From this moment Tasso was a ruined man; he had become that worst of social scourges, a courtier with a grievance, a semi-lunatic all the more dangerous and tiresome because his mental powers were not so much impaired as warped. Studying his elaborate apology, we do not know whether to despise the obstinacy of his devotion to the House of Este, or to respect the sentiment of loyalty which survived all real or fancied insults. Against the duke he utters no word of blame. Alfonso is always magnanimous and clement, excellent in mind and body, good and courteous by nature, deserving the faithful service and warm love of his dependents. Montecatino is the real villain. 'The princes are not tyrants—they are not, no, no: he is the tyrant.'[40]

After quitting Ferrara, Tasso wandered through Mantua, Padua, Venice, coldly received in all these cities; for 'the hearts of men were hardened by their interests against him.' Writing from Venice to the Grand Duke in July, Maffeo Veniero says: 'Tasso is here, disturbed in mind; and though his intellect is certainly not sound, he shows more signs of affliction than of insanity.'[41]

The sequestration of his only copy of the Gerusalemme not unnaturally caused him much distress; and Veniero adds that the chief difficulty under which he labored was want of money. Veniero hardly understood the case. Even with a competence it is incredible that Tasso would have been contented to work quietly at literature in a private position.[42] From Venice he found his way southward to Urbino, writing one of his sublimest odes upon the road from Pesaro.[43]

Francesco Maria della Rovere received him with accustomed kindness; but the spirit of unrest drove him forth again, and after two months we find him once more, an indigent and homeless pedestrian, upon the banks of the Sesia. He wanted to reach Vercelli, but the river was in flood, and he owed a night's lodging to the chance courtesy of a young nobleman. Among the many picturesque episodes in Tasso's wanderings none is more idyllically beautiful than the tale of his meeting with this handsome youth. He has told it himself in the exordium to his Dialogue Il Padre di Famiglia. When asked who he was and whither he was going, he answered: 'I was born in the realm of Naples, and my mother was a Neapolitan; but I draw my paternal blood from Bergamo, a Lombard city. My name and surname I pass in silence: they are so obscure that if I uttered them, you would know neither more nor less of my condition. I am flying from the anger of a prince and fortune. My destination is the state of Savoy.' Upon this pilgrimage Tasso chose the sobriquet of Omero Fuggiguerra. Arriving at Turin, he was refused entrance by the guardians of the gate. The rags upon his back made them suspect he was a vagabond infected with the plague. A friend who knew him, Angelo Ingegneri, happened to pass by, and guaranteed his respectability. Manso compares the journey of this penniless and haggard fugitive through the cities of Italy to the meteoric passage of a comet.[44] Wherever he appeared, he blazed with momentary splendor. Nor was Turin slow to hail the lustrous apparition. The Marchese Filippo da Este entertained him in his palace. The Archbishop, Girolamo della Rovere, begged the honor of his company. The Duke of Savoy, Carlo Emanuele, offered him the same appointments as he had enjoyed at Ferrara. Nothing, however, would content his morbid spirit. Flattered and caressed through the months of October and November he began once more in December to hanker after his old home. Inconceivable as it may seem, he opened fresh negotiations with the duke; and Alfonso, on his side, already showed a will to take him back. Writing to his sister from Pesaro at the end of September, Tasso stay that a gentleman had been sent from Ferrara expressly to recall him.[45] The fact seems to be that Tasso was too illustrious to be neglected by the House of Este. Away from their protection, he was capable of bringing on their name the slur of bad treatment and ingratitude. Nor would it have looked well to publish the Gerusalemme with its praises of Alfonso, while the poet was lamenting his hard fate in every town of Italy. The upshot of these negotiations was that Tasso resolved on retracing his steps. He reached Ferrara again upon February 21, 1579, two days before Margherita Gonzaga, the duke's new bride, made her pompous entrance into the city. But his reception was far from being what he had expected. The duke's heart seemed hardened. Apartments inferior to his quality were assigned him, and to these he was conducted by a courtier with ill-disguised insolence. The princesses refused him access to their lodgings, and his old enemies openly manifested their derision for the kill-joy and the skeleton who had returned to spoil their festival. Tasso, querulous as he was about his own share in the disagreeables of existence, remained wholly unsympathetic to the trials of his fellow-creatures. Self-engrossment closed him in a magic prison-house of discontent.

Therefore when he saw Ferrara full of merry-making guests, and heard the marriage music ringing through the courtyards of the castle, he failed to reflect with what a heavy heart the duke might now be entering upon his third sterile nuptials. Alfonso was childless, brotherless, with no legitimate heir to defend his duchy from the Church in case of his decease. The irritable poet forgot how distasteful at such a moment of forced gayety and hollow parade his reappearance, with the old complaining murmurs, the old suspicions, the old restless eyes, might be to the master who had certainly borne much and long with him. He only felt himself neglected, insulted, outraged:

Then he burst out into angry words, which he afterwards acknowledged to have been 'false, mad and rash.'[47] The duke's patience had reached its utmost limit. Tasso was arrested, and confined in the hospital for mad folk at S. Anna. This happened in March 1579. He was detained there until July 19, 1586, a period of seven years and four months.

No one who has read the foregoing pages will wonder why Tasso was imprisoned. The marvel is rather that the fact should have roused so many speculations. Alfonso was an autocratic princeling. His favorite minister Montecatino fell in one moment from a height of power to irrecoverable ruin. The famous preacher Panigarola, for whom he negotiated a Cardinal's hat, lost his esteem by seeking promotion at another Court, and had to fly Ferrara. His friend, Ercole Contrario, was strangled in the castle on suspicion of having concealed a murder. Tasso had been warned repeatedly, repeatedly forgiven; and now when he turned up again with the same complaints and the same menaces, Alfonso determined to have done with the nuisance. He would not kill him, but he would put him out of sight and hearing. If he was guilty, S. Anna would be punishment enough. If he was mad, it might be hoped that S. Anna would cure him. To blame the duke for this exercise of authority, is difficult. Noble as is the poet's calling, and faithful as are the wounds of a devoted friend and servant, there are limits to princely patience. It is easier to blame Tasso for the incurable idealism which, when he was in comfort at Turin, made him pine 'to kiss the hand of his Highness, and recover some part of his favor on the occasion of his marriage.'[48]

Three long letters, written by Tasso during the early months of his imprisonment, discuss the reasons for his arrest.[49] Two of these are directed to his staunch friend Scipione Gonzaga, the third to Giacomo Buoncompagno, nephew of Pope Gregory XIII. Partly owing to omissions made by the editors before publication, and partly perhaps to the writer's reticence, they throw no very certain light even on his own opinion.[50] But this much appears tolerably clear. Tasso was half-mad and altogether irritable. He had used language which could not be overlooked. The Duke continued to resent his former practice with the Medici, and disapproved of his perpetual wanderings. The courtiers had done their utmost to prejudice his mind by calumnies and gossip, raking up all that seemed injurious to Tasso's reputation in the past acts of his life and in the looser verses found among his papers. It may also be conceded that they contrived to cast an unfavorable light upon his affectionate correspondence with the two princesses. Tasso himself laid great stress upon his want of absolute loyalty, upon some lascivious compositions, and lastly upon his supposed heresies. It is not probable that the duke attached importance to such poetry as Tasso may have written in the heat of youth; and it is certain that he regarded the heresies as part of the poet's hallucinations. It is also far more likely that the Leonora episode passed in his mind for another proof of mental infirmity than that he judged it seriously. It was quite enough that Tasso had put himself in the wrong by petulant abuse of his benefactor and by persistent fretfulness. Moreover, he was plainly brain-sick. That alone justified Alfonso in his own eyes.

And brain-sick Tasso was, without a shadow of doubt.[51] It is hardly needful to recapitulate his terror of the Inquisition, dread of being poisoned, incapacity for self-control in word and act, and other signs of incipient disease. During the residence in S. Anna this malady made progress. He was tormented by spectral voices and apparitions. He believed himself to be under the influence of magic charms. He was haunted by a sprite, who stole his books and flung his MSS. about the room. A good genius, in the form of a handsome youth, appeared and conversed with him. He lost himself for hours together in abstraction, talking aloud, staring into vacancy, and expressing surprise that other people could not see the phantoms which surrounded him. He complained that his melancholy passed at moments into delirium (which he called frenesia), after which he suffered from loss of memory and prostration. His own mind became a constant cause of self-torture. Suspicious of others, he grew to be suspicious of himself. And when he left S. Anna, these disorders, instead of abating, continued to afflict him, so that his most enthusiastic admirers were forced to admit that 'he was subject to constitutional melancholy with crises of delirium, but not to actual insanity.'[52] At first, his infirmity did not interfere with intellectual production of a high order, though none of his poetry, after the Gerusalemme was completed in 1574, rose to the level of his earlier work. But in course of time the artist's faculty itself was injured, and the creations of his later life are unworthy of his genius.

The seven years and four months of Tasso's imprisonment may be passed over briefly. With regard to his so-called dungeon, it is certain that, after some months spent in a narrow chamber, he obtained an apartment of several rooms. He was allowed to write and receive as many letters as he chose. Friends paid him visits, and he went abroad under surveillance in the city of Ferrara. To extenuate the suffering which a man of his temper endured in this enforced seclusion would be unjust to Tasso. There is no doubt that he was most unhappy. But to exaggerate his discomforts would be unjust to the duke. Even Manso describes 'the excellent and most convenient lodgings' assigned him in S. Anna, alludes to the provision for his cure by medicine, and remarks upon the opposition which he offered to medical treatment. According to this biographer, his own endeavors to escape necessitated a strict watch upon his movements.[53] Unless, therefore, we flatly deny the fact of his derangement, which is supported by a mass of testimony, it may be doubted whether Tasso was more miserable in S. Anna than he would have been at large. The subsequent events of his life prove that his release brought no mitigation of his malady.

It was, however, a dreary time. He spent his days in writing letters to all the princes of Italy, to Naples, to Bergamo, to the Roman Curia, declaiming on his wretchedness and begging for emancipation. Occasional poems flowed from his pen. But during this period he devoted his serious hours mainly to prose composition. The bulk of his Dialogues issued from S. Anna. On August 7, 1580, Celio Malaspina published a portion of the Gerusalemme at Venice, under the title of Il Gottifredo di M. Torquato Tasso. In February of the following year, his friend Angelo Ingegneri gave the whole epic to the world. Within six months from that date the poem was seven times reissued. This happened without the sanction or the supervision of the luckless author; and from the sale of the book he obtained no profit. Leonora d'Este died upon February 10, 1581. A volume of elegies appeared on this occasion; but Tasso's Muse uttered no sound.[54] He wrote to Panigarola that 'a certain tacit repugnance of his genius' forced him to be mute.[55] His rival Guarini undertook a revised edition of his lyrics in 1582. Tasso had to bear this dubious compliment in silence. All Europe was devouring his poems; scribes and versifiers were building up their reputation on his fame. Yet he could do nothing. Embittered by the piracies of publishers, infuriated by the impertinence of editors, he lay like one forgotten in that hospital. His celebrity grew daily; but he languished, penniless and wretched, in confinement which he loathed. The strangest light is cast upon his state of mind by the efforts which he now made to place two of his sister's children in Court-service. He even tried to introduce one of them as a page into the household of Alfonso. Eventually, Alessandro Sersale was consigned to Odoardo Farnese, and Antonio to the Duke of Mantua. In 1585 new sources of annoyance rose. Two members of the Delia Crusca Academy in Florence, Leonardo Salviati and Bastiano de'Rossi, attacked the Gerusalemme. Their malevolence was aroused by the panegyric written on it by Cammillo Pellegrini, a Neapolitan, and they exposed it to pedantically quibbling criticism. Tasso replied in a dignified apology. But he does not seem to have troubled himself overmuch with this literary warfare, which served meanwhile to extend the fame of his immortal poem. At this time new friends gathered round him. Among these the excellent Benedictine, Angelo Grillo, and the faithful Antonio Costantini demand commemoration from all who appreciate disinterested devotion to genius in distress. At length, in July 1586, Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir apparent to the Duchy of Mantua, obtained Tasso's release. He rode off with this new patron to Mantua, leaving his effects at S. Anna, and only regretting that he had not waited on the Duke of Ferrara to kiss his hand as in duty bound.[56] Thus to the end he remained an incorrigible courtier; or rather shall we say that, after all his tribulations, he preserved a doglike feeling of attachment for his master?

The rest of Tasso's life was an Odyssey of nine years. He seemed at first contented with Mantua, wrote dialogues, completed the tragedy of Torrismondo and edited his father's Floridante. But when Vincenzo Gonzaga succeeded to the dukedom, the restless poet felt himself neglected. His young friend had not leisure to pay him due attention. He therefore started on a journey to Loreto, which had long been the object of his pious aspiration. Loreto led to Rome, where Scipione Gonzaga resided as Patriarch of Jerusalem and Cardinal. Rome suggested Southern Italy, and Tasso hankered after the recovery of his mother's fortune. Accordingly he set off in March 1588 for Naples, where he stayed, partly with the monks of Monte Oliveto, and partly with the Marchese Manso. Rome saw him again in November; and not long afterwards an agent of the Duke of Urbino wrote this pitiful report of his condition. 'Every one is ready to welcome him to hearth and heart; but his humors render him mistrustful of mankind at large. In the palace of the Cardinal Gonzaga there are rooms and beds always ready for his use, and men reserved for his especial service. Yet he runs away and mistrusts even that friendly lord. In short, it is a sad misfortune that the present age should be deprived of the greatest genius which has appeared for centuries. What wise man ever spoke in prose or verse better than this madman?[57] In the following August, Scipione Gonzaga's servants, unable to endure Tasso's eccentricities, turned him from their master's house, and he took refuge in a monastery of the Olivetan monks. Soon afterwards he was carried to the hospital of the Bergamasques. His misery now was great, and his health so bad that friends expected a speedy end.[58] Yet the Cardinal Gonzaga again opened his doors to him in the spring of 1590. Then the morbid poet turned suspicious, and began to indulge fresh hopes of fortune in another place. He would again offer himself to the Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: actum est de eo.[59] Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his broken health, and another illness made him desire a change of scene. This time Antonio Costantini offered to attend upon him. They visited Siena, Bologna and Mantua. At Mantua, Tasso made some halt, and took a new long poem, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, seriously in hand. But the demon of unrest pursued him, and in November 1591 he was off again with the Duke of Mantua to Rome. From Rome he went to Naples at the beginning of the following year, worked at the Conquistata, and began his poem of the Sette Giornate.[60] He was always occupied with the vain hope of recovering a portion of his mother's estate. April saw him once more upon his way to Rome. Clement VIII. had been elected, and Tasso expected patronage from the Papal nephews.[61]

He was not disappointed. They received him into their houses, and for a while he sojourned in the Vatican. The year 1593 seems, through their means, to have been one of comparative peace and prosperity. Early in the summer of 1594 his health obliged him to seek change of air. He went for the last time to Naples. The Cardinal of S. Giorgio, one of the Pope's nephews, recalled him in November to be crowned poet in Rome. His entrance into the Eternal City was honorable, and Clement granted him a special audience; but the ceremony of coronation had to be deferred because of the Cardinal's ill health.

Meanwhile his prospects seemed likely to improve. Clement conferred on him a pension of one hundred ducats, and the Prince of Avellino, who had detained his mother's estate, compounded with him for a life-income of two hundred ducats. This good fortune came in the spring of 1595. But it came too late; for his death-illness was upon him. On the first of April he had himself transported to the convent of S. Onofrio, which overlooks Rome from the Janiculan hill. 'Torrents of rain were falling with a furious wind, when the carriage of Cardinal Cinzio was seen climbing the steep ascent. The badness of the weather made the fathers think there must be some grave cause for this arrival. So the prior and others hurried to the gate, where Tasso descended with considerable difficulty, greeting the monks with these words: 'I am come to die among you.''[62] The last of Tasso's letters, written to Antonio Costantini from S. Onofrio, has the quiet dignity of one who struggles for the last time with the frailty of his mortal nature.[63]

'What will my good lord Antonio say when he shall hear of his Tasso's death? The news, as I incline to think, will not be long in coming; for I feel that I have reached the end of life, being unable to discover any remedy for this tedious indisposition which has supervened on the many others I am used to—like a rapid torrent resistlessly sweeping me away. The time is past when I should speak of my stubborn fate, to mention not the world's ingratitude, which, however, has willed to gain the victory of bearing me to the grave a pauper; the while I kept on thinking that the glory which, despite of those that like it not, this age will inherit from my writings, would not have left me wholly without guerdon. I have had myself carried to this monastery of S. Onofrio; not only because the air is commended by physicians above that of any other part of Rome, but also as it were upon this elevated spot and by the conversation of these devout fathers to commence my conversation in heaven. Pray God for me; and rest assured that as I have loved and honored you always in the present life, so will I perform for you in that other and more real life what appertains not to feigned but to veritable charity. And to the Divine grace I recommend you and myself.'

On April 25, Tasso expired at midnight, with the words In manus tuas, Domine, upon his lips. Had Costantini, his sincerest friend, been there, he might have said like Kent:

But Costantini was in Mantua; and this sonnet, which he had written for his master, remains Tasso's truest epitaph, the pithiest summary of a life pathetically tragic in its adverse fate—

The wreath of laurel which the world grudged was placed upon his bier; and a simple stone, en graved with the words Hic jacet Torquatus Tassus, marked the spot where he was buried.

The foregoing sketch of Tasso's life and character differs in some points from the prevalent conceptions of the poet. There is a legendary Tasso, the victim of malevolent persecution by pedants, the mysterious lover condemned to misery in prison by a tyrannous duke. There is also a Tasso formed by men of learning upon ingeniously constructed systems; Rosini's Tasso, condemned to feign madness in punishment for courting Leonora d'Este with lascivious verses; Capponi's Tasso, punished for seeking to exchange the service of the House of Este for that of the House of Medici; a Tasso who was wholly mad; a Tasso who remained through life the victim of Jesuitical influences. In short, there are as many Tassos as there are Hamlets. Yet these Tassos of the legend and of erudition do not reproduce his self-revealed lineaments. Tasso's letters furnish documents of sufficient extent to make the real man visible, though something yet remains perhaps not wholly explicable in his tragedy.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GERUSALEMME LIBERATA

In a previous portion of this work, I attempted to define the Italian Romantic Epic, and traced the tale of Orlando from Pulci through Boiardo and Ariosto to the burlesque of Folengo. There is an element of humor more or less predominant in the Morgante Maggiore, the Orlando Innamorato, and the Orlando Furioso. This element might almost be regarded as inseparable from the species. Yet two circumstances contributed to alter the character of Italian Romance after the publication of the Furioso. One of these was the unapproachable perfection of that poem. No one could hope to surpass Ariosto in his own style, or to give a fresh turn to his humor without passing into broad burlesque. The romantic poet had therefore to choose between sinking into parody with Folengo and Aretino, or soaring into the sublimities of solemn art. Another circumstance was the keen interest aroused in academic circles by Trissino's unsuccessful epic, and by the discussion of heroic poetry which it stimulated. The Italian nation was becoming critical, and this critical spirit lent itself readily to experiments in hybrid styles of composition which aimed at combining the graces of the Romantic with the dignity of the Heroic poem. The most meritorious of these hybrids was Bernardo Tasso's Amadigi, a long romance in octave stanzas, sustained upon a grave tone throughout, and distinguished from the earlier romantic epics by a more obvious unity of subject. Bernardo Tasso possessed qualities of genius and temper which suited his proposed task. Deficient in humor, he had no difficulty in eliminating that element from the Amadigi. Chivalrous sentiment took the place of irony; scholarly method supplied the want of wayward fancy.

It was just at this point that the young Torquato Tasso made his first essay in poetry. He had inherited his father's temperament, its want of humor, its melancholy, its aristocratic sensitiveness. At the age of seventeen he was already a ripe scholar, versed in the critical questions which then agitated learned coteries in Italy. The wilding graces and the freshness of the Romantic Epic, as conceived by Boiardo and perfected by Ariosto, had forever disappeared. To 'recapture that first fine careless rapture' was impossible. Contemporary conditions of society and thought rendered any attempt to do so futile. Italy had passed into a different stage of culture; and the representative poem of Tasso's epoch was imperatively forced to assume a different character. Its type already existed in the Amadigi, though Bernardo Tasso had not the genius to disengage it clearly, or to render it attractive. How Torquato, while still a student in his teens at Padua, attacked the problem of narrative poetry, appears distinctly in his preface to Rinaldo. 'I believe,' he says, 'that you, my gentle readers, will not take it amiss if I have diverged from the path of modern poets, and have sought to approach the best among the ancients. You shall not, however, find that I am bound by the precise rules of Aristotle, which often render those poems irksome which might otherwise have yielded you much pleasure. I have only followed such of his precepts as do not limit your delight: for instance, in the frequent use of episodes, making the characters talk in their own persons, introducing recognitions and peripeties by necessary or plausible motives, and withdrawing the poet as far as possible from the narration. I have also endeavored to construct my poem with unity of interest and action, not, indeed, in any strict sense, but so that the subordinate portions should be seen to have their due relation to the whole.' He then proceeds to explain why he has abandoned the discourses on moral and general topics with which Ariosto opened his Cantos, and hints that he has taken Virgil, the 'Prince of Poets,' for his model. Thus the Romantic Epic, as conceived by Tasso, was to break with the tradition of the Cantastorie, who told the tale in his own person and introduced reflections on its incidents. It was to aim at unity of subject and to observe classical rules of art, without, however, sacrificing the charm of variety and those delights which episodes and marvelous adventures yielded to a modern audience. The youthful poet begs that his Rinaldo should not be censured on the one hand by severely Aristotelian critics who exclude pleasure from their ideal, or on the other by amateurs who regard the Orlando Furioso as the perfection of poetic art. In a word, he hopes to produce something midway between the strict heroic epic, which had failed in Trissino's Italia Liberata through dullness, and the genuine romantic epic, which in Ariosto's masterpiece diverged too widely from the rules of classical pure taste. This new species, combining the attractions of romance with the simplicity of epic poetry, was the gift which Tasso at the age of eighteen sought to present in his Rinaldo to Italy. The Rinaldo fulfilled fairly well the conditions propounded by its author. It had a single hero and a single subject—

The perilous achievements and the passion of Rinaldo in his youth form the theme of a poem which is systematically evolved from the first meeting of the son of Amon with Clarice to their marriage under the auspices of Malagigi. There are interesting episodes like those of young Florindo and Olinda, unhappy Clizia and abandoned Floriana. Rinaldo's combat with Orlando in the Christian camp furnishes an anagnorisis; while the plot is brought to its conclusion by the peripeteia of Clarice's jealousy and the accidents which restore her to her lover's arms. Yet though observant of his own classical rules, Tasso remained in all essential points beneath the spell of the Romantic Epic. The changes which he introduced were obvious to none but professional critics. In warp and woof the Rinaldo is similar to Boiardo's and Ariosto's tale of chivalry; only the loom is narrower, and the pattern of the web less intricate. The air of artlessness which lent its charm to Romance in Italy has disappeared, yielding place to sustained elaboration of Latinizing style. Otherwise the fabric remains substantially unaltered—like a Gothic dwelling furnished with Palladian window-frames. We move in the old familiar sphere of Paladins and Paynims, knights errant and Oriental damsels, magicians and distressed maidens. The action is impelled by the same series of marvelous adventures and felicitous mishaps. There are the same encounters in war and rivalries in love between Christian and Pagan champions; journeys through undiscovered lands and over untracked oceans; fantastic hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. Rinaldo, like any other hero of the Renaissance, is agitated by burning thirst for fame and blind devotion to a woman's beauty. We first behold him pining in inglorious leisure[64]:—

The vision of Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order how the hero acquired his horse, Baiardo, Tristram's magic lance, his sword Fusberta from Atlante, his armor from Orlando, the trappings of his charger from the House of Courtesy, the ensign of the lion rampant on his shield from Chiarello, and the hand of his lady after some delays from Malagigi.

No new principle is introduced into the romance. As in earlier poems of this species, the religious motive of Christendom at war with Islam becomes a mere machine; the chivalrous environment affords a vehicle for fanciful adventures. Humor, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence. Charles the Great assumes the sobriety of empire; and his camp, in its well-ordered gravity, prefigures that of Goffredo in the Gerusalemme.[65] Thus Tasso's originality must not be sought in the material of his work, which is precisely that of the Italian romantic school in general, nor yet in its form, which departs from the romantic tradition in details so insignificant as to be inessential. We find it rather in his touch upon the old material, in his handling of the familiar form. The qualities of style, sympathy, sentiment, selection in the use of phrase and image, which determined his individuality as a poet, rendered the Rinaldo a novelty in literature. It will be therefore well to concentrate attention for a while upon those subjective peculiarities by right of which the Rinaldo ranks as a precursor of the Gerusalemme.

The first and the most salient of these is a pronounced effort to heighten style by imitation of Latin poets. The presiding genius of the work is Virgil. Pulci's racy Florentine idiom; Boiardo's frank and natural Lombard manner; Ariosto's transparent and unfettered modern phrase, have been supplanted by a pompous intricacy of construction.

The effort to impose Latin rules of syntax on Italian is obvious in such lines as the following:[66]

or in these:

Virgil is directly imitated, where he is least worthy of imitation, in the details of his battle-pieces. Thus:[67]

This Virgilian imitation yields some glowing flowers of poetry in longer passages of description. Among these may be cited the conquest of Baiardo in the second canto, the shipwreck in the tenth, the chariot of Pluto in the fourth, and the supper with queen Floriana in the ninth.

The episode of Floriana, while closely studied upon the Aeneid, is also a first sketch for that of Armida. Indeed, it should be said in passing that Tasso anticipates the Gerusalemme throughout the Rinaldo. The murder of Anselmo by Rinaldo (Canto XI.) forecasts the murder of Gernando by his namesake, and leads to the same result of the hero's banishment. The shipwreck, the garden of courtesy, the enchanted boat, and the charmed forest, are motives which reappear improved and elaborated in Tasso's masterpiece.[68]

While Tasso thus sought to heighten diction by Latinisms, he revealed another specific quality of his manner in Rinaldo. This is the inability to sustain heroic style at its ambitious level. He frequently drops at the close of the octave stanza into a prosaic couplet, which has all the effect of bathos. Instances are not far to seek:[69]

The reduplication of epithets, and the occasional use of long sonorous Latin words, which characterize Tasso's later manner, are also noticeable in these couplets. Side by side with such weak endings should be placed some specimens, no less characteristic, of vigorous and noble lines:[70]