Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/267

Rh with Milton is most obvious. Yet he has advantages which it would be unjust to deny. He has not, like Milton, proposed to himself an unattainable object: he has not to justify the ways of God to man, but to recount the conquest of Jerusalem. He is more uniform in merit: it cannot be said of his poem that the catastrophe takes place in the middle, and that the interest steadily declines thenceforth.

What, however, especially distinguishes Tasso, not only from Milton, but from modern epic poets in general, is the number and excellence of his characters, mostly of his own creation. Rinaldo, Tancred, Argante, Emireno, Solimano, Clorinda, Armida, Erminia, form a gallery of portraits whose picturesqueness and variety redeem Tasso's inferiority in other respects; while at the same time, even were his canvas less brilliantly occupied, it could not be said that his poem wanted either the unity, the interest, the dignity, the just proportion, the poetical spirit, the elevated diction, or the harmonious versification essential to a great epic. The great defect of the poem, regarded as an epic, is that Tasso's bent, like Virgil's, was rather towards the pathetic, the picturesque, and the romantic, than towards the sublime and majestic. He can command dignity and grandeur en occasion; but, even as the Æneid opens most readily at Dido, Marcellus, or Euryalus, so the Jerusalem attracts most by its female characters, Erminia, Clorinda, and Armida. Armida is a charming personage, an improvement upon the Alcina of Ariosto, but a passage like the following, rendered by Miss Ellen Clerke, would be more appropriately placed in an Orlando or an Odyssey than in an epic on so high and grave a