A Leaf of Bay

— One of the most pleasant events of the Tasso Centenary has been the reproduction, by Pier Desiderio Pasolini, of Flaminio Nobili’s Treatise of Human Love, with autographic notes by his contemporary, Torquato Tasso.

Count Pasolini has, besides the charme et l’air agréable of a delightful style, the rarer gift of feeling, and enabling his readers to feel, the reality of figures which the centuries have turned to dust. From old chronicles he evolved a Cateriria Sforza of flesh and blood, —“a being breathing thoughtful breath,” — as real as any woman of the nineteenth century ; and now, in his preface to simple-minded Flaminio Nobili, he has done the same part by Leonora and Lucrezia d’Este, Duchess Renata, and Francesco-Maria della Rovere.

One would have thought that after Goethe, Byron, Symonds, and the rest of the innumerable train who have dealt with the subject, nothing remained to be said of the Bergamo poet and his time ; but the wand of the diviner reveals fresh water in parched places, and the publication of this pamphlet, annotated by the hand of Tasso, which Pasolini chanced on one day in the old printshop in Piazza Ara Cœli, has been the occasion of a terse, but vivid and sympathetic study of the elements which went to form the “ only Christian of our Renaissance.”

As Symonds says, fiction is always less interesting than truth ; and certainly, the melodramatic, romantic, lovelorn Tasso has yielded place to a figure more inherently sad and touching. The former Tasso was the butt of circumstance, the victim of jealousy and tyranny ; but this Tasso is in more grievous case, for his own morbid, sensitive spirit wields the pitiless scourge. He is one born out of time, a dreamy knight who has lapsed two hundred years, and is at war with his age. From outward fret and persecution there is escape to the hermitage of a quiet soul, but “ who shall minister to a mind diseased ? ”

In my childish days, it was with a sense of elusiveness and disappointment that, in the peaceful convent garden, — it is all rooted up now, leaving Tasso’s oak standing stark and solitary, — I thought of the poet’s death on the eve of his coronation. Why might he not have lived for his triumph ? pleaded child ignorance impatiently. Why might the wreath rest only on an impassive brow ? No solution fell then to the little girl’s throbbing question, but now the answer slowly spells itself out : he came the sooner to his crown of rest ; and it is with nameless but clear relief that, as the evening bells break out over the amaranthine city, I read that last letter written from the airy convent on the Janiculum : —

“ What will my Signor Antonio say when he shall hear of his Tasso’s death ? The news, I incline to think, will not be long in coming ; for I feel that I have reached the end of life, no remedy having been found for this troublesome indisposition, added to the many others I am used to,— liko a rapid torrent resistlessly sweeping me away. It is too late to speak of my stubborn fate, not to mention the world’s ingratitude, which yet willed to have the victory of leading me a beggar to the grave ; the while I kept on thinking that the glory which, despite of those that like it not, this age will inherit from my writings would not have left me wholly without guerdon. I have had myself brought to this monastery of St. Onofrio ; not only because the air is commended by physicians above that of any other part of Rome, but also, as it were, upon this elevated spot and by the conversation of these devout fathers to commence my conversation in heaven. Pray God for me; and rest assured that as I have loved and honored you always in the present life, so will I perform for you in that other and more real life what appertains not to feigned, but to veritable charity. And to the divine grace I recommend yon and myself.”