Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

It may therefore be true, as Mr. Hallam has said, that the events in Tasso spring naturally one from another; but so may a series of successive turnings off the line of a road we have been travelling, when taken singly, produce no serious, and even no sensible, deviation; yet their effect, when taken together, may be wholly to change our direction, and prevent us from making any way at all towards our point. Without doubt, each incident of an epic poem ought to follow naturally in the train of that which directly precedes it; but it is far more important that it should bear a legitimate relation to the central design, and should magnify, not detract from, the grandeur of that on which the whole fabric principally depends.

But there are surely many other objections to the mode, which Tasso has adopted, of impeding and retarding the accomplishment of his main action. Considering the nature of his theme, and the solemnity of the sanctions under which the Crusades were undertaken, although we have no right to ask that passion and infirmity should be banished from the camp, yet the wholesale entanglement of the very first warriors in love affairs, their rushing in a mass, with few exceptions besides greyheads of the camp, upon the track of Armida, their compelling Godfrey to allow the interests of this treacherous beauty to interrupt the august purpose of their undertaking, and then the very large proportion of the poem occupied in unravelling the web thus tangled, form, to my view at least, a bad poetical mixture of the intrusive with the Christian elements of the design.

Nor let it here be said, that even so our great Achilles stays the progress of the Greeks towards triumph for the love of a weak woman. We need not dwell on such distinctions as that Briseis was a noble and worthy, but Armida an unworthy object of attachment; that Achilles was but one, while Tasso touches all, who by age were capable, with the same phrensy. It is not even this worthy attachment alone, that acts upon Achilles: that is not the main stress of the tempest which so rends the strong heaving oak when he cries,

ἀλλά μοι οἰδάνεται κραδίη χόλῳ, ὁππότ’ ἐκείνωνμνήσομαι, ὥς μ’ ἀσύφηλον ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἔρεξενἈτρείδης, ὡσεί τιν’ ἀτίμητον μετανάστην960.

In Achilles, baffled love is surmounted by the image of agonizing pride, pierced through and through; and high over this again towers his hatred of the meanness of Agamemnon, and his sense of Justice, stung to the very inmost quick. Even supposing the question to be open, whether Homer has mixed his ingredients in due or in undue proportions, at all events there is no essential conflict among them. But such a conflict becomes visible and glaring, when a scope is assigned to the impulses and sway of personal passion upon an army devoted to God and to the highest aim, such as it is quite impossible to exemplify, nay to suppose, in any army that has ever been banded together for any even of the meaner ends of earthly policy.

Again, although Tasso’s poem is eminently Christian in its general intention, who does not feel that, instead of gathering our main sympathies and interest by means of his accessory circumstances round his principal subject, he has too effectually severed them from it, and has left it so bare and naked, that his liberation of Jerusalem is after all very like a common capture and sack; very like what, mutatis mutandis, the capture of it by the Saracens must have been? We leave him with our minds full of Tancredi and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Gildippe and Odoardo; but the associations, which these names suggest, connect themselves with any subject, rather than with the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre; and the respected Godfrey, with his plans, has, at most points of the poem, little more share in our thoughts than the Jupiter of the Iliad, as he feasts remotely grand on Olympus, or sits on Ida for the convenience of a nearer view.

Relative places of Rinaldo and Tancredi.

Besides these objections of irrelevant interpolation, incongruous mixture, and divided interests, it may be observed that the relative prominence of the heroes of Tasso is not clearly pronounced. No one can doubt as to the question, who is the first, and by far the first, figure of the Iliad. Achilles ever haunts us, either in recollection or by sight; at any rate, he stands among and above his brother chieftains, as Saul out-topped by head and shoulders the people of Israel. But it is not easy to say who is the hero or protagonist of the Jerusalem. Although the interest which he attracts is inferior, yet the virtues, intellect, and moral force of Godfrey stand high and clear beyond those of all the other more prominent personages: he bears himself so meekly in his high office, and yet so perfectly and so exclusively exhibits the political spirit, that by mere moral and official greatness he stands, in any general view of the poem, an inconvenient neighbour and a dangerous rival to the two other figures, for one of whom the title of hero must have been designed. Taking, next, the yet more serious question between Tancredi and Rinaldo, which of this pair is intended to command the chief interest? Apparently, in Tasso’s intention, it is Rinaldo; because without him the main action stops, with him it proceeds. And yet the poet has assigned to Tancredi the deadly single combat with, and the triumph so powerfully described over, Argante, the only really great and terrible champion on the Mahometan side. How would the Iliad stand, if Diomed had killed Hector, and had left to Achilles only Æneas or Sarpedon?

Tasso here seems himself to have felt an incongruity, and to have sought to compensate Rinaldo in quantity for the (comparatively) deficient quality of his conquests. In the final assault he slays a multitude of the enemy like sheep961; when, as the poet says, in a manner surely far beneath his theme, the taste of victory had excited in him the appetite of carnage962.

Nor is it only in the distribution of military glory, that Rinaldo appears to have suffered for the advantage of Tancred. On one occasion indeed, immediately after the death of Gernando, Tasso has degraded Tancred for the advantage of Rinaldo. For the poet makes this warrior plead, that the offence of Rinaldo should be considered according to the quality of him who committed it, and that there can be no such thing as true justice without respect of persons:

Or ti sovvegnaSaggio signor, chi sia Rinaldo, e quale;… non dee chi regnaNel castigo con tutti esser uguale.Vario è l’ istesso error ne’ gradi vari;E sol l’ egualità giusta è co’ pari963.

It was acting on an opinion of this kind, in the case of the Master of Stair after the Massacre of Glencoe, that left uneffaced a deep stain on the memory of William III. and of Scotland. Doubtless there have been periods when, even in Christian countries, such sentiments have been professed as well as practised; but can there have been any period when the utterance of them from the mouth of a knight, who is exhibited to us as a pattern, would not have caused a revulsion in the minds of ordinary hearers or readers?

The Woman-characters of Tasso.

The Jerusalem is greatly overstocked with interesting couples; so much so, that at times we almost seem to be reading a Pastoral poem. Taken singly, the details of these love-stories are worked up with infinite art and beauty, and are the most effective and successful portions of the whole Epic; but the aggregate is so much too large, that it chills the general tone, as well as weakens the broader effects. The excess of quantity is, indeed, gross and glaring. Tasso has followed the Christian Romancers in employing largely the idea of the woman-warrior, practically unknown to Homer, introduced with great spirit but no very elevated moral effect in Virgil, carried by Bojardo and Ariosto to its perfection; and, without doubt, a conception far more suitable to the standard of those great poets of fancy, than to the lofty level of the Epic or the higher drama, which deal with the greatest powers and the deepest problems of our nature. Still, as to the manner of employing it, we need not deny that high praise must be accorded to the Clorinda of Tasso. It is indeed easy to criticize the religious incidents of her death, and not easy to understand what business she has after death in a tree of the enchanted wood; or why, when that wood becomes the prey of the carpenters, she is so unceremoniously overlooked in her uncomfortable abode. But as to the main exhibition of the character, she follows Bradamante without degeneracy: pure, upright, chivalrous, thoroughly martial, and yet not grossly masculine. She falls to the lot of Tancred. But besides the Sofronia, the Erminia, and the Gildippe, in the second degree of prominence, there is projected on the picture another person yet more conspicuous than even Clorinda, namely, Armida; so different that they can hardly be compared, and yet inconveniently jarring from the similarity of their relations to the great heroes of the poem. Both, too, are lovely; both figure in the camp. Notwithstanding, however, the profusion of charms, which Tasso has called into existence to set off the person and the powers of Armida, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than her character itself, except its place in the poem, and her particular relation to Rinaldo. When every one else is ravished by her overpowering attractions, he remains insensible: and yet afterwards, with no poetical justification for the change, he becomes desperately enamoured of her. Here we see that feebleness in the conception and exhibition of character, which depresses the flight of Tasso, which excludes him from a place in the class, quite as open to poets as to philosophers, the class of the greatest masters of thought and of human nature.

The Armida of Tasso.

We become acquainted with Armida, the beautiful enchantress, first in the guise of a forlorn damsel, who implores succour from the Christian heroes; and this is perhaps the most successful portion of the rôle assigned to her. Then she appears as the Circe of her own gardens: then she is a Dido without an Æneas, for the escape of Rinaldo from the disgraceful servitude into which she had inveigled him bears no resemblance to the fond and deep passion of the Carthaginian queen, which grew out of an honourable hospitality afforded to the Trojans in distress. With a disagreeable amount of likeness in detail, the copy still misses the original, and loses all that force and majesty of intense passion to which here, and here alone, Virgil has been enabled to ascend. Then instead of that tragic end of Dido, in which, though with an attitude somewhat theatrical, softness and fierceness are so wonderfully blended, so that she does not forfeit sympathy even in her keenest longings for revenge, Armida has recourse to an expedient which is wholly debased and vulgar. She simply offers herself for sale, promising to be the prize of any warrior of the Egyptian camp, who shall execute her vengeance on Rinaldo for the offence of having escaped out of her toils.

Nor have we yet done with the doublings of her tortuous path. She sees Rinaldo pass her in the battle; and, not without infinite doubting, shoots an arrow at him. It is perhaps difficult to define in language what it is, that constitutes the difference between the mental struggles of genuine passion, and mere incongruous vacillation. We see the former in Dido; and one sign of it is a certain progression. Where the law of nature is followed, perpetual fluctuation is not allowed; by degrees, though they may be slow and many, the mind is worked up to a strong resolve, where it abides: its agitation and seeming reflux is but the receding wave of the advancing tide; and when once a strong purpose is full-formed after struggle in a truly powerful nature, whether of man or woman, it must not be changed. Now this is what we miss in Armida. She is ever playing at backwards and forwards. Thrice she draws the bow, thrice she relaxes it: at last she discharges the arrow, but with it a wish that it may miss:

Lo stral volò; ma con lo strale un votoSubito uscì, che vada il colpo a voto964.

Not unnaturally, this unsatisfactory passage leads us to one of the worst of all the provoking conceits that disfigure from time to time the beautiful pages of this poem:

Tanto poteva in lei, benchè perdente,(Or che potria vittorioso?) amore965.

Yet, after all this, revenge again gets the upper hand, and her eye follows the arrow with avidity, hoping it may strike. She then repeats the shot again and again, and while doing it is again herself shot in return by love:

E mentre ella saetta, Amor lei piaga966.

Again the same alternation is reiterated; but her champions fail. She flies. She resumes the part of Dido; apostrophizes her own weapons in a speech of near thirty lines, entreating them to despatch her. Rinaldo then arrests her arm; and yet once more, in stanzas replete with beauty of diction, we have the same unsatisfactory and indecisive mixture of ill-assorted emotions, without the strength either of harmony or of contrast, founded on no natural law, connected by no moral or mental tie, ordered to no end or consummation. However, he vows himself her adorer, and she gives herself up to his disposal:

Ecco l’ ancella tua; d’ essa a tuo sennoDispon, gli disse; e le fia legge il cenno967.

And so we leave them. But unhappily we cannot, in leaving them, forget that she is a Mahometan and a sorceress; that her frauds have been the great scandal of the army, and the main obstacle to the completion of its design; that she has never throughout the whole poem exhibited a single quality containing in it the elements of just moral attraction; and that this triumph of mere corporeal form, without one solitary note of inward loveliness, is achieved over the greatest of the warriors of Christ, when engaged, under the immediate and special direction of the Almighty, in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from infidel dominion. With all these circumstances before us, it must be admitted that a more lame and unsatisfactory contribution to the climax of a great Christian poem could hardly have been contrived. Nor is the impression much amended by the dedication of the eight last stanzas of the work to the completion of the victory by Godfrey. A reader may, on the contrary, well feel perturbed by the sharpness of the transition, and by the air of unconsciousness with which, in gathering up the threads of the action, Tasso has brought into close neighbourhood matters so heterogeneous, that they form a kind of moral chaos. And the observation applies to the close of the poem, which may well have accompanied it throughout its course; that the sympathies of the reader are not evoked and managed with due, or with any, reference to the greatness and nobleness of the objects, but, on the contrary, are allured into the wrong quarter. Homer has carefully contrived, in the case of Paris, that even his extraordinary personal attractions shall do nothing to give him a hold upon our favour, while he has given his warmest sympathies to the beauty of the innocent, though comparatively insignificant, Euphorbus968. How tame and flat, on the contrary, has Tasso made the stainless Erminia, whom indeed he altogether forgets before the poem closes; and what efforts of art has he not used to gather admiring interest around the character and fate of the heartless, even when enamoured, Armida. Nay, more, with some brilliant exceptions, especially that noble one of the first view of Jerusalem, how cold and slack, how uninteresting to the reader, is the movement of the main action of the poem, compared with that of the love-stories which invade and engross so inordinate a portion of the ground. We seem to feel that, after all, the Siege of Jerusalem is not the principal business in hand; it is the task which must somehow or other be got through, but it is not the life and pulse, the light and joy of the poem. As the Siege of Troy was the instrument of Homer, to enable him to develop his Achilles, so the much higher subject of the Crusade is the tool of Tasso to enable him to exhibit his workmanship, chiefly in connection with love-stories, upon very inferior persons and performances. The relative values of the setting and the jewel are totally different in the two cases.

The affront of Gernando.

Besides the first great hindrance to the prosecution of the siege in the seductive power of Armida when she appears in the camp, there is a second, namely, the slaughter of Gernando by Rinaldo, upon a personal affront. It has here been objected to the first, that the effect assigned to it is out of proportion to all example and to all likelihood, though it may be suitable to the passionate susceptibilities of Tasso’s individual mind; and that this disproportion jars peculiarly from the more than usual elevation of the subject. Is the second obstacle more happily conceived?

Rinaldo, in the Fifth Canto, unlike his companions, has proved impregnable to the assaults of Armida’s mingled beauty and art:

Ma perch’ a lui colpi d’ amor più lentiNon hanno il petto oltra la scorza inciso,Nè molto impaziente è di rivale,Nè la donzella di seguir gli cale969.

He rather aspires to succeed to the fallen Dudone in the immediate command of the forces. Yet even with respect to this, his ambition purports to be under the guidance of high principle:

I gradi primi

Più meritar che conseguir desio970.

Presently the Norwegian Prince Gernando, moved by jealousy, insults him; on which Rinaldo there and then gives him the lie, and slays him.

It is hardly possible to measure the inferiority of this combination, as respects poetic art and effect, to the scene of the First Book of the Iliad, with which it must naturally be compared: where Achilles is stung, and stung at once in every fibre of his deep, proud, and impassioned nature, by the mingled meanness and tyranny of Agamemnon. The affront in Homer is so contrived that it shall contain all the highest elements of provocation: avarice, tyranny, injustice, ingratitude, on the one side are made to exacerbate the wounds inflicted by public degradation, and by the sudden loss of a beloved object, on the other. But the insult of Gernando to Rinaldo is an every-day insult of the streets: yet an American duellist could not have been more summary in his proceedings, than is the great Christian champion. The brutal provocation instantly breaks down both the piety and the moral firmness of Rinaldo. It is not so with Achilles. In him there is a conscious force of self-command, which absolutely, though not relatively to his passion, is even beyond that of other men; and though unequal, indeed, yet is all but not unequal to controlling that tempestuous flood of wrath. Nothing can be grander than the picture of this his first great mental convulsion. We must quote the lines:

ὣς φάτο· Πηλείωνι δ’ ἄχος γένετ’, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορστήθεσσιν λασίοισι διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν,ἢ ὅγε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦτοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὁ δ’ Ἀτρείδην ἐναρίζοι,ἠὲ χόλον παύσειεν, ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν971.

Then, while the strong current eddies to and fro within him, and while his fingers, playing instinctively on the handle of his sword, cause its blade to be seen, comes the warning vision of Pallas to him, and to him alone. This admonition restores the disturbed balance of his mind; and, his inward wound assuaged with the promise of a future revenge, to be wrought out for him by the self-condemning hands of the inflicters and abettors of the wrong, he moodily foregoes the reckoning of blood.

Such is the solid, the Cyclopian structure of the fabric, into which Homer has built his characters. Had the hero of Tasso indeed been endowed with a sublimity of passion beyond or like that of Achilles, we might not have been entitled to call him strictly to account for the slaughter of Gernando. But the truth is, that he is a somewhat jejune and feeble character; and his offence in this instance is not from the excess of the impelling, but from the defect, or rather the utter absence, of the restraining power.

Gioberti, in a posthumous work972, remarks that the heroes of Paganism are more effective than those of Christianity, because the standard by which they are measured is lower, the idea imperfect instead of perfect. There is, I believe, much both of truth and of depth in this observation. It is no more than justice that Tasso should have the benefit of it, which is not inconsiderable.

Differing modes of describing personages.

Such, however, as his heroes are, he takes the precaution to describe them in outline at a very early stage indeed of his proceedings, namely, in the stanzas 8-10 of the First Canto. He here places before us Godfrey, Baldwin, Tancred, Boemondo, and Rinaldo; and he resumes from time to time the business of describing them. Bojardo and Ariosto avoid this; but it is probably because they were dealing with characters of well-known type, already familiar to their audience. Homer, who drew so much more powerfully, had more to describe than any of them. And yet it may be said he never describes characters at all, with the very slight exceptions of Nestor, in a few words, and Thersites with somewhat more detail: the latter, it is evident, because he wanted to concentrate contempt and disgust upon his qualities, for exhibiting which in action he could not afford to such a wretch any extended space: the former, perhaps because he has thought it better for effect to abstain from marking him through the poem by distinctive epithets, and could produce a certain roundness of figure, highly suitable to the personage, in this way with more convenience. But, in general, Homer’s characters are described by their actions only, with the aid of choice and characteristic epithets, and here and there of some small but pointed allusion, not from themselves nor from the Poet, but in the speeches of others. Thus he grapples with the full scale of the demands of the dramatic art. Others could not follow him. We must not blame Tasso for a proceeding quite necessary by way of clue to his poem; rather, indeed, we should praise the ingenious manner in which he has effected his purpose, by a survey which the Almighty takes of the Christian camp; a proceeding alike conducive to the religious character of his poem, not always so well cared for, and to the supply of the first necessities of his readers.

In the details of his battles, Tasso is a great and skilful describer. Perhaps in this point alone, out of so many, he may be termed superior to Homer. At least we may be disposed to think he has nothing so unsatisfactory under this head as the death of Patroclus. It may be another question how far he is indebted for instruction in this department to his great countrymen, especially Ariosto, and also whether he has anywhere equalled the magnificent account of that terrible contest with Rodomonte, which, in the Furioso, sums up Ruggiero’s triumphs.

As nearly all the greater situations and combinations of the Gerusalemme, and its general framework, have been suggested by the ancients, so the minor imitations are too numerous for notice. Many of Tasso’s similes are extremely beautiful and finished; and he has followed Homer in employing them to relieve the narrative of battle; but he has not observed the same judicious parsimony in other parts of his poem; he has apparently not perceived, certainly not followed, the general rules of Homer in the distribution of this ornament, and the result has been that they produce a somewhat cloying effect.

Like Virgil, he has been betrayed into imitating Homer in certain cases, where the whole reason of the case was changed: as, for instance, in the Invocation before the Catalogue, and in the wish expressed for multiplied organs of speech. To Homer, a reciting poet, the Catalogue was a great effort of memory, and it therefore justified the special application to the Muse: to Tasso it must have been one of the easier parts of his performance. As respects the second point, what can be more reasonable in the case of an unwritten composition? what less so, when the poet works with pen and ink? Nor is the case much mended by supposing that Tasso had in mind his recitations, unless the recitation had been, not the accident, but the rule, so that the poem would itself, in the ordinary course of thought, be conceived of as associated with the act of reciting.

Tasso seems, however, to have fallen into a more serious error in introducing a Second Catalogue into his poem. The first may be defended by the same reasoning, which so amply warrants that of Homer. But what interest could Christendom or Italy feel in the detailed muster-roll of the Egyptian army?