Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 6 and 7 (of 7) / The Catholic Reaction

by John Addington Symonds

In the absence of his father little Torquato grew up with his mother and sister at Sorrento under the care of a good man, Giovanni Angeluzzo who gave him the first rudiments of education. He was a precocious infant, grave in manners, quick at learning, free from the ordinary naughtinesses of childhood. Manso reports that he began to speak at six months, and that from the first he formed syllables with precision. His mother Porzia appears to have been a woman of much grace and sweetness, but timid and incapable of fighting the hard battle of the world. A certain shade of melancholy fell across the boy's path even in these earliest years, for Porzia, as we have seen, met with cruel treatment from her relatives, and her only support, Bernardo, was far away in exile. In 1552 she removed with her children to Naples, where Torquato was sent at once to the school which the Jesuits had opened there in the preceding year. These astute instructors soon perceived that they had no ordinary boy to deal with. They did their best to stimulate his mental faculties and to exalt his religious sentiments; so that he learned Greek and Latin before the age of ten, and was in the habit of communicating at the altar with transports of pious ecstasy in his ninth year.[5] The child recited speeches and poems in public, and received an elementary training in the arts of composition. He was in fact the infant prodigy of those plausible Fathers, the prize specimen of their educational method. As might have been expected, this forcing system overtaxed his nerves. He rose daily before daybreak to attack his books, and when the nights were long he went to morning school attended by a servant carrying torches.

Without seeking to press unduly on these circumstances, we may fairly assume that Torquato's character received a permanent impression from the fever of study and the premature pietism excited in him by the Jesuits in Naples. His servile attitude toward speculative thought, that anxious dependence upon ecclesiastical authority, that scrupulous mistrust of his own mental faculties, that pretense of solving problems by accumulated citations instead of going to the root of the matter, whereby his philosophical writings are rendered nugatory, may with probability be traced to the mechanical and interested system of the Jesuits. He was their pupil for three years, after which he joined his father in Rome. There he seems to have passed at once into a healthier atmosphere. Bernardo, though a sound Catholic, was no bigot; and he had the good sense to choose an able master for his son—'a man of profound learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.'[6] The boy was lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso, who had come from Bergamo to profit by the tutor's care.

The young Tasso's home cannot, however, have been a cheerful one. The elderly hidalgo sitting up in bed to darn a single pair of hose, the absent mother pining for her husband and tormented by her savage brother's avarice, environed the precocious child of ten with sad presentiments. That melancholy temperament which he inherited from Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously-haunting troubles of his parents. And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such expressions of ungovernable grief as he openly expressed in the letter to Amerigo Sanse verino.[7] Is it possible, then, thought Torquato, that the mother from whose tender kisses and streaming tears I was severed but one year ago,[8] has died of poison—poisoned by my uncles? Sinking into the consciousness of a child so sensitive by nature and so early toned to sadness, this terrible suspicion of a secret death by poison incorporated itself with the very essence of his melancholy humor, and lurked within him to flash forth in madness at a future period of life. That he was well acquainted with the doleful situation of his family is proved by his first extant letter. Addressed to the noble lady Vittoria Colonna on behalf of Bernardo and his sister, this is a remarkable composition for a boy of twelve.[9] His poor father, he says, is on the point of dying of despair, oppressed by the malignity of fortune and the rapacity of impious men. His uncle is bent on marrying Cornelia to some needy gentleman, in order to secure her mother's estate for himself. 'The grief, illustrious lady, of the loss of property is great, but that of blood is crushing. This poor old man has naught but my sister and myself; and now that fortune has deprived him of wealth and of the wife he loved like his own soul, he cannot bear that that man's avarice should rob him of his beloved daughter, with whom he hoped to end in rest these last years of his failing age. In Naples we have no friends; for my father's disaster makes every one shy of us: our relatives are our enemies. Cornelia is kept in the house of my uncle's kinsman Giangiacopo Coscia, where no one is allowed to speak to her or give her letters.'

In the midst of these afflictions, which already tuned the future poet's utterance to a note of plaintive pathos and ingenuous appeal for aid, Torquato's studies were continued on a sounder plan and in a healthier spirit than at Naples. The perennial consolation of his troubled life, that delight in literature which made him able to anticipate the lines of Goethe—

That naught belongs to me I know,
Save thoughts that never cease to flow
From founts that cannot perish,
And every fleeting shape of bliss
Which kindly fortune lets me kiss,
Or in my bosom cherish—

now became the source of an inner brightness which not even the 'malignity of fortune,' the 'impiety of men,' the tragedy of his mother's death, the imprisonment of his sister, and the ever-present sorrow of his father, 'the poor gentleman fallen into misery and misfortune through no fault of his own,' could wholly overcloud. The boy had been accustomed in Naples to the applause of his teachers and friends. In Rome he began to cherish a presentiment of his own genius. A 'vision splendid' dawned upon his mind; and every step he made in knowledge and in mastery of language enforced the delightful con viction that 'I too am a poet.' Nothing in Tasso's character was more tenacious than the consciousness of his vocation and the kind of self-support he gained from it. Like the melancholy humor which degenerated into madness, this sense of his own intellectual dignity assumed extravagant proportions, passed over into vanity, and encouraged him to indulge fantastic dreams of greatness. Yet it must be reckoned as a mitigation of his suffering; and what was solid in it at the period of which I now am writing, was the certainty of his rare gifts for art.

The Roman residence was broken by Bernardo's journey to Urbino in quest of the appointment he expected from Duke Guidubaldo. He sent Torquato with his cousin Cristoforo meanwhile to Bergamo, where the boy enjoyed a few months of sympathy and freedom. This appears to have been the only period of his life in which Tasso experienced the wholesome influences of domesticity. In 1557 his father sent for him to Pesaro, and Tasso made his first entrance into a Court at the age of thirteen. This event decided the future of his existence. Urbino was not what it had been in the time of Duke Federigo, or when Castiglione composed his Mirror of the Courtier on its model. Yet it retained the old traditions of gentle living, splendor tempered by polite culture, aristocratic urbanity refined by arts and letters. The evil days of Spanish manners and Spanish bigotry, of exhausted revenues and insane taxation, were but dawning; and the young prince, Francesco Maria, who was destined to survive his heir and transfer a ruined duchy to the mortmain of the Church, was now a boy of eight years old. In fact, though the Court of Urbino labored already under that manifold disease of waste which drained the marrow of Italian principalities, its atrophy was not apparent to the eye. It could still boast of magnificent pageants, trains of noble youths and ladies moving through its stately palaces and shady villa-gardens, academies of learned men discussing the merits of Homer and Ariosto and discoursing on the principles of poetry and drama. Bernardo Tasso read his Amadigi in the evenings to the Duchess. The days were spent in hunting and athletic exercises; the nights in masquerades or dances. Love and ambition wore an external garb of ceremonious beauty; the former draped itself in sonnets, the latter in rhetorical orations. Torquato, who was assigned as the companion in sport and study to the heir-apparent, shared in all these pleasures of the Court. After the melancholy of Rome, his visionary nature expanded under influences which he idealized with fatal facility. Too young to penetrate below that glittering surface, flattered by the attention paid to his personal charm or premature genius, stimulated by the conversation of politely educated pedants, encouraged in studies for which he felt a natural aptitude, gratified by the comradeship of the young prince whose temperament corresponded to his own in gravity, he conceived that radiant and romantic conception of Courts, as the only fit places of abode for men of noble birth and eminent abilities, which no disillusionment in after life was able to obscure. We cannot blame him for this error, though error it indubitably was. It was one which he shared with all men of his station at that period, which the poverty of his estate, the habits of his father, and his own ignorance of home-life almost forced upon his poet's temperament.

At Urbino Tasso read mathematics under a real master, Federigo Comandino, and carried on his literary studies with enthusiasm. It was probably at this time that he acquired the familiar knowledge of Virgil which so powerfully influenced his style, and that he began to form his theory of epic as distinguished from romantic poetry. After a residence of two years he removed to Venice, where his father was engaged in polishing the Amadigi for publication. Here a new scene of interest opened out for him; and here he first enjoyed the sweets of literary fame. Bernardo had been chosen secretary by an Academy, in which men like Veniero, Molino, Gradenigo, Mocenigo, and Manuzio, the most learned and the noblest Venetians, met together for discussion. The slim lad of fifteen was admitted to their sessions, and surprised these elders by his eloquence and erudition. It is noticeable that at this time he carefully studied and annotated Dante's Divine Comedy, a poem almost neglected by Italians in the Cinque Cento. It seemed good to his father now that he should prosecute his studies in earnest, with the view of choosing a more lucrative profession than that of letters or Court-service. Bernardo, while finishing the Amadigi, which he dedicated to Philip II., sent his son in 1560 to Padua. He was to become a lawyer under the guidance of Guido Panciroli. But Tasso, like Ovid, like Petrarch, like a hundred other poets, felt no inclination for juristic learning. He freely and frankly abandoned himself to the metaphysical conclusions which were being then tried between Piccolomini and Pendasio, the one an Aristotelian dualist, the other a materialist for whom the soul was not immortal. Without force of mind enough to penetrate the deepest problems of philosophy, Tasso was quick to apprehend their bearings. The Paduan school of scepticism, the logomachy in vogue there, unsettled his religious opinions. He began by criticising the doubts of others in his light of Jesuit-instilled belief; next he found a satisfaction for self-esteem in doubting too; finally he called the mysteries of the Creed in question, and debated the articles of creation, incarnation, and immortality. Yet he had not the mental vigor either to cut this Gordian knot, or to untie it by sound thinking. His erudition confused him; and he mistook the lumber of miscellaneous reading for philosophy. Then a reaction set in. He remembered those childish ecstasies before the Eucharist: he recalled the pictures of a burning hell his Jesuit teachers had painted; he heard the trumpets of the Day of Judgment, and the sentence 'Go ye wicked!' On the brink of heresy he trembled and recoiled. The spirit of the coming age, the spirit of Bruno, was not in him. To all appearances he had not heard of the Copernican discovery. He wished to remain a true son of the Church, and was in fact of such stuff as the Catholic Revival wanted. Yet the memory of these early doubts clung to him, principally, we may believe, because he had not force to purge them either by severe science or by vivid faith. Later, when his mind was yielding to disorder, they returned in the form of torturing scruples and vain terrors, which his fervent but superficial pietism, his imaginative but sensuous religion, were unable to efface. Meanwhile, with one part of his mind devoted to these problems, the larger and the livelier was occupied with poetry. To law, the Brod-Studium indicated by his position in the world, he only paid perfunctory attention. The consequence was that before he had completed two years of residence in Padua, his first long poem, the Rinaldo, saw the light. In another chapter I mean to discuss the development of Tasso's literary theories and achievements. It is enough here to say that the applause which greeted the Rinaldo, conquered his father's opposition. Proud of its success, Bernardo had it printed, and Torquato in the beginning of his nineteenth year counted among the notable romantic poets of his country.

At the end of 1563, Tasso received an invitation to transfer himself from Padua to Bologna. This proposal came from Monsignor Cesi, who had recently been appointed by Pope Pius IV. to superintend public studies in that city. The university was being placed on a new footing, and to secure the presence of a young man already famous seemed desirable. An exhibition was therefore offered as an inducement; and this Tasso readily accepted. He spent about two years at Bologna, studying philosophy and literature, planning his Dialogues on the Art of Poetry, and making projects for an epic on the history of Godfred. Yet in spite of public admiration and official favor, things did not go smoothly with Tasso at Bologna. One main defect of his character, which was a want of tact, began to manifest itself. He showed Monsignor Cesi that he had a poor opinion of his literary judgment, came into collision with the pedants who despised Italian, and finally uttered satiric epigrams in writing on various members of the university. Other students indulged their humor in like pasquinades. But those of Tasso were biting, and he had not contrived to render himself generally popular. His rooms were ransacked, his papers searched; and finding himself threatened with a prosecution for libel, he took flight to Modena. No importance can be attached to this insignificant affair, except in so far as it illustrates the unlucky aptitude for making enemies by want of savoir vivre which pursued Tasso through life. His real superiority aroused jealousy; his frankness wounded the self-love of rivals whom he treated with a shadow of contempt. As these were unable to compete with him in eloquence, or to beat him in debate, they soothed their injured feelings by conspiracy and calumny against him.

In an age of artifice and circumspection, while paying theoretical homage to its pedantries, and following the fashion of its compliments, Tasso was nothing if not spontaneous and heedless. This appears in the style of his letters and prose compositions, which have the air of being uttered from the heart. The excellences and defects of his poetry, soaring to the height of song and sinking into frigidity or baldness when the lyric impulse flags, reveal a similar quality. In conduct this spontaneity assumed a form of inconsiderate rashness, which brought him into collision with persons of importance, and rendered universities and Courts, the sphere of his adoption, perilous to the peace of so naturally out-spoken and self-engrossed a man. His irritable sensibilities caused him to suffer intensely from the petty vengeance of the people he annoyed; while a kind of amiable egotism blinded his eyes to his own faults, and made him blame fortune for sufferings of which his indiscretion was the cause.