In his seventeenth year, therefore, Bernardo placed his son at Padua, to study jurisprudence, as Petrarch and Ariosto had been condemned to do before him, by prudent parents, and like each of those hopeful sons, who were
"born a father's hopes to cross,
And pen a stanza when he should engross,"
Torquato (though it is said that he dutifully and diligently applied with his head to the study of the law) gave his heart and his hand in secret to the unportioned muse. The issue of this affiance, while he was yet embroiled in the nets of legal precedents and practice, was the "Rinaldo" already mentioned, a romantic poem, in twelve cantos. The hero is not his own champion of that name, the glory of his later poems, but one of "the million" that figure in the "Orlando Furioso"—a work which so possessed the mind of young Tasso, while he was at Venice, that he tells us he could not sleep for the fame of Ariosto. This juvenile performance is written more after the manner of that inimitable master than the "Gerusalemme;" but, though deficient in the humour and vivacity which constitute the all-binding and assimilating spell of Ariosto's tissue of episodes, and by which the reader is reconciled to wink at all the author's incongruities and caprices, Tasso's poem, nevertheless, by a more serious kind of magic, laid hold upon public feeling and so happily hit the expiring taste of his countrymen for the extravagances of chivalrous fiction, that where his father, after years of hard toil in the same fields had miscarried, the son, in ten months, achieved a triumph, of which the trophies remain to this day; "Rinaldo" being yet one of the metrical romances which are interwoven with the party coloured staple of Italian literature.
Well might Bernardo be astonished and delighted, yet humbled and chagrined (in some measure), when the manuscript of his son's poem was presented to him, seeing himself already eclipsed in his meridian altitude (which he fondly imagined he had attained in the "Amadigi") by this morning-star of promise just "flaming in the forehead of the orient sky;" and perceiving, as he must have done, that his purpose was for ever thwarted, of placing the boy in that path where fortune scatters her golden apples before the feet of competitors in the race for her favour, rather than indulging them with golden dreams under the shadows of laurels planted by the wayside, the most precious rewards which she bestows on the most successful among poets. The father, however, was too great a lover of song to ruin a good poet in making a bad lawyer, as might have been the case had he persevered in his former views with his son. Wherefore, after some delay, he reluctantly, yet willingly, (a state of mind perfectly possible, though hard to reconcile,) gave his consent to the publication of the "Rinaldo." He who in the letter to his daughter formerly quoted, so tenderly and beautifully anticipated the happiness of being himself, with his very features, perpetuated in her infant progeny, could not but be transported to see himself, with the features of his very soul, perpetuated in the glorious offspring of his son's congenial yet surpassing mind. With a smile and a sigh, therefore, he permitted the poem to appear, surrendering at the same time his cherished expectation of seeing that son as eminent in the law as he was now likely to be in that which is remotest from law practice and law profits. "Let who will make the laws," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "let me make the songs of a people, and by these I will govern them." Tasso's songs have assuredly had larger dominion, and had deeper, wider, more enduring influence in modifying the subsequent character of his countrymen than any legislative enactments, in which it may be imagined that he would never have been concerned, could have exercised. But then he might have enriched and ennobled himself; he might have escaped most of the calamities which hunted him to death in the midst of life; and he might not only have been happier himself, but a more useful member of that society in which he was born, which he served in his day, and in which he died without any monument except some splendid sculpture to record his name. It came otherwise to pass; and whether the world has been made better or worse by his labours, it must be acknowledged that the fame which he sought, and for which he sacrificed all beside, was dearly purchased to himself by the sufferings which it cost him to win. It is reported that when Bernardo remonstrated with him on his indiscreet preference of philosophy (for with him philosophy and poetry were identified) to jurisprudence, and angrily demanded, "What has your philosophy done for you?" he replied, "It has taught me to bear with meekness the reproofs of a father."
The appearance of Torquato's "Rinaldo" was not only the dawn of his own day of glory, but the dawn of a new day in the literature of his country. The age of absolute romance was succeeded by one of transition in public taste, during which what was most truly wonderful and meritoriously captivating in the wild fictions of knight-errantry was engrafted upon a stock of classical invention, design, and execution. This was in fact the nearest recurrence that could be made in epic poetry to the models of the ancients,—for the mythological machinery of Greece and Rome could not again be revived in poetry any more than in religion; Jupiter could never again resume his thunder and his throne; Neptune his trident; Pallas her ægis, or Venus her cestus; nor could the supernatural interposition of the supreme God, the agency of angels and sainted spirits, or of Saturn and his legions, be extensively employed (without constructive irreverence, not to say rank blasphemy) as auxiliaries in heroic fable, disguised as true history, or true history disguised as heroic fable. Tasso, Marino, Camoëns, and Milton have indeed presumed upon the perilous experiment of enlisting the armies of heaven and hell in conflict with each other, and intermeddling with earthly affairs; yet, with the exception of our countryman—and he would be a bold critic who should dare to arraign him for impiety in the use of what nothing but the most signal, unexampled, and inimitable felicity of success could justify,—it may be added, that he would be a critic not less bold, who, as a believer in the Christian faith, should venture to defend even Milton to the extent in which he has exercised this questionable, though hitherto unlitigated, license of fiction;—with the exception of our countryman, the authors aforenamed have, for the most part, grievously miscarried in the management of their agents of this class, whether good or evil, these being among the most indifferent and ineffective personages in their respective poems. Epic poetry, indeed, either upon classic or romantic precedent, may be said to have become extinct from the time of Tasso. "Paradise Lost" cannot be classed with either; he having achieved the only work of the kind, which, being neither the one nor the other, but combining the merits of each, touched the point beyond which improvement could not be carried. He may be said to have lived in the last age in which supernatural agents and miraculous interventions could be successfully introduced into narrative verse, as being consistent with popular credulity or superstitious belief—an absolutely indispensable requisite for the employment of such means to illustrate human affairs. For example, a poem equal to Homers or Ariosto's, written now on the plan, and with the gods of the one or the enchantments of the other, would be insufferable: no power of genius could create an interest in behalf of Apollo and Venus, no longer believed in by the poet or by his readers; nor would the achievements of giants and witches, if celebrated by one born in this "age of reason," find mercy from criticism, or indulgence even from the vulgar students of our penny literature. Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and the monstrosities of the German drama, have been long ago forgotten; the "Michael Scott" of the great minstrel "of that ilk!" alone keeps his ground; but all the other preternatural machines of the same creative hand would have perished utterly, had they not been associated with records of the doings and sufferings of beings of flesh and blood like ourselves, though existing in a state of semi-barbarous society exceedingly different from our own.
The "Rinaldo" was the first form of the abstract conception of a regular poem, at once to rival Virgil and Ariosto, which originated in the mind of Torquato while yet a youth of seventeen, but was not wholly developed till, at twice that age, he had produced the "Gerusalemme Liberata." All the characteristics of his peculiar genius are perceptible in the incidents, style, embellishments, and conduct of this juvenile essay; which, contrasted with the matured form and perfect majesty of that later offspring of his genius, is, as his own Gabriel, sent to comfort Godfrey, at the opening of the siege of Jerusalem:—take the image in Fairfax's version,—
"A stripling seem'd he, thrice five winter's old,
And radiant beams adorn'd his locks of gold,"—
compared with Milton's "Raphael," "in prime of manhood, where youth ended," alighting on the eastern cliff of Paradise, where,—
"like Maia's son he stood,
And shook his wings, that heavenly fragrance fill'd
The circuit wide."[40]