Any thing approaching to an elaborate criticism of the _Torquato Tasso_
of Goethe we do not, in this place, intend to attempt; our object is
merely to translate some of the more striking and characteristic
passages, and accompany these extracts with such explanatory remarks as
may be necessary to render them quite intelligible.
There is, we cannot help remarking, a peculiar awkwardness in
introducing a veritable poet amongst the personages of a drama. We
cannot dissociate his name from the remembrance of the works he has
written, and the heroes whom he has celebrated. Tasso--is it not another
name for the _Jerusalem Delivered_? and can he be summoned up in our
memory without bringing with him the shades of Godfrey and Tancred? We
expect to hear him singing of these champions of the cross; this was his
life, and we have a difficulty in according to him any other. It is only
after some effort that we separate the man from the poet--that we can
view him standing alone, on the dry earth, unaccompanied by the
creations of his fancy, his imaginative existence suspended, acting and
suffering in the same personal manner as the rest of us. The poet
brought into the ranks of the _dramatis personae!_--the creator of
fictions converted himself into a fictitious personage!--there seems
some strange confusion here. It is as if the magic wand were waved over
the magician himself--a thing not unheard of in the annals of the black
art. But then the second magician should be manifestly more powerful
than the first. The second poet should be capable of overlooking and
controlling the spirit of the first; capable, at all events, of
animating him with an eloquence and a poetry not inferior to his own.
For there is certainly this disadvantage in bringing before us a
well-known and celebrated poet--we expect that he should speak in poetry
of the first order--in such as he might have written himself. It is long
before we can admit him to be neither more nor less poetical than the
other speakers; it is long before we can believe him to talk for any
other purpose than to say beautiful and tender things. Knowing, as we
do, the trick of poets, and what is indeed their office as spokesmen of
humanity, we suspect even when he is relating his own sufferings, and
complaining of his own wrongs, that he is still only making a poem; that
he is still busied first of all with the sweet expression of a feeling
which he is bent on infusing, like an electric fluid, through the hearts
of others. Altogether, he is manifestly a very inconvenient personage
for the dramatist to have to deal with.
These impressions wear off, however, as the poem proceeds--just as, in
real life, familiar intercourse with the greatest of bards teaches us to
forget the author in the companion, and the man of genius in the
agreeable or disagreeable neighbour. In the drama of Goethe, we become
quite reconciled to the new position in which the poet of the Holy
Sepulchre is placed. _Torquato Tasso_ is what in this country would be
called a dramatic poem, in opposition to the tragedy composed for the
stage, or _quasi_ for the stage. The _dramatis personae_ are few, the
conduct of the piece is on the classic model--the model, we mean, of
Racine; the plot is scanty, and keeps very close to history; there is
little action, and much reflection.