"Misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.
* * * *
No voice divine the storm allay'd,
No light propitious shone,
When snatch'd from all effectual aid,
_We_ perish'd, _each alone_;
_But I beneath a rougher sea_,
_And 'whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he._"
Both of Tasso's parents had early and deeply impressed upon his mind and
his affections veneration and love to God. In his tenth year the Jesuit
fathers, following up the religious instructions of this child of
promise according to their views of the Gospel, admitted him to the
sacrament; on which occasion, though he acknowledges, in one of his
epistles, that he could not enter into the mystery of "the real
presence," according to the Roman interpretation of the true and simple
scripture doctrine of "the _communion_ of the body and the blood of
Christ," yet, impressed with awe by the pomp of the spectacle, and
elevated almost to transport by sympathy of devotion with the
surrounding multitude, he received the symbol, according to his own
ingenuous account, with "a certain indescribable and unwonted
satisfaction." This circumstance deserves particular mention, because,
assuredly, by such a course of domestic and school discipline the boy
was trained up in what he understood to be genuine piety, and of which,
through after life, he became a zealous professor, however lax on some
other subjects his writings, and even his actions, may have been. In the
latter respect, however, he was countenanced by the licentious manners
of the age, and especially of that class of society, refined and exalted
as it was, in which his lot was cast, but in which he was rather
entertained as a guest than recognised as a member of the privileged
order. His father, in one of his letters to his mother, says, "It is of
the utmost importance to impress, with all your influence and authority,
upon the infantine mind the name, the love, and the fear of God, that
the child may learn to love and honour Him from whom he has received,
not life only, but all the benefits and mercies of providence and grace,
which can render man happy in this world, and blessed in that which is
to come." In the same letter he says, "I condemn those who beat their
children, not less than if they should dare to lay hands on the image of
God."
It was after the expatriated party to whom Bernardo belonged had planned
an attack upon Naples, by the combined fleets of France and Turkey,
which miscarried in a miserable piratical descent upon the neighbouring
coast, and a disgraceful re-embarkment, that Portia and her daughter
were received into a convent, and Torquato was sent to his father at
Rome; who, an exile, on a bed of sickness, and in deep poverty, was
solacing himself, amidst his misfortunes, with preparing a volume of his
Rime for the press, and unweariedly labouring to complete his _Amadigi._
In "the eternal city," young Tasso prosecuted his studies with
indefatigable assiduity, and having for companion a cousin of his own
name, Christofero Tasso, a lad of indolent habits and slow capacity. He,
by his example and influence, for a while happily stimulated the latter
to become a worthy competitor of himself; but he soon growing tired in
the course, Torquato left him, and every rival beside, far behind in
every learned and liberal accomplishment.
In 1556 Portia died, at Naples, never having seen her husband since his
original proscription. Her illness was so brief and so violent, that
Bernardo doubted whether it was poison or a broken heart that had cut
her off in the prime of her years,--most of which, however, had been so
melancholy, since her happiness first seemed consummated by her union
with the man of her choice, and in the children of their love, that
there needed no auxiliary, in this instance, for Nature to do her work
in the shape of death. Meanwhile Bernardo, not being permitted to return
to Naples, was compelled, by the stress of hard circumstances, to leave
his daughter in the hands of those whom he had but too much reason to
call her enemies, though the nearest of kin to her deceased mother.
These--probably from motives of rapacity, though political rancour may
have added its malignity to the cold venom of avarice--instituted a
process against young Torquato, to disinherit him, under a pretence
which a fiend incarnate (had such a wanderer from the abyss of lost
spirits been permitted to darken the earth with his shadow) might have
blushed to advance in a court of justice,--that, having followed his
miserable parent to Rome, the boy (at ten years of age!) had made
himself partaker of his father's imputed treason, and thereby
righteously exposed himself to the same penalties of exile and
confiscation. The issue of this iniquitous proceeding does not appear,
except it may be gathered from the fact, that the uncles contrived to
withhold Torquato's portion of his mother's dowry from him till the last
year of his life: and, further to secure the control, at least, of the
property by themselves, they married her daughter Cornelia, who, at
fifteen years, had grown up into a beauty, to a gentleman of Sorrento,
of narrow fortune, but honourable birth, in spite of the protestations
of her father, whose ambition had destined her for a higher and more
wealthy alliance; his hopes and his plans being even a day's march
beyond his power of overtaking them by performance. There is extant a
letter written on this occasion by Torquato (probably at the dictation
of his father) to Signora Vittoria Colonna, in which the lad bitterly
complains against the cruelty of his uncles in forcing this match upon
his sister; and implores her interference to prevent the entailment of
poverty and disgrace upon the young Cornelia, by such a sacrifice of her
person and property to the mercenary views of her relatives. "It is
hard," says the reputed writer, "to lose one's fortune; but the
degradation of blood is much harder to bear. My poor old father has only
us two; and, since fortune has robbed him of his property, and of a wife
whom he loved as his own soul, suffer not rapacity to deprive him of his
beloved daughter, in whose bosom he hoped to finish tranquilly the few
last years of his old age. We have no friends at Naples; our relations
are our enemies, and, on account of the circumstances of my father's
situation, every one fears to take us by the hand." These stern but
tender sentiments, wrung in the agony of heart-sickness from the father,
were written, not only by the hand of the son upon the paper of the
epistle, but on his own heart, and became identified with his personal
feelings through life. Though he never suffered the escutcheon of his
family to be blemished by a humbling connection, yet he paid dearly,
both in his affections and in his pride, to preserve it; and, if the
tradition of his love for a princess of the house of Este be founded in
truth, he must have felt that he was himself, in that case, playing the
part of "some poor gentleman," whose alliance would be a degradation of
the most ancient blood of Italy. Both the father and the son, in the
sequel, were reconciled--first for Cornelia's sake, and afterwards for
his own--to her husband; who proved a worthy and kind consort, with whom
she lived happily, though not long, and by whom she had several
children.
In a letter addressed by Bernardo to his daughter, while she was yet a
girl, occurs the following affecting day-dreams of the comforts of old
age which he hoped to realise in her filial attentions. After exhorting
her to mind her lessons, and promising in due time to provide a husband
worthy of her, with whom she should live near himself, he thus fondly
adverts to that closing scene of a troubled life, to which many a
sufferer like him, to the last moment, looked on as a forlorn
hope--forlorn, yet inexpressibly soothing, and cherished even in the
heart of despair:--"Sweet and tranquil to me will be old age, when I
shall see (as I hope it may be the will of God) myself perpetuated in
your little ones, with my very features impictured on their
countenances. Death will then appear to me less terrible, when,
beholding you in honour and in peace, enjoying the love of your husband,
and the delights derived from the affections of your children, you shall
close with pale hands these eyes of mine. And surely it is due to a dear
father to receive the last kisses, the last tears, and every other pious
and tender office, from a dutiful and loving daughter."
Fresh commotions in Italy rendering Rome an unsafe sojourn for the
homeless Bernardo, he removed his son and his nephew to Bergamo, and
fled himself to Ravenna, with two shirts and his _Amadigi_ yet
uncompleted; as destitute as his contemporary Camoëns, when he escaped
from shipwreck with his _Lusiad_ in one hand, and with the other
buffeting the waves--thus saving at once his life and his immortality!
On as troubled a sea, by land, as any breadth of water between Lisbon
and Canton, not excepting that round the Cape of Storms, Bernardo was
tossed to and fro throughout Italy; and continued to the last as poor,
yet as sanguine, as the only genius that Portugal had hitherto produced,
and proved itself unworthy to give birth to another by its neglect, if
not its ingratitude and inhumanity, to that one. But here a gleam of
sunshine broke upon Bernardo, amidst the darkness of his flight from
Rome. The duke of Urbino invited him to Pesaro, and afforded him a
welcome but temporary asylum there from the persecution of his enemies,
and the pressure of indigence--a retreat, indeed, which he himself
acknowledged was such as might give inspiration to any poet, and where
lie, himself, in quiet and amidst that comfort to which he had lately
been a stranger, might complete his long poem.
Torquato for a little time was pleasantly situated at Bergamo, in the
family of his cousin and fellow-student, where, being a boy of
exceedingly prepossessing appearance, amiable disposition, and
manifestly brilliant talents, he was much noticed and even caressed by
many of the principal persons in the neighbourhood. Bernardo, however,
anxious to have him under his own eye and direction, soon reclaimed him.
At Pesaro, Torquato, as might be expected, won attention from the whole
circle of his father's acquaintance; and the duke d'Urbino himself was
so delighted with his graceful modesty and rare accomplishments, that he
introduced him to his own son as a suitable companion in his studies and
his pleasures. The young noble of fortune at once became attached to the
young noble of genius, and a friendship, so natural to kindred minds
early associated--the dawn of affection preceding the day-star of
passion in the order of Providence--speedily sprang up, and amidst all
the splendour of station which through life distinguished the one, and
the sufferings by adversity which were the subsequent lot of the other,
was never forsworn or forgotten by either. And well was the lustre, so
transiently shed by the prince, in the court of his father, upon the
humble son of the exile there, imperishably reflected upon himself, in
after years, even from the dungeons of Ferrara, by the glory of the
author of "Gerusalemme Liberata."
Bernardo having at length put the finishing stroke to his _Amadigi_,
looked to the munificence of the king of France and the prince of
Salerno for the means of printing it. In these reliances he was
disappointed; and it appears that his patron, the prince, was himself so
impoverished, that the pension to the poet of 300 crowns (a poor
compensation for all his services and sacrifices) was about this time
withdrawn. So utterly perished were Bernardo's resources, in this
extremity, that, according to his own lamentable statement, had it not
been for the bounty of the duke d'Urbino, he must have been almost
reduced to the necessity of begging bread for himself and his son. The
duke liberally supplied him, not with bread only for himself and his
son, but presented him with 300 ducats, to which were added a hundred
gold crowns by the cardinal de Tournon. Hereupon he repaired to Venice,
to publish his work. Being received with great respect by the literary
characters of that city, then eminent for noble arts as well as
victorious arms and prosperous commerce, he was adopted by them, and
made secretary to their academy. To this office was annexed a salary so
considerable, that, with his wonted improvidence, he immediately
established himself in a handsome house, sumptuously furnished, and
adorned with what seems to have been his delight, rich tapestry, the
poetry of the needle and the shuttle, and which at best is but to
painting what painting itself sometimes is to nature — a copy
reminding the spectator of an original, of which one of the greatest
merits of the imitation is the difficulty overcome in achieving it.
Bernardo's vicissitudes would present a touching but melancholy contrast
to those of Gil Blas of Santillane, if written in a style of seriousness
and sympathy with what is most sacred in suffering, and trying in hope
deferred, equal to the pungent humour and heartless indifference to what
is "virtuosest, discreetest, best," in the characteristic adventures of
that gay footman of fortune. But such transitions as both Bernardo and
Torquato experienced, strange as they seem to us, were events of common
occurrence, arising out of the state of society in the petty
principalities and commonwealths of Italy in the middle ages, and long
after the revival of learning, when those who followed the profession of
letters were too often dependent for the means of subsistence upon the
precarious patronage of haughty nobles and ostentatious ecclesiastics.
The part which Torquato had to bear in the diversities of circumstance,
scene, and company, into which he was thrown with his parent, was too
well calculated to cherish and confirm all his natural aspirings; while
those patrician sentiments, which had been instilled into him from his
cradle, amidst poverty, ignominy, and all the wretchedness of ephemeral
favour, ever sustained in him a lofty self-esteem, on the ground of
honourable birth, the consciousness of innate genius, and the pride of
acquired learning, to which had been carefully added those gentlemanly
accomplishments which rendered him a fit companion for people of the
highest rank in an age of extraordinary display of personal conduct and
ceremonial bearing. Tasso, in addition to his peculiar advantages,
excelled in all these conventional ones, except in self-control--that
especially which degenerates into servility--for (though the most
exquisite flatterer in the world, as thousands of panegyrical verses
prove him to have been) he never learned the meaner, but more
profitable, art of being a court-minion.
While he was thus pursuing his studies with in defatigable application,
he was not less diligent in cultivating those talents, which had given
such extraordinary signs of power within him. It is stated that while,
for the latter purpose, he was reading with intense devotion the poets
both of old Italy and new, as well as the relics of the nobler bards of
ancient Greece, like most of his countrymen, (perhaps, from secret
nationality of feeling,) he preferred the Latins to these, and among the
Latins Virgil beyond every other bore the palm in his youthful
imagination. In fact he grew so enamoured of the graces and excellences
of the Æneid, that his own epic became just such a work as, it might be
presumed, Virgil himself would have composed in the same age, and under
the same influences, as Tasso lived; while, on the other hand, had their
births been exchanged, Tasso might have been the glory of the court of
Augustus, and flourished then in splendour amidst the greatest and most
intellectual society of men of talents that were ever contemporary,
instead of being an almoner, an exile, a prisoner, beholden for food and
raiment, in his best estate, to the bounty--or rather to the
parsimony--of "the Great Vulgar" of Italy in the sixteenth century,
whose names are more illustrious from having been connected with his,
than for any record of themselves or their ancestors, which could render
their families illustrious beyond the little boundaries of their
domains. This supposition, in reference to Virgil and Tasso, may be
deemed impertinent; hazardous it certainly is, and once would have been
deemed heretical by the idolaters of the Roman poet. Though this is not
precisely the place, yet, in a discursive memoir like the present, it
may be allowable, to remark upon a line of Boileau, which has done more
injury to the reputation of Tasso than all the splenetic criticisms of
Sperone, and the verbal persecutions of the Della Cruscans. Ridiculing
the bad taste of certain personages who haunt courts, and from their
rank and assurance are permitted to judge as foolishly as they please of
the merits of authors with impunity, he says (and in a note gives a
special instance of such aristocratic wrong-headness[38]) that these
will prefer "_à Malherbe, Théophile_," "Théophile to Malherbe,"--
"Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile:"
"And Tasso's tinsel to all Virgil's gold."
This flippant antithesis, which, from its sparkling ambiguity, might
itself be quoted as a specimen of sheer "tinsel" (_clinquant_), amounts
to no more than that there are "fools," as the satirist calls them, who
prefer what is _false_ in Tasso to what is _true_ in Virgil; but that
the whole, the half, or even a tenth of the "Gerusalemme Liberata," of
which he himself speaks elsewhere with sufficient commendation, is
composed of "_clinquant_," without a greatly overbalancing weight of
gold even in its worst parts, he has not dared to affirm, though by a
pitiful insinuation, not less unworthy of the author than unjust to the
object, he has had the left-handed luck to fix a stigma to that effect
upon the fair fame of one, in comparison with whose magnificent
creations of thought his own finely elaborated productions are but as
"French wire" to "solid bullion." The feeble confirmation of Boileau's
equivocal sentence, by the elegant but prejudiced Addison, is of little
weight. The critic, who, in tracing Milton's obligations to some of his
great forerunners, acknowledges that among these he might have included
Tasso, but that he does not deem him "a sufficient voucher," could be
but very imperfectly acquainted with the authority which he affected to
disparage, but which the poet of "Paradise Lost" held in very different
estimation. Try Boileau, when he attempts a strain of heroics, as in the
"Ode on the taking of Namur," or Addison, in his celebrated "Campaign,"
by any page that may be first opened in all Tasso's multifarious
compositions in verse, and the "white plume" on the crest of Louis XIV.,
which the court poet mistook for a star, and the destroying "angel,"
which the court critics of queen Anne's reign hailed as descending from
"the highest heaven of invention," and the feather metamorphosis, in the
first instance, will be pronounced a puerile and pedantic conceit; and
the "angel," in the second, a piece of commonplace machinery, which
scarcely escapes the charge of profaneness in its main attribute.
Marlborough, a mortal man, burning to avenge his country's wrongs, may
well be imagined as slaughtering, with terrible delight, the thousands
and tens of thousands of her enemies; but that an angel should be
"pleased" (as the cold and heartless phrase is) in executing judgments
upon unresisting victims of divine wrath (righteous as the vengeance may
be) is utterly inconceivable; nor can the poet shelter himself under the
doubtful interpretation of the context,--
"Pleased _the Almighty's orders to perform_,
Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm,"--
because the first, last, and only impression upon the reader's mind will
be, that the destroyer is "pleased" with the _destruction_, though the
Almighty himself declares that "_He_ hath no pleasure in the death of
the wicked." Both these passages might have escaped carping criticism;
but, when Boileau and Addison mislead the public to believe that Tasso's
writings are "all tinsel," it is fair to show that their own are not
"all gold."[39]
Torquato's mind now feeling strength, and gaining confidence to
undertake things beyond his years, he diligently gave his days and
nights, in the intervals of severer exercises, to reading and meditating
upon the works of his great Italian predecessors, that he might form,
after their models, a style of verse and manner of composition which
should rival theirs, and yet be all his own. Unconsciously, it is
probable, at first, but gradually as he grew up, through an undefined
period, he conceived, and, before he reached the age of eighteen, had
executed, what Dr. Black calls "the most wonderful work that ever was
written by man," when the youth of the author, and the short time in
which it was composed--ten months, it is reported--are taken into the
account. The "Joan of Arc," by our illustrious countryman, Southey,
produced in a less compass of time, and at an age not much more advanced
than Tasso's, may fairly be put in competition with the "Rinaldo,"
without disparagement to either. Nothing connected with the existence of
man, in this mysterious world, at once living within and beyond himself,
exceeds, either in purity or intensity, the delight of youth when
framing poetry at first according to the extent of new-formed powers,
and anticipating poetry to come, when years shall have matured his
faculties, and his wings, after their first moulting, shall have
acquired full vigour of plume to bear him "with no middle flight" above
the Aonian mounts while he pursues
"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
Among real "curiosities of literature" there yet remain copies of Dante
and Petrarch, with marginal notes in Torquato's handwriting, which prove
with what microscopic minuteness he examined and studied the productions
of those masters of that language, to which he himself was destined to
give consummate grace as well as power of expression--the strength of
Dante, modified from the muscular proportions of Hercules to those of
the fine-limbed Apollo,--the delicacy of Petrarch veiled, like the
Medicean Venus, in the mantle of Minerva. It may here be noticed, that
Tasso was no more an expert penman than a fluent speaker; his
manuscripts, according to his own acknowledgment, being very
indifferently recommended either by the fashion of the letters, or the
correctness of the spelling. The numberless erasures, interpolations,
and new readings, with which many of his best works, preserved in the
library of the house of Este, are disfigured to the eye, are interesting
marks of that process of elaboration by which he slowly but as
effectually brought out all the hidden beauty of his thoughts, as though
they had been suddenly conceived and perfectly expressed in the ardour
of inspiration.
During their residence at Venice, Torquato was much employed by his
father in transcribing his own multitudinous poems and letters, as well
as in preparing for the press the enormous length of the "Amadigi." By
this exercise the son himself became daily more familiarised with the
means and artifices by which those who excel others in the productions
of their genius, form their peculiar style according to their peculiar
standard of intellect, and identify their whole cast of thinking with
their whole structure of language. To put a passage of an eloquent
author to the nicest test of _touch_ (if the expression may be allowed
for the intercourse of mind with mind, in the communication and
reception of ideas splendidly conceived and felicitously bodied forth by
the one, and by degrees only apprehended by the other,)--to put to the
nicest test of _touch_, as it were, any eloquent passage of poet or
orator, let the admirer copy it out at length, and he will find that the
progress of mind, hand, and eye, going all together, and through every
part, will give him the most distinct possible possession of the whole
in its full proportion, minutest details, and utmost effect.
But while thus the amanuensis of his father, Torquato was not less
assiduously cultivating his own talents, and meditating the composition
already alluded to, in which he was soon not only to rival the former,
but even while a boy, and upon the enchanted ground of romance itself,
to prove a greater magician than he. This the sudden and passionate
admiration with which his "Rinaldo" was hailed throughout Italy, and
beyond the Alps and Pyrenees, irreversibly established. The failure of
Bernardo's hopes, in the neglect with which both sovereign princes and
the reading public, after the first effervescence of applause, treated
his "Amadigi," was nearly contemporaneous with the first triumph of his
more fortunate son, who, so far as fame could gratify or reward his
literary labours, may be said to have succeeded in all that he
attempted, either in prose and verse, thenceforward, though some of his
performances had but an ephemeral popularity, being welcomed at first,
and afterwards formally honoured from the courtesy due to their author,
and the measure of kindred excellence by which they were all allied to
the happier offspring of his too prolific mind. Bernardo, after he found
that the stupendous monument of labour in vain, which he had spent so
many years in accumulating, was likely to be left to moulder away and
fall of itself into oblivion,--having at its first appearance excited
neither enough of envy or admiration to render it extensively attractive
to public curiosity,--lay down in despondency at its base, amidst his
perished hopes; and though he made several attempts afterwards to rise,
these were all equally unavailing, and the latest solace of his life was
the contemplation of that glory descending upon his son which had
departed from him.
In considering the fate, by a natural death (so to express it), after a
date somewhat longer than that of a natural life, of those who have been
renowned in their own age, but have dwindled into insignificance, or
become utterly extinct in that which followed, it may be said of the far
greater number of those who flourish among contemporaries, not, indeed,
that they,
"are born to blush unseen,
And waste their sweetness on the desert air,"
but that they are flowers which bloom in their season, and charm with
their fragrance the passers by of one generation, then disappear, and
are remembered no more. This is the order of Providence, and it is wise
and good; for were the Almighty less liberal of his gifts, though the
possessors being "few and far between" might be more admired and longer,
the world would be less benefited than by that perpetual succession and
supply (according to the demand for literature) of minds worthy,
perhaps, of any age, but formed peculiarly to suit the taste, the
manners, and the society of their own. Among Chalmers' "English Poets,"
for example, how many names, once illustrious, now merely catalogued,
are prefixed to works, unread though unforgotten, on which talents as
diversified and as well cultivated as the circumstances of the times
would allow were painfully expended, to delight and improve mankind;
each of whose possessors hoped, besides serving his own generation, to
leave something behind which the world would not willingly let die. Yet
it may be questioned whether some of these, had they lived in other
periods, or under different orders of things, might not have taken far
higher rank among the candidates for fame, and established permanent
claims to the veneration of posterity. Is not great genius, as we call
it, when fortunately developed, and favoured by many contingencies,
without which it never would have been so developed, more common than is
generally imagined? Is there not at all times and every where a class of
intelligences which may be trained up to become generals and captains in
literature, in comparison with the rank and file out of which they may
be called by peculiar events in their own or their nation's history, and
without which they could not have risen above the ordinary state of
their less distinguished, but, perhaps, equally capable companions; as
the working bees in a hive, as some naturalists tell us, when their
queen is lost or taken away from the little community, by a particular
regimen, may be nourished up into queens, and from labourers become
perpetuators of the race? There seems some probability for this
hypothesis, fanciful as it may be deemed, because in all extraordinary
emergencies, whether in the world of politics or of literature, minds of
the first order are invariably brought into activity from the motives,
the means, and the opportunities then afforded to them, though they
could never have risen above the depression, mediocrity, or neutral
indifference to which they were born, in which they had long lived, and
must assuredly have died, had it not been for those apparently
accidental opportunities which gave them distinction and pre-eminence,
by a change in themselves resembling a new creation, but in reality only
an awakening of latent powers.
While Torquato was thus continually giving new pledges, and redeeming
old ones of equal lustre, or surpassing the proudest names in his
country's literature, the old man, from bitter but unprofitable
experience as regarded himself, having proved the precariousness of the
favour of princes, and the vanity of expecting fortune to follow fame in
verse, determined to indemnify his son for the loss of both his parents'
property by bringing him up to a profession in which wealth and honour
might more readily be acquired by common industry than by idly looking
for the golden rewards of genius at the hands either of aristocratic
patrons, who bestow them as bounties, or of the multitude that compose
the public, and who care little about the good or ill fare of those on
whom their transient applauses are lavished.
"So praisen babes the peacock's spotted trayne,
And wondren at bright Argus' golden eye:
But who rewardes him e'er the more for thy,
Or feedes him once the fuller by a graine?"