeps_; just as the poet’s exuberance
of fancy and occasionally melodramatic touch reflects the eager, playful,
pleasure-loving, fanciful, and histrionic tone of his favourite Court
of Ferrara. His heroines certainly stand forth in dazzling prominence.
Clorinda, the fair Amazon, is a fighting man to all intents, with a man’s
mien, a man’s directness, a man’s sense of fair play, added to the charm
of a beautiful, high-born Lady. Armida, matchless in her witchery, is a
doughty warrior too; but also, by turns, languishing lover and ruthless,
Circe-like enchantress. Erminia, disinherited Princess, gracious, tender,
shy and sensitive, is yet bold to face all things—even the sight and
touch of blood—if so she may help and tend the man who, in the day of her
calamity, saved her from shame.
Fanciful figures: yet Clorinda and Armida (in her warrior-rôle) have not
been without their parallels on the Russian front. And the fair Erminia
might stand for us as the prototype of the gently nurtured girl of our
time who has found herself and her true _métier_ in the self-sacrificing
toils of Red Cross work. Of the knowledge of healing herbs, says Tasso
(vi. 67)—
Arte, che, per usanza, in quel paese
Nelle figlie de’ re par che si serbe;
And indeed the tendance of the wounded is essentially a royal task in
any country; and one in which not a few royal princesses have shewn
themselves versed in our day. Erminia, when at last she finds her love,
tends him right royally (xix. 111 _sqq._), but her address to the
exhausted Tancred evinces also something peculiarly modern. What could be
more in the professional Red Cross style than her injunction: “You shall
know all you ask in good time; now you must be obedient and hold your
tongue, and try to get some sleep” (xix. 114)?—
Saprai, rispose, il tutto: or (tel comando
come medica tua), taci, e riposa.
But are Tasso’s heroines after all so wonderful? To-day is the day of
Women. They have proved and established in National Service their claim
to the National Franchise and to a place in the National Legislature,
and, what is more, their claim to be man’s companion and competitor in
countless fields of activity. For a large part of the last century we had
a woman on the throne: the present century may yet see a woman actually
leading the king’s government. It is their War as well as ours; and now
the victory is won, their part in it—without which victory had been
unattainable—shall have full recognition. Apart from the noble work of
the Red Cross Sisters and helpers, from the valour of the girl-chauffeurs
and others who have sought and found a place as near as possible to
the firing line, we have thousands of maidens and young matrons ready
to risk comeliness and health and their whole physical future in the
pestilent atmosphere of munition shops; thousands more who have donned
the King’s uniform as “Waac’s” and “Wrens” and “Penguins.” How few and
far between, in comparison, are the Women in Tasso’s scheme! How sorely
his imagination would have been taxed, yet withal how congenially, had it
fallen to him to describe the manifold activities—and the undiminished
charms—of our twentieth century girlhood! Erminia is in some ways more
of a Victorian type; but, if the fight is recognised as being fought
elsewhere than in the actual front line, Clorinda is with us everywhere;
strengthening the hands and inspiring the hearts of her compatriots,
striking the chill of fear into the foe, and the dart of cupid into the
susceptible hero at her side.
Armida, in Tasso’s scheme, bridges the gap between the seen and the
unseen, between women’s work and the work of the Angels—good Angels,
and bad. This brings us to another of Tasso’s _fregi_, and one of his
most imaginative “embroideries”: I mean his elaborate description of the
part played in the drama of the Crusade by the heavenly hosts and the
hosts of the infernal regions. To the latter, surely, and especially to
the magnificent picture of Satan’s Council of War (iv. 1-19), Milton
must probably owe more than we ordinarily recognise. Among the most
splendid passages of the Poem are, on the other hand, the descriptions
of the counter-activities of the heavenly armies: God’s sending
forth of Gabriel (i. 7), the Court of the Most High (ix. 55 _sqq._),
Michael’s scornful, single-handed rout of the massed battalions of
Hell (ix. 63-5). But mythological as is the tone in which these events
are narrated, and mythical as the whole conception might have seemed
to a more materialistic generation than our own, we shall be ready
to recognise that all this strain in the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is,
after all, based, in a sense, on hard fact. It is, in fact, the Poet’s
recognition of the paramount spiritual impulse which drove those hordes
of Crusaders across a dangerous Europe into a still more dangerous Asia:
his consciousness that the war they were waging was, in our present-day
phrase, a “Spiritual War.” Have we not too our still warm and throbbing
legend of the “Angels at Mons” and of the “White Companion”? Have not our
own soldiers each his Guardian Angel, his “Defensor celeste” (vii. 84)?
Whether Angel forms were seen at Mons or not, those of us who believe in
their existence at all, believe that they were there, and not there only;
but their force is everywhere joined to ours as often as we are really
fighting “for God and the Right.”
One further point, as regards angelic agency—this time the evil angels.
Tasso, like Dante in his classic episode of Buonconte (_Purg._ v. 109
_sqq._), attributes to the fiends a certain control over the weather
(vii. 115 _sqq._) Many of us would like to share this conviction with
him when we think of the repeated occasions in which our well-planned
offensives in the West have been wrecked by the sudden break-up of a fine
spell. And to the intervention of St. Michael, on the contrary, we would
blithely ascribe that most opportune change of wind in the early morning
of the day when we first played with gas at Loos.
The spiritual motive of the Crusades is finely typified in the character
of Godfrey, who like our own loved Lord Roberts, initiated every fresh
plan with prayer; whose incorruptible soul saw nothing of the material
openings that a Crusade might offer—openings that were the very
_raison-d’-être_ of crusading to the shrewd merchants of Venice in later
years—Godfrey, to whom was unthinkable the mere notion of such bargaining
and traffic as Frederic of Swabia was to employ a century later. “We are
not out for gain,” he says to Altamoro of Samarcand, “we are not traders,
but Crusaders.”
Che della vita altrui prezzo non cerco;
Guerreggio an Asia, non cambio o merco.
...
We should like to picture Tasso weaving into his stately verse,
descriptions of submarine warfare, of the advance of the tanks, of
an artillery barrage on a fifty-mile front: and we could find in
_Gerusalemme Liberata_ a starting-point for most of these. But space
permits us only two more points.
The Hun-spirit, and the glory of our Boy-heroes, are both depicted in
Tasso’s magic tapestry: the one succinctly and sternly, the other more
diffusely and with all the glamour of his genius.
The brutal measures devised—some of them not put into practice—by the
Sultan against the subject Christian population of Jerusalem, and all the
other infidel horrors of oppression and cruelty which Tasso evidently
puts forth as the _ne plus ultra_ of bygone barbarism, have been matched
and exceeded by those wreaked upon Christian populations by the modern
Turk with the connivance of his Teutonic ally; matched and exceeded by
the votaries of the “good German God” themselves, upon defenceless civil
populations of invaded districts, and equally defenceless prisoners of
war. But the spirit of “Frightfulness” itself is sharply sketched with a
single stroke of the pen in the description of one of the leaders of the
Egyptian army (vii. 22): “no true knight, but a fierce, murderous robber.”
Albiazar ch’ è fiero
Omicida ladron, non cavaliero.
But now that victory is won, and those horrors (save for the deep wounds
of Europe) seem an evil dream, we fain would forget the unforgettable,
lest we retard the work of reconciliation.
Let us finish on a happier note, with Rinaldo—Rinaldo who, as Spenser
says in his Prefatory Letter to the _Faëry Queen_, represents “the
Vertues of a private man,” even as Godfrey those of a good governour.
Rinaldo’s very existence is, doubtless, largely due to “dynastic
reasons”: to the necessity of flattering, that is, the House of Este;
yet he concentrates in himself all the elements of the perfect knight,
the pattern of chivalry, as conceived by Tasso. If the desire to please
a patron, Alfonso d’ Este, brought Rinaldo into the world, did not a
similar motive assist at the birth of Virgil’s _Pius Aeneas_? Both Aeneas
and Rinaldo are strong enough to “stand on their own feet.”
Rinaldo is in many ways the true type of our modern Boy-heroes—yes, our
heroes, and those of the other side—as well as of mediaeval chivalry.
Unable to rest at home when war is raging across the world, he dashes
off, while still under sixteen years of age, by paths known only to
himself, and “joins up” in Palestine.
Allor (ne pur tre lustri avea forniti)
Fuggì soletto, e corse strade ignote,
Varcò l’ Egeo, passò di Greca i liti,
Giunse nel campo in region remote
Nobilissima fuga, e che l’ imiti
Ben degna alcun magnanima nipote.
Tre anni son ch’ è in guerra: e intempestiva
Molle piuma del mento appena usciva.