Again, one of the most characteristic of the fregi with which Tasso adorns the chroniclers’ story is found in the prominence of his heroines. Doubtless we owe this largely to the brilliant originality of the Italian ladies of the Renaissance, in which the House of Este, under his patron Alfonso, was facile princeps; just as the poet’s exuberance of fancy and occasionally melodramatic touch reflects the eager, playful, pleasure-loving, fanciful, and histrionic tone of his favourite Court of Ferrara. His heroines certainly stand forth in dazzling prominence. Clorinda, the fair Amazon, is a fighting man to all intents, with a man’s mien, a man’s directness, a man’s sense of fair play, added to the charm of a beautiful, high-born Lady. Armida, matchless in her witchery, is a doughty warrior too; but also, by turns, languishing lover and ruthless, Circe-like enchantress. Erminia, disinherited Princess, gracious, tender, shy and sensitive, is yet bold to face all things—even the sight and touch of blood—if so she may help and tend the man who, in the day of her calamity, saved her from shame.
Fanciful figures: yet Clorinda and Armida (in her warrior-rôle) have not been without their parallels on the Russian front. And the fair Erminia might stand for us as the prototype of the gently nurtured girl of our time who has found herself and her true métier in the self-sacrificing toils of Red Cross work. Of the knowledge of healing herbs, says Tasso (vi. 67)—
Arte, che, per usanza, in quel paese
Nelle figlie de’ re par che si serbe;
And indeed the tendance of the wounded is essentially a royal task in any country; and one in which not a few royal princesses have shewn themselves versed in our day. Erminia, when at last she finds her love, tends him right royally (xix. 111 sqq.), but her address to the exhausted Tancred evinces also something peculiarly modern. What could be more in the professional Red Cross style than her injunction: “You shall know all you ask in good time; now you must be obedient and hold your tongue, and try to get some sleep” (xix. 114)?—
Saprai, rispose, il tutto: or (tel comando
come medica tua), taci, e riposa.
But are Tasso’s heroines after all so wonderful? To-day is the day of Women. They have proved and established in National Service their claim to the National Franchise and to a place in the National Legislature, and, what is more, their claim to be man’s companion and competitor in countless fields of activity. For a large part of the last century we had a woman on the throne: the present century may yet see a woman actually leading the king’s government. It is their War as well as ours; and now the victory is won, their part in it—without which victory had been unattainable—shall have full recognition. Apart from the noble work of the Red Cross Sisters and helpers, from the valour of the girl-chauffeurs and others who have sought and found a place as near as possible to the firing line, we have thousands of maidens and young matrons ready to risk comeliness and health and their whole physical future in the pestilent atmosphere of munition shops; thousands more who have donned the King’s uniform as “Waac’s” and “Wrens” and “Penguins.” How few and far between, in comparison, are the Women in Tasso’s scheme! How sorely his imagination would have been taxed, yet withal how congenially, had it fallen to him to describe the manifold activities—and the undiminished charms—of our twentieth century girlhood! Erminia is in some ways more of a Victorian type; but, if the fight is recognised as being fought elsewhere than in the actual front line, Clorinda is with us everywhere; strengthening the hands and inspiring the hearts of her compatriots, striking the chill of fear into the foe, and the dart of cupid into the susceptible hero at her side.
Armida, in Tasso’s scheme, bridges the gap between the seen and the unseen, between women’s work and the work of the Angels—good Angels, and bad. This brings us to another of Tasso’s fregi, and one of his most imaginative “embroideries”: I mean his elaborate description of the part played in the drama of the Crusade by the heavenly hosts and the hosts of the infernal regions. To the latter, surely, and especially to the magnificent picture of Satan’s Council of War (iv. 1-19), Milton must probably owe more than we ordinarily recognise. Among the most splendid passages of the Poem are, on the other hand, the descriptions of the counter-activities of the heavenly armies: God’s sending forth of Gabriel (i. 7), the Court of the Most High (ix. 55 sqq.), Michael’s scornful, single-handed rout of the massed battalions of Hell (ix. 63-5). But mythological as is the tone in which these events are narrated, and mythical as the whole conception might have seemed to a more materialistic generation than our own, we shall be ready to recognise that all this strain in the Gerusalemme Liberata is, after all, based, in a sense, on hard fact. It is, in fact, the Poet’s recognition of the paramount spiritual impulse which drove those hordes of Crusaders across a dangerous Europe into a still more dangerous Asia: his consciousness that the war they were waging was, in our present-day phrase, a “Spiritual War.” Have we not too our still warm and throbbing legend of the “Angels at Mons” and of the “White Companion”? Have not our own soldiers each his Guardian Angel, his “Defensor celeste” (vii. 84)? Whether Angel forms were seen at Mons or not, those of us who believe in their existence at all, believe that they were there, and not there only; but their force is everywhere joined to ours as often as we are really fighting “for God and the Right.”