Chapter 8 - Tasso
The reputation of Tasso in England has never, I think, stood as high as that of Ariosto, and this may seem a little surprising. We might have supposed that a nation of Puritans and a nation which has been acknowledged by a foreign critic as supreme in the energy of its moral poetry would have preferred the edifying Gerusalemme to the licentious Furioso. Yet I think the explanation is fairly simple. Ariosto has been preferred because, we must reluctantly admit, he is by almost any standard the greater poet. Nor ought we to press too far the contrast between his ribaldry and the grave loftiness of Tasso. Tragic, and even religious, elements do co-exist in Ariosto with his licentiousness, his mockery, and his wonderful comic invention. That indeed is his greatness. He treats the formulae of chivalrous romance now as a burlesque, now seriously, and without discomfort enables, nay compels, us to conform to his mood. Within that particular convention totam vitae imaginem expressit. He had also the advantage of coming first. When a poet like Spenser turned to the Jerusalem his ideas of what a romantic epic ought to be had already been formed by the Furioso—I should add, by the Innamorato as well. When in The Faerie Queene, IV, iii, 45 Spenser writes
Much more of price and of more gratious powre
Is this, then that same water of Ardenne,
The which Rinaldo drunck in happie howre,
he means Boiardo’s Rinaldo, not Tasso’s.
At the same time there have been very few periods in which English taste has not acknowledged Tasso as one of the great masters. In Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric, or the precepts of rhetoric made plain by examples, published in 1588, he is mentioned on the title-page as one of the sources from which these examples are to be drawn, along with Homer, Virgil, Sidney and Sallust—who is not the author of Catiline and Jugurtha but du Bartas. Gabriel Harvey praises him for his civile ingenium et heroicus animus: Sir John Harington refers to his ‘excellent work’. We do not in the Elizabethan period find him much praised for what he himself would perhaps have regarded as his greatest achievement. I mean his solution of the problem which occupies so much of his own critical writings, the problem of combining the romantic variety which popular taste demanded with the unity of action demanded by the Humanists. Thus in the dedicatory letter prefixed to The Faerie Queene Spenser seems quite unaware of the structural difference between the Furioso and the Gerusalemme. The difference which he stresses is of quite another order, based on the assumption that epic poets teach virtue not (as le Bossu was later to think) by the general tendency of their fable but by the exemplary character of their hero. Hence comes a curious classification, distinguishing poets who teach public and private virtue in the same hero, as Virgil did in Aeneas and Ariosto in Orlando, and those who have a different hero for each, as Homer had. Agamemnon in the Iliad showed public virtue, Odysseus in the Odyssey, private. Tasso is a poet of this kind, with Goffredo for political and Rinaldo for ethical virtue. All this comes from a critical background very naïf compared with that of the Discorsi.
In the seventeenth century the position is somewhat different. To Milton Tasso is one of the great models of epic mentioned in The Reason of Church Government along with Homer, Virgil, and the book of Job: but he is also, in the Tractate, one of the great critics, side by side with Castelvetro. There is no doubt that Milton fully understood the critical problem of which Tasso’s epic was the practical solution: he himself was deeply concerned with it and had pondered ‘whether the rules of Aristotle are to be followed’. He writes as a man of the Renaissance but one better informed than our Elizabethans. In that respect, however, he was (as I suspect great men often are) ‘behind his age’. In this century trends of taste hostile to Tasso were beginning to make themselves felt. In 1634 Sir William Alexander in his Anacrisis quotes with approval from Sperone Speroni who ‘thinking his exquisite work of Godfred to be too full of rich conceits and more dainty than did become the gravity of such a work, said that it was a heroic poem written in madrigals’. That is the beginning of a line of attack which culminates in Boileau’s notorious denunciation. I say notorious because it seems no common insolence for a Frenchman, one of a nation that has produced no epic since the chansons de geste, to speak thus of a poem which man and boy can still read with unflagging interest for the story alone. One sees, of course, what such critics mean. What they are objecting to might be called by a modern the operatic quality in Tasso. The speech of Olindo at the stake in canto II—the one that begins Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise—is an example. But I doubt if this sort of criticism was the most serious threat launched against Tasso’s popularity in the seventeenth century. Far more important, because it went down to deeper preferences and aversions, was the revolt against the supernatural and the marvellous, in that sense the counter-romanticism, which we see in Davenant, Hobbes and Rymer. (Notice in passing that in romantic England poetic rebellions are usually anti-romantic; in France it is the romantics who rebel.) Davenant thought that Tasso’s errors—by which he means magicians and enchanted woods—were derived from the ancients and were ‘excusable in them’ but ‘by being his admit no pardon’. He means that the ancients, poor Pagans, knew no better than to believe in mythology whereas Tasso went in for marvels gratuitously. The same critical attitude can be seen working out to a very different result in Rymer, who says that Spenser ‘though he had read Tasso suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto’. Here Tasso is the good boy and Ariosto the bad: partly, I suppose, because of Tasso’s superior unity, but partly because Ariosto gives us even more of those marvels which Rymer disliked. As a result of Ariosto’s influence The Faerie Queene, Rymer complains, ‘is perfect fairy land’—using in reprobation the very words which a romantic might have used as the highest praise. At the same time he treats Tasso with respect and quotes Gerusalemme, II, 96 for comparison with the corresponding descriptions of nocturnal silence in Apollonius Rhodius and Virgil. He criticizes Tasso’s stanza on the characteristically Rymerian ground that ‘there seems to be some superfluity of Fish’.
But even in the late seventeenth century opposite forces were present. Dryden never shared the anti-romantic bias of his age. He always admired and often tried to contribute to what he called the ‘enthusiastic parts of poetry’ and ‘the fairy way of writing’. Many of his worst miscarriages indeed result from his efforts to do what nature had disqualified him from doing: a thing worth notice for we are too apt to assume that what a writer likes and what he can do coincide. Nor was Dryden romantic only in the sense of loving marvels: he was also romanesque, he desired the grandiose and the heroic. Accordingly it is not surprising to find him defending his own Alma by the precedent of Homer’s Achilles, Tasso’s Rinaldo, and Calprenède’s Artaban and even declaring that these were his models. The third is significant. The heroic prose romances are now unread, but they were once most intimately connected in men’s minds with the romantic epics. Scaliger and Tasso himself both mention Heliodorus among epic writers and Sidney, with some reservation, treats Amadis as a heroic poem. The huge French successors of these romances continued to enjoy great popularity throughout the seventeenth century: prose like that and poetry like Tasso’s must have given one another mutual support. There must have been—and Dryden partly reveals it to us—a continuous possibility of escape into such regions from the prison of ‘good sense’.
Whether the taste ever quite died out I do not know; but if it did, the revival was not long in coming. The desire for the ‘gothick’ begins almost with the beginning of the eighteenth century and grows steadily. And the ‘world of fine fabling’ which a critic like Hurd denied is found in Spenser and Tasso. To a modern critic the differences between Tasso and real medieval poetry may seem very much more important than the similarities: is not the Gerusalemme rooted in the Counter-Reformation? But we must remember, firstly, how ignorant these early medievalists were of the true Middle Ages, and secondly how ill provided the Middle Ages are with the sort of poetry they wanted to read. They wanted chivalry, not scholastic philosophy; enchanters, not allegory. They wanted, quite simply, knights in armour, castles, and love stories. They wanted precisely the imaginary Middle Ages which Boiardo had created, Ariosto perfected, and Tasso delivered from their satiric elements. Hence the romantic young lady asking Waverley to help her over her translation of Tasso. Since then there has been a decline in his fame. The herald of this new decline was perhaps Vernon Lee. That gifted lady wrote under the spell of not the imagined Middle Ages but the imagined ‘Renaissance’—the glorious, coloured, full-blooded, Pagan phantasmagoria of poisoning cardinals and Machiavellian Popes and wicked beauties which so enchanted our fathers. Tasso is not at all like that: Harvey had noted his civile ingenium. According to Vernon Lee we find in him ‘the pallor of Autumn’. At the moment, we live in the full tide of the most violent counter-romanticism that has ever been seen, and Tasso’s English readers are few. We can only guess where he will be found when this tide also ebbs.
It would appear, then, that ever since he wrote, with some few eclipses—none of them complete—Tasso has been a major star in the poetical sky visible from this island. But when we come to look for traces of his influence on our own poetry, they are not so marked as we might perhaps have expected. Compared with the traces of Petrarch they are insignificant. It would even be difficult to point to any one book so continuously affected by Tasso as The Water Babies is by Rabelais, or Chaucer by Boccaccio. This does not mean that he has not been taken to our hearts: it may even mean the opposite. It is not the greatest authors who are most directly imitated, or, if they are, not for their true greatness. Petrarch in the shades might envy Tasso for having escaped the tasteless imitation which Elizabethan England lavished on himself: for what could give one less idea of the drugged yet golden melancholy, the rapt immobility of the Rime than the conceits which our sonneteers are always stealing from them and making frigid by the theft?
There is in Spenser one long passage very recognizably derived from the Gerusalemme and there are, of course, a number of sonnets. The sonnets hardly matter: this amatory Italianate vein in English poetry always sounds exactly the same whoever it is taken from. But the passage in The Faerie Queene is of some interest. Both poets are doing the same thing: they are describing the rescue of a young man from an enchanted garden, a garden of erotic enchantment in which he is held captive by a beautiful female figure. And both poets, by modern standards, lie open to the same charge: at any rate, at first sight. We are told that they both make the thing which was meant to be evil too beautiful: so beautiful that all the reader’s sympathies go out to it, and it may be supposed that the poets’ sympathies did the same. This would be a serious charge, if true: not on moral grounds, which are not my concern at the moment, but on artistic. There would be a fatal discrepancy between the profound and the superficial meaning of the poetry. I do not myself believe that the charge is true. As regards Tasso I believe it proceeds from a misunderstanding both of his mind and of his art, and first as regards his mind. Professor Tolkien, lecturing at St Andrews not many years ago, remarked how the idea of the beautiful but evil fay has disappeared from the modern imagination. Perhaps in the world built by industrialism beauty has become so rare and evil so undisguisedly ugly that we can no longer believe ill of beauty. With the old poets it was not so. They believed that a thing might be perfectly beautiful, might be of a beauty to break the heart, and yet be evil. As for their art, it must be allowed that in one respect art has become more integrated since their times. The old poet, or painter, or musician does seem to have aimed simply at giving each part of his work the greatest beauty. The speeches of wicked characters were made as plausible as the poet could make them, the alluring temptations as alluring as he could make them. He did not feel it necessary to sow hints of falsity in the villain’s speech. Perhaps this change is seen most clearly in the history of opera. A modern composer underlines his evil characters or places with discords. An old composer was content with making a courtesan’s song soft and melting or a tyrant’s song loud and declamatory; within that very general limit he then made each simply good of its kind. Thus Wagner gives Alberich ugly music to sing: but Mozart gives to the Queen of Night music as beautiful as he gives to Sarastro.
That would be my defence of Tasso. But the point is that no such defence is needed for the passages borrowed from Tasso in The Faerie Queene. Elsewhere I have already analysed them at some length and it would be tedious to repeat the details. I will here content myself with saying that though Spenser’s Bower of Bliss is closely copied from Tasso’s garden of Armida, everything in Spenser’s Bower is deliberately contrasted with his garden of Adonis which comes about six cantos later: everything therefore has a significance in him which it had not in Tasso. Tasso, quite innocently, and following a well established tradition, frequently uses the contrast of art and nature—
E quel che il bello e il caro accresce all’opre
L’arte che tutto fa, nulla si scopre.
Spenser reproduces these passages for a different purpose. He emphasizes the art of the evil garden in order that, six cantos later, he may contrast it with the naturalness of the good one. In the one all is imitation, arrangement and sterility; in the other all is spontaneous and fertile. Thus Spenser’s poem contains, as Tasso’s does not, the answer to the evil garden on its own ground. In Tasso we have merely the conflict between sensuality and valour. In Spenser we have the answer to depraved and artful sensuality given by innocent and natural sensuousness. Armida is defeated only by virtue she could never understand: Acrasia is answered by something which does much better what she professed to do—beaten, as we say, on her home ground. This will be very surprising to those who expect to find Spenser differing from Tasso by his ‘Puritanism’ in the popular modern sense of the word. But in reality Puritanism and the Counter-Reformation, or even Puritanism and the Middle Ages, were on this point in positions almost opposite to those that moderns imagine for them. Asceticism is far more characteristic of Catholicism than of the Puritans. Celibacy and the praise of virginity are Catholic: the honour of the marriage bed is Puritan. Milton was being typically Puritan when he wrote, something too excessively, of the loves of Adam and Eve. Comus is his least Puritan poem.
Poetically the chief contrast between Spenser and Tasso at this point is one of complexity. Tasso does a very simple thing and does it extremely well. Spenser builds up a contrast which will be lost unless the reader can carry it in his head for six cantos—that is, for thousands of lines. I don’t think that means that Spenser is more modern; I think it means that he is more medieval. For surely intricacy is a mark of the medieval mind: intricacy in scholastic philosophy, in Gothic architecture, in dress, in the rhyme schemes of poetry, and (what here concerns us most) the intricacy of allegory. It is not fanciful to see an analogy between the superior intricacy of Spenser’s fable over Tasso’s and the difference between his stanza and the ottava rima. Both are things of untiring beauty, but how different they are. The Italian stanza is all clear bell-like music; it carries you on with untroubled speed through the whole length of some of the longest poems in the world. The Spenserian is labyrinthine and meditative, turning back upon itself in the centre where the two rhymes meet and then pausing again, either for recapitulation or thundering defiance, or for a dying fall in the final alexandrine.
Professor Mario Praz has justly pointed out how Milton’s abstinence from the particular, his lunghezza de’ membri e de’ periodi, and his verses entering l’uno nell’altro, conform to Tasso’s precepts. Yet it is extraordinary how little recognizable Tasso we find in Milton. The councils in Heaven and Hell, the descent of Gabriel and Michael, and other such ‘machines’ (as the old critics would have called them) are part of the Homeric and Virgilian tradition as Christianized by Vida amidst the tasteless absurdities of the Christiad. There is possibly a closer connexion in these two pictures:
Quando dall’alto soglio il Padre Eterno,
Ch’è nella parte più del Ciel sincera,
E quanto è dalle stelle al basso inferno,
Tanto è più in su della stellata spera,
Gli occhi in giù volse, e in un sol punto, e in una
Vista mirò ciò, ch’in se il mondo aduna—
(Gerusalemme Liberata, I, vii, 3–8)
and
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High throned above all highth, bent down his eye,
His own works and their works at once to view.
(P.L. III, 56–9)
But even here the similarity is not of the closest. Where Milton explicitly recalls the Italian epics it is usually Tasso’s predecessors he thinks of. Thus at the very outset he challenges comparison with Ariosto by promising
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,
a direct translation of
Cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima.
And in the severest of all his poems he turns aside to remember, of all people, Boiardo:
Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp
When Agrican with all his Northern powers
Beseig’d Albracca, as Romances tell,
The City of Gallaphrone, from thence to win
The fairest of her Sex, Angelica,
His daughter, sought by many prowest Knights,
Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne.
(P.R. III, 337–43)
How closely he had read the Innamorato may be seen from a passage in Paradise Lost where he reproduces a passage from it, I suppose unconsciously. Boiardo has said (II, xxx, 44–8)
Da l’altra parte anchora i Saracini
Facean tremar di stridi tutto il loco,
Correndo l’un ver l’altro, son vicini,
Scema il campo in mezzo a poco a poco;
Fossa non v’è, nè fiume, che confini. . . .
Part of this comes in P.L. VI at line 68
On they move
Indissolubly firm; nor obvious Hill
Nor straitening Vale, nor Wood, nor Stream, divides
Their perfect ranks.
The other part comes about thirty lines later in the form
for now
’Twixt Host and Host but narrow space was left.
This is not conscious imitation: it is the involuntary reminiscence of a man steeped in another author. Yet who would have thought a priori that Milton delighted in the winning absurdities of Boiardo? It raises our opinion of both poets.
But it is time to draw to a close an inquiry which is already proving itself so negative. Of Tasso’s minor works we find traces in English, but usually so much of a piece with the general Italian influence as to be hardly worth picking out. Of his great poem we find much praise and constant enjoyment and one translation which is very well worth reading on its own merits. Perhaps the truth is that what is best in the Gerusalemme is not very imitable. Its conceits, those conceits which led Speroni to call it an epic in madrigals, could be copied; we may be thankful they were not. But its virtues do not easily flow over into other men’s work. No poem is more completely, and in a sense severely, the poem it set out to be and no other. And that, I suggest, is its abiding merit. A certain kind and degree of artificiality, a certain very skilful balance of unity and variety, a certain tone of disciplined ardour—these prevail from the first line to those wholly satisfactory last words e scioglie il voto which Tasso had in mind before he put pen to paper. Those words may be applied to the poet as well as to the hero. Scioglie il voto: he did what he meant, he made good his promise. The actions and the characters are far removed from reality as a modern critic understands it. But then they are all at exactly the same distance from it and thus all real in relation to one another—the shepherds who entertain Erminia being neither nearer to nor further from actual rusticity than the great deeds of Argante and Rinaldo are from actual war or Clorinda herself from the Countess in Froissart at the siege of Hennebont who ‘had a glaive in her hand and was that day as good as a man’. In this perfect keeping, which enables us to accept Tasso’s world as real while we are reading, lies the great charm of the poem; in that and in something better. I mean that quite unforced and quite sincere elevation of sentiment which makes us feel that Tasso is, in a very serious and even reverent sense of the word, the most boyish of the poets.