d worldly nature of that
religious revolution. He therefore lived and worked in a continual
discord. This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his
reason. I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor
and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked
from infancy. But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered,
and the internal perplexity to which he was habitually subject.

[Footnote 83: Carducci, in his essay _Dello Svolgimento della
Letteratura Nazionale_, and Quinet, in his _Revolutions d'ltalie_.]

When Tasso first saw the light, the Italians had rejected the
Reformation and consented to stifle free thought. The culture of the
Renaissance had been condemned; the Spanish hegemony had been accepted.
Of this new attitude the concordat between Charles and Clement, the
Tridentine Council, the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus were
external signs. But these potent agencies had not accomplished their
work in Tasso's lifetime. He was rent in twain because he could not
react against them as Bruno did, and could not identify himself with
them as Loyola was doing. As an artist he belonged to the old order
which was passing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging.
His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier
Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his
difficulties. While accepting service in the modern spirit of
subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly
imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of
equality with princes.

We therefore see in Tasso one who obeyed influences to which his real
self never wholly or consciously submitted. He was not so much out of
harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized
contradictions. The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the
theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the classical lumber
absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the
hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous;
the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary
lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the
soul and God: these were principles which Tasso accepted without having
properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual
being. What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to
use Dante's words, as Lo