SOURCE: Burwick, Frederick. “Goethe's Classicism: The Paradox of Irrationality in Torquato Tasso.” In A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister, pp. 11-33. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Burwick explores Goethe's utilization of dramatic tension between the rational and the irrational in Torquato Tasso.]

It is quite likely that when Goethe first conceived the idea of dramatizing the conditions of madness tormenting the life of the poet, Torquato Tasso, he had in mind a very different sort of play than the one which he finally completed a decade later. However different the results may have been, from first to last it was the paradoxicality of the poet's own poetic vision that provoked Goethe's fascination. Tasso, in 1580, was caught up in a dilemma of poetic representation that was all too familiar to Goethe when he commenced his play in 1780. Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) is a classical epic that seems schizophrenically split by its own romantic predilections. Indeed, it is not the fate of Rinaldo, the classical hero of the epic, which provides the moving force of the narrative, but rather the misadventures of Tancred, who represents not heroic triumph but life as impassioned wreck.¹ Not just the inherent contradictions of Tasso's poetic vision, but also his seeming inability to hold that ruptured vision of his poetry separate from the circumstances of his life in court, until even his ducal patron was no longer willing to excuse his behavior as the momentary fits of inspired madness.

As a classical trope, the furor poeticus has traditionally allowed the poet to lay claim to sources of inspiration beyond the mere province of human reason. A contrary tradition, upheld by Horace, insisted upon ‘clear understanding’ as the primary requisite for good writing, and the elder Seneca scorned the notion of poetry ‘ready-made’ in a fit of frenzy.² Through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the claims of divine inspiration were variously praised as personal revelation or denounced as blasphemy, satanism, or lunacy. Whatever its provenance, the visionary gift brought no blessing to those recipients persecuted by the Inquisition. The debate concerning the nature of inspiration thus persisted through the Renaissance³ and took still another ideological turn in Enlightenment aesthetics, when ‘poetic madness’ justified a resistance to the dictates of rational authority.

Early in his career, Goethe participated in the ‘cult of genius’ and asserted its claims for inspiration beyond the bourne of reason. Throughout this period, such works as Von deutscher Baukunst and ‘Prometheus’ proclaim the advantages of an irrepressible enthusiasm in artistic creativity. In the Weimar period, Goethe began to emphasize, instead, the values of classical order. The opposition of two aesthetic ideals, originality and passion vs. tradition and reason, inform plot and character in several works completed after his return to Weimar from his Italian journey. In Torquato Tasso, Goethe thematizes and problematizes the pretenses of the furor poeticus in relation to the structure of classical drama and the strictures of classical poetics.

Goethe found these dramatic tensions between the rational and irrational, the classic and romantic, readily available in his source materials. Tasso himself, in composing La Gerusalemme liberata, had struggled with the opposing demands of epic and romance, history and fantasy. He labored too with his religious themes, anxious of critical judgment but also fearful of incriminations from the powerful Inquisitors. His confinement for madness is often taken as evidence of a turmoil of reason and passion which the poet could not control, and many critics have claimed that Tasso also failed to reconcile these extremes in his epic poem. It is no wonder, then, that Tasso's great poem has continued to arouse controversy since the time of its first appearance.

Most critics concede that Goethe's dramatic portrait of Torquato Tasso as the ‘mad’ poet in the court of Alfonso II in Ferrara bears little biographical similarity to Goethe's own experience in the court of Carl August in Weimar. Goethe himself, however, declared that he had combined attributes of his own life with that of Tasso.⁴ Many circumstances in the play suggest that Goethe intended his account of Tasso's passion and paranoia in a courtly world of rivalry and intrigue to provide a critique of the contemporary plight of the poet. Unlike his Tasso, who laments that the Duke excludes him from any serious consideration of the affairs of state, Goethe achieved prominence in the court of Weimar precisely because he was an astute counselor as well as gifted poet. Tasso's anxieties, however, about measuring himself against the great poets of the past and about the reception of his own endeavors in the midst of political turmoil are anxieties that may well have troubled Goethe, even if he was determined to triumph over them.

The pathology that weakens Tasso's character Goethe attributes to a poetic imagination not balanced by an adequate practical understanding. As he expressed the meaning of the play to Caroline Herder, Tasso dramatizes ‘die Disproportion des Talents mit dem Leben’.⁵ Tasso has nourished his fantasy in solitude, as the other characters often remind us, and is ill at ease in society. Faust diagnosed his own psychological dilemma as the antagonism between worldly and spiritual inclinations: ‘Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, / Die eine will sich von der andern trennen’ (ll.1112-13: ‘Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, / And each withdraws from, and repels, the other.’) The split of the human being into two opposing halves is externalized in the characters of Antonio and Tasso. Each possesses attributes the other lacks. The shrewd statesman and the sensitive poet, as Leonore observes, are ‘in opposition because nature failed to make one man out of both of them’ (‘darum Feinde …, weil die Natur / Nicht einen Mann aus ihnen beiden formte,’ III.ii).

The action in Torquato Tasso is minimal: the poet presents his finished draft of La Gerusalemme liberata to the Duke in Act I; in Act IV he wants it back; in Act II he quarrels with Antonio, the Duke's secretary of state, and rashly draws his sword; in Act V he is no sooner released from house arrest than he again trespasses propriety by passionately embracing Princess Leonora d'Este, the Duke's sister. With the exception of the symbolic bestowal of the wreaths in Act I, these are the only moments of overt action, but they effectively mark the dramatic tensions affecting Tasso's poetic creativity and his role at court. Even though he is pampered, he must satisfy the Duke's expectations by providing a worthy ‘ornament’ of his art. He may mingle freely with court nobility, but he must recognize his subservient place in the courtly hierarchy. In La Gerusalemme liberata, the poet could project himself into the hero and the lover. In reality (as represented in the two major incidents of Goethe's play), he fails miserably to assert himself in either role.

Tasso is admired by the Princess and by Countess Leonora Sanvitale (Prinzessin and Leonore in the play). The Princess confesses that she loves him and feels attracted to him in spite of herself:

To love a thing I had to treasure it:
I had to love it for its power to make
My life a life such as I'd never known.
At first I said: avoid him, keep away!
I did draw back, yet with each step drew closer,
So sweetly lured, and so severely punished.

(III.ii)⁶

She makes clear, however, that it is a Platonic love of ‘Entbehren’ (II.i; III.ii). Necessary to that deliberately imposed renunciation, she must disassociate the poet from his poetry. If she must acknowledge an irresistible attraction, it must not be for the man but for the seductive work of art that he produces. Even in her confession to Leonore, she describes her love for ‘a thing’, not for a vital and passionate person. Leonore, however, is not one to adopt self-denial or ‘Entbehren’ as a way of life. ‘Do you love him then?’ she asks herself, ‘If not, what is it that makes you so unwilling to do without him?’ Her motive, she admits only in monologue, is to lure him to her court in Florence, where she imagines that, just as Petrarch gave enduring life to Laura, Tasso will immortalize her in song (III.iii). The quarrel with Antonio, who chides him as a dreamer, is a breaking point for Tasso's already exacerbated sensibility. In return for the comfort and support which the Duke has lavishly provided, he must return a suitable poem in tribute and honor to his patron. Tasso wants his gift to be perfect, yet he no sooner gives it than he begins to worry about its imperfections. His self-recriminations make him all the more sensitive to the criticism of others. Already inclined, as the other characters reveal through recollections of his previous behavior, to be suspicious of dark plots at work against him, he begins to imagine that his friends have turned to enemies and are set on wreaking his utter ruin.

The historical Tasso charged himself with heresy and fled from his confinement under Alfonso II. After years of wandering, he returned in 1579 to the court of Ferrara, where he was again imprisoned for his frenzied accusations during the celebrations which Alfonso had prepared for his bride, Margherita Gonzaga. During the seven years of his incarceration for apparent insanity in the hospital of Sant' Anna, he continued his revision of La Gerusalemme liberata, but he also wrote several philosophical dialogues which established his reputation as literary theorist and critic. To these years of his confinement belong Cavaletta, or On Tuscan Poetry (1585), Gianluca, or On Masks (1585), and Discorso dell'arte del dialogo (1585), as well as Malpiglio, or On the Court (1585), in which he insinuates how malevolent intrigues may be hidden by the very dazzle and splendor of courtly life. After regaining his freedom in 1586, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga offered him sanctuary in Mantua, where he completed Il re Torrismondo, but he soon recommenced his restless wandering. After the publication of his Discorsi dell' Arte Poetica (1590), he went on to elaborate his critical tenets in Discorsi del Poema Eroica (1594). The reactionary religious temperament of the Inquisition did not make it easy to satisfy ecclesiastic authority during the Counter-Reformation. Eager that his account of the Crusades would gain church approval, Tasso brought forth a revised version of his epic, La Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). His religious epic, Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato (1594), was intended to win the favor of Pope Clement VIII.

Goethe shifts the emphasis away from the religious preoccupation, although he does have Tasso declare his need to go to Rome to consult his wise friends in correcting his poem. More important to Goethe is the poet's inability to convince his courtly audience of the high accomplishment of his art. In adapting his historical sources, Goethe subtracts some ten years from Tasso's age, not so much to lend the impetuosity of youth to the poet's forbidden love for the Duke's sister, but rather to excuse his inexperience with the wiles of court. Dismissing Tasso's brash expectations of instant friendship, the reserved statesman rebukes the poet as a spoiled child accustomed to having his way:

With full sails you drive on! And it would seem
You're used to winning battles
So, the too hasty boy should take by storm
The confidence and friendship of a man?

(II.iii)⁷

Goethe needs this harsh voice of repudiation, for the audience might otherwise lose all sympathy with the petulant, sulking ‘hero’ of this play. Antonio betrays enough envious pique and haughtiness for the audience to take Tasso's side against him, in spite of the partial truth in his scorn for the poet's behavior.

When Goethe began his composition of Tasso in 1780, he relied on the biography by Giovanni Battista Manso which attributed Tasso's madness to his unrequited love. The historical Tasso was, no doubt, a character much like Werther. Before completing the play in 1789, Goethe had read the new and more historically accurate biography by the Abbate Pierantonio Serassi which presented evidence of the conflict with Antonio Montecatino.⁸ In weaving together these two accounts of Tasso's mental duress, Goethe neglected neither Tasso's poetry, nor his poetic principles.

In his Discorsi del Poema Eroica Tasso conscientiously documents his poetic principles with reference to Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Horace, and with passages cited from Homer and Virgil. Nevertheless, he is far from endorsing an academic revival of Greek or Roman classicism. In defining mimesis as an imitation of ‘human and divine action’, for example, Aristotle is modified to include the supernatural and the marvelous. Mimesis for Aristotle required a replication in art not simply of the external consequences, the praxis, but more importantly of the subjective springs of action in deliberating and choosing, the dianoia. Tasso, however, wants the poet to attend more extensively to subjective processes. Poetry cannot imitate the divine except through the human sense of the marvelous. Adapting from Aristotle and Horace, Tasso declares that ‘the epic poem is an imitation of a noble action, great and perfect, narrated in the loftiest verse, with the purpose of moving the mind to wonder and thus being useful.’⁹

During the quattrocento, as C. P. Brand reminds us, the Italian epic appropriated and elaborated the magic and enchantment of the chivalrous romances. Religious and patriotic fervor were replaced by whimsy and sensual indulgence. Pulci's Morgante (1486), Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (1494), and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516-32) fully exploited the romantic motifs of passionate love and fantastic adventure, yet they did so with an aloof irony that remains fully conscious of its own wild fictions. Educated amidst the humanist zeal to reclaim the classical models, Tasso's generation turned to Homer and Virgil and criticized Pulci and Ariosto for their disorder and lack of seriousness.¹⁰ Schooled in Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Ars Poetica, Tasso intended to give his epic poem the structure and solemnity that his predecessors had neglected. The problem was, of course, that he was himself far too fond of chivalric romance to subordinate adventure and enchantment in his narrative.

In order to preserve the integrity of the Crusades and the Christian ideals of his heroes, Tasso cannot assume the kind of ironic detachment that enabled Ariosto to tell of Orlando's mad passion without implicating narrator and reader into the emotional turmoil of the romance. Although by no means infected by Orlando's demon, as Giambattista Marino suggested in his sonnet,¹¹ Tasso does indeed conjure with madness, and his narrative strategy is to make that madness participatory. The reader, no less than the characters, are caught up in the confusion and misperceptions in the poet's frequent scenes of deception and disguise, as when Erminia dons the garb of Clorinda (Canto VI), or a mutilated corpse is dressed in the armor of Rinaldo (Canto VIII). Ismen's conjuring in the haunted forest (Canto XIII) and the vision in the Hermit's cave of Armida enticing Rinaldo with her sexual allures (Canto XIV) are difficult to reduce to a strictly allegorical interpretation.¹² Although they may well represent the temptation and evil which distract the wavering Christian from his religious duty, the erotic and the marvelous have a narrative vitality of their own. In comparison to Ariosto, Tasso may seem to lack the fecundity of imagination in engendering the marvelous. His peculiar gift, however, is to make his magic seem real. His characters seem to feel their experiences with a palpable intensity. His enchantments may not have the splendor of Ariosto's, but his spells are more binding upon the reader precisely because they reflect familiar fantasies and deceptions of the real world.

This is not to deny the confounding of historical reality with the charms of romance in La Gerusalemme Liberata, but rather to suggest that the heroic epic serves as vehicle for Tasso's desire to master and manipulate the flirtations and intrigues of the courtly world. The Christian vicissitudes of the Crusades and the promised redemption of Christ are made more, not less, relevant by introducing a seductive temptress and a magic castle. In creating Clorinda, Armida, and Ermina, Tasso may well have appropriated directly from his perception of feminine roles in court. While there is no evidence to support the contention that the poet expressed his own forbidden attraction to the Duke's sister in the highly charged eroticism of Rinaldo's embrace of Armida (Canto XVI), biographers did indeed record that Tasso had dared to embrace the Princess. Although Goethe develops a multifaceted account of the poet's madness, he did not endorse the romantic interpretation that Tasso was imprisoned as punishment for his rebellion against aristocratic authority.

In his enthusiastic account of the Golden Age (II.i), Tasso tells the Princess that it exists in the ideal of freedom. The free creatures of nature convey their message to mankind: ‘Erlaubt ist, was gefällt’ (‘Proper is what pleases’). Goethe has taken the line from Tasso's pastoral play, Aminta (1573), where it has moral legitimacy only because pleasure is prescinded from responsibility. Tasso must have known that it was a dubious doctrine, for it echoes Semiramis's rationale for her incest in Dante's Inferno (V, 56: ‘libito fè licito’).¹³ The Princess's response, ‘Erlaubt ist, was sich ziemt’ (‘Proper is what is in keeping with decorum’), repeats the bon mot of another poet of the Ferrara court, Giovanni Battista Guarini, taken from his pastoral drama, Il Pastor fido (1580), which countered the hedonistic liberty of Tasso's Aminta. Guarini's words are heard again when Antonio expresses to Leonora his contempt for Tasso's flirtations:

He boasts of two great flames! He ties and loosens
Now this knot, now the other, and he wins
Such hearts with such an art. Is that to be
Believed?

(III.iv.2094-97)¹⁴

Goethe has simply translated from a sonnet in which Guarini mocks his rival.¹⁵ Although he uses Guarini's critique of Tasso, there is no room in his plot for Guarini himself: Goethe has already introduced a rival poet in the haunting presence of Ariosto. Goethe focuses attention on the mind of the poet through the attractions of Leonore and the Princess, as well as through the rivalry with Ariosto and Antonio. Because the poet's response, marked not by reserve but by an excitable sensitivity, is in itself dramatic and ‘stagey’ (‘bretterhaft’), Goethe simply engages Tasso's intensity to stage the power of the imagination to arouse the passions and to confound the practical reason. In devoting himself to his poetry, Tasso misapprehends the actual contingencies of court. Goethe, exactly as he stated, has located the conflict in ‘die Disproportion des Talents mit dem Leben’.

Tasso was twenty-nine when he wrote Aminta, and thirty-one when he finished La Gerusalemme liberata. In Goethe's play, however, Tasso is repeatedly referred to as a youth, and his uncontrolled emotionality is attributed, in part, to his immaturity. The concluding scene of reconciliation between Tasso and Antonio opens the possibility that Tasso may yet learn to control his mental and emotional excesses. Antonio's praise of Ariosto (I.iv) suggests that the statesman is not totally deficient in poetic sensibility. Not until the concluding scene, in which Antonio patiently consoles the raving poet, does that sensibility become fully manifest. The clash occurs when Antonio coldly disdains to offer Tasso his hand in friendship. When he stretches forth his hand at the play's close, Tasso desperately clutches it, clinging to Antonio as his sole remaining hope. In the bravura piece at the end of Act I, Antonio gives tribute to the power of Orlando Furioso, in which ‘Madness on a lute well-tuned will seem / To strum at random to and fro, / And yet in loveliest rhythm keeps its bounds.’ Antonio also insinuates that Tasso wants the ability to keep his madness in measure. Tasso deserves his laurel wreath not for his poetic genius, says Antonio, but rather for his boldness: ‘Whoever ventures to that great man's side / For his mere boldness deserves a garland.’¹⁶ The passage accomplishes several dramatic purposes: it acknowledges the high honor accorded courtly poets; it injures Tasso by reminding him of the great predecessor whom he presumes to rival; it initiates the hostility between Tasso and Antonio.

Antonio's reference to the ‘Kranz’ further elaborates one of the major symbols of the play. In the opening scene, the Princess and Leonore are weaving wreaths for the garden herma of the two poets, Virgil and Ariosto. The Princess places her wreath of laurel on the head of Virgil, Leonora's wreath of flowers decorates the brow of Ariosto. When Tasso arrives with his copy of La Gerusalemme liberata for the Duke, he is crowned with the laurel wreath which the Princess takes from Virgil to present to him. The symbolic portent of this coronation almost overwhelms Tasso:

O take it off my head again, remove it!
It singes me, I feel it burn my temples.
And like a sun's ray that too hotly were
To strike my forehead, it consumes my power
To think, numbs and confuses. Feverish heat
Stirs up my blood. Forgive me. It's too much.

(I.iii)¹⁷

Where else in literature has the poet expressed the burden of the past with such agony, the anxiety of influence with such excruciating pain? Ariosto, Tasso's immediate predecessor in the court of Ferrara, has been awarded the wreath of flowers because, Leonora declares, his ‘Scherze nie verblühen’ (‘jests never fade’) and he allows us to dream of a Golden Age. Ariosto (1474-1533) entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este in 1503, and after 1518 resided in the court of Duke Alfonso I. Orlando Furioso was written during the period 1516-21, with an additional six cantos added in 1532. The sensuality and the fantasy of his epic brought acclaim to Ferrara and stirred the envy even of the powerful neighbor to the north, Venice, home to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. Tasso (1544-95) began his service to Cardinal Luigi d'Este in 1565, and under the protection of the Princesses, Leonora and Lucrezia, subsequently became a member of the court of Alfonso II. He is thus successor, as court poet, to the greatest Italian poet of the age. He claims his debt, however, to an even greater poet. Not Ariosto's Orlando Furioso but Virgil's Aeneid will be his model and the standard against which his own La Gerusalemme liberata shall be measured.

Although he follows Virgil, Tasso enhances his historical and heroic materials with scenes of Christian zeal and erotic passion. His fantastic narrative and strophic form reveal a closer kinship to Orlando Furioso than Tasso willingly acknowledged. Because his epic is to be a tribute to the court of Ferrara, he claims as his subject the First Crusade. The Crusades contributed much to shaping the aristocracy of the age. The House of Este received its dominion of Ferrara in 1208, following the Conquest of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Throughout the thirteenth century each bloody Crusade was followed by another, ending only with the devastating Muslim conquest of Acre. The church subsequently revised its stance in recording the history of the Crusades. The historical Tasso, not as naïve about the politics of church and state as Goethe's poet, thus felt compelled to revise his poem in conformance with the new orthodoxy. His epic poem may have brought glory to the court of Ferrara, but the House of Este was not long to prevail.

When Antonio returns from his meeting with Pope Gregory XIII, in Goethe's play, he informs the Duke of a successful diplomatic mission. The Duke declares that ‘Rom will alles nehmen, geben nichts.’ Antonio reports that the Pope has extended the grant to Ferrara:

He sees the small things small, the large ones large.
In order to rule a world, he willingly
And graciously gives in to all his neighbours.
The little strip of land he grants to you
He values greatly, as he does your friendship.

(I.iv.616-20)¹⁸

For his diplomacy, Alfonso declares, Antonio deserves a wreath of oak leaves. A cue that prompts Antonio's attention to the floral and laurel wreaths. Referring to the laurel worn by Tasso, he remarks that ‘in rewarding, Alfonso is immoderate’. The deserved praise, he emphasizes, belongs to the floral-wreathed Ariosto.

Whatever success Antonio, as fictional statesman, may have achieved in Rome, in reality the court of Ferrara was doomed. With the death of Gregory XIII, there was great turmoil in the Vatican. Four Popes (Sixtus V, Urban VII, Gregory XIV, Innocence IX) followed within the next six years. When Clement VIII assumed the papal seat in 1592, he began to reclaim lands for the Church State. In 1598, Ferrara was once again under papal authority. The historical materials would have made it easy for Goethe to have written a play richly woven with allusions to religious heresy, to rivalry among the ruling houses, to tensions between aristocracy and papal authority. In fact, there is a minimum of such reference, and that minimum functions to give credibility to the role of Antonio rather than to introduce factional intrigues at work against Tasso. His madness, in Goethe's play, is aggravated by his own incapacity to reconcile life and poetry. Because the Duke has indeed, just as Tasso laments, excluded him from the practical affairs of state, Tasso must struggle all the harder in his isolation to make his poem speak to a courtly audience from which he remains effectively estranged.

The very suppression of physical action, which is confined to the poet's anxieties about his poem and the eruption of his pent up emotions, force all the dramatic tensions into dialogue. Even the dialogue exhibits the strain of self-consciously measured language. Turbulent energies are made to wear the stately dress of courtly speech. Meaning is robed in a style that is mannered, elegant, yet often duplicitous. Not even in Tasso's emotional outbursts does language doff its finery to tumble wild and naked across the stage. Rather, it dons the garb of high tragedy, the language of Tasso's own Il re Torrismondo. No sooner, however, does Tasso adopt a poetic pose, than he begins to believe in it. He is carried away by his own words. In dramatizing Tasso's gestures as heroic fighter and lover, Goethe adapts from his biographical sources: Tasso had drawn his blade against a servant whom he suspected of spying on him, and he had publicly embraced the Princess. In Goethe's play, both these incidents occur in consequence of Tasso's being impelled by his own verbal excesses.

In drawing his sword against Antonio, Tasso is not resorting to a weapon after having been vanquished in the verbal fencing. He draws the sword, rather, to parry Antonio's trope. The turn in their play of wit comes when Antonio suggests that Tasso has taken his laurels too seriously: ‘Mistake a gracious bounty for reward, / Fortuitous frippery for true ornament.’ At this point Tasso ceases to be awed by Antonio's appeal to restraint and mature wisdom. He is now convinced that the proffered friendship has been rejected because of Antonio's petty jealousy: ‘Your meaning's clear to me now. That's enough. / Deep into you I look, and for a lifetime / Now know you through and through.’¹⁹ When Antonio tells Tasso that he is ‘Held und Sieger’ only when no other play is involved but ‘Lippenspiel and Saitenspiel’ (‘the play of lips and musical strings’) Tasso recognizes an implicit challenge and returns the trope by declaring himself ready for the ‘Wagespiel der Waffen’ (‘the daring play of weapons’). Antonio seems not to have anticipated that his mockery would agitate his excitable opponent to such a rage. It is not his sword that trespasses the propriety (‘Es ziemt’) of the place, Tasso insists, but Antonio's words.

Tasso, to be sure, claims that he is in full control of his language even when he dissembles. When he justifies to himself the explanation he has given the Duke in requesting the return of his epic poem and permission to leave the court, he confesses in soliloquy that the whole dialogue was a deception (V.i.3091-3101). But his pretence at controlling the voice of his dissembling self collapses with the entrance of the Princess in the scene which immediately follows. While his imagination may give rise to his manneristic posturing in language, his language also seems to stimulate his imagination to defy ethical boundaries.

At first feigning concern solely for his poem, Tasso betrays increasing excitement, as the dialogue progresses, at his own words. If he is aided by his friends in Rome, he says, ‘With care and patience there perhaps I'll give / My poem the last touches it still needs.’ He will then travel on incognito to Naples, in spite of the ban against him, to visit his sister. The Princess expresses her concern for his safety and tells him that in parting he takes away the pleasures they might have shared: ‘[you] deprive us / Of what with us alone you could enjoy.’ This indication of her sadness in his parting prompts an abrupt change in his tone and manner: ‘It's not your wish, then, quite to banish me? / Sweet utterance, a dear and lovely comfort!’²⁰ He pleads to her to give him sanctuary in one of the country estates. No sooner has he envisaged this setting than he animates it with an image of himself as a menial tending her gardens. If he is to surrender to what he has already conceived as bondage, it is no self-degradation to serve as gardener rather than as poet. His desperate fantasies, however, alarm the Princess (V.iv.3206-13). What must he do, Tasso asks, to gain her forgiveness, and her brother's? She replies that he must forgive himself: ‘No thing that you are not we ask of you, / If only you will be yourself, and like it.’ She laments that he cannot be helped unless he is able to respond to the friendship that is offered him, ‘As long as you refuse the helping hand / Your friend extends in urgency, in vain.’²¹

With these last words the Princess inadvertently touches the wound left by Antonio's haughty refusal to offer his hand. Tasso is deeply moved: ‘It's you entirely, as you were when first, / A holy angel, you appeared to me.’ From a melancholy brooding his mood swings suddenly into an ecstatic outburst (V.iv.3245-56). The source of his ecstasy, he seems to acknowledge, may be his own madness. Here he admits that the mind may confound reality with its self-engendered images. Goethe has Tasso discriminate three modes of delusion: error, which results from the mind seeking to substantiate a subjective feeling by confirming it in the objective world; delirium, in which a person acts upon delusion; heightened sense, in which the mind sees through the veil of manner and custom to discover the essential truth. Tasso, of course, grasps this third possibility. His feeling of love is the truth which can no longer be repressed. For the Princess, however, a certain repression is necessary in condoning the otherwise unruly feeling. In their earlier intimate exchange, the province of love, so declared the Princess, was to be governed by restraint. ‘Entbehren’ (‘self-denial’), as she recognizes, has lost the battle to ‘Leidenschaft’ (‘passion’). Perhaps Tasso is right in claiming that it is a battle that has also destroyed his ‘eignes Selbst.’ She now sees it threatening her as well. ‘Tasso, if I'm to listen to you further, / Dampen this ardour, for it frightens me.’ But Tasso is beyond such restraint. He is ‘free as a god,’ he declares, ‘For ever you have made me wholly yours. / So take, too, the gift of all I am.’²² In his rapture he takes her in his arms and presses her close to him. Her cry, ‘Hinweg!’, at his impulsive embrace echoes his earlier plea, ‘Nehmt ihn hinweg!’, when she placed the laurels upon his head.

Having constrained physical action, Goethe intensifies symbolic and metaphoric action. The crowning of Virgil and Ariosto in the opening scene is a symbolic ritual in which Goethe introduces into the external action the literary tradition in which Tasso struggles to gain a place. Throughout the following scenes, the very word ‘Kranz’ reinvokes the celebration of the two poets of the past and Tasso's agony as the new poet laureate. Instead of reconciling himself with the poetic past, he declares himself a spectator. If he is to wear the laurels, he announces, he shall wear them in the same solitude where he is accustomed to indulging his dreams (I.iii.530-48). As the dream of poetic fantasy unfolds, it ceases to matter whether other poets have dreamt the same dream. Although his Tasso refers to poetic imagination with the commonplace metaphor of a mirror, Goethe distinguishes its poetological significance from the mimetic principle of holding up the mirror to reality. More importantly for Tasso's dilemma, he also sets it at odds with that variation of mimesis which holds that poets must imitate the great literary models of the past. Goethe's Tasso affirms a version of the doctrine of imitation that was to become prominent in the romantic period: the poet imitates not the external object, but his own internal process of apprehending the object.

Tasso's mirror is thus a ‘Zauberfläche’ that reflects the images of his own mind. At once the aloof observer and a participant in the magic scene, he watches his projected self moving in a world perhaps not of his own making but held together by the magnetic power of his own imagination, which draws images into its force field and holds them there (I.iii.549-57). In the movement of this passage, Goethe marks the intensity of Tasso's imagination. What begins in speculating on a possible encounter with his own reflected image in a secluded spring, becomes complicated by imagining that it is reflected from the past, and then progressively animated by calling first upon the poets of antiquity and then upon the heroes from their works. The reflecting surface of the water is utterly forgotten. In his enthusiasm Tasso is ready to spring into the midst of the imaginary company of Alexander, Homer, and Achilles. Leonore calls out to him to awaken, to return from what is ‘gegenwärtig’ only in his mind in order to acknowledge those who are ‘gegenwärtig’ in the immediate reality.

The Princess, however, praises him for speaking so ‘menschlich’ when he speaks to the phantom images of his mind. Tasso's poetic power lies in the strength of his imaginative vision. He creates a poetic presence in which the poet and the hero are united. His imagination is the magnet which holds this fictive world together. He is no sooner called forth from his vision than he finds himself catered to, humored, yet inevitably excluded from any practical deliberations in court. The magnet works its power only in seclusion and has power only over the images of fantasy. Antonio, in the very next scene, returns triumphant from Rome. His jealous repudiation of the poet is evident from his very first words to Tasso.

As the Princess asserts in the opening scene, it is still possible to dream one's way into the Golden Age of poetry (I.i.23). She must acknowledge, however, that it is only a dream, and not untroubled by the disruptive presence of reality. The Princess, Leonore says, possesses a constancy of mind that elevates her above the vain appeals of flattery. Although the Princess responds by reminding her that these very words are spoken in the language of flattery, Leonore is too much the lady of the court to seek an alternative to the well practiced banter of praise. The Princess and her sister, she goes on, have used their intellectual powers to bring fame to the House of Este and have made themselves the most highly honored women of the age. The Princess recognizes the truth of Leonore's claim that the arts serve to display power and to satisfy ‘the princely appetite for fame’ (‘die fürstliche Begier des Ruhms’), but she also argues that they provide a means for exalting the human life itself. When Leonore says she wants ‘to linger on the island of poetry, and walk in its laurel groves,’ the Princess tells her that even in a land of poetry she would still seek the poet (I.i.151-54). Let the poet cross over alone to explore the realm of poetry, the Princess argues, for upon his return he might enable us to share in the strange vision. Leonore agrees (I.i.167-72). Having debated the relationship between the dream of a golden age and the realization of worldly power, the Princess and Leonore in this opening scene effectively anticipate the opposing forces with which Tasso must contend. In order to serve the Muse, the Renaissance artist must also manage to serve God and Mammon as well. As the Italian principalities vie with one another through the display of pomp and splendor, poet and painter, sculptor and architect may gain social importance but must nevertheless surrender independence and perhaps even artistic integrity. The conflict between the ideals of art and the wealth of court repeats itself in the personal struggle of the artist. He must somehow fulfill his creative vision and, at the same time, honor the religious authority, and celebrate the worldly grandeur of a noble patron. As Leonore phrases it, ‘What history offers, what this life can give him / At once and willingly his heart takes up.’ Or, in the words of the Princess, he ‘hovers on the plane of honeyed dreams / And yet […] real things too / attract him strongly and can hold him fast.’ Can Tasso discriminate the ‘honeyed dreams’ and the reality, the ‘phantasmal shapes’ and the aristocracy whom he must serve? The overt action is starkly limited, as I have already noted, to the presentation of the epic poem and the request for its return, to the thwarted duel with Antonio and the impulsive embrace of the Princess. With all of Tasso's energies and efforts stifled, frustrated, and repressed, his only action is the action of words. Yet even his words, he is told, must conform to courtly principles. When he is called to self-denial, Tasso seeks gratification. When he is told that he must come to his senses, he lapses further into self-deception. Denied actual physical expression, the action is dramatically subverted into intense psychological confrontations in the dialogue (‘entbehren’ vs. ‘befriedigen,’ ‘besinnen’ vs. ‘betrügen’). When ‘moderation’ (‘Mäßigkeit’) is held up as a moral and aesthetic commandment, the intimidated poet is all the more impelled to excess. Antonio praises Ariosto as a poet whose ‘loveliest rhythm keeps its bounds’ (‘im schönsten Takt sich mäßig hält,’ I.iv.733) even when he may seem to wallow in frenzied madness. When Tasso accuses him of coldness, Antonio replies, ‘The moderate man quite often is called cold’ (‘Der Mäßige wird öfters kalt genannt,’ II.iii.1222). The command to moderation pushes Tasso further into that immoderation perceived as ranting and raving (‘toben und rasen’). Observing his mounting excitement, the Princess warns him that he must moderate his ardor (‘mäßige die Glut,’ V.iv.3258). He responds, in his last gesture of physical action, by clasping her in his arms.

The Golden Age of poetry, as conceived by the Princess, is an ideal which will restore moderation and self-denial to those whose feelings grow pampered and spoilt. Tasso, however, imagines a Golden Age ‘When on a free earth human beings roamed / Like happy herds, to pasture on delight’ (‘Da auf der freien Erde Menschen sich / Wie frohe Herden im Genuß verbreiten,’ II.i.980-81). Where the Princess seeks to reassert moral order (‘Erlaubt ist, was sich ziemt’), Tasso longs to escape moral restraints (‘Erlaubt ist, was gefällt’). Confined to house arrest after his quarrel with Antonio, Tasso reflects upon the apparent futility of his dream of gratified desires (IV.i.2189-94). The soliloquy might have been an occasion for him to recognize the folly of his self-delusion. He seems to acknowledge that his ‘protracted dream’ was but ‘dear delusion’. But he is not ready to abandon the dream. Indeed, he resolutely declares that he will continue it now that he is free of the fetters of sleep. He is now all the more determined to act upon the dream.

Tasso's dream of pleasure inevitably gives rise to nightmares of persecution. His very belief that a ‘consummate joy’ is at a hand requires him to believe, as well, in deliberate plots to foil its realization. When Antonio offers his diagnosis of Tasso's madness to Duke Alfonso, he lays the blame upon ‘immoderation’. Antonio explains, in terms very different from Tasso's, the causes and consequences of dreaming while awake (V.i.2914-30). Antonio's account of Tasso's madness culminates in a crushing indictment not only of the madman but of the poet as well. Because of his delusions of persecution, Tasso has engulfed himself in torment. Not only has he become personally incapable of feeling ‘peace or joy’, he can no longer give pleasure through his poetry. Duke Alfonso, although he looks upon Tasso as an investment, still believes that it is worth spending more to succor the potential bounty of his literary power. With patience and tolerance, he replies, Tasso may still be encouraged to make full use of his great talents.

In the course of the play the concept of madness shifts. Rather than referring to his raptures of inspiration, Tasso's wild actions are perceived as fits of delirium. Although it is feared, even in the first act, that he spends too much time alone, absorbed in his own thoughts, his madness is still excused as dithyrambic (‘wild begeistert’). Tasso himself is content with this definition of his peculiarity. He assures the Princess:

As one enchanted by deluded frenzy
Is promptly, willingly cured when gods are near,
So I was cured of every fantasy,
Of all obsession, every devious urge,
Cured by a single glance that met your glance.

(II.i.874-78)²³

Tasso, of course, was not cured by that ‘single glance’ of the Princess. Instead, her very presence further arouses the urges and obsessions that dictate more and more of his actions. The rational order of classicism gives way to the emotional excess of romanticism. After he has dared to take her into his arms, Duke Alfonso orders his attendants to escort him away into confinement: ‘He's out of his mind. Hold on to him!’ (‘Er kommt von Sinnen, halt ihn fest!’ V.iv.3277).

The opposition of the classic and romantic is better understood as dialectic rather than as absolute. Far from being mutually exclusive, the classic and romantic derive energy from each other and are typically defined in terms of relationship. Goethe's diagnosis—that the classic is the healthy and the romantic is the sick²⁴—is reappraised as an inevitable cyclical recurrence in Herbert Grierson's definition of the classic and the romantic as ‘the systole and diastole of the human heart in history.’²⁵ The romantic sickness is not fatal, but vital—a periodic hibernation during which poetry gives up its vigilant observation of external being and retreats into reverie and introspection. As Goethe acknowledges, the classic and romantic result from the poet's own objective or subjective inclination. In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller suggested to Goethe that his classical presumptions were not as classical as he might want to believe. Comparatists the world over often cite Faust in discussions of European romanticism. Reluctant to accept Goethe's admission, ‘daß ich selber wider Willen romantisch sei’,²⁶ many Germanists continue to oppose the notion of a romantic Goethe as a gross misunderstanding of the poet's manner and meaning.

Perhaps it would be better to appraise the relation of classic and romantic motifs in terms of ‘container’ and ‘thing contained.’ The transparency or opacity of one or the other would effect how that relationship might be perceived. Although we might invoke the term vehicle with I. A. Richards' sense of an implicated tenor,²⁷ the presence of the romantic in the classic, and vice versa, involves more than the metaphorical texture of a work. Even metaphorical reference, as Samuel Levin has argued, may be cognitively immediate or interactive, rather than synecdochic or structural.²⁸ In a perceptive and well-documented essay, The Raven and the Bust of Pallas: Classic Artifact in the Gothic Tale’, Patricia Merivale explains why the prophetic bird perches upon the bust of Pallas Athene over the chamber door of the tormented scholar, and why so many other tales of sinister derangement implicate classical symbols of rational order. The classical artifact is a reminder of rationality, yet it may also represent a failure and perversion of classical ideals. Although Byron's Manfred is ready to scorn the classical ideal of beauty, he must nevertheless admit its allure: ‘It will not last, / But it is well to have known it, though but once’ (III.i.14-15). While Manfred may resign himself to a fleeting perception of the unattainable ideal, many another character in romantic fiction (among her examples, Merivale examines Joseph von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild and Prosper Mérimée's La Vénus d'Ille) is victimized by a quest to embrace the classical ideal. The very symbol of rational order thus becomes an instrument of irrational desires.

Just as romantic narrative may invoke the classical, so too a classical work may enclose within its rational order the ferment of romantic irrationality. Not every instance of madness in classical literature should be viewed as an outbreak of romantic temperament. Euripides, after all, provided a classical model for the tragic struggle with one's own irrational self in Medea. Fully aware of the evil of her act, Medea confesses simply that her temperament is stronger than her will or reason (1078-80). As E. R. Dodds demonstrates in The Greeks and the Irrational, irrationality is not only celebrated in bacchanalia and maenadism, it persists in Greek literature from the righteous anger and folly or delusion of the Homeric hero through the subversions of rationalism in the drama of the classical age.

There is a difference, however, between the madness that recognizes the constraints of classical norms, and the madness that envisions an alternate world. Yet even Don Quixote, who is smitten by romance and tries to reenact its fictions, is made to suffer his satirical mishaps in a world where pragmatic reason prevails. But once the poet presents a mad poet as spokesman, interpreter, perhaps even as alter ego, how can the reader or spectator sustain confidence in rational order? When Goethe introduces Tasso into the classical theater of Weimar, he complicates dramatic representation by insisting upon the validity of the poetic imagination even as he exposes its excesses. By showing how Tasso both controls and is controlled by the fictions he creates, how he observes, or thinks he observes, other fictions operative in the Duke's court, Goethe allows his Tasso to give free rein to the imaginative ardor of the romantic poet.

This does not mean that Goethe was willing to have it both ways. Byron and Shelley, as we have seen, championed the romantic rebel against external authority. Peacock believed that the classical and rational elements found a harmonic reciprocity in Tasso's great epic. Schlegel called him a poet of feeling, whose pretenses to classical form were ineffective. Goethe's dramatic representation exhibits in the character of Tasso the power of inspiration and passion upon the individual imagination. But it also confirms the rational order upheld by the Princess, the Duke, and his Minister. Even in the midst of his raving in the final scene, Goethe's Tasso retains enough insight into his dilemma to know why his classical principles must guide his romantic impulses.

Notes

1. Georges Günter, Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata: Epos der Gegenreformation oder Moderner Roman? in Das Paradox, eine Herausforderung des abendländischen Denkens, ed. by Paul Geyer and Roland Hagenbüchle (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1992), pp. 323-34.

2. In his Epistles, 2.3 (‘Ars poetica’), 295-301, Horace ridicules would-be poets who think that by their eccentricity they will gain the entry into Helicon which Democritus denied to the ‘sane-minded poet.’ The doctrine of ‘divine frenzy’ is also denounced by the elder Seneca, Prologue 1ff. and Suasoriae III.7 (=Moral Essays, 3 vols, ed. and transl. by J. W. Basore, New York and London: The Loeb Classical Library, 1928), but defended by the younger Seneca, Epistolae Morales, 84, 1-7.

3. Scaliger refers to the poet as ‘another god’ (‘alter deus’); see Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561), quoted in V. Rüfener, ‘Homo secundus deus. Eine geistesgeschichtliche Studie zum menschlichen Schöpfertum’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 63 (1955), 249-91; in Ficino the poet is called a ‘god upon earth’ (‘est utique deus in terris’); see Marsilio Ficino, Theologia Platonica, 16, 6, in Opera (Basle, 1576, facsimile reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), I, 295.

4. Goethe told Eckermann on 6 May 1827: ‘Ich hatte das Leben Tassos, ich hatte mein eigenes Leben, und indem ich zwei so wunderliche Figuren mit ihren Eigenheiten zusammen warf, entstand in mir das Bild des Tasso, dem ich, als prosaischen Kontrast, den Antonio entgegenstellte, wozu es mir auch nicht an Vorbildern fehlte. Die weiteren Hof-, Lebens- und Liebesverhältnisse waren übrigens in Weimar wie in Ferrara, und ich kann mit Recht von meiner Darstellung sagen: sie ist Bein von meinem Bein und Fleisch von meinem Fleisch.’ That he sought to merge his own experience with that of Tasso was not a belated afterthought; he made the same assertion at the time of composition: ‘Meine Absicht ist, meinen Geist mit dem Charakter und den Schicksalen dieses Dichters zu füllen.’ (Italienische Reise, 28 March 1788); quoted in Hans Gerhard Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen, 6 vols (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1908), IV, 302.

5. Caroline Herder to Herder, between 16 and 20 March 1789: ‘Ich habe die Fortsetzung von “Tasso” wieder abgeschrieben. Goethe kam dazu … Von diesem Stück sagte er mir im Vertrauen den eigentlichen Sinn. Es ist die Disproportion des Talents mit dem Leben.’ Quoted in Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen, IV, 309.

6. The German text is quoted from the Hamburg edition; the English text is from Michael Hamburger's translation of the play for the Suhrkamp English edition of Goethe's collected works, volume II:

   Ihn mußt ich ehren, darum liebt ich ihn;
   Ich mußt' ihn lieben, weil mit ihm mein Leben
   Zum Leben ward, wie ich es nie gekannt.
   Erst sagt' ich mir: entferne dich von ihm!
   Ich wich und wich, und kam nur immer näher,
   So lieblich angelockt, so hart bestraft!

7. Du gehst mit vollen Segeln! Scheint es doch,
   Du bist gewohnt, zu siegen
   Der übereilte Knabe will des Manns
   Vertraun und Freundschaft mit Gewalt ertrotzen?

8. Giovanni Battista Manso, La Vita di Torquato Tasso (Venice, 1621); Abate Pierantonio Serassi, La Vita di Torquato Tasso (Rome, 1785; Bergamo, 1790). In his Italienische Reise (28 March 1788) Goethe records: ‘Ich lese jetzt das Leben des Tasso, das Abbate Serassi und zwar recht gut geschrieben hat.’ See Gräf, IV, 302. See also H. G. Haile, Artist in Chrysalis: A Biographical Study of Goethe in Italy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 187-89.

9. Discourses on the Heroic Poem, pp. 10, 17.

10. C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso, a Study of the Poet and his Contribution to English Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 57-59.

11. Joseph Tusiani, in the Introduction to his translation of Jerusalem Delivered (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), p.17, quotes from Giambattista Marino, Torquato Tasso:

    Raising at last my trumpet for a more
    melodious sound, as Ariosto has done,
    I sang of arms and battles, knights and war.
    O cruel destiny! To imitate
    the Furioso's genius and his song,
    I shared the madness of Orlando's fate.

12. Although Tasso's Allegoria della Gerusalemme Liberata, written in 1575 and appended to the poem as published by Feba Bonna in 1581, does provide an allegorical reading of his own poem, it is by no means an adequate and satisfactory interpretation. Rather, it reveals the poet's concern in defending the orthodoxy of his religious and political ideas. As is evident in his Discorsi del Poema Eroica, Tasso preferred not to isolate allegory as an independent mode of poetry. He endorses, instead, Dante's discrimination of fourfold meaning: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogic. The first is directed to the understanding, the second teaches, the latter two modes of poetic discourse are directed to the intellect, stimulating speculation, respectively, on worldly and spiritual matters (p. 153).

13. Dante had the phrase, in turn, from Paulus Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri septem, who thus records Semiramis's justification of incest: ‘praecepit enim ut inter parentes ac filios nulla delata reverentia naturae de coniugiis adpetendis quod cuique libitum esset licitum fieret.’

14. Er rühmt sich zweier Flammen! knüpft und löst
    Die Knoten hin und wieder und gewinnt
    Mit solchen Künsten solche Herzen! Ist's
    Zu glauben?

15. Wolfdietrich Rasch, Goethes Torquato Tasso'. Die Tragödie des Dichters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1954). Noting that Goethe could have found Guarini's sonnet in Serrasi's biography of Tasso, Rasch quotes the lines which Goethe has given to Antonio:

    Di due fiamme si vanta, e stringe e spezza
    Più volte un nodo, e con quest'arte piega
    (Chi ‘l crederebbe!) a suo favore i Dei.

16. […] auf wohlgestimmter Laute wild
    Der Wahnsinn hin und her zu wühlen scheint
    Und doch im schönsten Takt sich mäßig hält.
    Wer neben diesen Mann sich wagen darf,
    Verdient für seine Kühnheit schon den Kranz.

17. O nehmt ihn weg von meinem Haupte wieder,
    Nehmt ihn hinweg! Er sengt mir meine Locken!
    Und wie ein Strahl der Sonne, der zu heiß
    Das Haupt mir träfe, brennt er mir die Kraft
    Des Denkens aus der Stirne. Fieberhitze
    Bewegt mein Blut. Verzeiht! Es ist zuviel!

18. Er sieht das Kleine klein, das Große groß.
    Damit er einer Welt gebiete, gibt
    Er seinen Nachbarn gern und freundlich nach.
    Das Streifchen Land, das er dir überläßt,
    Weiß er, wie deine Freundschaft, wohl zu schätzen.

19. ANTONIO:

    Er halte gnädiges Geschenk für Lohn,
    Zufälligen Putz für wohlverdienten Schmuck.

    TASSO:

    Du brauchst nicht deutlicher zu sein. Es ist genug!
    Ich blicke tief dir in das Herz und kenne
    Fürs ganze Leben dich.

20. TASSO:

    So leg ich da mit Sorgfalt und Geduld
    Vielleicht die letzte Hand an mein Gedicht. […]

    PRINZESSIN:

    [du] nimmst uns weg,
    Was du mit uns allein genießen konntest.

    TASSO:

    So willst du mich nicht ganz und gar verstoßen?
    O süßes Wort, so schöner, teurer Trost!

21. Wir wollen nichts von dir, was du nicht bist,
    Wenn du erst dir mit dir selbst gefällst […]
    Wenn du nicht selbst des Freundes Hand ergreifst,
    Die, sehnlich ausgereckt, dich nicht erreicht.

22. PRINZESSIN:

    Wenn ich dich, Tasso, länger hören soll,
    So mäßige die Glut, die mich erschreckt. […]

    TASSO:

    Ich fühle mich von aller Not entladen,
    Frei wie ein Gott […]
    Du hast mich ganz auf ewig dir gewonnen,
    So nimm denn auch mein ganzes Wesen hin!

23. Wie den Bezauberten von Rausch und Wahn
    Der Gottheit Nähe leicht und willig heilt,
    So war auch ich von aller Phantasie,
    Von jeder Sucht, von jedem falschen Triebe
    Mit einem Blick in deinen Blick geheilt.

24. ‘Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke’ (2 April 1829), in Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, ed. by F. Bergemann (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1951), p. 313.

25. Herbert J. C. Grierson, ‘Classical and Romantic’, in The Background of English Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), pp. 256, 287.

26. See Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, on Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, and classic and romantic as objective and subjective (21 March 1830).

27. I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), chapters 5 and 6.

28. Samuel R. Levin, Metaphoric Worlds. Conceptions of a Romantic Nature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988) describes literary conditions which render the covert implications inadequate and require the reader to accept the epistemological consequences of metaphor as a direct reference to a cognitive world.