After leaving Bologna, Tasso became for some months house-guest of his father's earliest patrons, the Modenese Rangoni. With them he seems to have composed his Dialogues upon the Art of Poetry. For many years the learned men of Italy had been contesting the true nature of the Epic. One party affirmed that the ancients ought to be followed; and that the rules of Aristotle regarding unity of plot, dignity of style, and subordination of episodes, should be observed. The other party upheld the romantic manner of Ariosto, pleading for liberty of fancy, richness of execution, variety of incident, intricacy of design. Torquato from his earliest boyhood had heard these points discussed, and had watched his father's epic, the Amadigi, which was in effect a romantic poem petrified by classical convention, in process of production. Meanwhile he carefully studied the text of Homer and the Latin epics, examined Horace and Aristotle, and perused the numerous romances of the Italian school. Two conclusions were drawn from this preliminary course of reading: first, that Italy as yet possessed no proper epic; Trissino's Italia Liberata was too tiresome, the Orlando Furioso too capricious; secondly, that the spolia opima in this field of art would be achieved by him who should combine the classic and romantic manners in a single work, enriching the unity of the antique epic with the graces of modern romance, choosing a noble and serious subject, sustaining style at a sublime altitude, but gratifying the prevalent desire for beauty in variety by the introduction of attractive episodes and the ornaments of picturesque description. Tasso, in fact, declared himself an eclectic; and the deep affinity he felt for Virgil, indicated the lines upon which the Latin language in its romantic or Italian stage of evolution might be made to yield a second Aeneid adapted to the requirements of modern taste. He had, indeed, already set before himself the high ambition of supplying this desideratum. The note of prelude had been struck in Rinaldo; the subject of the Gerusalemme had been chosen. But the age in which he lived was nothing if not critical and argumentative. The time had long gone by when Dante's massive cathedral, Boccaccio's pleasure domes, Boiardo's and Ariosto's palaces of enchantment, arose as though unbidden and unreasoned from the maker's brain. It was now impossible to take a step in poetry or art without a theory; and, what was worse, that theory had to be exposed for dissertation and discussion. Therefore Tasso, though by genius the most spontaneous of men, commenced the great work of his life with criticism. Already acclimatized to courts, coteries, academies, formed in the school of disputants and pedants, he propounded his Ars Poetica before establishing it by an example. This was undoubtedly beginning at the wrong end; he committed himself to principles which he was bound to illustrate by practice. In the state of thought at that time prevalent in Italy, burdened as he was with an irresolute and diffident self-consciousness, Tasso could not deviate from the theory he had promulgated. How this hampered him, will appear in the sequel, when we come to notice the discrepancy between his critical and creative faculties. For the moment, however, the Dialogues on Epic Poetry only augmented his fame.
Scipione Gonzaga, one of Tasso's firmest and most illustrious friends, had recently established an Academy at Padua under the name of Gli Eterei. At his invitation the young poet joined this club in the autumn of 1564, assumed the title of Il Pentito in allusion to his desertion of legal studies, and soon became the soul of its society. His dialogues excited deep and wide-spread interest. After so much wrangling between classical and romantic champions, he had transferred the contest to new ground and introduced a fresh principle into the discussion. This principle was, in effect, that of common sense, good taste and instinct. Tasso meant to say: there is no vital discord between classical and romantic art; both have excellences, and it is possible to find defects in both; pedantic adherence to antique precedent must end in frigid failure under the present conditions of intellectual culture; yet it cannot be denied that the cycle of Renaissance poetry was closed by Ariosto; let us therefore attempt creation in a liberal spirit, trained by both these influences. He could not, however, when he put this theory forward in elaborate prose, abstain from propositions, distinctions, deductions, and con clusions, all of which were discutable, and each of which his critics and his honor held him bound to follow. In short, while planning and producing the Gerusalemme, he was involved in controversies on the very essence of his art. These controversies had been started by himself and he could not do otherwise than maintain the position he had chosen. His poet's inspiration, his singer's spontaneity, came thus constantly into collision with his own deliberate utterances. A perplexed self-scrutiny was the inevitable result, which pedagogues who were not inspired and could not sing, but who delighted in minute discussion, took good care to stimulate. The worst, however, was that he had erected in his own mind a critical standard with which his genius was not in harmony. The scholar and the poet disagreed in Tasso; and it must be reckoned one of the drawbacks of his age and education that the former preceded the latter in development. Something of the same discord can be traced in contemporary painting, as will be shown when I come to consider the founders of the Bolognese Academy.
At the end of 1565 Tasso was withdrawn from literary studies and society in Padua. The Cardinal Luigi d'Este offered him a place in his household; and since this opened the way to Ferrara and Court-service, it was readily accepted. It would have been well for Tasso, at this crisis of his fate, if the line of his beloved Aeneid—
Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum—
that line which warned young Savonarola away from Ferrara, had sounded in his ears, or met his eyes in some Virgilian Sortes. It would have been well if his father, disillusioned by the Amadigi's ill-success, and groaning under the galling yoke of servitude to Princes, had forbidden instead of encouraging this fatal step. He might himself have listened to the words of old Speroni, painting the Court as he had learned to know it, a Siren fair to behold and ravishing of song, but hiding in her secret caves the bones of men devoured, and 'mighty poets in their misery dead.' He might even have turned the pages of Aretino's Dialogo delle Corti, and have observed how the ruffian who best could profit by the vices of a Court, refused to bow his neck to servitude in their corruption. But no man avoids his destiny, because few draw wisdom from the past and none foresee the future. To Ferrara Tasso went with a blithe heart. Inclination, the custom of his country, the necessities of that poet's vocation for which he had abandoned a profession, poverty and ambition, vanity and the delights of life, combined to lure him to his ruin.
He found Ferrara far more magnificent than Urbino. Pageants, hunting parties, theatrical entertainments, assumed fantastic forms of splendor in this capital, which no other city of Italy, except Florence and Venice upon rare occasions, rivaled. For a long while past Ferrara had been the center of a semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry, emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique elements in a specific type of modern romance. This culminated in the permanent and monumental work began by Boiardo in the morning, and completed by Ariosto in the meridian of the Renaissance. Within the circuit of the Court the whole life of the Duchy seemed to concentrate itself. From the frontier of Venice to the Apennines a tract of fertile country, yielding all necessaries of life, corn, wine, cattle, game, fish, in abundance, poured its produce into the palaces and castles of the Duke. He, like other Princes of his epoch, sucked each province dry in order to maintain a dazzling show of artificial wealth. The people were ground down by taxes, monopolies of corn and salt, and sanguinary game-laws. Brutalized by being forced to serve the pleasures of their masters, they lived the lives of swine. But why repaint the picture of Italian decadence, or dwell again upon the fever of that phthisical consumption? Men like Tasso saw nothing to attract attention in the rotten state of Ferrara. They were only fascinated by the hectic bloom and rouged refinement of its Court. And even the least sympathetic student must confess that the Court at any rate was seductive. A more cunningly combined medley of polite culture, political astuteness, urbane learning, sumptuous display, diplomatic love-intrigue and genial artistic productiveness, never before or since has been exhibited upon a scale so grandiose within limits so precisely circumscribed, or been raised to eminence so high from such inadequate foundations of substantial wealth. Compare Ferrara in the sixteenth with Weimar in the eighteenth century, and reflect how wonderfully the Italians even at their last gasp understood the art of exquisite existence!
Alfonso II., who was always vainly trying to bless Ferrara with an heir, had arranged his second sterile nuptials when Tasso joined the Court in 1565. It was therefore at a moment of more than usual parade of splendor that the poet entered on the scene of his renown and his misfortune. He was twenty-one years of age; and twenty-one years had to elapse before he should quit Ferrara, ruined in physical and mental health,—quantum mutatus ab illo Torquato! The diffident and handsome stripling, famous as the author of Rinaldo, was welcomed in person with special honors by the Cardinal, his patron. Of such favors as Court-lacqueys prize, Tasso from the first had plenty. He did not sit at the common table of the serving gentlemen, but ate his food apart; and after a short residence, the Princesses, sisters of the Duke, invited him to share their meals. The next five years formed the happiest and most tranquil period of his existence. He continued working at the poem which had then no name, but which we know as the Gerusalemme Liberata. Envies and jealousies had not arisen to mar the serenity in which he basked. Women contended for his smiles and sonnets. He repaid their kindness with somewhat indiscriminate homage and with the verses of occasion which flowed so easily from his pen. It is difficult to trace the history of Tasso's loves through the labyrinth of madrigals, odes and sonnets which belong to this epoch of his life. These compositions bear, indeed, the mark of a distinguished genius; no one but Tasso could have written them at that period of Italian literature. Yet they lack individuality of emotion, specific passion, insight into the profundities of human feeling. Such shades of difference as we perceive in them, indicate the rhetorician seeking to set forth his motive, rather than the lover pouring out his soul. Contrary to the commonly received legend, I am bound to record my opinion that love played a secondary part in Tasso's destinies. It is true that we can discern the silhouettes of some Court-ladies whom he fancied more than others. The first of these was Laura Peperara, for whom he is supposed to have produced some sixty compositions. The second was the Princess Leonora d'Este. Tasso's attachment to her has been so shrouded in mystery, conjecture and hair-splitting criticism, that none but a very rash man will pronounce confident judgment as to its real nature. Nearly the same may be said about his relations to her sister, Lucrezia. He has posed in literary history as the Rizzio of the one lady and the Chastelard of the other. Yet he was probably in no position at any moment of his Ferrarese existence to be more than the familiar friend and most devoted slave of either. When he joined the Court, Lucrezia was ten and Leonora nine years his senior. Each of the sisters was highly accomplished, graceful and of royal carriage. Neither could boast of eminent beauty. Of the two, Lucrezia possessed the more commanding character. It was she who left her husband, Francesco Maria della Rovere, because his society wearied her, and who helped Clement VIII. to ruin her family, when the Papacy resolved upon the conquest of Ferrara. Leonora's health was sickly. For this reason she refused marriage, living retired in studies, acts of charity, religion, and the company of intellectual men. Something in her won respect and touched the heart at the same moment; so that the verses in her honor, from whatever pen they flowed, ring with more than merely ceremonial compliment. The people revered her like a saint; and in times of difficulty she displayed high courage and the gifts of one born to govern. From the first entrance of Tasso into Ferrara, the sisters took him under their protection. He lived with them on terms of more than courtly intimacy; and for Leonora there is no doubt that he cherished something like a romantic attachment. This is proved by the episode of Sofronia and Olindo in the Gerusalemme, which points in care fully constructed innuendoes to his affection. It can even be conceded that Tasso, who was wont to indulge fantastic visions of unattainable greatness, may have raised his hopes so high as sometimes to entertain the possibility of winning her hand. But if he did dally with such dreams, the realities of his position must in sober moments have convinced him of their folly. Had not a Duchess of Amalfi been murdered for contracting a marriage with a gentleman of her household? And Leonora was a grand-daughter of France; and the cordon of royalty was being drawn tighter and tighter yearly in the Italy of his day. That a sympathy of no commonplace kind subsisted between this delicate and polished princess and her sensitively gifted poet, is apparent. But it may be doubted whether Tasso had in him the stuff of a grand passion. Mobile and impressible, he wandered from object to object without seeking or attaining permanence. He was neither a Dante nor a Petrarch; and nothing in his Rime reveals solidity of emotion. It may finally be said that had Leonora returned real love, or had Tasso felt for her real love, his earnest wish to quit Ferrara when the Court grew irksome, would be inexplicable. Had their liaison been scandalous, as some have fancied, his life would not have been worth two hours' Purchase either in the palace or the prison of Alfonso.
Whatever may be thought of Tasso's love-relations to these sisters—and the problem is open to all conjectures in the absence of clear testimony— it is certain that he owed a great deal to their kindness. The marked favor they extended to him, was worth much at Court: and their maturer age and wider experience enabled them to give him many useful hints of conduct. Thus, when he blundered into seeming rivalry with Pigna (the Duke's secretary, the Cecil of that little state), by praising Pigna's mistress, Lucrezia Bendidio, in terms of imprudent warmth, it was Leonora who warned him to appease the great man's anger. This he did by writing a commentary upon three of Pigna's leaden Canzoni, which he had the impudence to rank beside the famous three sisters of Petrarch's Canzoniere. The flattery was swallowed, and the peril was averted. Yet in this first affair with Pigna we already hear the grumbling of that tempest which eventually ruined Tasso. So eminent a poet and so handsome a young man was insupportable among a crowd of literary mediocrities and middle-aged gallants. Furthermore the brilliant being, who aroused the jealousies of rhymesters and of lovers, had one fatal failing—want of tact. In 1568, for example, he set himself up as a target to all malice by sustaining fifty conclusions in the Science of Love before the Academy of Ferrara. As he afterwards confessed, he ran the greatest risks in this adventure; but who, he said, could take up arms against a lover? Doubtless there were many lovers present; but none of Tasso's eloquence and skill in argument.
In 1569, Tasso was called to his father's sickbed at Ostiglia on the Po. He found the old man destitute and dying. There was not money to bury him decently; and when the funeral rites had been performed by the help of money-lenders, nothing remained to pay for a monument above his graven What the Romans called pietas was a strong feature in Torquato's character. At crises of his life he invariably appealed to the memory of his parents for counsel and support. When the Delia Cruscans attacked his own poetry, he answered them with a defense of the Amadigi; and he spent much time and pains in editing the Floridante, which naught but filial feeling could possibly have made him value at the worth of publication.
In the spring of the next year, Lucrezia d'Este made her inauspicious match with the Duke of Urbino, Tasso's former playmate. She was a woman of thirty-four, he a young man of twenty-one. They did not love each other, had no children, and soon parted with a sense of mutual relief. In the auturmn Tasso accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d'Este into France, leaving his MSS. in the charge of Ercole Rondinelli. The document drawn up for this friend's instructions in case of his death abroad is interesting. It proves that the Gerusalemme, here called Gottifredo, was nearly finished; for Tasso wished the last six cantos and portions of the first two to be published. He also gave directions for collection and publication of his love sonnets and madrigals, but requested Rondinelli to bury 'the others, whether of love or other matters which were written in the service of some friend,' in his grave. This last commission demands comment. That Tasso should have written verses to oblige a friend, was not only natural but consistent with custom. Light wares like sonnets could be easily produced by a practiced man of letters, and the friend might find them valuable in bringing a fair foe to terms. But why should any one desire to have such verses buried in his grave? The hypothesis which has been strongly urged by those who believe in the gravity of Tasso's liaison with Leonora, is that he used this phrase to indicate love-poems which might compromise his mistress. We cannot, however, do more than speculate upon the point. There is nothing to confirm or to refute conjecture in the evidence before us.