WITH TASSO AT VILLA D'ESTE
His weary heart awhile to soothe
He wove all into verses smooth.
* * *
for soothly he
Was deemed a craft-master to be
In those most noble days of old,
Whose lays were e'en as kingly gold
To our thin brass or drossy lead;
Well, e'en so all the tale is said
How twain grew one and came to bliss?
Woe's me, an idle dream it is!
WILLIAM MORRIS.
Supreme above all the enchanted gardens of Italy, both in the
bewildering beauty of its sensuous charm and in the potency of its
appeal to the imagination, stands the Villa d'Este at Tivoli.
It is a hillside villa, a succession of terraces forming a stairway of
flowers between the palace and the lower garden, where
"Cypress and fig tree and orange in tier upon tier still repeated,
Rose-garden on garden upheaved in balconies step to the sky."
But it is also a superb water-staircase, for the river Anio, turned from
its course by a gigantic feat of engineering, leaps in a magnificent
cascade, laughs in the spray of a thousand fountain jets, and makes the
bosquets which shadow the regal staircase a haunt of the water nymphs as
well as of the Dryads. You fancy, as your unwary foot presses the
concealed springs that it is the white hands of mischievous Naiads which
dash the water in your face, a pensive melancholy settles upon you with
the mysterious dusk, and you are startled by Undine's "short, quick
sobs," and are loth to believe that the plaintive sounds with which the
air pulses are but the dropping of rills in and out of the shadowy
pools.
The pompous hydraulic organ no longer thunders its "full-mouthed
diapason," but the nightingales fill the long summer nights with their
surges of wild rhapsodies. Both the eye and the ear of the artist
receive refreshment and stimulus here. The garden is a bath of
verdancy and coolness even upon the most torrid day. The very light
which filters through the dense foliage is tinged with green. The
marbles are velvety and moist with moss, and the maidenhair fern drips
lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water
notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in
the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its
influence in investing his _fetes champetres_ with the grace of the
idyl.
[Illustration: In the Garden of Villa d'Este
From a photograph by Mr. Charles S. Platt]
That its appeal was no less powerful to a poet, the "craft-master" of
his day, it is our purpose later to show.
Many minor poets also have felt and, with more or less success, have
interpreted its wondrous charm--Story perhaps best of all.
"What peace and quiet in this villa sleep!
Here let us pause nor chase for pleasure on,
Nothing can be more exquisite than this.
See how the old house lifts its face of light
Against the pallid olives that between
Throng up the hill. Look down this vista's shade
Of dark square-shaven ilexes where sports
The fountain's, thin white thread and blows away.
And mark! along the terraced balustrade
Two contadini stopping in the shade
With copper vases poised upon their heads,
How their red jackets tell against the green!
Old, all is old,--what charm there is in age!
Do you believe this villa when 'twas new
Was half so beautiful as now it seems?
Look at these balustrades of travertine--
Had they the charm when fresh and shapely carved
As now that they are stained and graved with time
And mossed with lichens, every grim old mask
That grins upon their pillars bearded o'er
With waving sprays of slender maidenhair?
Ah, no! I cannot think it; things of art
Snatch nature's graces from the hand of Time."
But it is the view afforded by the double arcade of loggias and by every
window of the palace facade which was the crowning glory of the villa.
The amethystine Sabine Hills and the immense Campagna encircle the
Eternal City, from whose mists the dome of Saint Peter's seems to rise a
buoyant, iridescent bubble.
It was Pirro Ligorio (architect also of the exquisite Villa Pia) who in
1545 accomplished the miracle of converting the savage cliff into a
staircase of enchantment. Nature had given the villa its marvellous site
and genius availed itself of all the resources of art and wealth to
effect the wonder.
Cardinal Ippolito's orders to Ligorio were: "Surpass the work of Vignola
in the villas of Caprarola and Lante. Restore the glory of Tivoli in the
Augustan age."
[Illustration: Hydraulic Organ, Villa d'Este.]
Excavations in the neighbourhood were daily bringing to light
masterpieces of classical sculpture, and for the "statues which whiten
the shadow" of Villa d'Este, Ligorio was given carte blanche to despoil
the gardens of Hadrian's palace. To-day only a long procession of broken
pedestals bears witness to statues of emperors, gods, and goddesses long
since removed to different museums.
The exodus began immediately upon the succession of Ippolito's nephew,
Cardinal Luigi d'Este, who came to his inheritance deeply in debt; but
that spendthrift prelate retained sixty statues, some of which are seen
in the etching made by Piranesi, and it was not until 1745 that these
were purchased by Cardinal Albani.
The creator of this paradise, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II., son of
Lucrezia Borgia, was, like his villa, a refined product of the later
Renaissance and must not be confounded with his uncle, Cardinal Ippolito
d'Este I.
This first Cardinal Ippolito was a man of very different fibre, as may
be seen from a single incident. Sent to Rome as his brother's envoy, on
the occasion of Duke Alphonso's marriage, he fell in love with a pretty
cousin of Lucrezia Borgia who accompanied the bride on her wedding
journey to Ferrara.
Unfortunately the coquettish girl praised the beautiful eyes of Giulio
d'Este, the Cardinal's younger brother, whereupon this prince of the
Church hired assassins who waylaid his brother and tore out his
offending eyes.
The Duke banished Ippolito temporarily, but Giulio brooded over the
injury and conspired to depose Alphonso and place another brother, Don
Ferrante, on the throne. For this act both Ferrante and Giulio were
condemned to be imprisoned for life. Ferrante died in confinement but
Giulio, after fifty-three years spent in a dungeon of the castle, was
finally released.
It might have been expected that the blending of d'Este brutality with
the unscrupulous Borgia craft would have given as a result only a more
refined cruelty; but if this was the case Cardinal Ippolito II.
completely deceived his contemporaries and has left the reputation
(through the pen of his panegyrist Mureto) of the utmost affable
condescension and magnificent patronage of men of genius. He was himself
a dilettante; and it was his ambition to pose as the most cultured and
brilliant of the great cardinals of his day. Ippolito I. had been a boon
companion of Leo X. in his hunting parties at the Villa La
Magliana, but it was not as a "_cacciator signorile_" or "sporting
gentleman" that Ippolito II. wished to eclipse the then illustrious
representative of the house of Medici, Cardinal Ferdinando, who was
attempting to rival him in his magnificent villa on the Pincian hill.
[Illustration: Villa d'Este in 1740
From an etching by Piranesi]
It does not seem to have occurred to Mureto that both of these men were
looking forward to the papacy, and desired to emulate in their own
pontificates that of Leo X. Each piece of sculpture acquired for their
villas, every literary man attached to their service was a step toward
that end. Ippolito II. was as keen a hunter of genius as his uncle had
been of deer or boar; and having once bagged his game, as capable of
availing himself without scruple of his trophies as Ippolito I. of
tearing the antlers from a dying stag.
The princely Cardinal entertained on one occasion a house party of two
hundred and fifty guests in his palatial villa, and established here a
veritable court. The grandiose frescoes of Zuccari, Tempesta, Muziano,
and Vasari still celebrate the glories of his family under the guise of
the heroes of mythology garlanded by troops and bevies of cupids, "_una
copiosa quantita di Amorini_." But the gods and demigods banquet all
alone on the ceiling of the great hall where they once looked down upon
the revels of the Cardinal's convives--noble or distinguished men all of
them in their day, although the one name that comes to us of all who
shared Ippolito's lavish hospitality and that sheds most glory upon his
proud house is that of a poet, by turns patronised as a dependent,
ungratefully neglected, and cruelly wronged.
The visitor is shown with pride the room so whimsically decorated with
singing birds, where Tasso wrote his _Amyntas_, and the Fountain of
Nature in the lower garden where the pastoral was presented with musical
accompaniment before a distinguished audience.
That Leonora d'Este was among those who listened, and indeed had been
her uncle's guest and Tasso's good and evil fate during the months which
he spent at Villa d'Este, is the only conclusion possible for the
thoughtful reader of the poem; and the idyl composed under such
circumstances leads inevitably to the tragedy (enacted at that other
villa) of Belriguardo, of which Goethe has given us so truthful and so
masterly a transcription.
Cardinal Ippolito, as his portraits make him known to us, has none of
the sensuality which stamped the face of his grandfather Pope
Alexander Borgia, or the heaviness of jaw expressing the stubborness and
brutality of the earlier D'Estes; on the contrary, every line of the
slight figure is expressive of refinement, the delicate red-stockinged
feet are as shapely as a woman's, the expressive, almost transparent
hands might be those of an artist as they finger caressingly his
collection of intaglios and luxuriate in the smoothness of jades and
ivory carvings. His excessive pallor and thinness would give an
expression of asceticism, almost of spirituality to the intellectual
face were it not in a measure contradicted by the craft in the
close-set, slanting eyes, which with the pointed, fulvous beard suggest
a possibility of foxy cunning, and inspire in the beholder an
uncomfortable, haunting feeling of distrust even when the Cardinal's
manner is most condescending and cajoling.
So, robed in filmy lace over rosy velvet, we may see him in imagination
tripping daintily down his monumental staircase, his train islanding his
figure as in some ensanguined pool and slipping after him adown the
steps like the drip of some trail of blood which strangely leaves no
stain upon the white marble.
But his face is wreathed with smiles, for he genuinely loves his two
beautiful nieces, Lucrezia, Duchess of Urbino, and the gentle Leonora,
who are his guests, and he loves his villa, whose beauties he is
pointing out to them.
"You do not see the garden at its best," he cavils. "Wait till the roses
garland the balustrades. It is too early yet to enjoy Tivoli; the frost
may have left the ground but it lingers still in the pavements of this
great palace. The halls are damp as vaults; we would have done well, my
nieces, to have remained another month in Rome. Not till the middle of
May will society desert the city for its _villeggiatura_. What do you
say, Leonora, shall we confess that we have made a mistake and return?"
"Dear uncle, as you say, it is only the palace which, in spite of its
braziers, retains the winter chill. Here in the garden the air is balmy,
and the Judas trees are all a crimson mist. See how the green is
creeping, like an inundation through the russets of last year's grasses.
In another fortnight all this magical change will have been wrought, and
those who come later will have missed the fairy spectacle."
"Spectacle! ah! that reminds me," replied the Cardinal; "while Nature is
shifting the scenes we must prepare the _scenario_. Confess that I have
provided a worthy theatre, one which should suggest to a poet a worthy
theme. There, alas! is my great lack--I have no poet. How wastefully on
those who need them not are the most precious gifts bestowed! My uncle
and godfather, Cardinal Ippolito--the saints rest his soul!--was a
dull-brained barbarian and yet he had attached to his service that pearl
of poets Ariosto, whom he had neither the intelligence to appreciate nor
the justice to reward. What think you was Ariosto's meed for dedicating
to his patron the _Orlando Furioso_? He was made governor of that nest
of bandits, the mountain district of Garfagnana, and it in open
insurrection against the Duke of Ferrara. A pretty post for a scholar
and a poet! But to it he went, and conquered the brigands, proving
himself as expert in the use of the sword as in that of the pen.
"We produce no such men now. Bernardo Tasso, to whom I gave employment
when he was exiled from Naples, and who wandered freely in this garden,
felt not its charm, for he was but a third-rate poet, and even he is
dead. Who in our day can interpret the poetry which I feel here but
cannot express? And with but so little more of endowment I might have
done it, for after all is not the inner ear, the second sight, the major
part of genius?
"Listen, and tell me what you hear. Only the musical plash of the
fountains and the sonorous undertone of the organ, like the distant roar
of surf upon the beach? Ah, me! ah, me! how materialistic you are, my
children. Your old uncle hears in these myriad-voiced fountains the
musical instruments which Boccaccio gave to the Satyrs; 'cymbals, pipes,
and whistling reeds,' and the song of the nymphs. Did you note that
startled cry? It is the Oread Arethusa flying from the river-god
Alpheus. He is imprisoned in the organ, where he is mightily bellowing,
and whence he will presently burst forth. But Arethusa will slip away
(coquette that she is), under ground and under sea to her Sicilian home;
for fable and stream sing eternally the same story, _Mulier hominis
confusio est_.
"Tell me, my niece, have we in all Italy a poet who can voice such a
theme?"
"Yes, uncle," the Duchess of Urbino interposed, "Bernardo Tasso's little
son heard and understood the song of the fountains when he played here
in his childhood. He told me that he believed a _folletto_ or tricksy
spirit talked with him here and promised him that if he came again he
would find here both love and fame. He can interpret your songs for you,
for he has grown a man, and is a greater poet than his father."
"And meantime," added Leonora, "he has absorbed all that the
universities of Bologna and Padua can give him, and has written a
romantic poem, the _Rinaldo_, on the exploits of one of our ancestors,
that mythical old peer of Charlemagne, which he has dedicated to our
house. It is in recognition of this tribute that our brother Luigi has
made him his secretary."
"And Luigi is at the French Court intriguing with the Queen Mother,
Catherine de' Medici. Torquato is doubtless with him," replied the
Cardinal. "I ask you of what good to tantalise me with impossible
suggestions? He had the eyes of a poet, that lad, and he might have
served my turn."
"He may still serve you, Uncle Ippolito, for he has quarrelled with
Luigi, and is in Rome."
"And wherefore in Rome? To curry favour with Cardinal de' Medici?"
"Possibly, for Tasso is writing a great epic on the taking of
Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders."
"'Tis no epic that I wish, but a pastoral--a mere trifle. Yet not so
fast. A poem such as you describe, if it were indeed a work of genius,
might rouse Christendom to another crusade, a life-work worthy of the
next Pope. Lucrezia, the boy must not submit his poem to Cardinal de'
Medici. Can you summon him to me, and will he come instantly?"
"If Leonora calls him," the Duchess replied, "he will come."
Cardinal Ippolito lifted his eyebrows almost imperceptibly and darted a
keen, sidelong glance at Leonora. She had not heard her sister's last
remark, the name of Torquato Tasso had obliterated the present and she
was gazing dreamily at the rainbow-tinted dome of St. Peter's.
"Leonora," the Cardinal said softly, "have you heard what Lucrezia was
saying, that this young poet has written an epic? If I could see it I
might be able to help him in his career, perhaps give him fame."
"O Uncle, will you? How good you are! I will write him at once."
"My dear, I am not good, or disinterested. I am a selfish, an ambitious
old man. This festival, given ostensibly for the entertainment of my
friends and to introduce my charming nieces, is a part of my deep,
ulterior motives. Come, I will confess the machinations of my wicked old
heart. Why not, since my ambitions are for you as well as for myself?
Nay, Leonora, never flush and tremble, I have no wish to buy my own
advancement by selling you to some degenerate prince. Matchmaking is not
my kind of diplomacy. I have seen enough in our own family of
magnificence won through the martyrdom of women. Your mother, Renee of
France, though a king's daughter, brought with her a dowry of
unhappiness. My own mother, innocent though she was, bequeathed to us
the shameful legacy of the Borgias' deeds and instincts. You may be
happy, Lucrezia, with your Duke of Urbino. I ask no confidences, but I
am glad that I am not responsible for your marriage.
"You, at least, Leonora, shall live your own life wedded or unwedded as
you like. I shall be so great that I can ennoble whom I will, and you,
beloved child, shall be the power behind the throne to advise me on whom
to shower my benefits."
Lucrezia clapped her hands softly. "Bravo, dear Uncle, I have guessed
this ambition, have I not? Cardinal de' Medici is already spoken of as
the Pope's successor. But the Medici balls have been carved too often
over St. Peter's chair, and you are minded to blazon in their place the
d'Este eagle. You need not answer for I know that I am right."
The Cardinal smiled mysteriously. "Too shrewd, my niece, too shrewd by
half. How your woman's intuition leaps over intervening obstacles. Never
a whisper of this guess at my aims. Remember, it is but your own surmise
and that I have never breathed such an aspiration. The immediate object
of my solicitude is to secure a charming play worthy of the setting of
Villa d'Este breathing the spirit of Ovid and Anacreon, one which will
make the old Greek gods live again in these delicious haunts and will
redound to the reputation of your uncle's taste in literature."
"How magnanimous you are," cried Leonora, "to disclaim your principal
motive, that of helping Tasso! He shall come, and he will give you the
most beautiful idyl that was ever written."
* * *
And who shall say that Tasso did not make good the promise of his
patroness? In the _Amyntas_ we have the development of a theme which is
the inevitable product of such a temperament in such a situation, and to
the poem itself we will now look for a record of what transpired at
Villa d'Este during the writing and the presentation of the pastoral.
To us it is true that the archaic quality, the pseudo-classicism of this
pastoral seems at first artificial. "It has only so much of rustic
nature as suits a graceful urban fancy." Arcadia is a no man's land, so
far from our desires that we cannot picture it even in imagination; but
to one who knows how sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for
Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come
to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in
literature or the plastic arts,--all the pretty imagery of the Golden
Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere
feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet
or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having once
learned its technique genius and passion were unconscious of their
limitations, but flowed with as true and spontaneous an impulse within
these formal bounds as waters in their marble fountains and conduits.
"All the melodies that had been growing through two centuries in
Italy [says Symonds] are concentrated in the songs of the _Amyntas_
and the _Pastor Fido_. The idyllic voluptuousness which permeated
literature and art steeps their pictures in a golden glow. While we
recognise in both these poems--the one perfumed and delicate like
flowers of spring, the other sculptured in pure forms of classic
grace--evident signs of a civilisation sinking to decay, we are
bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been
steadily advancing. They complete and close the Renaissance."
But the living quality in the _Amyntas_ which makes it a thousand-fold
more real to us than the Elizabethan masques is not its perfectness of
form but the stamp which it bears of being the expression of personal
experience and longing but thinly veiled in poetic imagery. Reading the
poem at Villa d'Este we read between the lines and recognise the _scena_
of the pastoral and the love which inspired its plot.
In spite of the changes wrought by time we discover the origin of each
descriptive passage. This rocky reservoir whose shadowy surface seems to
mirror reflections of mysterious faces is surely--
"Dian's pool
Where the great plane's cool shade to cooler waves
Invites the huntress nymphs."
Its encircling laurel thickets might mask to-day strange woodland
deities like the Satyr of the play who while Sylvia bathed
"Crouched lynx-eyed among the thick-set shrubs."
The description of the tumultuous pursuit of this Satyr calls up so
vividly the Polyphemus in the _Triumph of Galatea_ that we are convinced
that Tasso must have been influenced by Raphael's great painting in the
Farnesina.
"Not all am I
A despicable thing,..."
He makes the Satyr say;
"This ruddy russet front, these shoulders huge,
These nervy bull-thewed arms, this silky breast,
And these my velvet thighs are manhood's mould robust.
Ill favoured I? Not so!"
As one listens to the delirious nightingales in the dim, green-arched
_allees_, one forgets the trysting trees in other Italian gardens and is
sure that only here could Daphne have drawn her argument for love from
their caresses.
"_Daphne:_
The gentle, jocund spring,
Smiling and wantoning,
Makes all things amorous.
Thou only thus,
Untamed wild creature, wilder than the rest,
Deniest love the harbourage of thy breast.
List to yon nightingale
Singing within the vale
'I love, love, love.'
With what renewed embracement vine clasps vine,
Fir blends its boughs with fir, and pine with pine.
Beneath the rugged bark
May'st thou mute inward sighings mark,
And wilt thou graceless be
Less than a vine or tree--
To keep thyself unloving, loverless?
Bend, bend thy stubborn heart
Fool that thou art."
But the physical peculiarity which actually identifies Villa d'Este as
the locale of the poem is its cliff, the "sheer crag" from whence
Amyntas leaps in his despair.
"Now did he lead me where the cloven steep
Among the rocks and solitary crags
Looms pathless and breaks sheer above a vale.
There paused we, and I, peering far below,
Shuddered, drew from the brink.
* * *
'Sylvia, I come, I follow!' So he cried:
Then headlong leaped,--and left me turned to stone."
There are other poems of Tasso's which refer to his residence at Villa
d'Este, and infer Leonora's presence at that time. We may cite in
particular the canzone to Leonora at her uncle's villa, beginning "_Al
nobil colle ove in antichi marmi_":
"To the romantic hills where free
To thine enchanted eyes
Works of Greek art in statuary
Of antique marbles rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloomy groves
Fast bears me as it flies.
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.
"There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things
Of heroes to the Tuscan strings
On my sweet lyre anew,
And to the brooks and trees around
Ippolito's high name resound."
This poem would seem to imply that a part of the _Jerusalem_ was written
here, possibly the episode of Sophronia and Olindo, so dear to Tasso
himself that though it was not an integral part of the epic he dared the
Inquisition rather than comply with the demands of the censor that it
should be stricken out. The description of Sophronia is admitted to have
been intended to denote Leonora:
"Amongst them in the city lived a maid
The flower of virgins in her perfect prime,
Supremely beautiful! but that she made
Never her care, or beauty only weighed
In worth with virtue; and her worth acquired
A deeper charm from blooming in the shade,
Lovers she shunned, nor loved to be admired,
But from their praises turned to live a life retired."
Equally applicable to Tasso is that of Olindo, the lover who--
"Feared much, hoped little, and in nought presumed.
He could not or he durst not speak, but doomed
To voiceless thought his passion."
But during those "livelong summer days" the poet's passion was not
utterly voiceless. The _Amyntas_ is throughout a continual and
unequivocal expression, and he daringly in the very prelude makes the
god of love, who explains the scheme of the play, declare--
"For wheresoe'er I am, there I am Love,
No less in shepherds' than in heroes' hearts,
The _unequal lot grows equal_ at my will,
My chiefest vaunt, my miracle is this."
Openly and repeatedly Tasso asserts that while he is not indifferent to
literary distinction it is not the chief end which he has in view in
writing the _Amyntas._
"Deem not" (he says) "that all Love's bliss
At last is but a breath
Of fame that followeth.
Love's meed is love, it wooeth, _winneth_ this.
Nathless the lover steadfast to his end
Hath laud ofttimes and maketh Fame his friend."
Goethe makes Tasso confide this double aim to Leonora and her reply
shows that he did indeed win the meed he sought. "For what" the poet
asks her "is more deserving to survive and silently to last for
centuries than the confession of a noble love, confided modestly to
gentle song?"
We follow step by step that wooing, finding it in the exquisite
apostrophe to the golden age--which concludes:
"Then let us live as erst kind Nature's thralls
And let us love--since hearts
No truce of time may know, and youth departs:
Ay! let us love: suns sink but sink to soar--
On us, our brief day o'er,
Night falls and sleep descends for evermore."
Here again Goethe discovers the personal note, transcribing the poem
unscrupulously from its setting in the _Amyntas_ and making Leonora
reply with didactic coldness to Tasso's appeal--
"_Tasso:_
The golden age, ah! whither is it flown,
For which in secret every heart repines?
When every bird winging the limpid air
And every living thing o'er hill and dale
Proclaimed to man, What pleases is allowed.
"_Princess_:
My friend, the golden age hath passed away.
Shall I confess to thee my secret thoughts?
The golden age, wherewith the bard is wont
Our spirits to beguile, that lovely prime,
Existed in the past no more than now;
Still meet congenial spirits and enhance
Each other's pleasures in this beauteous world;
But in the motto change one single word
And say my friend,--What's fitting is allowed."
Perhaps Leonora did speak thus in the open discussion which followed the
reading of the poem as in that at the Court of Urbino when Cardinal
Bembo, distraught by his own rhapsody on love, stood silent as one
transported, and the lady Emilia to recall him to himself shook him
playfully, crying, "Have a care, Pietro, lest in this mood your soul
should be separated from your body."
And the gay Cardinal replied: "Madam, this would not be the first
miracle which Love hath wrought in me."
Certainly, Tasso's wooing, even at Villa d'Este, was not always a happy
one. In the following stanzas he tells of temporary despairs, but he
hints also of a great hope at his darkest moment:
"By what dim ways at last Love leadeth man
Unto his joy and sets him 'mid the bliss
Of his heart's heaven of love--then when he most
Thinketh him sunk in an abyss of bale;
O blest Amyntas--from thy fate
I augur for mine own, that so may she,
That fair untender maid, who in a smile
Of pity sheaths the steel of heartlessness,
So may she with true pity heal the hurt
Wherewith feigned pity pierced me to the heart."
In another beautiful passage it is not hope which he sings but rapture:
"Let him who serveth Love
Divine it in his heart, though scarce may he
Divine or give it voice."
What was the boon which gave Tasso so much bliss? Perchance no greater
than the one he celebrates in the exquisite lines:
_Stava Madonna ad un balcon soletta._
"My lady at a balcony alone
One day was standing, when I chanced to stretch
My arm on hers; pardon I begged, if so
I had offended her; she sweetly answered,
'Not by the placing of thy arm hast thou
Displeased me aught, but by withdrawing it
Do I remain offended!' O fond words!
Dear little love words, short but sweet, and courteous!
Courteous as sweet, affectionate as courteous!
If it were true and certain what I heard,
I shall be always seeking not to offend thee,
Repeating the great bliss: but my sweet life,
By all my eagerness therein remember--
Where there is no offence, there must be
No visiting of vengeance!"
It must have been early in their acquaintance that such gratitude was
poured forth for so slight a favour. There are balconies at Villa
d'Este, balustraded terraces where now the contorted stems of giant
vines wrestle with the carved pillarets and rend them relentlessly from
their copings where at intervals the bayonet-leaved aloes keep sentinel
like the bravi of Cardinal Ippolito I., their long green knives
unsheathed and ready for any deed of horror. Here, unconscious of spying
eyes, Leonora may have leant apparently absorbed in that glorious view,
and Tasso's hand have stolen furtively to her own.
But was there no other guerdon for his long service than this shy
avowal--no other bliss before that long horror of imprisonment and real
or imputed madness which ended only after Leonora's death? Only the Duke
Alphonso and those who so basely read the poet's private papers can
reply.
Cardinal Ippolito must have guessed to what end the pastoral of Villa
d'Este was tending; but whether his sympathy was real or feigned for his
own uses we cannot know.
[Illustration: _Alinari_
Villa d'Este--Terrace Staircase]
He never attained his ambition, for death suddenly claimed him before
the aged Pope whom he had hoped to succeed. Tasso's tragedy culminated,
as Goethe tells us, at another villa, that of Belriguardo. The pastoral
of Villa d'Este ends in a chorus or envoy expressive of that tremulous
hope which flutters so deliciously in every line of the exquisite poem:
"I know not if the bitterness
That, serving long, long yearning, one hath borne
In tears and all forlorn,
May wholly turn to sweet, and Love requite
All sorrows with delight.
But if this be and pain
That bringeth joy enricheth often gain;
I ask thee not, O Love,
To give me gain thy common gains above.
* * *
If gentle dear disdains
And dulcet coy defeats
And strifes fond lovers use
To fire their hearts--but close with love's long truce."
NOTE.--The selections from the _Amyntas_ quoted in this article
have been selected from the admirable metrical translation of Mr.
R. Whitmore.
[Illustration]