Let the poet bear into the recesses of woods and shadowy hills a heart full-fraught with the sympathies which will have been fostered by intercourse with his kind—a memory covered with the secret inscriptions which joy and sorrow fail not indelibly to write: then will the voice of every stream respond to him in tones of gladness or melancholy, accordant with those of his own soul, and he himself, by the might of feelings intensely human, may breathe the living spirit of the oracle into the resounding cavern or the whispering oak. We thus admit it essential to his high office, that the chambers of imagery in the heart of the poet must be filled with materials moulded from the sorrows, the affections, the fiery trials, and immortal longings of the human soul. Where love, and faith, and anguish, meet and contend—where the tones of prayer are wrung from the suffering spirit—there lie his veins of treasure; there are the sweet waters ready to flow from the stricken rock. But he will not seek them through the gaudy and hurrying masque of artificial life; he will not be the fettered Samson to make sport for the sons and daughters of fashion. Whilst he shuns no brotherly communion with his kind, he will ever reserve to his nature the power of self-communion—silent hours for
“The harvest of the quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart,”
and inviolate retreats in the depths of his being—fountains lone and still, upon which only the eye of Heaven shines down in its hallowed serenity. So have those who make us “heirs of truth and freedom by immortal lays,” ever preserved the calm, intellectual ether in which they live and move from the taint of worldly infection; and it appears the object of Goethe, in the work before us, to make the gifted spirit sadder and wiser by the contemplation of one, which, having sold its birthright, and stooped from its “privacy of glorious light,” is forced into perpetual contact with things essentially of the earth earthy. Dante has spoken of what the Italian poets must have learned but too feelingly under their protecting princes—the bitter taste of another’s bread, the weary steps by which the stairs of another’s house are ascended; but it is suffering of a more spiritual nature which is here portrayed. Would that the courtly patronage, at the shrine of which the Italian muse has so often waved her censer, had imposed no severer tasks upon its votaries than the fashioning of the snow statue which it required from the genius of Michael Angelo! The story of Tasso is fraught with yet deeper meaning, though it is not from the period of his most agonising trials that the materials of Goethe’s work are drawn. The poet is here introduced to us as a youth at the court of Ferrara; visionary, enthusiastic, keenly alive to the splendour of the gorgeous world around him, throwing himself passionately upon the current of every newly-excited feeling; a creature of sudden lights and shadows, of restless strivings after ideal perfection, of exultations and of agonies. Why is it that the being thus exhibited as endowed with all these trembling capacities for joy and pain, with noble aspirations and fervid eloquence, fails to excite a more reverential interest, a more tender admiration? He is wanting in dignity, in the sustaining consciousness of his own high mission; he has no city of refuge within himself, and thus—
“Every little living nerve,
That from bitter words doth swerve,”
has the power to shake his whole soul from its pride of place. He is thus borne down by the cold, triumphant worldliness of the courtier Antonio, from the collision with whom, and the mistaken endeavour of Tasso’s friends to reconcile natures dissimilar as the sylph and gnome of fanciful creations, the conflicting elements of the piece are chiefly derived. There are impressive lessons to be drawn from the contemplation of these scenes, though, perhaps, it is not quite thus that we could have wished him delineated who “poured his spirit over Palestine;” and it is occasionally almost too painful to behold the high-minded Tasso, recognised by his country as superior with the sword and the pen to all men, struggling in so ignoble an arena, and finally overpowered by so unworthy an antagonist. This world is indeed “too much with us,” and but too powerful is often its withering breath upon the ethereal natures of love, devotion, and enthusiasm, which, in other regions,
“May bear bright, golden flowers, but not in this soil.”
Yet who has not known victorious moments, in which the lightly-armed genii of ridicule have quailed!—the conventional forms of life have shrunk as a shrivelled scroll before the Ithuriel touch of some generous feeling, some high and overshadowing passion suddenly aroused from the inmost recesses of the folded soul, and striking the electric chain which mysteriously connects all humanity? We could have wished that some such thrilling moment had been here introduced by the mighty master of Germany—something to relieve the too continuous impression of inherent weakness in the cause of the vanquished—something of a transmuting power in the soul of Tasso, to glorify the clouds which accumulate around it—to turn them into “contingencies of pomp” by the interpenetration of its own celestial light. Yet we approach with reverence the work of a noble hand; and, whilst entering upon our task of translation, we acknowledge, in humility, the feebleness of all endeavour to pour into the vase of another language the exquisitely subtle spirit of Goethe’s poetry—to transplant and naturalise the delicate felicities of thought and expression by which this piece is so eminently distinguished.
The visionary rapture which takes possession of Tasso upon being crowned with laurel by the Princess Leonora d’Este, the object of an affection which the youthful poet has scarcely yet acknowledged to himself, is thus portrayed in one of the earlier scenes:—