No poet perhaps ever owed so much to female influence as Tasso, or wrote so much under the intoxicating inspiration of love and beauty. He paid most dearly for such inspiration; and yet not too dearly. The high tone of sentiment, the tenderness, and the delicacy which pervade all his poems, which prevail even in his most voluptuous descriptions, and which give him such a decided superiority over Ariosto, cannot be owing to any change of manners or increase of refinement produced by the lapse of a few years. It may be traced to the tender influence of two elegant women. He for many years read the cantos of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to the Princesses Lucretia and Leonora, both of whom he admired—one of whom he adored.
Au reste—the kiss, which he is said to have imprinted on the lips of Leonora in a transport of frenzy, as well as the idea that she was the primary cause of his insanity, and of his seven years' imprisonment at St. Anne's, rest on no authority worthy of credit; yet it is not less certain that she was the object of his secret and fervent admiration, and that this hopeless passion conspired, with many other causes, to fever his irritable temperament and unsettle his imagination, beyond that "fine madness," which we are told ought "to possess the poet's brain."
When Tasso first visited Ferrara, in 1565, he was just one-and-twenty, with all the advantages which a fine countenance, a majestic figure, (for he was tall even among the tallest,) noble birth, and excelling talents could bestow: he was already distinguished as the author of the Rinaldo, his earliest poem, in which he had celebrated (as if prophetically,) the Princesses d'Este—and chiefly Leonora.
Lucrezia Estense, e l'altra i cui crin d'oro,
Lacci e reti saran del casto amore.[120]
When Tasso was first introduced to her in her brother's court, Leonora was in her thirtieth year; a disparity of age which is certainly no argument against the passion she inspired. For a young man, at his first entrance into life, to fall in love ambitiously—with a woman, for instance, who is older than himself, or with one who is, or ought to be, unattainable—is a common occurrence. Tasso, from his boyish years, had been the sworn servant of beauty. He tells us, in grave prose, "che la sua giovanezza fu tutta sotto-posta all' amorose leggi;"[121] but he was also refined, even to fastidiousness, in his intercourse with women. He had formed, in his own poetical mind, the most exalted idea of what a female ought to be, and unfortunately, she who first realised all his dreams of perfection, was a Princess—"there seated where he durst not soar." Leonora was still eminently lovely, in that soft, artless, unobtrusive style of beauty, which is charming in itself, and in a princess irresistible, from its contrast with the loftiness of her station and the trappings of her rank. Her complexion was extremely fair; her features small and regular; and the form of her head peculiarly graceful, if I may judge from a fine medallion I once saw of her in Italy. Ill health, and her early acquaintance with the sorrows of her unfortunate mother, had given to her countenance a languid and pensive cast, and sicklied all the natural bloom of her complexion; but "Paleur, qui marque une ame tendre, a bien son prix:" so Tasso thought; and this "vago Pallore," which "vanquishes the rose, and makes the dawn ashamed of her blushes," he has frequently and beautifully celebrated; as in the pretty Madrigal—
Vita della mia Vita!
O Rosa scolorita! &c.
and in those graceful lines,
Languidetta beltà vinceva amore, &c.
applicable only to Leonora. Her eyes were blue; her mouth of peculiar beauty, both in form and expression. In the seventh Sonnet, "Bella è la donna mia," he says it was the most lovely feature in her face; in another, still finer,[122] he styles this exquisite mouth "a crimson shell"—