Jerusalem Delivered

by Torquato Tasso

  Did the “smile” of Tasso at the close of this extraordinary scene, and the words which he omitted to add, signify that his friend had seen and heard more, perhaps, than the poet would have liked to explain? Did he mean that he himself alone had been seen and heard, and was author of the whole dialogue? Perhaps he did; for credulity itself can impose; — can take pleasure in seeing others as credulous as itself. On the other hand, enough has become known in our days of the phenomena of morbid perception, to render Tasso’s actual belief in such visions not at all surprising. It is not uncommon for the sanest people of delicate organisation to see faces before them while going to sleep, sometimes in fantastical succession. A stronger exercise of this disposition in temperaments more delicate will enlarge the face to figure; and there can be no question that an imagination so heated as Tasso’s, so full of the speculations of the later Platonists, and accompanied by a state of body so “nervous,” and a will so bent on its fancies, might embody whatever he chose to behold. The dialogue he could as easily read in the vision’s looks, whether he heard it or not with ears. If Nicholay, the Prussian bookseller, who saw crowds of spiritual people go through his rooms, had been a poet, and possessed of as wilful an imagination as Tasso, he might have gifted them all with speaking countenances as easily as with coats and waistcoats. Swedenborg founded a religion on this morbid faculty; and the Catholics worship a hundred stories of the like sort in the Lives of the Saints, many of which are equally true and false; false in reality, though true in supposition. Luther himself wrote and studied till he saw the Devil; only the great reformer retained enough of his naturally sturdy health and judgment to throw an inkstand at Satan’s head, — a thing that philosophy has been doing ever since.

  Tasso’s principal residence while at Naples had been in the beautiful monastery of Mount Olivet, on which the good monks begged he would write them a poem; which he did. A cold reception at Rome, and perhaps the difference of the air, brought back his old lamentations; but here again a monastery gave him refuge, and he set himself down to correct his former works and compose new ones. He missed, however, the comforts of society and amusement which he had experienced at Naples. Nevertheless, he did not return thither. He persuaded himself that it was necessary to be in Rome in order to expedite the receipt of some books and manuscripts from Bergamo and other places; but his restlessness desired novelty. He thus slipped back from the neighbourhood of Rome to the city itself, and from the city back to the monastery, his friends in both places being probably tired of his instability. He thought of returning to Mantua; but a present from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, accompanied by an invitation to his court, drew him, in one of his short-lived transports, to Florence. He returned, in spite of the best and most generous reception, to Rome; then left Rome for Mantua, on invitation from his ever-kind deliverer from prison, now the reigning duke; tired again, even of him; returned to Rome; then once more to Naples, where the Prince of Conca, Grand Admiral of the kingdom, lodged and treated him like an equal; but he grew suspicious of the admiral, and went to live with his friend Manso; quitted Manso for Rome again; was treated with reverence on the way, like Ariosto, by a famous leader of banditti; was received at Rome into the Vatican itself, in the apartments of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino, nephew of the new pope Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to be raised at once to their highest and most reasonable pitch; but fell ill, and was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air. A life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was approaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man than Tasso; but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all his weaknesses, and notwithstanding the enemies they provoked and the friends they cooled, was really almost adored for his genius in his own time, and instead of refusing jewels one day and soliciting a ducat the next, might have settled down almost any where in quiet and glory, if he had but possessed the patience to do so, it becomes an association of weakness with power, and of adversity with the means of prosperity, the absurdity of which admiration itself can only drown in pity.

  He now took up his abode in another monastery, that of San Severino, where he was comforted by the visits of his friend Manso, to whom he had lately inscribed a dialogue on Friendship; for he continued writing to the last. He had also the consolation, such as it was, of having the law-suit for his mother’s dowry settled in his favour, though under circumstances that rendered it of little importance, and only three months before his death. So strangely did Fortune seem to take delight in sporting with a man of genius, who had thought both too much of her and too little; too much for pomp’s sake, and too little in prudence. Among his new acquaintances were the young Marino, afterwards the corrupter of Italian poetry, and the Prince of Venosa, an amateur composer of music. The dying poet wrote madrigals for him so much to his satisfaction, that, being about to marry into the house of Este, he wished to reconcile him with the Duke of Ferrara; and Tasso, who to the last moment of his life seems never to have been able to resist the chance of resuming old quarters, apparently from the double temptation of renouncing them, wrote his old master a letter full of respects and regrets. But the duke, who himself died in the course of the year, was not to be moved from his silence. The poet had given him the last possible offence by recasting his Jerusalem, omitting the glories of the house of Este, and dedicating it to another patron. Alfonso, who had been extravagantly magnificent, though not to poets, had so weakened his government, that the Pope wrested Ferrara from the hands of his successor, and reduced the Este family to the possession of Modena, which it still holds and dishonours. The duke and the poet were thus fading away at the same time; they never met again in this world; and a new Dante would have divided them far enough in the next.

  The last glimpse of honour and glory was now opening in a very grand manner on the poet — the last and the greatest, as if on purpose to give the climax to his disappointments. Cardinal Cintio requested the Pope to give him the honour of a coronation. It had been desired by the poet, it seems, three years before. He was disappointed of it at that time; and now that it was granted, he was disappointed of the ceremony. Manso says he no longer cared for it; and, as he felt himself dying, this is not improbable. Nevertheless he went to Rome for the purpose; and though the severity of the winter there delayed the intention till spring, wealth and honours seemed determined to come in floods upon the poor expiring great man, in order to take away the breath which they had refused to support. The Pope assigned him a yearly pension of a hundred scudi; and the withholders of his mother’s dowry came to an accommodation by which he was to have an annuity of a hundred ducats, and a considerable sum in hand. His hand was losing strength enough to close upon the money. Scarcely was the day for the coronation about to dawn, when the poet felt his dissolution approaching. Alfonso’s doctors had killed him at last by superinducing a habit of medicine-taking, which defeated its purpose. He requested leave to return to the monastery of St. Onofrio — wrote a farewell letter to Constantini — received the distinguished honour of a plenary indulgence from the Pope — said (in terms very like what Milton might have used, had he died a Catholic), that “this was the chariot upon which he hoped to go crowned, not with laurel as a poet into the capitol, but with glory as a saint to heaven” — and expired on the 25th of April, 1575, and the fifty-first year of his age, closely embracing the crucifix, and imperfectly uttering the sentence beginning, “Into thy hands, O Lord!”

  Even after death, success mocked him; for the coronation took place on the senseless dead body. The head was wreathed with laurel; a magnificent toga delayed for a while the shroud; and a procession took place through the city by torchlight, all the inhabitants pouring forth to behold it, and painters crowding over the bier to gaze on the poet’s lineaments, from which they produced a multitude of portraits. The corpse was then buried in the church of St. Onofrio; and magnificent monuments talked of, which never appeared. Man
so, however, obtained leave to set up a modest tablet; and eight years afterwards a Ferrarese cardinal (Bevilacqua) made what amends he could for his countrymen, by erecting the stately memorial which is still to be seen.

  Poor, illustrious Tasso! weak enough to warrant pity from his inferiors — great enough to overshadow in death his once-fancied superiors. He has been a by-word for the misfortunes of genius: but genius was not his misfortune; it was his only good, and might have brought him all happiness. It is the want of genius, as far as it goes, and apart from martyrdoms for conscience’ sake, which produces misfortunes even to genius itself — the want of as much wit and balance on the common side of things, as genius is supposed to confine to the uncommon.

  Manso has left a minute account of his friend’s person and manners. He was tall even among the tall; had a pale complexion, sunken cheeks, lightish brown hair, head bald at the top, large blue eyes, square forehead, big nose inclining towards the mouth, lips pale and thin, white teeth, delicate white hands, long arms, broad chest and shoulders, legs rather strong than fleshy, and the body altogether better proportioned than in good condition; the result, nevertheless, being an aspect of manly beauty and expression, particularly in the countenance, the dignity of which marked him for an extraordinary person even to those who did not know him. His demeanour was grave and deliberate; he laughed seldom; and though his tongue was prompt, his delivery was slow; and he was accustomed to repeat his last words. He was expert in all manly exercises, but not equally graceful; and the same defect attended his otherwise striking eloquence in public assemblies. His putting to flight the assassins in Ferrara gave him such a reputation for courage, that there went about in his honour a popular couplet

  “Colla penna e colla spada

  Nessun val quanto Torquato.”

  For the sword as well as pen

  Tasso is the man of men.

  He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as combined piquancy with sweetness; and he always dressed in black. Manso’s account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell all; for Tasso himself informs us that he stammered, and was near-sighted; and a Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to the near-sightedness some visible defect in the eyes. I should doubt, from what Tasso says in his letters, whether he was fond of speaking in public, notwithstanding his début in that line with the Fifty Amorous Conclusions.Nor does he appear to have been remarkable for his conversation. Manso has left a collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings — a suspicious amount, and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus. The two following have the greatest appearance of being genuine:

  A Greek, complaining that he had spoken ill of his country, and maintaining that all the virtues in the world had issued out of it, the poet assented; with the addition, that they had not left one behind them.

  A foolish young fellow, garnished with a number of golden chains, coming into a room where he was, and being overheard by him exclaiming, “Is this the great man that was mad?” Tasso said, “Yes; but that people had never put on him more than one chain at a time.”

  His character may be gathered, but not perhaps entirely, from what has been written of his life; for some of his earlier letters shew him to have been not quite so grave and refined in his way of talking as readers of the Jerusalem might suppose. He was probably at that time of life not so scrupulous in his morals as he professed to be during the greater part of it. His mother is thought to have died of chagrin and impatience at being separated so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do to save her dowry from her brothers; and I take her son to have combined his mother’s ultra-sensitive organisation with his father’s worldly imprudence and unequal spirits. The addition of the nervous temperament of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other gave rise to the poet’s trembling eagerness for distinction; and Torquato’s very love for them both hindered him from seeing what should have been corrected in the infirmities which he inherited. Falling from the highest hopes of prosperity into the most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid principles of action to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an excess of self-esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and his naturally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend to almost every species of inconsistency. The Duke of Ferrara, he complains, did not believe a word he said; and the fact is, that, partly from disease, and partly from a want of courage to look his defects in the face, he beheld the same things in so many different lights, and according as it suited him at the moment, that, without intending falsehood, his statements are really not to be relied on. He degraded even his verses, sometimes with panegyrics for interest’s sake, sometimes out of weak wishes to oblige, of which he was afterwards ashamed; and, with the exception of Constantini, we cannot be sure that any one person praised in them retained his regard in his last days. His suspicion made him a kind of Rousseau; but he was more amiable than the Genevese, and far from being in the habit of talking against old acquaintances, whatever he might have thought of them. It is observable, not only that he never married, but he told Manso he had led a life of entire continence ever since he entered the walls of his prison, being then in his thirty-fifth year. Was this out of fidelity to some mistress? or the consequence of a previous life the reverse of continent? or was it from some principle of superstition? He had become a devotee, apparently out of a dread of disbelief; and he remained extremely religious for the rest of his days. The two unhappiest of Italian poets, Tasso and Dante, were the two most superstitious.

  As for the once formidable question concerning the comparative merits of this poet and Ariosto, which anticipated the modern quarrels of the classical and romantic schools, some idea of the treatment which Tasso experienced may be conceived by supposing all that used to be sarcastic and bitter in the periodical party-criticism among ourselves some thirty years back, collected into one huge vial of wrath, and poured upon the new poet’s head. Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up in the pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolator of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a “review” of the Jerusalem Delivered, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and contemptuous. But now that the only final arbiter, posterity, has accepted both the poets, the dispute is surely the easiest thing in the world to settle; not, indeed, with prejudices of creeds or temperaments, but before any judges thoroughly sympathising with the two claimants. Its solution is the principle of the greater including the less. For Ariosto errs only by having an unbounded circle to move in. His sympathies are unlimited; and those who think him inferior to Tasso, only do so in consequence of their own want of sympathy with the vivacities that degrade him in their eyes. Ariosto can be as grave and exalted as Tasso when he pleases, and he could do a hundred things which Tasso never attempted. He is as different in this respect as Shakspeare from Milton. He had far more knowledge of mankind than Tasso, and he was superior in point of taste. But it is painful to make disadvantageous comparisons of one great poet with another. Let us be thankful for Tasso’s enchanted gardens, without being forced to vindicate the universal world of his predecessor. Suffice it to bear in mind, that the grave poet himself agreed with the rest of the Italians in calling the Ferrarese the “divine Ariosto;” a title which has never been popularly given to his rival.