Granting it to be true, that the Siege of Jerusalem is a nobler subject than the Wrath of Achilles, together with all that it includes of the siege of Troy, yet neither is the Siege of Jerusalem, with the high elements it comprehends, really the staple of the subject matter of Tasso, nor is the Siege of Troy the real subject of the poem of Homer. Tasso had evidently studied with attention the Iliad as well as the Æneid; and he has taken largely from, or worked largely after, both, but a great deal more, as far as I have seen, from the former than the latter. In which selection, doubtless, he chose well. The copy of a copy is pretty sure to be a vulgar work. Without noticing at present anything except what governs the main action, it may be observed, that the Wrath of Achilles is reproduced in the Offence, given and taken, of Rinaldo: and the relation of the one to Godfrey is evidently suggested by that of the other to Agamemnon.
Achilles the subject of the Iliad.
It is needful here to return to a topic, which I have already more lightly touched. We may reckon it among the chief distinctions of Homer, that he has been able to make of the individual man the broad basis of the most heroical among epic songs. The weak thread of the Æneid is really sustained by something that lies behind the figure of Æneas, namely, by its hanging on the splendid fortunes of Rome; the Odyssey is toned more nearly to the colour of a domestic painting; but in the Iliad, the man Achilles is the power whose action propels, and whose inaction stops, the world-wide conflict before Troy. The Poet has accomplished this great feat by dint of powers, that have given to the character of his hero on the one hand dimensions absolutely colossal, and, on the other, the finest lines that miniature itself could require.
For efforts of such a range as this, after-poets had not the necessary strength. They had not such command over the high-born material, of which man is formed, as to make their mode of treating it in one single figure the main stake, on which the fortune of their entire works was to depend. Men like Tasso sought and found a basis, less elevated indeed and splendid, but equally solid, and far more accessible, in the great events of history, or in the multitude of associations, alike noble and familiar, which belonged to them. These, which with Homer had been organically, and not mechanically alone, grouped about the one great Humanity of his poem, now became the central stem of the epic; and the properly and strictly personal element, which had been primary, became no more than accessory. But events are made for man, and not man for events; and we can scarcely doubt that the transition from the older epic, which gathered all its interests around the human soul as a centre, to the newer, which exhibits the human soul itself in a subordinate relation to external history or fortune, has been a transition downwards. It may be said, that Achilles is not the subject of the Iliad, in the same sense as Ulysses of the Odyssey. It is at any rate true that the action of the Odyssey is more directly related to the hero, than that of the Iliad. And so precise is the working of Homer’s intellect in all that appertains to poetical consistency, that a distinction of shade, just proportioned to this difference, is perhaps perceptible in the very exordia of the two poems, μῆνιν ἄειδε Θεὰ, and ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον. The one seems to propose the Wrath of the Man: the other the Man himself. But substantially the proposition is questionable: Achilles is in effect, as truly as Ulysses, the life and strength, the chief glory and beauty, of his own poem.
It might perhaps be doubted, whether even the Liberation of Jerusalem was a finer subject for Christendom, than the siege of Troy for the Greek race. For it is a mistake to suppose that because the Redemption of mankind infinitely transcends all other transactions, the poetry which is composed about it will therefore be excellent in proportion. But at any rate this is not the question. Homer’s subject is, indeed, the Titanic passion of Achilles, and to this subject every Book of the Iliad, some of them positively and some negatively, but every one of them effectively, contributes; but is the Liberation of Jerusalem the true subject of the poem of Tasso?
Subject of the Gerusalemme more doubtful.
The three first Cantos, with the ninth, the eleventh, and the nineteenth, are the only ones, which are in strictness occupied with the proper theme of the Jerusalem. The fifth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and large portions at the least of the other eleven, are taken from the Siege, and are given to the truancy, or erratic and separate adventures, of those who ought to have carried it on; mainly of the two principal Christian warriors, Rinaldo and Tancredi. In short, near a moiety of the work is occupied, not with the Liberation of Jerusalem at all, but with the events which draw away the champions pledged to it, upon errands of a character the most incongruous with the grand design.
Will it be answered, that in the same manner Achilles disappears from the eye of the spectator during one moiety of the Iliad? The apparent parallel is wholly false. For the subject of the Iliad is the passion of Achilles; and the whole movement of the poem in his absence bears directly upon the enhancement and elevation of that subject. It exhibits to us the successive efforts of the Greeks, and of their most redoubted chieftains, one by one, to make up for the seclusion of Achilles from the fighting host. It was impossible for Homer more effectually to magnify his hero, than by recounting fully these exploits and their failure. In showing the perils and calamities brought about by his absence, they deeply impress us with the grandeur and efficacy of his presence, and prepare us for the reappearance of something more than man: of something which, but for a most skilful preparatory mechanism, we should probably have repelled as an unnatural exaggeration. But the love-born vagaries of the warriors of Tasso are mere impediments to the conquest of Jerusalem, and have no effect whatever in enhancing the poetical greatness of the achievement which was to crown the work, while they seriously deduct from the power and effectiveness, already in the case of Rinaldo but moderate, of the characters assigned to the warriors themselves.
It may therefore be true, as Mr. Hallam has said, that the events in Tasso spring naturally one from another; but so may a series of successive turnings off the line of a road we have been travelling, when taken singly, produce no serious, and even no sensible, deviation; yet their effect, when taken together, may be wholly to change our direction, and prevent us from making any way at all towards our point. Without doubt, each incident of an epic poem ought to follow naturally in the train of that which directly precedes it; but it is far more important that it should bear a legitimate relation to the central design, and should magnify, not detract from, the grandeur of that on which the whole fabric principally depends.
But there are surely many other objections to the mode, which Tasso has adopted, of impeding and retarding the accomplishment of his main action. Considering the nature of his theme, and the solemnity of the sanctions under which the Crusades were undertaken, although we have no right to ask that passion and infirmity should be banished from the camp, yet the wholesale entanglement of the very first warriors in love affairs, their rushing in a mass, with few exceptions besides greyheads of the camp, upon the track of Armida, their compelling Godfrey to allow the interests of this treacherous beauty to interrupt the august purpose of their undertaking, and then the very large proportion of the poem occupied in unravelling the web thus tangled, form, to my view at least, a bad poetical mixture of the intrusive with the Christian elements of the design.