1544-1595.
"Tu che ne vai in Pindo,
Ivi pende mia cetra ad un cipresso,
Salutala in inio nome, e dille poi
Ch' io son dagl' anni e da fortuna oppresso."
"Thou, who to Pindus tak'st thy way,
Where hangs my harp upon the cypress tree,
Salute it in my name, and say,
I am bow'd down with years and misery."
These few lines, which, in the simple and beautiful original, show what
a burthen of thought and power of feeling may be compressed within the
smallest compass that language will allow, were written by Torquato
Tasso, during his second confinement as a lunatic in the hospital of St.
Anne, at Ferrara, by the duke of Alfonso, his patron and his oppressor.
They were written when all Europe was listening to the voice of his
song, but heard not that of his complaint; in the meridian of his glory
as a poet, and in the depth of his humiliation as a man. A spectacle
more deplorable and repulsive could hardly be presented to the eye of
humanity; nor a fame more enviable and attractive be contemplated by
young "spirits of finer mould," to tempt them to hazard all perils of
such suffering for the acquisition of such renown. This fragment--a
specimen of thousands of fancies, no doubt, equally exquisite and
affecting, which were continually passing through the darkened chamber
of his mind, more dreary than the gloom of his prison-house--has been
quoted at the commencement of this memoir, as letting the reader at once
into the whole mystery of the poet's life, by a single flash of his
genius affording a glance at his afflictions. What these were, a long
and melancholy tale must unfold; what their effect was may be painfully
conceived, when we recollect that he was scarcely turned upon _forty_,
at the time that he sends the message to his forlorn harp in the woods
of Pindus, that he is "oppressed with _years_ and ill fortune,"--"dagl'
_anni_ e da fortuna oppresso."
If ever man was born a poet, it might be said so of Tasso; while his
whole manner of life, not less than its remarkable vicissitudes,
exemplified the poetic character, as it has been idealised in our minds
from infancy, by the impressions left upon them, both from fabling
traditions and authentic records, concerning these privileged, but on
the whole (perhaps) unhappy, beings. The price of greatness must be
paid, in labour or suffering, by every man who would distinguish himself
in any way above his fellow-creatures; and the poet (_no_ more, it may
be, though apparently _much_ more, than the prince, the warrior, the
statesman, or the philosopher,) must endure hardships, mental and
personal, in proportion to his enjoyments, and be humbled in the same
degree that he is exalted above the common lot. Among any ten names,
which might be mentioned as having secured an imperishable pre-eminence
beyond the probability of revolution, in the same walk of polite
literature, Tasso's undoubtedly would be one. At what an expense it was
acquired, we proceed to show in a train of events, almost as romantic,
and a thousand times more touching, than any thing in his own
diversified fictions. He was a poet in every thing and at all times,
from infancy (if we may believe his biographers) till he died in extreme
old age (if we measure his life by his own testimony above quoted), in
his fifty-second year! Smiles and tears, rapture and agony, hope and
despondency, a palace and a dungeon, were the alternations frequently
crossing in the course of one who was the companion of princes, the
delight of ladies, the admiration of the world,--an outcast, a wanderer,
clothed in rags and asking bread, or the lonely tenant of a maniac's
cell. Such was he, and such were the changes of his state.
Torquato was the son of Bernardo Tasso, himself a poet of first rank in
his generation, and who has left works, both in prose and verse, to
which posterity is yet willing to give honour; but which suffer more
eclipse by proximity to the surpassing splendour of his son's, than
might have been their lot had he appeared by himself, the single one of
his race, who had proved how hard, and yet how possible, it is to climb
"The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar."
Bernardo was the descendant of an honourable line of ancestors,--one of
whom, nearly two centuries before him, had been a benefactor to the
public, by first introducing the method of epistolary intercourse
through the medium of posts; and, leaving to his children the reputation
which he had acquired in the conduct of these, they became his
successors, not only in establishments for that purpose in their own
country, but some of them in lands beyond the Alps. It is said that
noble alliances were formed by various branches of the Tasso family, in
Spain and in Flanders, while others became sovereign princes in Germany,
that menagerie for potentates of all genera and species, from the
two-headed eagle of Austria to the wren of * * * *. It would be
invidious to set down one out of a hundred who might contend for the
honour of filling up the blank, as the least of the little among the
great. But, whatever were the hereditary glories of a name,--drawn like
a golden chain out of the darkness of the past, and connected, as that
of the obscurest peasant in a civilised country may be presumed to have
been, with all the varieties of rank, all the gradations of intellect,
and all the changes of good and evil fortune,--of all the links which
formed that chain, those of Bernardo and Torquato were and have remained
the most illustrious, though the consecutive or collateral series has
been continued to the present day, when the representatives are still
found at Bergamo.
Bernardo, who was born in 1493, being left an orphan in early youth,
with two dependent sisters to provide for out of a very slender
patrimony, was compelled to quarter himself on the patronage of sundry
princes and prelates, who, according to the fashion of the times--some
from parade, and others from attachment to the noble arts,--loved to
have men of genius and letters in their train. Many of these, indeed,
were kept, not only to adorn their courts and swell their pomp, but were
employed as secretaries and counsellors, as well as occasionally
entrusted with important embassies, which, both in war and peace, were
frequent between the commonwealths and principalities into which Italy
was divided, and by whose conflicting interests, or under the malignant
influence of whose petty intrigues (the rank growth of such a state of
society), it was continually more or less distracted. Bernardo was,
therefore, from the pressure of circumstances, a restless and homeless
man through the principal part of his life, serving the great without
serving himself, for precarious bread; and at once pursuing fortune and
fame, in the vain hope of being at length--and at length--and at length
rewarded for his fidelity to his masters with the former, and leaving an
inheritance of the latter, which should as much exalt his family by
distinction in literature, as others had aggrandised it by the
acquirement of riches and alliances with rank, at home and abroad.
At the age of forty-one, after a youth of liberal study, sanguine
anticipation, and cherished but ill-directed love for a lady of great
beauty and no less celebrity, having been praised by Ariosto--in the
unsuccessful pursuit of which he compensated himself and delighted his
countrymen with the blandishments of poetry,--he was at length appointed
secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno. Him Bernardo
accompanied through many strange vicissitudes of prosperity and
misfortune, in the court and in the battle-field; till, at the end of a
few years, he shared so grievously, yet so magnanimously, in the ruin of
his patron, that, the latter being involved in a conspiracy against the
vice-regal government of Naples, and compelled to flee into France, the
poet followed him thither at the sacrifice of his small estate, and an
income which had just raised him above want. Before this ebbing in the
tide of his affairs, which, "taken at the flood" (had that not been
arrested in its advance), he might reasonably have expected would have
led on to fortune, he had married a lady of Naples, named Portia Rossi,
an heiress in expectance, and of great personal and mental
accomplishments. This was the golden age of Bernardo's life. After the
revelry of fancy and romance which had carried him away during his
former passion, wherein his heart had little share, the love of
affection endeared him to his home, and he felt the transition like one
who exclaims, "How sweet is daylight and fresh air!" after the midnight
splendour of the ball-room, with the dream-like fascinations of music,
dancing, and spectacle, which vanish as effectually as fairy palaces
conjured up in the wilderness, and leave the heart desolate.
While Bernardo was at Naples, he commenced a poem of the romantic class
on the adventures of Amadis de Gaul, or "Amadigi," as the work is
entitled. This he projected upon the regular plan of a fable, having a
beginning, middle, and end; but he was not of sufficient authority to
establish, by his example, a classical form of epic, though his more
successful and more gifted son seems to have borrowed the idea of doing
that from him. When he read the first cantos of this performance, as
originally constructed, he observed, that though the presence chamber of
the court of Salerno was well filled at first with eager and expecting
auditors, before he had done nearly all of them had disappeared. From
this he concluded (not suspecting any deficiency of power in himself),
that the unity of action prescribed by the severer critics was, in its
very nature, not agreeable to nature in art, knowing that he had
punctiliously observed all the rules of the latter. This failure,
enforced by the persuasions of his friends, and the commands of the
prince, induced him to remodel what he had written, and elaborate the
remainder after the precedents of Pulci, Bojardo, and Ariosto. The work
was extended to a hundred cantos, and, when published, was so well
received, that the author had cause to congratulate himself on having
met the public taste and gratified it; but it was the public taste of
the day only, for his poem passed away with the fashion of it, and is
now remembered among "things that were," while the three productions of
his afore-named predecessors still keep their graduated rank of ascent,
and find readers in every age, notwithstanding all the defects and
excesses that may be charged upon them. Bernardo's failed; less,
perhaps, because of its inferiority, than because it did not display the
proportionate superiority which the others had each in turn manifested
over all its respective forerunners.
It was while Bernardo resided at Sorrento, a city in the vicinity of
Naples, where he occupied a palace overlooking the sea, happy in his
home, and prosperous, or rather promising himself prosperity in his
fortune, the prince of Salerno having released him from all burdensome
duties in his service, that his son Torquato, the second of that name
(the first having died young), was born, on the 11th of March, 1544.
Sorrento is here put down as the birth-place of the poet, among other
cities contending for that honour, like those seven
----"that strove for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begg'd his bread."
_Ath. I._ 384.
For of Tasso, in the sequel, a sarcasm as bitter might be recorded. A
daughter, elder than either of the boys, was at this time growing up
under the eyes of their parents. A letter of the father's (previous to
_our_ Torquato's birth) to his sister Afra, who had retired into a
convent, gives a lively glimpse of Bernardo's affectionate and domestic
character.[37] "My young daughter is very beautiful, and affords me
great hopes that she will lead a virtuous and honourable life. My infant
son"--Torquato the first--"is before God our Creator, and prays for your
salvation. My Portia is seven months gone with child; whether a son or a
daughter, it shall be supremely dear to me; only may God, who gives it
me, grant that it may be born with his fear; pray together with the holy
nuns that the Almighty may preserve the mother, who in this world is my
highest joy." It is ludicrous, yet affecting, to observe what little
circumstances are eagerly laid hold upon after death, respecting the
personal history of men who, during their lives, were neglected in their
hardest trials, or oppressed in their helplessness by those who were
bound to protect and foster them. The very hour of Tasso's birth, as
well as the place, has been contested against his own authority: he says
that it was four o'clock in the morning; Serassi, that it was mid-day.
"He ought to have been born at Naples," says Manso, "though he happened
first to appear at Sorrento." It may be settled that he was a native of
Italy rather than of any place where he may first have seen the light,
in a country throughout which he was a stranger and a pilgrim all his
days. Indeed, he ought to have been born on the sea; so little claim, on
the ground of paternal kindness shown to him, had any city in the
peninsula to the glory of his birth.
Scarcely had he been welcomed into the world under auspices so cheering
as those recently mentioned, than the fortunes of his family took an
adverse turn. Bernardo was summoned away from the delightful retirement
of Sorrento, to join his patron in the war which had just broken out
between the emperor Charles V. and Francis I., and in which the prince
brilliantly distinguished himself. Meanwhile, if we are to believe his
nursery traditions, the little Torquato was giving, even from his
cradle, proofs of the spirit that was in him, scarcely less
extraordinary than if, like Hercules, he had strangled serpents, or like
another poet of old, attracted bees to his lips, whether to gather or to
deposit sweetness there we need not stay to enquire. Manso, his latest
and most munificent patron, his first and most encomiastic biographer,
(whose memoir, like Boccaccio's of Dante, reads more like romance than
reality in many passages, and no where more than in this instance,)
says, that the child, even during his first year, gave evidence of the
divinity of his genius. For scarcely had he attained his sixth month,
when, contrary to the usage of children, he began not only to let loose
his tongue (or to prattle _a snodar la lingua_), but even to speak
outright, and that in such a manner that he was never known to lisp (or
clip) his syllables, as all other infants do, but formed his words
complete, and gave them perfect utterance. If this be true, his
marvellous faculty of speech, like the produce of a premature spring,
must have suffered an early blight: for he himself records that, in
speaking, he was little favoured by nature, having an unconquerable
impediment of tongue; whence he preferred to communicate his thoughts
rather in writing than by the audible voice, when he meant to win
attention or produce impression. His own testimony is so far at variance
with the assertion of his friend Manso respecting his early fluency,
that he appeals for confirmation of the fact that he is a stammerer
(probably to no very inconvenient degree) to some of his correspondents.
But we are told, on the same authority, that the infant was equally
precocious in the faculties of the mind; that he could reason, explain
his thoughts, and answer questions with surprising intelligence.
Moreover, to crown the climax, it is said that he seldom cried, and
never laughed; the only exception, it may be presumed, of a healthy
child since the world began; but that he was grave, dignified, and sage,
and announced by his behaviour that he was destined for some great
design.
On the return of Bernardo from the army, he enjoyed a brief prolongation
of his domestic quiet at Sorrento, during which all that a romantic
father and a passionately tender mother could do to awaken, cherish, and
confirm the early intimations of transcendent intellect in their darling
son, was employed; and such discipline, by its natural effect, no doubt,
coloured and characterised their son's mind, in the sequel, to the end
of life. In one of Bernardo's letters to Portia, during his late
absence, he says, that, while he leaves to her the delicate task to
adorn their daughter Cornelia with every virtue and accomplishment which
becomes a maiden, he intends himself to train up their young Torquato
for his more arduous station in society, when he should be of proper
age. This purpose was never realised.
In 1552, the prince of Salerno and his adherents being declared rebels,
Bernardo, as one of the most attached of his friends, was included in
the proscription: his estate was confiscated, and an income of 900 scudi
lost; leaving him utterly destitute of resources, with the exception of
a few valuable trinkets, and the hope of some time recovering his wife's
dowry--a hope which outlived himself, and which he bequeathed as a
perpetual plague of expectation and disappointment to his son, who, as
will be seen, obtained a decree to have it, against his mother's
brothers, nearly at his own last hour. Bernardo being thus driven into
exile, his wife remained with the children at Naples, in very narrow
circumstances, though amongst wealthy relatives, who seem always to have
treated her and her offspring with unnatural hard-heartedness. Torquato,
meanwhile, under her superintendence, was making progress in the general
rudiments of knowledge; but especially in the acquisition of languages,
in rhetoric, and in poetry, proportioned to the promise of his earlier
years. His principal tutor was one Angeluzzo, at a college of the
Jesuits, recently established in that city. So eager and intent was he
in quest of knowledge (such as lay within his reach), that his mother,
so far from having to urge or bribe him onward, was obliged, for his
health's sake, to restrain him. Early and late he was at his books; and
on the winter's mornings he was sent from his home to the school with a
lantern and servant to conduct him. At seven years of age he was already
a considerable proficient in the Greek and Latin tongues, and had begun
to exercise himself in oral eloquence and written composition; but no
genuine specimens of either of these have been preserved.
The following beautiful and touching lines, in which he alludes to the
worst period of his life,--his separation from his mother, when called
away from Naples to join his father at Rome,--have been absurdly
attributed to him as actually penned at this date. Hoole, and even Hunt,
two of his modern translators, have fallen into this error; whereas a
moment's consideration would convince any man, who understood the
difference between adult poetry and puerile attempts at rhyming, that
such verses, at such an age, (nine years!) would have been sufficiently
remarkable to justify belief in the fables of his babyhood, when he sat
talking pretty unbroken Italian on his mother's knee, before he was
twelve months old.
The passage occurs in a figurative canzonet on the river Metauso, but
addressed to the duke of Urbino, imploring refuge and protection in his
adversity. Though left unfinished, the fragment is acknowledged to be
one of the most exquisitely wrought of all the author's lyrics:--
"Me dal sen della madre empia Fortuna
Pargoletto divelse: ah! di que' baci,
Ch' ella bagnò di lagrime dolenti,
Con sospir mi rimembra, e degli ardenti
Preghi, che sen portar l' aure fugaci,
Ch' io giunger non dovea più volto à volto
Fra quelle braccia accolto
Con nodi così stretti, e sì tenaci.
Lasso! e seguii con mal sicure piante,
Qual Ascanio, o Cammilla, il padre errante."
"Me, from a tender mother's breast,
Stern Fortune, while an infant, tore;
Ah! I remember how she press'd.
Press'd me, and kiss'd me, o'er and o'er,
Bathed with her tears, with doleful sighs,
Breathed for me many a fervent prayer,
Which, ere it reach'd the skies,
Was scatter'd by the passing air.
"For I was nevermore to meet
That parent face to face,
Clasp'd in her clear embrace,
With folds so strait, so binding and so sweet.
Alas! 't was mine thenceforth to roam
With ill-supporting feet,
And, like Ascanius o'er the trackless floods,
Or young Camilla, cast on wilds and woods,
Follow a wandering father without home."
These lines--breathing forth such grateful recollections of maternal
tenderness, watching, weeping, praying, over a most beloved and
affectionate child, from whom she was parting for ever, and who was
destined to be far greater than even she, in her fondest entrancement,
could have hoped--remind us of our own Cowper's filial reminiscences, in
"words that weep," translating "tears that speak," on receiving, at a
more distant period of a suffering life, his mother's picture: at sight
of which, for a while, he lived over again, with a thousand times more
intense delight, the scenes of infancy, renewed, like a vision of
pre-existence in some happier state than that which had intervened since
he had borne the burthen and heat of a long day of life consumed in
anguish of spirit, for which, on this side of the grave, he found no
solace, and beyond it, no hope for his bewildered mind; dark as Egypt
under the ninth plague in that quarter, though, in every other, light as
the land of Goshen. Between Tasso and Cowper there were many traits of
sad as well as noble resemblance--kindred genius, a kindred malady, and
kindred misfortunes; but not kindred alleviations: the advantage here
was on our countryman's side; but his disease lay deeper than that of
the former, and the symptoms, if not so violent after the first terrible
attack, were more inveterate; so that, contemplating the fate of the
glorious Italian under eclipse, and pitying him with a sympathy which no
man living but himself could feel, Cowper might have drawn the same
comparison between Tasso's case and his own, as he has done in those
heart-wringing verses (the last which he is recorded to have composed)
under the title of "The Castaway." These were founded upon a
circumstance mentioned in Anson's Voyage, of a sailor who fell overboard
in a storm, when the ship could not be stayed to rescue him, but who
followed in its wake, crying after it, and being heard by his
companions, while he
----"lived an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried 'adieu.'"
* * * *
"At length he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank."