Odio il suo amore
    Ch’ odia la mia onestate; (Ib.)

and again: 

In questa guisa gradirei ciascuno
Insidiator di mia virginitate,
Che tu dimandi amante, ed io nemico. (Ib.)

Silvia here conjoins the unwholesome medieval ideal of virginity with the corrupt spectre of renaissance ’honour’—­

              quel vano
    Nome senza soggetto,
    Quell’ idolo d’ errori, idol d’ inganno[178], (Coro I.)

as Tasso himself styled it—­that conventional mask so bitterly contrasted with the natural goodness of the age of gold[179].

The general conception of love and its attendant emotions that permeates the work and vitiates so many of its descendants appears yet more glaringly characterized in some of the minor personages.  On these it is not my intention to dwell.  Of Dafne and Tirsi, that is, be it remembered, Tasso’s self, I have spoken, however briefly, yet at sufficient length already.  Suffice it to add here that Dafne’s suggestion, that modesty is commonly but a veil for lust, is nothing more than the cynical expression of the attitude adopted throughout the play.  Love is no ideal and idealizing emotion, but a mere gratification of the senses—­a luxuria scarcely distinguishable from gula.  Ignorance can alone explain an attitude of indifference towards its pleasures.  The girl who does not care to embrace opportunity is no better than a child—­’Fanciulla tanto sciocca, quanto bella,’ as Dafne says.  So, again, there is nothing ennobling in the devotion of the hero, nothing elevating in his fidelity.  All the mysticism, all the ideality, of the early days of the renaissance have long since disappeared, and chivalrous feeling, that last lingering glory of the middle age, is dead.

We are, indeed, justified in regarding what I may term the degeneration of sexual feeling in the Aminta as to a great extent the negation of chivalrous love, for, even apart from the allegorizing mysticism of Dante, that love contained its ennobling elements.  And yet, strangely enough, not a little of the convention at least of chivalrous love survives in the debased Arcadian love of the sentimental pastoral.  Both alike are primarily of an animal nature, and this in a sense other than that in which physical love may be said to form an element in all natural relation between man and woman.  Again, in both we find the rational machinery by which love shall be rewarded.  The lover serves his apprenticeship, either with deeds of arms or with sighs and sonnets, and the credit of the mistress is light who refuses to reward him for his service.  The System assumes neither choice, nor passion, nor pleasure on her part.  Her act is regarded in the cold light of a calculated payment, undisguised by any joy of passionate surrender.  But whereas in the outgrowth of feudalism, in the chivalry of the middle ages, this system formed the great incentive to martial daring, whereas when idealized in Beatrice it became almost undistinguishable from the ferveurs of religion, we find it with Tasso sinking into a weak and mawkish sensuality.  More than any other sentimentalist Tasso justified his title by ’fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,’ and it may be added that the ear is constantly catching the fundamental note.