The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well justified, though for different reasons. The Jerusalem Delivered has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into the distance, the life-large figures compressed into brilliant miniatures, so clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified as well as lessened, their colours being now closer and brighter, the shadows and trivial features no longer visible.” Carlyle was kinder and less critical than when he classed the Jerusalem Delivered with the Nibelungen Lied—for Dresden china shepherdesses are not more unlike the statues of Michelangelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriemhilda or Hagen von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up the general impression left by the poem, as of a small, graceful, and, in spite of its great historical original, unimportant series of events transacting itself without passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines. We never hear the “dreadful clamour” of battle, and the duels of the champions smack of the school of arms, for Tasso, though no fighter, was an accomplished swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty, and the tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet and the man of letters, though his fame is less in the world than it was, Tasso must always be admirable, because he was a thorough workman. He was the poet of a decline. The choice of words, the use of the file, the avoidance of improprieties of metre, are more with him than inspiration. But he did at least reap the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for the language, and he left a finished example of the “learned” poetry of Southern Europe in the later sixteenth century.
Giordano Bruno.
It would tax the power of the greatest creative dramatist to draw two conceivable human beings who should differ so widely as Tasso and his only Italian contemporary who can be said to stand on a corresponding level of genius—Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title which he habitually used, was probably the more considerable man of the two in intrinsic power, while both his life and his character are more interesting. But then he is incomparably more difficult to understand. I cannot profess to deal with what, to the majority of those who have paid much attention to his work, is most valuable in him—his philosophic ideas, and the influence he may have had on later thinkers. His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of a certain stamp of character.[119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of Genoa. This was in 1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life. His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons, thence to Toulouse, Paris, England, once more to Paris, and from thence to Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the authorities. He defended the doctrines of Copernicus, and he expounded, more or less obscurely, his doctrines on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had an “art of memory” which was founded upon, or was an adaptation of, the curious reasoning machine invented by Raymond Lully, the Catalan scholastic and mystic of the thirteenth century. Even if I could profess to understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would not be the place to expound them. What does appear very clearly is, that he was a man of extreme and passionate arrogance. The doctrine he most certainly held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even a glimpse of the only important truths, and that official teachers who did not accept him at his own valuation were pigs, dogs, brutes, and beasts. He poured these epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford, whither he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was kind to him, and on whom he may have had some influence. The only place in which he escaped a violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg. Even there he could not rest, and he committed himself to a public and sweeping denunciation of the Papacy. At last he received an invitation from a Venetian magnifico of the house of Mocenigo to come and be his teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno’s “art of memory,” and probably also believed him to be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on the hopeless errand of making Mocenigo so wise that the Council of Ten would no longer be able to treat him as a person of no importance. Within a very few months this strange bargain bore its fruit. The magnifico discovered that he was no wiser than before, and that so far from being richer, he had given money to the Nolan for which no equivalent had been returned. He accused his teacher of being a cheat; and Bruno, whose temper had never been under restraint, answered, with more truth than prudence, that his employer was a fool. Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition. The Pope claimed him, and after some demur he was surrendered by the Serene Republic. On his trial before the Inquisition Bruno protested that he was a loyal son of the Church, and that if he had spoken heresy it was when he was speaking philosophically, and not theologically. The distinction would not serve, and he was condemned to death. Whether he was burnt in the body or only in effigy has been disputed. The balance of evidence is in favour of the contention that he actually suffered. In that case the date of his death is 1599.
Literary character of his work.
Some anti-clerical writers on the Continent, and a few Englishmen who sympathise with them, have been attracted to Bruno because they can use his name as a weapon in their warfare with ecclesiastical authority. It is needless to add that numbers quote him as an example of papal tyranny who have never made the certainly not inconsiderable effort required to read any one of his treatises. We can speak of him here only as a man of letters, and can put aside his Latin treatises and purely philosophic work. His wandering life, and perhaps the restless explosive nature of the man, made it impossible for him to produce books on a large scale. Bruno was essentially a writer of pamphlets, which he produced as opportunity served. Three of these may be mentioned here as especially characteristic of the Nolan’s genius and spirit—La Cena del le Ceneri (‘The Ash Wednesday Supper’), dedicated to Castelnau de Mauvissière, French ambassador in London; the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (‘The Driving out of the Triumphant Beast’); and Gli Eroici Furori (‘The Heroic Furies’), the latter two dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue, and the last-named contains much verse. Although he excuses himself for part of what appears in Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante by saying that it is the personages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue form (the most difficult perhaps of all in literature) does not appear to me to be well managed. There is too much of the Nolan, and the other personages are apt to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him, or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this in itself is typical of the author. The dialogues are the literary expression of the very remarkable human being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic and fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into rockets of rhetoric, while the epithets fly out in sheets as of sparks from an anvil. What he means or is endeavouring to prove is far from being always clear, not because his language is obscure, for on the contrary his sentences are commonly simple enough, but because there was always far more passion and emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power. The title of his dialogues, ‘The Heroic Furies,’ is in a way a description of his whole work. There is in him a constant heroic fury of effort towards some vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force and greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all his smoky obscurity there is a very real fire in Giordano Bruno, which finds its best expression in verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He was a real Faust, who strove to grasp—
“Was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält;”
who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified an illimitable intellectual arrogance, often superbly expressed, by his imaginary discovery.
The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their contemporaries is very great. There was abundant interest of a kind in literary matters, there was no want of criticism, and the Academies were active. The long controversy over the Jerusalem in which Tasso allowed himself to be entangled is, if valuable for nothing else, at least a proof that Italians read poetry, and could talk about it.[120] What they could not at this period do was to produce anything original and valuable—with the exception of Tasso himself, and of Bruno. The once famous Pastor Fido of Giambattista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible example of what may happen to a literature when its writers have become extremely cultivated in all that is mere matter of language, but have unfortunately nothing to say—or, if they have something to say, are cowed into insignificance by the fear of compromising themselves.[121]
Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous, and afflicted by a vanity which caused him to be for ever comparing himself to Tasso, and complaining of his contemporary’s greater fame, but by no means without parts or knowledge. Yet his Pastor Fido is a mere echo of the Aminta. Guarini’s play—if play it can be called—was first acted at Turin in 1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From the Aminta, and through the Pastor Fido, came the line of the Italian literary opera of later times. The verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat sensual lusciousness—but withal it is nerveless and imitative.