Tasso was tall and active; his countenance was handsome, though in later years much clouded by melancholy. In his younger days he was an expert swordsman, and skilled in all bodily exercises.
The vicissitudes of his life afford such picturesque material for narration and description that we cannot wonder that it became a favourite theme with poets and biographers. The noble play of Goethe is familiar to all lovers of poetry. Of his biographers the earliest was Manso, a Neapolitan nobleman, who had the singular fortune of being, in the course of his long life, the friend of three renowned epic poets, of Tasso himself, of Marino, and of the greatest of all, Milton, whose acquaintance he made during the travels of the English poet in Italy. Tasso mentions him in the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_:
"Fra cavalier magnanimi e cortesi Risplende il Manso."
Marino did not leave his praises unsung, and Milton addressed him in one of his finest Latin poems. He must have had striking qualities to endear him to men so eminent and so different; but his biography, probably because it was the first, gave rise to many legends which have been repeated down to the present day. He seems to have been somewhat credulous, and to have relied too much on the statements made to him by Tasso himself, without distrusting his informant's wild and heated imagination.
The Abbé Serassi, in his biography published in 1785, did what Manso had neglected to do. He sifted the evidence and examined the documents; and gave to the world a picture much nearer the truth than had yet been presented; but it was reserved for the indefatigable labours of Angelo Solerti to produce a really exhaustive history of the poet.
It must be confessed that in turning from Tasso's life, so full of passion and romance, to his poetry, we experience a certain sense of disappointment. Had he not been so striking an object of sympathy and interest, it may be doubted whether his works would have arrested quite so much attention as they actually did. Considering the varied panorama of life that had been unfolded before him and the mental sufferings he underwent, he does not sound those depths of impassioned meditation that might be expected. What traces there are of them, will be found rather in his letters than in his poems. This fact is very strange and points to the limitations of his talent. He had materials in his life sufficient to inspire him with great lyric poems, and yet we find nothing in his odes, sonnets and madrigals to compare to the finest passages of Petrarch, or of Leopardi, or even of Filicaia. None of his shorter poems impress themselves indelibly on the reader: none glow with the intensity of lyric fire.