Nor let it here be said, that even so our great Achilles stays the progress of the Greeks towards triumph for the love of a weak woman. We need not dwell on such distinctions as that Briseis was a noble and worthy, but Armida an unworthy object of attachment; that Achilles was but one, while Tasso touches all, who by age were capable, with the same phrensy. It is not even this worthy attachment alone, that acts upon Achilles: that is not the main stress of the tempest which so rends the strong heaving oak when he cries,
ἀλλά μοι οἰδάνεται κραδίη χόλῳ, ὁππότ’ ἐκείνων
μνήσομαι, ὥς μ’ ἀσύφηλον ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἔρεξεν
Ἀτρείδης, ὡσεί τιν’ ἀτίμητον μετανάστην[960].
In Achilles, baffled love is surmounted by the image of agonizing pride, pierced through and through; and high over this again towers his hatred of the meanness of Agamemnon, and his sense of Justice, stung to the very inmost quick. Even supposing the question to be open, whether Homer has mixed his ingredients in due or in undue proportions, at all events there is no essential conflict among them. But such a conflict becomes visible and glaring, when a scope is assigned to the impulses and sway of personal passion upon an army devoted to God and to the highest aim, such as it is quite impossible to exemplify, nay to suppose, in any army that has ever been banded together for any even of the meaner ends of earthly policy.
Again, although Tasso’s poem is eminently Christian in its general intention, who does not feel that, instead of gathering our main sympathies and interest by means of his accessory circumstances round his principal subject, he has too effectually severed them from it, and has left it so bare and naked, that his liberation of Jerusalem is after all very like a common capture and sack; very like what, mutatis mutandis, the capture of it by the Saracens must have been? We leave him with our minds full of Tancredi and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Gildippe and Odoardo; but the associations, which these names suggest, connect themselves with any subject, rather than with the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre; and the respected Godfrey, with his plans, has, at most points of the poem, little more share in our thoughts than the Jupiter of the Iliad, as he feasts remotely grand on Olympus, or sits on Ida for the convenience of a nearer view.
Relative places of Rinaldo and Tancredi.
Besides these objections of irrelevant interpolation, incongruous mixture, and divided interests, it may be observed that the relative prominence of the heroes of Tasso is not clearly pronounced. No one can doubt as to the question, who is the first, and by far the first, figure of the Iliad. Achilles ever haunts us, either in recollection or by sight; at any rate, he stands among and above his brother chieftains, as Saul out-topped by head and shoulders the people of Israel. But it is not easy to say who is the hero or protagonist of the Jerusalem. Although the interest which he attracts is inferior, yet the virtues, intellect, and moral force of Godfrey stand high and clear beyond those of all the other more prominent personages: he bears himself so meekly in his high office, and yet so perfectly and so exclusively exhibits the political spirit, that by mere moral and official greatness he stands, in any general view of the poem, an inconvenient neighbour and a dangerous rival to the two other figures, for one of whom the title of hero must have been designed. Taking, next, the yet more serious question between Tancredi and Rinaldo, which of this pair is intended to command the chief interest? Apparently, in Tasso’s intention, it is Rinaldo; because without him the main action stops, with him it proceeds. And yet the poet has assigned to Tancredi the deadly single combat with, and the triumph so powerfully described over, Argante, the only really great and terrible champion on the Mahometan side. How would the Iliad stand, if Diomed had killed Hector, and had left to Achilles only Æneas or Sarpedon?
Tasso here seems himself to have felt an incongruity, and to have sought to compensate Rinaldo in quantity for the (comparatively) deficient quality of his conquests. In the final assault he slays a multitude of the enemy like sheep[961]; when, as the poet says, in a manner surely far beneath his theme, the taste of victory had excited in him the appetite of carnage[962].
Nor is it only in the distribution of military glory, that Rinaldo appears to have suffered for the advantage of Tancred. On one occasion indeed, immediately after the death of Gernando, Tasso has degraded Tancred for the advantage of Rinaldo. For the poet makes this warrior plead, that the offence of Rinaldo should be considered according to the quality of him who committed it, and that there can be no such thing as true justice without respect of persons: