It is not practicable, in this succinct memoir, to trace the sufferer through all the details which have been recorded of his miseries from penury, pride, ambition, and disappointment, the wrongs inflicted on him by patrons and rivals, and above all, those growing symptoms of a mind diseased, occasioning suspicions, jealousies, misunderstandings, and quarrels with his friends and contemporaries; while that insidious malady, which no medicine can reach, was making its unchecked ravages upon his constitution, and inveterately fixing upon him its evil influences, so that, with brief and distant lucid intervals, his remaining days were passed in horror and despondency, whether amidst the darkness of the dungeons of Ferrara, or wandering amidst the broad sunshine on foot, and depending for bread and shelter upon casual hospitality, from province to province throughout Italy. Imagining that his enemies—enemies as imaginary, in this case, as were his fears of them—had accused him to Alfonso of treason, and to the pope of heresy, he at length grew so outrageous, that, one day, for some unaccountable provocation, he drew a dagger upon a servant, and assaulted him in an apartment of the duchess of Urbino. Being instantly disarmed, he was confined, by order of the duke, within the precincts of the palace. Here, when for the first time he found himself a prisoner, he was overwhelmed with anguish, and bitterly bewailed his fate. As soon as he could again command his passion, he wrote a very penitential letter to Alfonso, suing for pardon and release. Both were granted to him; and he was removed, under the eye of the duke himself, to the palace of Belriguardo, in the country, that he might recover his health and spirits, amidst scenes and with the society in which he had formerly delighted to be placed. With a delicate regard to one of his most grievous temptations—that he had been guilty of heresy, Alfonso introduced to him the head of the holy inquisition at Ferrara, who, after duly examining him, fully absolved him from all imputations of the kind, and assured him that he was yet a good catholic. Not contented with this, he suddenly left Belriguardo, and took refuge in a convent of St. Francis, from which he sent word to his patron, that as soon as he should be sufficiently restored he intended to enter himself among the fraternity. But nothing could calm the troubled waters of his mind; he still conceived himself under the displeasure of the duke, and that his acquittal by the inquisitor was invalid. In this turmoil of doubts and self-reproaches, he importuned Alfonso and the duchess of Urbino with letters concerning his imaginary offences, and imploring comfort and assurance which they could not give, because he would not receive. With Leonora he appears never to have had that freedom and frequency of correspondence which he had hitherto been permitted to hold with her elder sister. Whether this be in favour of his presumed passion or not must be left to those who are skilled in the mysteries of love-making between unequal parties. On this subject, as on the poet's strange melancholy, and the severity with which it was visited by his patron, whether for the punishment of the lover or the cure of the maniac, it would be futile to argue here. After all the explanation and mystification by Tasso's biographers, the general impression has been, is, and probably will remain, that his love for Leonora was real; that his imprisonment was vindictive on the part of her brother, and that his frenzy was the effect of hopeless passion and impotent resentment against oppression. "Historians," says Ugo Foscolo, "will be ever embarrassed to explain aright the reasons of Tasso's imprisonment: it is involved in the same obscurity as the exile of Ovid. Both were among those thunder-strokes that despotism darts forth. In crushing their victims they terrified them, and reduced spectators to silence. There are incidents in courts, that, although known to many persons, remain in eternal oblivion—contemporaries dare not reveal, and posterity can only divine them."
In the following summer, Tasso, bewildered and desperate, and not knowing whither to turn, or in whom to confide, at length fled secretly from Ferrara to visit his sister at Torrento, whom he had not seen since they were children together. She was now a widow, the mother of two sons, and dependent upon her uncles, who still withheld her mother's dowry, for the means of subsistence. With that caution to do every thing by stealth, which characterises the hallucination of one who fancies all the world conspiring to do him harm, he presented himself before her in the habit of a shepherd, affecting to be the bearer of certain letters from himself. He found her alone; her children being absent. The letters represented her brother at Ferrara as surrounded by enemies, and in the most imminent danger of his life, unless she interposed in his behalf, and rescued him from their machinations. When she had read the distressing intelligence, she implored the supposed messenger to tell her all, the worst, at once. He answered by a recital of miseries so aggravated, in a tone so earnest and impassioned, that, whether she suspected him or not, she fainted with alarm. When she had been sufficiently recovered, the cunning minstrel changed the hand that played upon her, like Timotheus on his harp, and, from excess of pity for her brother's sufferings, gently awoke all her tenderness of affection, by old and beautiful recollections of former days, and hopes yet possible to be realised in years to come. At length, when she was well prepared, he discovered himself fully to her, and they were brother and sister again in a moment, and thenceforth to the end of life. With her he remained in comparative tranquillity for several months, being all the while unacknowledged in the neighbourhood, except as Cornelia's cousin from Bergamo, who, coming to Rome, had availed himself of the opportunity to visit her.
But, as might be expected, his self-tormenting mind became unquiet amidst scenes of repose, which, from day to day, delighted him at first, but, from day to day, presenting little change of aspect or incident, he sighed again for Ferrara, choosing rather the agony of life to that rest which was no longer supportable. Thither, then, he returned, on the assurance of pardon from the duke, and the restoration of his papers. It was soon after his arrival, that an act of indiscretion attributed to him by some, and denied by others of his biographers, is said to have caused him to be put in ward as a person of deranged intellect. Being in company with Alfonso and his sisters, in the presence of the court, in reply to a question from Leonora, Tasso gave her an involuntary salute, their faces being so near together that he felt attraction to be irresistible. The duke, astonished and indignant, turned to his attendants and exclaimed, "See to what a lamentable condition this great man has been brought by the loss of his reason!" But the date of this circumstance happens to be as disputable as the fact; for it is certain that the poet had not long resided at Ferrara, when, still unsatisfied with the duke's conduct towards him, he again withdrew from the city, and successively sought temporary refuge at Mantua, Urbino, Florence, Padua, Turin, and Venice. Being ill at ease every where, by a fatality of instinct, as it might be deemed, he returned to Ferrara, and thence departed no more till after a confinement of seven years. For, imagining himself coldly received at court, and unworthily repulsed when he sought an audience, he vented his anguish of disappointment in bitter invectives against the duke, who, amidst the festivities of his new nuptials with a young bride, his third wife, a daughter of the duke of Mantua, was little inclined to hearken to the complaints and supplications of one whom he had long looked upon as insane. On this ground he was committed to St. Anne's hospital, as a lunatic, which in those days of medical ignorance of the proper treatment of such patients was to be punished as a criminal for his misfortune. The following extract must stand in place of multifarious details of the poet's feelings under this long restraint. His imprisonment commenced in March, 1579. Soon afterwards he thus expressed himself in a letter to his friend Scipio Gonzaga:—
"Ah me! I had intended to compose two heroic poems of noble argument, and four tragedies, of which I had contrived the plots. Many works in prose also, on the most exalted and useful subjects, I had contemplated; purposing so to unite philosophy and eloquence, that I might leave an eternal monument to my memory in the world. Alas! I hoped to close my life with glory and renown, but now, borne down under the load of my misfortunes, I have lost all prospect of fame and distinction. Indeed I should consider myself abundantly happy, if, without suspicion, I could but quench the thirst with which I am tormented; and if, as one of the multitude, I could lead a life of freedom in some poor cottage, if not in health, which I can no longer be, yet exempt from this anguish. If I were not honoured, it would be enough for me not to be abominated; and if I could not live like men, I might at least quench the thirst that consumes me, like the brutes which freely drink from stream and fountain. Nor do I fear so much the vastness as the duration of this calamity; and the thought of this is horrible to me, especially as in this place I can neither write nor study. The dread, too, of perpetual imprisonment increases my melancholy, and the indignities which I suffer exasperate it; while the squalor of my beard, my hair, and my dress, the sordidness and the filth of the place, exceedingly annoy me. But, above all, I am afflicted by solitude, my cruel and natural enemy; which; even in my best state; was sometimes so distressing, that often, at the most unseasonable hours, I have gone in search of company. Sure I am, that if she who so little has corresponded to my attachment, if she saw me in such a condition; and in such misery, she would have some compassion upon me."
Though such statements must be received with some allowance for the power of self-torturing which he possessed in no small degree, and exercised with as little forbearance as though he were his own most implacable enemy, yet, according to Tasso's representation, the treatment which he experienced under the hands of his brother-poet, Agostino Morti, formerly a disciple of Ariosto, the keeper of the hospital, was almost as bad as that which he received at his own. He says that by this man he was not allowed the necessaries of life, the medicines which his bodily disease required, nor the spiritual consolations which his heart-sickness needed: moreover, that his meditations were disturbed by the inmates of the house, so that he could not proceed with the preparation of his works for the press; but above all, that he was under the power of witchcraft, Morti being in league with certain magicians to destroy him by enchantments; and as this was a capital crime, he threatens to accuse the keeper to the duke.[41] His sonnets to the cats of the hospital, imploring them to lend him the light of their eyes to write by, are specimens of that kind of mirth which suits and sets off melancholy, in a certain "humorous sadness." Their genuineness, however, is not certain, and they are hardly translatable.
Whatever were the actual circumstances of Tasso's mental alienation and corporal sufferings from disease or ill usage, his life, from the period of his first imprisonment, was to himself like one of the opium-eater's dreams—splendours and horrors, alternations of agony and rapture, changes sudden, frequent, and strangely contrasted: he inhabited a world of unrealities, of which the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, were the more real in proportion as they were ideal, and therefore incurable; acting upon the soul itself like that effect upon the bodily senses, excruciatingly susceptible of impressions of pain, so happily imagined, and not less felicitously expressed by the most polished of our own poets:—
"Say what their use, were finer optics given?
To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven;
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,
To smart and agonise at every pore;
Or, quick effluvia darting through the brain,
Die of a rose in aromatic pain;
If nature thunder'd in his opening ears,
And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres.
How would he wish that heaven had left him still
The whispering zephyr and the purling rill."
POPE's Essay on Man, Epist. I.
And such a being, too exquisitely sensitive, is every poet, whose imagination or whose passion overmasters his reason and his judgment. Tasso was eminently such—a poet in every thing, and all life long.
Meanwhile editions of his "Gerusalemme" were multiplying throughout Italy, and beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees; while the mind that conceived and produced it was wandering, like a lost star through the infinity of space, unaccompanied by any kindred planet, and unattracted by any parent sun; and the poet himself—he whom monarchs had delighted to honour, the associate of sovereigns, who had been the favourite of princesses, and the admiration or the envy of the highest intellects of his age—was treated as a brute, out of whose living frame the rational soul had departed, and whose animal appetites were to be subdued by severe abstinence, or controlled by harsh discipline.