A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

"Fra cavalier magnanimi e cortesi
Risplende il Manso."

Marino did not leave his praises unsung, and Milton addressed him in one of his finest Latin poems. He must have had striking qualities to endear him to men so eminent and so different; but his biography, probably because it was the first, gave rise to many legends which have been repeated down to the present day. He seems to have been somewhat credulous, and to have relied too much on the statements made to him by Tasso himself, without distrusting his informant's wild and heated imagination.

The Abbé Serassi, in his biography published in 1785, did what Manso had neglected to do. He sifted the evidence and examined the documents; and gave to the world a picture much nearer the truth than had yet been presented; but it was reserved for the indefatigable labours of Angelo Solerti to produce a really exhaustive history of the poet.

It must be confessed that in turning from Tasso's life, so full of passion and romance, to his poetry, we experience a certain sense of disappointment. Had he not been so striking an object of sympathy and interest, it may be doubted whether his works would have arrested quite so much attention as they actually did. Considering the varied panorama of life that had been unfolded before him and the mental sufferings he underwent, he does not sound those depths of impassioned meditation that might be expected. What traces there are of them, will be found rather in his letters than in his poems. This fact is very strange and points to the limitations of his talent. He had materials in his life sufficient to inspire him with great lyric poems, and yet we find nothing in his odes, sonnets and madrigals to compare to the finest passages of Petrarch, or of Leopardi, or even of Filicaia. None of his shorter poems impress themselves indelibly on the reader: none glow with the intensity of lyric fire.

Not being able to give him the title of a great lyric poet, we proceed to enquire whether he was a great epic or a great dramatic poet.

His narrative poems are four in number; the Rinaldo, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, and the Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato, a long work in blank verse on the subject of the Creation. His Rinaldo is remarkable because it was written in such early youth; his Gerusalemme Conquistata was admitted even by his admirers to be an utter failure. It has only one striking passage, a prophecy of evil to the house of Bourbon, which seems clearly to foretell the crimes and horrors of the French Revolution, and which deserves to rank among poetical prophecies next to the celebrated prediction of the discovery of America in the tragedy of Medea attributed to Seneca. The Sette Giornate furnished some hints to Milton when he came to the description of the Creation of the World in Paradise Lost. It has, however, no intrinsic merit to recommend it, being heavy and uninteresting to the last degree. These three poems had hardly vitality enough to keep them alive until the close of the Century in which they were written, and to modern readers they are quite dead. And yet the subjects were of sufficient interest to afford brilliant opportunities of displaying the powers of a great writer. We cannot help asking the question, can he be a great poet who allowed such brilliant opportunities to escape?

His pastoral play, Aminta, has much sweetness and freshness of style; his tragedy, Torrismondo, has some touches that lead us to think that under happier circumstances and with a mind less pre-occupied with his own distresses, he might have become a fine dramatist; but the shepherds and nymphs of the Aminta seem vapid and mawkish to readers of the present day; and the Torrismondo has not that convincing power that a tragedy ought to possess.

In all these works, lyric, epic, and dramatic, Tasso's style, though sweet and flowing in the earlier productions, is strangely devoid of originality, and, therefore, of colour; and no writer was more deeply imbued with the conventional phraseology of the poetry of his age. Thought and style are alike devoid of those vivid touches that command admiration and ensure immortality. We are left under the impression that the poet is not fixing all his powers of mind on his verse, and that his attention is largely engaged elsewhere. This absence of full power is the only trace in his poems of the disordered state of his mind. Many poets, whose sanity has never been questioned, have passages far more morbid and eccentric than any that can be found in Tasso's pages. He never indulges in wild flights of fancy, the order of his thoughts is lucidity itself; and there are no incoherent and very few exaggerated metaphors. On the contrary, they would rather gain by a little more irregularity. They are so logically thought out as to become occasionally almost exasperating.

Thus it will be seen that his claims to rank as a great poet rest entirely on the Gerusalemme Liberata.

In considering that celebrated poem, the first thought that must occur to the reader is the extremely happy choice of the subject. It was unhackneyed; it was picturesque; it was noble. We cannot help feeling that Ariosto is sometimes dragged down by the frivolous stories he tells; we cannot help feeling that Tasso is sustained and inspired by the magnificent episodes it is his duty to narrate. He is rather too fond of imitating passages from Homer and Virgil, but such imitation was universal in his day, and in his case it is skilfully executed. The Oriental colouring of the scenes laid in Palestine and Syria is, perhaps, not very vivid, but it is quite as vivid as his contemporaries expected. On the whole it would be harsh to deny that he has done justice to his subject, and in one respect he deserves the highest praise: he imparts a human interest and an air of reality to his characters that cannot be too highly extolled. Ariosto often treats his characters merely as puppets, and is himself the first to laugh at them. Very different is the attitude of Tasso towards his creations. He believes in them with unshaken sincerity, and he loves them because he believes in them. Erminia, Sophronia, Armida, Rinaldo, Goffredo, Tancredi, all stand before us in the life, moving and breathing. As Goethe says, in his play on the subject of Tasso: