Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/266

248 could not avoid making Hector more attractive than Achilles. Another defect lay less in the nature of things than in the spirit of the age, the occasional anticipation of the false taste of the seventeenth century. Italy was weary of the elegant exteriors and empty interiors of the compositions of Bembo and Molza. A Wordsworth, arising to proclaim a return to nature, might have endowed her with a new age of great literature, but the circumstances of the time absolutely forbade any such apparition, and the craving for vitality and vigour had to be appeased by a show of intellectual dexterity and mere exaggeration. Tasso betrays just enough of the premonitory symptoms of this literary plague to call down the wrath of Boileau, whose outrageous denunciation has been remembered where measured reproof would have been forgotten. When all has been said that can be said, the Jerusalem Delivered remains a very great poem, the greatest of all the artificial epics after the Æneid and Paradise Lost (for Ariosto's poem, so frequently paralleled with it, is not an epic at all). That Tasso should approach Virgil more nearly than any other poet is perhaps unfortunate for him; the Jerusalem and the Æneid constantly admit of comparison, and wherever comparison is possible the former is a little behind. To compare Tasso with Milton seems almost profanation; and indeed, if, as so often assumed, the greatness of an epic poet is to be measured by his sublimity, the Jerusalem is entirely out of the field. Milton is the sublimest of non-dramatic poets after Homer: Tasso, always dignified and sometimes grand, rarely attains sublimity, and falls particularly short of it in the description of the infernal council, where comparison