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,