Jersusalem Delivered

by Torquato Tasso

  The ancient stem of Este had divided in the eleventh century into a German branch and an Italian branch. A German Este-Guelf—Welf IV—was invested in the year 1070 with the Duchy of Bavaria; from him the houses of Brunswick and Hanover and the present royal family of England are descended. The brother of that Guelf was Fulco I, who founded the Italian family of Este. Albert of Este was Marquis of Ferrara in the year 1400. The rule of the Este family extended along the Marches of Ancona, and afterward they added Modena and Reggio to their domains. Alfonso I of Este, who died in 1535, had been a friend to Ariosto. It was he who had for his second wife Lucrezia Borgia. His successor, Ercole II, had married a daughter of King Louis XII of France; and the successor of Ercole II in Ferrara was Alfonso II, who has a large place in the story of Torquato Tasso.

  The cardinal Luigi d'Este, brother of Alfonso II, invited the young poet to Ferrara, where he gave him the rank of noble as a cavalier of the court. That was in 1565. In the next year there was the marriage of the Duke Alfonso II with Barbara, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I, who had taken in 1555 the throne resigned by his brother, Charles V. While the wedding festivities were afoot the Pope died—Pius IV, who had been a cardinal de' Medici. The cardinal Luigi d'Este went to Rome to take part in the election of another pope, and Tasso, then twenty-two years old, stayed behind, much liked by the duke and his new duchess, and by the duke's sisters, Lucrezia—who afterward became Duchess of Urbino—and Leonora d'Este. Young as he was, Tasso had won for himself the first place among Italian poets, and he was the son of a poet who perhaps ranked first among the minor singers between Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. Young Tasso, with religious earnestness, keen sensibility, and grace of song, won easy welcome at a court where literature was in high esteem. The Duke of Ferrara encouraged Tasso to go on with his epic. In September 1569 the elder Tasso died in his son's arms. In his last years he had found rest as chief secretary to the Duke of Mantua, and he was, at the end of his life, Governor of Ostiglia.

  In 1571 Torquato Tasso went to Paris with his patron, the cardinal Luigi d'Este. There he established friendship with the poet Ronsard, twenty years his senior, and was presented to Charles IX as "the poet of Godfrey and other French heroes who distinguished themselves at the siege of Jerusalem." He had then written eight or nine cantos of his poem, and his age was twenty-seven.

  Upon his return, Tasso was separated by religious opinions from the service of the cardinal d'Este, but was easily received into the patronage of the duke, who gave him a yearly pension of I80 gold crowns, and required of him no personal service. In 1573 he produced at the ducal court in Ferrara his pastoral play of "Aminta," the fame of which spread beyond Italy, and confirmed the reputation won by his "Rinaldo." The lyric beauty of "Aminta" allied the literature of the day in Italy to the new development in Tasso's time of the art of music. Meanwhile, Tasso was steadily proceeding toward the close of his "Goffredo," and had completed eighteen cantos in 1574, when he was struck down by fever. There was nothing in Torquato Tasso's life before this fever to indicate that his keen nervous sensibility had passed the bounds of health and grown into disease. With difficulty recovering the threads of his argument, Tasso finished his poem—which he then called "Geoffredo"—at the age of thirty. Our English Spenser, about nine years younger than Tasso, was then a graduate still studying at Cambridge.

  While the great poem was being finished, and the poet's health was weak, Alfonso II increased his favors. He entertained Tasso as a guest in his villa at Belriguardo. The duke's sister Lucrezia gave him change of air with friendliest welcome in the castle of Durante, by Urbino. When separated from her husband and returned to her brother, she would have had the poet always of her household. And the time was come when he could be much aided by the friendship of women, for the troubled mind was growing restless with vain fears that came and went.

  At first he had much anxiety about the orthodoxy of his poem. It must be submitted to the Pope for strict examination. He must go to Rome, against the advice and wish of the duke and the ladies, who sought to detain him. Leave was unwillingly given, and he went to Rome, where his kinsman, Scipione Gonzaga, introduced him to that cardinal de' Medici who afterward became Grand Duke of Tuscany. The cardinal invited Tasso to enter his service, and Tasso went so far toward acceptance of the invitation that he fretted himself with fear lest he might be regarded as a traitor at Ferrara. He went back and was kindly received. But his distress of mind increased. He had been submitting his poem in manuscript to the criticism of friends, and paid minute attention to all the poor and positive suggestions made by men who were no poets for improvement of a poet's work. This would have worried a sane man, if a sane man could have brought such trouble on himself. Then he suspected, and thereby provoked, hostilities; he thought himself surrounded by enemies who plotted against him; he thought that the Inquisition would pronounce his poem to be heretical. This disease of mind raised active quarrels, by one of which Tasso made an enemy who set upon him in the market-place; but the poet was a good swordsman, and put his attacker to flight. At last, his tendency to such delusions caused Tasso in the chamber of the Duchess of Urbino to draw his dagger against a servant whom he suspected of design to poison him. For this he was placed under arrest for a few days in his own chamber, and the excess was forgiven. Then he fancied himself an unpardonable heretic. The duke introduced him to the chief of the Inquisition at Ferrara, who, after making show of strict examination, satisfied the sick mind with a certificate of orthodoxy. But the need of direct ministration to a mind diseased had become so clear that Tasso was placed for medical treatment in the Franciscan convent at Ferrara.

  Suspecting the monks of a design to poison him, he escaped from them next day, leaving all his papers behind and having very little money with him. In shepherd's disguise he went to his sister Corneli., then become a widow. She had not seen him since their childhood. He feigned to her that he was a messenger from her brother, whose life was in danger from the enemies by whom he was beset. She fainted, and her emotion gave him faith in her. He stayed for some months under her care, then pleaded for leave to go back into the duke's service at Ferrara. He was received again in 1578, but was not satisfied. In calmer hours, with pen in hand, he still had the full use of his genius, but the sick fancies that had prompted once the drawing of a dagger, and the apparent impossibility of getting his assent to friendly care over his health, had so far altered his relations with his friends at Ferrara, that Tasso's next delusion was to look upon the duke as an enemy who did him wrong.

  He broke away again, went to Mantua, wandered from place to place in North Italy, and found rest for a short time in Turin with Carlo Ingegneri, who was afterward the first publisher of his yet unpublished poem. The archbishop and Duke Carlo Emanuel also received Tasso hospitably at Turin.

  Next year he went suddenly back to Ferrara. The duke was occupied with preparations for his marriage to Margherita Gonzaga, his third wife. Tasso came to him full of the irritations of his sick mind, resented the neglect of his complaints, and his delusions turned them, as often happens in such cases, with all their force against his friend. Especially this happens where, as in Tasso's case, the insane delusions spring up in a mind still capable of work along the lines within which the disease has not yet crept. Again and again the cruel malady is found in such cases to pervert some old love toward wife or friend. Who that has lived long has not known such cases? Tasso now poured out his wrath against the duke as his chief enemy, detailed imagined injuries, and as he was reputed in Italy to be as valiant with the sword as with the pen—"Colla penna a colla spada nessun val quanto Torquato," had been said of him—his insanity seemed dangerous to the duke, who at last used his authority to place him in a lunatic-asylum—St. Anne's Hospital for lunatics—where he would be under absolute restraint.

  To all Italy it was a grief that her chief poet should be in a lunatic-asylum. Tasso was not denied the use of his pen, and was still able to make good use of it when following lines of
thought that were not crossed by his delusions. Still he believed himself to be in the hands of poisoners; sometimes he thought himself to be under magic spells. He wrote appeals for his deliverance from bondage to Pope Gregory XIII, to Cardinal Albani, to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to the Duchess of Urbino, to the Countess of Mantua, to the Emperor, and to the Inquisition. Intercession was made by his native town of Bergamo, that sent a deputation of its citizens. But the Duke of Ferrara remained firm in the belief that Tasso's insanity had made him dangerous. When, after seven years in the asylum, the poet was set at last free on the intercession of Vicenzo Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua, he was given into the care of Vicenzo Gonzaga upon his promise to keep such good watch that the duke Alfonso should be in no danger from Tasso's insane passion against him.

  There has been a sentimental fancy, much discussed, that has taken, no doubt, a firmer hold upon belief since the greatest of the German poets founded upon it his play of "Torquato Tasso." It is that Tasso was shut up in the lunatic-asylum because he had aspired to the hand of the duke's sister Leonora. There is no solid evidence whatever upon which this fancy rests. It was in March, 1579, that Tasso was placed in the asylum. Leonora died after a long illness in 1581 at the age of forty-three; but Tasso was not released from Santa Anna until 1586.

  It was a real vexation to Tasso to learn in his confinement that his "Goffredo," as the poem was first called—whence Fairfax's title, "Godfrey of Bulloigne"—had been badly misprinted at Venice. The revised edition of it, with its name changed to "Gerusalemme Liberata," was published at Parma in 1581, and there were not fewer than six editions of it in that year. How could Italians read such a poem and not seek the deliverance of its writer from a lunatic-asylum, while he still had, in many an hour, his genius at command, and wrote wise thoughts in prose or verse within hearing of the cries of lunatics about him? In 1582 Tasso's lyrics were revised and re-edited for him by the poet Battista Guarini, who was then at the Court of Ferrara.

  Set free in July, 1586, Torquato Tasso was received with great honor in Mantua, where he finished for the press his father's "Floridante," published it in 1587, and revised his own tragedy of "Torrismondo." Next year he visited his native town, and went also to Rome, where Scipione Gonzaga—now become Patriarch of Jerusalem—and others received him so well that he had new hopes, of which nothing came. The disease was rooted in him, though less fierce in its attacks. In Santa Anna he had considered himself to be molested by a troublesome spirit who stole his money, hid his keys, and tossed his papers out of order. Now he received imaginary visits from a courteous spirit with whom he was sometimes heard to talk. He thought also that his mental disease had been healed miraculously by a visit from the Virgin Mary. In 1588 he tried to recover property of his mother's, from which he had been shut out by her relations, and which was not obtained until the last year of his life. He found hospitality in Rome, in Florence, Mantua, Naples, but was nowhere trusted with an office that would give him independent means, and was not the less restless and suspicious for being distressed by poverty and sickness.

  When this was his condition, Tasso set to work upon a new revision of his "Gerusalemme Liberata," which he completed, and marked by giving to the revised poem a distinct name as "Gerusalemme Conquistata." He published this in 1593, and said in a letter that men would come to be thought fools who did not see how much better the poem was in its new form. But that last revision has been set aside, as giving evidence, even in work of his best genius, that Tasso's mind was losing its best powers. To the same time belongs also Tasso's poem on the "Seven Days of Creation"—"La Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato."

  At last a new patron was found in the cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, who invited Tasso to come to Rome and be crowned laureate in the capitol. Tasso reached Rome in November, 1594. Weather was then ill suited to an outdoor festival, and also the cardinal was ill. The ceremony was therefore put off till the next April. Tasso recovered at this time enough of his mother's dowry, through the Pope's intervention, in a yearly rent-charge from Prince Avellino, who held his mother's estate. The Pope also settled upon him a pension of 200 crowns. But he was wrecked as he came into harbor. During that winter his health wholly failed, and on April 1st he went into the monastery of St. Onofrio, that he might die with pious care about him. He died in the very month of April, which was to have been the month of his coronation in the capitol as the Italian laureate. Cardinal Cinzio came to him in the hour of his death, on April 25, 1595, with the Pope's benediction. "This," said Tasso, "is the crown with which I hope to be crowned. It is not the glory of the poet's laurel, but the glory of the blessed in heaven." He died at the age of fifty-one, twenty years after the completion of those works by which he won his place with the great poets of Italy. He was buried in the church of the convent of St. Onofrio, under a plain slab, inscribed only

  "Hic Jacet Torquatus Tassus."

  Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata" is a more regular epic than the great poem of Ariosto, which preceded it. "Orlando Furioso" was, in forty-six cantos, a poet's dream. Its distinct fancies played through one another with a lively grace, in lines as delicate as might be traced by an enchanter for the moving figures on a magic shield. Ariosto's poem was begun as a continuation of Bojardo's "Orlando Innamorato." Orlando—Roland—was enamoured of the fair heathen, Angelica, daughter of Galaphron, King of Cathay. Where Bojardo broke off, Ariosto began; and although a new life stirred in his verse, that separated Ariosto's poem from his predecessor's both in form and substance, yet the want of a beginning would be a defect in epic treatment of an action, if the action otherwise were one. But there is want also of unity. The search for Angelica runs through some twenty cantos. Then follows the madness of Orlando, caused by discovering that she is married to Medoro. This yields a romance of great deeds done by the mad Paladin. At last Orlando's reason is brought back to him in a bottle from the moon, and snuffed in through the nose. Ariosto did not aim at the production of an epic. With a fine spirit of raillery, that played with the theme in which he took and gave delight, Ariosto brought the freshness of a new life into contact with an older world of thought. He flashed into the old life a radiance of youth by the warmth of his hand-grasp. Crude marvels of a romance of chivalry that had idealized the loves and wars and superstitions of the Middle Ages, were touched by the new spirit that laughed at their absurdity, while it delighted in the opportunities they offered to the artist. In the higher literature of Europe, Ariosto's romance begins a new epoch as with a farewell festival, in which the young world has set all its lamps alight that it may cheerfully bid godspeed to the old.

  It was an absolute farewell. In the lower literature of Europe old forms are repeated by a herd of imitators, but the men of genius who are the voice of life for their own time, kindle from height to height new beacon-fires to stir successive generations to the war for truth. Spenser, inspired in his youth by Ariosto, planned a romance similar in outward form, but wholly different in spirit. He made it significant of all the conflicts of the time in which he lived, and of the struggle to achieve the highest hopes of man. He was not only an artist who delighted in the picturesque imaginations of the past, but an Englishman who battled for the future. Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered" came to him at the beginning of his work as another of the great poems of Italy, then newly published, and might seem to him as a link between "Orlando Furioso" and his "Faerie Queene." Tasso's poem was religious, the work of a good Catholic; Spenser's, the work of an active Protestant reformer. How far the details of Tasso's after-interpretation of the allegory of his poem—which will be found at the close of this volume, in Fairfax's translation—were in his mind while writing it, may be open to some question. But there can be no doubt that he had, while writing, a broad sense of the Battle of Life, figured by the Holy War and all the difficulties that delayed the capture of Jerusalem. If it was, as I think, no after-invention that made Godfrey stand for the guiding power of Reason, and Rinaldo for the Combatant Power in affairs
of life, there was distinct approach of Tasso to the manner of the "sage and serious Spenser," whom Milton dared "be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

  But Tasso's poem differed from Spenser's as from Ariosto's, in being a carefully planned epic. It has one action, the siege of Jerusalem; great in itself, and in its consequences, from the poet's point of view. This stood in Tasso's poem as, in the "Iliad," the siege of Troy; and this gave its name to the poem, rather than Godfrey, as at first designed. Jerusalem was Tasso's Ilion. To name the poem after Godfrey would be like naming the "Iliad" after Agamemnon. The chief hero of Tasso's action is not Godfrey, but Rinaldo. His anger, like the anger of Achilles, for a time withdraws him from the siege. The temptations of Armida have so obvious a significance that their main features were used by Spenser with little change to crown the allegory of his second book.

  A charm that Tasso shares with Ariosto and with Spenser lies in the sweet music of his verse, and in his purity of style. In Ariosto's time there was no widespread corruption of style by excess of ornament. Tasso was more, and Spenser most, open to temptation of a fashion that required elaboration of speech with simile and metaphor, with classical allusions, and all figures of rhetoric. But Spenser set aside the fashion of his day, and looked back with reverence to the simplicity of Chaucer's English. He made that his model. Tasso—the pure music of whose "Aminta" was, almost in his own day, neglected for the more ingeniously conceited "Pastor Fido" of Guarini—told his story of "Jerusalem Delivered" in clear musical stanzas, free from all rhetorical exaggeration, and from all labor after ingenious tricks of thought.