Tasso and his goblin.

They write to us from Saint Petersburg:

“Venerable master, having read in the first issue of the Spiritist Review of 1864 the case of a rapping Spirit of the sixteenth century, I was reminded of another; perhaps you will judge it worthy of a small place in your journal. I take it from a notice on the life and character of Tasso, written by Mr. Suard, perpetual secretary of the class of the French language and literature, and inserted in the translation of Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1803. [Jérusalem délivrée: Poëme — Google Books.]

“After stating that Tasso’s religious sentiments, exalted as a consequence of his melancholy disposition and of the misfortunes that resulted from it, led him seriously to convince himself that he was the object of the persecutions of an imp who overturned everything in his house, stole his money, and removed from the table and before his very eyes everything that was served to him, he adds, along with his historian: Here is the manner in which Tasso himself gives an account of this persecution: “Brother R… (he communicates to one of his friends) brought me two of your letters, but one of them disappeared as soon as I had read it, and I believe the goblin took it, all the more since it was the one in which you spoke of him. It is one of those prodigies of which I was so often a witness in the hospital, which does not allow one to doubt that it is the work of some magician, and I have many other proofs. This very day he removed a loaf of bread from before me, and another day a dish of fruit.” Next, he complains of the books and papers that are stolen from him, and adds: “Those that disappeared while I was not here may have been taken by men who, I think, have the keys to all my little boxes, so that I no longer have anything I can protect against the assaults of my enemies or of the devil, except my will, which will never consent to anything’s being taught me by him or his followers, nor to contracting familiarity with him or his magicians. In another letter he says: “Everything goes from bad to worse; this devil, who never left me, whether I slept or walked, seeing that he could not obtain from me the agreement he desired, took to robbing me of my money openly.”

“On another occasion,” continued the author of the notice, “he believed that the Virgin Mary appeared to him, and the abbé Serassi relates that during an illness he had in prison, Tasso commended himself with such ardor to the Holy Virgin that she appeared to him and cured him. Tasso consecrated this miracle in a sonnet.

“Continuing, the goblin transformed itself into a more affable demon, with whom Tasso claimed to converse more familiarly and who taught him marvelous things. Nevertheless, little satisfied with this strange commerce, Tasso attributed its origin to the imprudence he had committed in his youth of composing a dialogue in which he imagined himself conversing with a Spirit. “What I would never have wished to do in earnest, even had it been possible for me,” he concluded. “Mr. Suard ends the account by saying: One cannot avoid a sad reflection in thinking that it was at thirty years of age, after having written an immortal work, that the unfortunate man was chosen to give the most deplorable example of the weakness of the spirit.

“But you, sir, thanks to the light of Spiritism, can form another judgment and see in these facts, I am certain, one more link in the chain of spiritist phenomena that bind ancient times to the present epoch.”

Without the slightest doubt, the facts that take place today, perfectly proven and explained, prove that Tasso could have found himself under the dominion of one of those obsessions which we witness daily, and which have nothing supernatural about them. Had he known the true cause, he would have been no more impressed by it than one is at present; but, in that epoch, the idea of the devil, of witches, and of magicians was in all its force, and since, far from combating it, people sought to maintain it, it could react in a lamentable manner upon weak brains. Thus, it is more probable that Tasso was no more mad than are the obsessed of our present-day society, who require moral care and not medicines. [1]

[Jerusalem Delivered:

Gerusalemme liberata — Google Books.]