A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

Whatever may have been his motives, he wrote again and again to Alfonso and the Princesses for pardon for his errors and for permission to return. Eleonora alone answered him, and her reply was not encouraging. The mortification of being repulsed was doubtless intolerable to his proud spirit. He deserted Sorrento and the sister whose affection he should have valued above all the favours of princes. He went straight to Ferrara, but the doors of the Palace were barred against him, and to add to his afflictions, the Duke refused to allow his manuscripts to be given up to him. He was lonely and destitute, and the bitterness of his fall was intensified by the jeers of those who, on the very spot of his disgrace, had envied him the brilliancy of his triumph. Without a morsel of bread to eat, or a roof under which to take shelter, he sold some valuable trinkets which had been given to him in happier days by the Princess Lucrezia, and with the proceeds he made his way through Mantua and Padua to Venice.

In these towns he seems to have been received with the consideration due to his poetical renown; but still the painful question as to where he should find a permanent home occurred to him in moments of anxiety and gloom. Strange to say, help came to him from an unexpected quarter. The Duke of Urbino's marriage with the Princess Lucrezia had turned out most unhappily, and the couple were now separated. It probably occurred to the Duke that the best way of annoying the House of Este would be to show favour to the poet who had been expelled from Ferrara in such deep disgrace, and Tasso owed to rancour and resentment that temporary respite from misfortune which he might have implored in vain from esteem and humanity.

The Duke in time wearied of the capricious and irritable poet, and Tasso found it expedient to remove to Turin. He received no countenance from the House of Savoy, and again his evil star led him to the Court of Ferrara.

In the month of February, 1579, he returned to Ferrara when it was at its gayest, on the occasion of the Duke's marriage to Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua. But Tasso was looked upon with aversion as an intruder. He wearied those who did not want to see him with long stories of his grievances, and with bitter invectives at princely ingratitude. These invectives waxed fiercer, until, after a culmination of insane violence, the Duke's patience was exhausted, and he had the unhappy poet arrested and thrown into a cell in the madhouse of Ferrara.

Here Tasso languished for more than seven years, until July, 1586. The most zealous admirers of the poet cannot deny that he brought this terrible catastrophe upon himself. The Duke cannot be blamed for having ordered his incarceration; indeed, in the frenzied condition of his mind at the time of arrest, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to him. If not placed under restraint, he might have done himself an injury, or he might even have attacked others. If he had been held in captivity for some weeks, or even months, until the paroxysm of his frenzy had spent itself, the Duke would not have incurred the odium which subsequently blackened his memory. But the peculiar hardship of Tasso's imprisonment was its long duration. A short period of restraint might actually have been beneficial, but seven years of gloomy captivity aggravated the malady which they were intended to cure, and it is no wonder that the patient subsided from wild excitability into sullen despair.

It is due to his gaolers to say that he was not treated with the inhumanity popularly supposed. Visitors were admitted into his presence, he was allowed occasionally to take walks in the town of Ferrara and the neighbourhood; his manuscripts were restored to him; he was at liberty to receive the letters of his friends, and to beguile with composition the weary hours of captivity. But still the galling fact remained that he was a prisoner, and a mind naturally prone to melancholy was still more darkened by contrasting the stern reality with the brilliant hopes fostered by the triumphs of his youth. He wrote to many of the nobles and princes of Italy, imploring them to use their influence to obtain his release. These letters do not seem to have been either intercepted or delayed. Strong representations were undoubtedly made to the Court of Ferrara to obtain the liberation of one so gifted and so unfortunate. Unhappily for his credit and honour, Alfonso proved inflexible, and what was originally salutary discipline became at last detestable tyranny.

Many different opinions were expressed as to whether Tasso was really insane. Montaigne, who was travelling in Italy at the time of his incarceration, visited him in his cell and left a pitiable description of the apathetic misery in which he found him, as if his powers of endurance were exhausted by suffering, and nothing but the stupor of despair remained. Others pointed to the poems, the essays, the letters he wrote in captivity, and asked in indignant tones whether the author of compositions so pregnant with thought and so perfect in diction could possibly be insane? Peculiar, he undoubtedly was; but he had expiated his errors by severe suffering, and was it not reasonable to suppose that he had learnt a salutary lesson, and would not, if restored to freedom, repeat the regrettable follies of the past?

This consideration, doubtless, after the lapse of so many years, inclined Alfonso to clemency, and when his brother-in-law, Vincenzo Gonzaga, interceded for the luckless poet, he did not meet with the harsh refusal given to others, but was able to boast that he alone of so many petitioners had obtained Tasso's release.

The door of the cell where the author of the Gerusalemme had languished for so many years was opened, and he was free to go wherever he liked. As may be imagined, he was cured of his wish to figure at the Court of Ferrara, and he left the inhospitable dominions, never to return.

Vincenzo Gonzaga took him to Mantua, where he passed the time immediately following his release. But the re-action, after so long a period of wretchedness, was too trying for his enfeebled frame. He forsook the brilliant circles of Mantua for a quieter retreat at Bergamo with some of his relatives. Here he finished his tragedy of Torrismondo, begun many years previously, but thrown aside, at first because he was engaged on the arduous task of his great epic, and then because his own life drifted into a tragedy far transcending the mimic sorrows of the stage.