still exists at S. Onofrio.  Twenty-one years ago I gazed upon this mask, before I knew then more than every schoolboy knows of Tasso’s life and writings.  This is what I wrote about it in my Roman diary:  ’The face is mild and weak, especially in the thin short chin and feeble mouth.[77] The forehead round, and ample in proportion to the other features.  The eyes are small, but this may be due to the contraction of death.  The mouth is almost vulgar, very flat in the upper lip; but this also ought perhaps to be attributed to the relaxation of tissue by death.

Tasso was constitutionally inclined to pensive moods.  His outlook over life was melancholy.[78]

[Footnote 77:  Giov.  Imperiale in the Museum Historicum describes him thus:  ’Perpetuo moerentis et altius cogitantis gessit aspectum, gracili mento, facie decolori, conniventibus cavisque oculis.’]

[Footnote 78:  ‘La mia fiera malinconia’ is a phrase which often recurs in his letters.]

The tone of his literary work, whether in prose or poetry, is elegiac—­musically, often querulously plaintive.  There rests a shadow of dejection over all he wrote and thought and acted.  Yet he was finely sensitive to pleasure, thrillingly alive to sentimental beauty.[79] Though the man lived purely, untainted by the license of the age, his genius soared highest when he sang some soft luxurious strain of love.  He was wholly deficient in humor.  Taking himself and the world of men and things too much in earnest, he weighed heavily alike on art and life.  The smallest trifles, if they touched him, seemed to him important.[80] Before imaginary terrors he shook like an aspen.  The slightest provocation roused his momentary resentment.  The most insignificant sign of neglect or coldness wounded his self-esteem.  Plaintive, sensitive to beauty, sentimental, tender, touchy, self-engrossed, devoid of humor—­what a sentient instrument was this for uttering Aeolian melodies, and straining discords through storm-jangled strings!

[Footnote 79:  ‘Questo segno mi ho proposto:  piacere ed onore’ (Lettere, vol. v. p. 87).]

[Footnote 80:  It should be said that as a man of letters he bore with fools gladly, and showed a noble patience.  Of this there is a fine example in his controversy with Della Cruscans.  He was not so patient with the publishers and pirates of his works.  No wonder, when they robbed him so!]

From the Jesuits, in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves.  These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination.  Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso’s nature.  As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and supporting in its substance.  Piety was neither deeply rooted nor indigenous, neither impassioned nor logically reasoned, in the adult man.[81] What it might have been, but for those gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood, cannot now be fancied.  If he contained the stuff of saint or simple Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in their school at Naples.