The events of 1575, 1576, and 1577 require to be minutely studied: for upon our interpretation of them must depend the theory which we hold of Tasso's subsequent misfortunes. It appears that early in the year 1575 he was becoming discontented with Ferrara. A party in the Court, led by Pigna, did their best to make his life there disagreeable. They were jealous of the poet's fame, which shone with trebled splendor after the production of Aminta. Tasso's own behavior provoked, if it did not exactly justify their animosity. He treated men at least his equals in position with haughtiness, which his irritable temper rendered insupportable. We have it from his own pen that 'he could not bear to live in a city where the nobles did not yield him the first place, or at least admit him to absolute equality'; that 'he expected to be adored by friends, served by serving-men, caressed by domestics, honored by masters, celebrated by poets, and pointed out by all.'[19]
He admitted that it was his habit 'to build castles in the air of honors, favors, gifts and graces, showered on him by emperors and kings and mighty princes'; that 'the slightest coldness from a patron seemed to him a tacit act of dismissal, or rather an open act of violence.'[20] His blood, he argued, placed him on a level with the aristocracy of Italy; but his poetry lifted him far above the vulgar herd of noblemen. At the same time, while claiming so much, he constantly declared himself unfit for any work or office but literary study, and expressed his opinion that princes ought to be his tributaries.[21] Though such pretensions may not have been openly expressed at this period of his life, it cannot be doubted that Tasso's temper made him an unpleasant comrade in Court-service. His sensitiveness, as well as the actual slenderness of his fortunes, exposed him only too obviously to the malevolent tricks and petty bullyings of rivals. One knows what a boy of that stamp has to suffer at public schools, and a Court is after all not very different from an academy.
Such being the temper of his mind, Tasso at this epoch turned his thoughts to bettering himself, as servants say. His friend Scipione Gonzaga pointed out that both the Cardinal de'Medici and the Grand Duke of Tuscany would be glad to welcome him as an ornament of their households. Tasso nibbled at the bait all through the summer; and in November, under the pretext of profiting by the Jubilee, he traveled to Rome. This journey, as he afterwards declared, was the beginning of his ruin.[22] It was certainly one of the principal steps which led to the prison of S. Anna.
There were many reasons why Alfonso should resent Tasso's entrance into other service at this moment. The House of Este had treated him with uniform kindness. The Cardinal, the duke and the princesses had severally marked him out by special tokens of esteem. In return they expected from him the honors of his now immortal epic. That he should desert them and transfer the dedication of the Gerusalemme to the Medici, would have been nothing short of an insult; for it was notorious that the Estensi and the Medici were bitter foes, not only on account of domestic disagreements and political jealousies, but also because of the dispute about precedence in their titles which had agitated Italian society for some time past. In his impatience to leave Ferrara, Tasso cast prudence to the winds, and entered into negotiations with the Cardinal de'Medici in Rome. When he traveled northwards at the beginning of 1576, he betook himself to Florence. What passed between him and the Grand Duke is not apparent. Yet he seems to have still further complicated his position by making political disclosures which were injurious to the Duke of Ferrara. Nor did he gain anything by the offer of his services and his poem to Francesco de'Medici. In a letter of February 4, 1576, the Grand Duke wrote that the Florentine visit of that fellow, 'whether to call him a mad or an amusing and astute spirit, I hardly know,'[23] had been throughout a ridiculous affair; and that nothing could be less convenient than his putting the Gerusalemme up to auction among princes. One year later, he said bluntly that 'he did not want to have a madman at his Court.'[24] Thus Tasso, like his father, discovered that a noble poem, the product of his best pains, had but small substantial value. It might, indeed, be worth something to the patron who paid a yearly exhibition to its author; but it was not a gem of such high price as to be wrangled for by dukes who had the cares of state upon their shoulders. He compromised himself with the Estensi, and failed to secure a retreat in Florence.
Meanwhile his enemies at Ferrara were not idle. Pigna had died in the preceding November. But Antonio Montecatino, who succeeded him as ducal secretary, proved even a more malicious foe, and poisoned Alfonso's mind against the unfortunate poet. The two princesses still remained his faithful friends, until Tasso's own want of tact alienated the sympathies of Leonora. When he returned in 1576, he found the beautiful Eleonora Sanvitale, Countess of Scandiano, at Court. Whether he really fell in love with her at first sight, or pretended to do so in order to revive Leonora d'Este's affection by jealousy, is uncertain.[25] At any rate he paid the countess such marked attentions, and wrote for her and a lady of her suite such splendid poetry, that all Ferrara rang with this amour. A sonnet in Tasso's handwriting, addressed to Leonora d'Este and commented by her own pen, which even Guasti, no credulous believer in the legend of the poet's love, accepts as genuine, may be taken as affording proof that the princess was deeply wounded by her servant's conduct.[26]
It is obvious that, though Tasso's letters at this period show no signs of a diseased mind, his conduct began to strike outsiders as insane. Francesco de'Medici used the plain words matto and pazzo. The courtiers of Ferrara, some in pity, some in derision, muttered 'Madman,' when he passed. And he spared no pains to prove that he was losing self-control. In the month of January 1577, he was seized with scruples of faith, and conceived the notion that he ought to open his mind to the Holy Office. Accordingly, he appeared before the Inquisitor of Bologna, who after hearing his confession, bade him be of good cheer, for his self-accusations were the outcome of a melancholy humor. Tasso was, in fact, a Catholic molded by Jesuit instruction in his earliest childhood; and though, like most young students, he had speculated on the groundwork of theology and metaphysic, there was no taint of heresy or disobedience to the Church in his nature. The terror of the Inquisition was a morbid nightmare, first implanted in his mind by the experience of his father's collision with the Holy Office, enforced by Antoniano's strictures on his poem, and justified to some extent by the sinister activity of the institution which had burned a Carnesecchi and a Paleario. However it grew up, this fancy that he was suspected as a heretic took firm possession of his brain, and subsequently formed a main feature of his mental disease. It combined with the suspiciousness which now became habitual. He thought that secret enemies were in the habit of forwarding delations against him to Rome.
All through these years (1575-1577) his enemies drew tighter cords around him. They were led and directed by Montecatino, the omnipotent persecutor, and hypocritical betrayer. In his heedlessness Tasso left books and papers loose about his rooms. These, he had good reason to suppose, were ransacked in his absence. There follows a melancholy tale of treacherous friends, dishonest servants, false keys, forged correspondence, scraps and fragments of imprudent compositions pieced together and brought forth to incriminate him behind his back. These arts were employed all through the year which followed his return to Ferrara in 1576. But they reached their climax in the spring of 1577. He had lost his prestige, and every servant might insult him, and every cur snap at his heels. Even the Gerusalemme, became an object of derision. It transpired that the revisers, to whom he had confided it, were picking the poem to pieces; ignoramuses who could not scan a line, went about parroting their pedantries and strictures. At the beginning of 1576 Tasso had begged Alfonso to give him the post of historiographer left vacant by Pigna. It was his secret hope that this would be refused, and that so he would obtain a good excuse for leaving Ferrara.[27] But the duke granted his request. In the autumn of that year, one of the band of his tormentors, Maddalò de'Frecci, betrayed some details of his love-affairs. What these were we do not know. Tasso resented the insult, and gave the traitor a box on the ears in the courtyard of the castle. Maddalò and his brothers, after this, attacked Tasso on the piazza, but ran away before they reached him with their swords. They were outlawed for the outrage, and the duke of Ferrara, still benignant to his poet, sent him a kind message by one of his servants. This incident weighed on Tasso's memory. The terror of the Inquisition blended now with two new terrors. He conceived that his exiled foes were plotting to poison him. He wondered whether Maddalò's revelations had reached the duke's ears, and if so, whether Alfonso would not inflict sudden vengeance. There is no sufficient reason, however, to surmise that Tasso's conscience was really burdened with a guilty secret touching Leonora d'Este. On the contrary, everything points to a different conclusion. His mind was simply giving way. Just as he con jured up the ghastly specter of the Inquisition, so he fancied that the duke would murder him. Both the Inquisition and the duke were formidable; but the Holy Office mildly told him to set his morbid doubts at rest, and the duke on a subsequent occasion coldly wrote: 'I know he thinks I want to kill him. But if indeed I did so, it would be easy enough.' The duke, in fact, had no sufficient reason and no inclination to tread upon this insect.
In June 1577, the crisis came. On the seventeenth evening of the month Tasso was in the apartments of the Duchess of Urbino. He had just been declaiming on the subject of his imaginary difficulties with the Inquisition, when something in the manner of a servant who passed by aroused his suspicion. He drew a knife upon the man—like Hamlet in his mother's bedchamber. He was immediately put under arrest, and confined in a room of the castle. Next day Maffeo Veniero wrote thus to the Grand Duke of Tuscany about the incident. 'Yesterday Tasso was imprisoned for having drawn a knife upon a servant in the apartment of the Duchess of Urbino. The intention has been to stay disorder and to cure him, rather than to inflict punishment. He suffers under peculiar delusions, believing himself guilty of heresy and dreading poison; which state of mind arises, I incline to think, from melancholic blood forced in upon the heart and vaporing to the brain. A wretched case, in truth, considering his great parts and his goodness!'[28]
Tasso was soon released, and taken by the duke his villa of Belriguardo. Probably this excursion was designed to soothe the perturbed spirits of the poet. But it may also have had a different object. Alfonso may have judged it prudent to sift the information laid before him by Tasso's enemies. We do not know what passed between them. Whether moral pressure was applied, resulting in the disclosure of secrets compromising Leonora d'Este, cannot now be ascertained; nor is it worth while to discuss the hypothesis that the Duke, in order to secure his family's honor, imposed on Tasso the obligation of feigning madness.[29] There is a something not entirely elucidated, a sediment of mystery in Tasso's fate, after this visit to Belriguardo, which criticism will not neglect to notice, but which no testing, no clarifying process of study, has hitherto explained. All we can rely upon for certain is that Alfonso sent him back to Ferrara to be treated physically and spiritually for derangement; and that Tasso thought his life was in danger. He took up his abode in the Convent of S. Francis, submitted to be purged, and began writing eloquent letters to his friends and patrons.
Those which he addressed to the Duke of Ferrara at this crisis, weigh naturally heaviest in the scale of criticism.[30] They turn upon his dread of the Inquisition, his fear of poison, and his diplomatic practice with Florence. While admitting 'faults of grave importance' and 'vacillation in the service of his prince,' he maintains that his secret foes have exaggerated these offenses, and have succeeded in prejudicing the magnanimous and clement spirit of Alfonso. He is particularly anxious about the charge of heresy. Nothing indicates that any guilt of greater moment weighed upon his conscience.[31] After scrutinizing all accessible sources of information, we are thus driven to accept the prosaic hypothesis that Tasso was deranged, and that his Court-rivals had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity for making the duke sensible of his insanity.