CONCLUSION.
The Main Events of European History--Italy in the
Renaissance--Germany and Reformation--Catholic Reaction--Its
Antagonism to Renaissance and Reformation--Profound Identity of
Renaissance and Reformation--Place of Italy in European
Civilization--Want of Sympathy between Latin and Teutonic
Races--Relation of Rome to Italy--Macaulay on the Roman Church--On
Protestantism--Early Decline of Renaissance Enthusiasms--Italy's
Present and Future
RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
CHAPTER VII.
TORQUATO TASSO.
Tasso's Relation to his Age--Balbi on that Period--The Life of
Bernardo Tasso--Torquato's Boyhood--Sorrento, Naples, Rome,
Urbino--His first Glimpse of the Court--Student Life at Padua and
Bologna--The _Rinaldo_--Dialogues on Epic Poetry--Enters the
Service of Cardinal d'Este--The Court of Ferrara--Alfonso II. and
the Princesses--Problem of Tasso's Love--Goes to France with
Cardinal d'Este--Enters the Service of Duke Alfonso--The
_Aminta_--Tasso at Urbino--Return to Ferrara--Revision of the
_Gerusalemme_--Jealousies at Court--Tasso's Sense of His own
Importance--Plans a Change from Ferrara to Florence--First Symptoms
of Mental Disorder--Persecutions of the Ferrarese Courtiers--Tasso
confined as a Semi-madman--Goes with Duke Alfonso to
Belriguardo--Flies in Disguise from Ferrara to Sorrento--Returns to
Court Life at Ferrara--Problem of his madness--Flies again--Mantua,
Venice, Urbino, Turin--Returns once more to Ferrara--Alfonso's
Third Marriage--Tasso's Discontent--Imprisoned for Seven years in
the madhouse of S. Anna--Character of Tasso--Character of Duke
Alfonso--Nature of the Poet's Malady--His Course of Life in
Prison--Released at the Intercession of Vincenzo Gonzaga--Goes to
Mantua--The _Torrismondo_--An Odyssey of nine Years--Death at Sant
Onofrio in Rome--Constantini's Sonnet.
It was under the conditions which have been set forth in the foregoing
chapters that the greatest literary genius of his years in Europe, the
poet who ranks among the four first of Italy, was educated, rose to
eminence, and suffered. The political changes introduced in 1530, the
tendencies of the Catholic Revival, the terrorism of the Inquisition,
and the educational energy of the Jesuits had, each and all, their
manifest effect in molding Tasso's character. He represents that period
when the culture of the Renaissance was being superseded, when the
caries of court-service was eating into the bone and marrow of Italian
life, when earlier forms of art were tending to decay, or were passing
into the new form of music. Tasso was at once the representative poet of
his age and the representative martyr of his age. He was the latter,
though this may seem paradoxical, in even a stricter sense than Bruno.
Bruno, coming into violent collision with the prejudices of the century,
expiated his antagonism by a cruel death. Tasso, yielding to those
influences, lingered out a life of irresolute misery. His nature was
such, that the very conditions which shaped it sufficed to enfeeble,
envenom, and finally reduce it to a pitiable ruin.
Some memorable words of Cesare Balbi may serve as introduction to a
sketch of Tasso's life. 'If that can be called felicity which gives to
the people peace without activity; to nobles rank without power; to
princes undisturbed authority within their States without true
independence or full sovereignty; to literary men and artists numerous
occasions for writing, painting, making statues, and erecting edifices
with the applause of contemporaries but the ridicule of posterity; to
the whole nation ease without dignity and facilities for sinking
tranquilly into corruption; then no period of her history was so
felicitous for Italy as the 140 years which followed the peace of
Cateau-Cambresis. Invasions ceased: her foreign lord saved Italy from
intermeddling rivals. Internal struggles ceased: her foreign lord
removed their causes and curbed national ambitions. Popular revolutions
ceased: her foreign lord bitted and bridled the population of her
provinces. Of bravi, highwaymen, vulgar acts of vengeance, tragedies
among nobles and princes, we find indeed abundance; but these affected
the mass of the people to no serious extent. The Italians enjoyed life,
indulged in the sweets of leisure, the sweets of vice, the sweets of
making love and dangling after women. From the camp and the
council-chamber, where they had formerly been bred, the nobles passed
into petty courts and moldered in a multitude of little capitals. Men
bearing historic names, insensible of their own degradation, bowed the
neck gladly, groveled in beatitude. Deprived of power, they consoled
themselves with privileges, patented favors, impertinences vented on the
common people. The princes amused themselves by debasing the old
aristocracy to the mire, depreciating their honors by the creations of
new titles, multiplying frivolous concessions, adding class to class of
idle and servile dependents on their personal bounty. In one word, the
paradise of mediocrities came into being.'
Tasso was born before the beginning of this epoch. But he lived into
the last decade of the sixteenth century. In every fiber of his
character he felt the influences of Italian decadence, even while he
reacted against them. His misfortunes resulted in great measure from his
not having wholly discarded the traditions of the Renaissance, though
his temperament and acquired habits made him in many points sympathetic
to the Counter-Reformation. At the same time, he was not a mediocrity,
but the last of an illustrious race of nobly gifted men of genius.
Therefore he never patiently submitted to the humiliating conditions
which his own conception of the Court, the Prince, the Church, and the
Italian gentleman logically involved at that period. He could not be
contented with the paradise of mediocrities described by Balbi. Yet he
had not strength to live outside its pale. It was the pathos of his
situation that he persisted in idealizing this paradise, and expected to
find in it a paradise of exceptional natures. This it could not be. No
one turns Circe's pigsty into a Parnassus. If Tasso had possessed force
of character enough to rend the trammels of convention and to live his
own life in a self-constructed sphere, he might still have been
unfortunate. Nature condemned him to suffering. But from the study of
his history we then had risen invigorated by the contemplation of
heroism, instead of quitting it, as now we do, with pity, but with pity
tempered by a slight contempt.
Bernardo, the father of Torquato Tasso, drew noble blood from both his
parents. The Tassi claimed to be a branch of that ancient Guelf house of
Delia Torre, lords of Milan, who were all but extirpated by the Visconti
in the fourteenth century. A remnant established themselves in mountain
strongholds between Bergamo and Como, and afterwards took rank among the
more distinguished families of the former city. Manso affirms that
Bernardo's mother was a daughter of those Venetian Cornari who gave a
queen to Cyprus.[1] He was born at Venice in the year 1493; and, since
he died in 1568, his life covered the whole period of national glory,
humiliation, and attempted reconstruction which began with the invasion
of Charles VIII. and ended with the closing of the Council of Trent.
Born in the pontificate of Alexander VI., he witnessed the reigns of
Julius II., Leo X., Clement VII., Paul IV., Pius IV., and died in that
of Pius V.
All the illustrious works of Italian art and letters were produced while
he was moving in the society of princes and scholars. He saw the
Renaissance in its splendor and decline. He watched the growth,
progress, and final triumph of the Catholic Revival. Having stated that
the curve of his existence led upward from a Borgia and down to a
Ghislieri Vicar of Christ, the merest tyro in Italian history knows what
vicissitudes it spanned.
[Footnote 1: This is doubtful. Serrassi believed that Bernardo's mother
was also a Tasso.]
Though the Tassi were so noble, Bernardo owned no wealth. He was left
an orphan at an early age under the care of his uncle, Bishop of
Recanati. But in 1520 the poignard of an assassin cut short this
guardian's life; and, at the age of seventeen, he was thrown upon the
world. After studying at Padua, where he enjoyed the patronage of Bembo,
and laid foundations for his future fame as poet, Bernardo entered the
service of the Modenese Rangoni in the capacity of secretary. Thus began
the long career of servitude to princes, of which he frequently
complained, but which only ended with his death.[2] The affairs of his
first patrons took him to Paris at the time when a marriage was arranged
between Renee of France and Ercole d'Este. He obtained the post of
secretary to this princess, and having taken leave of the Rangoni, he
next established himself at Ferrara. Only for three years, however; for
in 1532 reasons of which we are ignorant, but which may have been
connected with the heretical sympathies of Renee, induced him to resign
his post. Shortly after this date, we find him attached to the person of
Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, one of the chief feudatories
and quasi-independent vassals of the Crown of Naples. In the quality of
secretary he attended this patron through the campaign of Tunis in 1535,
and accompanied him on all his diplomatic expeditions.
[Footnote 2: He speaks in his letters of the difficulty 'di sottrarre il
collo all difficile noioso arduo giogo della servitu dei Principi.'
_Lettere Ined._ Bologna, Romagnoli, p. 34.]
The Prince of Salerno treated him more as an honored friend and
confidential adviser than as a paid official. His income was good, and
leisure was allowed him for the prosecution of his literary studies. In
this flourishing state of his affairs, Bernardo contracted an alliance
with Porzia de'Rossi, a lady of a noble house, which came originally
from Pistoja, but had been established for some generations in Naples.
She was connected by descent or marriage with the houses of Gambacorti,
Caracciolo, and Caraffa. Their first child, Cornelia, was born about the
year 1537. Their second, Torquato, saw the light in March 1544 at
Sorrento, where his father had been living some months previously and
working at his poem, the _Amadigi_.
At the time of Torquato's birth Bernardo was away from home, in
Lombardy, France, and Flanders, traveling on missions from his Prince.
However, he returned to Sorrento for a short while in 1545, and then
again was forced to leave his family. Married at the mature age of
forty-three, Bernardo was affectionately attached to his young wife, and
proud of his children. But the exigencies of a courtier's life debarred
him from enjoying the domestic happiness for which his sober and gentle
nature would have fitted him. In 1547 the events happened which ruined
him for life, separated him for ever from Porzia, drove him into
indigent exile, and marred the prospects of his children. In that year,
the Spanish Viceroy, Don Pietro Toledo, attempted to introduce the
Inquisition, on its Spanish basis, into Naples. The population resented
this exercise of authority with the fury of despair, rightly judging
that the last remnants of their liberty would be devoured by the foul
monster of the Holy Office. They besought the Prince of Salerno to
intercede for them with his master, Charles V., whom he had served
loyally up to this time, and who might therefore be inclined to yield to
his expostulations. The Prince doubted much whether it would be prudent
to accept the mission of intercessor. He had two counsellors, Bernardo
Tasso and Vincenzo Martelli. The latter, who was an astute Florentine,
advised him to undertake nothing so perilous as interposition between
the Viceroy and the people. Tasso, on the contrary, exhorted him to
sacrifice personal interest, honors, and glory, for the duty which he
owed his country. The Prince chose the course which Tasso recommended.
Charles V. disgraced him, and he fled from Naples to France, adopting
openly the cause of his imperial sovereign's enemies. He was immediately
declared a rebel, with confiscation of his fiefs and property. Bernardo
and his infant son were included in the sentence. After twenty-two years
of service, Bernardo now found himself obliged to choose between
disloyalty to his Prince or a disastrous exile. He took the latter
course, and followed Ferrante Sanseverino to Paris. But Bernardo Tasso,
though proving himself a man of honor in this severe trial, was not of
the stuff of Shakespeare's Kent; and when the Prince of Salerno
suspended payment of his salary he took leave of that master. Some
differences arising from the discomforts and irritations of both exiles
had early intervened between them. Tasso was miserably poor. 'I have to
stay in bed,' he writes, 'to mend my hose; and if it were not for the
old arras I brought with me from home, I should not know how to cover my
nakedness.'[3] Besides this he suffered grievously in the separation
from his wife, who was detained at Naples by her relatives--'brothers
who, instead of being brothers, are deadly foes, cruel wild beasts
rather than men; a mother who is no mother but a fell enemy, a fury from
hell rather than a woman.'[4] His wretchedness attained its climax when
Porzia died suddenly on February 3, 1556. Bernardo suspected that her
family had poisoned her; and this may well have been. His son Torquato,
meanwhile had joined him in Rome; but Porzia's brothers refused to
surrender his daughter Cornelia, whom they married to a Sorrentine
gentleman, Marzio Sersale, much to Bernardo's disgust, for Sersale was
apparently of inferior blood. They also withheld Porzia's dowry and the
jointure settled on her by Bernardo--property of considerable value
which neither he nor Torquato were subsequently able to recover.
[Footnote 3: _Lett. Ined_. p. 100]
[Footnote 4: _Letter di Torquato Tasso_, February 15, 1556, vol. II. p.
157.]
In this desperate condition of affairs, without friends or credit, but
conscious of his noble birth and true to honor, the unhappy poet
bethought him of the Church. If he could obtain a benefice, he would
take orders. But the King of France and Margaret of Valois, on whose
patronage he relied, turned him a deaf ear; and when war broke out
between Paul IV. and Spain, he felt it prudent to leave Rome. It was at
this epoch that Bernardo entered the service of Guidubaldo della Rovere,
Duke of Urbino, with whom he remained until 1563, when he accepted the
post of secretary from Guglielmo, Duke of Mantua. He died in 1569 at
Ostiglia, so poor that his son could scarcely collect money enough to
bury him after selling his effects. Manso says that a couple of
door-curtains, embroidered with the arms of Tasso and De'Rossi, passed
on this occasion into the wardrobe of the Gonzaghi. Thus it seems that
the needy nobleman had preserved a scrap of his heraldic trophies till
the last, although he had to patch his one pain of breeches in bed at
Rome. It may be added, as characteristic of Bernardo's misfortunes, that
even the plain marble sarcophagus, inscribed with the words _Ossa
Bernardi Tassi_ which Duke Guglielmo erected to his memory in S. Egidio
at Mantua, was removed in compliance with a papal edict ordering that
monuments at a certain height above the ground should be destroyed to
save the dignity of neighboring altars!
Such were the events of Bernardo Tasso's life. I have dwelt upon them
in detail, since they foreshadow and illustrate the miseries of his more
famous son. In character and physical qualities Torquato inherited no
little from his father. Bernardo was handsome, well-grown, conscious of
his double dignity as a nobleman and poet. From the rules of honor, as
he understood them, he deviated in no important point of conduct. Yet
the life of courts made him an incorrigible dangler after princely
favors. The _Amadigi_, upon which he set such store, was first planned
and dedicated to Charles V., then altered to suit Henri II. of France,
and finally adapted to the flattery of Philip II., according as its
author's interests with the Prince of Salerno and the Duke of Urbino
varied. No substantial reward accrued to him, however, from its
publication. His compliments wasted their sweetness on the dull ears of
the despot of Madrid. In misfortune Bernardo sank to neither crime nor
baseness, even when he had no clothes to put upon his back. Yet he took
the world to witness of his woes, as though his person ought to have
been sacred from calamities of common manhood. A similar dependent
spirit was manifested in his action as a man of letters. Before
publishing the _Amadigi_ he submitted it to private criticism, with the
inevitable result of obtaining feigned praises and malevolent
strictures. Irresolution lay at the root of his treatment of Torquato.
While groaning under the collar of courtly servitude, he determined
that the youth should study law. While reckoning how little his own
literary fame had helped him, he resolved that his son should adopt a
lucrative profession. Yet no sooner had Torquato composed his _Rinaldo_,
than the fond parent had it printed, and immediately procured a place
for him in the train of the Cardinal Luigi d'Este. It is singular that
the young man, witnessing the wretchedness of his father's life, should
not have shunned a like career of gilded misery and famous indigence.
But Torquato was born to reproduce Bernardo's qualities in their
feebleness and respectability, to outshine him in genius, and to
outstrip him in the celebrity of his misfortunes.
In the absence of his father little Torquato grew up with his mother and
sister at Sorrento under the care of a good man, Giovanni Angeluzzo who
gave him the first rudiments of education. He was a precocious infant,
grave in manners, quick at learning, free from the ordinary
naughtinesses of childhood. Manso reports that he began to speak at six
months, and that from the first he formed syllables with precision. His
mother Porzia appears to have been a woman of much grace and sweetness,
but timid and incapable of fighting the hard battle of the world. A
certain shade of melancholy fell across the boy's path even in these
earliest years, for Porzia, as we have seen, met with cruel treatment
from her relatives, and her only support, Bernardo, was far away in
exile. In 1552 she removed with her children to Naples, where Torquato
was sent at once to the school which the Jesuits had opened there in the
preceding year. These astute instructors soon perceived that they had no
ordinary boy to deal with. They did their best to stimulate his mental
faculties and to exalt his religious sentiments; so that he learned
Greek and Latin before the age of ten, and was in the habit of
communicating at the altar with transports of pious ecstasy in his ninth
year.[5] The child recited speeches and poems in public, and received an
elementary training in the arts of composition. He was in fact the
infant prodigy of those plausible Fathers, the prize specimen of their
educational method. As might have been expected, this forcing system
overtaxed his nerves. He rose daily before daybreak to attack his books,
and when the nights were long he went to morning school attended by a
servant carrying torches.
[Footnote 5: 'Sentendo in me non so qual nuova insolita contentezza,'
'non so qual segreta divozione.' _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 90.]
Without seeking to press unduly on these circumstances, we may fairly
assume that Torquato's character received a permanent impression from
the fever of study and the premature pietism excited in him by the
Jesuits in Naples. His servile attitude toward speculative thought, that
anxious dependence upon ecclesiastical authority, that scrupulous
mistrust of his own mental faculties, that pretense of solving problems
by accumulated citations instead of going to the root of the matter,
whereby his philosophical writings are rendered nugatory, may with
probability be traced to the mechanical and interested system of the
Jesuits. He was their pupil for three years, after which he joined his
father in Rome. There he seems to have passed at once into a healthier
atmosphere. Bernardo, though a sound Catholic, was no bigot; and he had
the good sense to choose an able master for his son--'a man of profound
learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of
teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a
gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.'[6] The boy was
lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso,
who had come from Bergamo to profit by the tutor's care.
[Footnote 6: Bernardo's _Letter to Cav. Giangiacopo Tasso_, December 6,
1554.]
The young Tasso's home cannot, however, have been a cheerful one. The
elderly hidalgo sitting up in bed to darn a single pair of hose, the
absent mother pining for her husband and tormented by her savage
brother's avarice, environed the precocious child of ten with sad
presentiments. That melancholy temperament which he inherited from
Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously-haunting
troubles of his parents. And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can
hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such
expressions of ungovernable grief as he openly expressed in the letter
to Amerigo Sanseverino.[7] Is it possible, then, thought Torquato, that
the mother from whose tender kisses and streaming tears I was severed
but one year ago,[8] has died of poison--poisoned by my uncles? Sinking
into the consciousness of a child so sensitive by nature and so early
toned to sadness, this terrible suspicion of a secret death by poison
incorporated itself with the very essence of his melancholy humor, and
lurked within him to flash forth in madness at a future period of life.
That he was well acquainted with the doleful situation of his family is
proved by his first extant letter. Addressed to the noble lady Vittoria
Colonna on behalf of Bernardo and his sister, this is a remarkable
composition for a boy of twelve.[9] His poor father, he says, is on the
point of dying of despair, oppressed by the malignity of fortune and the
rapacity of impious men. His uncle is bent on marrying Cornelia to some
needy gentleman, in order to secure her mother's estate for himself.
'The grief, illustrious lady, of the loss of property is great, but that
of blood is crushing. This poor old man has naught but my sister and
myself; and now that fortune has deprived him of wealth and of the wife
he loved like his own soul, he cannot bear that that man's avarice
should rob him of his beloved daughter, with whom he hoped to end in
rest these last years of his failing age. In Naples we have no friends;
for my father's disaster makes every one shy of us: our relatives are
our enemies. Cornelia is kept in the house of my uncle's kinsman
Giangiacopo Coscia, where no one is allowed to speak to her or give her
letters.'
[Footnote 7: Dated February 13, 1556.]
[Footnote 8: See _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 100, for Tasso's description of
the farewell to his mother, which he remembered deeply, even in later
life.]
[Footnote 9: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 6.]
In the midst of these afflictions, which already tuned the future poet's
utterance to a note of plaintive pathos and ingenuous appeal for aid,
Torquato's studies were continued on a sounder plan and in a healthier
spirit than at Naples. The perennial consolation of his troubled life,
that delight in literature which made him able to anticipate the lines
of Goethe--
That naught belongs to me I know,
Save thoughts that never cease to flow
From founts that cannot perish,
And every fleeting shape of bliss
Which kindly fortune lets me kiss,
Or in my bosom cherish--
now became the source of an inner brightness which not even the
'malignity of fortune,' the 'impiety of men,' the tragedy of his
mother's death, the imprisonment of his sister, and the ever-present
sorrow of his father, 'the poor gentleman fallen into misery and
misfortune through no fault of his own,' could wholly overcloud. The boy
had been accustomed in Naples to the applause of his teachers and
friends. In Rome he began to cherish a presentiment of his own genius. A
'vision splendid' dawned upon his mind; and every step he made in
knowledge and in mastery of language enforced the delightful conviction
that 'I too am a poet.' Nothing in Tasso's character was more tenacious
than the consciousness of his vocation and the kind of self-support he
gained from it. Like the melancholy humor which degenerated into
madness, this sense of his own intellectual dignity assumed extravagant
proportions, passed over into vanity, and encouraged him to indulge
fantastic dreams of greatness. Yet it must be reckoned as a mitigation
of his suffering; and what was solid in it at the period of which I now
am writing, was the certainty of his rare gifts for art.
The Roman residence was broken by Bernardo's journey to Urbino in quest
of the appointment he expected from Duke Guidubaldo. He sent Torquato
with his cousin Cristoforo meanwhile to Bergamo, where the boy enjoyed a
few months of sympathy and freedom. This appears to have been the only
period of his life in which Tasso experienced the wholesome influences
of domesticity. In 1557 his father sent for him to Pesaro, and Tasso
made his first entrance into a Court at the age of thirteen. This event
decided the future of his existence. Urbino was not what it had been in
the time of Duke Federigo, or when Castiglione composed his Mirror of
the Courtier on its model. Yet it retained the old traditions of gentle
living, splendor tempered by polite culture, aristocratic urbanity
refined by arts and letters. The evil days of Spanish manners and
Spanish bigotry, of exhausted revenues and insane taxation, were but
dawning; and the young prince, Francesco Maria, who was destined to
survive his heir and transfer a ruined duchy to the mortmain of the
Church, was now a boy of eight years old. In fact, though the Court of
Urbino labored already under that manifold disease of waste which
drained the marrow of Italian principalities, its atrophy was not
apparent to the eye. It could still boast of magnificent pageants,
trains of noble youths and ladies moving through its stately palaces and
shady villa-gardens, academies of learned men discussing the merits of
Homer and Ariosto and discoursing on the principles of poetry and drama.
Bernardo Tasso read his _Amadigi_ in the evenings to the Duchess. The
days were spent in hunting and athletic exercises; the nights in
masquerades or dances. Love and ambition wore an external garb of
ceremonious beauty; the former draped itself in sonnets, the latter in
rhetorical orations. Torquato, who was assigned as the companion in
sport and study to the heir-apparent, shared in all these pleasures of
the Court. After the melancholy of Rome, his visionary nature expanded
under influences which he idealized with fatal facility. Too young to
penetrate below that glittering surface, flattered by the attention paid
to his personal charm or premature genius, stimulated by the
conversation of politely educated pedants, encouraged in studies for
which he felt a natural aptitude, gratified by the comradeship of the
young prince whose temperament corresponded to his own in gravity, he
conceived that radiant and romantic conception of Courts, as the only
fit places of abode for men of noble birth and eminent abilities, which
no disillusionment in after life was able to obscure. We cannot blame
him for this error, though error it indubitably was. It was one which he
shared with all men of his station at that period, which the poverty of
his estate, the habits of his father, and his own ignorance of home-life
almost forced upon his poet's temperament.
At Urbino Tasso read mathematics under a real master, Federigo
Comandino, and carried on his literary studies with enthusiasm. It was
probably at this time that he acquired the familiar knowledge of Virgil
which so powerfully influenced his style, and that he began to form his
theory of epic as distinguished from romantic poetry. After a residence
of two years he removed to Venice, where his father was engaged in
polishing the _Amadigi_ for publication. Here a new scene of interest
opened out for him; and here he first enjoyed the sweets of literary
fame. Bernardo had been chosen secretary by an Academy, in which men
like Veniero, Molino, Gradenigo, Mocenigo, and Manuzio, the most learned
and the noblest Venetians, met together for discussion. The slim lad of
fifteen was admitted to their sessions, and surprised these elders by
his eloquence and erudition. It is noticeable that at this time he
carefully studied and annotated Dante's _Divine Comedy_, a poem almost
neglected by Italians in the Cinque Cento. It seemed good to his father
now that he should prosecute his studies in earnest, with the view of
choosing a more lucrative profession than that of letters or
Court-service. Bernardo, while finishing the _Amadigi_, which he
dedicated to Philip II., sent his son in 1560 to Padua. He was to become
a lawyer under the guidance of Guido Panciroli. But Tasso, like Ovid,
like Petrarch, like a hundred other poets, felt no inclination for
juristic learning. He freely and frankly abandoned himself to the
metaphysical conclusions which were being then tried between Piccolomini
and Pendasio, the one an Aristotelian dualist, the other a materialist
for whom the soul was not immortal. Without force of mind enough to
penetrate the deepest problems of philosophy, Tasso was quick to
apprehend their bearings. The Paduan school of scepticism, the logomachy
in vogue there, unsettled his religious opinions. He began by
criticising the doubts of others in his light of Jesuit-instilled
belief; next he found a satisfaction for self-esteem in doubting too;
finally he called the mysteries of the Creed in question, and debated
the articles of creation, incarnation, and immortality. Yet he had not
the mental vigor either to cut this Gordian knot, or to untie it by
sound thinking. His erudition confused him; and he mistook the lumber of
miscellaneous reading for philosophy. Then a reaction set in. He
remembered those childish ecstasies before the Eucharist: he recalled
the pictures of a burning hell his Jesuit teachers had painted; he
heard the trumpets of the Day of Judgment, and the sentence 'Go ye
wicked!' On the brink of heresy he trembled and recoiled. The spirit of
the coming age, the spirit of Bruno, was not in him. To all appearances
he had not heard of the Copernican discovery. He wished to remain a true
son of the Church, and was in fact of such stuff as the Catholic Revival
wanted. Yet the memory of these early doubts clung to him, principally,
we may believe, because he had not force to purge them either by severe
science or by vivid faith. Later, when his mind was yielding to
disorder, they returned in the form of torturing scruples and vain
terrors, which his fervent but superficial pietism, his imaginative but
sensuous religion, were unable to efface. Meanwhile, with one part of
his mind devoted to these problems, the larger and the livelier was
occupied with poetry. To law, the _Brod-Studium_ indicated by his
position in the world, he only paid perfunctory attention. The
consequence was that before he had completed two years of residence in
Padua, his first long poem, the _Rinaldo_, saw the light. In another
chapter I mean to discuss the development of Tasso's literary theories
and achievements. It is enough here to say that the applause which
greeted the _Rinaldo_, conquered his father's opposition. Proud of its
success, Bernardo had it printed, and Torquato in the beginning of his
nineteenth year counted among the notable romantic poets of his
country.
At the end of 1563, Tasso received an invitation to transfer himself
from Padua to Bologna. This proposal came from Monsignor Cesi, who had
recently been appointed by Pope Pius IV. to superintend public studies
in that city. The university was being placed on a new footing, and to
secure the presence of a young man already famous seemed desirable. An
exhibition was therefore offered as an inducement; and this Tasso
readily accepted. He spent about two years at Bologna, studying
philosophy and literature, planning his Dialogues on the Art of Poetry,
and making projects for an epic on the history of Godfred. Yet in spite
of public admiration and official favor, things did not go smoothly with
Tasso at Bologna. One main defect of his character, which was a want of
tact, began to manifest itself. He showed Monsignor Cesi that he had a
poor opinion of his literary judgment, came into collision with the
pedants who despised Italian, and finally uttered satiric epigrams in
writing on various members of the university. Other students indulged
their humor in like pasquinades. But those of Tasso were biting, and he
had not contrived to render himself generally popular. His rooms were
ransacked, his papers searched; and finding himself threatened with a
prosecution for libel, he took flight to Modena. No importance can be
attached to this insignificant affair, except in so far as it
illustrates the unlucky aptitude for making enemies by want of _savoir
vivre_ which pursued Tasso through life. His real superiority aroused
jealousy; his frankness wounded the self-love of rivals whom he treated
with a shadow of contempt. As these were unable to compete with him in
eloquence, or to beat him in debate, they soothed their injured feelings
by conspiracy and calumny against him.
In an age of artifice and circumspection, while paying theoretical
homage to its pedantries, and following the fashion of its compliments,
Tasso was nothing if not spontaneous and heedless. This appears in the
style of his letters and prose compositions, which have the air of being
uttered from the heart. The excellences and defects of his poetry,
soaring to the height of song and sinking into frigidity or baldness
when the lyric impulse flags, reveal a similar quality. In conduct this
spontaneity assumed a form of inconsiderate rashness, which brought him
into collision with persons of importance, and rendered universities and
Courts, the sphere of his adoption, perilous to the peace of so
naturally out-spoken and self-engrossed a man. His irritable
sensibilities caused him to suffer intensely from the petty vengeance of
the people he annoyed; while a kind of amiable egotism blinded his eyes
to his own faults, and made him blame fortune for sufferings of which
his indiscretion was the cause.
After leaving Bologna, Tasso became for some months house-guest of his
father's earliest patrons, the Modenese Rangoni. With them he seems to
have composed his Dialogues upon the Art of Poetry. For many years the
learned men of Italy had been contesting the true nature of the Epic.
One party affirmed that the ancients ought to be followed; and that the
rules of Aristotle regarding unity of plot, dignity of style, and
subordination of episodes, should be observed. The other party upheld
the romantic manner of Ariosto, pleading for liberty of fancy, richness
of execution, variety of incident, intricacy of design. Torquato from
his earliest boyhood had heard these points discussed, and had watched
his father's epic, the _Amadigi_, which was in effect a romantic poem
petrified by classical convention, in process of production. Meanwhile
he carefully studied the text of Homer and the Latin epics, examined
Horace and Aristotle, and perused the numerous romances of the Italian
school. Two conclusions were drawn from this preliminary course of
reading: first, that Italy as yet possessed no proper epic; Trissino's
_Italia Liberata_ was too tiresome, the _Orlando Furioso_ too
capricious; secondly, that the _spolia opima_ in this field of art would
be achieved by him who should combine the classic and romantic manners
in a single work, enriching the unity of the antique epic with the
graces of modern romance, choosing a noble and serious subject,
sustaining style at a sublime altitude, but gratifying the prevalent
desire for beauty in variety by the introduction of attractive episodes
and the ornaments of picturesque description. Tasso, in fact, declared
himself an eclectic; and the deep affinity he felt for Virgil, indicated
the lines upon which the Latin language in its romantic or Italian stage
of evolution might be made to yield a second Aeneid adapted to the
requirements of modern taste. He had, indeed, already set before himself
the high ambition of supplying this desideratum. The note of prelude had
been struck in _Rinaldo_; the subject of the _Gerusalemme_ had been
chosen. But the age in which he lived was nothing if not critical and
argumentative. The time had long gone by when Dante's massive cathedral,
Boccaccio's pleasure domes, Boiardo's and Ariosto's palaces of
enchantment, arose as though unbidden and unreasoned from the maker's
brain. It was now impossible to take a step in poetry or art without a
theory; and, what was worse, that theory had to be exposed for
dissertation and discussion. Therefore Tasso, though by genius the most
spontaneous of men, commenced the great work of his life with criticism.
Already acclimatized to courts, coteries, academies, formed in the
school of disputants and pedants, he propounded his _Ars Poetica_ before
establishing it by an example. This was undoubtedly beginning at the
wrong end; he committed himself to principles which he was bound to
illustrate by practice. In the state of thought at that time prevalent
in Italy, burdened as he was with an irresolute and diffident
self-consciousness, Tasso could not deviate from the theory he had
promulgated. How this hampered him, will appear in the sequel, when we
come to notice the discrepancy between his critical and creative
faculties. For the moment, however, the Dialogues on Epic Poetry only
augmented his fame.
Scipione Gonzaga, one of Tasso's firmest and most illustrious friends,
had recently established an Academy at Padua under the name of Gli
Eterei. At his invitation the young poet joined this club in the autumn
of 1564, assumed the title of Il Pentito in allusion to his desertion of
legal studies, and soon became the soul of its society. His dialogues
excited deep and wide-spread interest. After so much wrangling between
classical and romantic champions, he had transferred the contest to new
ground and introduced a fresh principle into the discussion. This
principle was, in effect, that of common sense, good taste and instinct.
Tasso meant to say: there is no vital discord between classical and
romantic art; both have excellences, and it is possible to find defects
in both; pedantic adherence to antique precedent must end in frigid
failure under the present conditions of intellectual culture; yet it
cannot be denied that the cycle of Renaissance poetry was closed by
Ariosto; let us therefore attempt creation in a liberal spirit, trained
by both these influences. He could not, however, when he put this theory
forward in elaborate prose, abstain from propositions, distinctions,
deductions, and conclusions, all of which were discutable, and each of
which his critics and his honor held him bound to follow. In short,
while planning and producing the _Gerusalemme_, he was involved in
controversies on the very essence of his art. These controversies had
been started by himself and he could not do otherwise than maintain the
position he had chosen. His poet's inspiration, his singer's
spontaneity, came thus constantly into collision with his own deliberate
utterances. A perplexed self-scrutiny was the inevitable result, which
pedagogues who were not inspired and could not sing, but who delighted
in minute discussion, took good care to stimulate. The worst, however,
was that he had erected in his own mind a critical standard with which
his genius was not in harmony. The scholar and the poet disagreed in
Tasso; and it must be reckoned one of the drawbacks of his age and
education that the former preceded the latter in development. Something
of the same discord can be traced in contemporary painting, as will be
shown when I come to consider the founders of the Bolognese Academy.
At the end of 1565 Tasso was withdrawn from literary studies and society
in Padua. The Cardinal Luigi d'Este offered him a place in his
household; and since this opened the way to Ferrara and Court-service,
it was readily accepted. It would have been well for Tasso, at this
crisis of his fate, if the line of his beloved Aeneid--
Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum--
that line which warned young Savonarola away from Ferrara, had sounded
in his ears, or met his eyes in some Virgilian _Sortes_. It would have
been well if his father, disillusioned by the _Amadigi's_ ill-success,
and groaning under the galling yoke of servitude to Princes, had
forbidden instead of encouraging this fatal step. He might himself have
listened to the words of old Speroni, painting the Court as he had
learned to know it, a Siren fair to behold and ravishing of song, but
hiding in her secret caves the bones of men devoured, and 'mighty poets
in their misery dead.' He might even have turned the pages of Aretino's
_Dialogo delle Corti_, and have observed how the ruffian who best could
profit by the vices of a Court, refused to bow his neck to servitude in
their corruption. But no man avoids his destiny, because few draw wisdom
from the past and none foresee the future. To Ferrara Tasso went with a
blithe heart. Inclination, the custom of his country, the necessities of
that poet's vocation for which he had abandoned a profession, poverty
and ambition, vanity and the delights of life, combined to lure him to
his ruin.
He found Ferrara far more magnificent than Urbino. Pageants, hunting
parties, theatrical entertainments, assumed fantastic forms of splendor
in this capital, which no other city of Italy, except Florence and
Venice upon rare occasions, rivaled. For a long while past Ferrara had
been the center of a semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which
the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry,
emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique
elements in a specific type of modern romance. This culminated in the
permanent and monumental work began by Boiardo in the morning, and
completed by Ariosto in the meridian of the Renaissance. Within the
circuit of the Court the whole life of the Duchy seemed to concentrate
itself. From the frontier of Venice to the Apennines a tract of fertile
country, yielding all necessaries of life, corn, wine, cattle, game,
fish, in abundance, poured its produce into the palaces and castles of
the Duke. He, like other Princes of his epoch, sucked each province dry
in order to maintain a dazzling show of artificial wealth. The people
were ground down by taxes, monopolies of corn and salt, and sanguinary
game-laws. Brutalized by being forced to serve the pleasures of their
masters, they lived the lives of swine. But why repaint the picture of
Italian decadence, or dwell again upon the fever of that phthisical
consumption? Men like Tasso saw nothing to attract attention in the
rotten state of Ferrara. They were only fascinated by the hectic bloom
and rouged refinement of its Court. And even the least sympathetic
student must confess that the Court at any rate was seductive. A more
cunningly combined medley of polite culture, political astuteness,
urbane learning, sumptuous display, diplomatic love-intrigue and genial
artistic productiveness, never before or since has been exhibited upon a
scale so grandiose within limits so precisely circumscribed, or been
raised to eminence so high from such inadequate foundations of
substantial wealth. Compare Ferrara in the sixteenth with Weimar in the
eighteenth century, and reflect how wonderfully the Italians even at
their last gasp understood the art of exquisite existence!
Alfonso II., who was always vainly trying to bless Ferrara with an heir,
had arranged his second sterile nuptials when Tasso joined the Court in
1565. It was therefore at a moment of more than usual parade of splendor
that the poet entered on the scene of his renown and his misfortune. He
was twenty-one years of age; and twenty-one years had to elapse before
he should quit Ferrara, ruined in physical and mental health,--_quantum
mutatus ab illo_ Torquato! The diffident and handsome stripling, famous
as the author of _Rinaldo_, was welcomed in person with special honors
by the Cardinal, his patron. Of such favors as Court-lacqueys prize,
Tasso from the first had plenty. He did not sit at the common table of
the serving gentlemen, but ate his food apart; and after a short
residence, the Princesses, sisters of the Duke, invited him to share
their meals. The next five years formed the happiest and most tranquil
period of his existence. He continued working at the poem which had then
no name, but which we know as the _Gerusalemme Liberata_. Envies and
jealousies had not arisen to mar the serenity in which he basked. Women
contended for his smiles and sonnets. He repaid their kindness with
somewhat indiscriminate homage and with the verses of occasion which
flowed so easily from his pen. It is difficult to trace the history of
Tasso's loves through the labyrinth of madrigals, odes and sonnets which
belong to this epoch of his life. These compositions bear, indeed, the
mark of a distinguished genius; no one but Tasso could have written them
at that period of Italian literature. Yet they lack individuality of
emotion, specific passion, insight into the profundities of human
feeling. Such shades of difference as we perceive in them, indicate the
rhetorician seeking to set forth his motive, rather than the lover
pouring out his soul. Contrary to the commonly received legend, I am
bound to record my opinion that love played a secondary part in Tasso's
destinies. It is true that we can discern the silhouettes of some
Court-ladies whom he fancied more than others. The first of these was
Laura Peperara, for whom he is supposed to have produced some sixty
compositions. The second was the Princess Leonora d'Este. Tasso's
attachment to her has been so shrouded in mystery, conjecture and
hair-splitting criticism, that none but a very rash man will pronounce
confident judgment as to its real nature. Nearly the same may be said
about his relations to her sister, Lucrezia. He has posed in literary
history as the Rizzio of the one lady and the Chastelard of the other.
Yet he was probably in no position at any moment of his Ferrarese
existence to be more than the familiar friend and most devoted slave of
either. When he joined the Court, Lucrezia was ten and Leonora nine
years his senior. Each of the sisters was highly accomplished, graceful
and of royal carriage. Neither could boast of eminent beauty. Of the
two, Lucrezia possessed the more commanding character. It was she who
left her husband, Francesco Maria della Rovere, because his society
wearied her, and who helped Clement VIII. to ruin her family, when the
Papacy resolved upon the conquest of Ferrara. Leonora's health was
sickly. For this reason she refused marriage, living retired in studies,
acts of charity, religion, and the company of intellectual men.
Something in her won respect and touched the heart at the same moment;
so that the verses in her honor, from whatever pen they flowed, ring
with more than merely ceremonial compliment. The people revered her like
a saint; and in times of difficulty she displayed high courage and the
gifts of one born to govern. From the first entrance of Tasso into
Ferrara, the sisters took him under their protection. He lived with them
on terms of more than courtly intimacy; and for Leonora there is no
doubt that he cherished something like a romantic attachment. This is
proved by the episode of Sofronia and Olindo in the _Gerusalemme_, which
points in carefully constructed innuendoes to his affection. It can
even be conceded that Tasso, who was wont to indulge fantastic visions
of unattainable greatness, may have raised his hopes so high as
sometimes to entertain the possibility of winning her hand. But if he
did dally with such dreams, the realities of his position must in sober
moments have convinced him of their folly. Had not a Duchess of Amalfi
been murdered for contracting a marriage with a gentleman of her
household? And Leonora was a grand-daughter of France; and the cordon of
royalty was being drawn tighter and tighter yearly in the Italy of his
day. That a sympathy of no commonplace kind subsisted between this
delicate and polished princess and her sensitively gifted poet, is
apparent. But it may be doubted whether Tasso had in him the stuff of a
grand passion. Mobile and impressible, he wandered from object to object
without seeking or attaining permanence. He was neither a Dante nor a
Petrarch; and nothing in his _Rime_ reveals solidity of emotion. It may
finally be said that had Leonora returned real love, or had Tasso felt
for her real love, his earnest wish to quit Ferrara when the Court grew
irksome, would be inexplicable. Had their _liaison_ been scandalous, as
some have fancied, his life would not have been worth two hours'
Purchase either in the palace or the prison of Alfonso.
Whatever may be thought of Tasso's love-relations to these sisters--and
the problem is open to all conjectures in the absence of clear
testimony--it is certain that he owed a great deal to their kindness.
The marked favor they extended to him, was worth much at Court: and
their maturer age and wider experience enabled them to give him many
useful hints of conduct. Thus, when he blundered into seeming rivalry
with Pigna (the Duke's secretary, the Cecil of that little state), by
praising Pigna's mistress, Lucrezia Bendidio, in terms of imprudent
warmth, it was Leonora who warned him to appease the great man's anger.
This he did by writing a commentary upon three of Pigna's leaden
Canzoni, which he had the impudence to rank beside the famous three
sisters of Petrarch's Canzoniere. The flattery was swallowed, and the
peril was averted. Yet in this first affair with Pigna we already hear
the grumbling of that tempest which eventually ruined Tasso. So eminent
a poet and so handsome a young man was insupportable among a crowd of
literary mediocrities and middle-aged gallants. Furthermore the
brilliant being, who aroused the jealousies of rhymesters and of lovers,
had one fatal failing--want of tact. In 1568, for example, he set
himself up as a target to all malice by sustaining fifty conclusions in
the Science of Love before the Academy of Ferrara. As he afterwards
confessed, he ran the greatest risks in this adventure; but who, he
said, could take up arms against a lover? Doubtless there were many
lovers present; but none of Tasso's eloquence and skill in argument.
In 1569, Tasso was called to his father's sickbed at Ostiglia on the Po.
He found the old man destitute and dying. There was not money to bury
him decently; and when the funeral rites had been performed by the help
of money-lenders, nothing remained to pay for a monument above his
graven What the Romans called _pietas_ was a strong feature in
Torquato's character. At crises of his life he invariably appealed to
the memory of his parents for counsel and support. When the Delia
Cruscans attacked his own poetry, he answered them with a defense of the
_Amadigi_; and he spent much time and pains in editing the _Floridante_,
which naught but filial feeling could possibly have made him value at
the worth of publication.
In the spring of the next year, Lucrezia d'Este made her inauspicious
match with the Duke of Urbino, Tasso's former playmate. She was a woman
of thirty-four, he a young man of twenty-one. They did not love each
other, had no children, and soon parted with a sense of mutual relief.
In the auturmn Tasso accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d'Este into France,
leaving his MSS. in the charge of Ercole Rondinelli. The document drawn
up for this friend's instructions in case of his death abroad is
interesting. It proves that the _Gerusalemme_, here called _Gottifredo_,
was nearly finished; for Tasso wished the last six cantos and portions
of the first two to be published. He also gave directions for collection
and publication of his lovesonnets and madrigals, but requested
Rondinelli to bury 'the others, whether of love or other matters which
were written in the service of some friend,' in his grave. This last
commission demands comment. That Tasso should have written verses to
oblige a friend, was not only natural but consistent with custom. Light
wares like sonnets could be easily produced by a practiced man of
letters, and the friend might find them valuable in bringing a fair foe
to terms. But why should any one desire to have such verses buried in
his grave? The hypothesis which has been strongly urged by those who
believe in the gravity of Tasso's _liaison_ with Leonora, is that he
used this phrase to indicate love-poems which might compromise his
mistress. We cannot, however, do more than speculate upon the point.
There is nothing to confirm or to refute conjecture in the evidence
before us.
Tasso met with his usual fortunes at the Court of Charles IX. That is to
say, he was petted and caressed, wrote verses, and paid compliments. It
was just two years before the Massacre of S. Bartholomew, and France
presented to the eyes of earnest Catholics the spectacle of truly
horrifying anarchy. Catherine de'Medici inclined to compromise matters
with the Huguenots. The social atmosphere reeked with heresy and
cynicism. In that Italianated Court, public affairs and religious
questions were treated from a purely diplomatic point of view. Not
principle, but practical convenience ruled conduct and opinion. The
large scale on which Machiavellism manifested itself in the discordant
realm of France, the apparent breakdown of Catholicism as a national
institution, struck Tasso with horror. He openly proclaimed his views,
and roundly taxed the government with dereliction of their duty to the
Church. An incurable idealist by temperament, he could not comprehend
the stubborn actualities of politics. A pupil of the Jesuits, he would
not admit that men like Coligny deserved a hearing. An Italian of the
decadence, he found it hard to tolerate the humors of a puissant nation
in a state of civil warfare. But his master, Luigi d'Este, well
understood the practical difficulties which forced the Valois into
compromise, and felt no personal aversion for lucrative transaction with
the heretic. Though a prince of the Church, he had not taken priest's
orders. He kept two objects in view. One was succession to the Duchy of
Ferrara, in case Alfonso should die without heirs.[10]
[Footnote 10: Cardinal Ferdinando de'Medici succeeded in a like position
to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. But Luigi d'Este did not survive his
brother.]
The other was election to the Papacy. In the latter event France, the
natural ally of the Estensi, would be of service to him, and the Valois
monarchs, his cousins, must therefore be supported in their policy.
Tasso had been brought to Paris to look graceful and to write madrigals.
It was inconvenient, it was unseemly, that a man of letters in the
Cardinal's train should utter censures on the Crown, and should profess
more Catholic opinions than his patron. Without the scandal of a public
dismissal, it was therefore contrived that Tasso should return to Italy;
and after this rupture, the suspicious poet regarded Luigi d'Este as his
enemy. During his confinement in S. Anna he even threw the chief blame
of his detention upon the Cardinal.[11]
After spending a short time at Rome in the company of the Cardinals
Ippolito d'Este and Albano, Tasso returned to Ferrara in 1572. Alfonso
offered him a place in his own household with an annual stipend worth
about 88 _l_. of our money. No duties were attached to this post, except
the delivery of a weekly lecture in the university. For the rest, Tasso
was to prosecute his studies, polish his great poem, and augment the
luster of the court by his accomplishments.[12] It was of course
understood that the _Gerusalemme_, when completed, should be dedicated
to the Duke and shed its splendor on the House of Este. Who was happier
than Torquato now? Having recently experienced the discomforts of
uncongenial service, he took his place again upon a firmer footing in
the city of his dreams. The courtiers welcomed him with smiles. He was
once more close to Leonora, basking like Rinaldo in Armida's garden,
with golden prospects of the fame his epic would achieve to lift him
higher in the coming years.
[Footnote 11: See _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 80: to Giacomo Buoncompagno.]
[Footnote 12: 'Egli mi disse, allor che suo mi fece: Tu canta, or che
se' 'n ozio.']
No wonder that the felicity of this moment expanded in a flower of
lyric beauty which surpassed all that Tasso had yet published. He
produced _Aminta_ in the winter of 1572-3. It was acted with
unparalleled applause; for this pastoral drama offered something
ravishingly new, something which interpreted and gave a vocal utterance
to tastes and sentiments that ruled the age. While professing to exalt
the virtues of rusticity, the _Aminta_ was in truth a panegyric of Court
life, and Silvia reflected Leonora in the magic mirror of languidly
luxurious verse. Poetry melted into music. Emotion exhaled itself in
sensuous harmony. The art of the next two centuries, the supreme art of
song, of words subservient to musical expression, had been indicated.
This explains the sudden and extraordinary success of the _Aminta_. It
was nothing less than the discovery of a new realm, the revelation of a
specific faculty which made its author master of the heart of Italy. The
very lack of concentrated passion lent it power. Its suffusion of
emotion in a shimmering atmosphere toned with voluptuous melancholy,
seemed to invite the lutes and viols, the mellow tenors, and the trained
soprano voices of the dawning age of melody. We may here remember that
Palestrina, seven years earlier in Rome, had already given his Mass of
Pope Marcello to the world.
Lucrezia d'Este, now Duchess of Urbino, who was anxious to share the
raptures of _Aminta_, invited Tasso to Pesaro in the summer of 1573,
and took him with her to the mountain villa of Casteldurante. She was an
unhappy wife, just on the point of breaking her irksome bonds of
matrimony. Tasso, if we may credit the deductions which have been drawn
from passages in his letters, had the privilege of consoling the
disappointed woman and of distracting her tedious hours. They roamed
together through the villa gardens, and spent days of quiet in the
recesses of her apartments. He read aloud passages from his unpublished
poem, and composed sonnets in her honor, praising the full-blown beauty
of the rose as lovelier than its budding charm. The duke her husband,
far from resenting this intimacy, heaped favors and substantial gifts
upon his former comrade. He had not, indeed, enough affection for his
wife to be jealous of her. Yet it is indubitable that if he had
suspected her of infidelity the Italian code of honor would have
compelled him to make short work with Tasso.[13]
[Footnote 13: This is how he wrote in his Diary about Lucrezia. 'Finally
the Duke decided upon his marriage with Donna Lucrezia d'Este, which
took place, though little to his taste, for she was old enough to have
been his mother.' 'The Duchess wished to return to Ferrara, where she
subsequently chose to remain, a resolution which gave no annoyance to
her husband; for, as she was unlikely to bring him a family, her absence
mattered little.' 'February 15, 1598. Heard that Madame Lucrezia d'Este,
Duchess of Urbino, my wife, died at Ferrara during the night of the
11th.' (Dennistoun's _Dukes of Urbino_, vol. iii. pp. 127, 146, 156.)
Francesco Maria had been attached in Spain to a lady of unsuitable
condition, and his marriage with Lucrezia was arranged to keep him out
of a _mesalliance_.]
Meanwhile it seemed as though Leonora had been forgotten by her servant.
We possess one letter written to her from Casteldurante on September 3,
1573, in which he encloses a sonnet, disparaging it by comparison with
those which he believes she has been receiving from another poet
(Guarino probably), and saying that, though the verses were written, not
for himself, but 'at the requisition of a poor lover, who, having been
for some while angry with his lady, now is forced to yield and crave for
pardon,' yet he hopes that they 'will effect the purpose he
desires.'[14] Few of Tasso's letters to Leonora have survived. This,
therefore, is a document of much importance; and it is difficult to
resist the conclusion that he was indirectly begging Leonora to forgive
him for some piece of petulance or irritation. At any rate, his position
between the two princesses at this moment was one of delicacy, in which
a less vain and more cautious man than Tasso might have found it hard to
keep his head cool.
[Footnote 14: _Lettere_, vol. i, p. 47. The sonnet begins, 'Sdegno,
debil guerrier.']
Up to the present time his life had been, in spite of poverty and
domestic misfortunes, one almost uninterrupted career of triumph. But
his fiber had been relaxed in the irresponsible luxurious atmosphere of
Courts, and his self-esteem had been inflated by the honors paid to him
as the first poet of his age in Europe. Moreover, he had been
continuously over-worked and over-wrought from childhood onwards. Now,
when he returned to Ferrara with the Duchess of Urbino at the age of
twenty-nine, it remained to be seen whether he could support himself
with stability upon the slippery foundation of princely favor, whether
his health would hold out, and whether he would be able to bring the
publication of his long expected poem to a successful issue.
In 1574 he accompanied Duke Alfonso to Venice, and witnessed the
magnificent reception of Henri III, on his return from Poland. A fever,
contracted during those weeks of pleasure, prevented him from working at
the epic for many months. This is the first sign of any serious failure
in Tasso's health. At the end of August 1574, however, the _Gerusalemme_
was finished, and in the following February he began sending the MS. to
Scipione Gonzaga at Rome. So much depended on its success, that doubts
immediately rose within its author's mind. Will it fulfill the
expectation raised in every Court and literary coterie of Italy? Will it
bear investigation in the light of the Dialogues on Epic Poetry? Will
the Church be satisfied with its morality; the Holy Office with its
doctrine? None of these diffidences assailed Tasso when he flung
_Aminta_ negligently forth and found he had produced a masterpiece. It
would have been well for him if he had turned a deaf ear to the doubting
voice on this occasion also. But he was not of an independent character
to start with; and his life had made him sensitively deferent to
literary opinion. Therefore, in an evil hour, yielding to Gonzaga's
advice, he resolved to submit the _Gerusalemme_ in MS. to four
censors--Il Borga, Flaminio de'Nobili, vulpine Speroni with his
poisoned fang of pedantry, precise Antoniano with his inquisitorial
prudery. They were to pass their several criticisms on the plot,
characters, diction, and ethics of the _Gerusalemme_; Tasso was to
entertain and weigh their arguments, reserving the right of following or
rejecting their advice, but promising to defend his own views. To the
number of this committee he shortly after added three more scholars,
Francesco Piccolomini, Domenico Veniero, and Celio Magno.[15] Not to
have been half maddened by these critics would have proved Tasso more or
less than human. They picked holes in the structure of the epic, in its
episodes, in its theology, in its incidents, in its language, in its
title. One censor required one alteration, and another demanded the
contrary. This man seemed animated by an acrid spite; that veiled his
malice in the flatteries of candid friendship. Antoniano was for cutting
out the love passages: Armida, Sofronia, Erminia, Clorinda, were to
vanish or to be adapted to conventual proprieties. It seemed to him more
than doubtful whether the enchanted forest did not come within the
prohibitions of the Tridentine decrees. As the revision advanced,
matters grew more serious. Antoniano threw out some decided hints of
ecclesiastical displeasure; Tasso, reading between the lines, scented
the style of the Collegium Germanicum.
[Footnote 15: Tasso consulted almost every scholar he could press into
his service. But the official tribunal of correction was limited to the
above named four acting in concert with Scipione Gonzaga.]
Speroni spoke openly of plagiarism--plagiarism from himself
forsooth!--and murmured the terrible words between his teeth, 'Tasso is
mad!' He was in fact driven wild, and told his tormentors that he would
delay the publication of the epic, perhaps for a year, perhaps for his
whole life, so little hope had he of its success.[16] At last he
resolved to compose an allegory to explain and moralize the poem. When
he wrote the _Gerusalemme_ he had no thought of hidden meanings; but
this seemed the only way of preventing it from being dismembered by
hypocrites and pedants.[17] The expedient proved partially successful.
When Antoniano and his friends were bidden to perceive a symbol in the
enchanted wood and other marvels, a symbol in the loves of heroines and
heroes, a symbol even in Armida, they relaxed their wrath. The
_Gerusalemme_ might possibly pass muster now before the Congregation of
the Index. Tasso's correspondence between March 1575 and July 1576 shows
what he suffered at the hands of his revisers, and helps to explain the
series of events which rendered the autumn of that latter year
calamitous for him.[18] There are, indeed, already indications in the
letters of those months that his nerves, enfeebled by the quartan fever
under which he labored, and exasperated by carping or envious criticism,
were overstrung.
[Footnote 16: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 114.]
[Footnote 17: _Ib_. vol. i. p. 192.]
[Footnote 18: Vol. i. pp. 55-215.]
Suspicions began to invade his mind. He complained of headache. His
spirits alternated between depression and hysterical gayety. A dread
lest the Inquisition should refuse the imprimatur to his poem haunted
him. He grew restless, and yearned for change of scene.
The events of 1575, 1576, and 1577 require to be minutely studied: for
upon our interpretation of them must depend the theory which we hold of
Tasso's subsequent misfortunes. It appears that early in the year 1575
he was becoming discontented with Ferrara. A party in the Court, led by
Pigna, did their best to make his life there disagreeable. They were
jealous of the poet's fame, which shone with trebled splendor after the
production of _Aminta_. Tasso's own behavior provoked, if it did not
exactly justify their animosity. He treated men at least his equals in
position with haughtiness, which his irritable temper rendered
insupportable. We have it from his own pen that 'he could not bear to
live in a city where the nobles did not yield him the first place, or at
least admit him to absolute equality'; that 'he expected to be adored by
friends, served by serving-men, caressed by domestics, honored by
masters, celebrated by poets, and pointed out by all.'[19]
[Footnote 19: _Lettere_, vol. iii. p. 41, iv. p. 332.]
He admitted that it was his habit 'to build castles in the air of
honors, favors, gifts and graces, showered on him by emperors and kings
and mighty princes'; that 'the slightest coldness from a patron seemed
to him a tacit act of dismissal, or rather an open act of
violence.'[20] His blood, he argued, placed him on a level with the
aristocracy of Italy; but his poetry lifted him far above the vulgar
herd of noblemen. At the same time, while claiming so much, he
constantly declared himself unfit for any work or office but literary
study, and expressed his opinion that princes ought to be his
tributaries.[21] Though such pretensions may not have been openly
expressed at this period of his life, it cannot be doubted that Tasso's
temper made him an unpleasant comrade in Court-service. His
sensitiveness, as well as the actual slenderness of his fortunes,
exposed him only too obviously to the malevolent tricks and petty
bullyings of rivals. One knows what a boy of that stamp has to suffer at
public schools, and a Court is after all not very different from an
academy.
Such being the temper of his mind, Tasso at this epoch turned his
thoughts to bettering himself, as servants say. His friend Scipione
Gonzaga pointed out that both the Cardinal de'Medici and the Grand Duke
of Tuscany would be glad to welcome him as an ornament of their
households. Tasso nibbled at the bait all through the summer; and in
November, under the pretext of profiting by the Jubilee, he traveled to
Rome. This journey, as he afterwards declared, was the beginning of his
ruin.[22] It was certainly one of the principal steps which led to the
prison of S. Anna.
[Footnote 20: _Lettere_, vol. iii. p. 164, v. p. 6.]
[Footnote 21: _Ib._ vol. iii. pp. 85, 86, 88, 163, iv. pp. 8, 166, v. p.
87.]
[Footnote 22: Letter to Fabio Gonzaga in 1590 (vol. iv. p. 296).]
There were many reasons why Alfonso should resent Tasso's entrance into
other service at this moment. The House of Este had treated him with
uniform kindness. The Cardinal, the duke and the princesses had
severally marked him out by special tokens of esteem. In return they
expected from him the honors of his now immortal epic. That he should
desert them and transfer the dedication of the _Gerusalemme_ to the
Medici, would have been nothing short of an insult; for it was notorious
that the Estensi and the Medici were bitter foes, not only on account of
domestic disagreements and political jealousies, but also because of the
dispute about precedence in their titles which had agitated Italian
society for some time past. In his impatience to leave Ferrara, Tasso
cast prudence to the winds, and entered into negotiations with the
Cardinal de'Medici in Rome. When he traveled northwards at the beginning
of 1576, he betook himself to Florence. What passed between him and the
Grand Duke is not apparent. Yet he seems to have still further
complicated his position by making political disclosures which were
injurious to the Duke of Ferrara. Nor did he gain anything by the offer
of his services and his poem to Francesco de'Medici. In a letter of
February 4, 1576, the Grand Duke wrote that the Florentine visit of that
fellow, 'whether to call him a mad or an amusing and astute spirit, I
hardly know,'[23] had been throughout a ridiculous affair; and that
nothing could be less convenient than his putting the _Gerusalemme_ up
to auction among princes. One year later, he said bluntly that 'he did
not want to have a madman at his Court.'[24] Thus Tasso, like his
father, discovered that a noble poem, the product of his best pains, had
but small substantial value. It might, indeed, be worth something to the
patron who paid a yearly exhibition to its author; but it was not a gem
of such high price as to be wrangled for by dukes who had the cares of
state upon their shoulders. He compromised himself with the Estensi, and
failed to secure a retreat in Florence.
[Footnote 23: _Lettere_, vol. iii. p. viii.]
Meanwhile his enemies at Ferrara were not idle. Pigna had died in the
preceding November. But Antonio Montecatino, who succeeded him as ducal
secretary, proved even a more malicious foe, and poisoned Alfonso's mind
against the unfortunate poet. The two princesses still remained his
faithful friends, until Tasso's own want of tact alienated the
sympathies of Leonora. When he returned in 1576, he found the beautiful
Eleonora Sanvitale, Countess of Scandiano, at Court. Whether he really
fell in love with her at first sight, or pretended to do so in order to
revive Leonora d'Este's affection by jealousy, is uncertain.[25] At any
rate he paid the countess such marked attentions, and wrote for her and
a lady of her suite such splendid poetry, that all Ferrara rang with
this amour. A sonnet in Tasso's handwriting, addressed to Leonora d'Este
and commented by her own pen, which even Guasti, no credulous believer
in the legend of the poet's love, accepts as genuine, may be taken as
affording proof that the princess was deeply wounded by her servant's
conduct.[26]
[Footnote 24: _Lettere_, vol. iii. p. xxx. note 34.]
[Footnote 25: Guarino, in a sonnet, hinted at the second supposition.
See Rosini's _Saggio sugli Amori_, &c. vol. xxxiii. of his edition of
Tasso, p. 51.]
[Footnote 26: _Lettere_, vol. iii. p. xxxi.]
It is obvious that, though Tasso's letters at this period show no signs
of a diseased mind, his conduct began to strike outsiders as insane.
Francesco de'Medici used the plain words _matto_ and _pazzo_. The
courtiers of Ferrara, some in pity, some in derision, muttered 'Madman,'
when he passed. And he spared no pains to prove that he was losing
self-control. In the month of January 1577, he was seized with scruples
of faith, and conceived the notion that he ought to open his mind to the
Holy Office. Accordingly, he appeared before the Inquisitor of Bologna,
who after hearing his confession, bade him be of good cheer, for his
self-accusations were the outcome of a melancholy humor. Tasso was, in
fact, a Catholic molded by Jesuit instruction in his earliest childhood;
and though, like most young students, he had speculated on the
groundwork of theology and metaphysic, there was no taint of heresy or
disobedience to the Church in his nature. The terror of the Inquisition
was a morbid nightmare, first implanted in his mind by the experience of
his father's collision with the Holy Office, enforced by Antoniano's
strictures on his poem, and justified to some extent by the sinister
activity of the institution which had burned a Carnesecchi and a
Paleario. However it grew up, this fancy that he was suspected as a
heretic took firm possession of his brain, and subsequently formed a
main feature of his mental disease. It combined with the suspiciousness
which now became habitual. He thought that secret enemies were in the
habit of forwarding delations against him to Rome.
All through these years (1575-1577) his enemies drew tighter cords
around him. They were led and directed by Montecatino, the omnipotent
persecutor, and hypocritical betrayer. In his heedlessness Tasso left
books and papers loose about his rooms. These, he had good reason to
suppose, were ransacked in his absence. There follows a melancholy tale
of treacherous friends, dishonest servants, false keys, forged
correspondence, scraps and fragments of imprudent compositions pieced
together and brought forth to incriminate him behind his back. These
arts were employed all through the year which followed his return to
Ferrara in 1576. But they reached their climax in the spring of 1577. He
had lost his prestige, and every servant might insult him, and every cur
snap at his heels. Even the _Gerusalemme_, became an object of derision.
It transpired that the revisers, to whom he had confided it, were
picking the poem to pieces; ignoramuses who could not scan a line, went
about parroting their pedantries and strictures. At the beginning of
1576 Tasso had begged Alfonso to give him the post of historiographer
left vacant by Pigna. It was his secret hope that this would be refused,
and that so he would obtain a good excuse for leaving Ferrara.[27] But
the duke granted his request. In the autumn of that year, one of the
band of his tormentors, Maddalo de'Frecci, betrayed some details of his
love-affairs. What these were we do not know. Tasso resented the insult,
and gave the traitor a box on the ears in the courtyard of the castle.
Maddalo and his brothers, after this, attacked Tasso on the piazza, but
ran away before they reached him with their swords. They were outlawed
for the outrage, and the duke of Ferrara, still benignant to his poet,
sent him a kind message by one of his servants. This incident weighed on
Tasso's memory. The terror of the Inquisition blended now with two new
terrors. He conceived that his exiled foes were plotting to poison him.
He wondered whether Maddalo's revelations had reached the duke's ears,
and if so, whether Alfonso would not inflict sudden vengeance. There is
no sufficient reason, however, to surmise that Tasso's conscience was
really burdened with a guilty secret touching Leonora d'Este. On the
contrary, everything points to a different conclusion. His mind was
simply giving way. Just as he conjured up the ghastly specter of the
Inquisition, so he fancied that the duke would murder him. Both the
Inquisition and the duke were formidable; but the Holy Office mildly
told him to set his morbid doubts at rest, and the duke on a subsequent
occasion coldly wrote: 'I know he thinks I want to kill him. But if
indeed I did so, it would be easy enough.' The duke, in fact, had no
sufficient reason and no inclination to tread upon this insect.
[Footnote 27: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 139.]
In June 1577, the crisis came. On the seventeenth evening of the month
Tasso was in the apartments of the Duchess of Urbino. He had just been
declaiming on the subject of his imaginary difficulties with the
Inquisition, when something in the manner of a servant who passed by
aroused his suspicion. He drew a knife upon the man--like Hamlet in his
mother's bedchamber. He was immediately put under arrest, and confined
in a room of the castle. Next day Maffeo Veniero wrote thus to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany about the incident. 'Yesterday Tasso was imprisoned for
having drawn a knife upon a servant in the apartment of the Duchess of
Urbino. The intention has been to stay disorder and to cure him, rather
than to inflict punishment. He suffers under peculiar delusions,
believing himself guilty of heresy and dreading poison; which state of
mind arises, I incline to think, from melancholic blood forced in upon
the heart and vaporing to the brain. A wretched case, in truth,
considering his great parts and his goodness!'[28]
Tasso was soon released, and taken by the duke his villa of Belriguardo.
Probably this excursion was designed to soothe the perturbed spirits of
the poet. But it may also have had a different object. Alfonso may have
judged it prudent to sift the information laid before him by Tasso's
enemies. We do not know what passed between them. Whether moral pressure
was applied, resulting in the disclosure of secrets compromising Leonora
d'Este, cannot now be ascertained; nor is it worth while to discuss the
hypothesis that the Duke, in order to secure his family's honor, imposed
on Tasso the obligation of feigning madness.[29] There is a something
not entirely elucidated, a sediment of mystery in Tasso's fate, after
this visit to Belriguardo, which criticism will not neglect to notice,
but which no testing, no clarifying process of study, has hitherto
explained. All we can rely upon for certain is that Alfonso sent him
back to Ferrara to be treated physically and spiritually for
derangement; and that Tasso thought his life was in danger. He took up
his abode in the Convent of S. Francis, submitted to be purged, and
began writing eloquent letters to his friends and patrons.
[Footnote 28: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 228.]
[Footnote 29: This is Rosini's hypothesis in the Essay cited above. The
whole of his elaborate and ingenious theory rests upon the supposition
that Alfonso at Belriguardo extorted from Tasso an acknowledgment of his
_liaison_ Leonora, and spared his life on the condition of his playing a
fool's part before the world. But we have no evidence whatever adequate
to support the supposition.]
Those which he addressed to the Duke of Ferrara at this crisis, weigh
naturally heaviest in the scale of criticism.[30] They turn upon his
dread of the Inquisition, his fear of poison, and his diplomatic
practice with Florence. While admitting 'faults of grave importance' and
'vacillation in the service of his prince,' he maintains that his secret
foes have exaggerated these offenses, and have succeeded in prejudicing
the magnanimous and clement spirit of Alfonso. He is particularly
anxious about the charge of heresy. Nothing indicates that any guilt of
greater moment weighed upon his conscience.[31] After scrutinizing all
accessible sources of information, we are thus driven to accept the
prosaic hypothesis that Tasso was deranged, and that his Court-rivals
had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity for making the duke
sensible of his insanity.
After the middle of July, the Convent of S. Francis became intolerable
to Tasso. His malady had assumed the form of a multiplex fear, which
never afterwards relaxed its hold on his imagination. The Inquisition,
the duke, the multitude of secret enemies plotting murder, haunted him
day and night like furies. He escaped, and made his way, disguised in a
peasant's costume, avoiding cities, harboring in mountain hamlets, to
Sorrento.
[Footnote 30: _Lettere_, vol. i. 257-262.]
[Footnote 31: Those who adhere to the belief that all Tasso's troubles
came upon him through his _liaison_ with Leonora, are here of course
justified in arguing that on _this_ point he could not write openly to
the Duke. Or they may question the integrity of the document.]
Manos, who wrote the history of Tasso's life in the spirit of a
novelist, has painted for us a romantic picture of the poet in a
shepherd's hut.[32] It recalls Erminia among the pastoral people.
Indeed, the interest of that episode in the _Gerusalemme_ is heightened
by the fact that its ill-starred author tested the reality of his
creation ofttimes in the course of this pathetic pilgrimage. Artists of
the Bolognese Academy have placed Erminia on their canvases. But, up to
the present time, I know of no great painter who has chosen the more
striking incident of Tasso exchanging his Court-dress for sheepskin and
a fustian jacket in the smoky cottage at Velletri.
He reached Sorrento safely--'that most enchanting region, which at all
times offers a delightful sojourn to men and to the Muses; but at the
warm season of the year, when other places are intolerable, affords
peculiar solace in the verdure of its foliage, the shadow of its woods,
the lightness of the fanning airs, the freshness of the limpid waters
flowing from impendent hills, the fertile expanse of tilth, the serene
air, the tranquil sea, the fishes and the birds and savory fruits in
marvelous variety; all which delights compose a garden for the intellect
and senses, planned by Nature in her rarest mood, and perfected by art
with most consummate curiosity.'[33] Into this earthly paradise the
wayworn pilgrim entered.
[Footnote 32: Rosini's edition of Tasso, vol. xxx. p. 144.]
[Footnote 33: Manso, _ib._ p. 46.]
It was his birthplace; and here his sister still dwelt with her
children. Tasso sought Cornelia's home. After a dramatic scene of
suspense, he threw aside his disguise, declared himself to be the poet
of Italy and her brother; and for a short while he seemed to forget
Courts and schools, pedants and princes, in that genial atmosphere.
Why did he ever leave Sorrento? That is the question which leaps to the
lips of a modern free man. The question itself implies imperfect
comprehension of Tasso's century and training. Outside the Court, there
was no place for him. He had been molded for Court-life from childhood.
It was not merely that he had no money; assiduous labor might have
supplied him with means of subsistence. But his friends, his fame, his
habits, his ingrained sense of service, called him back to Ferrara. He
was not simply a man, but that specific sort of man which Italians
called _gentiluomo_--a man definitely modified and wound about with
intricacies of association. Therefore, he soon began a correspondence
with the House of Este. If we may trust Manso, Leonora herself wrote
urgently insisting upon his return.[34] Yet in his own letters Tasso
says that he addressed apologies to the duke and both princesses.
Alfonso and Lucrezia vouchsafed no answer. Leonora replied coldly that
she could not help him.[35]
[Footnote 34: Manso, _ib._ p. 147.]
[Footnote 35: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 275.]
Anyhow, Ferrara drew him back. It is of some importance here to
understand Tasso's own feeling for the duke, his master. A few months
later, after he had once more experienced the miseries of Court-life,
he wrote: 'I trusted in him, not as one hopes in men but as one trusts
in God.... I was inflamed with the affection for my lord more than ever
was man with the love of woman, and became unawares half an idolater....
He it was who from the obscurity of my low fortunes raised me to the
light and reputation of the Court; who relieved me from discomforts, and
placed me in a position of honorable ease; he conferred value on my
compositions by listening to them when I read them, and by every mark of
favor; he deigned to honor me with a seat at his table and with his
familiar conversation; he never refused a favor which I begged for;
lastly, at the commencement of my troubles, he showed me the affection,
not of a master, but of a father and a brother.'[36] These words, though
meant for publication, have the ring of truth in them. Tasso was
actually attached to the House of Este, and cherished a vassal's loyalty
for the duke, in spite of the many efforts which he made to break the
fetters of Ferrara. At a distance, in the isolation and the ennui of a
village, the irksomeness of those chains was forgotten. The poet only
remembered how sweet his happier years at Court had been. The sentiment
of fidelity revived. His sanguine and visionary temperament made him
hope that all might yet be well.
Without receiving direct encouragement from the duke, Tasso accordingly
decided on returning.
[Footnote 36: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 278, ii. p. 26.]
His sister is said to have dissuaded him; and he is reported to have
replied that he was going to place himself in a voluntary prison.[37] He
first went to Rome, and opened negotiations with Alfonso's agents. In
reply to their communications, the duke wrote upon March 22, 1578, as
follows: 'We are content to take Tasso back; but first he must recognize
the fact that he is full of melancholic humors, and that his old notions
of enmities and persecutions are solely caused by the said humors. Among
other signs of his disorder, he has conceived the idea that we want to
compass his death, whereas we have always received him gladly and shown
favor to him. It can easily be understood that if we had entertained
such a fancy, the execution of it would have presented no difficulty.
Therefore let him make his mind up well, before he comes, to submit
quietly and unconditionally to medical treatment. Otherwise, if he means
to scatter hints and words again as he did formerly, we shall not only
give ourselves no further trouble about him, but if he should stay here
without being willing to undergo a course of cure, we shall at once
expel him from our state with the order not to return.'[38] Words could
not be plainer than these. Yet, in spite of them, such was the
allurement of the cage for this clipped singing-bird, that Tasso went
obediently back to Ferrara. Possibly he had not read the letter written
by a greater poet on a similar occasion: 'This is not the way of coming
home, my father! Yet if you or others find one not beneath the fame of
Dante and his honor, that will I pursue with no slack step. But if none
such give entrance to Florence, I will never enter Florence. How! Shall
I not behold the sun and stars from every spot of earth? Shall I not be
free to meditate the sweetest truths in every place beneath the sky
unless I make myself ignoble, nay, ignominious to the people and the
state of Florence? Nor truly will bread fail.' These words, if Tasso had
remembered them, might have made his cheek blush for his own servility
and for the servile age in which he lived. But the truth is that the
fleshpots of Egyptian bondage enticed him; and moreover he knew, as
half-insane people always know, that he required treatment for his
mental infirmities. In his heart of hearts he acknowledged the justice
of the duke's conditions.
[Footnote 37: Manso, p. 147. Here again the believers in the Leonora
_liaison_ may argue that by prison he meant love-bondage, hopeless
servitude to the lady from whom he could expect nothing now that her
brother was acquainted with the truth.]
[Footnote 38: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 233.]
An Epistle or Oration addressed by Tasso to the Duke of Urbino, sets
forth what happened after his return to Ferrara in 1578.[39]
[Footnote 39: _Lettere_, i. pp. 271-290.]
He was aware that Alfonso thought him both malicious and mad. The first
of these opinions, which he knew to be false, he resolved to pass in
silence. But he openly admitted the latter, 'esteeming it no disgrace to
make a third to Solon and Brutus.' Therefore he began to act the madman
even in Rome, neglecting his health, exposing himself to hardships, and
indulging intemperately in food and wine. By these means, strange as it
may seem, he hoped to win back confidence and prove himself a discreet
servant of Alfonso. Soon after reaching Ferrara, Tasso thought that he
was gaining ground. He hints that the duke showed signs of raising him
to such greatness and showering favors upon him so abundant that the
sleeping viper of Court envy stirred. Montecatino now persuaded his
master that prudence and his own dignity indicated a very different line
of treatment. If Tasso was to be great and honored, he must feel that
his reputation flowed wholly from the princely favor, not from his
studies and illustrious works. Alfonso accordingly affected to despise
the poems which Tasso presented, and showed his will that: 'I should
aspire to no eminence of intellect, to no glory of literature, but
should lead a soft delicate and idle life immersed in sloth and
pleasure, escaping like a runaway from the honor of Parnassus, the
Lyceum and the Academy, into the lodgings of Epicurus, and should harbor
in those lodgings in a quarter where neither Virgil nor Catullus nor
Horace nor Lucretius himself had ever stayed.' This excited such
indignation in the poet's breast that: 'I said oftentimes with open face
and free speech that I would rather be a servant of any prince his enemy
than submit to this indignity, and in short _odia verbis aspera movi_.'
Whereupon, the duke caused his papers to be seized, in order that the
still imperfect epic might be prepared for publication by the hated
hypocritical Montecatino. When Tasso complained, he only received
indirect answers; and when he tried to gain access to the princesses, he
was repulsed by their doorkeepers. At last: 'My infinite patience was
exhausted. Leaving my books and writings, after the service of thirteen
years, persisted in with luckless constancy, I wandered forth like a new
Bias, and betook myself to Mantua, where I met with the same treatment
as at Ferrara.'
This account sufficiently betrays the diseased state of Tasso's mind.
Being really deranged, yet still possessed of all his literary
faculties, he affected that his eccentricity was feigned. The duke had
formed a firm opinion of his madness; and he chose to flatter this whim.
Yet when he arrived at Ferrara he forgot the strict conditions upon
which Alfonso sanctioned his return, began to indulge in dreams of
greatness, and refused the life of careless ease which formed part of
the programme for his restoration to health. In these circumstances he
became the laughing-stock of his detractors; and it is not impossible
that Alfonso, convinced of his insanity, treated him like a Court-fool.
Then he burst out into menaces and mutterings of anger. Having made
himself wholly intolerable, his papers were sequestrated, very likely
under the impression that he might destroy them or escape with them into
some quarter where they would be used against the interests of his
patron. Finally he so fatigued everybody by his suspicions and
recriminations that the duke forebore to speak with him, and the
princesses closed their doors against him.
From this moment Tasso was a ruined man; he had become that worst of
social scourges, a courtier with a grievance, a semi-lunatic all the
more dangerous and tiresome because his mental powers were not so much
impaired as warped. Studying his elaborate apology, we do not know
whether to despise the obstinacy of his devotion to the House of Este,
or to respect the sentiment of loyalty which survived all real or
fancied insults. Against the duke he utters no word of blame. Alfonso is
always magnanimous and clement, excellent in mind and body, good and
courteous by nature, deserving the faithful service and warm love of his
dependents. Montecatino is the real villain. 'The princes are not
tyrants--they are not, no, no: he is the tyrant.'[40]
After quitting Ferrara, Tasso wandered through Mantua, Padua, Venice,
coldly received in all these cities; for 'the hearts of men were
hardened by their interests against him.' Writing from Venice to the
Grand Duke in July, Maffeo Veniero says: 'Tasso is here, disturbed in
mind; and though his intellect is certainly not sound, he shows more
signs of affliction than of insanity.'[41]
[Footnote 40: _Lettere_, ibid. p. 289.]
[Footnote 41: _Lettere_, ibid. p. 233.]
The sequestration of his only copy of the _Gerusalemme_ not unnaturally
caused him much distress; and Veniero adds that the chief difficulty
under which he labored was want of money. Veniero hardly understood the
case. Even with a competence it is incredible that Tasso would have been
contented to work quietly at literature in a private position.[42] From
Venice he found his way southward to Urbino, writing one of his
sublimest odes upon the road from Pesaro.[43]
[Footnote 42: Tasso declares his inability to live outside the Court.
'Se fra i mali de l'animo, uno de'piu gravi e l'ambizione, egli ammalo
di questo male gia molti anni sono, ne mai e risanato in modo ch'io
abbia potuto sprezzare affatto i favori e gli onori del mondo, e chi puo
dargli' (_Lettere_, vol. iii. p. 56). 'Io non posso acquetarmi in altra
fortuna di quella ne la quale gia nacqui' (_Ibid._ p. 243).]
[Footnote 43: It is addressed to the Metaurus, and begins: 'O del grand,
Apennino.']
Francesco Maria della Rovere received him with accustomed kindness; but
the spirit of unrest drove him forth again, and after two months we find
him once more, an indigent and homeless pedestrian, upon the banks of
the Sesia. He wanted to reach Vercelli, but the river was in flood, and
he owed a night's lodging to the chance courtesy of a young nobleman.
Among the many picturesque episodes in Tasso's wanderings none is more
idyllically beautiful than the tale of his meeting with this handsome
youth. He has told it himself in the exordium to his Dialogue _Il Padre
di Famiglia_. When asked who he was and whither he was going, he
answered: 'I was born in the realm of Naples, and my mother was a
Neapolitan; but I draw my paternal blood from Bergamo, a Lombard city.
My name and surname I pass in silence: they are so obscure that if I
uttered them, you would know neither more nor less of my condition. I am
flying from the anger of a prince and fortune. My destination is the
state of Savoy.' Upon this pilgrimage Tasso chose the sobriquet of
_Omero Fuggiguerra_. Arriving at Turin, he was refused entrance by the
guardians of the gate. The rags upon his back made them suspect he was a
vagabond infected with the plague. A friend who knew him, Angelo
Ingegneri, happened to pass by, and guaranteed his respectability. Manso
compares the journey of this penniless and haggard fugitive through the
cities of Italy to the meteoric passage of a comet.[44] Wherever he
appeared, he blazed with momentary splendor. Nor was Turin slow to hail
the lustrous apparition. The Marchese Filippo da Este entertained him in
his palace. The Archbishop, Girolamo della Rovere, begged the honor of
his company. The Duke of Savoy, Carlo Emanuele, offered him the same
appointments as he had enjoyed at Ferrara. Nothing, however, would
content his morbid spirit. Flattered and caressed through the months of
October and November he began once more in December to hanker after his
old home. Inconceivable as it may seem, he opened fresh negotiations
with the duke; and Alfonso, on his side, already showed a will to take
him back. Writing to his sister from Pesaro at the end of September,
Tasso stay that a gentleman had been sent from Ferrara expressly to
recall him.[45] The fact seems to be that Tasso was too illustrious to
be neglected by the House of Este. Away from their protection, he was
capable of bringing on their name the slur of bad treatment and
ingratitude. Nor would it have looked well to publish the _Gerusalemme_
with its praises of Alfonso, while the poet was lamenting his hard fate
in every town of Italy. The upshot of these negotiations was that Tasso
resolved on retracing his steps. He reached Ferrara again upon February
21, 1579, two days before Margherita Gonzaga, the duke's new bride, made
her pompous entrance into the city. But his reception was far from being
what he had expected. The duke's heart seemed hardened. Apartments
inferior to his quality were assigned him, and to these he was conducted
by a courtier with ill-disguised insolence. The princesses refused him
access to their lodgings, and his old enemies openly manifested their
derision for the kill-joy and the skeleton who had returned to spoil
their festival. Tasso, querulous as he was about his own share in the
disagreeables of existence, remained wholly unsympathetic to the trials
of his fellow-creatures. Self-engrossment closed him in a magic
prison-house of discontent.
[Footnote 44: _Op. cit._ p. 143.]
[Footnote 45: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 268.]
Therefore when he saw Ferrara full of merry-making guests, and heard
the marriage music ringing through the courtyards of the castle, he
failed to reflect with what a heavy heart the duke might now be entering
upon his third sterile nuptials. Alfonso was childless, brotherless,
with no legitimate heir to defend his duchy from the Church in case of
his decease. The irritable poet forgot how distasteful at such a moment
of forced gayety and hollow parade his reappearance, with the old
complaining murmurs, the old suspicions, the old restless eyes, might be
to the master who had certainly borne much and long with him. He only
felt himself neglected, insulted, outraged:
Questa e la data fede?
Son questi i miei bramati alti ritorni?[46]
Then he burst out into angry words, which he afterwards acknowledged to
have been 'false, mad and rash.'[47] The duke's patience had reached its
utmost limit. Tasso was arrested, and confined in the hospital for mad
folk at S. Anna. This happened in March 1579. He was detained there
until July 19, 1586, a period of seven years and four months.
[Footnote 46: From the sonnet, _Sposa regal_ (_Opere_ vol. iii. p.
218).]
[Footnote 47: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 67.]
No one who has read the foregoing pages will wonder why Tasso was
imprisoned. The marvel is rather that the fact should have roused so
many speculations. Alfonso was an autocratic princeling. His favorite
minister Montecatino fell in one moment from a height of power to
irrecoverable ruin. The famous preacher Panigarola, for whom he
negotiated a Cardinal's hat, lost his esteem by seeking promotion at
another Court, and had to fly Ferrara. His friend, Ercole Contrario, was
strangled in the castle on suspicion of having concealed a murder. Tasso
had been warned repeatedly, repeatedly forgiven; and now when he turned
up again with the same complaints and the same menaces, Alfonso
determined to have done with the nuisance. He would not kill him, but he
would put him out of sight and hearing. If he was guilty, S. Anna would
be punishment enough. If he was mad, it might be hoped that S. Anna
would cure him. To blame the duke for this exercise of authority, is
difficult. Noble as is the poet's calling, and faithful as are the
wounds of a devoted friend and servant, there are limits to princely
patience. It is easier to blame Tasso for the incurable idealism which,
when he was in comfort at Turin, made him pine 'to kiss the hand of his
Highness, and recover some part of his favor on the occasion of his
marriage.'[48]
Three long letters, written by Tasso during the early months of his
imprisonment, discuss the reasons for his arrest.[49] Two of these are
directed to his staunch friend Scipione Gonzaga, the third to Giacomo
Buoncompagno, nephew of Pope Gregory XIII. Partly owing to omissions
made by the editors before publication, and partly perhaps to the
writer's reticence, they throw no very certain light even on his own
opinion.[50] But this much appears tolerably clear. Tasso was half-mad
and altogether irritable. He had used language which could not be
overlooked. The Duke continued to resent his former practice with the
Medici, and disapproved of his perpetual wanderings. The courtiers had
done their utmost to prejudice his mind by calumnies and gossip, raking
up all that seemed injurious to Tasso's reputation in the past acts of
his life and in the looser verses found among his papers. It may also be
conceded that they contrived to cast an unfavorable light upon his
affectionate correspondence with the two princesses. Tasso himself laid
great stress upon his want of absolute loyalty, upon some lascivious
compositions, and lastly upon his supposed heresies. It is not probable
that the duke attached importance to such poetry as Tasso may have
written in the heat of youth; and it is certain that he regarded the
heresies as part of the poet's hallucinations. It is also far more
likely that the Leonora episode passed in his mind for another proof of
mental infirmity than that he judged it seriously. It was quite enough
that Tasso had put himself in the wrong by petulant abuse of his
benefactor and by persistent fretfulness. Moreover, he was plainly
brain-sick. That alone justified Alfonso in his own eyes.
[Footnote 48: _Lettere_, vol. ii. 34.]
[Footnote 49: _Ibid._ pp. 7-62, 80-93.]
[Footnote 50: We are met here as elsewhere in the perplexing problem of
Tasso's misfortunes with the difficulty of having to deal with mutilated
documents. Still the mere fact that Tasso was allowed to correspond
freely with friends and patrons, shows that Alfonso dreaded no
disclosures, and confirms the theory that he only kept Tasso locked up
out of harm's way.]
And brain-sick Tasso was, without a shadow of doubt.[51] It is hardly
needful to recapitulate his terror of the Inquisition, dread of being
poisoned, incapacity for self-control in word and act, and other signs
of incipient disease. During the residence in S. Anna this malady made
progress. He was tormented by spectral voices and apparitions. He
believed himself to be under the influence of magic charms. He was
haunted by a sprite, who stole his books and flung his MSS. about the
room. A good genius, in the form of a handsome youth, appeared and
conversed with him. He lost himself for hours together in abstraction,
talking aloud, staring into vacancy, and expressing surprise that other
people could not see the phantoms which surrounded him. He complained
that his melancholy passed at moments into delirium (which he called
_frenesia_), after which he suffered from loss of memory and
prostration. His own mind became a constant cause of self-torture.
Suspicious of others, he grew to be suspicious of himself. And when he
left S. Anna, these disorders, instead of abating, continued to afflict
him, so that his most enthusiastic admirers were forced to admit that
'he was subject to constitutional melancholy with crises of delirium,
but not to actual insanity.'[52] At first, his infirmity did not
interfere with intellectual production of a high order, though none of
his poetry, after the _Gerusalemme_ was completed in 1574, rose to the
level of his earlier work. But in course of time the artist's faculty
itself was injured, and the creations of his later life are unworthy of
his genius.
[Footnote 51: A letter written by Guarini, the old friend, rival and
constant Court-companion of Tasso at Ferrara, upon the news of his death
in 1595, shows how a man of cold intellect judged his case. 'The death
by which Tasso has now paid his debt to nature, seems to me like the
termination of that death of his in this world which only bore the outer
semblance of life.' See Casella's _Pastor Fido_, p. xxxii. Guarini means
that when Tasso's mind gave way, he had really died in his own higher
self, and that his actual death was a release.]
[Footnote 52: Tasso's own letters after the beginning of 1579, and
Manso's Life (_op. cit._ pp. 156-176), are the authorities for the
symptoms detailed above. Tasso so often alludes to his infirmities that
it is not needful to accumulate citations. I will, however, quote two
striking examples. 'Sono infermo come soleva, e stanco della infermita,
la quale e _non sol malattia del corpo ma de la mente_' (_Lettere_, vol.
iii. p. 160). 'Io sono poco sano e tanto maninconico che _sono riputato
matto da gli altri e da me stesso_' (_Ib._ p. 262).]
The seven years and four months of Tasso's imprisonment may be passed
over briefly. With regard to his so-called dungeon, it is certain that,
after some months spent in a narrow chamber, he obtained an apartment of
several rooms. He was allowed to write and receive as many letters as he
chose. Friends paid him visits, and he went abroad under surveillance in
the city of Ferrara. To extenuate the suffering which a man of his
temper endured in this enforced seclusion would be unjust to Tasso.
There is no doubt that he was most unhappy. But to exaggerate his
discomforts would be unjust to the duke. Even Manso describes 'the
excellent and most convenient lodgings' assigned him in S. Anna,
alludes to the provision for his cure by medicine, and remarks upon the
opposition which he offered to medical treatment. According to this
biographer, his own endeavors to escape necessitated a strict watch upon
his movements.[53] Unless, therefore, we flatly deny the fact of his
derangement, which is supported by a mass of testimony, it may be
doubted whether Tasso was more miserable in S. Anna than he would have
been at large. The subsequent events of his life prove that his release
brought no mitigation of his malady.
[Footnote 53: _Op. cit._ p. 155.]
It was, however, a dreary time. He spent his days in writing letters to
all the princes of Italy, to Naples, to Bergamo, to the Roman Curia,
declaiming on his wretchedness and begging for emancipation. Occasional
poems flowed from his pen. But during this period he devoted his serious
hours mainly to prose composition. The bulk of his Dialogues issued from
S. Anna. On August 7, 1580, Celio Malaspina published a portion of the
_Gerusalemme_ at Venice, under the title of _Il Gottifredo di M.
Torquato Tasso_. In February of the following year, his friend Angelo
Ingegneri gave the whole epic to the world. Within six months from that
date the poem was seven times reissued. This happened without the
sanction or the supervision of the luckless author; and from the sale of
the book he obtained no profit. Leonora d'Este died upon February 10,
1581. A volume of elegies appeared on this occasion; but Tasso's Muse
uttered no sound.[54] He wrote to Panigarola that 'a certain tacit
repugnance of his genius' forced him to be mute.[55] His rival Guarini
undertook a revised edition of his lyrics in 1582. Tasso had to bear
this dubious compliment in silence. All Europe was devouring his poems;
scribes and versifiers were building up their reputation on his fame.
Yet he could do nothing. Embittered by the piracies of publishers,
infuriated by the impertinence of editors, he lay like one forgotten in
that hospital. His celebrity grew daily; but he languished, penniless
and wretched, in confinement which he loathed. The strangest light is
cast upon his state of mind by the efforts which he now made to place
two of his sister's children in Court-service. He even tried to
introduce one of them as a page into the household of Alfonso.
Eventually, Alessandro Sersale was consigned to Odoardo Farnese, and
Antonio to the Duke of Mantua. In 1585 new sources of annoyance rose.
Two members of the Delia Crusca Academy in Florence, Leonardo Salviati
and Bastiano de'Rossi, attacked the _Gerusalemme_. Their malevolence was
aroused by the panegyric written on it by Cammillo Pellegrini, a
Neapolitan, and they exposed it to pedantically quibbling criticism.
Tasso replied in a dignified apology. But he does not seem to have
troubled himself overmuch with this literary warfare, which served
meanwhile to extend the fame of his immortal poem. At this time new
friends gathered round him. Among these the excellent Benedictine,
Angelo Grillo, and the faithful Antonio Costantini demand commemoration
from all who appreciate disinterested devotion to genius in distress. At
length, in July 1586, Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir apparent to the Duchy of
Mantua, obtained Tasso's release. He rode off with this new patron to
Mantua, leaving his effects at S. Anna, and only regretting that he had
not waited on the Duke of Ferrara to kiss his hand as in duty bound.[56]
Thus to the end he remained an incorrigible courtier; or rather shall we
say that, after all his tribulations, he preserved a doglike feeling of
attachment for his master?
[Footnote 54: _Lacrime di diversi poeti volgari_, &c. (Vicenza, 1585).]
[Footnote 55: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 103. The significance of this
message to Panigarola is doubtful. Did Tasso mean that the contrast
between past and present was too bitter? 'Most friendship is feigning,
most loving mere folly.']
[Footnote 56: All the letters written from Mantua abound in references
to this neglect of duty.]
The rest of Tasso's life was an Odyssey of nine years. He seemed at
first contented with Mantua, wrote dialogues, completed the tragedy of
_Torrismondo_ and edited his father's _Floridante_. But when Vincenzo
Gonzaga succeeded to the dukedom, the restless poet felt himself
neglected. His young friend had not leisure to pay him due attention. He
therefore started on a journey to Loreto, which had long been the object
of his pious aspiration. Loreto led to Rome, where Scipione Gonzaga
resided as Patriarch of Jerusalem and Cardinal. Rome suggested Southern
Italy, and Tasso hankered after the recovery of his mother's fortune.
Accordingly he set off in March 1588 for Naples, where he stayed, partly
with the monks of Monte Oliveto, and partly with the Marchese Manso.
Rome saw him again in November; and not long afterwards an agent of the
Duke of Urbino wrote this pitiful report of his condition. 'Every one is
ready to welcome him to hearth and heart; but his humors render him
mistrustful of mankind at large. In the palace of the Cardinal Gonzaga
there are rooms and beds always ready for his use, and men reserved for
his especial service. Yet he runs away and mistrusts even that friendly
lord. In short, it is a sad misfortune that the present age should be
deprived of the greatest genius which has appeared for centuries. What
wise man ever spoke in prose or verse better than this madman?[57] In
the following August, Scipione Gonzaga's servants, unable to endure
Tasso's eccentricities, turned him from their master's house, and he
took refuge in a monastery of the Olivetan monks. Soon afterwards he was
carried to the hospital of the Bergamasques. His misery now was great,
and his health so bad that friends expected a speedy end.[58] Yet the
Cardinal Gonzaga again opened his doors to him in the spring of 1590.
Then the morbid poet turned suspicious, and began to indulge fresh hopes
of fortune in another place. He would again offer himself to the
Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of
Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the
Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: _actum est de eo_.[59]
Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his
dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his
broken health, and another illness made him desire a change of scene.
This time Antonio Costantini offered to attend upon him. They visited
Siena, Bologna and Mantua. At Mantua, Tasso made some halt, and took a
new long poem, the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_, seriously in hand. But the
demon of unrest pursued him, and in November 1591 he was off again with
the Duke of Mantua to Rome. From Rome he went to Naples at the beginning
of the following year, worked at the _Conquistata_, and began his poem
of the _Sette Giornate_.[60] He was always occupied with the vain hope
of recovering a portion of his mother's estate. April saw him once more
upon his way to Rome. Clement VIII. had been elected, and Tasso expected
patronage from the Papal nephews.[61]
[Footnote 57: _Lettere_, vol. iv. p. 147.]
[Footnote 58: _Ibid._ p. 229.]
[Footnote 59: _Lettere_, vol. iv. p. 315.]
[Footnote 60: Yet he now felt that his genius had expired. 'Non posso
piu fare un verso: la vena e secca, e l'ingegno e stanco' (_Lettere_,
vol. v. p. 90).]
[Footnote 61: During the whole period of his Roman residence, Tasso,
like his father in similar circumstances, hankered after ecclesiastical
honors. His letters refer frequently to this ambition. He felt the
parallel between himself and Bernardo Tasso: 'La mia depressa
condizione, e la mia infelicita, quasi ereditaria' (vol. iv. p. 288).]
He was not disappointed. They received him into their houses, and for a
while he sojourned in the Vatican. The year 1593 seems, through their
means, to have been one of comparative peace and prosperity. Early in
the summer of 1594 his health obliged him to seek change of air. He went
for the last time to Naples. The Cardinal of S. Giorgio, one of the
Pope's nephews, recalled him in November to be crowned poet in Rome. His
entrance into the Eternal City was honorable, and Clement granted him a
special audience; but the ceremony of coronation had to be deferred
because of the Cardinal's ill health.
Meanwhile his prospects seemed likely to improve. Clement conferred on
him a pension of one hundred ducats, and the Prince of Avellino, who had
detained his mother's estate, compounded with him for a life-income of
two hundred ducats. This good fortune came in the spring of 1595. But it
came too late; for his death-illness was upon him. On the first of April
he had himself transported to the convent of S. Onofrio, which overlooks
Rome from the Janiculan hill. 'Torrents of rain were falling with a
furious wind, when the carriage of Cardinal Cinzio was seen climbing the
steep ascent. The badness of the weather made the fathers think there
must be some grave cause for this arrival. So the prior and others
hurried to the gate, where Tasso descended with considerable difficulty,
greeting the monks with these words: 'I am come to die among you.''[62]
The last of Tasso's letters, written to Antonio Costantini from S.
Onofrio, has the quiet dignity of one who struggles for the last time
with the frailty of his mortal nature.[63]
'What will my good lord Antonio say when he shall hear of his Tasso's
death? The news, as I incline to think, will not be long in coming; for
I feel that I have reached the end of life, being unable to discover any
remedy for this tedious indisposition which has supervened on the many
others I am used to--like a rapid torrent resistlessly sweeping me away.
The time is past when I should speak of my stubborn fate, to mention not
the world's ingratitude, which, however, has willed to gain the victory
of bearing me to the grave a pauper; the while I kept on thinking that
the glory which, despite of those that like it not, this age will
inherit from my writings, would not have left me wholly without guerdon.
I have had myself carried to this monastery of S. Onofrio; not only
because the air is commended by physicians above that of any other part
of Rome, but also as it were upon this elevated spot and by the
conversation of these devout fathers to commence my conversation in
heaven. Pray God for me; and rest assured that as I have loved and
honored you always in the present life, so will I perform for you in
that other and more real life what appertains not to feigned but to
veritable charity. And to the Divine grace I recommend you and myself.'
[Footnote 62: Manso _op. cit._ p. 215.]
[Footnote 63: This letter proves conclusively that, whatever was the
nature of Tasso's malady, and however it had enfeebled his faculties as
poet, he was in no vulgar sense a lunatic.]
On April 25, Tasso expired at midnight, with the words _In manus tuas,
Domine_, upon his lips. Had Costantini, his sincerest friend, been
there, he might have said like Kent:
O, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.
But Costantini was in Mantua; and this sonnet, which he had written for
his master, remains Tasso's truest epitaph, the pithiest summary of a
life pathetically tragic in its adverse fate--
Friends, this is Tasso, not the sire but son;
For he of human offspring had no heed,
Begetting for himself immortal seed
Of art, style, genius and instruction.
In exile long he lived and utmost need;
In palace, temple, school, he dwelt alone;
He fled, and wandered through wild woods unknown;
On earth, on sea, suffered in thought and deed.
He knocked at death's door; yet he vanquished him
With lofty prose and with undying rhyme;
But fortune not, who laid him where he lies.
Guerdon for singing loves and arms sublime,
And showing truth whose light makes vices dim,
Is one green wreath; yet this the world denies.
The wreath of laurel which the world grudged was placed upon his bier;
and a simple stone, engraved with the words _Hic jacet Torquatus
Tassus_, marked the spot where he was buried.
The foregoing sketch of Tasso's life and character differs in some
points from the prevalent conceptions of the poet. There is a legendary
Tasso, the victim of malevolent persecution by pedants, the mysterious
lover condemned to misery in prison by a tyrannous duke. There is also a
Tasso formed by men of learning upon ingeniously constructed systems;
Rosini's Tasso, condemned to feign madness in punishment for courting
Leonora d'Este with lascivious verses; Capponi's Tasso, punished for
seeking to exchange the service of the House of Este for that of the
House of Medici; a Tasso who was wholly mad; a Tasso who remained
through life the victim of Jesuitical influences. In short, there are as
many Tassos as there are Hamlets. Yet these Tassos of the legend and of
erudition do not reproduce his self-revealed lineaments. Tasso's letters
furnish documents of sufficient extent to make the real man visible,
though something yet remains perhaps not wholly explicable in his
tragedy.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GERUSALEMME LIBERATA.
Problem of Creating Heroic Poetry--The Preface to Tasso's
_Rinaldo_--Subject of _Rinaldo_--Blending of Romantic Motives with
Heroic Style--Imitation of Virgil--Melody and Sentiment--Choice of
Theme for the _Gerusalemme_--It becomes a Romantic Poem after
all--Tancredi the real Hero--Nobility of Tone--Virgilian
Imitation--Borrowings from Dante--Involved Diction--Employment of
Sonorous Polysyllabic Words--Quality of Religious Emotion in this
Poem--Rhetoric--Similes--The Grand Style of Pathos--Verbal
Music--The Chant d'Amour--Armida--Tasso's Favorite Phrase, _Un non
so che_--His Power over Melody and Tender Feeling--Critique of
Tasso's Later Poems--General Survey of his Character.
In a previous portion of this work, I attempted to define the Italian
Romantic Epic, and traced the tale of Orlando from Pulci through Boiardo
and Ariosto to the burlesque of Folengo. There is an element of humor
more or less predominant in the _Morgante Maggiore_, the _Orlando
Innamorato_, and the _Orlando Furioso_. This element might almost be
regarded as inseparable from the species. Yet two circumstances
contributed to alter the character of Italian Romance after the
publication of the _Furioso_. One of these was the unapproachable
perfection of that poem. No one could hope to surpass Ariosto in his own
style, or to give a fresh turn to his humor without passing into broad
burlesque. The romantic poet had therefore to choose between sinking
into parody with Folengo and Aretino, or soaring into the sublimities of
solemn art. Another circumstance was the keen interest aroused in
academic circles by Trissino's unsuccessful epic, and by the discussion
of heroic poetry which it stimulated. The Italian nation was becoming
critical, and this critical spirit lent itself readily to experiments in
hybrid styles of composition which aimed at combining the graces of the
Romantic with the dignity of the Heroic poem. The most meritorious of
these hybrids was Bernardo Tasso's _Amadigi_, a long romance in octave
stanzas, sustained upon a grave tone throughout, and distinguished from
the earlier romantic epics by a more obvious unity of subject. Bernardo
Tasso possessed qualities of genius and temper which suited his proposed
task. Deficient in humor, he had no difficulty in eliminating that
element from the _Amadigi_. Chivalrous sentiment took the place of
irony; scholarly method supplied the want of wayward fancy.
It was just at this point that the young Torquato Tasso made his first
essay in poetry. He had inherited his father's temperament, its want of
humor, its melancholy, its aristocratic sensitiveness. At the age of
seventeen he was already a ripe scholar, versed in the critical
questions which then agitated learned coteries in Italy. The wilding
graces and the freshness of the Romantic Epic, as conceived by Boiardo
and perfected by Ariosto, had forever disappeared. To 'recapture that
first fine careless rapture' was impossible. Contemporary conditions of
society and thought rendered any attempt to do so futile. Italy had
passed into a different stage of culture; and the representative poem of
Tasso's epoch was imperatively forced to assume a different character.
Its type already existed in the _Amadigi_, though Bernardo Tasso had not
the genius to disengage it clearly, or to render it attractive. How
Torquato, while still a student in his teens at Padua, attacked the
problem of narrative poetry, appears distinctly in his preface to
_Rinaldo_. 'I believe,' he says, 'that you, my gentle readers, will not
take it amiss if I have diverged from the path of modern poets, and have
sought to approach the best among the ancients. You shall not, however,
find that I am bound by the precise rules of Aristotle, which often
render those poems irksome which might otherwise have yielded you much
pleasure. I have only followed such of his precepts as do not limit your
delight: for instance, in the frequent use of episodes, making the
characters talk in their own persons, introducing recognitions and
peripeties by necessary or plausible motives, and withdrawing the poet
as far as possible from the narration. I have also endeavored to
construct my poem with unity of interest and action, not, indeed, in any
strict sense, but so that the subordinate portions should be seen to
have their due relation to the whole.' He then proceeds to explain why
he has abandoned the discourses on moral and general topics with which
Ariosto opened his Cantos, and hints that he has taken Virgil, the
'Prince of Poets,' for his model. Thus the Romantic Epic, as conceived
by Tasso, was to break with the tradition of the Cantastorie, who told
the tale in his own person and introduced reflections on its incidents.
It was to aim at unity of subject and to observe classical rules of art,
without, however, sacrificing the charm of variety and those delights
which episodes and marvelous adventures yielded to a modern audience.
The youthful poet begs that his _Rinaldo_ should not be censured on the
one hand by severely Aristotelian critics who exclude pleasure from
their ideal, or on the other by amateurs who regard the _Orlando
Furioso_ as the perfection of poetic art. In a word, he hopes to produce
something midway between the strict heroic epic, which had failed in
Trissino's _Italia Liberata_ through dullness, and the genuine romantic
epic, which in Ariosto's masterpiece diverged too widely from the rules
of classical pure taste. This new species, combining the attractions of
romance with the simplicity of epic poetry, was the gift which Tasso at
the age of eighteen sought to present in his _Rinaldo_ to Italy. The
_Rinaldo_ fulfilled fairly well the conditions propounded by its author.
It had a single hero and a single subject--
Canto i felici affanni, e i primi ardori,
Che giovinetto ancor soffri Rinaldo,
E come il trasse in perigliosi errori
Desir di gloria ed amoroso caldo.
The perilous achievements and the passion of Rinaldo in his youth form
the theme of a poem which is systematically evolved from the first
meeting of the son of Amon with Clarice to their marriage under the
auspices of Malagigi. There are interesting episodes like those of young
Florindo and Olinda, unhappy Clizia and abandoned Floriana. Rinaldo's
combat with Orlando in the Christian camp furnishes an anagnorisis;
while the plot is brought to its conclusion by the peripeteia of
Clarice's jealousy and the accidents which restore her to her lover's
arms. Yet though observant of his own classical rules, Tasso remained in
all essential points beneath the spell of the Romantic Epic. The changes
which he introduced were obvious to none but professional critics. In
warp and woof the _Rinaldo_ is similar to Boiardo's and Ariosto's tale
of chivalry; only the loom is narrower, and the pattern of the web less
intricate. The air of artlessness which lent its charm to Romance in
Italy has disappeared, yielding place to sustained elaboration of
Latinizing style. Otherwise the fabric remains substantially
unaltered--like a Gothic dwelling furnished with Palladian
window-frames. We move in the old familiar sphere of Paladins and
Paynims, knights errant and Oriental damsels, magicians and distressed
maidens. The action is impelled by the same series of marvelous
adventures and felicitous mishaps. There are the same encounters in war
and rivalries in love between Christian and Pagan champions; journeys
through undiscovered lands and over untracked oceans; fantastic
hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive
passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without
helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens
of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the
furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. Rinaldo,
like any other hero of the Renaissance, is agitated by burning thirst
for fame and blind devotion to a woman's beauty. We first behold him
pining in inglorious leisure[64]:--
Poi, ch'oprar non poss'io che di me s'oda
Con mia gloria ed onor novella alcuna,
O cosa, ond' io pregio n'acquisti e loda,
E mia fama rischiari oscura e bruna.