The second half of the 16th century wit nessed a great change in this bright Italian world. The long gathering darkness settled in the double pall of Spanish servitude and Catholic obscurantism. The Italian intelligence has always been either Roman Catholic or ra tionalist. Some, like Machiavelli, have con sidered religion as a question politic or artistic, neither to be discussed nor denied; others, like Savonarola, have demanded a reform of clergy, but not of dogma. But while other countries were shaken by religious storms and persecutions, in Italy there was no strife and consequently no victory. The heavy hand of the victorious papal power was accepted in differently. The Council of •Trent (154S-63) enforced discipline, which was resumed in the axiom Si non caste tainen saute and encour aged hypocrisy. The institution of the comforted timid souls, scandalized by the cur rent freedom of thought and license of expres sion. The Cardinals in Council could neither create a religious spirit in Italy nor seriously reform the clergy; but they did try and par tially succeeded in creating the appearance of this double reform. In the country where Savonarola had been • an anachronism, and where Socinius found neither disciples nor op ponents, there could be no real revival of faith; but society asserted the appearance of decency; and literature, assuming the forms of without altering the paganism of its informing spirit, declined into the vacuity and affectation, hyprocrisy, pedantism and mannerism, which culminated in secentismo.
Yet two genuine poets and one immortal masterpiece brighten the gloom of the closing Cinquecento. Cruarini's Pastor Fido) and Tasso's mark the momentous parting between classical Cinquecento and rococo Sei cento, and they gleam with the beauties of both. This is a new and delicate art. Sensualism is veiled in sweet melancholy, a melancholy as in definite as it is alluring; (a modern expression) and delicacy of images.
There have been privileged poets whose souls have vibrated in unison with an environ ment which they have identified and represented in the serenity of mutual comprehension. There are others, the martyr poets, who have been doomed to live in times and places in bitter contradiction with their own nature: of these the most unhappy is Torquato Tasso. Both the exterior and the spiritual conditions of his life were intolerably miserable. As a man — whether as courtier or as lover; as a spiritual being— both as Christian and as poet, there was eternal warfare between his character, his circumstances and his environment. There was ample cause for his insanity and for his subse quent pitiful death. Tasso's heart full of ten derness and sentiment craved love in the love less circle of court life; Tasso's soul craved the comfort of Faith and of a spiritual religion; and the Church gave him sophism and formal ism. He was a feather, beaten and tossed upon a stormy sea. When at last after pitiful mis fortune, imprudence and illness, he was visited by a gleam of glory, cheered by a ray of hope, then he died; he died, and the bells of the cap ital pealed • for his incoronation; the laurel crowning of the author of ‘Gerusalemme Lib crab.' Tasso's great poem glorifies the second Cru sade, the battles between the Christian army under Godfrey of Bouillon and the Infidel un der Aladin. The love of Tancredi for Erminia, of Olindo for Sofronia, the enchantments of Armida's garden; how eagerly have they been read, how freely imitated! The weakness and yet the charm of iGerusalemme) is that this poem, having the heroic or epic form, is lyric and sentimental in inspiration.. Modernity characterizes Tasso's poem; a sympathizing in trospection. It thrills in the immortal smile of Armida's eyes, it is beautifully analyzed in that scene of beauty, the death of Clcirinda. 'Gerusalemme' was the last glory of Cinque cento before the gloom of Seicento.