As Her Royal Highness had not arrived, I visited the church of San Paolo: I saw nothing but tombs there; for the rest, not a soul, except those of a few dead men and mine, which is hardly living. At the back of the choir hung a picture by Guercino[168].
The cathedral is deceptive: you see a front and sides encrusted with bas-reliefs representing sacred and profane subjects. Over this exterior run other ornaments usually placed in the interior of Gothic edifices, such as rudentures, Arab corbels, nimbused soffits, galleries with small columns, pointed arches and trefoils, disposed in the thickness of the walls. You enter, and you stand dumbfounded at the sight of a new church with spherical vaults, with massive pillars. Something of that incongruity exists in France, both physically and morally: in our old castles, they are contriving modern closets, with plenty of pigeon—holes, alcoves and clothes-presses. Break into the souls of a good many of those men tabarded with historic names: what do you find there? Backstair tendencies.
I was quite abashed at the sight of that cathedral: it seemed to have been turned, like a gown worn inside out; a burgess' wife of the time of Louis XV. cloaked as a castellan's lady of the twelfth century[169].
Ferrara.
Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison[170], has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the Gerusalemme.
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky:
"My adversities," he says, "began with my life. Cruel fortune snatched me from my mother's arms. I remember her kisses moist with tears, her prayers which the winds have carried away. I was not again to press my face to her face. With an uncertain step, like Ascanius or young Camillus, I followed my wandering and outlawed father. I grew up in poverty and exile."
Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father.