Felicia Hemans in The New Monthly Magazine Volume 40 1834/Scenes and Passages from the "Tasso" of Goethe
The New Monthly Magazine, Volume 40, Pages 1-8
GERMAN STUDIES.
BY MRS. HEMANS.
No. I.—Scenes and Passages from the "Tasso" of Goethe.
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 small 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 well-being 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 departing 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."
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 Sampson 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 pourtrayed. Would that the courtly patronage, at the shrine of which the Italian muse has so often waved her censer, had exposed 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 agonizing 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, recognized 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 naturalize 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 pourtrayed in one of the earlier scenes:—
"Let me then bear the burden of my bliss
To some deep grove, that oft hath veil'd my grief;—
There let me roam in solitude: no eye
Shall then recall the triumph undeserved.
And if some shining fountain suddenly
On its clear mirror to my sight should give
The form of one who, strangely, brightly crown'd,
Seems musing in the blue reflected heaven
As it streams down through rocks and parted trees,—
Then will I dream that on the enchanted wave
I see Elysium pictured! I will ask,
Who is the blest departed one?—the youth
From long-past ages with his glorious wreath?
Who shall reveal his name?—who speak his worth?
Oh, that another and another there
Might press, with him to hold bright communing!
Might I but see the minstrels and the chiefs
Of the old time on that pure fountain-side
For evermore inseparably link'd
As they were link'd in life! Not steel to steel
Is bound more closely by the magnet's power
Than the same striving after lofty things
Doth bind the Bard and Warrior. Homer's life
Was self-forgetfulness: he pour'd it forth,
One rich libation to another's fame;
And Alexander through th' Elysian grove
To seek Achilles and his poet flies.
Might I behold their meeting!"
But he is a reed shaken with the wind. Antonio reaches the Court of Ferrara at this crisis, in all the importance of a successful negociation with the Vatican. He strikes down the wing of the poet's delicate imagination with the arrows of a careless irony; and Tasso is for a time completely dazzled and overpowered by the worldly science of the skilful diplomatist. The deeper wisdom of his own simplicity is yet veiled from his eyes. Life seems to pass before him, as pourtrayed by the discourse of Antonio, like a mighty triumphal procession, in the exulting movements and clarion sounds of which he alone has no share; and, at last, the forms of beauty peopling his own spiritual world seem to dissolve into clouds, even into faint shadows of clouds, before the strong glare of the external world, leaving his imagination as a desolate house, whence light and music have departed. He thus pours forth, when alone with the Princess Leonora, the impressions produced upon him by Antonio's descriptions:—
"They still disturb my heart,—
Still do they crowd my soul tumultuously,—
The troubling images of that vast world,
Which,—living, restless, fearful as it is,—
Yet, at the bidding of one Master-Mind,
E'en as commanded by a demi-god,
Seems to fulfil its course.—With eagerness,
Yea, with a strange delight, my soul drank in
The strong words of th' experienced; but, alas!
The more I listen'd still the more I sank
In mine own eyes;—I seem'd to die away
As into some faint echo of the rocks,—
A shadowy sound—a nothing!"
There is something of a very touching beauty in the character of the Princess Leonora d'Este. She does not, indeed, resemble some of the lovely beings delineated by Shakspeare—the females "graceful without design, and unforeseeing," in whom, even under the pressure of heaviest calamity, it is easy to discern the existence of the sunny and gladsome nature which would spring up with fawn-like buoyancy, were but the crushing weight withdrawn. The spirit of Leonora has been at once elevated and subdued by early trial: high thoughts, like messengers from heaven, have been its visitants in the solitude of the sick chamber; and, looking upon life and creation, as it were, through the softening veil of remembered suffering, it has settled into such majestic loveliness as the Italian painters delight to shadow forth on the calm brow of their Madonna. Its very tenderness is self-resignation; its inner existence serene, yet sad,—"a being breathing thoughtful breath." She is worshipped by the poet as his tutelary angel, and her secret affection for him might almost become that character. It has all the deep devotedness of a woman's heart, with the still purity of a seraphic guardian, taking no part in the passionate dreams of earthly happiness. She feels his genius with a reverential appreciation; she watches over it with a religious tenderness, for ever interposing to screen its unfolding powers from every ruder breath. She rejoices in his presence as a flower filling its cup with gladness from the morning light; yet, preferring his well-being to all earthly things, she would meekly offer up, for the knowledge of his distant happiness, even the fulness of that only and unutterable joy. A deep feeling of woman's lot on earth,—the lot of endurance and of sacrifice,—seems ever present to her soul, and speaks characteristically in these lines, with which she replies to a wish of Tasso's for the return of the golden age:—
"When earth has men to reverence female hearts,
To know the treasure of rich Truth and Love,
Set deep within a high-soul'd woman's breast;—
When the remembrance of our summer prime
Keeps brightly in man's heart a holy place;—
When the keen glance that pierces through so much
Looks also tenderly through that dim veil
By Time or Sickness hung 'round drooping forms;—
When the possession, stilling every wish,
Draws not Desire away to other wealth;—
A brighter day-spring then for us may dawn
Then may we solemnize our golden age.'
A character thus meditative, affectionate, and self-secluding, would naturally be peculiarly sensitive to the secret intimations of coming sorrow: forebodings of evil arise in her mind from the antipathy so apparent between Tasso and Antonio; and after learning that the cold, keen irony of the latter has irritated the poet almost to frenzy, she thus, to her friend Leonora de Sanvitale, reproaches herself for not having listened to the monitory whispers of her soul:—
"Alas! that we so slowly learn to heed
The secret signs and omens of the breast!
An oracle speaks low within our hearts,
Low, still, yet clear, its prophet voice forewarns
What to pursue, what shun.
*****
Yes, my whole soul misgave me silently
When he and Tasso met."
She admits to her friend the necessity for his departure from Ferrara, but thus reverts, with fondly clinging remembrance, to the time when he first became known to her:—
"Oh! mark'd and singled was the hour when first
He met mine eye!—Sickness and grief just then
Had pass'd away; from long, long suffering freed,
I lifted up my brow, and silently
Gazed upon life again.—The sunny day,
The sweet looks of my kindred, made a light
Of gladness round me, and my freshen'd heart
Drank the rich healing balm of hope once more.
Then onward, through the glowing world I dared
To send my glance, and many a kind bright shape
There beckon'd from afar. Then first the youth,
Led by a sister's hand, before me stood,
And my soul clung to him e'en then, O friend!
To cling for ever more.
Leonora.Lament it not,
My princess!—to have known heaven's gifted ones
Is to have gather'd into the full soul
Inalienable wealth!
Princess. Oh! precious things—
The richly graced, the exquisite, are things
To fear, to love with trembling!—beautiful
Is the pure flame when on thy hearth it shines,
When in the friendly torch it gives thee light,
How gracious and how calm!—but, once unchained,
Lo! Ruin sweeps along its fatal path!"
She then announces her determination to make the sacrifice of his society, in which alone her being seems to find its full completion.
"Alas! dear friend, my soul indeed is fix'd—
Let him depart!—yet cannot I but feel
Ev'n now the sadness of long days to come;
The cold void left me by a lost delight!—
No more shall sunrise from my opening eye
Chase his bright image glorified in dreams;
Glad Hope to see him shall no longer stir
With joyous flutterings my scarce-waken'd soul;
And vainly, vainly, through yon garden bowers,
Amidst the dewy shadows, my first look
Shall seek his form! How blissful was the thought
With him to share each golden evening's peace!
How grew the longing, hour by hour, to read
His spirit yet more deeply! Day by day
How my own being, tuned to happiness,
Gave forth a voice of finer harmony!—
Now is the twilight gloom around me fallen:
The festal day, the sun's magnificence,
All riches of this many-coloured world,
What are they now?—dim, soulless, desolate!
Veiled in the cloud that sinks upon my heart.—
Once was each day a life!—each care was mute,
Ev'n the low boding hush'd within the soul,
And the smooth waters of a gliding stream,
Without the rudder's aid, bore lightly on
Our fairy bark of joy!"
Her companion endeavours, but in vain, to console her.
"Leonora.If the kind words of friendship cannot soothe,
The still sweet influences of this fair world
Shall win thee back unconsciously to peace.
Princess.Yes, beautiful it is! the glowing world!
So many a joy keeps flitting to and fro,
In all its paths, and ever, ever seems
One step, but one, removed—till our fond thirst
For the still fading fountain, step by step,
Lures to the grave! so seldom do we find
What seem'd by Nature moulded for our love,
And for our bliss endow'd—or if we find,
So seldom to our yearning hearts can hold!
That which once freely made itself our own
Bursts from us!—that which eagerly we press'd
We coldly loose! A treasure may be ours,
Only we know it not, or know, perchance,
Unconscious of its worth!"
But the dark clouds are gathering within the spirit of Tasso itself, and the devotedness of affection would in vain avert their lightnings by the sacrifice of all its own pure enjoyments. In the solitary confinement to which the Duke has sentenced him as a punishment for his duel with Antonio, his jealous imagination, like that of the self-torturing Rousseau, pictures the whole world as arrayed in one conspiracy against him, and he doubts even of her truth and gentleness whose watching thoughts are all for his welfare.—The following passages affectingly mark the progress of the dark despondency which finally overwhelms him, though the concluding lines of the last are brightened by a ray of those immortal hopes, the light of which we could have desired to recognise more frequently in this deeply thoughtful work:—
PRESENTIMENT OF HIS RUIN.
"Alas! too well I feel, too true a voice
Within me whispers, that the mighty Power
Which, on sustaining wings of strength and joy,
Bears up the healthful spirit, will but cast
Mine to the earth—will rend me utterly!——
I must away!"
ON A FRIEND'S DECLARING HERSELF UNABLE TO RECOGNISE HIM.
"Rightly thou speak'st; I am myself no more,
And yet in worth not less than I have been.
Seems this a dark, strange riddle? Yet 'tis none!
The gentle moon that gladdens thee by night,
Thine eye, thy spirit irresistibly
Winning with beams of love—mark! how it floats
Thro' the day's glare, a pale and powerless cloud!
I am o'ercome by the full blaze of noon;
Ye know me, and I know myself no more!"
ON BEING ADVISED TO REFRAIN FROM COMPOSITION.
"Vainly, too vainly, 'gainst the power I strive,
Which, night and day, comes rushing thro' my soul!
Without that pouring forth of thought and song
My life is life no more!
Wilt thou forbid the silkworm to spin on,
When hourly, with the labour'd line, he draws
Nearer to death?—in vain!—the costly web
Must from his inmost being still be wrought,
Till he lies wrapt in his consummate shroud.
Oh! that a gracious God to us may give
The lot of that blest worm!—to spread free wings
And burst exultingly on brighter life,
In a new realm of sunshine!"
He is at last released, and admitted into the presence of the Princess Leonora, to take his leave of her before commencing a distant journey. Notwithstanding his previous doubts of her interest in him, he is overcome by the pitying tenderness of her manner, and breaks into a strain of passionate gratitude and enthusiasm:—
"Thou art the same pure angel, as when first
Thy radiance cross'd my path. Forgive, forgive,
If for a moment, in his blind despair,
The mortal's troubled glance hath read thee wrong!
Once more he knows thee! His expanding soul
Flows forth to worship thee for evermore,
And his full heart dissolves in tenderness!
*****
Is it false light which draws me on to thee?
Is it delirium?—Is it thought inspired,
And grasping first high truth divinely clear?
Yes! 'tis ev'n so—the feeling which alone
Can make me blest on earth!"
The wildness of his ecstacy at last terrifies his gentle protectress from him; he is forsaken by all as a being lost in hopeless delusion, and being left alone to the insulting pity of Antonio, his strength of heart is utterly subdued; he passionately bewails his weakness, and even casts down his spirit almost in wondering admiration before the calm self-collectedness of his enemy, who himself seems at last almost melted by the extremity of the poet's desolation, as thus poured forth:—
"Can I then image no high-hearted man
Whose pangs and conflicts have surpass'd mine own,
That my vex'd soul might win sustaining power
From thoughts of him?— I cannot!— all is lost!
One thing alone remains—one mournful boon—
Nature on us, her suffering children, showers
The gift of tears—the impassion'd cry of grief,
When man can bear no more;—and with my woe,
With mine above all others, hath been link'd
Sad music, piercing eloquence, to pour
All, all its fulness forth! To me a God
Hath given strong utterance for mine agony,
When others, in their deep despair, are mute!
*****
Thou standest calm and still, thou noble man!
I seem before thee as the troubled wave!
But oh! be thoughtful!—in thy lofty strength
Exult thou not! By nature's might alike
That rock was fix'd, that quivering wave was made
The sensitive of storm! She sends her blasts,—
The living water flies—it quakes and swells,
And bows down tremblingly with breaking foam;
Yet once that mirror gave the bright sun back
In calm transparence—once the gentle stars
Lay still upon its undulating breast!
Now the sweet peace is gone—the glory now
Departed from the wave! I know myself
No more in these dark perils, and no more
I blush to lose that knowledge. From the bark
Is wrench'd the rudder, and through all its frame
The quivering vessel groans. Beneath my feet
The rocking earth gives way—to thee I cling—
I grasp thee with mine arms. In wild despair
So doth the struggling sailor clasp the rock
Whereon he perishes!"
And thus painfully ends this celebrated drama, the catastrophe being that of the spiritual wreck within, unmingled with the terrors drawn from outward circumstances and change. The majestic lines in which Byron has embodied the thoughts of the captive Tasso will form a fine contrast and relief to the music of despair with which Goethe's work is closed:—
"All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear,
But must be borne. I stoop not to despair,
For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow circus of my dungeon wall;
And freed the holy sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honour of the sacred war for Him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven;
For He hath strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employ'd my penance to record
How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored."