The master word, the magic word of Tasso's sentiment, is uttered at this moment of illusion. The poet has no key to mysteries locked up within the human breast more powerful than this indefinite un non so che.
Enough has been said to show how Tasso used the potent spell of vagueness, when he found himself in front of supreme situations. This is in truth the secret of his mastery over sentiment, the spell whereby he brings nature and night, the immense solitudes of deserts, the darkness of forests, the wailings of the winds and the plangent litanies of sea-waves into accord with overstrained humanity. It was a great discovery; by right of it Tasso proved himself the poet of the coming age.
When the Gerusalemme was completed, Tasso had done his best work as a poet. The misfortunes which began to gather round him in his thirty-first year, made him well-nigh indifferent to the fate of the poem which had drained his life-force, and from which he had expected so much glory. It was published without his permission or supervision. He, meanwhile, in the prison of S. Anna, turned his attention to prose composition. The long series of dialogues, with which he occupied the irksome leisure of seven years, interesting as they are in matter and genial in style, indicate that the poet was now in abeyance. It remained to be seen whether inspiration would revive with freedom. No sooner were the bolts withdrawn than his genius essayed a fresh flight. He had long meditated the composition of a tragedy, and had already written some scenes. At Mantua in 1586-7 this work took the form of Torrismondo. It cannot be called a great drama, for it belongs to the rigid declamatory species of Italian tragedy; and Tasso's genius was romantic, idyllic, elegiac, anything but genuinely tragic. Yet the style is eminent for no bility and purity. Just as the Aminta showed how unaffected Tasso could be when writing without preconceived theories of heightened diction, so the Torrismondo displays an unstrained dignity of simple dialogue. It testifies to the plasticity of language in the hands of a master, who deliberately chose and sustained different styles in different species of poetry, and makes us regret that he should have formed his epic manner upon so artificial a type. The last chorus of Torrismondo deserves to be mentioned as a perfect example of Tasso's melancholy elegiac pathos.
Meanwhile he began to be dissatisfied with the Gerusalemme, and in 1588 he resolved upon remodeling his masterpiece. The real vitality of that poem was, as we have seen, in its romance. But Tasso thought otherwise. During the fourteen years which elapsed since its completion, the poet's youthful fervor had been gradually fading out. Inspiration yielded to criticism; piety succeeded to sentiment and enthusiasm for art. Therefore, in this later phase of his maturity, with powers impaired by prolonged sufferings and wretched health, tormented by religious scruples and vague persistent fear, he determined to eliminate the romance from the epic, to render its unity of theme more rigorous, and to concentrate attention upon the serious aspects of the subject. The result of this plan, pursued through five years of wandering, was the Gerusalemme Conquistata, a poem which the world has willingly let die, in which the style of the Gerusalemme Liberata is worsened, and which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what was immortal in Tasso's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out. A further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem upon the Creation of the World, called Le Sette Giornate. Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of Tasso, it would not be mentioned by posterity.
Tasso has already occupied us through two chapters. Before passing onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repetition, some of the salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his personal appearance nothing has hitherto been said. 'Tasso was tall, well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard were of a light-brown color. His head was large, forehead broad and square, eyebrows dark, eyes large, lively and blue, nose large and curved toward the mouth, lips thin and pale.' So writes Manso, the poet's friend and biographer, adding: 'His voice was clear and sonorous; but he read his poems badly, because of a slight impediment in his speech, and because he was short-sighted.' I know not whether I am justified in drawing from this description the conclusion that Tasso was, physically, a man of mixed lymphatic and melancholic temperament, of more than ordinary sensitiveness. Imperfection, at any rate, is indicated by the thin pale lips, the incoherent utterance and the uncertain vision to which his friend in faithfulness bears witness. Of painted portraits representing Tasso in later life there are many; but most of these seem to be based upon the mask taken from his face after death, which still exists at S. Onofrio. Twenty-one years ago I gazed upon this mask, before I knew then more than every schoolboy knows of Tasso's life and writings. This is what I wrote about it in my Roman diary: 'The face is mild and weak, especially in the thin short chin and feeble mouth.[77] The forehead round, and ample in proportion to the other features. The eyes are small, but this may be due to the contraction of death. The mouth is almost vulgar, very flat in the upper lip; but this also ought perhaps to be attributed to the relaxation of tissue by death.
Tasso was constitutionally inclined to pensive moods. His outlook over life was melancholy.[78]
The tone of his literary work, whether in prose or poetry, is elegiac—musically, often querulously plaintive. There rests a shadow of dejection over all he wrote and thought and acted. Yet he was finely sensitive to pleasure, thrillingly alive to sentimental beauty.[79] Though the man lived purely, untainted by the license of the age, his genius soared highest when he sang some soft luxurious strain of love. He was wholly deficient in humor. Taking himself and the world of men and things too much in earnest, he weighed heavily alike on art and life. The smallest trifles, if they touched him, seemed to him important.[80] Before imaginary terrors he shook like an aspen. The slightest provocation roused his momentary resentment. The most insignificant sign of neglect or coldness wounded his self-esteem. Plaintive, sensitive to beauty, sentimental, tender, touchy, self-engrossed, devoid of humor—what a sentient instrument was this for uttering Aeolian melodies, and straining discords through storm-jangled strings!
From the Jesuits, in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature. As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its substance. Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither impassioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood, cannot now be fancied. If he contained the stuff of saint or simple Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in their school at Naples.
During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither as a thinker, nor as a Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, did this noble and ingenuous, but weakly nature attain to thoroughness.
Tasso's mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for forming original or comprehensive views. He lived for no great object, whether political, moral, religious, or scientific. He committed himself to no vice. He obeyed no absorbing passion of love or hatred. In his misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a prostrate human being. The poet who complained so querulously, who wept so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command admiration.