"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
Among real "curiosities of literature" there yet remain copies of Dante and Petrarch, with marginal notes in Torquato's handwriting, which prove with what microscopic minuteness he examined and studied the productions of those masters of that language, to which he himself was destined to give consummate grace as well as power of expression—the strength of Dante, modified from the muscular proportions of Hercules to those of the fine-limbed Apollo,—the delicacy of Petrarch veiled, like the Medicean Venus, in the mantle of Minerva. It may here be noticed, that Tasso was no more an expert penman than a fluent speaker; his manuscripts, according to his own acknowledgment, being very indifferently recommended either by the fashion of the letters, or the correctness of the spelling. The numberless erasures, interpolations, and new readings, with which many of his best works, preserved in the library of the house of Este, are disfigured to the eye, are interesting marks of that process of elaboration by which he slowly but as effectually brought out all the hidden beauty of his thoughts, as though they had been suddenly conceived and perfectly expressed in the ardour of inspiration.
During their residence at Venice, Torquato was much employed by his father in transcribing his own multitudinous poems and letters, as well as in preparing for the press the enormous length of the "Amadigi." By this exercise the son himself became daily more familiarised with the means and artifices by which those who excel others in the productions of their genius, form their peculiar style according to their peculiar standard of intellect, and identify their whole cast of thinking with their whole structure of language. To put a passage of an eloquent author to the nicest test of touch (if the expression may be allowed for the intercourse of mind with mind, in the communication and reception of ideas splendidly conceived and felicitously bodied forth by the one, and by degrees only apprehended by the other,)—to put to the nicest test of touch, as it were, any eloquent passage of poet or orator, let the admirer copy it out at length, and he will find that the progress of mind, hand, and eye, going all together, and through every part, will give him the most distinct possible possession of the whole in its full proportion, minutest details, and utmost effect.
But while thus the amanuensis of his father, Torquato was not less assiduously cultivating his own talents, and meditating the composition already alluded to, in which he was soon not only to rival the former, but even while a boy, and upon the enchanted ground of romance itself, to prove a greater magician than he. This the sudden and passionate admiration with which his "Rinaldo" was hailed throughout Italy, and beyond the Alps and Pyrenees, irreversibly established. The failure of Bernardo's hopes, in the neglect with which both sovereign princes and the reading public, after the first effervescence of applause, treated his "Amadigi," was nearly contemporaneous with the first triumph of his more fortunate son, who, so far as fame could gratify or reward his literary labours, may be said to have succeeded in all that he attempted, either in prose and verse, thenceforward, though some of his performances had but an ephemeral popularity, being welcomed at first, and afterwards formally honoured from the courtesy due to their author, and the measure of kindred excellence by which they were all allied to the happier offspring of his too prolific mind. Bernardo, after he found that the stupendous monument of labour in vain, which he had spent so many years in accumulating, was likely to be left to moulder away and fall of itself into oblivion,—having at its first appearance excited neither enough of envy or admiration to render it extensively attractive to public curiosity,—lay down in despondency at its base, amidst his perished hopes; and though he made several attempts afterwards to rise, these were all equally unavailing, and the latest solace of his life was the contemplation of that glory descending upon his son which had departed from him.
In considering the fate, by a natural death (so to express it), after a date somewhat longer than that of a natural life, of those who have been renowned in their own age, but have dwindled into insignificance, or become utterly extinct in that which followed, it may be said of the far greater number of those who flourish among contemporaries, not, indeed, that they,
"are born to blush unseen,
And waste their sweetness on the desert air,"
but that they are flowers which bloom in their season, and charm with their fragrance the passers by of one generation, then disappear, and are remembered no more. This is the order of Providence, and it is wise and good; for were the Almighty less liberal of his gifts, though the possessors being "few and far between" might be more admired and longer, the world would be less benefited than by that perpetual succession and supply (according to the demand for literature) of minds worthy, perhaps, of any age, but formed peculiarly to suit the taste, the manners, and the society of their own. Among Chalmers' "English Poets," for example, how many names, once illustrious, now merely catalogued, are prefixed to works, unread though unforgotten, on which talents as diversified and as well cultivated as the circumstances of the times would allow were painfully expended, to delight and improve mankind; each of whose possessors hoped, besides serving his own generation, to leave something behind which the world would not willingly let die. Yet it may be questioned whether some of these, had they lived in other periods, or under different orders of things, might not have taken far higher rank among the candidates for fame, and established permanent claims to the veneration of posterity. Is not great genius, as we call it, when fortunately developed, and favoured by many contingencies, without which it never would have been so developed, more common than is generally imagined? Is there not at all times and every where a class of intelligences which may be trained up to become generals and captains in literature, in comparison with the rank and file out of which they may be called by peculiar events in their own or their nation's history, and without which they could not have risen above the ordinary state of their less distinguished, but, perhaps, equally capable companions; as the working bees in a hive, as some naturalists tell us, when their queen is lost or taken away from the little community, by a particular regimen, may be nourished up into queens, and from labourers become perpetuators of the race? There seems some probability for this hypothesis, fanciful as it may be deemed, because in all extraordinary emergencies, whether in the world of politics or of literature, minds of the first order are invariably brought into activity from the motives, the means, and the opportunities then afforded to them, though they could never have risen above the depression, mediocrity, or neutral indifference to which they were born, in which they had long lived, and must assuredly have died, had it not been for those apparently accidental opportunities which gave them distinction and pre-eminence, by a change in themselves resembling a new creation, but in reality only an awakening of latent powers.
While Torquato was thus continually giving new pledges, and redeeming old ones of equal lustre, or surpassing the proudest names in his country's literature, the old man, from bitter but unprofitable experience as regarded himself, having proved the precariousness of the favour of princes, and the vanity of expecting fortune to follow fame in verse, determined to indemnify his son for the loss of both his parents' property by bringing him up to a profession in which wealth and honour might more readily be acquired by common industry than by idly looking for the golden rewards of genius at the hands either of aristocratic patrons, who bestow them as bounties, or of the multitude that compose the public, and who care little about the good or ill fare of those on whom their transient applauses are lavished.
"So praisen babes the peacock's spotted trayne,
And wondren at bright Argus' golden eye:
But who rewardes him e'er the more for thy,
Or feedes him once the fuller by a graine?"
SPENSER, Ecl. X.