A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The novel by Cinthio himself on which this play is founded was dramatised by Whetstone; but that Shakespeare had seen Cinthio’s dramatic version also may be inferred from a minute circumstance. Cinthio’s play, not his novel or Whetstone’s adaptation of it, has a character named Angela, whose name disappears fromMeasure for Measure, but who bequeaths Angelo as that of her brother, whom Cinthio calls Juristi, and Whetstone Andrugio.

CHAPTER XVIII
TASSO

The year 1564 is memorable in the intellectual history of the world. It marks the beginning of the long ascent of the North, and of the slow depression of the South. In it Shakespeare was born; in it Michael Angelo died; in it the decrees of the Council of Trent were promulgated by one of the most liberal and enlightened of the Popes, even as the Society of Jesus had been established twenty-four years before by another entitled to the same commendation. Neither Paul nor Pius was free to gratify his personal inclinations at the expense of the institution over which he presided; and in fact the Society and the Council were less important in themselves than as indicative of the new spirit which was to prevail in Roman Catholic countries, destructive, so far as its influence extended, of science, and deadly to learning, literature, and art. The time was at hand when the policy of great states was to be controlled by confessors; when the clergy, under the influence of a training in special seminaries, were to be converted from an order into a caste; when the entire influence of State and Church was to be devoted to the repression of free thought, with the inevitable result of intellectual degeneracy, and mortifying inferiority to the nations which, with whatever limitations, acknowledged the principle of freedom.

From this period Italian literature, though still interesting in itself, becomes comparatively unimportant in its relation to general civilisation; it drops from the first place into the third, and every year widens the interval between the retrogressive and the progressive peoples. The results of eighty years of oppression are thus stated by an illustrious visitor on the authority of the Italians themselves: “I have sate among their learned men,” says Milton, “and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while they themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought, that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian.” These, it will be observed, are not Milton’s own words, but report the views of the cultivated Italians with whom he associated, and who, enslaved but not subdued, still nurtured hopes which our times have seen fulfilled. Could the foreigner have been excluded, could men like these have been left to settle by themselves with priest and prince, it is probable that the anti-Renaissance reaction and the counter-Reformation would never have come to pass. Yet Italy cannot be wholly excused; the foreigner had brought the mischief, but who had brought the foreigner?

This age of decadence is nevertheless represented to posterity by one of the greatest poets of Italy; nor can his misfortunes be specially charged upon it. The sad story of TORQUATO TASSO has ever excited and ever must excite the deepest compassion; but it is not now believed that any fellow-mortal was responsible for his sorrows, or that they were materially aggravated by ill-usage from any quarter. The simple fact is that during the later part of his life Tasso was frequently either insane or on the borderland between sanity and insanity, and that, given his peculiar mental constitution, his double portion of the morbid irritability and sensitiveness commonly incidental to the poetical temperament, the same affliction must have befallen him under any circumstances or in any age of the world. It is indeed possible that his brain was in some measure clouded and warped by the unnatural discipline of the Jesuits into whose hands he fell in his boyhood, and that this determined the nature of some of the symptoms of mental alienation which he afterwards manifested. It was, moreover, his great misfortune that his age should have afforded no other sphere for a delicate and candid mind than a court honeycombed with intrigue and jealousy. Yet the fate of so morbidly sensitive a spirit could hardly have been materially different; it is only wonderful that he should have regained so much of his intellect and died master of himself. Courtly society and religious excitement between them admirably trained his magnificent genius to write theJerusalem Delivered, in its relation to general culture the epic of the Roman Catholic revival, but, from the large-hearted humanity of the author, happily much more.

The circumstances of Tasso’s youth were such as to intensify the innate melancholy of his disposition. His father Bernardo, whom we have met with as a poet and a high-minded cavalier, ruined himself and his family within a few years after Torquato’s birth at Sorrento (1544) by the noble imprudence of the advice which he gave to his Neapolitan patron, and, though afterwards the servant of princes, died in poverty. When twelve years old Tasso lost his mother, poisoned, as was thought, by her relatives, to rob her husband of her portion. We have spoken of the Jesuitry which marred his early education; afterwards, however, he was brought up in a much saner manner. At Urbino, where his father found a temporary refuge, afterwards in busy Venice and at Padua, where he ineffectually studied law, he had become a master of classics, mathematics, and philosophy, and had not only read but annotated Dante. By the time (1565) when he became attached to the court of Ferrara, he had published hisRinaldo, in form an imitation of Ariosto, but indicative of a new spirit; and had less fortunately signalised the termination of a two years’ residence at Bologna by a scrape in which he had involved himself by reciting a pasquinade upon the university, which not unnaturally caused him to be accused of having written it. This adventure at least evinced serious deficiency in tact—an endowment more essential than genius in the situation where he now found himself.

Tasso’s immediate obligations at the court of Ferrara were to Luigi, Cardinal d’Este, brother of the Duke, who seems to have expected nothing from him but duteous attendance, and the completion of the great poem of which theRinaldo had given promise, and whose theme was still unfixed. Nothing appears to the Cardinal’s disadvantage; nor is any especial reproach addressed to his high-spirited brother the Duke, except the heavy taxation he imposed to maintain a magnificence disproportioned to his revenue. The two great ladies of the court, the Duke’s sisters, were decidedly sympathetic, and there seems no reason to attribute malevolence to his fellow-courtiers. The situation of this child of genius at a court was indeed a false one, and could have no fortunate issue; yet the innate germ of insanity would almost certainly have developed itself, whatever the external circumstances of his lot. For five or six years all went well. Tasso chose the subject of his poem, laboured diligently at it, attracted universal admiration by the brilliancy and fluency of his occasional compositions, disputed successfully with the élite of Ferrara on the subject of Love, and in 1571 accompanied the Cardinal on a mission to France. The French court had not yet resolved upon the St. Bartholomew, and its coquettings with the Huguenots scandalised the devout poet. He composed two discourses upon France and its affairs, which, although in some respects fanciful, display much penetration. On his return he quitted the Cardinal’s service for no very apparent reason, and shortly afterwards entered the Duke’s. This would bring him into more intimate relations with the Duke’s sisters. One of these, Lucrezia, soon contracted, avowedly for reasons of state, a marriage with the Duke of Urbino; but Leonora, weak in health and devoted to good works, remained single. With her the romance of Tasso’s life is associated; and although the belief that a presumptuous attachment occasioned his imprisonment is undoubtedly groundless, the attachment itself is the evident inspiration of much of his lyrical poetry:

Lady, though cruel destiny deny
To follow you, and eager feet enchains,
Ever the heart upon your vestige strains,
And save your tresses knows not any tie.
And as the birdling doth attendant fly,
Lured by the hand that tempting food detains,
Moved by like cause if follows you and plains,
Pining for consolation from your eye.
Gently within your hand the roamer take
Into your breast, and let it nestle there,
Soothed to great blissfulness in narrow span,
Until at length its soul in song awake,
And its dear woe and your great worth declare
From Adria’s shore to shores Etrurian.