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* TWe avail ourselves of this occasion tQ make a few remarks on the kind of persons as well as incidents which poets of first-rate character make the subject of their art . The reader will perhaps have remarked that ( to use a trivial epithet ) there is not in either Iphigenia or Tasso a bad character . Indeed , persons thoroughly
odious are as seldom found in Goethe as in Shakspeare . Mon-r sters of cruelty and atrocity—murders , rapes , incest—conflagrations ; irresistible appetites , which are to passions what convulsion are to voluntary movements ; outrageous and frightful incidents ^ such as the Newgate Calendar contains ; naked men tied on wild horses , and these driven into the desert : women bundled into
sacks and thrown into the sea—shipwreck and cannibalism united ( but , by the bye , this is a comic incident , and therefore hardly belongs here ) all these , are the stimulants by which a . worn-out taste is to be excited to enjoyment . This has been called , with more truth than politeness , the Satanic School ; and it gave great bffence to the noble poet to whom it was applied . We do not approve of the appellation . —It might have been called in better
taste the Old-Bailey School of Poetry 5 The French have set about dramatizing the Causes celebres , and we are at due distance following in their steps . A ThurteH ' s murder was performed at the Surrey Theatre , but the government officiously interfered , and stopped the performance . Another of the imitative arts , not
happ ily under the restraints of the police has taken up this class of subjects of taste ;—and the curious may still see in Fleet-street models in wax-work of the burkers of the Italian boy , and Cook the late murderer , who in a more classical style burned his victim after slaughtering him . A feW years since , real horrors of this
Kind were thought to be German , and there was a foundation for Xhis in the translations of Schiller ' s Ghost Seer , as well as of his earliest and worst tragedies , and also in the Englishing of some of the wild ropaances of Vert Weber . This perversion of taste was certainly hot unfrequent in Germany half a century ago . Goethe has done more than any man to bring back the public
Teeling ihe pathos that arises -out of the conflict between the poetical character and the spirit of the every-day world . But grief , like every strong affection when it does not overpower , quickens the faculties of all men , and on this occasion the dullest of spectators could not have failed to discern and feel , and duly apply all the bearings of the play on the awful event that had taken place . At that passage where Tasso , -taring ammtedf , takes his laurel crown / rom his hea 4 an < l delivers it up with his sword / mournfully exclaiming—Wer weinte nicht , wenn das xmsterbliche - ¦•¦' ' . Vor def Zerstoning selbstnicht sicher ist ?
Who would not weep when immortality Itself ia nuhject to destruction ' s power ?—the performance was suspended for a time by the general burst of feeling . The play terminates with a pathetic speech by Tawso , On th « occasion of this being delivered , ¦ the actor came forward , and connecting it with the la ; sfc wprds of his character , recited aa elegiac poem in the octave stanza , tha whole drapaatic company appearing ovi the itetsge m the old JUli ^ n mouyoing coitwnq , . ;
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« 9 S , Ooe * &V Works .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 598, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/22/
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