JERUSALEM DELIVERED. In dealing with the (1581), critics have the advantage of knowing from Tasso's dialogues and from his later version of the poem Regained,) 1593), the con siderations which determined for the author its content and its form. In his critical theory and rnamen0 are basic and distinct categories; while prominent before his mind were the successful examples of Ariosto, Boiardo and Pulci. These chivalric romances were loose agglomerations of episodes related but tenuously to a central theme. Tasso consciously strove to build a poem of the same kind that would conform however, as regards the cate gory of plot, to the canons of Aristotle's as modified by himself. It would have a unified theme to constitute a major in terest. To this the episodic would be subject in the category of ornament. As an Italian of his time, Tasso conceived of religion, rather than patriotism as the subject of most lasting interest (the traditional motive of the ancient epic). But the imaginative tale, whether patriotic or religious, must, to convey its mes sage to the reader, carry the conviction of his torical narrative (doctrine of verisimilitude). Actual history does not leave room for the dis tinctive act of the poet: invention. He must select accordingly a subject which, recognized as history, will he but so vaguely known in detail that the fictitious will be accepted as true. The Turkish menace was the terror of Tasso's time; and one of the poetic commonplaces was to incite Christian Europe to a new Crusade. The subject of the holy wars thus imposed itself upon him for reasons of piety, present interest, and theoretical suitability. He chose the conquest of Jerusalem by Geoffrey of Bouillon (First Crusade, A.D. 1096-99) i its epic motive was to be the triumph of the just man through God over the wiles of sin and the obstacles set by evil fortune.
The operation of Tasso's pious purpose and of his critical theory can be traced through the (Jerusalem Delivered) in the parts that are worthless. The theme that gives his much sought logical unity is mechanical and unimagi native. His just man, Geoffrey, is a lifeless abstraction, his Divinity a dull magician work ing in roundabout ways to produce miracles not worth the trouble. The preoccupation of the moral purpose contributes some allegory that is shallow if geometrically logical. The episodes gain nothing from their dependence on the plot ; while the theory of ornament as applied to style carries metaphor-making to extremes that have interest only historically as setting a fashion henceforth current in the most decadent period of Italian letters. So far as the 'Jerusalem Delivered' is a regular epic, it is dead. It lives only as a fantastic romance that gave free play to Tasso's supreme genius in the moods associated with the elegy and the idyll.
As the religious spirit overrides Tasso's biography so it overrides the strong passions of his soul. He felt intensely the beauty of life; he was deeply attached to the exterior world; he knew the inspirations of love, the allurements of sensuous pleasure. He never
surmounted entirely the thought of death; rather he knows to the full what delusion means, the anguish of separation from loved objects and people, solitude, helplessness, despair. So he knows also the value of the Christian promise; and paying submissive tribute to the anthropomorphic aspects of dogma, he rises through faith to a vivid realiza tion of true Christian experience. These are the elements of the lyric exaltation that has made some of his episodes immortal. In Sophronia he incarnates a mood of religious rapture indifferent to death and to worldly love, so completely does the martyr feel herself safe with God; whereas her lover, Olindo, snatches at the last consolations of life, rebelling in despair at the thought of what death makes forever impossible. Death and love are once more set in contrast in the death and conversion of Clorinda. Here is a violent sob of fare well accentuated by the bitterness of avoidable error — the great motive that romanticism has always played on to rouse extreme effects of pathos. But love struggles over the grave to console with the softening and sweetening hope in the Resurrection. Clorinda's mute benedic tion on Tancred is one of the most moving touches in all poetry. Erminia's flight to the Christian camp over a moonlit solitude is a complex experience of humility, surrender, de votion, expressing in words filled with beautiful Vergilian echoes, a suffocated lament for un realizable yearnings. In the story of 'Armida' the idyllic sweetness, the sensuous suppres sions of the
Tasso's orthodoxy in religion and in critical theory, his development of ingenuity in metaphor, his impeccable Petrarchism, his urbane preciosity, his skill in classic allusion, his elegant fancy, conquered the aristocratic circles of the next two centuries in Europe, when everyone ranked him as superior to Petrarch and Dante— this, in spite of a fatuous pedantic quarrel over the theory of the epic which embittered the poet's later years and lasted for several decades after his death. The Romantic movement of the 19th century, re jecting most of the critical tradition from which Tasso drew, justly relegated him to a more modest position in the literary hierarchy of Italy. In virtue of his story-telling gift, the common people of all regions of that country have accorded to the 'Jerusalem Delivered' a popularity, as a code-book of rustic chivalry, second only to the legends of Roland and Charlemagne still so current in the South. The poem endures in literature as the best ex pression of the ideals and mental traits of the Italian Counter-Reform and as the greatest product of the preceptual msthetics of the Renaissance. Tasso's only equals among Italians in religious literature are Dante and Fogazzaro.