During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a while with philosophical doubts.  But though he read widely and speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled.  His own beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with terror from their analysis.  The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy.  Neither as a thinker, nor as a Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, did this noble and ingenuous, but weakly nature attain to thoroughness.

[Footnote 81:  Tasso’s diffuse paraphrase of the Stabat Mater might be selected to illustrate the sentimental tenderness rather than strength of his religious feeling.]

Tasso’s mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for forming original or comprehensive views.  He lived for no great object, whether political, moral, religious, or scientific.  He committed himself to no vice.  He obeyed no absorbing passion of love or hatred.  In his misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a prostrate human being.  The poet who complained so querulously, who wept so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command admiration.

There is nothing sublimely tragic in Tasso’s suffering.  The sentiment inspired by it is that at best of pathos.  An almost childish self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing prosaic or utilitarian objects—­the favor of princes, place at Courts, the recovery of his inheritance—­in a romantic and unpractical spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord.  Yet how touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer on the highroads of a world he never understood!  Shelley’s phrase, ’the world’s rejected guest’ exactly seems to suit him.

[Footnote 82:  The numerous plaintive requests for a silver cup, a ring, a silk cloak and such trifles in his later letters indicate something quite childish in his pre-occupations.]

And yet he allowed himself to become the spoiled child of his misfortunes.  Without them, largely self-created as they were, Tasso could not now appeal to our hearts.  Nor does he appeal to us as Dante, eating the salt bread of patrons’ tables, does; as Milton, blind and fallen on evil days; as Chatterton, perishing in pride and silence; as Johnson, turning from the stairs of Chesterfield; as Bruno, averting stern eyes from the crucifix; as Leopardi, infusing the virus