Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 37

If the _Rinaldo_ prefigures Ta.s.so's maturer qualities of style, it is no less conspicuous for the light it throws upon his eminent poetic faculty. Nothing distinguished him more decidedly from the earlier romantic poets than power over pathetic sentiment conveyed in melodious cadences of oratory. This emerges in Clarice's monologue on love and honor, that combat of the soul which forms a main feature of the lyrics in _Aminta_ and of Erminia's episode in the _Gerusalemme_.[71] This steeps the whole story of Clizia in a delicious melancholy, foreshadowing the death-scene of Clorinda.[72] This rises in the father's lamentation over his slain Ugone, into the music of a threnody that now recalls Euripides and now reminds us of mediaeval litanies.[73]

Censure might be pa.s.sed upon rhetorical conceits and frigid affectations in these characteristic outpourings of pathetic feeling. Yet no one can ignore their liquid melody, their transference of emotion through sound into modulated verse.

[Footnote 70: _Rinaldo_, Canto ii. 28, 44.]

[Footnote 71: Canto ii. 3-11.]

[Footnote 72: Canto vii. 16-51.]

[Footnote 73: Canto vii. 3-11.]

That lyrical outcry, finding rhythmic utterance for tender sentiment, which may be recognized as Ta.s.so's chief addition to romantic poetry, pierces like a song through many pa.s.sages of mere narration. Rinaldo, while carrying Clarice away upon Baiardo, with no chaste intention in his heart, bids her thus dry her tears:[74]

Egli dice: Signora, onde vi viene S spietato martir, s grave affanno?

Perche le luci angeliche e serene Ricopre della doglia oscuro panno?

Forse fia l'util vostro e 'l vostro bene Quel ch'or vi sembra insupportabil danno, Deh! per Dio, rasciugate il caldo pianto.

E l'atroce dolor temprate alquanto.

It is not that we do not find similar lyrical interbreathings in the narrative of Ariosto. But Ta.s.so developed the lyrism of the octave stanza into something special, lulling the soul upon gentle waves of rising and falling rhythm, foreshadowing the coming age of music in cadences that are untranslateable except by vocal melody. In like manner, the idyl, which had played a prominent part in Boiardo's and in Ariosto's romance, detaches itself with a peculiar sweetness from the course of Ta.s.so's narrative. This appears in the story of Florindo, which contains within itself the germ of the _Aminta_, the _Pastor Fido_ and the _Adone_.[75] Together with the bad taste of the artificial pastoral, its preposterous costume (stanza 13), its luxury of tears (stanza 23), we find the tyranny of kisses (stanzas 28, 52), the yearning after the Golden Age (stanza 29), and all the other apparatus of that operatic species. Ta.s.so was the first poet to bathe Arcady in a golden afternoon light of sensuously sentimental pathos. In his idyllic as in his lyrical interbreathings, melody seems absolutely demanded to interpret and complete the plangent rhythm of his dulcet numbers.

Emotion so far predominates over intelligence, so yearns to exhale itself in sound and shun the laws of language, that we find already in _Rinaldo_ Ta.s.so's familiar _Non so che_ continually used to adumbrate sentiments for which plain words are not indefinite enough.

[Footnote 74: Canto iv. 47.]

[Footnote 75: Canto v. 12-57.]

The _Rinaldo_ was a very remarkable production for a young man of eighteen. It showed the poet in possession of his style and displayed the specific faculties of his imagination. Nothing remained for Ta.s.so now but to perfect and develop the type of art which he had there created. Soon after his first settlement in Ferrara, he began to meditate a more ambitious undertaking. His object was to produce the heroic poem for which Italy had long been waiting, and in this way to rival or surpa.s.s the fame of Ariosto. Trissino had chosen a national subject for his epic; but the _Italia Liberata_ was an acknowledged failure, and neither the past nor the present conditions of the Italian people offered good material for a serious poem. The heroic enthusiasms of the age were religious. Revived Catholicism had a.s.sumed an att.i.tude of defiance. The Company of Jesus was declaring its crusade against heresy and infidelity throughout the world. Not a quarter of a century had elapsed since Charles V. attacked the Mussulman in Tunis; and before a few more years had pa.s.sed, the victory of Lepanto was to be won by Italian and Spanish navies. Ta.s.so, therefore, obeyed a wise instinct when he made choice of the first crusade for his theme, and of G.o.dfrey of Boulogne for his hero. Having to deal with historical facts, he studied the best authorities in chronicles, ransacked such books of geography and travel as were then accessible, paid attention to topography, and sought to acquire what we now call local coloring for the details of his poem. Without the sacrifice of truth in any important point, he contrived to give unity to the conduct of his narrative, while interweaving a number of fict.i.tious characters and marvelous circ.u.mstances with the historical personages and actual events of the crusade. The vital interest of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ flows from this interpolated material, from the loves of Rinaldo and Tancredi, from the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda. The _Gerusalemme_ is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem has been engrafted. Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity, repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens Virgil's hero, is transferred to Rinaldo's part in Ta.s.so's story. The battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in the tenth Aeneid; but the duels of Tancredi with Clorinda and Argante breathe the spirit and the fire of chivalry. The celestial and infernal councils, adopted as machinery, recall the rival factions in Olympus; but the force by which the plot moves is love. Pluto and the angel Gabriel are inactive by comparison with Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.

Ta.s.so in truth thought that he was writing a religious and heroic poem.

What he did write, was a poem of sentiment and pa.s.sion--a romance. Like Anacreon he might have cried:

thelo legein Atreidas thelo de Kadmon adein, ha barbitos de chordais Erota mounon echei.

He displayed, indeed, marvelous ingenuity and art in so connecting the two strains of his subject, the stately Virgilian history and the glowing modern romance, that they should contribute to the working of a single plot. Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures. No one who has studied the _Gerusalemme_ returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired. He skips canto after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia's pastoral idyl, of Armida's sensuous charms, of Clorinda's dying words, of the Siren's song and the music of the magic bird: of all, in fact, which is not pious in the poem.

Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the other beloved by him--the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Ta.s.so's own soul's image--is the veritable hero of the _Gerusalemme_; and by a curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the close, without a word. The force of the poem is spiritualized and concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of sublimity in pathos. It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden.

Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Ta.s.so bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever. Argante, Solimano, Tisaferno, excite our interest, and win the sympathy we cannot spare the saintly hero; and in the death of Solimano Ta.s.so's style, for once, verges upon tragic sublimity.

What Ta.s.so aimed at in the _Gerusalemme_ was n.o.bility. This quality had not been prominent in Ariosto's art. If he could attain it, his ambition to rival the _Orlando Furioso_ would be satisfied. One main condition of success Ta.s.so brought to the achievement. His mind itself was eminently n.o.ble, incapable of baseness, fixed on fair and worthy objects of contemplation. Yet the personal n.o.bility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type. He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature.

His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody. In order to a.s.sume the heroic strain, Ta.s.so had recourse to scholars.h.i.+p, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets. This was consistent with the tendency of the Cla.s.sical Revival; but since the subject to be dignified by epic style was Christian and mediaeval, a discord between matter and manner amounting almost to insincerity resulted. Some examples will make the meaning of this criticism more apparent. When Goffredo rejects the emba.s.sy of Atlete and Argante, he declares his firm intention of delivering Jerusalem in spite of overwhelming perils. The crusaders can but perish:

Noi morirem, ma non morremo inulti. (i. 86.)

This of course is a reminiscence of Dido's last words, and the difference between the two situations creates a disagreeable incongruity. The nod of Jove upon Olympus is translated to express the fiat of the Almighty (xiii. 74); Gabriel is tricked out in the plumes and colors of Mercury (i. 13-15); the very angels sinning round the throne become 'dive sirene' (xiv. 9); the armory of heaven is described in terms which reduce Michael's spear and the arrows of pestilence to ordinary weapons (vii. 81); h.e.l.l is filled with harpies, centaurs, hydras, pythons, the common lumber of cla.s.sical Tartarus (iv. 5); the angel sent to cure Goffredo's wound culls dittany on Ida (xi. 72); the heralds, interposing between Tancredi and Argante, hold pacific scepters and have naught of chivalry (vi. 51). It may be said that both Dante before Ta.s.so, and Milton after him, employed similar cla.s.sical language in dealing with Christian and mediaeval motives. But this will hardly serve as an excuse; for Dante and Milton communicate so intense a conviction of religious earnestness that their Latinisms, even though incongruous, are recognized as the mere clothing of profoundly felt ideas. The sublimity, the seriousness, the spiritual dignity is in their thought, not in its expression; whereas Ta.s.so too frequently leaves us with the certainty that he has sought by ceremonious language to realize more than he could grasp with the imagination. In his council of the powers of h.e.l.l, for instance, he creates monsters of huge dimensions and statuesque distinctness; but these are neither grotesquely horrible like Dante's, nor are they spirits with incalculable capacity for evil like Milton's.

Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme, E in fronte umana ban chiome d'angui attorte; E lor s'aggira dietro immensa coda, Che quasi sferza si ripiega e snoda.

Against this we have to place the dreadful scene of Satan with his angels transformed to snakes (_Par. Lost_, x. 508-584), and the Dantesque horror of the 'vermo reo che 'l mondo fora' (_Inf._ x.x.xiv.

108). Again when Dante cries--

O Sommo Giove, Che fosti in terra per noi crocifisso!

we feel that the Latin phrase is accidental. The spirit of the poet remains profoundly Christian. Ta.s.so's Jehovah-Jupiter is always 'il Re del Ciel'; and the court of blessed spirits which surrounds his 'gran seggio,' though described with solemn pomp of phrase, cannot be compared with the Mystic Rose of Paradise (ix. 55-60). What Ta.s.so lacks is authenticity of vision; and his heightened style only renders this imaginative poverty, this want of spiritual conviction, more apparent.

His frequent borrowings from Virgil are less unsuccessful when the matter to be ill.u.s.trated is not of this exalted order. Many similes (vii. 55, vii. 76, viii. 74) have been transplanted with nice propriety.

Many descriptions, like that of the approach of night (ii-96), of the nightingale mourning for her young (xii. 90), of the flying dream (xiv.

6), have been translated with exquisite taste. Dido's impa.s.sioned apostrophe to Aeneas reappears appropriately upon Armida's lips (xvi.

56). We welcome such culled phrases as the following:

l'orticel dispensa Cibi non compri alia mia parca mensa (vii. 10).

Premer gli alteri, e sollevar gl'imbelli (x. 76).

E Tisaferno, il folgore di Marte (xvii. 31).

Va, vedi, e vinci (xvii. 38).

Ma mentre dolce parla e dolce ride (iv. 92).

Che vinta la materia e dal lavoro (xvi. 2).

Non temo io te, ne tuoi gran vanti, o fero: Ma il Cielo e il mio nemico amor pavento (xix. 73).

It may, however, be observed that in the last of these pa.s.sages Ta.s.so does not show a just discriminative faculty. Turnus said:

Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta, ferox: Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis.

From Jupiter to Amor is a descent from sublimity to pathos. In like manner when Hector's ghost reappears in the ghost of Armida's mother,

Quanto diversa, oime, da quel che pria Visto altrove (iv. 49),

the reminiscence suggests ideas that are unfavorable to the modern version.

In his description of battles, the mustering of armies, and military operations, Ta.s.so neither draws from mediaeval sources nor from experience, but imitates the battle-pieces of Virgil and Lucan, sometimes with fine rhetorical effect and sometimes with wearisome frigidity. The death of Latino and his five sons is both touching in itself, and a good example of this Virgilian mannerism (ix. 35). The death of Dudone is justly celebrated as a sample of successful imitation (iii. 45):

Cade; e gli occhi, ch'appena aprir si ponno, Dura quiete preme e ferreo sonno.

The wound of Gerniero, on the contrary, ill.u.s.trates the peril of seeking after conceits in the inferior manner of the master (ix. 69):

La destra di Gerniero, onde ferita Ella fu pria, manda recisa al piano; Tratto anco il ferro, e con tremanti dita Semiviva nel suol guizza la mano.

The same may be said about the wound of Algazel (ix. 78) and the death of Ardonio (xx. 39). In the description of the felling of the forest (iii. 75, 76) and of the mustering of the Egyptian army (xvii. 1-36) Ta.s.so's Virgilian style attains real grandeur and poetic beauty.

Ta.s.so was nothing if not a learned poet. It would be easy to ill.u.s.trate what he has borrowed from Lucretius, or to point out that the pathos of Clorinda's apparition to Tancredi after death is a debt to Petrarch. It may, however, suffice here to indicate six phrases taken straight from Dante; since the _Divine Comedy_ was little studied in Ta.s.so's age, and his selection of these lines reflects credit on his taste. These are:

Onorate l'altissimo campione! (iii. 73: _Inf._ iv.)

Goffredo intorno gli occhi gravi e tardi (vii. 58: _Inf._. iv.).

a riveder le stelle (iv. 18: _Inf._ x.x.xiv.).