Soon it is over, and to earth go back— To earth and the eternal sun—the atoms Erstwhile combined in me for pain and joy. And of the mighty Talbot, whose renown But now filled all the world, nothing remains Except a handful of light dust. So ends The life of man—and all we bear away, As booty from the battle of existence, Is comprehension of its nothingness And sovereign contempt of all the ends That seemed exalted and desirable.

In short, the characters of 'The Maid of Orleans' leave much to be desired on the score of verisimilitude. One has the feeling all along, as in the case of Goethe's 'Helena', of being in an artificial world made to order by an imaginative fiat. To enjoy the play it is necessary to put aside one's rationalism and surrender oneself to the illusion one knows that the author wishes to produce. 'The Maid of Orleans' does not compel the surrender like 'Wallenstein'; one must meet the poet half-way. That done, however, everything is in order, for the technique of the play is faultless. It is not easy to point to a better piece of dramatic exposition than the scenes which precede the appearance of Johanna in the French army. The Prologue is perhaps a trifle too long, but serves admirably to give the tragic keynote, by picturing the shepherd-girl of Dom Remi leading a life apart from that of her family, given to strange brooding, and at last receiving the sign from Heaven, which she prophetically feels to be the call of death. And then the desperate plight of France; the helpless weakness of the king; the disgust and discouragement of the generals; and after this the news of a long unwonted victory, followed quickly by the appearance of Johanna and the magic change of the military situation,—how vividly it is all brought before one! And what a fine scene is that at the end of the second act, in which Burgundy is won over! One who is not touched by this portion of the play; who does not return to it with ever-renewed pleasure after each sojourn in the choking air of naturalism, is—to state the case as gently as possible—unfortunately endowed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 123: Trevelyan, "The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay", II, 249.]

[Footnote 124: According to Boettiger, whose statements are not always trustworthy in matters of detail, Schiller said to him in November, 1801, that he had at one time planned three different plays on the subject of the Maid of Orleans, and that he would have executed all three if he had had time. One of these was to have been a historical tragedy, with Johanna dying at the stake in Rouen.—This can hardly mean anything more than that Schiller was in doubt for a while as to the best treatment of his theme. The idea of his actually making three different plays on the same subject is quite too preposterous. His promise, in a letter of March 1, 1802, that if he should write a second 'Maid of Orleans', Goeschen should publish it, is only an author's playful 'jollying' of a friendly publisher. The passage from Boettiger is quoted at length by Boxberger in his Introduction to 'The Maid of Orleans' (Kuerschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Vol. CXXII, second part, page 211).]

[Footnote 125: Lewis E. Gates, "Studies and Appreciations."]

[Footnote 126: Compare Morley's "Voltaire", Chapter III.]



CHAPTER XIX

The Bride of Messina

Das Leben ist der Gueter hoechstes nicht, Der Uebel groesztes aber ist die Schuld. 'The Bride of Messina'.

After the completion of 'The Maid of Orleans', in the spring of 1801, Schiller found himself once more the unhappy victim of leisure. A new task was needed to make life tolerable, but what should it be? 'At my time of life', he remarked in a letter to Koerner, 'the choice of a subject is far more difficult; the levity of mind which enables one to decide so quickly in one's youth is no longer there, and the love, without which there can be no poetic creation, is harder to arouse.' Ere long, having a mind to try his hand upon a tragedy in 'the strictest Greek form', he was musing upon that which in time came to be known as 'The Bride of Messina'.

For the present, however, and for some time to come, he did not advance beyond very general planning. In the summer he spent several weeks with Koerner in Dresden, during which literary labor was suspended. After his return to Weimar, in September, he found the conditions without and within unfavorable to a serious creative effort, so he undertook a German version of Gozzi's 'Turandot'. This occupied him until January, 1802. Then it was a question whether his next theme should be 'The Knights of Malta', or 'Warbeck', or 'William Tell', the last having begun to interest him because of a persistent rumor that he was working upon a play of that name. But none of the four projects carried the day immediately, and the winter and spring passed without bringing a decision. He began to be worried over the 'spirit of distraction' that had come upon him. In August, however, the long vacillation came to an end, and 'The Bride of Messina' began to take shape on paper. He found it more instructive than any of his previous works. It was also, he remarked in a letter, a more grateful task to amplify a small matter than to condense a large one. Once begun, the composition proceeded very steadily,—but little disturbed by the arrival, one day in November, of a patent of nobility from the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire,—until the end was reached, in February, 1803.

The play may be described as an attempt to treat a medieval romantic theme in such a manner as to convey a suggestion of Greek tragedy. Although written with enthusiasm it is not the bearer of any heartfelt message and must be regarded as a study of theory rather than of life. The highly artificial plot does not reflect any past or present verities of human existence upon the planet earth. Nor can we call the play an imitation of the Greeks, its general atmosphere being anything but Greek. The dialogue is not written in classical trimeters, but in the modern pentameter; while the speaking chorus, divided into two warring factions and going about here and there as the scene changes, has little resemblance to anything found in the Greek drama. On the other hand, there is a chorus, and there are dreams which take the place of oracles. There is also a further suggestion of the antique in the pervading fatalism of the piece.

Of all Schiller's works 'The Bride of Messina' has been the most variously judged by the critics. Some have seen in it the very perfection of art, others the climax of artificiality. Schiller himself reported, after seeing it performed at Weimar, in 1803, that he had 'received for the first time the impression of true tragedy'. There is also an authentic record to the effect that Goethe was inexpressibly delighted with it and declared that 'by this production the boards had been consecrated to higher things'. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote that nothing could surpass the majesty of the play, and Koerner assigned it a high rank among Schiller's productions. On the other hand it was spoken of by the satellites of the disgruntled Herder as a 'singular fata morgana', and a 'shocking monstrosity'; while F.H. Jacobi characterized it as a 'disgusting spook made by mixing heaven and hell'. And these discordant voices, in all their vehemence of expression, have been echoed by later critics; so that in the case of this particular drama, as Bellermann observes, it is hardly possible to speak of a settled average opinion. On one point, nevertheless, there is very general agreement: namely, that the diction of the choruses is magnificent in its kind. Nothing finer in German poetry anywhere.

From the outset critical discussion of 'The Bride of Messina' has turned mainly upon its antique elements, that is, upon its chorus and its treatment of the fate-idea. There has been endless comparison of Sophocles' 'King Oedipus' and endless logomachy about free-will and predestination in their relation to guilt. And such discussion is pertinent, because we have Schiller's own word that he wished to vie with Sophocles. An oft-quoted passage from a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt runs as follows:

My first attempt at a tragedy in the strict form will give you pleasure. From it you will be able to judge whether I could have carried off a prize as a contemporary of Sophocles. I do not forget that you have called me the most modern of modern poets, and have thus thought of me in the sharpest contrast to everything that is styled antique. I should thus have reason to be doubly pleased if I could wrest from you the admission that I have been able to make even this strange spirit my own.

At first blush this looks like an abandonment of the position stated so clearly and emphatically in the letter to Suevern (page 380). In reality, however, it is not so. Schiller was not concerned to imitate Sophocles, nor to revive an ancient form with, pedantic rigor. He was as far as possible from a one-sided worship of the Greeks. His reference to his 'strict form' hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot, fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian audience by a play of Sophocles,—more especially by the 'King Oedipus'.

For the groundwork of his tragedy he resorted to the well-worn fiction of the hostile brothers, giving it this form: Two princes grow up in mutual hatred, but are finally reconciled through the influence of their mother. Both fall in love, each without the other's knowledge, with a young woman of whose family they know nothing, and who is in reality their sister. One day the younger prince finds the object of his passion in the arms of his brother, who has just learned the secret of the girl's birth. Instantly the old hate blazes up anew, and in a paroxysm of blind rage Don Cesar kills his brother. Then, when he discovers the whole truth, he expiates his crime by a voluntary death.—In this scheme, it will be observed, the salient point is the fratricide committed in a sudden frenzy of passion: everything else leads up to this or grows out of it. From a modern point of view the crime is adequately accounted for by the character of Don Cesar; but if the story was to be given a Sophoclean coloring it was necessary that the horrors appear as the necessary evolution of ineluctable fate.

In employing the fate-idea for dramatic purposes the Greek poet had, in the first place, the great advantage of a definite mythological tradition which was known to everybody. In the second place, he wrote for people who still believed in oracles and received them seriously as credible manifestations of divine foreknowledge. Again, he could count on a living belief in the hereditary character of guilt: the belief that a good man, leading his life without evil intent, might be led to commit horrible and revolting acts because of some ancient taint in his blood; or because the gods, in their inscrutable government of the world, had decreed that he should thus sin and suffer. Just how far the Greek conception of moral responsibility differed in a general way from the modern, is a trite question which need not be gone into here. Suffice it to say that the difference has often been too broadly and too sharply stated. Not all Greek tragedies were tragedies of fate,—indeed it was a saying of Schiller that the 'King Oedipus' constitutes a genus by itself—nor is there any definite unitary conception which can be described as 'modern' for the purpose of a contrast.

After all, that which affects us in tragedy is very much the same as that which affected the Greeks, namely, the sense of life's overruling mystery. And whether we refer the happenings of life to an all-wise Providence, or to a scientific order which is so because it is so, they remain alike incommensurable with our ethical feeling. The bullet of a crazed fanatic, or a lethal germ in a glass of water, may end the noblest career in horrible suffering. In the drama, it is true, we prefer that no use be made of such mad calamities and that what befalls a man shall at least seem to grow out of his character. But then a man's character is the effect of a hundred subtle causes which began their operation in part before he was born; so that there is an element of essential truth in the saying that character is fate. We have become aware that there is a sense in which it is exactly true that the sins of the father are visited upon the children.

In short, modern thought has not tended to clear up but rather to deepen the mystery of life in its relation to antecedent conditions; of fate in its relation to desert. Our common sense, as embodied in law, treats a man as responsible for the good or evil that he personally intends. This is no doubt an excellent practical rule, without which society could hardly exist at all; but looked at philosophically it does not really touch the heart of the great mystery which is the theme of 'King Oedipus' and of 'The Bride of Messina'. The young Oedipus, while living at Corinth with his foster-father, Polybus, whom he supposes to be his real father, is told by the oracle that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. What should he do? Commit suicide in order to stultify the oracle, or resolve to kill no man and to marry no woman? The story imputes to him no blame for doing neither of these things. He acts as a man would act who sees himself confronted by an evitable danger. He leaves Corinth, but the very step that he takes to avoid his fate brings it surely to pass. He meets a stranger in the road. A quarrel arises over the question of passing,—a quarrel as to the merit of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled itself, as the spectator knew from the beginning that it would. The interest of the tragedy turns largely upon the overwhelming remorse of Oedipus and Jocasta when they discover the truth.

To match these conditions Schiller requires us to imagine a medieval prince of Messina reigning at some indefinite time in the Middle Ages. While his two sons are yet children he has a dream in which he sees two laurel-trees growing out of his marriage-bed, and between them a lily which changes to flame and consumes his house. An Arabian astrologer, for whom he has a heathenish partiality, interprets the dream as meaning that a daughter yet to be born will cause the destruction of his dynasty. So when a daughter is born he orders her put to death. But the mother has also had her dream,—of a lion and an eagle bringing their bloody prey in sweet concord to a little child playing on the grass. A pious Christian monk explains this dream as meaning that a daughter will unite the quarrelsome sons in passionate love. So the queen saves the life of her new-born child and has her secretly brought up in a convent not far from Messina. As long as the father lives the hostile brothers are restrained from fighting, but when he dies their feud breaks out in open war. Each surrounds himself with retainers, Messina is torn by factional strife, and there is danger from external enemies. Citizens implore the mother to effect a reconciliation, failing which they threaten a revolution. At last she succeeds in arranging a peaceful meeting in her presence.

Such is Schiller's presupposition,—a singular blend of Christianity and paganism, such as at once gives difficulty to the imagination. A prince reigning under a Christian order of things, in a city of churches and convents, yet willing to murder his child on account of a dream interpreted to him by an Arab soothsayer, is not a very plausible invention. And the same may be said of much that follows. In half-a-dozen places the tragedy would come to an untimely end did not one or another of the characters conveniently refrain from doing or saying what a human being would inevitably do or say under the circumstances. Beatrice grows up in the convent without taking vows and is kept in ignorance of her lineage. Though her mother longs for her, she never sees her, and communicates with her only through the old servant, Diego. Such conduct is perhaps intelligible during the life of the king, but with him out of the way one would expect the mother to take her daughter home without a moment's delay. Instead of that she waits two months, merely sending word to Beatrice to prepare for some unnamed change of fortune. She also keeps the secret from her sons during these two months, without any sufficient reason. When questioned on the subject by Don Cesar in the play, she makes the bitter feud of the brothers her excuse:

How could I place your sister here atwixt Your bare and reeking swords? In your fierce rage You would not hearken to a mother's voice; And could I have brought her, the pledge of peace, The anchor of my every dearest hope, To be perchance the victim of your strife?

But this is strange logic. One does not see at all how the sister's life would have been imperiled; and if she was to be the pledge of peace,—as the mother's dream seemed to foretell,—then there was the best of reasons for bringing her home at the earliest possible moment.

And then how singularly Don Manuel behaves! He is the elder son, and as such must be heir to the throne; but of that we hear nothing in the play. He falls in love with Beatrice, sees her often during a period of months, and secures from her a promise of marriage; but he never tells her who he is, nor does he ask her a question about her own lineage. When she tells him of an old man who comes to her occasionally as messenger from her unknown family, and who has at last bidden her prepare for a change of abode, he makes no attempt to see the stranger and find out whither his bride is to be taken. For such conduct he can have no possible reason, but Schiller has one; for were Don Manuel once to set eyes on the old family servant, Diego, a clearing-up would of course be inevitable. Instead of doing the one natural thing, Don Manuel abducts his sweetheart during the night, with her consent, and takes her to a garden in Messina. There he leaves her alone to await his coming,—a singular thing for a prince to do with his bride, but necessary to the tragedy.

More dubious still is the remarkable silence of Beatrice when she is exposed to the stormy wooing of Don Cesar in the garden. The fiction is that he has caught a glimpse of her two months before, on the occasion of his father's funeral, and has since been constantly searching for her. Having now found her, through one of his spies, he makes love to her jubilantly through sixty lines of text, but she answers never a syllable and lets him go away in supposed triumph. A bare word from her, such as a woman could not help saying under the circumstances, would end the complication, since it would send Don Cesar away baffled; and then there would be no occasion for his returning to the garden a little later. Maidenly fright and consternation cannot account rationally for such behavior; one sees that she holds her tongue because to set it in motion would be dramaturgically disastrous.

But the climax of unnaturalness is reached in the scene between the queen and her two sons, when old Diego reports that Beatrice has been abducted from the convent—presumbly by Moorish corsairs. The distracted mother urges her sons to go at once to the rescue of their sister. But here a difficulty presents itself. If the brothers are to have the faintest chance of finding their sister, it is clearly of the first importance that they know something about her, and particularly that they know where she has been kept in hiding. Now this knowledge can be safely imparted to Don Cesar but not to Don Manuel. So Don Cesar is made to rush away hotly, at all adventure, without the slightest clew of any kind,—the reason being that it would not do for him to hear that which Diego is about to tell. The younger brother thus conveniently out of the way, Don Manuel, who has begun to suspect the truth, implores his mother to tell him where the lost Beatrice has been concealed. Evidently the only natural part for the mother is to answer the question. But that would not do; so she interrupts him and urges him away with such senseless exclamations as 'Fly to action!' 'Follow your brother's example!' 'Behold my tears!' And when at last he succeeds in bringing out the fateful inquiry, she only answers:

The bowels of earth were not a safer refuge!

Then Don Manuel ceases to press his question and stands quietly by while Diego tells his remorseful story of Beatrice's visit to the church on the day of her father's funeral. Strangely enough this recital suggests to Don Manuel the hopeful suspicion that his sister and his sweetheart may, after all, not be the same person; so he rushes away to question Beatrice, when he must know that his mother is the one person in the world who can best resolve his doubts. Then, when he is gone, Don Cesar comes back, and the mother very calmly proceeds to give him the all-important information which she has just withheld from Don Manuel.

Such is the device, of convenient silence at critical points where speech would be natural but ruinous, by which Schiller leads up to his climax. There is no other play of his, early or late, the entanglement of which is so palpably artificial; so like a child's house of cards, built up with bated breath lest a breath should topple it over. According to Boettiger, Schiller once took note of what some critic had remarked upon this lavish use of silence in 'The Bride of Messina' and expressed surprise that any one could so misconceive him. He went on to say, if we can trust Boettiger, that it is 'precisely in this closing of the mouth at critical moments, when a saving word might rend the iron net of fate, that the unevadable and demonic power of evil-brooding destiny manifests itself most clearly and sends a gruesome shudder of awe through every spectator.' This is certainly a good defense if we assume that the great object of dramatic poetry is to exhibit the working-out of some abstract scheme of mysterious fate. Under that hypothesis one has no right to complain if the characters are treated like puppets,—pulled hither and thither in unnatural directions and made to speak when they should be silent, and to be silent when they should speak. If one finds the scheme impressive, one will think of that, get his thrill of awe and be thankful. But it is somewhat different if one holds that the verities of human nature are more interesting than any scheme, and that the great object of the serious drama should be to exhibit human beings in the stress of life. One who takes that view will wish, while recognizing the great qualities of 'The Bride of Messina', that its author had not gone quite so far in his contempt of realism.

For, after all, the highest law of the drama is the law of psychological truth, which requires that the characters be humanly conceivable and act as human beings would act under the circumstances imagined. This law is not kept in 'The Bride of Messina', with the result that the first three acts fall short of the effect that they are intended to produce. It is different with the fourth act. There everything is in order, and the simple and noble impressiveness of the tragedy leaves nothing to be desired. And it is an interesting fact that this impressiveness depends only in a slight degree upon the fulfillment of the old dreams and prophecies. To be sure they are fulfilled; but we are not required to put faith in the inspiration either of the Arab soothsayer or of the Christian monk. Their vaticinations might be mere fallible guess-work; Don Cesar might live and give them the lie, so far as any external constraint is concerned. But he himself feels that the heavy hand of fate is upon him and that continued life would be intolerable. The whole pathos of the tragedy is transferred to the inner being of the surviving brother, and one feels that his self-destruction proceeds from the law of his own nature, and not from any fatalistic necessity that is laid upon him.

The truth would seem to be that the fate-idea, while of course it must be taken into consideration in any careful estimate of 'The Bride of Messina', has been made a little too prominent by many of the critics. What the spectator sees, says one writer who is in the main an admirable expounder of Schiller, is "gigantic Fate striding over the stage. He sees a wild, tyrannical race, burdened with ancestral guilt, turning against its own flesh and blood.... He is made to feel that the self-destruction of this race is nothing accidental, that it is a divine visitation, a judgment of eternal justice pronounced against usurpation and lawlessness, that it means the birth of a new spiritual order out of doom and death."[127] But is this what is actually seen? Is it not rather true that Schiller makes but little out of the matter of ancestral guilt? We hear, it is true, that the old prince was of an alien stock that had won the sovereignty of Messina with the sword and held it by force. But this is no very appalling crime as the world goes, and especially as the world went in the Middle Ages. One hardly thinks of William of Normandy, for example, as a revolting criminal deserving of the divine wrath. Then we hear, too, that the old prince had appropriated to himself a wife who was 'his father's choice'. But the whole matter is disposed of in two or three choral lines which leave not even a clear, much less a strong impression. There are no data for an ethical judgment. We are not told wherein the superior right of the father consisted. For aught we know the son may have had the better claim, and the father's curse may have been only the impotent scolding of a disappointed dotard. It is difficult to see anything here which can rationally warrant eternal justice in extirpating the race. And when we pass from the presuppositions to the play itself, we see that none of the characters except Don Cesar does anything seriously blameworthy.

If then it were clearly the central purpose of Schiller to justify the moral government of the world, or to exhibit the workings of an august Fate in itself worthy of reverence, we should have to admit that he has missed the mark; for the fate that he represents is not worthy of reverence at all. But what is the central fact of the play, as seen by the unsophisticated spectator who has never read the Greek poets nor heard of the house of Labdacus? Evidently it is the murder expiated by a voluntary death. A high-minded youth knowingly kills his brother in a moment of blind rage, because he thinks that his brother has deceived him. When he learns the truth, and learns also of the old dreams and prophecies, he feels that he too must die. Here is the real tragedy,—in the resolution of Don Cesar and his steadfast adherence to it in the face of his mother's and his sister's entreaties. The apparatus of dreams and prophecies and fate is meant to work upon the mind of Don Cesar rather than upon that of the spectator. Superstition adds to the burden of his remorse until it becomes unbearable and death appears the only road to peace:

Dying I bring to naught the ancient curse, A free death only breaks the chain of fate,

In a prefatory essay upon 'The Use of the Chorus in Tragedy' Schiller defended his innovation and incidentally set his heel upon the head of the serpent of naturalism. True art, he insisted, must have a higher aim than to produce an illusion of the actual. Its object is not to divert men with a momentary dream of freedom, but to make them truly free by awakening and developing the power of imaginative objectivation. Nature itself being only an idea of the mind, and not something that appears to the senses, art must be ideal in order to represent the reality of nature. To demand upon the stage an illusion of the actual is absurd, since dramatic art rests entirely upon ideal conventions of one kind or another. Therefore, so the argument goes on, it was well when a poetic diction was substituted for the prose of every-day life, and the next great step is to reintroduce the chorus and thereby 'declare war openly and honestly against naturalism in art'. The chorus is likened to a 'living wall which tragedy builds about itself in order completely to shut out the actual world and to preserve for itself its ideal domain, its poetic freedom'.

In consonance with these ideas we have a chorus divided into two parts, one consisting of the elderly retainers of Don Manuel, the other of the younger retainers of Don Cesar. These two semi-choruses take a certain part in the action. On the one hand they are like the materialized shadows of their respective leaders, having no will of their own. When the brothers compose their feud and embrace each other, the semi-choruses do likewise,—which comes perilously near to the ridiculous. On the other hand the semi-choruses have a horizon of their own and perform, to a certain extent, the old function of the ideal spectator. They comment in sonorous strains upon present, past and future, and upon the high matters of life and death and fate.

Schiller's argument on the use of the chorus, while interesting in its way, does not now sound very convincing; perhaps because we have come to have less faith than he had in the possibility of settling such questions by abstract reasoning. Forms of art spring out of local and temporal conditions; they have their exits and their entrances. Now and then a reversion to some earlier form may prove acceptable, but in general it can have only a curious or antiquarian interest. The man of reading, who knows his Greek poets, will be glad to have seen once or twice in his life a genuine Greek play,—preferably in the Greek language, with all the accessories as perfect as possible. Next to that he will enjoy a perfect imitation, like the first portion of Goethe's 'Helena'. But just in proportion as he is permeated by the Greek spirit he will feel the spuriousness of Schiller's so-called chorus. For the effect of the Greek chorus depended not so much upon the meaning of the words as upon the sensuous charm of the music and the dance. To sacrifice these is to sacrifice that which is most vital and leave only the simulacrum of a chorus. Some small effects in the line of the picturesque can be achieved by means of costuming, marching and grouping, but the rest can be nothing but elocution,—a frosty appeal to the ethical sense, offered as a surrogate for the witchery of song and rhythmic motion. One may be pardoned for thinking that a good ballet would have served the purpose better.

The reader of the play, however, is not disturbed by any considerations of this kind. For him the choruses are simply poetry,—admirable poetry, for the most part, in Schiller's very best vein. What a wealth of imagery and what a splendor of varying rhythms! And how cunningly the gorgeous diction twines itself, like ivy about a bare wall, concealing the nakedness of commonplace and giving an effect of noble sententious wisdom! This is and must remain the great value of 'The Bride of Messina',—to delight the reader with the charm of its style. Schiller's plea for the chorus passed unheeded save by the philologists. His example was not imitated; indeed he himself probably had no serious hope that it would be. On the other hand, there did spring up in the next two decades a most luxuriant crop of so-called fate-tragedies, which, with their horrors, banalities and puerilities, soon brought the species into contempt and made it fair game for the telling satire of Platen. The fashion,—a thoroughly bad fashion in the main,—was undoubtedly set by 'The Bride of Messina'; but we cannot make Schiller answerable for the hair-raising and blood-curdling inventions of Werner, Houwald, Muellner, Grillparzer and Heine.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 127: Kuno Francke, "Social Forces in German Literature," page 394.]



CHAPTER XX

William Tell

Der alte Urstand der Natur kehrt wieder, Wo Mensch dem Menschen gegenuebersteht; Zum letzten Mittel, wenn kein andres mehr Verfangen will, ist ihm das Schwert gegeben. 'William Tell'.

Schiller's last play, like his first, was inspired by the Goddess of Freedom, but what a difference between the wild-eyed bacchante of the earlier day and the decorous muse of 'William Tell'! There the frenzied revolt of a young idealist against chimerical wrongs of the social order; here a handful of farmers, rising sanely in the might of union and appealing to the old order against intolerable oppression. There the tragedy of an individual madman; here the triumph of a laudable patriotism.

'Tell' is a fresh illustration of its author's versatility, for nothing more different from its immediate predecessors could easily be imagined. It is also the most thoroughly human among his plays, and the only one that does not end upon a tragic note. Finally it is the most popular, though the most loosely articulated,—a fact that shows how little the permanent interest and classical prestige of a dramatic production depend upon its satisfying the ideal demands of critical theory.

It was noted casually in the preceding chapter that rumor began to be occupied with speculations about Schiller's 'Tell' before he had seriously thought of writing a play on the subject. In the summer of 1797 Goethe had revisited Switzerland and brought back with him the idea of a narrative poem about William Tell. He discussed the matter with Schiller, incidentally telling him much about the Forest Cantons. Possibly he may have suggested, in the presence of a mutual friend, that the theme had dramatic possibilities,—which would account sufficiently for the aforesaid rumor. Finding his supposed plan the subject of curious gossip, Schiller was led to look more closely into the subject. He read Tschudi's 'Chronicon' and found it Homeric and Herodotean in its simple straightforwardness. The legend fascinated him and he began to see in it the material of a popular drama that should take the theatrical world by storm. He was eager for such a triumph, and the more so because 'The Bride of Messina', as staged by Iffland in Berlin, had met only with an equivocal success: many were pleased, but there was a plenty of adverse comment. Iffland was now the director of the Royal Prussian Theater, and thus in a position to serve the interests of Schiller, whom he devotedly admired. It was therefore worth while for a man who had chosen to be a dramatic poet, and whose income depended upon his popularity, to forego further experimentation with unfamiliar art-forms and set about supplying that which would interest average human nature.

Work began in the spring of 1803 and proceeded very steadily during the ensuing months. The letters of the period express unbounded confidence in the nascent play. It was to be a 'powerful thing which should shake the theaters of Germany', and a 'genuine folk-play for the entire public'. Honest Tschudi continued to be the great source, but other writers were read and excerpted. Schiller took infinite pains with his local color, noting down from the books all sorts of minutiae that might aid his imagination. Take for illustration the following jottings from Faesi and Schleuchzer, two of his subsidiary authorities:

There are mountains that consist entirely of ice—Firnen; they shine like glass and get their isolated conical shape from the process of melting in the summer.—Clouds form in the mountain-gorges and attach themselves to the rocks; herefrom prognostication of the weather.—View from on high when one stands above the clouds. The landscape seems to lie before one like a great lake, from which islands stand forth.—In the summer, cascades everywhere in the mountains.—Chamois graze in flocks, the picket (Vorgeis) piping in case of danger.—Weather signs: Swallows fly low, aquatic birds dive, sheep graze eagerly, dogs paw up the earth, fish leap from the water. 'The gray governor of the valley (Thalvogt) is coming'; when this or that mountain puts on a cap, then drop the scythe and take the rake.—Peculiarity of a certain lake that it draws to itself persons sleeping on its bank.

A large amount of such conscientious note-taking, aided by a marvelous power of visualization, and supplemented also by what Goethe could tell from personal observation, resulted in a remarkably vivid and accurate local color. A letter of Schiller's written in December, 1803, tells of a purpose to go to Switzerland before he should print his play. The plan was not carried out, but if it had been there would have been little to change; for 'William Tell' reads throughout like the work of one thoroughly familiar with Swiss character, topography and folk-lore. There is not a slip of any importance in the entire play. Of course the conspiring farmers are idealized and their enemies are diabolized; but all this is so in the saga. Schiller had to deal with a patriotic myth, and he made no attempt to go behind the romantic veil of tradition; his purpose being simply to present the poetic essence of the saga as handed down by Tschudi. And he succeeded admirably. So far as the Swiss people are concerned, he well deserves the memorial they have placed in his honor upon the Mythenstein, near the legendary birth-place of their national independence.

Toward the close of the year 1803 came an interruption, Weimar society being thrown into a flutter by the visit of Madame de Stael, now on her famous tour of inspection. It was of course fitting that Schiller, as a local lion, should take his part in entertaining her; but the voluble lady was an Erscheinung new to his experience, and with his imperfect command of colloquial French he was hard put to it to bear up against the torrent of her conversation. He measured her very correctly at their first meeting, when they fell into an argument on the merits of the French drama. 'For what we call poetry', he wrote to Goethe, 'she has no sense'; nevertheless he gave her full credit for her great qualities, in especial for a good sense amounting to genius. And she in turn was pleased with the serious German who argued with her in lame French, not as one caring to hold his own in a conversational fencing-match, but as one wishing to convince her of important truths in which he really believed. It must have been an interesting occasion in a small way, this first rencontre between Schiller and the lady who was afterwards to speak of him so nobly and withal so justly in her celebrated book about Germany. Madame de Stael's sojourn in Weimar lasted some ten weeks, her portentous gift of speech becoming gradually more and more irksome to Schiller and Goethe. The social gayeties occasioned by her presence caused some retardation in the progress of 'William Tell', but on February 18, 1804, it was completed, and two days later the final installment was despatched to the waiting Iffland. How eagerly he was waiting may be inferred from the language used by him after perusal of the first act, which had been sent him a month earlier:

I have read, devoured, bent my knee; and my heart, my tears, my rushing blood, have paid ecstatic homage to your spirit, to your heart. Oh more! Soon, soon, more! Pages, scraps—whatever you can send! I tender hand and heart to your genius. What a work! What wealth, force, poetic beauty and irresistible power! God keep you! Amen.

These high-keyed expectations were not disappointed. The first performances of 'Tell', in the spring of 1804, were received with prodigious enthusiasm, and ever since then it has been a prime favorite of the German stage. It has no characters that can be called great, as Wallenstein is great, no complexity of plot, no thrilling surprises; and as for its psychology, a fairy tale could hardly be more simple. That which has endeared it to the Germans is its picturesqueness and its passionate zeal for freedom.

The theme of 'Tell' is the successful revolt of the Forest Cantons against their governors. Three actions that have no necessary connection with one another—the conspiracy of the cantons, the private feud of Tell and Gessler, and the love-affair of Rudenz and Bertha—are carried along together in such a way that all find their natural conclusion in the final celebration of victory. This feature of the play has often been criticized as impairing its unity; and certainly, from the conventional point of view the objection has some force. 'Tell' is a play without a preponderating hero. We may say that it has three heroes, or rather five, since among the conspirators interest is pretty evenly distributed between Stauffacher, Melchthal and Walther Fuerst. But in reality the hero is the Swiss people considered as a unit. Stauffacher and the other conspirators interest us as representatives of a suffering population. To portray the suffering and the termination of it through sturdy self-help is the central purpose of the play. This it is which gives it an essential unity, notwithstanding the three separate actions.

The theme is an inspiring one, and the modern world owes Schiller an immense debt for presenting it in austere simplicity, unincumbered with any dubious or disturbing philosophy. One cannot help loving so good a lover of freedom; for the sentiment does honor to human nature, notwithstanding some latter-day indications that it is going out of fashion. It may not be the highest and holiest of enthusiasms for the individual,—we give our best homage rather to self-surrender,—but if any political emotion is worthy of a lasting reverence, it is that one which attaches men to the motherland and leads them to stand together against an alien oppressor. Sometimes it may be well, in God's long providence, that a weak or a backward people should be absorbed or ruled by a stronger power; but the sentiment which leads it to fight against absorption or subjugation is none the less admirable. And when the foreign domination is reckless and inhuman, standing for nothing but vindictive malice and the greed of empire; and when the victims of the misrule are strong in the simple virtues of the poor, we have the case in its most appealing aspect.

This is the case that is presented in 'William Tell',—the most notable drama in modern literature upon the theme of national resistance to foreign tyranny. Its influence in Germany as a classic of political freedom—during the Napoleonic era and later, when it was a question of setting a limit to domestic absolutism—has been immense. And there is really no danger of its losing its potency; for it appeals to a sentiment which, while it may wax and wane with the movements of the Zeitgeist, is now wrought into the heart-fiber of all the occidental nations, and not least of all—contrary to an opinion widely accepted in this country—of the Germans.

The uppermost thought of Schiller, then, was to win sympathy for freedom and the rights of man; yet in 'William Tell' we have nothing to do with any species of cloud-born idealism. The bearers of the message are not fantastic dreamers, like Posa; they do not call themselves ambassadors of all mankind, or citizens of the centuries to come. They are a plain, practical folk, whose wishes do not fly far afield and who attempt nothing that they cannot carry through. They are not in the least given to fighting for the sake of fighting; on the contrary, the thought of bloodshed is abhorrent to them. All they wish is to be allowed to pursue their peaceful, partriarchal industries, as their fathers did before them, under laws of their own devising. But things have come to such a pass that their lives, their property and the honor of their women are not safe from the malice, cupidity and lust of their rulers. And even under such conditions the thought of a radical revolution does not occur to them: they do not rise against the overlordship of the emperor, but only against the brutal tyranny of the governors who disgrace him. Their final triumph opens no other vista of change than that, in the future, another emperor will send them better governors. Thus the upshot of the whole revolution is simply a provisional demonstration of Stauffacher's proposition that 'tyrannical power has a limit'.

This seems, at first, like a rather lame vindication of the sacred majesty of freedom, especially when we reflect that the whole question at issue is not a question of independence at all, but merely whether the cantons will give up their Reichsunmittelbarkeit,—and with it certain old customs to which they are attached,—in order to become vassals of the House of Hapsburg. Were they willing to do that,—so it is said by Roesselmann at the Ruetli meeting,—all their troubles would end forthwith; the cruel governors would deal kindly with them, would 'fondle' them. If this is so,—and other passages confirm the saying of the priest Roesselmann,—then it is patent that the conduct of Gessler is not the aimless brutality of a brute, but a policy deliberately pursued for the purpose of terrorizing the cantons into an acceptance of Hapsburg overlordship. And this in turn throws its own light on the character of Gessler. Only a blockhead would try to gain such an end in such a way. This, however, is only another way of saying what has often been pointed out, that Gessler is simply a fairy-tale tyrant, copied very closely from Tschudi; a sort of typical bad man, whom the saga, after inventing him out of nothing, has made as black as possible in order the more clearly and strongly to justify the revolt. And yet, in the play, Gessler never becomes entirely ridiculous; he does not seem a caricature of humanity,—perhaps because history teems with governors and viceroys who have exercised their little brief authority very much in his spirit, even if they have failed to commit his particular atrocities.

These last considerations are meant to light up the fact that the effect of the play does not, after all, depend mainly upon its vindication of any political doctrine. We are nowhere in the region of abstractions. The sympathy that one feels for the insurgents is in no sort political, but purely human; it is of the same kind that one might feel for a community of Hindu ryots in their efforts to rid themselves of a man-eating tiger. Only in the play this sympathy is very much intensified by the picturesque lovableness of the afflicted population. It is here, in the picture of land and people, that Schiller's mature art, which had brought him to a sovereign mastery of stage effects, may be said to win its greatest triumph. One may describe his method, fairly if somewhat paradoxically, as that of romantic realism. What a masterpiece of exposition we have in the opening scenes! The beautiful lake, at precisely its most fascinating point; the fisher-boy, all careless of the great world, singing his pretty song of the smiling but treacherous water; the herdsman and the hunter, announcing themselves above on the rocks in characteristic songs, and then conversing for a moment about the weather and their employments; the sudden arrival of Baumgarten with his tale of wrong and vengeance; the storm on the lake, and the hurried dialogue between the cautious fisherman and the stout-hearted Tell, who 'does what he cannot help doing'; the building of the hateful Zwing-Uri; the death of the slater and Bertha's curse; the grief and fury of young Melchthal, and, finally, the solemn covenant for life and death of the three leaders,—what variety and animation are here, and what a wealth of realistic detail! And how perfectly convincing it all is,—not a false note anywhere, nor a note that is held too long! Well might Goethe characterize this exposition as 'a complete piece in itself and withal an excellent one'. The first act of 'Tell' is one of the best first acts in all dramatic literature.

It is quite true that the exposition seems to promise somewhat more than is afterwards fulfilled. One who is familiar with Schiller's usual method naturally expects that something will come of the rescue of Baumgarten; but nothing does come of it except to throw a side-light upon the general situation and to bring out the character of Tell. Again, one expects to see more of Dame Gertrud, the 'wise daughter of noble Iberg'. One looks for her to reappear under circumstances that shall give her something important to do and shall put her sagacity and courage to the test. It is not the habit of Schiller to introduce such weighty personages at the beginning of a play and then drop them. To understand him in this instance one has but to remember that his hero is always the Swiss people. The Stauffachers, as a shining example of thrift and virtue; their dignified and influential position in the community; their fine new house that has roused the venomous jealousy of Gessler,—all this is part of the situation, and it is the situation that counts. And how superbly the picture is completed by the meeting at the Ruetli! Such an old-fashioned parliament, held of necessity under the stars and in the darkness of night, but with all possible regard to the ancient forms, was not only a novel and a picturesque idea in itself, but it was the best device which could possibly be imagined for bringing sharply into view the whole character of the Swiss, in its winsome, patriarchal simplicity.

Here again, however, we have a radical departure from Schiller's usual method; for what is actually done at this seemingly important meeting is, after all, in itself rather insignificant, and without direct influence upon the subsequent course of events. The conspirators decide to do nothing immediately, but to wait for a favorable opportunity during the Christmas season, some seven or eight weeks ahead. This determination obviously involves a halt in the dramatic action, so far as the conspiracy is concerned. In dealing with this difficulty, Schiller departs from his ordinary method of concentration and allows himself to be guided by the epical character of Tschudi's narrative. The result is that we have, somewhat as in Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen', a succession of dramatic pictures, rather than a drama bound together by a severe logic. In the third and fourth acts we hear no more of the conspirators,—aside from some expressions of regret for the delay,—and attention is concentrated upon Tell, who has hitherto taken no part except to rescue Baumgarten and to refuse his cooeperation at the Ruetli, on the ground that he is not the man for a confab, and that 'the strong man is mightiest alone'.

The character of Tell, as depicted by Schiller, has been the subject of much criticism, the strictures relating more particularly to his shooting the apple from his son's head, and then to his subsequent assassination of Gessler. There is an oft-quoted opinion of Bismarck, which may be quoted again, since it expresses so well a thought that has no doubt occurred, some time or other, to most readers and spectators of the play. Busch makes Bismarck say, under date of October 25, 1870:

It would have been more natural and more noble, according to my ideas, if, instead of shooting at the boy, whom the best of archers might hit instead of the apple, he had killed the governor on the spot. That would have been righteous wrath at a cruel demand. I do not like his hiding and lurking; that does not befit a hero—not even a bushwhacker.

Undoubtedly such conduct as is here suggested for Tell would be more 'heroic', in accordance with, our conventional ideas of heroism. And the thing would have been dramatically feasible. We can imagine Tell, for example, as making sham preparations to shoot at the apple and then suddenly sending his arrow through the heart of his enemy; and we can also imagine a further management of the scene such that Tell should escape with his boy. Thus everything would be accomplished on the public square at Altorf, in full face of the enemy, which is subsequently accomplished from the secure ambush by the 'hollow way' near Kuessnacht. Such conduct would have been 'heroic', but the obvious objection to it is that it would have destroyed the very heart of the saga, which it was not for Schiller to make over but to render dramatically plausible. It may be urged, perhaps, that a poet who had made Joan of Arc die in glory on the battle-field need not have been so punctilious in following the exact line of Tschudi's story. But the cases are not exactly parallel. There the alternative was a scene of unmitigated and revolting horror, which would have destroyed the effect of the tragedy; here it was simply a question of when Gessler should be killed with an arrow. To make Tell do just what the saga makes him do, and do it without forfeiting sympathy, was a delicate problem, which may well have fascinated Schiller, who is surely the last man in the world to be accused of holding tame views as to 'heroism'. At any rate he must have felt that a Tell who should not shoot at the apple and hit it would be simply no Tell at all.

One who looks closely at the famous scene will not fail to see that it is very cleverly constructed and that every objection which has been urged against it is really met in the text. In the first place, Tell is not, and was never meant for, a hero of the conventional sort. There is no element of Quixotry about him. He is a plain man, of limited horizon and small gift of speech. Public affairs do not particularly interest him. He is a hardy mountaineer, with a strong trust in his own strength and resourcefulness; a good oarsman and a great shot with the crossbow; but he makes no fuss about these things. Let it be repeated that he is not foolhardy. The dangers of the mountain, which bulk so large in the imagination of his wife, are simply the familiar element of the life that he loves. He treats her timorous apprehensions with the good-natured coolness of a man who knows how to take care of himself. He is affectionate, but not a bit sentimental. All this makes an eminently natural and consistent character.

Now what must such a character do when required, under penalty of death, by a brutal tyrant whose power is absolute, to hit an apple on his son's head? Naturally his first thought is of the child, and he tries to escape by offering his own life. The reply is that he must shoot or die with his child. Thus there is no recourse; to refuse to shoot at all is worse than to shoot and miss. If he kill Gessler on the spot,—and we must suppose that the thought occurs to him,—he will expose not only himself but his child and his wife and children at home to the fury of the troopers. The only safety lies in making a successful shot. And after all Tell knows that he can make it; it is only a question of nerve, and he has the nerve if he can only find it. And here comes in an important touch which is not in Tschudi—the fearless confidence of Walther Tell in his father's marksmanship. The effect of this is to touch the pride of the bowman, to clear his eye, and to steady his hand. It is also a familiar fact that, with strong natures, a terrible danger, with just one chance of escape, may produce a moment of perfect self-control while the chance is taken.

The whole scene, in addition to its effectiveness on the stage, is psychologically true to life. With all deference to the great qualities of the first Chancellor of the German Empire, one must insist that Schiller was a better playwright than he and found precisely the best solution to his dramatic problem.

And so of the later scene in the 'hollow way'; there is nothing wrong with it, unless it be the great length of the soliloquy. The killing of an enemy from an ambush, without giving him a chance for his life, is of course somewhat repugnant to our ideas of chivalry. We think of it instinctively as the deed of a savage, and not of a man with a pure heart and a good cause. But it must be remembered that such ideas are themselves conventional, and that we have in 'Tell' a reversion to primitive conditions in which 'man stands over against man'. Gessler has forfeited all right to chivalrous treatment, and Tell is no knight engaged in fighting out a gentleman's feud. What is he to do? For himself, perhaps, he might take the chances of a fugitive in the mountains, but he cannot leave his wife and children exposed to Gessler's vengeful malice. There is no law to which he can appeal, the only law of the land being Gessler's will. In such a situation, clearly, there is no place for refined and chivalrous compunctions, or for ethical hair-splitting. Tell does what he must do. He is in the position of a man protecting his family from a savage or a dangerous beast, and is not called upon to risk his own life needlessly. Every reader of the old saga instinctively justifies him. His conduct is not noble or heroic, but natural and right.

If this is so, however, there would seem to be no pressing need of his long soliloquy. He being ex proposito a man of few words, his sudden volubility is a little surprising, though it should be duly noticed that the soliloquy is not a self-defense. There is no casuistry in it. Tell does not argue the case with himself, like one in doubt about the rightness of his conduct. That is as clear as day to him, and he never wavers for a moment. But he has time to think while waiting, and his soliloquy is only his thinking made audible. Delivered with even a slight excess of declamatory fervor, the lines are ridiculously out of keeping with Tell's character; but they can be spoken so as to seem at least tolerably natural,—as natural, perhaps, as any soliloquy. And this is true, let it be remarked in passing, of many and many a passage in Schiller. To some extent, very certainly, his reputation as a rhetorician is due to the histrionic spouting of lines that do not need to be spouted. To some extent, but not entirely: for even in 'Tell' his old fondness for absurdly extravagant forms of expression sometimes reasserted itself. Thus what can one make of a plain fisherman who talks in this wise about a rainstorm?

Rage on, ye winds! Flame down, ye lightning-bolts! Burst open, clouds! Pour out, ye drenching streams Of heaven, and drown the land! Annihilate I' the very germ the unborn brood of men! Ye furious elements, assert your lordship! Ye bears, ye ancient wolves o' the wilderness, Come back again! The land belongs to you. Who cares to live in it bereft of freedom!

The most serious blemish in 'William Tell' is the introduction of Johannes Parricida in the fifth act,—an idea which Goethe attributed to feminine influence of some sort.[128] The effect of it is to convert the rugged, manly Tell of the preceding acts into a sanctimonious Pharisee with whom one can have little sympathy. No doubt there is a moral difference between his act and that of Parricida, but it is a difference which one does not wish to hear Tell himself dilate upon. Seeing that the murdered emperor was solely responsible for the brutal governors and thus indirectly for all the woes of Switzerland; and seeing, too, that his death is the only guarantee we have at the end that the killing of Gessler will do any good, and not simply have the effect to bring down upon the land, including Tell and his family, the vengeance of some still more fiendish successor,—considering all this, one would rather not hear those horrified ejaculations of Tell about the pollution of the murderer's presence. They may produce a certain stagy effect of contrast, but the effect was not worth producing at the expense of Tell's character.

As for the love-story in 'William Tell', it is hardly of sufficient weight to merit extended discussion. Both Bertha and Rudenz are rather tamely and conventionally drawn, to meet the need of a pair of romantic lovers; they evidently cost their creator no very strenuous communings with the Genius of Art. Their private affair of the heart has nothing to do with the Tell episode and is but loosely related to the popular uprising. Their absence would not be very seriously felt in the drama, save that one would not like to miss Attinghausen as a picturesque representative of the old patriarchal nobility. The two scenes in which he appears are in themselves admirable.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 128: See Eckermann's "Gespraeche", under date of March 16, 1831. What Goethe there says, however, is in flat contradiction of the following passage contained in a letter of Schiller to Iffland, written April 14, 1804: "Auch Goethe ist mit mir ueberzeugt, dasz ohne jenen Monolog und ohne die persoenliche Erscheinung des Parricida der Tell sich gar nicht haette denken lassen."]



CHAPTER XXI

The End.—Unfinished Plays, Translations and Adaptations

Es stuerzt ihn mitten in der Bahn, Es reiszt ihn fort vom vollen Leben. 'William Tell'.

Our story of Schiller's life draws to a close. After the completion of 'William Tell' his tireless energy of production found its next theme in the story of Dmitri, the reputed son of Ivan the Terrible. Just how and whence the suggestion came to him is unknown, but the connection of things is patent enough in a general way. Far-reaching intrigues in high life had always had a fascination for him, and recent studies undertaken for 'Warbeck' had interested him in the type of the pretender whose kingly bearing seems to betoken kingly blood. In a work upon Russia,—a land which had been brought closer to the Schiller household by the appointment of Wilhelm von Wolzogen as Weimarian envoy to the Czar,—he read anew the history of the 'false Dmitri', and was struck by its dramatic capabilities. In 'Warbeck' he had thought to portray a pretender who knew that his claims were fraudulent; in Dmitri he found one who believed in himself. The psychological problem, and the idea of conquering an entirely new territory for the German drama, attracted him strongly, and he set about the laborious task of self-orientation.

Ere long, however, there came an interruption which, for a while, seemed to promise a momentous change in the tenor of his life. Iffland wished to lure him to Berlin and had intimated that the Prussian government might be disposed to offer inducements. Schiller was not entirely averse to the idea; at least he thought it worth while to reconnoitre. So, toward the end of April, 1804, he set out with wife and children for the Prussian capital, where he was received with the greatest cordiality. The king and queen of Prussia, to whom he was presented, were very gracious, and it was all decidedly pleasant. So at least he thought and so his wife pretended to think,—keeping down for her husband's sake the dismay which a daughter of fair Thuringia could not help feeling at the thought of making a home on the flat banks of the Spree. After a fortnight Schiller returned to Weimar and was presently invited by the Prussian minister, Beyme, to name his terms. Now came the rub; for he did not really wish to leave Weimar. He had taken deep root there and his affections clung to the place for the sake of Goethe and a few other friends. On the other hand, his stipend was but four hundred thalers, and his other sources of income were by no means such as to free him from anxiety about the future of his family. Feeling that it was his duty to better his position if possible, he laid his case before Karl August, who promptly doubled his stipend. After this it was virtually impossible for him to leave Weimar. Unwilling nevertheless to renounce the Berlin prospects altogether, he wrote to Beyme that for a consideration of two thousand thalers annually he would reside a few months of each year in Berlin. To this proposition Beyme made no answer. Possibly he thought the price too high for a fractional poet.

Pending these futile negotiations Schiller worked with great zest upon 'Demetrius ',—reading, excerpting, examining maps and pictures, schematizing, balancing possibilities, and so forth. But again he was interrupted; first by an unusually severe illness, which brought him to death's door and left him for weeks in a condition of helpless languor, and then by the distractions incident to the arrival of the hereditary Prince of Weimar with his Russian bride, Maria Paulovna. Golden reports had preceded this princess, who was expected to reach Weimar in November, and preparations were made to welcome her with distinguished honors. For some reason Goethe, in his capacity of director of the theater, remained inactive amid the general flutter until a few days before the great event, when he besought Schiller to come to the rescue. The result was 'The Homage of the Arts', called by its author a 'prologue'.

We have a rustic scene in which country-folk plant an orange-tree and invoke the blessing of pagan divinities. The Genius of Art appears, and with him the seven goddesses: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, Music, Dance and Drama. Genius asks for an explanation of the tree-planting, and is told by the rustics that it is an act of homage to their new queen, who has come from high imperial halls to live in their humble valley. They wish to bind her to them by keeping her reminded of home. On hearing this Genius assures them that the queen will not find all things strange in her new home: old friends are there after all. Then he leads forward his seven goddesses, who explain themselves and say pretty things about Russia. 'The Homage of the Arts' is in no sense a weighty production, but its graceful verse and well-turned compliments had the desired effect. Maria Paulovna was pleased with it.

The reaction from these Russophile festivities fell heavily upon Schiller and he became gradually weaker. Unequal to creative effort he undertook a translation of Racine's 'Phedre' in German pentameters and finished it about the middle of January, 1805. After this he threw himself with great energy upon 'Demetrius', but it was the final flicker of a dying flame. In February came a fresh prostration, and it was then evident that the end was near. Nevertheless he worked on for a few weeks longer with feverish eagerness. On the evening of April 29, he went to the theater. After the play was over, the young Voss,—a son of the poet, who had attached himself warmly to Schiller during these latest years,—came to him to attend him home. He found him in a violent fever, which soon led to exhaustion and delirium. This time the strong will of the sufferer and the eager offices of wife and physician proved unavailing. He lingered on a few days longer, now and then in his delirium reciting disconnected verse or scraps of Latin, until the end came, on the afternoon of the 9th of May. Three days later, between twelve and one o'clock at night, the body of the dead man was borne by a little group of friends through the silent and deserted streets of Weimar, and lowered into a vault in the churchyard of St. James. There it remained until 1826, when the remains were exhumed and, after some curious vicissitudes, were placed in an oaken coffin and deposited in the ducal mausoleum, where they now rest near those of Goethe and Karl August.[129]

The death of Schiller made many mourners. Goethe, who had himself been very ill, wrote to a friend in Berlin: 'I thought to lose myself, and now I lose a friend, and with him the half of my existence.' From every hand came tokens of sympathy for the widow. Maria Paulovna asked for the privilege of caring for the children. Queen Luise of Prussia sent a message of heartfelt condolence. Cotta, whose business relations with Schiller had given rise to a warm personal affection, made generous offers of financial aid. As for the nation at large, however, it can hardly be said that much notice was taken of the event. Schiller had led a secluded life, had been but little in the public eye, and his personality was known to but few. What should the passing of a single dreamer signify in the stirring epoch of Austerlitz and Jena? Not many knew that one of the real immortals had ceased to breathe,—one whose figure would loom up larger and larger in receding time, like a high mountain in the receding distance.

But leaving this subject, of Schiller's subsequent influence and reputation, for discussion in the concluding chapter, let us now turn to a brief survey of his unfinished plays and of his more important work as translator and adapter.

And first, 'Demetrius', of which one may say, as Schiller said of the Faust-fragment of 1790, that it is the torso of a Hercules. Such extant portions as had reached something like a final form in verse tell of a tragedy that bade fair to rank with 'Wallenstein', perhaps to surpass 'Wallenstein', in dramatic power and psychological interest. The completed portions pertain mainly to the first two acts; for the rest we have an immense mass of schemes, arguments, excerpts and collectanea. To read through this material, particularly the various schemes laboriously written out in numberless revisions, conveys at first an impression of over-solicitude, as if erudition and logical analysis were being relied upon to take the place of slackening inspiration. The moment one turns to the finished scenes, however, one sees that the poetic spring was still flowing in full measure; and one is amazed at the creative power which could still, with death knocking at the door, so swiftly and so surely fashion great poetry out of dull and contradictory books.

The story of the false Demetrius had been familiar to Schiller from his youth, but there is no evidence that he ever thought of dramatizing it until the year 1802, when we hear of an intended drama to be called 'The Massacre at Moscow'. Just as before in the cases of Fiesco and Wallenstein, he found here a notable conspirator whose character and motives were the subject of dispute among the historians. The more usual view was that Demetrius was an escaped monk who gave himself out as the son of Ivan the Terrible, having either himself invented the fraud or else taken upon himself a role that was suggested to him by some one else. On the other hand, there were those who regarded him as the genuine son of Ivan and thus entitled to the throne which he conquered from the usurper, Boris Gudunoff, in the year 1605. Fraudulent pretender, or genuine Czar of the blood of Rurik,—this was the great question. With a fine dramatic intuition Schiller conceived a third possibility, namely, that Demetrius, though not in reality Ivan's son, fully believed himself to be such until he had triumphed, and then, though undeceived, went on his calamitous way as a tyrant because he could not turn back.

His first thought was to begin with a scene at Sambor in Galicia, wherein the escaped monk Grischka, tarrying at the house of Mnischek in complete ignorance of his high birth, but given none the less to ambitious dreaming, should be made known as Ivan's son, Demetrius, supposed to have been murdered sixteen years before at the instigation of Boris. Several scenes, interesting in their way but somewhat lacking in horizon, were elaborated in accordance with this idea. Then, however, the plan was modified and it was decided to begin directly with a session of the Polish parliament at Cracow, at which Demetrius should appear and triumphantly assert his claims before King Sigismund and the assembled nobles. This scene, though left imperfect here and there, is certainly one of the best that ever came from Schiller's pen. As usual we have a bit of world-drama, for the element out of which the action grows is the national antipathy of Poles and Russians. And what an interesting figure is the young Demetrius, confronting all the pomp and power with the easy dignity of one born to kingship, and carrying the parliament with him by dint of his own self-confidence and royal bearing. He is essentially a new creation, unlike any of Schiller's other youthful heroes, though a certain family resemblance is of course discernible. Ambition of power is the great mainspring of his character, and he is as unscrupulous as Napoleon. Nevertheless he has his sentimental and his ethical promptings, and the whole basis of his conduct in this first part of the play is his perfect confidence that he is the son of Ivan.

It is thus ever to be regretted that Schiller did not live to write the later scenes in which Demetrius, on the eve of his triumphant entry into Moscow, should be approached by the fabricator doli and told the true story of his vulgar birth. Here, just as in the 'Oedipus Rex', was a stupendous tragic fate, unconnected with any conscious guilt and growing entirely out of the circumstances. What should Demetrius do? What he was to say we know from a prose sketch which runs as follows:

You [addressed to the fabricator doli, who appears in the manuscript as X] have pierced the heart of my life, you have taken from me my faith in myself. Away, Courage and Hope! Away, joyous self-confidence! I am caught in a lie. I am at variance with myself. I am an enemy of mankind. I and truth are parted forever! What? Shall I undeceive the people? Unmask myself as a deceiver?—I must go forward. I must stand firm, and yet I can do it no longer in the strength of inward conviction. Murder and blood must maintain me in my position. How shall I meet the Czarina? How shall I enter Moscow amid the plaudits of the people, with this lie in my heart?

One sees from this whither Schiller's idea was tending. From the time that Demetrius is undeceived his character changes. The youth who, with truth on his side, had it in him to become a great and wise ruler, breaks with the moral law and becomes a Macbeth, or a Richard the Third. His course from this time on is flecked with blood and dishonored by treachery and tyranny. As Czar he excites the hatred of the Russians by his impolitic contempt of their customs. His Poles are insolent and trouble begins to brew about him. Finally there is an uprising against him and he falls—the victim of his own [Greek: hubris].

Had Schiller been permitted by fate to complete 'Demetrius', we should have had, it is safe to say, the most impressive of all his heroes, with the possible exception of Wallenstein. And we should have had also, in all probability, the very best of his historical tragedies; for his plan had provided for an unusually large number of highly promising scenes. The picturesque Polish parliament, with its tumultuous ending; the first meeting of Demetrius with his reputed mother; the scene with the fabricator doli; the triumphal entry into Moscow; Demetrius as Czar in the Kremlin; his love intrigues with Axinia and his perfunctory marriage to Marina; the final gathering and bursting of the storm of indignation,—all this would have been wrought into a dramatic masterpiece of the first order.

Like 'Demetrius' in having a royal pretender for a hero, but unlike it in every other respect, is the play which was to have been called 'Warbeck'. To this subject Schiller's attention was drawn in the summer of 1799, while reading English history in Rapin de Thoyras. During the ensuing years he took it up repeatedly, but each time dropped it in favor of some other theme. At the time of his death he left 'Warbeck' material sufficient to make eighty-four pages of octavo print. The most of this material consists of prose schemes, but there are also several hundred verses, some of them complete, others with lacunae, great or small. By a close study of these data one can make out the general character of the proposed play and the essential lineaments of the more important characters. The play was not to have been a tragedy, and it would have owed to history hardly anything more than its milieu and a few names. The plan was something like this:

About the year 1492 there turns up at Brussels, at the court of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, a young man calling himself Warbeck. He is ignorant of his own birth, and does not suppose himself to be of royal blood, but he has a strong resemblance to Edward the Fourth of England. Being herself of York blood and wishing to make trouble for the Tudor king, Henry the Seventh, Margaret persuades the stranger to pretend that he is the son of Edward the Fourth,—one of the two boys supposed to have been murdered in the tower by Richard of Gloucester. He consents to the fraud and speedily acquires a following as pretender to the English throne. In reality Margaret despises him and merely wishes to use him as a tool, but it soon appears that Warbeck is a man of character who insists on playing his assumed role in a manner worthy of an English sovereign. Preparations are made for an invasion of England to assert his claim. Meanwhile Warbeck falls in love with Adelaide, a princess of Brittany, for whom the imperious Margaret has other designs. Presently a man named Simnel appears, asserting fraudulently that he is a son of the fourth Edward. He and Warbeck fight a duel and Simnel is killed. Then the real Edward Plantagenet appears, with a convincing story of his own wonderful escape from the executioner in the Tower. A murderous plot is concocted against the boy's life, but he is saved by Warbeck, who acknowledges him as his rightful king. All this time Warbeck has supposed himself to be acting a part of pure fraud; and as he is really a man of honor, and in love with an amiable princess, the role of deceit has become increasingly hateful to him. At last, however, the old Earl of Kildare arrives, and from the depths of his superior knowledge makes it plain that Warbeck is in truth a natural son of Edward the Fourth. Thus all ends romantically and we have no adumbration of that later scene of the year 1499, when Perkin Warbeck was drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

From this plan it is clear that the principal stress was to fall on the character of Warbeck, conceived as a high-minded youth entangled in an odious lie. To quote Schiller's exact words: 'The problem of the piece is to carry him (Warbeck) ever deeper into situations in which his deceit brings him to despair, and to let his natural truthfulness increase as the circumstances force him to deception.' To arouse sympathy for such a character would have been, to say the least, a difficult task; one cannot wonder that Schiller was perplexed by it. The schemes indicate that his main reliance was the love-story, which would have been very prominent. Of the other characters, the most important, probably, was the Duchess Margaret, conceived as a selfish, overbearing, heartless creature, in sharp contrast with the romantic Adelaide. On the whole, judging from such imperfect data as we possess, one must regard 'Warbeck' as a far less powerful and promising design than 'Demetrius'.

Contemporaneous with 'Warbeck' and 'Demetrius', and broadly similar to them in that it was to deal with a political adventurer and to present an elaborate picture of intrigue in high life, is the plan of a play which was at first called 'Count Koenigsmark'. The subject occupied the thoughts of Schiller for some little time in the summer of 1804, until it was dropped in favor of 'Demetrius'. Count Koenigsmark was a nobleman who was murdered in the year 1694, at the court of Duke George I., of Hannover, in consequence of a supposed criminal relation with the Duchess Sophia, a princess of the house of Celle. As he mused upon the dramatic possibilities of the story, Schiller became less interested in Koenigsmark and more in the compromised duchess; so the name of the piece was changed to 'The Princess of Celle'. From his extant notes and sketches one can make out that the heroine was conceived, like Mary Stuart, as a noble sufferer. She is a virtuous lady who is given in marriage for political reasons to an unloved and licentious duke, whose mistresses insult her. In her misery she makes a friend of the chivalrous but inflammable Koenigsmark. Their relation excites suspicion, Koenigsmark is murdered and the duchess sent to prison,—disgraced but innocent. In prison she finds peace of soul, just as Mary Stuart finds it in the presence of death.

Much older than any of these plans and entirely different from them, is that of the 'Knights of Malta', which dates back to the year 1788. While pursuing his studies for 'Don Carlos' Schiller had become greatly interested in the story of La Valette's heroic defense of Malta in 1565. It seemed to him to promise well for a tragedy in the Greek style,—with a chorus, a simple plot and few characters. He began work upon it, but was soon diverted by his historical studies. In subsequent years, however, he returned to 'The Knights of Malta' from time to time, and as late as 1803 was strongly minded to attempt the completion of the work. During these fifteen years the plan underwent various changes. Although certain aspects of the subject made it very attractive to Schiller, he felt from the first that it lacked the 'salient point' of a good tragedy. The extant data show him working tentatively with one idea after another, without ever finding exactly what he wanted. This being so, it is hardly worth while to go minutely into the history of his plans and perplexities.

'The Knights of Malta' was to have been a poetic tragedy of heroic devotion, friendship and self-sacrifice. The exposition, as we have it in outline, shows,—partly by means of a chorus of 'spiritual' knights,—the desperate plight of the besieged Christians. The crisis requires absolute devotion to the principles of the order, but the knights have degenerated. Two of them are quarreling over a captured Greek girl, and so forth. La Valette, the grandmaster, institutes stern measures of reform to restore the ancient morale of the order, and these provoke intrigue and opposition. The defenders of Fort St. Elmo ask to be relieved, on the ground that the place cannot be held. La Valette decides that St. Elmo must be defended to the last: it is a case where a few must be ready to sacrifice themselves for their principles and for the order as a whole. Among those thus sent to death is La Valette's own son, who leaves behind a very dear friend. In the end the defenders of St. Elmo are killed, but Malta and the order are saved. The Turks raise the siege.

Reading this outline one has no great difficulty In seeing why Schiller's dramatic instinct could never be satisfied with 'The Knights of Malta'. It has no tragic climax, no point upon which the action could be focused. As a stage-play it would have had small chance of favor, on account of its chorus and its entire lack of female characters. Romantic love was to be left out and friendship to take its place. But could anything worth while have been done with the heroics of friendship after 'Don Carlos'? On the whole one must regard it as a great good fortune for the German drama that, when Schiller was hesitating in 1796 between 'Wallenstein' and 'The Knights of Malta', the former carried the day. As for the pseudo-antique chorus, the best that he could do with that, by way of an experiment, was done later in 'The Bride of Messina'.

Besides those already mentioned, there are a number of other plans which deserve a word, were it only to show the wide range of Schiller's interest and the eagerness of his quest after variety. Thus we find him occupied, at one time or another, with two antique themes, 'Aggripina' and 'The Death of Themistocles'; with an Anglo-Saxon theme of the tenth century, 'Elfride', and with a medieval romantic theme, 'The Countess of Flanders'. Then we find two subjects that were suggested by the reading of modern travels, 'The Ship' and 'The Filibuster'. In one the scene was to be laid on some distant coast or island, and the plot was to illustrate sea-life and commerce, with their characteristic types. In the other the whole action was to take place on shipboard, bringing in a mutiny, ship's justice, a sea-fight, trade with savages, and so forth. Finally there are sketches of two other plays, based on the annals of crime. In one of them, called 'The Children of the House', the hero was to be a thorough scoundrel, whom Nemesis would impel mysteriously to a course of conduct whereby his long hidden crimes would be discovered. The other, entitled 'The Police', was to present a story of crime and its discovery at Paris,—with telling realistic pictures for which Schiller took a mass of interesting notes.