Finally fortune seemed about to smile upon him; a faint ray of sunshine broke through the thick clouds that for so long had hung over his life. In November, 1594, he was invited to Rome, there to be crowned poet, as Petrarch had been. The pope assigned him a pension, and it seemed as if at last some measure of happiness might again be his. It was only a brief gleam of sunshine, however; the clouds soon closed again, and the sun of Tasso's life hastened to its setting shrouded in gloom. The coronation was put off on account of the ill health of Cardinal Cinzio and the inclemency of the season. In March, 1595, he himself fell sick, and in April was taken to the monastery of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum hill. To the monks who came to meet him he uttered the pathetic words: "My fathers, I have come to die among you." The pope sent his own physician to attend him, but in vain. The world-weary poet passed away April 25, 1595. His body lies buried in the adjacent church. The visitor to-day can still see his room, furnished as in his lifetime, and on the wall a copy of his last letter, in which he announces his speedy death.

Tasso's works are comparatively voluminous, and consist of lyrical poems, the pastoral poem, Aminta, a tragedy, Torrismondo, dialogues, letters, and the Jerusalem Delivered. In this brief sketch we can only discuss the latter, by which alone he is known the world over.

Already when only sixteen years old, he had felt the ambition to write a poem which should combine the merits of the regular epic (such as the Iliad and Æneid), and the romantic interest of the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. His Rinaldo, written when he was only nineteen years old, was remarkable both on account of the youth of its author and as a promise of what was to follow. For a number of years after this, however, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the task of preparing himself, by reading, study, and thought, to write the great poem which he had in mind.

His choice of a subject was a happy one. The fear of the Turk at that time was widespread; the wars between Christian and Saracen, which filled the old romances, were now occurring again on the eastern borders of Europe. The Turks had conquered Hungary, and their piratic ships had ravaged the coast of Italy, often destroying entire populations; a short time before Sorrento, Tasso's birthplace, had been attacked, and his sister escaped only by a miracle. Tasso himself must have heard many a story of the crusades, when a child at Sorrento, where Pope Urban, who had published the first crusade, was buried. His choice of the deliverance of Jerusalem from the unbeliever then was a natural one.

Contrary to the Orlando Furioso, the story of Jerusalem Delivered, is a simple one. Yet the main plot, i. e., the military operations of Godfrey, the various battles, and the final capture of Jerusalem, are not so effective or interesting as the various romantic episodes introduced from time to time; the reader to-day is disposed to hurry over the early cantos and to linger over the beautiful pages which tell the loves of Tancred and Clorinda, Olindo and Sophronia, Rinaldo, Armida, and Erminia.

The poem begins with the usual invocation:

The poet then plunges into the midst of the action, We learn how the Christian army has been in Holy Land for six years and had made many conquests:

In the spring of the seventh year the archangel Gabriel appears to Godfrey of Bouillon and orders him to assemble the chiefs of the army and prepare for a new and vigorous prosecution of the war. Godfrey obeys and is himself elected commander-in-chief. Then, after a review of the troops, which furnishes the poet an opportunity of giving a catalogue of the various Christian forces (after the manner of Homer), the whole army starts for Jerusalem.

The scene then changes to the Holy City itself, where King Aladine and his followers are seized with consternation at the news of the advance of the Christians. We now see the first of the famous episodes of the Jerusalem Delivered. The Magician Ismeno urges the king to seize a certain image of the Virgin Mary and shut it up in the royal mosque (thus converting it into a palladium for Jerusalem). The king does so; but immediately the image disappears from the mosque. Aladine is wild with rage and being unable to discover the perpetrator of the outrage, resolves to destroy all the Christians in the city. Now there was in the city a beautiful Christian girl:

Although she was unconscious of love herself, there was a noble Christian youth, Olindo, who had long loved her in secret. Sophronia resolves to save her people. She makes her way to the king's palace, and declares that she alone is guilty of having stolen the sacred image from the mosque.

At this moment Olindo approaches the spot, and discovering that the victim is Sophronia, bursts through the crowd, exclaiming that he himself is the author of the crime. Sophronia appeals to him not to sacrifice himself for her, but he remains firm until the king, angered at their apparent scorn of his power, condemns them both to be burned. Thus both are about to die, when a knight appears:

This is the first appearance of Clorinda, who is destined to play so large a part in the poem, and who shows the nobility of her character by interceding for the lovers with the king. The king, delighted at having so powerful an auxiliary in his hour of danger and need, willingly grants Clorinda's request, and the lovers are saved.

In the meantime the Christian army approach Jerusalem, which they reach at early dawn, and which they greet with deep emotion:

Erminia, daughter of the deceased king of Antioch, points out to King Aladine from a high tower the famous warriors among the Christians, and especially praises Tancred, who had conquered her father and taken her prisoner, and who, by his courtesy and gentle treatment, had won her love. A sortie is made from the city, and Tancred, finding himself engaged in battle with Clorinda, whom he esteems a man, breaks her helmet, and discovering her to be the maiden whom he loves, refuses to fight further with her.

Thus begins the most famous episode of the Jerusalem Delivered. For the next half of the poem Tancred and Clorinda are the real hero and heroine.

In the meantime Satan has called together his followers for consultation. Among the many plans for holding the Christian army in check is the sending of the beautiful enchantress Armida to the camp of Godfrey, where she succeeds by her wiles in drawing away from the army a number of the bravest warriors. The king of Egypt, with an immense army, announces his intention to help Jerusalem and from this time on, this menace hovers like a black cloud over the horizon of the poem, ever approaching nearer and nearer, till in the last canto the storm is averted by the bravery of the Christian warriors and the aid of heaven.

Argantes, one of the pagan warriors of Jerusalem, sends a herald to Godfrey's camp, challenging any of his warriors to single combat. Tancred is appointed by Godfrey to accept the challenge, and the two doughty champions fight all day long with no result. When night comes on both retire, bearing away serious wounds. Erminia, who has been in a terrible state of anxiety during the combat, cannot rest content when night comes on, without learning the condition of Tancred's wounds. She puts on Clorinda's suit of armor, leaves the city, and makes her way to the Christian camp, first sending a messenger to Tancred, announcing that a lady desires to see him. The scene which follows is very picturesque, describing as it does the silence of the night and the distant view of the tents.

Two sentinels see her, and believing her to be Clorinda, pursue her. She flies and is carried by her horse many miles away, finally reaching a shepherd's cottage on the banks of the Jordan, where for some time she takes up her abode far from war's alarms and the "pangs of despised love." The description of Erminia's life here is much admired for its delineations of the charm of rural life.

The shepherd, pitying Erminia's distress, takes her to his wife, and she thus becomes a member of the humble but happy household.

In the meantime many events are taking place between the Christians and pagans, sorties, single combats, and attacks on the walls of the city. Godfrey has caused powerful engines of war to be built, especially a mighty movable tower, so high that it overtops the walls of the city. Clorinda, eager for glory, undertakes one night to destroy the tower, in spite of the warning of her old servant Arsetes, who tells her the story of her birth, and reveals the fact that she is of Christian parentage. She issues forth, succeeds in setting fire to the tower, but not being able to reënter the city, flies, followed by Tancred, who not recognizing her, fights with her and to his own eternal sorrow, slays her. This passage is regarded as the most beautiful of the whole poem:

Clorinda, being dead, Tancred has little desire to live, but is comforted by a vision of her in heaven:

Up to this time the most prominent characters in the poem have been Tancred and Clorinda. This state of things now changes and the real hero, Rinaldo, who like Achilles has long been absent from the field of action, reappears and brings matters to a climax.

We have already seen how Armida has come to camp and carried off a number of the Christian warriors. At the same time Rinaldo had, in a contest for the successor of Dudo (killed in the first skirmish between the crusaders and the pagans), slain Gernando in the presence of the whole army, and was forced to fly the wrath of Godfrey. He, after having freed the fifty knights from the power of Armida, is himself caught by her wiles, and carried off by her to a gorgeous palace situated in the midst of a beautiful garden, on a high mountain in the island of Teneriffe. Here, lost in luxury and idleness, he sleeps out the thought of his duty as a Christian warrior.

In the meantime Godfrey, by various supernatural tokens, learns that Rinaldo alone can bring about the final success of the Christian arms. He is thus induced to pardon his crime, which indeed had in a certain sense been justified, and sends two messengers to bring him back. These embark on a magic vessel, traverse the Mediterranean, pass the strait of Gibraltar, enter the Atlantic, and reach the island of Teneriffe. The descriptions of this voyage and the allusion to Columbus, are famous and well deserve to be quoted, if we had the space. It is especially interesting to compare this fictitious voyage into the Atlantic Ocean with that of Ulysses in Dante's Inferno, the one written before, the other shortly after the discovery of America.

The ambassadors arrive at the island, climb the mountain, overcome all obstacles, enter the enchanted garden, and discover Rinaldo, surrounded by all the beauty of nature and magnificence of art.

The messengers succeed in arousing the dormant nobility of Rinaldo; he tears himself away, follows them to the camp of Godfrey, is pardoned by the latter, succeeds in breaking the spell of the enchanted forest, and thus prepares the way for the building of new war machines. The city then is assaulted and taken, and finally the Egyptian army, which now appears on the scene, is defeated and the poem ends.

The literature of the Italian Renaissance, which was inaugurated by Petrarch and Boccaccio, reached its highest point with Ariosto. Tasso, equally great with Ariosto, lived at the beginning of a long period of decline; the Jerusalem Delivered projecting the last rays of the glories of the Renaissance into this new period. The sixteenth century, especially the first half, is the golden age of Italian literature, comparable to that of Augustus in Rome, Louis XIV. in France, and Queen Elizabeth in England. In the narrow confines of this sketch we have only been able to treat in some detail the great writers thereof, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. Yet the number of men of genius and talent is legion—giants indeed lived in those days—not only in the field of art and scholarship but in literature. In lyrical poetry were Pietro Bembo, the Petrarch of his times; Michel Angelo and Vittoria Colonna. In the pastoral poem, besides Tasso, there were Sannazaro and Guarini, the former (whose Arcadia was imitated in England by Sidney and Spenser) on the border-line between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the latter on that between the sixteenth and seventeenth. In comic poetry there was Francesco Berni, who worked over Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, which has since then been read almost wholly in this version. In prose was developed an especially rich literature, among the great masters of which we may mention in history, Nicholas Machiavelli, who, in his Prince, introduced a new philosophy of politics; Guicciardini, Varchi, and Nardi; in the history of art, Vasari; in novels and stories, Luigi da Porto, who first told the story of Romeo and Juliet; Giraldo Cinzio, Matteo Bandello, who continued the work of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Forming a special group are Benvenuto Cellini, whose autobiography has made him famous; Firenzuola, who wrote on the beauty of woman; Baldasarre Castiglione, the Lord Chesterfield of his day, who in his book on the Courtier, depicted the character of the perfect gentleman according to the ideals of the times.

SUMMARY AND QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER VIII

Among the causes of the period of degradation, from 1560 to 1750, the leading ones must be sought for in the political and religious condition of Italy at that time. Spain had become possessed of a large part of the country, especially in the north and south, while the pope, who ruled the center, in temporal as well as spiritual matters, was the firm ally of the Spaniards. The country thus under foreign dominion, was oppressed and robbed without mercy. The Spanish viceroys, and their ignoble imitators, the Italian nobles, lived a life of luxury and vice, surrounded by bandits and brigands, and by paralyzing all commerce and industry, brought on famine and pestilence.

The religious condition was no better. The Catholic reaction, or counter reformation, which culminated in the Council of Trent, fastened still more firmly the chains of medieval superstition and dogmatism on the mass of the Italian people. The absolute power of the pope was reaffirmed; two mighty instruments were forged to crush out heresy and opposition—the Inquisition, which effectually choked out free thought, and the Jesuits, who found their way stealthily into all ranks and classes of society. Such was the condition of Italy at this time, "a prolonged, a solemn, an inexpressibly heartrending tragedy." The effect on the social life of Italy was almost fatal. Everywhere, to use the almost exaggerated language of Symonds, were to be seen idleness, disease, brigandage, destitution, ignorance, superstition, hypocrisy, vice, ruin, pestilence, "while over the Dead Sea of social putrefaction floated the sickening oil of Jesuit hypocrisy."

No wonder that in such a state of society, literature and art reached the lowest point in all its history. Scarcely a single man of genius or even of talent, can be found in the period between 1580 and 1750. All literature was marked by lack of originality of thought and by a style deformed by execrable taste, a style which consisted of wretched conceits, puns, antithesis, and gorgeous and far-fetched metaphors. This form of literary diction was not confined, however, to Italy, being represented in Spain by Gongora, in France by the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and in England by Lyly's Euphues. In Italy it is known as Marinism from the poet Marini, whose Adone (in which is told the love of Venus for Adonis, a subject previously treated by Shakespeare) exemplifying all phases of the above-mentioned style, had enormous popularity not only in Italy but abroad.

During the period now under discussion, poets were not wanting, for the defect was in quality rather than quantity. Yet not all were entirely without merit, for some possessed a certain degree of talent, especially in the musical elements of their verse. Such were the lyrical poets, Chiabrera, Testi, and Filicaja. In prose literature a better and saner style prevailed, especially in the dialogues of Galileo, and in the historical and critical writings of Sarpi and Vico.

In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended Spanish rule in Italy, and the breath of free thought from England sweeping across the plains of France entered Italy and gradually weakened the power of the Jesuits, dissipated to a certain extent superstition and ignorance, and aroused the country to a sense of its degradation. By bringing Italy into connection with other nations, and with newer ideas, it planted the germs of a new intellectual life. The influence of France, England, and Germany began to make itself felt. Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire influenced Italian tragedy, while Molière, who himself had borrowed largely from the early Italian comedies, now returned the favor by becoming the master of Goldoni. English influence came later, first Addison, Pope, and Milton, then toward the end of the eighteenth century, Young, Gray, Shakespeare, and Ossian. Last of all came the German influence, especially Klopstock and Goethe.

In this period of awakening the chief gain was in the field of the drama. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, Italy, in this branch of literature, could not even remotely be compared with France, Spain, or England. In the sixteenth century comedies had not been wanting, and beside the purely Italian creation of improvised farce (now represented in Punch and Judy shows, pantomimes, and harlequinades), Ariosto had written literary comedies in close imitation of Plautus and Terence. Yet, from Ariosto to Goldoni we find practically but one genuine writer of comedy; this singularly enough, was Machiavelli, whose Mandragora was enormously popular, and was declared by Voltaire to be better than Aristophanes and but little inferior to Molière. But one book does not make a literature any more than one swallow makes a summer. It was left for Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) to give his country a number of comedies worthy of being compared with those of Molière. Goldoni was a kindly, amiable man of the world as well as of letters, bright and witty but withal somewhat superficial. Although a keen observer of the outer form of society and human nature, he lacked the depth and insight, and especially the subtle pathos of Molière. He was greatly influenced by the latter, whom he looked upon as his master. Like him he began with light comedy, farcical in nature, and gradually produced more and more comedies of manner and character. Yet he is not a slavish imitator of the great Frenchman, to whom, while inferior in earnestness and knowledge of the human heart, he was equal in dialogue, in development of plot, and in comic talent. Goldoni composed rapidly (once he wrote sixteen comedies in a year), and has left behind him one hundred and sixty plays and eighty musical dramas and opera texts.

The musical drama is a peculiar Italian invention, and almost immediately reached perfection in Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), after whom it began rapidly to decline. Metastasio was universally admired and was, before Goldoni and Alfieri, the only Italian that had a European reputation, and who thus won some measure of glory for his country in her period of deepest degradation. His plays, meant to be set to music—the modern opera text is a debased form of this—were superficial, had no real delineation of character, yet were written in verses which flowed softly along like a clear stream through flowery meads. Light, artificial in sentiment, often lax in morals, yet expressing the courtly conventionalities of the times, Metastasio's poetry enjoyed vast popularity, while he himself became the favorite of the aristocratic society of Vienna, where he lived for fifty years, and the pride and glory of Italy. After him music became the all-important element in this peculiar form of drama, which thus became the modern opera, while the poetical element was degraded to the text thereof.

More famous, perhaps, than either the above was Alfieri, the founder of modern Italian tragedy. In the intellectual movement of the sixteenth century, tragedy, like comedy, had not been neglected, and many translations and imitations had been made of the Greek and Latin dramatists. The first regular tragedy, not only of Italian but of modern European literature, was the Sofonisba of Trissino, which became the model of all succeeding writers. Published first in 1524 it was soon translated into all European languages and has been imitated, among many others, by Corneille and Voltaire in France, Alfieri in Italy, and Geibel in Germany. In spite of this promising beginning, however, Italian tragedy did not develop as that of the neighboring countries did. Among the numberless writers of tragedy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scarcely one deserves mention. In the early part of the eighteenth century one name became famous, Scipio Maffei (1675-1755) the immediate predecessor of Alfieri, whose Merope was vastly popular throughout all Europe.

Yet Italy could not boast of a truly national drama before the appearance of Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), who gave her an honorable rank in this department of the world's literature. The story of his life, as told by himself in his autobiography, is exceedingly interesting. Born in Asti, near Turin, of a noble family, after a youth spent in idleness, ignorance, and selfish pleasure, he "found himself," at the age of twenty-six, and being fired with ambition to become a poet, he began a long period of self-education, in which he made especial effort to master the Italian language, which he, born in Piedmont, and long absent abroad, only half understood. The rest of his life was spent in this study and in writing his dramas.

In his reform of the Italian drama, Alfieri did not, like Manzoni later, try to introduce Shakesperean methods. He went back to the tragic system of the Greeks and tried to improve on the French followers of the latter. He observed the three unities, especially that of action, even more strictly than Corneille or even Racine. Hence his plays are extraordinarily short (only one is of more than fifteen hundred lines). The action moves on swiftly to the climax with no effort at mere dramatic situation or stage effect.

Of especial interest are the subjects of Alfieri's tragedies, all of them having a political or social tendency. They all express the theories of the French philosophers then so popular in Italy, concerning freedom and the rights of the people in opposition to the divine right of kings. His heroes—Virginius, Brutus, Timoleon—all proclaim the liberty of man. It is interesting to note that he dedicated one of his plays to George Washington. To the reader of the present day even his best plays—Virginia, Orestes, Agamemnon, Myrra, and Saul—seem conventional, monotonous, and unreal. The characters are mere types of passion or sentiment; there is no variety of action, no episodes, and no poetical adornments. Yet in his own age Alfieri was regarded as a great tragic poet, not only in his own country, but beyond the Alps. His influence on Italian literature was very great. For the next two generations there was scarcely a poet who did not admire and imitate him. Parini, Foscolo, Monti, Manzoni, Leopardi, and Pellico, all looked up to him as their master.

Alfieri was the first to speak of a fatherland, a united Italy; he practically founded the patriotic school of literature which has lasted down to the present time. Hence he is even more important from a political standpoint than from a literary one. He himself looked on his tragedies as a means of inspiring new and higher political ideas in his fellow-countrymen, degraded as they had been by the long oppression of Spain. "I wrote," he says, "because the sad conditions of the times did not allow me to act."

The literature of the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by this political and patriotic spirit; Monti, Foscolo, Manzoni, and Pellico, all wrote dramas in the spirit of Alfieri. Most of them, however, are better known in other accounts. Foscolo, through his letters of Jacopo Ortis, the Italian Werther, and his literary essays; Pellico for his My Prisons; Manzoni for his Betrothed, one of the great novels of modern times.

Greater than all of these, however, is Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who alone is worthy to be placed beside the four great Italian poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, the last three of whom, at least, he might under happier circumstances have equaled. The story of his life is a pathetic one. Born of a family noble but poor, with a sensitive and melancholy temperament, the circumstances of his life only added to his morbid tendency, and after a brief existence, passed in sickness, poverty, and gloom, he died. Leopardi was great as a poet, a philosopher, and scholar. His Ode to Italy is one of the noblest poems in the language, and his Solitary Shepherd of Asia, is full of incomparable beauty.

Other names of this later period crowd upon our attention, in political literature, Mazzini; in the novel, D'Azeglio, Cantù, Guerazzi, and Gozzi; in history Botta, Balbo, and Cantù. But we must hasten to close this brief survey, with merely mentioning the names of a few of the more important writers of the present time; in poetry, Carducci, Ada Negri, D'Annunzio; in the novel, which in Italy as elsewhere has usurped the chief place, Fogazzaro, D'Annunzio. The latter, although still young, is, next to Carducci, the most considerable figure in Italian literature to-day. In his dramas, poetry, and novels he shows a wonderful command of language and descriptive imagination, and at one time bid fair to become a truly great writer. In his later works he shows retrogression rather than progress, and the taint of immorality and a certain exaggerated eccentricity of thought have vitiated his talent and tended to destroy his popularity.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW