THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY—TORQUATO TASSO—HIS WORK—THE ‘GERUSALEMME LIBERATA’—GIORDANO BRUNO—LITERARY CHARACTER OF HIS WORK—GIAMBATTISTA GUARINI.

The Later Renaissance, which was so great in Spain and in England, and in France was important, was elsewhere a time of decline, of silence, or of very faint beginnings. The literature of Germany has been broken into periods of vigour, with long intervals of silence between. The second half of the sixteenth century was one of these. Among the smaller peoples, with Holland at their head, there was as yet little more than the attempt to produce literature. The Later Renaissance in Italy. The case of Italy was more fortunate than that of Germany. She at least can count two of her most interesting sons among the men of letters of this time, Tasso and Bruno. But here the decadence had begun, and had made no small progress towards the sheer dexterous futility which was to be personified in Marini. The spirit of the Renaissance was[353] worn out, and was replaced by mere accomplishment, and by the nervous fear which is visible all through the life of Tasso. The Roman Catholic reaction was not favourable to literature. It brought with it the tyranny, or at least the predominance, of a religion which could no longer inspire. The Popes of the time endeavoured to make Rome moral by methods which might have commended themselves to the strictest sect of the Puritans; and commendable as this effort to restrain the licence of the earlier Renaissance and the period of the Italian wars may have been, still it was an example of the attempt to repress which was being made everywhere in Italy, and which succeeded, since it had only to deal with men of a weak generation. Giordano Bruno was, indeed, indisciplined enough; but he spent the active part of his life out of Italy, and when he did return, his fate was a severe warning against independence of character.
Torquato Tasso.

The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to show under what a gloomy cloud literature had to work in Italy all through the later sixteenth century. It was a life of dependence, and was dominated by fear—fear of rivals, of envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of murder. That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso’s case is true; but though his contemporaries saw it to be unfounded, they do not seem to have thought it absurd. He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo Tasso of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Rossi, a[354] lady of a distinguished Neapolitan family. Bernardo Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer, and who gained some fame in his time as the author of a long epic founded on the Amadis of Gaul, was compelled to fly when his patron was driven from his principality of Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was detained in Naples by her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay her dowry. She died without again seeing her husband, but the young Torquato was allowed to return to his father. Bernardo, who found a refuge in the service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato read, but not at the law, and wrote his epic poem the Rinaldo—little to the satisfaction of his father, who, though a verse-writer himself, wished his son to qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was resolved to be a poet, and not a lawyer, which decision brought with it the absolute necessity of finding a patron. The Cardinal Luigi d’Este introduced him to the Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his Jerusalem Delivered and his play of Torrismondo, and had written his Discourses on Epic Poetry. Alphonso II. d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and seems to have treated him in the main with great kindness. The story of Tasso’s stay at this typical Italian Court, of his passion for Leonora d’Este, of the Duke’s discovery, and of the false accusation of madness, on which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the best known romances of literary history; but that it is a romance there can be no doubt. From his early[355] years Tasso seems to have suffered from a continual fear of persecution and the plots of enemies. When he accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d’Este to Paris, he imagined that some treason was being plotted against him at home. Later he thought he had been accused of heresy, and refused to be pacified by the assurances of the Duke and the head of the Inquisition, to whom he subjected his writings. He fled twice from Ferrara, and twice came back. He began to accuse the Duke of intending to have him murdered, and finally drew his dagger in the Palace on a servant whom he suspected of trying to poison him. Duke Alphonso vindicated his own character, and also gave the exact measure of the morality of the time by saying that it was absurd to suppose that he thought of killing “il Signor Tasso,” since if he wished to do so he had only to give the order. At last, and not until the Duke had displayed a patience which is sufficient evidence that he had no animosity against his servant, Tasso in 1579 was imprisoned as mad in the hospital of Saint Anne. The treatment of the mad was everywhere harsh at that time, but the poet appears to have received exceptional kindness. Friends exerted themselves for him, some from pity, others moved by the desire to be thought patrons of literature. In 1586 he was released, on condition that he would not return to Ferrara. During the last years of his life he wandered from one Italian Court to another, always quarrelling with his patrons, but always finding protectors. He died at Rome in 1595, when he was about to be[356] crowned as Poet Laureate on the Capitol. His Jerusalem Delivered was printed in a pirated edition during his imprisonment.[117]
His work.

The bulk of Tasso’s work is very great. In addition to the Rinaldo, and two forms of the Jerusalem, he wrote the pastoral play Aminta, the tragedy of Torrismondo, much minor verse, many sonnets, and many treatises in prose. A large number of his letters have been preserved. In his latter years, and in the undeniable decadence of his powers, he wrote a long poem in blank verse on the Seven Days of Creation.

Tasso’s minor work is no doubt of value for the study of his genius. His philosophic treatises, mostly in dialogue, would, I presume, for I cannot profess to speak of them with knowledge, be useful to the student of Italian thought under the Roman Catholic reaction. Even his play of Torrismondo, begun in his youth, and finished after his imprisonment in the hospital of Saint Anne, has a place in the history of the “classic” drama. In itself it is not attractive. It is an unpleasant, and even rather commonplace, story of suicide and accidental incest, frigidly told, with all the Senecan apparatus. The pastoral poem of Aminta is of more historical importance, and has some biographical interest, while the subject suited Tasso’s faculty for tender images and luscious verse. But he owes his place in literature to his Jerusalem Delivered.

Something has been said of the history of this poem.[357] It was begun in his youth, was continued during his stay at the Court of Ferrara, was read in parts to his patrons, and subjected to the criticism of friends. The desire to secure the honour of the dedication for the house of Este, which had already patronised Ariosto, is said, very plausibly, to have had a good deal to do with the Duke’s long-suffering towards the author. When published it was made the excuse for a dispute between the Academies which overran all Italy in the sixteenth century, and were already become the homes of mere word-splitting. The Jerusalem in fact became almost an affair of State at Ferrara. Its publication in a very inaccurate form in a pirated edition during his imprisonment was one of the most bitter, and certainly not the least genuine, of the grievances of a poet who had an artistic care about the execution of the work he published. The pirated edition bore the name which Tasso had chosen, Godfrey of Boulogne, but which he changed for Gerusalemme Liberata in the first authorised edition of 1581. Under the influence of the fretful piety of his later years he made his ill-advised recension, to which he gave the name of Gerusalemme Conquistata.
The Gerusalemme Liberata.

The enduring popularity of the Jerusalem Delivered in Italy has been vouched for by such well-known stories as that which tells how it was sung by gondoliers and country people even into this century. Ugo Foscolo has recorded that he heard a passage chanted by galley-slaves. Its acceptance among poets and men of letters, both in the sixteenth century and since, is[358] not a matter of legend. Milton admired Tasso, and Spenser did him the signal honour of direct imitation. Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss, and indeed the final adventure of Sir Guyon and the Palmer in the Second Book of the Fa?rie Queen, are modelled on, and in some passages are taken directly from, the description of the garden of Armida, and the rescue of Rinaldo in the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of the Jerusalem. The poem was three times translated in whole or in part into English before 1600, and one of these versions, Fairfax’s, has been given rank as a classic.[118]

[359]

The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well justified, though for different reasons. The Jerusalem Delivered has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted telescope, whereby the............