Drawn from obscurity by the publication of Rinaldo[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty.
"I saw," says the poet, describing, in Aminta[173], the first Court of Ferrara, "I saw charming goddesses and nymphs, without veils, without clouds: I felt the inspiration of a new virtue, of a new divinity, and I sang of war and heroes."
Tasso read the stanzas of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his Gerusalemme in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris.
Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. Aminta was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of Rinaldo admired the author of Orlando to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew:
Tasso at Ferrara.
"This laurel which you offer me," he wrote, "the judgment of wise men, of men of the world and my own judgment have laid on the head of the man to whom you are bound by ties of blood. Prostrate before his image, I give him the most honourable titles that affection and respect are able to dictate to me. I will loudly proclaim him my father, my lord and my master."
This modesty, so little known in our time, did not disarm jealousy. Torquato beheld the feasts given by Venice to Henry III. returning from Poland, when a manuscript of the Gerusalemme was printed by stealth: the minute criticism of the friends whose tastes he consulted alarmed him. Perhaps he showed himself too sensitive; but perhaps he had built the success of his love-affairs on his hopes of fame. He imagined himself set about by pitfalls and treasons; he was obliged to defend his life. His stay at Belriguardo, where Goethe evokes his shade, failed to calm him. Says the great German poet, who makes the great Italian poet speak:
Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaint:
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart[176].
. . . . . . . .
And what is more deserving to survive,
And silently to work for centuries,
Than the confession of a noble love
Confided modestly to gentle song[177]?
Says Goethe again, interpreting Leonora's sentiments: