Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 35

[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 Ta.s.so 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: Ta.s.so declares his inability to live outside the Court.

'Se fra i mali de l'animo, uno de'piu gravi e l'ambizione, egli ammal 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 pu 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 n.o.bleman.

Among the many picturesque episodes in Ta.s.so'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 pa.s.s 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 Ta.s.so 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 pa.s.s by, and guaranteed his respectability. Manso compares the journey of this penniless and haggard fugitive through the cities of Italy to the meteoric pa.s.sage of a comet.[44] Wherever he appeared, he blazed with momentary splendor. Nor was Turin slow to hail the l.u.s.trous 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, Ta.s.so stay that a gentleman had been sent from Ferrara expressly to recall him.[45] The fact seems to be that Ta.s.so was too ill.u.s.trious 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 ingrat.i.tude. 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 Ta.s.so 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 a.s.signed 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. Ta.s.so, 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. Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so 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. Ta.s.so 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. n.o.ble 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 Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so 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. Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so'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. Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so 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 pa.s.sed in his mind for another proof of mental infirmity than that he judged it seriously. It was quite enough that Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so's misfortunes with the difficulty of having to deal with mutilated doc.u.ments. Still the mere fact that Ta.s.so was allowed to correspond freely with friends and patrons, shows that Alfonso dreaded no disclosures, and confirms the theory that he only kept Ta.s.so locked up out of harm's way.]

And brain-sick Ta.s.so 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 pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tutional 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 Ta.s.so at Ferrara, upon the news of his death in 1595, shows how a man of cold intellect judged his case. 'The death by which Ta.s.so 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. x.x.xii. Guarini means that when Ta.s.so's mind gave way, he had really died in his own higher self, and that his actual death was a release.]

[Footnote 52: Ta.s.so'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. Ta.s.so so often alludes to his infirmities that it is not needful to acc.u.mulate 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 Ta.s.so's imprisonment may be pa.s.sed 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 Ta.s.so.

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' a.s.signed 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 ma.s.s of testimony, it may be doubted whether Ta.s.so 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 emanc.i.p.ation. 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 t.i.tle of _Il Gottifredo di M.

Torquato Ta.s.so_. 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 Ta.s.so'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. Ta.s.so 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.

Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so'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 Ta.s.so mean that the contrast between past and present was too bitter? 'Most friends.h.i.+p 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 Ta.s.so'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 Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so'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. n.o.body 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, Ta.s.so 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 Ta.s.so 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, Ta.s.so, like his father in similar circ.u.mstances, hankered after ecclesiastical honors. His letters refer frequently to this ambition. He felt the parallel between himself and Bernardo Ta.s.so: '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 Ta.s.so descended with considerable difficulty, greeting the monks with these words: 'I am come to die among you."[62]

The last of Ta.s.so'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 Ta.s.so'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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 G.o.d for me; and rest a.s.sured 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 Ta.s.so's malady, and however it had enfeebled his faculties as poet, he was in no vulgar sense a lunatic.]