This verbal music culminates in the two songs of earthly joy, the chants d'amour, or hymns to pleas ure, sung by Armida's ministers (xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13). Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty, and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights. It remained for Tasso to give that magic of the senses vocal utterance. From the myrtle groves of Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with their penetrative sweetness, their lingering regret, pass into the silence of the soul. It is eminently characteristic of Tasso's mood and age that the melody of both these honeyed songs should thrill with sadness. Nature is at war with honor; youth passes like a flower away; therefore let us love and yield our hearts to pleasure while we can. Sehnsucht, the soul of modern sentiment, the inner core of modern music, makes its entrance into the sphere of art with these two hymns. The division of the mind, wavering between natural impulse and acquired morality, gives the tone of melancholy to the one chant. In the other, the invitation to self-abandonment is mingled with a forecast of old age and death. Only Catullus, in his song to Lesbia, among the ancients touched this note; only Villon, perhaps, in his Ballade of Dead Ladies, touched it among the moderns before Tasso. But it has gone on sounding ever since through centuries which have enjoyed the luxury of grief in music.
If Tancredi be the real hero of the Gerusalemme, Armida is the heroine. The action of the epic follows her movements. She combines the parts of Angelica and Alcina in one that is original and novel. A sorceress, deputed by the powers of hell to defeat the arms of the crusaders, Armida falls herself in love with a Christian champion. Love changes her from a beautiful white witch into a woman.[76] When she meets Rinaldo in the battle, she discharges all her arrows vainly at the man who has deserted her. One by one, they fly and fall; and as they wing their flight, Love wounds her own heart with his shafts:
Scocca I' arco più volte, e non fa piaga
E, mentre ella saetta, amor lei piaga (xx. 65).
Then she turns to die in solitude. Rinaldo follows, and stays her in the suicidal act. Despised and rejected as she is, she cannot hate him. The man she had entangled in her wiles has conquered and subdued her nature. To the now repentant minister of hell he proposes baptism; and Armida consents:
Sì parla, e prega; e i preghi bagna e scalda
Or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri:
Onde, siccome suol nevosa falda
Dov'arde il sole, o tepid' aura spiri,
Così l'ira che in lei parea sì salda,
Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri.
Ecco l'ancilla tua; d'essa a tuo senno
Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).
This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the climax of the Gerusalemme. It is also the climax and conclusion of Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into the truths of human affection. Notice, too, with what audacity Tasso has placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress! Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he assigns the spoils of conquered hell to love triumphant in a woman's breast. Beauty, which in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to apotheosis through affection. In Armida we already surmise das ewig Weibliche of Goethe's Faust, Gretchen saving her lover's soul before Madonna's throne in glory.
What was it, then, that Tasso, this 'child of a later and a colder age,' as Shelley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature? We have seen that the Gerusalemme did not fulfill the promise of heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period. We know that neither the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the interest of posterity. We feel that religious emotion is feeble here, and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and evanescent—un non so che, to use the poet's favorite phrase—which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty. Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment. Unknown to the ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that non so che of modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso's work. The phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere of European feeling. Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase un non so che leaves definition to the instinct of those who feel, but will not risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words. Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind. Classical literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images and conscious thoughts. The mediaeval art of Dante, precisely, mathematically measured, had not felt the need of it. Boccaccio's clear-cut intaglios from life and nature, Petrarch's compassed melodies, Poliziano's polished arabesques, Ariosto's bright and many colored pencilings, were all of them, in all their varied phases of Renaissance expression, distinguished by decision and firmness of drawing. Vagueness, therefore, had hitherto found no place in European poetry or plastic art. But music, the supreme symbol of spiritual infinity in art, was now about to be developed; and the specific touch of Tasso, the musician-poet, upon portraiture and feeling, called forth this quality of vagueness, a vagueness that demanded melody to give what it refused from language to accept. Mendelssohn when some one asked him what is meant by music, replied that it had meanings for his mind more unmistakable than those which words convey; but what these meanings were, he did not or he could not make clear. This certainty of sentiment, seeming vague only because it floats beyond the scope of language in regions of tone and color and emotion, is what Tasso's non so che suggests to those who comprehend. And Tasso, by his frequent appeal to it, by his migration from the plastic into the melodic realm of the poetic art, proved himself the first genuinely sentimental artist of the modern age. It is just this which gave him a wider and more lasting empire over the heart through the next two centuries than that claimed by Ariosto.
It may not be unprofitable to examine in detail Tasso's use of the phrase to which so much importance has been assigned in the foregoing paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia. Sofronia, of all the heroines of the Gerusalemme, is the least interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity and Jesuitical acceptance of martyrdom. Olindo touches the weaker fibers of our sympathy by his feminine devotion to a woman placed above him in the moral scale, whose love he wins by splendid falsehood equal to her own. The episode, entirely idle in the action of the poem, has little to recommend it, if we exclude the traditionally accepted reference to Tasso's love for Leonora d'Este. But when Olindo and Sofronia are standing, back to back, against the stake, Aladino, who has decreed their death by burning, feels his rude bosom touched with sudden pity:
Un non so che d'inusitato e molle
Par che nel duro petto al re trapasse:
Ei presentillo, e si sdegnò; nè voile
Piegarsi, e gli occhi torse, e si ritrasse (ii. 37).
The intrusion of a lyrical emotion, unknown before in the tyrant's breast, against which he contends with anger, and before the force of which he bends, prepares us for the happy dénouement brought about by Clorinda. This vague stirring of the soul, this non so che, this sentiment, is the real agent in Sofronia's release and Olindo's beatification.