Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 38

Ond' e ch'or tanto ardire in voi s'alletti? (ix. 76: _Inf._ ix.)

A guisa di leon quando si posa (x. 56: _Purg._ vi.)

e guardi e pa.s.si (xx. 43: _Inf._ in.)

As in the _Rinaldo_, so also in the _Gerusalemme_, Ta.s.so's cla.s.sical proclivities betrayed him into violation of the clear Italian language.

Afraid of what is natural and common, he produced what is artificial and conceited. Hence came involved octaves like the following (vi. 109):

Siccome cerva, ch'a.s.setata il pa.s.so Mova a cercar d'acque lucenti e vive, Ove un bel fonte distillar da un sa.s.so O vide un fiume tra frondose rive, Se incontra i cani allor che il corpo la.s.so Ristorar crede all'onde, all'ombre estive, Volge indietro fuggendo, e la paura La stanchezza obbliar face e l'arsura.

The image is beautiful; but the diction is elaborately intricate, rhetorically indistinct. We find the same stylistic involution in these lines (xii. 6):

Ma s'egli avverra pur che mia ventura Nel mio ritorno mi rinchiuda il pa.s.so, D'uom che in amor m'e padre a te la cura E delle fide mie donzelle io la.s.so.

The limpid well of native utterance is troubled at its source by scholastic artifices in these as in so many other pa.s.sages of Ta.s.so's masterpiece. Nor was he yet emanc.i.p.ated from the weakness of _Rinaldo_.

Trying to soar upon the borrowed plumes of pseudo-cla.s.sical sublimity, he often fell back wearied by this uncongenial effort into prose. Lame endings to stanzas, sudden descents from highly-wrought to pedestrian diction, are not uncommon in the _Gerusalemme_. The poet, diffident of his own inspiration, sought inspiration from books. In the magnificence of single lines again, the _Gerusalemme_ reminds us of _Rinaldo_. Ta.s.so gained dignity of rhythm by choosing Latin adjectives and adverbs with pompous cadences. No versifier before his date had consciously employed the sonorous music of such lines as the following:--

Foro, tentando inaccessibil via (ii. 29).

Ond' Amor l'arco inevitabil tende (iii. 24).

Questa muraglia impenetrabil fosse (iii. 51).

Furon vedute fiammeggiare insieme (v. 28).

Qual capitan ch'inespugnabil terra (v. 64).

Sotto l'inevitabile tua spada (xvi. 33).

Immense solitudini d'arena (xvii. I).

The last of these lines presents an impressive landscape in three melodious words.

These verbal and stylistic criticisms are not meant to cast reproach on Ta.s.so as a poet. If they have any value, it is the light they throw upon conditions under which the poet was constrained to work. Humanism and the Catholic Revival reduced this greatest genius of his age to the necessity of clothing religious sentiments in scholastic phraseology, with the view of attaining to epic grandeur. But the Catholic Revival was no regeneration of Christianity from living sources; and humanism had run its course in Italy, and was ending in the sands of critical self-consciousness. Thus piety in Ta.s.so appears superficial and conventional rather than profoundly felt or originally vigorous; while the scholars.h.i.+p which supplied his epic style is scrupulous and timid.

The enduring qualities of Ta.s.so as a modern poet have still to be indicated; and to this more grateful portion of my argument I now address myself. Much might be said in the first place about his rhetorical dexterity--the flexibility of language in his hands, and the copiousness of thought, whereby he was able to adorn varied situations and depict diversity of pa.s.sions with appropriate diction. Whether Alete is subtly pleading a seductive cause, or Goffredo is answering his sophistries with well-weighed arguments; whether Pluto addresses the potentates of h.e.l.l, or Erminia wavers between love and honor; whether Tancredi pours forth the extremity of his despair, or Armida heaps reproaches on Rinaldo in his flight; the musical and luminously polished stanzas lend themselves without change of style to every gradation of the speaker's mood. In this art of rhetoric, Ta.s.so seems to have taken Livy for his model; and many of his speeches which adorn the graver portions of his poem are noticeable for compact sententious wisdom.

In fancy Ta.s.so was not so naturally rich and inventive as the author of _Orlando Furioso_. Yet a gallery of highly-finished pictures might be collected from his similes and metaphors. What pride and swiftness mark this vision of a thunderbolt:

Grande ma breve fulmine il diresti, Che inaspettato sopraggiunga e pa.s.si; Ma del suo corso momentaneo resti Vestigio eterno in dirupati sa.s.si (xx. 93).

How delicately touched is this uprising of the morning star from ocean:

Qual mattutina Stella esce dell'onde Rugiadosa e stillante; o come fuore Spunt nascendo gia dalle feconde Spume dell'ocean la Dea d'amore (xv. 60).

Here is an image executed in the style of Ariosto. Clorinda has received a wound on her uncovered head:

Fu levissima piaga, e i biondi crini Rosseggiaron cos d'alquante stille, Come rosseggia l'or che di rubini Per man d'ill.u.s.tre artefice sfaville (iii. 30).

Flowers furnish the poet with exquisite suggestions of color:

D'un bel pallor ha il bianco volto asperso, Come a gigli sarian miste viole (xii. 69).

Quale a pioggia d'argento e mattutina Si rabbellisce scolorita rosa (xx. 129).

Sometimes the painting is minutely finished like a miniature:

Cos piuma talor, che di gentile Amorosa colomba il collo cinge, Mai non s scorge a se stessa simile, Ma in diversi colori al sol si tinge: Or d'accesi rubin sembra un monile, Or di verdi smeraldi il lume finge, Or insieme li mesce, e varia e vaga In cento modi i riguardanti appaga (xv. 5).

Sometimes the style is broad, the touch vigorous:

Qual feroce destrier, ch'al faticoso Onor dell'arme vincitor sia tolto, E lascivo marito in vil riposo Fra gli armenti e ne'paschi erri dsciolto,

Se il desta o suon di tromba, o luminoso Acciar, cola tosto annitrendo e volto; Gia gia brama l'arringo, el'uom sul dorso Portando, urtato riurtar nel corso (xvi. 28).

I will content myself with referring to the admirably conceived simile of a bulky galleon at sea attacked by a swifter and more agile vessel (xix. 13), which may perhaps have suggested to Fuller his famous comparison of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in their wit encounters.

But Ta.s.so was really himself, incomparable and unapproachable, when he wrote in what musicians would call the _largo e maestoso_ mood.

Giace l'alta Cartago; appena i segni Dell'alte sue ruine il lido serba.

Muoino le citta, muoino i regni; Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba; E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni!

Oh nostra mente cupida e superba! (xv. 20).

This is perfect in its measured melancholy, the liquid flow of its majestic simplicity. The same musical breadth, the same n.o.ble sweetness, pervade a pa.s.sage on the eternal beauty of the heavens compared with the brief brightness of a woman's eyes:

oh quante belle Luci il tempio celeste in se raguna!

Ha il suo gran carro il di; le aurate stelle Spiega la notte e l'argentata luna; Ma non e chi vagheggi o questa o quelle; E miriam noi torbida luce e bruna, Che un girar d'occhi, un balenar di riso Scopre in breve confin di fragil viso (xviii. 15).

This verbal music culminates in the two songs of earthly joy, the _chants d'amour_, or hymns to pleasure, sung by Armida's ministers (xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13). Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty, and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights. It remained for Ta.s.so to give that magic of the senses vocal utterance. From the myrtle groves of Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with their penetrative sweetness, their lingering regret, pa.s.s into the silence of the soul. It is eminently characteristic of Ta.s.so's mood and age that the melody of both these honeyed songs should thrill with sadness. Nature is at war with honor; youth pa.s.ses like a flower away; therefore let us love and yield our hearts to pleasure while we can. _Sehnsucht_, the soul of modern sentiment, the inner core of modern music, makes its entrance into the sphere of art with these two hymns. The division of the mind, wavering between natural impulse and acquired morality, gives the tone of melancholy to the one chant. In the other, the invitation to self-abandonment is mingled with a forecast of old age and death. Only Catullus, in his song to Lesbia, among the ancients touched this note; only Villon, perhaps, in his Ballade of Dead Ladies, touched it among the moderns before Ta.s.so. But it has gone on sounding ever since through centuries which have enjoyed the luxury of grief in music.

If Tancredi be the real hero of the _Gerusalemme_, Armida is the heroine. The action of the epic follows her movements. She combines the parts of Angelica and Alcina in one that is original and novel. A sorceress, deputed by the powers of h.e.l.l to defeat the arms of the crusaders, Armida falls herself in love with a Christian champion. Love changes her from a beautiful white witch into a woman.[76] When she meets Rinaldo in the battle, she discharges all her arrows vainly at the man who has deserted her. One by one, they fly and fall; and as they wing their flight, Love wounds her own heart with his shafts:

Scocca I' arco piu volte, e non fa piaga E, mentre ella saetta, amor lei piaga (xx. 65).

Then she turns to die in solitude. Rinaldo follows, and stays her in the suicidal act. Despised and rejected as she is, she cannot hate him. The man she had entangled in her wiles has conquered and subdued her nature.

To the now repentant minister of h.e.l.l he proposes baptism; and Armida consents:

S parla, e prega; e i preghi bagna e scalda Or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri: Onde, siccome suol nevosa falda Dov'arde il sole, o tepid' aura spiri, Cos l'ira che in lei parea s salda, Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri.

_Ecco l'ancilla tua_; d'essa a tuo senno Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).

[Footnote 76: I may incidentally point out how often this motive has supplied the plot to modern ballets.]

This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the climax of the _Gerusalemme_. It is also the climax and conclusion of Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into the truths of human affection. Notice, too, with what audacity Ta.s.so has placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress!

Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he a.s.signs the spoils of conquered h.e.l.l to love triumphant in a woman's breast. Beauty, which in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to apotheosis through affection. In Armida we already surmise _das ewig Weibliche_ of Goethe's Faust, Gretchen saving her lover's soul before Madonna's throne in glory.

What was it, then, that Ta.s.so, this 'child of a later and a colder age,'

as Sh.e.l.ley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature?

We have seen that the _Gerusalemme_ did not fulfill the promise of heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period. We know that neither the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the interest of posterity. We feel that religious emotion is feeble here, and that the cla.s.sical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to a.n.a.lyze, intangible and evanescent--_un non so che_, to use the poet's favorite phrase--which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty. Ta.s.so, in one word, was the poet, not of pa.s.sion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment. Unknown to the ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as determined by the Cla.s.sical Revival, sentiment, that _non so che_ of modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Ta.s.so's work. The phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere of European feeling. Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase _un non so che_ leaves definition to the instinct of those who feel, but will not risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words.

Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind. Cla.s.sical literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images and conscious thoughts. The mediaeval art of Dante, precisely, mathematically measured, had not felt the need of it. Boccaccio's clear-cut intaglios from life and nature, Petrarch's compa.s.sed melodies, Poliziano's polished arabesques, Ariosto's bright and many colored pencilings, were all of them, in all their varied phases of Renaissance expression, distinguished by decision and firmness of drawing.