Montaigne and Tasso

By Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne’s visit to Tasso in Ferrara, 1580. Lithograph by P. J. Challamel after Louis Gallait’s painting Le Tasse visité dans sa prison par Montaigne (183), in Revue des peintres (1837), no. 208.

In 1580, two great writers met in Ferrara, in Italy. It should have been a wonderful moment: Italy’s greatest contemporary poet, Torquato Tasso, author of the epic La Gerusalemma liberata, or Jerusalem Delivered, came face to face with France’s first and greatest literary essayist, Michel de Montaigne. What a conversation they could have had! But the meeting left Montaigne, at least, filled with sorrow for the waste of an opportunity – and of a life. For Tasso, barely recognizable as the great man he had been, was confined in a lunatic asylum. He seems to have been in a semi-catatonic state, and showed no understanding of who his visitor was, or why Montaigne peered at him with so grave a frown.

Looking back on the encounter some years later, Montaigne speculated that Tasso had damaged himself with his own brilliance – he had been “blinded by the light”. Having pursued his genius into a furor, or poetic ecstasy, he could no longer find his way back. For Montaigne, no poetic achievement could be worth this. For him, the realm of the merely human was more than enough. People want to escape from themselves, he wrote; but instead they lose what is rightfully theirs.  “Instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.”

We do not know what Tasso might have made of Montaigne, since he could not say. We only know that some of his devotees in later years took a dim view of Montaigne’s attitude, thinking he showed a lack of poetic sensitivity. They had a point. But on the whole I am with Montaigne on this one. Not that he is likely to have been right about the reasons for Tasso’s madness (assuming that Tasso was mad at all – there have always been conspiracy theories about his confinement), but he was right about the dangers of neglecting the merely human. Overreaching ourselves in great creative or spiritual flights can achieve great things, but it can bring about some stupid and damaging things as well. In the end, I’d rather be an unimaginative traveller than a genius who has lost the ability even to feel curious about the person standing in front of him.

About the author: Sarah Bakewell’s latest book is How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press, 2010; Vintage, 2011). She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing and catalogues historic books for the National Trust.

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