SCENES AND PASSAGES FROM GOETHE.
SCENES FROM “TASSO.”
[One of the many literary projects contemplated by Mrs Hemans at this time, was a series of German studies, consisting of translations of scenes and passages from some of the most celebrated German authors, introduced and connected by illustrative remarks. The only one of these papers which she ever completed, was that on Goethe’s “Tasso,” published in the New Monthly Magazine for January 1834; a paper which well deserves attention, as it embodies so much of her individual feeling with respect to the high and sacred mission of the Poet; as well as regarding that mysterious analogy between the outer world of nature and the inner world of the heart, which it was so peculiarly the tendency of her writings to develop.—Memoir, pp. 272-3.]
The dramatic poem of “Tasso,” though presenting no changeful pageants of many-coloured life—no combination of stirring incidents, nor conflict of tempestuous passions—is yet rich in interest for those who find—
“The still, sad music of humanity,
... of ample power
To chasten and subdue.”
It is a picture of the struggle between elements which never can assimilate—powers whose dominion is over spheres essentially adverse; between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of the world. Why is it that this collision is almost invariably fatal to the gentler and the holier nature? Some master-minds have, indeed, winged their way through the tumults of crowded life, like the sea-bird cleaving the storm from which its pinions come forth unstained; but there needs a celestial panoply, with which few indeed are gifted, to bear the heirs of genius not only unwounded, but unsoiled, through the battle; and too frequently the result of the poet’s lingering afar from his better home has been mental degradation and untimely death. Let us not be understood as requiring for his wellbeing an absolute seclusion from the world and its interests. His nature, if the abiding-place of the true light be indeed within him, is endowed above all others with the tenderest and most widely-embracing sympathies. Not alone from “the things of the everlasting hills,” from the storms or the silence of midnight skies, will he seek the grandeur and the beauty which have their central residence in a far more majestic temple. Mountains, and rivers, and mighty woods, the cathedrals of nature—these will have their part in his pictures; but their colouring and shadows will not be wholly the gift of rising or departed suns, nor of the night with all her stars; it will be a varying suffusion from the life within, from the glowing clouds of thought and feeling, which mantle with their changeful drapery all external creation.
——“We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live.”