Tasso met with his usual fortunes at the Court of Charles IX. That is to say, he was petted and caressed, wrote verses, and paid compliments. It was just two years before the Massacre of S. Bartholomew, and France presented to the eyes of earnest Catholics the spectacle of truly horrifying anarchy. Catherine de'Medici inclined to compromise matters with the Huguenots. The social atmosphere reeked with heresy and cynicism. In that Italianated Court, public affairs and religious questions were treated from a purely diplomatic point of view. Not principle, but practical conveni ence ruled conduct and opinion. The large scale on which Machiavellism manifested itself in the discordant realm of France, the apparent breakdown of Catholicism as a national institution, struck Tasso with horror. He openly proclaimed his views, and roundly taxed the government with dereliction of their duty to the Church. An incurable idealist by temperament, he could not comprehend the stubborn actualities of politics. A pupil of the Jesuits, he would not admit that men like Coligny deserved a hearing. An Italian of the decadence, he found it hard to tolerate the humors of a puissant nation in a state of civil warfare. But his master, Luigi d'Este, well understood the practical difficulties which forced the Valois into compromise, and felt no personal aversion for lucrative transaction with the heretic. Though a prince of the Church, he had not taken priest's orders. He kept two objects in view. One was succession to the Duchy of Ferrara, in case Alfonso should die without heirs.[10]
The other was election to the Papacy. In the latter event France, the natural ally of the Estensi, would be of service to him, and the Valois monarchs, his cousins, must therefore be supported in their policy. Tasso had been brought to Paris to look graceful and to write madrigals. It was inconvenient, it was unseemly, that a man of letters in the Cardinal's train should utter censures on the Crown, and should profess more Catholic opinions than his patron. Without the scandal of a public dismissal, it was therefore contrived that Tasso should return to Italy; and after this rupture, the suspicious poet regarded Luigi d'Este as his enemy. During his confinement in S. Anna he even threw the chief blame of his detention upon the Cardinal.[11]
After spending a short time at Rome in the company of the Cardinals Ippolito d'Este and Albano, Tasso returned to Ferrara in 1572. Alfonso offered him a place in his own household with an annual stipend worth about 88 l. of our money. No duties were attached to this post, except the delivery of a weekly lecture in the university. For the rest, Tasso was to prosecute his studies, polish his great poem, and augment the luster of the court by his accomplishments.[12] It was of course understood that the Gerusalemme, when completed, should be dedicated to the Duke and shed its splendor on the House of Este. Who was happier than Torquato now? Having recently experienced the discomforts of uncongenial service, he took his place again upon a firmer footing in the city of his dreams. The courtiers welcomed him with smiles. He was once more close to Leonora, basking like Rinaldo in Armida's garden, with golden prospects of the fame his epic would achieve to lift him higher in the coming years.
No wonder that the felicity of this moment expanded in a flower of lyric beauty which surpassed all that Tasso had yet published. He produced Aminta in the winter of 1572-3. It was acted with unparalleled applause; for this pastoral drama offered something ravishingly new, something which interpreted and gave a vocal utterance to tastes and sentiments that ruled the age. While professing to exalt the virtues of rusticity, the Aminta was in truth a panegyric of Court life, and Silvia reflected Leonora in the magic mirror of languidly luxurious verse. Poetry melted into music. Emotion exhaled itself in sensuous harmony. The art of the next two centuries, the supreme art of song, of words subservient to musical expression, had been indicated. This explains the sudden and extraordinary success of the Aminta. It was nothing less than the discovery of a new realm, the revelation of a specific faculty which made its author master of the heart of Italy. The very lack of concentrated passion lent it power. Its suffusion of emotion in a shimmering atmosphere toned with voluptuous melancholy, seemed to invite the lutes and viols, the mellow tenors, and the trained soprano voices of the dawning age of melody. We may here remember that Palestrina, seven years earlier in Rome, had already given his Mass of Pope Marcello to the world.
Lucrezia d'Este, now Duchess of Urbino, who was anxious to share the raptures of Aminta, invited Tasso to Pesaro in the summer of 1573, and took him with her to the mountain villa of Casteldurante. She was an unhappy wife, just on the point of breaking her irksome bonds of matrimony. Tasso, if we may credit the deductions which have been drawn from passages in his letters, had the privilege of consoling the disappointed woman and of distracting her tedious hours. They roamed together through the villa gardens, and spent days of quiet in the recesses of her apartments. He read aloud passages from his unpublished poem, and composed sonnets in her honor, praising the full-blown beauty of the rose as lovelier than its budding charm. The duke her husband, far from resenting this intimacy, heaped favors and substantial gifts upon his former comrade. He had not, indeed, enough affection for his wife to be jealous of her. Yet it is indubitable that if he had suspected her of infidelity the Italian code of honor would have compelled him to make short work with Tasso.[13]
Meanwhile it seemed as though Leonora had been forgotten by her servant. We possess one letter written to her from Casteldurante on September 3, 1573, in which he encloses a sonnet, disparaging it by comparison with those which he believes she has been receiving from another poet (Guarino probably), and saying that, though the verses were written, not for himself, but 'at the requisition of a poor lover, who, having been for some while angry with his lady, now is forced to yield and crave for pardon,' yet he hopes that they 'will effect the purpose he desires.'[14] Few of Tasso's letters to Leonora have survived. This, therefore, is a document of much importance; and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was indirectly begging Leonora to forgive him for some piece of petulance or irritation. At any rate, his position between the two princesses at this moment was one of delicacy, in which a less vain and more cautious man than Tasso might have found it hard to keep his head cool.
Up to the present time his life had been, in spite of poverty and domestic misfortunes, one almost uninterrupted career of triumph. But his fiber had been relaxed in the irresponsible luxurious atmosphere of Courts, and his self-esteem had been inflated by the honors paid to him as the first poet of his age in Europe. Moreover, he had been continuously over-worked and over-wrought from childhood onwards. Now, when he returned to Ferrara with the Duchess of Urbino at the age of twenty-nine, it remained to be seen whether he could support himself with stability upon the slippery foundation of princely favor, whether his health would hold out, and whether he would be able to bring the publication of his long expected poem to a successful issue.
In 1574 he accompanied Duke Alfonso to Venice, and witnessed the magnificent reception of Henri III, on his return from Poland. A fever, contracted during those weeks of pleasure, prevented him from working at the epic for many months. This is the first sign of any serious failure in Tasso's health. At the end of August 1574, however, the Gerusalemme was finished, and in the following February he began sending the MS. to Scipione Gonzaga at Rome. So much depended on its success, that doubts immediately rose within its author's mind. Will it fulfill the expectation raised in every Court and literary coterie of Italy? Will it bear investigation in the light of the Dialogues on Epic Poetry? Will the Church be satisfied with its morality; the Holy Office with its doctrine? None of these diffidences assailed Tasso when he flung Aminta negligently forth and found he had produced a masterpiece. It would have been well for him if he had turned a deaf ear to the doubting voice on this occasion also. But he was not of an independent character to start with; and his life had made him sensitively deferent to literary opinion. Therefore, in an evil hour, yielding to Gonzaga's advice, he resolved to submit the Gerusalemme in MS. to four censors—Il Borga, Flaminio de'Nobili, vulpine Speroni with his poisoned fang of pedantry, precise Antoniano with his inquisitorial prudery. They were to pass their several criticisms on the plot, characters, diction, and ethics of the Gerusalemme; Tasso was to entertain and weigh their arguments, reserving the right of following or rejecting their advice, but promising to defend his own views. To the number of this committee he shortly after added three more scholars, Francesco Piccolomini, Domenico Veniero, and Celio Magno.[15] Not to have been half maddened by these critics would have proved Tasso more or less than human. They picked holes in the structure of the epic, in its episodes, in its theology, in its incidents, in its language, in its title. One censor required one alteration, and another demanded the contrary. This man seemed animated by an acrid spite; that veiled his malice in the flatteries of candid friendship. Antoniano was for cutting out the love passages: Armida, Sofronia, Erminia, Clorinda, were to vanish or to be adapted to conventual proprieties. It seemed to him more than doubtful whether the enchanted forest did not come within the prohibitions of the Tridentine decrees. As the revision advanced, matters grew more serious. Antoniano threw out some decided hints of ecclesiastical displeasure; Tasso, reading between the lines, scented the style of the Collegium Germanicum.
Speroni spoke openly of plagiarism—plagiarism from himself forsooth!—and murmured the terrible words between his teeth, 'Tasso is mad!' He was in fact driven wild, and told his tormentors that he would delay the publication of the epic, perhaps for a year, perhaps for his whole life, so little hope had he of its success.[16] At last he resolved to compose an allegory to explain and moralize the poem. When he wrote the Gerusalemme he had no thought of hidden meanings; but this seemed the only way of preventing it from being dismembered by hypocrites and pedants.[17] The expedient proved partially successful. When Antoniano and his friends were bidden to perceive a symbol in the enchanted wood and other marvels, a symbol in the loves of heroines and heroes, a symbol even in Armida, they relaxed their wrath. The Gerusalemme might possibly pass muster now before the Congregation of the Index. Tasso's correspondence between March 1575 and July 1576 shows what he suffered at the hands of his revisers, and helps to explain the series of events which rendered the autumn of that latter year calamitous for him.[18] There are, indeed, already indications in the letters of those months that his nerves, enfeebled by the quartan fever under which he labored, and exasperated by carping or envious criticism, were overstrung.
Suspicions began to invade his mind. He complained of headache. His spirits alternated between depression and hysterical gayety. A dread lest the Inquisition should refuse the imprimatur to his poem haunted him. He grew restless, and yearned for change of scene.