SOURCE: Hewitt, Regina. “Tasso's Place in the Courtly Universe: The Atavistic Cosmography of Goethe's Torquato Tasso.” Michigan Germanic Studies 9, no. 2 (fall 1983): 141-48.

[In the following essay, Hewitt offers an interpretation of the outcome of Torquato Tasso, contending that the reconciliation of Tasso and Antonio fits the “atavistic cosmography at the heart of Goethe's play.”]

Having set up the apparent incompatibility of the poet Torquato Tasso with the statesman Antonio Montecatino, the dramatic action of Goethe's Torquato Tasso tends towards the final embrace of its two antagonists. Critics have long been divided over this outcome. Some find it merely inconclusive; others see it as a tragic compromise on the part of the poet; still others interpret it as a reconciliation between the two figures.¹ No one among this latter group, however, has explored the evidence supporting the case for reconciliation which the Neoplatonic underpinnings of the play provide.² A careful reading in light of this subtext reveals that all that precedes the final scene—like a dramatic version of the Renaissance masterpiece, Castiglione's Il Cortegiano³—teaches the half-character Tasso that by subsuming his opposite type, the half-character Antonio, he will become a psychically-integrated individual able to take his proper place in the well-ordered universe. With their reconciliation, Tasso and Antonio become the ideal Renaissance man and fit themselves into the atavistic cosmography at the heart of Goethe's play.⁴

The notion of the well-ordered universe which makes this reconciliation intelligible sees every individual kind of thing—not just human beings, but all things animate and inanimate, subhuman and superhuman—as a distinct type. While possessing its own characteristic attributes, each type fits into a unique position in a universal hierarchy. Each kind depends on every other kind to support the larger scheme most widely known in Tillyard's familiar figures of the great chain of being, the corresponding planes, and the cosmic dance.⁵ Moreover, each type has its own microcosmic order which imitates the macrocosmic organizations. Human beings, for example, have a hierarchy of mental faculties and emotions presided over by reason. Hence, in such a scheme, the contemplative, passionate poet and the active, reasonable statesman need each other to keep the universe in balance; furthermore, the contemplative, passionate poet needs to incorporate some of the dynamic qualities of the active, reasonable statesman in order to keep his own mental balance.

As a member of a sixteenth-century court, Tasso takes this macrocosmic order for granted. As early as in Act I, in a prefiguration of his communion with Antonio, he expresses his desire to see poets and heroes together:

O säh' ich die Heroen, die Poeten
Der alten Zeit um diesen Quell versammelt!
O säh' ich hier sie immer unzertrennlich,
Wie sie im Leben fest verbunden waren!
So bindet der Magnet durch seine Kraft
Das Eisen mit dem Eisen fest zusammen,
Wie gleiches Streben Held und Dichter bindet.
Homer vergaß sich selbst, sein ganzes Leben
War der Betrachtung zweier Männer heilig,
Und Alexander in Elysium
Eilt, den Achill und den Homer zu suchen.

(ll. 545-555)⁶

Tasso, however, has not internalized these assumptions. He does not yet realize that this bond must obtain in the real world or that he can and must create such a tie in his own life. Instead, he concludes: “O daß ich gegenwärtig wäre, sie, / Die größten Seelen, nun vereint zu sehen!” (ll. 556f.). He distances himself from that union. He hopes, “daß [sein] Leben / Nach diesem Ziel ein ewig Wandeln sei” (ll. 501f.), but he waits for some transcendental “Verklärung” to bring him to that remote and disembodied goal of being as great a poet as Virgil with whose laurel he has just been crowned.⁷ He fails to realize that Virgil and Homer earned their honors by celebrating events and values that were integral to their own societies—societies that were real civilizations, not the timeless pastoral idylls in a “Golden Age” that Tasso imagines:

Die goldne Zeit, wohin ist sie geflohn,
Nach der sich jedes Herz vergebens sehnt?
Da auf der freien Erde Menschen sich
Wie frohe Herden im Genuß verbreiteten;
.....Wo jeder Vogel in der freien Luft
Und jedes Tier, durch Berg' und Täler schweifend,
Zum Menschen sprach: Erlaubt ist, was gefällt.

(ll. 979-982, 992-994)

The task of “educating” Tasso which all the characters but especially the Princess undertake has as its aim the integration of Tasso into the existing order. From her early response to Tasso's vision of the poets and heroes (“Ich freue mich, wenn du mit Geistern redest, / Dass du so menschlich sprichst, und hör' es gern” [ll. 562f.]), the Princess continues to try to make Tasso see his artistic vocation as a link in the chain of being. Art inspires others to vivify in actions the values it embodies:

Zwar herrlich ist die liedeswerte Tat,
Doch schön ist's auch, der Taten stärkste Fülle
Durch würd'ge Lieder auf die Nachwelt bringen.

(ll. 806-808)

She tells him that he will not reach his goal directly, through transcendence, but indirectly, by subordinating himself to the larger order. In this way, he will be a happy and fulfilled individual and will bring about the happiness and fulfillment of the others in the order—such as herself—whose existence his own touches:

Und wenn ihr mich denn ja behalten wollt,
So laßt es mir durch Eintracht sehn und schafft
Euch selbst ein glücklich Leben, mir durch euch.

(ll. 1062-1064)

The Princess is trying to channel Tasso's love for her into a love for the harmony of the universe for which she says the “Golden Age” is a metaphor:

                    … die schöne Zeit, sie war,
So scheint es mir, so wenig, als sie ist;
Und war sie je, so war sie nur gewiß,
Wie sie uns immer wieder werden kann.
Noch treffen sich verwandte Herzen an
und teilen den Genuß der schönen Welt;
Nur in dem Wahlspruch ändert sich, mein Freund,
Ein einzig Wort: Erlaubt ist, was sich ziemt.

(ll. 999-1006)

She is expressing the Neoplatonic Ideal, such as is expressed by Peter Bembo, a character in The Courtier. Bembo holds that, for the “reasonable lover,” love of physical beauty in one person is the first step on the ladder leading upward to love of all mankind and finally to love of God (or the Idea of the Good).⁸ This final goal is reached only “durch Mäßigung und durch Entbehren” (ll. 1121f.) required by the process of ascent.

To the end of directing Tasso's love outward toward the cosmos, the Princess encourages his friendship with Antonio. Such a relationship would require Tasso to curb his jealousy of the man whom he sees as his antagonist and to learn to admire some of the other person's strengths. (“Ich mag wohl sagen, alles, was mir fehlt” [l. 945.]). But Tasso, not yet a “reasonable lover,” misunderstands. He forces ardent brotherhood on the astonished Antonio (“Dir biet' ich ohne Zögern Herz und Hand …” [ll. 1200ff.]) and sensual love on the Princess (“So nimm denn auch mein ganzes Wesen hin!” [l. 3283]), thus bringing about his violent quarrel with the former and his estrangement from the latter.

Leonora penetrates to the heart of Tasso's antipathy toward Antonio, for she realizes that they are each one-half of a person:

Zwei Männer sind's, ich hab' es lang' gefühlt,
Die darum Feinde sind, weil die Natur
Nicht einen Mann aus ihnen beiden formte.

(ll. 1704-1706)

This bifurcation is also at the core of Tasso's alienation from the Princess, for if his faculties were guided by reason—as they would be if his character were balanced with Antonio's—he would be able to respond to the Princess' love in accordance with the given paradigm. While Antonio is himself less than perfect, he has at least learned self-control (“Das Alter muß doch einen Vorzug haben, / Daß … Es doch sich auf der Stelle fassen kann” [ll. 2171ff.]). Hence, he is able to seek reconciliation with Tasso and to help him discover the reasonableness of love.

Tasso's breakthrough begins with his acceptance, albeit reluctant, of duty, for such acceptance requires self-restraint: “Ich kenne meine Pflicht und gebe nach. / Es sei verziehn, sofern es möglich ist!” (ll. 2574.). The ability to know duty, which is the fruit of his quarrel with Antonio, is new to Tasso and foreshadows the potential success of the Court's educational endeavor. But Tasso must go beyond this half-willingness to forgive when to do otherwise is nearly unavoidable. He must divorce his overdeveloped ego from his true personal worth. The Princess' rejection effects this separation. Tasso responds to being turned away by her with: “… ich bin nichts; / Ich bin mir selbst entwandt” (ll. 3417f.). His egocentricity has been conquered. Freed from his narcissism, he is in a position to heed Antonio's advice: “Erkenne, was du bist!” (l. 3420), i.e., a being whose unreasonableness has caused him to abdicate his position in the universal order.

Tasso not only sees what he has been. He realizes what he can become: a better poet. In his response to Antonio's exhortation to self-knowledge, Tasso's art serves, for the first time, a function for him in the real world: expressing his human feelings, not striving toward some unattainable transcendence:

Die Träne hat uns die Natur verliehen,
Den Schrei des Schmerzens, wenn der Mann zuletzt
Es nicht mehr trägt—Und mir noch über alles—
Sie ließ im Schmerz mir Melodie und Rede,
Die tiefste Fülle meiner Not zu klagen:
Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Gott, zu sagen, wie ich leide.

(ll. 3427-3433)

Tasso then accepts Antonio's offered hand, symbolically joining himself to the rest of the universe. This link gives Tasso a place in his own society and confirms his vocation as a poet, associating him with Homer who likewise “sich selbst vergaß” (l. 452) in his integral relationship with his own civilization.

The “inconsistent” images in Tasso's ensuing final speech have caused much critical controversy. This last speech actually demonstrates Tasso's ability as a poet and displays, in the accurate if somewhat excessive words of Wolfdietrich Rasch, “ein Höchstmaß an Ausdruckskraft.”⁹ Tasso fills the void left by the disappearance of his old ego with changing images, showing that he has replaced his self-centeredness with “the poet's … power of reflecting other identities.”¹⁰ The shifting images describe the poet's own changes throughout the play. In this respect they are “confessional” and “lyrical.”¹¹ However, the speech also forms a narrative, the underlying purpose of which is to affirm the ordered world that Tasso now at last embraces.

The first image, the wave, represents the early Tasso, who, admired and crowned by the Court, deluded himself into believing that he was filling the role of a poet as perfectly as a calm wave fills that of a mirror:

In dieser Woge spiegelte so schön
Die Sonne sich, es ruhten die Gestirne
An dieser Brust, die zärtlich sich bewegte.

(ll. 3442-3444)

But this metaphor matches function and functionary incorrectly. Although a wave can mirror, its essential characteristic is not reflection but mobility. Similarly, although an egotistical poet can write verses, he is impeded in his task by that trait. Nature, which determines the place of all things in the hierarchy, acts through the storm (in the rustic metaphor) and through the Court (in Tasso's experience) to destroy the illusion and restore the proper balance:

                              … Die mächtige Natur,
Die diesen Felsen gründete, hat auch
Der Welle die Beweglichkeit gegeben.
Sie sendet ihren Sturm, die Welle flieht
Und schwankt und schwillt und beugt sich schäumend über.
.....Verschwunden ist der Glanz, entflohn die Ruhe.

(ll. 3437-3441, 3445)

Symbolic of his realization of his error, Tasso moves to the image of the ship. The ship is appropriate to the militant and defensive posture Tasso assumed in his encounters at Court and represents his narcissicism. Now Tasso can unashamedly celebrate the breaking into pieces of the vessel of egotism which confined the true poet:

Ich kenne mich in der Gefahr nicht mehr
Und schäme mich nicht mehr, es zu bekennen.
Zerbrochen ist das Steuer, und es kracht
Das Schiff an allen Seiten. Berstend reißt
Der Boden unter meinen Füßen auf!

(ll. 3446-3450)

Cast out of the sinking ship of his false assumptions, the poet Tasso does not drown; he clings to the statesman Antonio who is in his proper place in the order. (“O edler Mann, du stehest fest und still” l. 3434.) He survives as does a sailor clinging to a rock. Given the early Tasso's incorrect mode of thinking, he was supposed to run aground on the firmly structured universe. Having done so, Tasso can now use his psychological “shipwreck” to anchor himself in the real world, in the great chain of being. He gives up the search for transcendental fulfillment in favor of growth and development within the given order:

Ich fasse dich mich beiden Armen an!
So klammert sich der Schiffer endlich noch
Am Felsen fest, an dem er scheitern sollte.

(ll. 3451-3453)

Having made up his mind to accept his place in the macrocosm, he may without contradiction be granted, eventually, all the things he had previously been denied: a genuine and lasting role in his society and even the Princess' love. The courtly esteem and loving relationship which Tasso longed for are not excluded from the hierarchy; rather, they are incorporated and put to “right use.” Such integration can be seen from a passage in The Courtier:

… [The] selfe same thinges in sensuall [love] ought to be denyed otherwhile, and in reasonable, granted: because in the one, they bee honest, and in the other dishonest. Therefore the woman to please her good lover … may lawfully … come to kissing. … For since a kisse is a knitting together both of bodie and soule, it is to bee feared, lest the sensuall lover will be more enclined to the part of the bodie … but the reasonable lover woteth well, that although the mouth be a parcell of the bodie, yet is it an issue for the wordes, that be the interpreters of the soule, and for the inwarde breath, which is also called the soule. … For this doe all chaste lovers covet a kisse, as a coupling of soules together. And therefore Plato the devine lover saith, that in kissing, his soule came as farre as his lippes to depart out of the bodie.¹²

According to the courtly assumptions underlying the action in Tasso, the conclusion is hopeful. It leaves Tasso ready to climb the Neoplatonic ladder by which he may ascend to the highest kind of love and the most complete fulfillment. It also leaves the court ready to take its role in the world as a paradigm of a perfect society, a realization of the “Golden Age,” in which “Erlaubt ist, was sich ziemt.”

Notes

1. While some readers—such as Walter Silz, “Ambivalences in Goethe's Tasso,” Germanic Review, 31 (1956), 243-68 and J. R. Williams, “Reflections in Tasso's Final Speech,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 47 (1976-77), 47-67—find Torquato Tasso inconclusive and ambiguous with respect to the final relationship between Tasso and Antonio, many argue for or against accepting reconciliation as the end of the play. Following C. P. Magill, “Torquato Tasso oder die Feindlichen Brüder,” German Life and Letters, 23 (1969), 39-47, whose article summarizes a number of these views, one can classify opinions about the outcome of the play as optimistic or pessimistic. In general, optimistic interpretations accept as desirable and genuine a final concord between the two figures and are held, for example, by Arnold Bergstraesser, Goethe's Image of Man and Society (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1949) and Mark Boulby, “Judgment by Epithet in Goethe's Torquato Tasso,” PMLA [Publications of the Moderan Language Association of America] 87 (1972), 167-81. Pessimistic interpretations see the “reconciliation” as a compromise or a fiction and are held by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “Goethe's Tasso. The Tragedy of a Creative Artist,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 15 (1946), 96-127 and Emil Staiger, Goethe (Zürich: Atlantis, 1952), I, 423-25. This list does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of criticism but tries only to point to a few examples of the most readily discernible lines of controversy.

2. Gerhard Neumann, Konfiguration: Studien zu Goethes “Torquato Tasso” (München: Fink, 1965), p. 62, n. 68, notes the Neoplatonic subtext in the discussion between the two Leonores (ll. 197-235) but does not develop the reference or extend its significance to the play as a whole.

3. Boulby, p. 179, states that “Goethe certainly knew” the famous work of Baldassare Castiglione, published in 1528 as a guide to courtly conduct. It is cited here in Sir Thomas Hoby's celebrated English translation (1561) as reissued in Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, intro. W. H. D. Rouse, critical notes Drayton Henderson (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1928). The setting and subject of Tasso as well as the circumstances under which it was written suggest the aptness of examining it in light of Castiglione's underlying assumptions. Regarding the general circumstances of composition, see H. G. Haile, Artist in Chrysalis: A Biographical Study of Goethe in Italy (Urbana: U. of Illinois, 1973).

4. Of course, such a Weltanschauung is not characteristic of the mature Goethe; it is rather one assumed for purposes of transition. Goethe's earliest conception of the play began when he was breaking away from Sturm und Drang, and he developed his “gesteigerter Werther” within a very different set of assumptions from those surrounding the original Werther. This shift enabled him to experiment with a diametrically opposed value system that, together with his previous thought, contributed to the evolution of his mature views.

5. E. W. M. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, n.d.). The latter figure, with its musical associations is particularly pertinent to Tasso, for this play abounds in references to the ideal universe as musical harmony. See, for example, ll. 160, 731-33, 774, 1867f.

6. Citations to Tasso throughout are to Goethes Werke, 7th ed., gen. ed. Josef Kunz (Hamburg: Wegner, 1966).

7. E. L. Stahl, “Tasso's Tragedy and Salvation,” German Studies Presented to L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), pp. 191-203, writes at length on Goethe's use of “Verklärung” as applied to Tasso.

8. Castiglione, pp. 303-07.

9. Wolfdietrich Rasch, Goethes “Torquato Tasso”: Die Tragödie des Dichters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1956), p. 178.

10. Wilkinson, p. 121.

11. Stahl, p. 193 and Lawrence Ryan, “Die Tragödie des Dichters in Goethes Torquato Tasso,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 9 (1965), 312, respectively.

12. Castiglione, p. 315.