(a) Tasso
Tasso’s is the only one of the Renaissance romances of chivalry whose title is its subject. Malory’s subject is far more than the death of Arthur, Pulci’s than Morgante. Boiardo’s subject is not Orlando in love, nor Ariosto’s Orlando mad for love. Spenser’s title merely makes his encomium part of his allegory. But Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered exactly sums up his scope and his theme. The Carolingian tradition, still furnishing the scene and the persons, no longer furnishes the pattern. The persons are fewer; and they are recreated to function in a continuous story. Thus Soliman and Peter the Hermit have definite roles; and Godfrey becomes the protagonist. The time is idealized to assemble the heroic past about the medieval enterprise of deliverance, to bring into one sequence the chansons de geste, the Carolingian cycle of romance, and several crusades. The struggle of the West with the East, no longer background or setting, is brought forward. It appears much less as the exploits of individuals, much more as an enterprise in common. Further it is an enterprise of religion, to rescue the holy places from unbelievers, to restore them to Christendom as a shrine of pilgrimage. It is animated by pietas, the Vergilian motive Christianized, the sense of mission. The individual warriors, no longer adventurers, are soldiers of the Cross. Though the actual crusades were medieval, they were still in men’s minds as unfinished. Boiardo laments the postponement of a recent proposal to revive them. Tasso writes not to further this, or any other present movement, but to present crusade as historic. He focuses all crusades in one historic action. His narrative of Godfrey and the paladins is controlled by the idea of crusade as deliverance.
Such singleness of purpose naturally reduces encomium. The expected rolls of honor celebrating the house of Este, are fewer and more detached.[38] Reduced also, with one important exception, are lyric interludes. Turning conventional themes to beauty, Tasso pauses less often to dilate emotion with Ariosto than to interpose reflection or the escape of pastoral.
[In the garden of Armida] See how the rose pricks modest and virgin from the green. Half-open yet, half-closed, the less she shows herself the fairer she. Lo! bold already, she reveals her breast naked; lo! again it droops and is not seen. It is not seen which had been desired by a thousand maids and a thousand lovers.
So passes, at the passing of a day,
Of mortal life the flower and the green.
April cannot be halted nor return
To flower again, to green a second spring.
Gather we roses handsome as the morn
Of this our day, which soon will lose its calm,