Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 837 pages of information about Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2.

Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 837 pages of information about Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2.
noble and serious subject, sustaining style at a sublime altitude, but gratifying the prevalent desire for beauty in variety by the introduction of attractive episodes and the ornaments of picturesque description.  Tasso, in fact, declared himself an eclectic; and the deep affinity he felt for Virgil, indicated the lines upon which the Latin language in its romantic or Italian stage of evolution might be made to yield a second Aeneid adapted to the requirements of modern taste.  He had, indeed, already set before himself the high ambition of supplying this desideratum.  The note of prelude had been struck in Rinaldo; the subject of the Gerusalemme had been chosen.  But the age in which he lived was nothing if not critical and argumentative.  The time had long gone by when Dante’s massive cathedral, Boccaccio’s pleasure domes, Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s palaces of enchantment, arose as though unbidden and unreasoned from the maker’s brain.  It was now impossible to take a step in poetry or art without a theory; and, what was worse, that theory had to be exposed for dissertation and discussion.  Therefore Tasso, though by genius the most spontaneous of men, commenced the great work of his life with criticism.  Already acclimatized to courts, coteries, academies, formed in the school of disputants and pedants, he propounded his Ars Poetica before establishing it by an example.  This was undoubtedly beginning at the wrong end; he committed himself to principles which he was bound to illustrate by practice.  In the state of thought at that time prevalent in Italy, burdened as he was with an irresolute and diffident self-consciousness, Tasso could not deviate from the theory he had promulgated.  How this hampered him, will appear in the sequel, when we come to notice the discrepancy between his critical and creative faculties.  For the moment, however, the Dialogues on Epic Poetry only augmented his fame.

Scipione Gonzaga, one of Tasso’s firmest and most illustrious friends, had recently established an Academy at Padua under the name of Gli Eterei.  At his invitation the young poet joined this club in the autumn of 1564, assumed the title of Il Pentito in allusion to his desertion of legal studies, and soon became the soul of its society.  His dialogues excited deep and wide-spread interest.  After so much wrangling between classical and romantic champions, he had transferred the contest to new ground and introduced a fresh principle into the discussion.  This principle was, in effect, that of common sense, good taste and instinct.  Tasso meant to say:  there is no vital discord between classical and romantic art; both have excellences, and it is possible to find defects in both; pedantic adherence to antique precedent must end in frigid failure under the present conditions of intellectual culture; yet it cannot be denied that the cycle of Renaissance poetry was closed by Ariosto; let us therefore attempt creation in a liberal spirit,

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Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.