Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 39

Vagueness, therefore, had hitherto found no place in European poetry or plastic art. But music, the supreme symbol of spiritual infinity in art, was now about to be developed; and the specific touch of Ta.s.so, the musician-poet, upon portraiture and feeling, called forth this quality of vagueness, a vagueness that demanded melody to give what it refused from language to accept. Mendelssohn when some one asked him what is meant by music, replied that it had meanings for his mind more unmistakable than those which words convey; but what these meanings were, he did not or he could not make clear. This certainty of sentiment, seeming vague only because it floats beyond the scope of language in regions of tone and color and emotion, is what Ta.s.so's _non so che_ suggests to those who comprehend. And Ta.s.so, by his frequent appeal to it, by his migration from the plastic into the melodic realm of the poetic art, proved himself the first genuinely sentimental artist of the modern age. It is just this which gave him a wider and more lasting empire over the heart through the next two centuries than that claimed by Ariosto.

It may not be unprofitable to examine in detail Ta.s.so's use of the phrase to which so much importance has been a.s.signed in the foregoing paragraph. We meet it first in the episode of Olindo and Sofronia.

Sofronia, of all the heroines of the _Gerusalemme_, is the least interesting, notwithstanding her magnanimous mendacity and Jesuitical acceptance of martyrdom. Olindo touches the weaker fibers of our sympathy by his feminine devotion to a woman placed above him in the moral scale, whose love he wins by splendid falsehood equal to her own.

The episode, entirely idle in the action of the poem, has little to recommend it, if we exclude the traditionally accepted reference to Ta.s.so's love for Leonora d'Este. But when Olindo and Sofronia are standing, back to back, against the stake, Aladino, who has decreed their death by burning, feels his rude bosom touched with sudden pity:

Un non so che d'inusitato e molle Par che nel duro petto al re trapa.s.se: Ei presentillo, e si sdegn; ne voile Piegarsi, e gli occhi torse, e si ritra.s.se (ii. 37).

The intrusion of a lyrical emotion, unknown before in the tyrant's breast, against which he contends with anger, and before the force of which he bends, prepares us for the happy _denouement_ brought about by Clorinda. This vague stirring of the soul, this _non so che_, this sentiment, is the real agent in Sofronia's release and Olindo's beatification.

Clorinda is about to march upon her doom. She is inflamed with the ambition to destroy the engines of the Christian host by fire at night; and she calls Argante to her counsels:

Buona pezza e, signor, che in se raggira Un non so che d'insolito e d'audace La mia mente inquieta; o Dio l'inspira, O l'uom del suo voler suo Dio si face (xii. 5).

Thus at this solemn point of time, when death is certainly in front, when she knows not whether G.o.d has inspired her or whether she has made of her own wish a deity, Clorinda utters the mystic word of vague compulsive feeling.

Erminia, taken captive by Tancredi after the siege of Antioch, is brought into her master's tent. He treats her with chivalrous courtesy, and offers her a knight's protection:

Allora un non so che soave e piano Sentii, ch'al cor mi scese, e vi s'affisse, Che, serpendomi poi per l'alma vaga, Non so come, divenne incendio e piaga (xix. 94).

At that moment, by the distillation of that vague emotion into vein and marrow, Erminia becomes Tancredi's slave, and her future is determined.

These examples are, perhaps, sufficient to show how Ta.s.so, at the turning-points of destiny for his most cherished personages, invoked indefinite emotion to adumbrate the forces with which will contends in vain. But the master phrase rings even yet more tyrannously in the pa.s.sage of Clorinda's death, which sums up all of sentiment included in romance. Long had Tancredi loved Clorinda. Meeting her in battle, he stood her blows defenseless; for Clorinda was an Amazon, reduced by Ta.s.so's gentle genius to womanhood from the proportions of Marfisa.

Finally, with heart surcharged with love for her, he has to cross his sword in deadly duel with this lady. Malign stars rule the hour: he knows not who she is: misadventure makes her, instead of him, the victim of their encounter. With her last breath she demands baptism--the good Ta.s.so, so it seems, could not send so fair a creature of his fancy as Clorinda to the shades without viatic.u.m; and his poetry rises to the sublime of pathos in this stanza:

Amico, hai vinto: io ti perdon: perdona Tu ancora: al corpo no, che nulla pave; All'alma s: deh! per lei prega; e dona Battesmo a me ch'ogni mia colpa lave.

In queste voci languide risuona Un non so che di flebile e soave Ch'al cor gli serpe, ed ogni sdegno ammorza, E gli occhi a lagrimar gl'invoglia e sforza (xii. 66).

Here the vague emotion, the _non so che_, distils itself through Clorinda's voice into Tancredi's being. Afterwards it thrills there like moaning winds in an Aeolian lyre, reducing him to despair upon his bed of sickness, and rea.s.serting its lyrical charm in the vision which he has of Clorinda among the trees of the enchanted forest. He stands before the cypress where the soul of his dead lady seems to his misguided fancy prisoned; and the branches murmur in his ears:

Fremere intanto udia continuo il vento Tra le frondi del bosco e tra i virgulti, E trarne un suon che flebile concento Par d'umani sospiri e di singulti; E un non so che confuso instilla al core Di pieta, di spavento e di dolore (xiii. 40).

The master word, the magic word of Ta.s.so's sentiment, is uttered at this moment of illusion. The poet has no key to mysteries locked up within the human breast more powerful than this indefinite _un non so che_.

Enough has been said to show how Ta.s.so used the potent spell of vagueness, when he found himself in front of supreme situations. This is in truth the secret of his mastery over sentiment, the spell whereby he brings nature and night, the immense solitudes of deserts, the darkness of forests, the wailings of the winds and the plangent litanies of sea-waves into accord with overstrained humanity. It was a great discovery; by right of it Ta.s.so proved himself the poet of the coming age.

When the _Gerusalemme_ was completed, Ta.s.so had done his best work as a poet. The misfortunes which began to gather round him in his thirty-first year, made him well-nigh indifferent to the fate of the poem which had drained his life-force, and from which he had expected so much glory. It was published without his permission or supervision. He, meanwhile, in the prison of S. Anna, turned his attention to prose composition. The long series of dialogues, with which he occupied the irksome leisure of seven years, interesting as they are in matter and genial in style, indicate that the poet was now in abeyance. It remained to be seen whether inspiration would revive with freedom. No sooner were the bolts withdrawn than his genius essayed a fresh flight. He had long meditated the composition of a tragedy, and had already written some scenes. At Mantua in 1586-7 this work took the form of _Torrismondo_. It cannot be called a great drama, for it belongs to the rigid declamatory species of Italian tragedy; and Ta.s.so's genius was romantic, idyllic, elegiac, anything but genuinely tragic. Yet the style is eminent for n.o.bility and purity. Just as the _Aminta_ showed how unaffected Ta.s.so could be when writing without preconceived theories of heightened diction, so the _Torrismondo_ displays an unstrained dignity of simple dialogue. It testifies to the plasticity of language in the hands of a master, who deliberately chose and sustained different styles in different species of poetry, and makes us regret that he should have formed his epic manner upon so artificial a type. The last chorus of _Torrismondo_ deserves to be mentioned as a perfect example of Ta.s.so's melancholy elegiac pathos.

Meanwhile he began to be dissatisfied with the _Gerusalemme_, and in 1588 he resolved upon remodeling his masterpiece. The real vitality of that poem was, as we have seen, in its romance. But Ta.s.so thought otherwise. During the fourteen years which elapsed since its completion, the poet's youthful fervor had been gradually fading out. Inspiration yielded to criticism; piety succeeded to sentiment and enthusiasm for art. Therefore, in this later phase of his maturity, with powers impaired by prolonged sufferings and wretched health, tormented by religious scruples and vague persistent fear, he determined to eliminate the romance from the epic, to render its unity of theme more rigorous, and to concentrate attention upon the serious aspects of the subject.

The result of this plan, pursued through five years of wandering, was the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_, a poem which the world has willingly let die, in which the style of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is worsened, and which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what was immortal in Ta.s.so's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out. A further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem upon the Creation of the World, called _Le Sette Giornate_. Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of Ta.s.so, it would not be mentioned by posterity.

Ta.s.so has already occupied us through two chapters. Before pa.s.sing onward I must, however, invite the reader to pause awhile and reconsider, even at the risk of retrospect and repet.i.tion, some of the salient features of his character. And now I remember that of his personal appearance nothing has. .h.i.therto been said. 'Ta.s.so was tall, well-proportioned, and of very fair complexion. His thick hair and beard were of a light-brown color. His head was large, forehead broad and square, eyebrows dark, eyes large, lively and blue, nose large and curved toward the mouth, lips thin and pale.' So writes Manso, the poet's friend and biographer, adding: 'His voice was clear and sonorous; but he read his poems badly, because of a slight impediment in his speech, and because he was short-sighted.' I know not whether I am justified in drawing from this description the conclusion that Ta.s.so was, physically, a man of mixed lymphatic and melancholic temperament, of more than ordinary sensitiveness. Imperfection, at any rate, is indicated by the thin pale lips, the incoherent utterance and the uncertain vision to which his friend in faithfulness bears witness. Of painted portraits representing Ta.s.so in later life there are many; but most of these seem to be based upon the mask taken from his face after death, which still exists at S. Onofrio. Twenty-one years ago I gazed upon this mask, before I knew then more than every schoolboy knows of Ta.s.so's life and writings. This is what I wrote about it in my Roman diary: 'The face is mild and weak, especially in the thin short chin and feeble mouth.[77] The forehead round, and ample in proportion to the other features. The eyes are small, but this may be due to the contraction of death. The mouth is almost vulgar, very flat in the upper lip; but this also ought perhaps to be attributed to the relaxation of tissue by death.

Ta.s.so was const.i.tutionally inclined to pensive moods. His outlook over life was melancholy.[78]

[Footnote 77: Giov. Imperiale in the _Museum Historic.u.m_ describes him thus: 'Perpetuo moerentis et altius cogitantis gessit aspectum, _gracili mento_, facie decolori, conniventibus cavisque oculis.']

[Footnote 78: 'La mia fiera malinconia' is a phrase which often recurs in his letters.]

The tone of his literary work, whether in prose or poetry, is elegiac--musically, often querulously plaintive. There rests a shadow of dejection over all he wrote and thought and acted. Yet he was finely sensitive to pleasure, thrillingly alive to sentimental beauty.[79]

Though the man lived purely, untainted by the license of the age, his genius soared highest when he sang some soft luxurious strain of love.

He was wholly deficient in humor. Taking himself and the world of men and things too much in earnest, he weighed heavily alike on art and life. The smallest trifles, if they touched him, seemed to him important.[80] Before imaginary terrors he shook like an aspen. The slightest provocation roused his momentary resentment. The most insignificant sign of neglect or coldness wounded his self-esteem.

Plaintive, sensitive to beauty, sentimental, tender, touchy, self-engrossed, devoid of humor--what a sentient instrument was this for uttering Aeolian melodies, and straining discords through storm-jangled strings!

[Footnote 79: 'Questo segno mi ho proposto: piacere ed onore'

(_Lettere_, vol. v. p. 87).]

[Footnote 80: It should be said that as a man of letters he bore with fools gladly, and showed a n.o.ble patience. Of this there is a fine example in his controversy with Della Cruscans. He was not so patient with the publishers and pirates of his works. No wonder, when they robbed him so!]

From the Jesuits, in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superst.i.tious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Ta.s.so's nature.

As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its substance. Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither impa.s.sioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood, cannot now be fancied. If he contained the stuff of saint or simple Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in their school at Naples.

During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Ta.s.so played for a while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their a.n.a.lysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fas.h.i.+ons of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither as a thinker, nor as a Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, did this n.o.ble and ingenuous, but weakly nature attain to thoroughness.

[Footnote 81: Ta.s.so's diffuse paraphrase of the _Stabat Mater_ might be selected to ill.u.s.trate the sentimental tenderness rather than strength of his religious feeling.]

Ta.s.so's mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for forming original or comprehensive views. He lived for no great object, whether political, moral, religious, or scientific. He committed himself to no vice. He obeyed no absorbing pa.s.sion of love or hatred. In his misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a prostrate human being. The poet who complained so querulously, who wept so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command admiration.

There is nothing sublimely tragic in Ta.s.so's suffering. The sentiment inspired by it is that at best of pathos. An almost childish self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects--the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance--in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting friends.h.i.+p, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer on the highroads of a world he never understood! Sh.e.l.ley's phrase, 'the world's rejected guest' exactly seems to suit him.

[Footnote 82: The numerous plaintive requests for a silver cup, a ring, a silk cloak and such trifles in his later letters indicate something quite childish in his pre-occupations.]

And yet he allowed himself to become the spoiled child of his misfortunes. Without them, largely self-created as they were, Ta.s.so could not now appeal to our hearts. Nor does he appeal to us as Dante, eating the salt bread of patrons' tables, does; as Milton, blind and fallen on evil days; as Chatterton, peris.h.i.+ng in pride and silence; as Johnson, turning from the stairs of Chesterfield; as Bruno, averting stern eyes from the crucifix; as Leopardi, infusing the virus of his suffering into the veins of humanity; as Heine, motionless upon his mattress grave. These more potent personalities, bequeathing to the world examples of endurance, have won the wreath of never-blasted bays which shall not be set on Ta.s.so's forehead. We crown him with frailer leaves, bedewed with tears tender as his own sentiment, and aureoled with the light that emanates from pure and delicate creations of his fancy.

Though Ta.s.so does not command admiration by heroism, he wins compa.s.sion as a beautiful and finely-gifted nature inadequate to cope with the conditions of his century. For a poet to be independent in that age of intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible. To be light-hearted and ironically indifferent lay not in Ta.s.so's temperament. It was no less difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, cla.s.sical culture and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. He belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his epoch. One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic poet of the Catholic Revival.[83]

Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second chapter of this work. By natural inclination he belonged to the line of artists which began with Boccaccio and culminated in Ariosto. But his training and the bias of the times in which he lived, made him break with Boccaccio's tradition. He tried to be the poet of the Council of Trent, without having a.s.similated hypocrisy or acquired false taste, without comprehending the essentially prosaic and worldly nature of that religious revolution. He therefore lived and worked in a continual discord. This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his reason. I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked from infancy. But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered, and the internal perplexity to which he was habitually subject.

[Footnote 83: Carducci, in his essay _Dello Svolgimento della Letteratura n.a.z.ionale_, and Quinet, in his _Revolutions d'ltalie_.]

When Ta.s.so first saw the light, the Italians had rejected the Reformation and consented to stifle free thought. The culture of the Renaissance had been condemned; the Spanish hegemony had been accepted.

Of this new att.i.tude the concordat between Charles and Clement, the Tridentine Council, the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus were external signs. But these potent agencies had not accomplished their work in Ta.s.so's lifetime. He was rent in twain because he could not react against them as Bruno did, and could not identify himself with them as Loyola was doing. As an artist he belonged to the old order which was pa.s.sing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging.

His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his difficulties. While accepting service in the modern spirit of subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of equality with princes.

We therefore see in Ta.s.so one who obeyed influences to which his real self never wholly or consciously submitted. He was not so much out of harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized contradictions. The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the cla.s.sical lumber absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous; the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and G.o.d: these were principles which Ta.s.so accepted without having properly a.s.similated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante's words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius. It is in the _Aminta_, in the episodes of the _Gerusalemme_, in a small percentage of the _Rime_, that we find the true Ta.s.so. For the rest, he had not the advantages enjoyed by Boiardo and Ariosto in a less self-conscious age, of yielding to natural impulse after a full and sympathetic study of cla.s.sical and mediaeval sources. The a.n.a.lytical labors of the previous century hampered his creativeness. He brought to his task preoccupations of divers and self-contradictory pedantries--pedantries of Catholicism, pedantries of scholasticism, pedantries of humanism in its exhausted phase, pedantries of criticism refined and subtilized within a narrow range of problems. He had, moreover, weighing on his native genius the fears which brooded like feverish exhalations over the evil days in which he lived--fears of Church-censure, fears of despotic princes, fears of the Inquisition, fears of h.e.l.l, fears of the judgment of academies, fears of social custom and courtly conventionalities. Neither as poet nor as man had he the courage of originality. What he lacked was character. He obeyed the spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline Saul's armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his sling and stone of native force alone. Yet that native force was so vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of the c.u.mbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb freedom. In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene of Clorinda, the pastoral of Aminta and Silvia--episodes which created the music and the painting of two centuries, and which still live upon the lips of the people. But inasmuch as his genius labored beneath the superinc.u.mbent weight of precedents and deferences, the poet's nature was strained to the uttermost and his nervous elasticity was overtaxed. No sooner had he poured forth freely what flowed freely from his soul, than he returned on it with scrupulous a.n.a.lysis. The product of his spirit stood before him as a thing to be submitted to opinion, as a substance subject to the test of all those pedantries and fears. We cannot wonder that the subsequent conflict perplexed his reason and sterilized his creative faculty to such an extent that he spent the second half of his life in attempting to undo the great work of his prime. The _Gerusalemme Conquistata_ and the _Sette Giornate_ are thus the splendid triumph achieved by the feebler over the stronger portions of his nature, the golden tribute paid by his genius to the evil genius of the age controlling him. He was a poet who, had he lived in the days of Ariosto, would have created in all senses spontaneously, producing works of Virgilian beauty and divine melancholy to match the Homeric beauty and the divine irony of his great peer. But this was not to be. The spirit of the times which governed his education, with which he was not revolutionary enough to break, which he strove as a critic to a.s.similate and as a social being to obey, destroyed his independence, perplexed his judgment, and impaired his nervous energy. His best work was consequently of unequal value; pure and base metal mingled in its composition. His worst was a barren and lifeless failure.

CHAPTER IX.

GIORDANO BRUNO.

Scientific Bias of the Italians checked by Catholic Revival--Boyhood of Bruno--Enters Order of S. Dominic at Naples--Early Accusations of Heresy--Escapes to Rome--Teaches the Sphere at Noli--Visits Venice--At Geneva--At Toulouse--At Paris--His Intercourse with Henri III.--Visits England--The French Amba.s.sador in London--Oxford--Bruno's Literary Work in England--Returns to Paris--Journeys into Germany--Wittenberg, Helmstadt, Frankfort--Invitation to Venice from Giovanni Mocenigo--His Life in Venice--Mocenigo denounces him to the Inquisition--His Trial at Venice--Removal to Rome--Death by Burning in 1600--Bruno's Relation to the Thought of his Age and to the Thought of Modern Europe--Outlines of his Philosophy.

The humanistic and artistic impulses of the Renaissance were at the point of exhaustion in Italy. Scholars.h.i.+p declined; the pa.s.sion for antiquity expired. All those forms of literature which Boccaccio initiated--comedy, romance, the idyl, the lyric and the novel--had been worked out by a succession of great writers. It became clear that the nation was not destined to create tragic or heroic types of poetry.

Architecture, sculpture and painting had performed their task of developing mediaeval motives by the light of cla.s.sic models, and were now entering on the stage of academical inanity. Yet the mental vigor of the Italians was by no means exhausted. Early in the sixteenth century Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy; Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for psychology and the science of nature. It seemed as though the Renaissance in Italy were about to a.s.sume a fresh and more serious character without losing its essential inspiration. That evolution of intellectual energy which had begun with the a.s.similation of the cla.s.sics, with the first attempts at criticism, with the elaboration of style and the perfection of artistic form, now promised to invade the fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation. It is true, as we have seen, that the theological problems of the German Reformation took but slight hold on Italians. Their thinkers were already too far advanced upon the paths of modern rationalism to feel the actuality of questions which divided Luther from Zwingli, Calvin from Servetus, Knox from Cranmer. But they promised to accomplish master-works of incalculable magnitude in wider provinces of exploration and investigation. And had this progress not been checked, Italy would have crowned and completed the process commenced by humanism. In addition to the intellectual culture already given to Europe, she might have revealed right methods of mental a.n.a.lysis and physical research. For this further step in the discovery of man and of the world, the nation was prepared to bring an army of new pioneers into the field--the philosophers of the south, and the physicists of the Lombard universities.

Humanism effected the emanc.i.p.ation of intellect by culture. It called attention to the beauty and delightfulness of nature, restored man to a sense of his dignity, and freed him from theological authority. But in Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives, untouched.