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length . * Probably our author borrowed some features of his affecting picture from Rousseau , —the most admirable , fascinating ; and pitiable of insane philosophers . In the fifth act , Tasso obtains from the Duke his permission td repair to Rome . He takes leave of the Princess . Delicate and
even ambiguous as is her expression of friendship , the sympathy she expresses for his sufferings , and her earnest warnings against the peril to which he would expose himself ( he being a proscribed man ) at Naples , raises his passion to delirium . And he , the petty noble ., throws himself into her arms , and presses to his bosom the sister of his sovereign 1 Antonio and Alphonso are
witnesses of this act , —the catastrophe of the drama . They endeavour to assuage the paroxysm of his passion ; and the curtain drops at the close of a speech , which terminates from exhaustion , apparently in pathetic submission , but leaves the future condition of the sufferer to be foreseen without the aid of history . Thus affording an admirable comment on the fine text of our own great lyrical and philosophical analyst of the human soul *
We poets in our youth begin in gladness , But thereof conies in the end despondency and madness . * Wordsworth . Of this play the other characters are perfect . That of the Princess , especially , is admirably managed . The author , with exquisite decorum , leaves it a problem whether she had ever , in defiance of her rank , suffered an ignoble return of affection towards the poet to take place in her bosom . That was a secret too deep to be intrusted to words . Mrs . Siddons alone would have been
competent to inform the spectator with adequate dignity and grace . While we imagine how that magnificent and incomparable person , Mrs . Siddons , would have performed the Princess , yet we acknowledge that it is not , as a play capable of beingexhibited to the public , that we have delighted in the perusal of Tasso ( to the "writer of these sketches individually the most delightful of all Goethe's dramatic works . ) It does not lay before us the history of man , —the awful condition of humanity , —as the mythological dramas of the Greeks did . It is not one of those state-actions
in which ] 1 Princes should act , ' And raonarchs should behold the swelling scene . But while those sublime epitomes of Greek philosoph y were exhibiting before the collected people of Athens , a philosophical poem like Tasso might have been recited to the pupils of the Porch or the Academy * .
* Since the ahove was written , we have received an account of the solemnities which , accompanied and followed the interment of Goethe , which was performed with a splendour and taste never hefore so appropriately united . The theatre was dosed from the time of the poet ' s death till the evening after the funeral rites , which indeed may he said to have been terminated by the performance of Tasso . The unntness of this play for representation lies in the impossibility of finding a public capable of
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Goethe s Wories . 597
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 597, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/21/
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