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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well justified, though for different reasons. The Jerusalem Delivered has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into the distance, the life-large figures compressed into brilliant miniatures, so clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified as well as lessened, their colours being now closer and brighter, the shadows and trivial features no longer visible.” Carlyle was kinder and less critical than when he classed the Jerusalem Delivered with the Nibelungen Lied—for Dresden china shepherdesses are not more unlike the statues of Michelangelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriemhilda or Hagen von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up the general impression left by the poem, as of a small, graceful, and, in spite of its great historical original, unimportant series of events transacting itself without passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines. We never hear the “dreadful clamour” of battle, and the duels of the champions smack of the school of arms, for Tasso, though no fighter, was an accomplished swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty, and the tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet and the man of letters, though his fame is less in the world than it was, Tasso must always be admirable, because he was a thorough workman. He was the poet of a decline. The choice of words, the use of the file, the avoidance of improprieties of metre, are more with him than inspiration. But he did at least reap the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for the language, and he left a finished example of the “learned” poetry of Southern Europe in the later sixteenth century.

It would tax the power of the greatest creative dramatist to draw two conceivable human beings who should differ so widely as Tasso and his only Italian contemporary who can be said to stand on a corresponding level of genius—Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title which he habitually used, was probably the more considerable man of the two in intrinsic power, while both his life and his character are more interesting. But then he is incomparably more difficult to understand. I cannot profess to deal with what, to the majority of those who have paid much attention to his work, is most valuable in him—his philosophic ideas, and the influence he may have had on later thinkers. His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of a certain stamp of character.[119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of Genoa. This was in 1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life. His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons, thence to Toulouse, Paris, England, once more to Paris, and from thence to Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the authorities. He defended the doctrines of Copernicus, and he expounded, more or less obscurely, his doctrines on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had an “art of memory” which was founded upon, or was an adaptation of, the curious reasoning machine invented by Raymond Lully, the Catalan scholastic and mystic of the thirteenth century. Even if I could profess to understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would not be the place to expound them. What does appear very clearly is, that he was a man of extreme and passionate arrogance. The doctrine he most certainly held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even a glimpse of the only important truths, and that official teachers who did not accept him at his own valuation were pigs, dogs, brutes, and beasts. He poured these epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford, whither he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was kind to him, and on whom he may have had some influence. The only place in which he escaped a violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg. Even there he could not rest, and he committed himself to a public and sweeping denunciation of the Papacy. At last he received an invitation from a Venetian magnifico of the house of Mocenigo to come and be his teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno’s “art of memory,” and probably also believed him to be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on the hopeless errand of making Mocenigo so wise that the Council of Ten would no longer be able to treat him as a person of no importance. Within a very few months this strange bargain bore its fruit. The magnifico discovered that he was no wiser than before, and that so far from being richer, he had given money to the Nolan for which no equivalent had been returned. He accused his teacher of being a cheat; and Bruno, whose temper had never been under restraint, answered, with more truth than prudence, that his employer was a fool. Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition. The Pope claimed him, and after some demur he was surrendered by the Serene Republic. On his trial before the Inquisition Bruno protested that he was a loyal son of the Church, and that if he had spoken heresy it was when he was speaking philosophically, and not theologically. The distinction would not serve, and he was condemned to death. Whether he was burnt in the body or only in effigy has been disputed. The balance of evidence is in favour of the contention that he actually suffered. In that case the date of his death is 1599.

Some anti-clerical writers on the Continent, and a few Englishmen who sympathise with them, have been attracted to Bruno because they can use his name as a weapon in their warfare with ecclesiastical authority. It is needless to add that numbers quote him as an example of papal tyranny who have never made the certainly not inconsiderable effort required to read any one of his treatises. We can speak of him here only as a man of letters, and can put aside his Latin treatises and purely philosophic work. His wandering life, and perhaps the restless explosive nature of the man, made it impossible for him to produce books on a large scale. Bruno was essentially a writer of pamphlets, which he produced as opportunity served. Three of these may be mentioned here as especially characteristic of the Nolan’s genius and spirit—La Cena del le Ceneri (‘The Ash Wednesday Supper’), dedicated to Castelnau de MauvissiÈre, French ambassador in London; the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (‘The Driving out of the Triumphant Beast’); and Gli Eroici Furori (‘The Heroic Furies’), the latter two dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue, and the last-named contains much verse. Although he excuses himself for part of what appears in Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante by saying that it is the personages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue form (the most difficult perhaps of all in literature) does not appear to me to be well managed. There is too much of the Nolan, and the other personages are apt to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him, or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this in itself is typical of the author. The dialogues are the literary expression of the very remarkable human being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic and fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into rockets of rhetoric, while the epithets fly out in sheets as of sparks from an anvil. What he means or is endeavouring to prove is far from being always clear, not because his language is obscure, for on the contrary his sentences are commonly simple enough, but because there was always far more passion and emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power. The title of his dialogues, ‘The Heroic Furies,’ is in a way a description of his whole work. There is in him a constant heroic fury of effort towards some vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force and greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all his smoky obscurity there is a very real fire in Giordano Bruno, which finds its best expression in verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He was a real Faust, who strove to grasp—

who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified an illimitable intellectual arrogance, often superbly expressed, by his imaginary discovery.

The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their contemporaries is very great. There was abundant interest of a kind in literary matters, there was no want of criticism, and the Academies were active. The long controversy over the Jerusalem in which Tasso allowed himself to be entangled is, if valuable for nothing else, at least a proof that Italians read poetry, and could talk about it.[120] What they could not at this period do was to produce anything original and valuable—with the exception of Tasso himself, and of Bruno. The once famous Pastor Fido of Giambattista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible example of what may happen to a literature when its writers have become extremely cultivated in all that is mere matter of language, but have unfortunately nothing to say—or, if they have something to say, are cowed into insignificance by the fear of compromising themselves.[121]

Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous, and afflicted by a vanity which caused him to be for ever comparing himself to Tasso, and complaining of his contemporary’s greater fame, but by no means without parts or knowledge. Yet his Pastor Fido is a mere echo of the Aminta. Guarini’s play—if play it can be called—was first acted at Turin in 1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From the Aminta, and through the Pastor Fido, came the line of the Italian literary opera of later times. The verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat sensual lusciousness—but withal it is nerveless and imitative.