army, his marriage with Lady Milford is arranged for him as if he had no claim to be consulted. The president blurts out his plan with brutal coarseness, and urges it in language which he knows will rouse his son’s anger. So when he appears in the Miller house he makes himself as odious as possible. Diplomacy and finesse are weapons not found in his armory, though he is a courtier and a successful politician. He is simply a cynical brute in high office. In truth his conduct is so very inhuman as to convey an impression of burlesque. He seems copied from some ogre in a fairy tale.
But if President von Walter appears now like a melodramatic caricature, it is partly because times have changed; for Schiller was not without his models in the recent history of Wuerttemberg. During the period of Karl Eugen’s worst recklessness–the decade beginning with 1755,–he was loyally abetted by two men, Rieger and Montmartin, who made themselves thoroughly odious. Rieger was a man of talent and knowledge, but without heart and without conscience. It was he who managed the cruel and lawless conscriptions whereby Duke Karl raised the desired troops for France.[56] Young men were simply taken wherever they could be found,–pulled from their beds at night, or seized as they came from church,–and forced into the army under brutal conditions of service. Many a Wuerttemberg family could have told a tale of barbarity essentially similar to that recounted by the lackey to Lady Milford in the second act of Schiller’s play. Remorseless oppression of the people, for the purpose of raising money to be spent on the duke’s costly whims, became the order of the day.
Still more brutal and cynical in his methods than Rieger was Count Montmartin, who was made President of the State Council in 1758. A cunning and wicked intriguer, he lent himself without scruple to the gratification of his master’s lusts and caprices. The daughters of the land were unsafe from his machinations if they had had the misfortune to attract the wanton eye of their sovereign. In 1762, wishing to be rid of his powerful rival, Montmartin trumped up a charge that Rieger was engaged in treasonable correspondence with Prussia. The result was that Rieger was publicly disgraced. Meeting him one day on parade the duke angrily tore off his military order, struck him with his cane and then shut him up in the Hohentwiel, where he lay for four years without light, table, chair or bed. In like manner the patriotic publicist, Moser, was imprisoned for five years, without trial and without sentence, because he had withheld his consent to the duke’s high-handed proceedings.
Such was the political system that had afflicted Wuerttemberg during Schiller’s childhood. It furnished him with his dramatic ‘mythology’, as it has been called. The name may be allowed to pass, only it should be remembered that _this_ mythology was simply history. The rapier-thrusts of the dramatist were not directed against wind-mills of the imagination, but against political infamies that make one’s blood boil in the reading and that would have moved a more spirited people to hang their rulers to the nearest tree. This should be borne in mind by any one who, in the milder light of a later and better era, is disposed to carp at Schiller for caricaturing the nobility. He was not concerned with aristocracy in general, but with the particular kakistocracy that had disgraced his native land. And all that he did was to exhibit it as it was, or lately had been.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 51: ‘The New Heloise’, Part 1, letter 62.]
[Footnote 52: The adjectives are John Morley’s; “Diderot”, Chap. VII.]
[Footnote 53: “La premiere fois que je la vis, ce fut a l’eglise”,–says Diderot’s St. Albin, in recounting the beginning of his infatuation for Sophie. So with Faust and Margaret, and with Schiller’s beautiful Greek lady in ‘The Ghostseer’.]
[Footnote 54: “Schillers Leben und Werke”, 15. Aufl. (1900), p. 297. In earlier editions of Palleske’s work, which appeared originally in 1858-9, Louise was further characterized as ‘the crushed heart of the German people’; and the sentence, ‘which had to recover from those wounds’, read: ‘which is beginning to recover’.]
[Footnote 55: One strophe runs:
Dann wird ein Tag sein, den werd’ ich auferstehn! Dann wird ein Tag sein, den wirst du auferstehn! Dann trennt kein Schicksal mehr die Seelen, Die du einander, Natur, bestimmtest.]
[Footnote 56: See above, page 7.]
CHAPTER VII
Theater Poet in Mannheim
Die Schaubuehne ist mehr als jede andere oeffentliche Anstalt des Staats eine Schule der praktischen Weisheit, ein Wegweiser, durch das buergerliche Leben, ein unfehlbarer Schluessel zu den geheimsten Zugaengen der menschlichen Seele.–_Discourse on the Theater, 1784_.
Mannheim, famed for the geometric regularity of its streets, was in Schiller’s day a city of about twenty thousand inhabitants. Since 1720 it had been the capital of the Bavarian Palatinate, and under the Elector Karl Theodor it had acquired some distinction as a nursery of the arts. We have seen that Schiller, coming thither from Suabia, imagined himself escaping from the land of the barbarians to the land of the Greeks. In the year 1777 the Upper and Lower Palatinate were united, and the Elector transferred his residence to Muenchen. For this withdrawal of the light of their ruler’s countenance the Mannheimers were compensated in a measure by the establishment among them of a so-called National Theater. There was no German nation at the time, but there was a very general interest in the German drama. Lessing’s famous experiment at Hamburg, though it turned out badly, had set people thinking. Playwrights and actors were learning to regard themselves no longer as purveyors of mere amusement, but as the dignified representatives of a noble art having boundless possibilities of influence. The public was becoming interested in the principles of dramatic construction and in the criteria of excellence. Scholars were beginning to inquire whether the stage might not again become what it had been for the ancient Athenians. And so the way had been prepared for a serious conception of the theater and for experiments like that at Mannheim.
The management of the enterprise was placed in the hands of Baron Heribert von Dalberg, a young nobleman (born in 1750), who had given no evidence of unusual fitness for such an office, but was a connoisseur and a gentleman. He devoted himself zealously to his work and soon made his theater famous. He was courteous and hospitable, kept an eye open for promising talent and enjoyed the role of Maecenas. His system provided for regular meetings of his actors, at which plays were discussed, reports rendered and grievances ventilated. For the rest he was not a man of ideas, but a follower of tradition. He disliked to take risks and often missed the mark in his judgment of persons and of plays. He continued until 1803 to act as intendant and occasionally tried his hand at dramatic composition, or the adaptation of a Shaksperian play, All told, his services were such that the Mannheiniers have deemed him worthy of a statue.
Among the actors whom Baron Dalberg’s enterprise had assembled at Mannheim were three or four of notable talent. Thus there was Iffland, of the same age as Schiller, who was destined to win fame as an actor, playwright and manager. Like Diderot, Iffland believed ardently in the moral mission of the drama. He was himself a man of character who had taken to the stage against the wish of his kinfolk, and now his hobby was to refine the language of the stage and to elevate the actor’s profession. He was an industrious and thoughtful player, who gave careful attention to the little matters of mimicry and personation and seldom failed to please. Another was Beil, a greater actor in point of natural endowment, who relied more upon vigorous realism than upon studied refinements. Then there was Beck, who was at his best as a portrayer of youthful enthusiasm and sentiment. His nature was akin to Schiller’s and a warm friendship sprang up between the two.
When Schiller arrived in Mannheim, late in July, 1783, Dalberg was in Holland. There was nothing going on at the theater, and the sweltering town, deserted by such as could get away, was suffering from an epidemic of malarial fever. But the faithful Streicher was there and friend Meyer, the manager, and Schwan, the publisher, whose vivacious daughter, Margarete, gradually kindled in the heart of the new-comer another faint blue flame which he ultimately mistook for love. His first concern was to write to Frau von Wolzogen, who had loaned him money for his journey, a detailed report of his finances. He was the possessor of fifteen thalers, whereof he had reserved five for the return to Bauerbach. His friend Meyer had found him a nice place where, by dispensing with breakfast, he could eat, drink and lodge for about two thalers a week. Hair-dresser, washerwoman, postman and tobacconist would require, all told, one thaler. So he hoped to keep afloat in the great world at least three weeks, and then,–back to his heart’s home in Saxony! The letter continues:
Oh, I shall long to be soon, soon, with you again; and meanwhile, in the midst of my greatest distractions, I shall think of you, my dearest friend. I shall often break away from social circles and, alone in my room, sadly dream myself back with you and weep. Continue, my dear, continue to be what you have been hitherto, my first and dearest friend; and let us be, all by ourselves, an example of pure friendship. We will make each other better and nobler. By mutual sympathy and the delicate tie of beautiful emotions we will exhaust the joys of this life and at the last be proud of this our blameless league. Take no other friend into your heart. Mine remains yours unto death and beyond that, if possible.
One sees that the writer of this letter had lived quite long enough in his idyllic retirement, and that his benefactress had judged the case wisely.
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.[57]
We who do not live in an epoch of emotional expansion have the right to get what amusement we can out of this note of high-flown sentimentalism. At the same time its instructive aspect should not be lost sight of. When a youth of twenty-three, battling with the vulgar prose of life, falls into such a tone in writing to a middle-aged lady who has befriended him; when he lets his imagination brood upon the coming luxury of tears and of beautiful emotions; when he is so pathetically eager to reign without a rival in the heart of his friend, and to assure her of his everlasting loyalty in the world to come,–how shall we expect him to express himself when he undertakes to speak the language of strong feeling in works of the imagination? Evidently we must be prepared for all things in the way of sentimental extravagance.
After two weeks of idle waiting Schiller was able to report that Dalberg had returned and was showing himself very friendly. The man was ‘all fire,’–only it was gunpowder flame that would not last long. The genial intendant insisted that Schiller should by all means remain in Mannheim. ‘Fiesco,’ now in print as a tragedy, should be put upon the stage at once; ‘Louise Miller’ should be taken under consideration, a performance of ‘The Robbers’ be given for the author’s special gratification, and so forth. At first Schiller was little disposed to bank upon this effusive kindness. His plans went no further than to effect a sale of the stage-rights of his two plays and then to return to Bauerbach. But the lures of Dalberg finally prevailed and in September he made a contract for a year’s employment as dramatist of the Mannheim theater. He was to furnish one entirely new play, in addition to those he had on hand, and to have as compensation three hundred florins, the copyright of all the plays and the receipts of a single performance of each of them. For a moment the future looked tolerably bright. He saw in his mind’s eye an assured income of more than twelve hundred florins, which would provide amply for his needs and enable him to pay his debts.
But his plans went all wrong. In the first place, the pestilent fever, which he fought with giant doses of quinine, proved very intractable and held him in its grip for months. He was unable to work and fell into a sort of mental coma. In a letter of November 13 he describes himself as eating Peruvian bark like bread; and six weeks later he was still suffering from the effects of his unlucky midsummer plunge into the miasmatic air of Mannheim. In other ways, too, the new situation proved a disappointment. Social demands involved him in expenditures far in excess of his modest calculations, while the intervals of relief from physical incapacity were filled with a hundred distractions which left him no time for sustained mental effort. And so he drifted into the winter without accomplishing anything more notable than the final revision of ‘Fiesco’.
About this time he was elected a member of the so-called ‘German Society’, a learned body which enjoyed the protection of the Elector. This little honor was highly valued by Schiller, since it made him a citizen of the Palatinate and gave him an assured social status. On the other hand, his emergence into the light of day as a respectable functionary was not without its disadvantages, since his creditors now became importunate. There were pressing duns from Stuttgart and from Bauerbach, but the debtor could not pay. He became involved in a painful correspondence with his father, who had undertaken to guarantee a small debt of his son provided that another larger one be paid so and so. When this hope failed, the old captain lost patience and began to deal out counsel, reproof and warning with a lavish hand. He recommended his son to save the pennies and live more economically; to return to medicine; to marry a wife; to remember his Creator, and so on. To all of which the perplexed Friedrich could only reply with fresh promises, excuses and recommendations of patience. In like manner he put off Frau von Wolzogen until she began to lose faith in him. A sharp letter from her brought him to his knees with a humble apology, but it was years before he could pay his debt to her.
The first performance of ‘Fiesco’, the adaptation of which to the stage had cost its author such a world of trouble, took place on the 12th of January, 1784. As played it differed a good deal from the published version, and not alone with respect to the catastrophe. Thus the painful episode of Bertha was worked over into something less revoltingly horrible. In the stage version, instead of being brutally violated, she is abducted by a tool of Gianettino, but rescued and restored to her home unharmed. With this change made it would seem as if there were less reason than ever for her being cursed and sent to a subterraneous prison-vault. Nevertheless Verrina’s curse was allowed to remain,–chiefly, as one cannot help surmising, that the girl might be rescued with _eclat_ in the fourth act. (The rescue scene in ‘The Robbers’ had been a great success.) It has already been noted that the offensive quarrel between Julia and Leonora was omitted and that Leonora was allowed to live. And there were other such changes. Schiller had been impressed by an actor’s criticism of his florid and violent language. He accordingly removed or toned down a few blemishes of this kind, but without making a radical revision of the style. Even in the stage version there is quite too much of rant and fustian.
The Mannheimers took but little interest in ‘Fiesco,’–it was too erudite for them, as Schiller explained to Reinwald some months later.[58] Republican liberty, he went on to say, was in that region a sound without meaning; there was no Roman blood in the veins of the Pfaelzer. In Berlin and Frankfurt, however, the piece had met with good success. We cannot blame Schiller for trying to extract comfort from these bits of evidence that the prophet was not without honor save in his own country, though we may question his implication that republican ideas were just then less rife in the Palatinate than in Berlin and Frankfurt. The fact is that the lover of republican ideas must have been the very person to feel the keenest dissatisfaction with ‘Fiesco.’ Where it did succeed, its success was due to causes having little to do with political sentiment. The Berlin triumph was equivocal, being the triumph not so much of Schiller as of one Pluemicke, who took high-handed liberties with the original text and made it over, in both language and thought, so as to suit the taste of the Berlin actors. This northern version, thus diluted with the water of the Spree, was presently published by the enterprising pirate, Himburg, and proved a formidable rival of the genuine edition. The play was tried at several theaters and with various endings,–curiously enough Pluemicke made Fiesco commit suicide in the moment of his triumph,–but it never became really popular. It was translated into English in 1796, into French in 1799.
Much more favorable was the reception given to ‘Cabal and Love’, which was first played at Mannheim on the 15th of April, 1784.[59] The part of the lackey who describes the horrors attending the exportation of soldiers to America was omitted; the satire was too strong for the politic Dalberg, who had all along been troubled by Schiller’s drastic treatment of princely iniquity and his obvious allusions to well-known persons. Even Schwan, who was delighted with ‘Louise Miller’ from the first and readily undertook to publish it, described its author as an executioner. This time the Mannheimers had no difficulty of comprehension and they gave their applause unstintingly. After the great scene in the second act they rose and cheered vociferously,–whereat Schiller bowed and felt very happy. ‘His manner’, says honest Streicher, who has left a report of the memorable evening, ‘his proud and noble bearing, showed that he had satisfied himself and was pleased to see his merit appreciated.’
A few days later the Mannheim players repeated their triumph at Frankfurt, where Schiller was lionized to his heart’s content. ‘Cabal and Love’ now quickly became a stage favorite. Within a few months it was played successfully at nearly all the more important theaters of Germany. Even Stuttgart fell into line, but the Duke of Wuerttemberg was not pleased, and a memorial of the nobility led to the prohibition of a second performance. At Braunschweig It was tried with a happy ending, but this innovation, reasonable as it seems, took no root. A badly garbled English translation by Timaeus appeared in 1795; a better one by Monk Lewis, under the title of ‘The Minister’, in 1797. A French translation by La Martelliere was hissed off the stage of the Theatre Francais in 1801.
From the Minerva press the new play got blame and praise. One writer saw in it the same Schiller who was already known as the ‘painter of terrible scenes and the creator of Shaksperian thoughts’. A Berlin critic named Moritz, of whom we shall hear later, called the piece a disgrace to the age and wondered how a man could write and print such nonsense. The plot consisted, he declared, of a simpleton’s quarrel with Providence over a stupid and affected girl. It was full of crass, ribald wit and senseless rodomantade. There were a few scenes of which something might have been made, but ‘this writer converted everything into inflated rubbish’. Some one taxed Moritz with undue severity, whereupon he returned to the attack, insisting that this extravagant, blasphemous and vulgar diction, which purported to be nature rude and strong, was in reality altogether unnatural.[60]
And, to be candid, the critic was able to bring together an anthology of quotations which seemed like a rather forcible indictment of Schiller’s literary taste. What Moritz failed to see was that the bad taste was only an excrescence growing upon a very vigorous stock. This was felt by another reviewer who declared that high poetic genius shone forth from every scene of Schiller’s works. Many years later Zelter, the friend of Goethe, bore witness to the electric effect of the play upon himself and the other excitable youth who saw it in the first days of its popularity. Like ‘The Robbers,’ it was a harbinger of the revolution. It seemed to voice the hitherto voiceless woe of the third estate; and just because of that savage force which made it seem absurd to sedate minds, just because it rang out in such shrill and clangorous notes, it has continued to be heard. Good taste is a matter of fashion. It is never the most vital quality of literature.
If any one should be tempted to think that Schiller’s youthful ideals of the dramatic art were not sufficiently exalted, he should read the lecture given before the Mannheim German Society, in June, 1784, on the question: ‘What can a good permanent theater really effect?’ It is an excellent, thoughtful essay, instinct with lofty idealism and at the same time full of sound observation. Setting out from the postulate that the highest aim of all institutions whatsoever is the furtherance of the general happiness, the paper discusses the theater as a public institution of the state. Its claims are examined, and the sphere and manner of its influence discussed, along with those of religion and the laws. Probably too much is made out of the moral and educational utility of the stage,–so at least it will be apt to seem to an American or an Englishman,–but the familiar arguments, the validity of which is now generally recognized in Germany, are marshalled with a fine breadth of view and with many felicities of expression. Toward the end there is a passage which shows that Schiller himself felt the shakiness of the utilitarian argument. He says: ‘What I have tried to prove hitherto–that the stage exerts an essential influence upon morals and enlightenment–was doubtful’; and then he goes on to speak of a value not doubtful, namely, its value as a means of refined pleasure. This is the heart of the matter forever and ever; and one could hardly sum up the case more sagely than Schiller does in the sentence: ‘The stage is the institution in which pleasure combines with instruction, rest with mental effort, diversion with culture; where no power of the soul is put under tension to the detriment of any other, and no pleasure is enjoyed to the damage of the community,’
The experience of Schiller at Mannheim illustrates the higher uses of adversity. Had he been well and happy, he might have written his third play, won the good will of Dalberg and then stuck fast for years in the Palatinate; which would have been a misfortune for him and for German letters. As it was, Mannheim gradually became odious to him. He had no buoyancy of spirit. ‘God knows I have not been happy here’, he wrote to Reinwald in May, 1784. His life was full of petty worries and distractions which weighted his imagination as with lead. As his year drew to an end he imagined that he had but to say the word to have his contract with the Mannheim theater renewed, but it was not so; Dalberg had quietly decided to get rid of him. From _his_ point of view his poet had been a bad investment. Schiller had not kept his contract in the matter of the new play; he had done nothing but procrastinate and make excuses. ‘Don Carlos’ had not even been begun. There seemed to be no excuse for such dawdling, when a man like Iffland could always be relied upon to turn out a fairly acceptable play in a few weeks. No great wonder, therefore, that Dalberg lost faith in Schiller and concluded that he had exhausted his vein. Through a friend he suggested a return to medicine.
Curiously enough Schiller grasped at the idea, professing that a medical career was the one thing nearest his heart. He had long feared, so he wrote, that his inspiration would forsake him if he relied upon literature for his living; but if he could devote himself to it in the intervals of medical practice, good things might be hoped for. He accordingly proposed a renewal of the contract for another year, with the understanding that he devote himself principally to his medical studies to the end of qualifying for the doctor’s degree; in the mean time he would undertake to produce one ‘great play’ and also to edit a dramatic journal. To this amazing proposal Dalberg paid no attention; and when the 1st of September arrived Schiller’s connection with the Mannheim theater came to an end.
It was a troublous, harassing time for him, that summer of 1784, and the more since the woes of the distracted lover were added to those of the disappointed playwright and the impecunious debtor. A German savant observes that Schiller was not, like Goethe, a virtuoso in love. And so it certainly looks, albeit the difference might perhaps appear a little less conspicuous if he had lived to a ripe old age and dressed up his recollections of youth in an autobiographical romance. He did not lack the data of experience, but without the charm of the retrospective poetic treatment his early love-affairs are not profoundly interesting. In the midst of his troubles it came over him that marriage might be the right thing for him; and so, one day in June, 1784, he offered himself to Frau von Wolzogen for a son-in-law. Nothing came of the suggestion; it was only a passing tribute to the abstract goodness of matrimony. About a year later he made, with similar results, an argumentative bid for the hand of Margarete Schwan. On the aforementioned visit to Frankfurt he met Sophie Albrecht, a melancholy poetess who had sought relief from the tameness of her married life by going upon the stage. Of her he wrote shortly afterwards:
In the very first hours a firm and warm attachment sprang up between us; our souls understood each other. I am glad and proud that she loves me and that acquaintance with me may perhaps make her happy. A heart fashioned altogether for sympathy, far above the pettiness of ordinary social circles, full of noble, pure feeling for truth and virtue, and admirable even where her sex is not usually so. I promise myself divine days in her immediate society.[61]
But all these palpitations were as water unto wine in comparison with his unwholesome passion for Charlotte von Kalb, whom he also met first in the spring of 1784. This lady, after a lonely and loveless girlhood, in which she had been tossed about as an unwelcome incumbrance from one relation to another, had lately married a Baron von Kalb. Her heart had no part in the marriage, which was arranged by her guardian. In the pursuit of his career her husband left her much to herself. She was an introspective creature, very changeable in her moods and passionately fond of music and poetry. In Schiller she found her affinity. He acted first as her guide about Mannheim, then as her mentor in matters of literature. They saw much of each other; became intimately confidential and soon were treading a dangerous path,–though not so dangerous, peradventure, as has sometimes been inferred from the two poems, ‘Radicalism of Passion’ and ‘Resignation’, which belong to this period.
In the first of these poems our old friend, the lover of Laura, who is supposed to have married another man in the year 1782, resolves to fight no longer the ‘giant-battle of duty’. He apostrophizes Virtue and bids her take back the oath that she has extorted from him in a moment of weakness. He will no longer respect the scruples that restrained him when the pitying Laura was ready to give all. Her marriage vow was itself sinful, and the god of Virtue is a detestable tyrant. In the other poem, which is a sort of antidote to the first, we hear of a poet, born in Arcadia, who surrendered his claim to earthly bliss on the promise of a reward in heaven. He gave up his all, even his Laura, to Virtue, though mockers called him a fool for believing in gods and immortality. At last he appears before the heavenly throne to claim his guerdon, but is told by an invisible genius that two flowers bloom for humanity,–Hope and Enjoyment. Who has the one must renounce the other. The high Faith that sustained him on earth was his sufficient reward and the fulfillment of Eternity’s pledge.
Wer dieser Blumen eine brach, begehre Die andre Schwester nicht.
Geniesze wer nicht glauben kann. Die Lehre Ist ewig wie die Welt. Wer glauben kann entbehre. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.[62]
When these poems were published, in 1786, their author saw fit to caution the public in a foot-note not to mistake an ebullition of passion for a system of philosophy, or the despair of an imaginary lover for the poet’s confession of faith. Thus warned one should not be too curious about the reality which is half revealed and half concealed by the verses. Enough that it was not altogether a calm, Platonic sentiment, and that the torment of it was a factor in that uneasiness which finally became a burning desire to escape from Mannheim. And the fates were preparing a way.
One day in June, when all was looking dark, Schiller received a packet containing an epistolary greeting, an embroidered letter-case and four portrait sketches. The letter was anonymous, but he presently discovered that it came from Gottfried Koerner, a young privat-docent in Leipzig, who had united with three friends in sending this token of regard to a Suabian poet whom they had found reason to like. Schiller did not answer immediately and the skies grew darker still. His relations with the Mannheim theater were presently strained to the point of disgust by the production of a farce in which he was satirized. He was in terrible straits for money. To have something to do, after he was set adrift by Dalberg, he decided to go ahead with his project of a dramatic journal. An attractive prospectus for the _Rhenish Thalia_ was issued, and he began to prepare for the first number, which was to contain an installment of ‘Don Carlos’. The advance subscriptions fell far short of his sanguine hopes. In these occupations the time passed until December. Then one day he penned an answer to the Leipzig letter. It was a turning-point in his destiny. A correspondence sprang up which presently convinced him that where these people were, there he must be.
Toward the end of the year there came another glint of good-will from the north. The Duke of Weimar happened to be visiting at the neighboring Darmstadt, and through Frau von Kalb Schiller procured an introduction and an invitation to read the beginning of ‘Don Carlos’. The result was the title of Weimar Councillor. This was very pleasant indeed; for while it put no florins in his purse, it gave him an honorable status in the German world. He had been cast off by a prince of the barbarians to be taken up by _the_ prince of the Greeks! Henceforth he was in a sense the colleague of Goethe and Wieland. He began to speak of the Duke of Weimar as _his_ duke, and to indulge in day-dreams concerning the little city of the Muses in Thueringen. For the rest there was an element of fate’s amusing irony in the new title, seeing that he had just announced himself, in the prospectus of the _Rhenish Thalia_, as a literary free-lance who served no prince, but only the public. The announcement contained a sketch of his life and a confession of his sins,–which he laid at the door of the Stuttgart Academy. ‘The Robbers’, he declared, had cost him home and country; but now he was free, and his heart swelled at the thought of wearing no other fetter than the verdict of the public, and appealing to no other throne than the human soul.
Owing to various delays the first number of the new journal did not appear until the spring of 1785, and by that time Schiller was all ready for his flight northward. Matters had continued to go badly with him. On the 22nd of February he wrote to Korner, ‘in a nameless oppression of the heart’, as follows:
I can stay no longer in Mannheim. For twelve days I have carried the decision about with me like a resolution to leave the world. People, circumstances, earth and sky, are repulsive to me. I have not a soul to fill the void in my heart–not a friend, man or woman; and what might be dear to me is separated from me by conventions and circumstances…. Oh, my soul is athirst for new nourishment, for better people, for friendship, affection and love. I must come to you; must learn, in your immediate society and in intimate relations with you, once more to enjoy my own heart, and to bring my whole being to a livelier buoyancy. My poetic vein is stagnant; my heart has dried up toward my associations here. You must warm it again. With you I shall be doubly, trebly, what I have been hitherto; and more than all that, my dearest friends, I shall be happy. I have never been so yet. Weep for me that I must make this confession. I have not been happy; for fame and admiration and all the other concomitants of authorship do not weigh as much as one moment of love and friendship. They starve the heart.
To the worldly-wise such a perfervid sight-draft upon the bank of love, made after a few weeks of epistolary acquaintance, will no doubt seem a little risky. One is reminded of Goethe’s Tasso, impulsively offering his friendship to a cooler man and getting the reply:
In Einem Augenblicke forderst du
Was wohlbedaechtig nur die Zeit gewaehrt.[63]
But this time Schiller’s instinct had guided him aright. Koerner was no Antonio, and he did not recoil even when he learned that his new friend was very much in need of money and would not be able to leave Mannheim, unless a Leipzig publisher could be found who would take over his magazine and advance a few pounds upon its uncertain prospects. This was easily arranged, for Korner was well-to-do and had himself lately acquired an interest in the publishing business of Goeschen at Leipzig. Goeschen took the _Thalia_ (dropping the ‘Rhenish’), Schiller paid his more pressing debts, and early in April was on his way to Leipzig, panting for the new friends as the hart panteth after the water-brooks.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 57:
A talent forms itself in solitude,
A character in the flowing tide of life. –_Goethes ‘Tasso’.]
[Footnote 58: Letter of May 5, 1784.]
[Footnote 59: But this performance was not the first in order of time. ‘Cabal and Love’ had already been played on the 13th of April by Grossmann’s company at Frankfurt. Grossmann was an intelligent theatrical man, who had conceived a liking for Schiller; only he wished that the ‘dear fiery man’ would be a little more considerate of stage limitations.]
[Footnote 60: Moritz’s critique is reprinted in J. Braun’s “Schiller und Goethe im Urteile ihrer Zeitgenossen”, I, 103.]
[Footnote 61: From the letter of May 5, quoted above.]
[Footnote 62: In Bulwer’s translation:
“He who has plucked the one, resigned must see The sister’s forfeit bloom:
Let Unbelief enjoy–Belief must be All to the chooser;–the world’s history Is the world’s judgment doom.”]
[Footnote 63:
Thou askest in a single moment that
Which only time can give with cautious hand.]
CHAPTER VIII
The Boon of Friendship
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,…
Mische seinen Jubel ein.
–‘_Song to Joy_’.
Gottfried Koerner, father of the more famous Theodor, was some three years older than Schiller and belonged to an opulent and distinguished family. His father was a high church dignitary, his mother the daughter of a well-to-do Leipzig merchant. The boy had grown up under austere religious influences and then drifted far in the direction of liberalism. After a university career devoted at first to the humanities and then to law, he had travelled extensively in foreign countries, and then returned to Leipzig, full of ambition but undecided as to his future course. Here, in 1778, he became acquainted with Minna Stock, the daughter of an engraver who had once been the teacher of Goethe. Stock died in 1773, leaving a widow and two daughters to battle with poverty. The elder daughter, Dora, inherited something of her father’s vivacious humor and artistic talent, while the younger and handsomer, Minna, was of a more domestic temper. When Koerner fell in love with the amiable Minna and wished to marry her, he met with opposition in his own family, who thought that the ‘engraver’s mamsell’ was not good enough for him. This little touch of adversity converted him from a gentleman of leisure and a browsing philosopher into a man with a purpose in life. He set about making himself independent of the family wealth. To this end he offered himself as a privat-docent in law at the Leipzig university. When this expedient failed him through lack of students, he began to practice and soon received an appointment which took him to Dresden. This in 1783. Dresden now became his official residence, but he made frequent visits to his betrothed in Leipzig, and during one of these his memorable letter to Schiller was indited.
The other member of the quartette was Ludwig Huber, at that time the accepted lover of Dora Stock. Huber was three years younger than Schiller,–an impressionable youth, of some linguistic talent, who had his occasional promptings of literary ambition. But his soarings were mere grasshopper flights; steady effort was not his affair and he lacked solid ability. A doting mother had watched and coddled him until in practical affairs he was comically helpless. As the futility of his character became more apparent with the lapse of time, he lost the esteem of his friends, and the engagement with Dora Stock was broken off. So far as Schiller is concerned, the friendship of Huber was a passing episode of no particular importance.
Early in the year 1785 Koerner lost both his parents and found himself the possessor of a considerable fortune. There was now no further obstacle to his marriage; so the time was fixed for the wedding and he set about preparing a home for his bride. Thus it came about that when Schiller arrived in Leipzig, on the 17th of April, 1785,–mud, snow and inundations had made the journey desperately tedious,–he did not at once meet the man whom he most cared to know. Huber and the two ladies, who seem to have expected a wild, dishevelled genius, were astonished to see a mild-eyed, bashful man, who bore little resemblance to Karl Moor and needed time to thaw up. But the stranger soon felt at home. He had explained to Huber minutely how he wished to live. He would no longer keep his own establishment,–he could manage an entire dramatic conspiracy more easily than his own housekeeping. At the same time he did not wish to live alone.
I need for my inward happiness [he wrote] a right, true friend who is always at hand like my angel; to whom I can communicate my budding ideas and emotions in the moment of their birth, without writing letters or making visits. Even the trivial circumstance that my friend lives outside my four walls; that I must go through the street to reach him, that I must change my dress, or the like, kills the enjoyment of the moment. My train of thought is liable to be rent in pieces before I can get to him…. I cannot live parterre, nor in the attic, and I should not like to look out upon a churchyard. I love men and the thronging crowd. If I cannot arrange it so that we (I mean the five-parted clover-leaf) may eat together, then I might resort to the table d’hote of an inn, for I had rather fast than not dine in company.[64]
It is clear that, notwithstanding experiences which might have embittered a less genial nature, Schiller was in no danger of becoming a misanthrope. For him the throng upon the street was not the madding crowd of the English poet, nor the ‘cursed race’ of Frederick the Great, but an inspiration; a spectacle to keep the heart warm and foster the sense of brotherhood. He felt the need of men, however shabbily they might treat him. And men enough were at hand; for the Leipzig fair was then on, and the town was full of strangers who were eager to gape at the author of ‘The Robbers’, to be introduced to him, to invite him here and there. So for a week he floated with the current of casual dissipation and then, caught for an hour by a refluent eddy of lonesomeness,–four parts of the pentamerous clover-leaf were paired lovers,–he penned a missive which might have changed much in his future career: He sent to Christian Schwan a formal proposal for the hand of Margarete. With characteristic optimism he urged that fortune had at last turned favorably. He had good prospects. He proposed to work hard upon ‘Don Carlos’ and the _Thalia_, and meanwhile quietly to return to medicine. Wherefore he now made bold to express a hope that he had long cherished but had not dared to utter.
The sequelae of this wooing have never been cleared up in detail. Schiller’s letter as preserved bears a marginal note by Schwan to the effect that Laura in the poem ‘Resignation’ was no other than his eldest daughter. ‘I gave her this letter to read’, the note says, ‘and told Schiller to apply directly to her. Why nothing came of the affair has remained a riddle to me. Happy my daughter would not have been with Schiller.’ The annotation is not dated. The identification of Laura with Margarete is obviously wrong. Was Schwan’s memory also at fault? Did he imagine, long after the fact, that he had actually taken what must have seemed to him, when Schiller had become a famous poet, the reasonable course to have pursued? Did he withhold the letter too long and then show it? Or was Margarete herself disinclined,–piqued perhaps by Schiller’s neglect of her, or by his passion for Charlotte von Kalb? Or did Schiller’s own courage fail him after he had received a hint of favor? A letter to Koerner, written May 7, tells of pleasant news from Mannheim, and shortly afterward a rumor was in circulation that Schiller was about to marry a rich wife. The probability is that neither party was more than half inclined to the match. The blue flame perished naturally for lack of fuel.
Early in May, following the custom of well-to-do Leipzigers, Schiller sought refuge from the incipient summer heat of the city by taking rooms in the suburban village (such it was then) of Gohlis. Here, in a little second-story chamber, which was provided with an infinitesimal bed-room, he lived some four months,–happy months, in the main, even If the famous ‘Song to Joy’, which local tradition ascribes to this time and place, was in fact written a little later in Dresden. Various friends were at hand. Besides Huber there was Goeschen, with whom he was soon on terms of intimacy. The Stock sisters,–‘our dear girls’, as he calls them in a letter to the absent Korner,–had likewise quartered themselves in Gohlis; and so had Dr. Albrecht and his wife, Sophie, the actress. These with one or two others were enough for converse and for jollity; and there were merry evenings, with wine and talk, and cards and skittles and nonsense. Though ordinarily he ‘joked wi’ difficulty’, Schiller could be jovial enough in a company of congenial spirits. Nevertheless there was but little of the bohemian about him. That dignified seriousness which pervades all his later writings, and gave to Goethe the impression of a man dwelling habitually above the plane of vulgar things, was beginning even now to characterize him as a social being.
While living at Gohlis he received a visit from Moritz, the man who had written so savagely of ‘Cabal and Love’. If ever an author has been justified in giving the cut direct to a pestilent reviewer, this was the occasion. But Schiller received his visitor with suave courtesy; an interchange of views followed and the two men parted with embraces and protestations of friendly esteem. Schiller was not a good hater, except of hate. His nature craved love and friendship. He was eager to learn of his critics and could not long cherish resentment over an honest expression of opinion. Besides this he had now come to feel that his early writings were anything but invulnerable.
Notwithstanding his promise of steady industry, Schiller accomplished but little during his sojourn at Gohlis. It was the old story: There were too many distractions, too many confusing images of what might be done. The scheme of an antidote to ‘The Robbers’, in the shape of a moral sequel, gradually dropped out of view, along with the medical studies. The _Thalia_, originally planned with reference to the public at Mannheim, refused to bear transplanting to another soil without a season of wilting. Instead of manuscript for the second number, Goeschen was obliged to content himself for several months with excuses for postponement. And as for ‘Don Carlos’, the conception had so changed with the lapse of time that its author felt at a loss how to manage It. The play, with its wonderful pair of dreamers, was waiting for the inspiration of a real friendship at Dresden.
Long before they met in the body Schiller and Koerner had given expression to their mutual trust in language of romantic enthusiasm. On the 2nd of May Koerner wrote at length of his own life, character and aspirations. The letter reveals a noble nature conscious of an exceptional indebtedness to fortune and eager to pay the debt by solid work for mankind, but lacking the ability to decide and execute. Koerner evidently felt that he was in some danger of becoming an intellectual Sybarite, and he hoped that Schiller’s example would save him from this danger by spurring him to literary effort. In his reply Schiller expresses his admiration of a character to whom fortune’s favor means not, as for most men, the opportunity of enjoyment, but the duty of more strenuous living; then he sends a jubilant Godspeed to the ‘dear wanderer who wishes to accompany him in such faithful, brotherly fashion on his romantic journey to truth, fame and happiness.’ The letter continues:
I now feel realized in us what as poet I but prophetically imagined. Brotherhood of spirits is the most infallible key to wisdom. Separately we can do nothing…. Do not fear from this time forth for the endless duration of our friendship. Its materials are the fundamental impulses of the human soul. Its territory is eternity; its _non plus ultra_ the Godhead.
Then, as if momentarily abashed by his own extravagance of expression, he protests that his _Schwaermerei_, if such it be, is nothing but a ‘joyful paroxysm anticipating our future greatness’. For his part, he would not ‘exchange one such moment for the highest triumph of cold reason’. Enthusiasm, he declares, is the greatest thing in life.
The two men did not see each other until July, when a meeting was arranged at an interjacent village, to which Schiller rode out with the Leipzig friends. The next day he wrote a letter to Koerner, who had returned to Dresden, describing an incident of the return journey,–a letter so full of instruction with regard to the Schiller of this period that it deserves to be quoted at some length:
Somehow we came to speak of plans for the future. My heart grew warm. It was not idle dreaming. I had a solid philosophic assurance of that which I saw lying before me in the glorious perspective of time. In a melting mood of shame, such as does not depress but rouses to manly effort, I looked back into the past, which I had misused through the most unfortunate waste of energy. I felt that nature had endowed me with powers on a bold plan, and that her intention with me (perhaps a great intention) had so far been defeated. Half of this failure was due to the insane method of my education, and the adverse humor of fate; the other and larger half, however, to myself. Deeply, my best of friends, did I feel all that, and in the general fiery ferment of my emotions, head and heart united in a Herculean vow to make good the past and begin anew the noble race to the highest goal. My feeling became eloquent and imparted itself to the others with electric power. O how beautiful, how divine, is the contact of two souls that meet on the way to divinity! Thus far not a syllable had been spoken of you, but I read your name in Huber’s eyes and involuntarily it came to my lips. Our eyes met and our holy purpose fused with our holy friendship. It was a mute hand-clasp–to remain faithful to the resolution of this moment; to spur each other on to the goal, to admonish and encourage, and not to halt save at the bourne where human greatness ends…. Our conversation had taken this turn when we got out for breakfast. We found wine in the inn, and your health was drunk. We looked at each other silently; our mood was that of solemn worship and each one of us had tears in his eyes, which he tried to keep back…. I thought of the beginning of the eucharist: ‘Do this as often as ye drink in memory of me.’ I heard the organ and stood before the altar. Suddenly I remembered that, it was your birthday. Unwittingly we had celebrated it with a holy rite. Dearest friend, had you seen your glorification in our faces, heard it in our tear-choked voices, at that moment you would have forgotten even your betrothed; you would have envied no happy mortal under the sun. Heaven has strangely brought us together, but in our friendship it shall have wrought a miracle. Dim foreboding led me to expect much, very much of you, when I first decided to come to Leipzig; but Providence has more than fulfilled the promise, and has vouchsafed to me in your arms a happiness of which I could not form an image.
It tends to provoke a smile to read on in this letter and find It suddenly turning from such ecstasies to a straightforward confession that the writer is embarrassed for lack of ready cash. He had met with disappointments. The Mannheim people had not treated him handsomely, the subscribers to the _Thalia_ were delinquent, and so forth. Could not Goeschen be persuaded to undertake a new and authentic edition of the published plays and to advance a sum of money on the prospects? Koerner’s reply was prompt and characteristic. He enclosed a draft for current expenses, promised more against the time of need and bade his friend have no further solicitude about money. He knew very well, so he averred with politic delicacy, that Schiller could easily earn enough by working for money; but for a year at least he was to let himself be relieved of that degrading necessity. They would keep an account and all should be paid back with interest in the time of abundance; but for the present no more of pecuniary anxieties! Schiller, to whose brief experience in a selfish world this sort of conduct was something new, replied that he would not entrench himself in a false pride, as the great Rousseau had done on a similar occasion, but would accept the generous offer; this being the best possible expression of his gratitude. Korner was pleased to have the business settled by letter. ‘I have always despised money’, he wrote, ‘to a degree that it disgusts me to talk about it with souls that are dear to me. I attach no importance to actions that are natural to people of our sort, and which you would perform for me were the conditions reversed.’
It was now arranged that after Koerner’s marriage Schiller should make his home in Dresden. The eagerly awaited migration took place in September, and Schiller entered the Saxon capital, which was to be his home for the next two years, in a flutter of joyous anticipation. The Koerners quartered him in their charming suburban cottage at Loschwitz, in the loveliest region he had known since his childhood. The guest, who had seen but little of the quiet joys of domestic life and was now received on the footing of an adopted brother, felt very happy. His intercourse with Koerner gave him the very kind of intellectual stimulus that he most needed. Koerner was at this time the more solid character of the two. He had seen more of the world. While capable of warm affection and strong enthusiasm, he had adopted, a profession which inevitably gave to his thoughts a practical bent. Besides this he had taken up the study of Kant with great earnestness and was thereby more than ever disposed to see all questions in the white light of pure reason. He was thus the very man to pour a cool Mephistophelean spray upon Schiller’s emotional fervors. One can easily imagine the general drift of the philosophical discussions that took place during the lengthening evenings of September, 1785, when we find Schiller expressing himself to the absent Huber in such language as this:
The boyhood of our minds is now over, I imagine, and likewise the honeymoon of our friendship. Let our hearts now cleave to each other in manly affection, gush little and feel much; plan little and act the more fruitfully. Enthusiasm and ideals have sunk incredibly in my estimation. As a rule we make the mistake of estimating the future from a momentary feeling of enhanced power, and painting things in the color of our transient exaltation of feeling. I praise enthusiasm, and love the divine ethereal power of kindling to a great resolution. It pertains to the better man, but it is not all of him.
But life at Loschwitz was not lived altogether in the upper altitudes of solemn philosophy. From this period dates the well-known ‘Petition’,–one of the few glints of playful humor to be found among Schiller’s poems. He had been left alone one day with ‘Don Carlos’, and he found his meditations disturbed by the operations of the washerwoman. The result was a string of humorous stanzas bewailing the fate of a poet who is compelled by his vocation to fix his mind upon the love ecstasies of Princess Eboli, and listen at the same time to the swashy music of the wash-tub:
I feel my love-lorn lady’s hurt,
My fancy waxes hotter;
I hear,–the sound of sock and shirt A-swishing in the water.
Vanished the dream–the faery chimes– My Princess, pax vobiscum!
The devil take these wash-day rimes, I will no longer risk ’em.
When the Koerners occupied their winter residence in the city, Schiller found rooms hard by, and was presently joined by Huber, who had secured a position in the diplomatic service. The time was now ripe for that jubilant song, more frequently set to music than any other of Schiller’s poems, wherein we are introduced to a mystic brotherhood, worshiping in fiery intoxication at the shrine of the celestial priestess, Joy, whose other name is Sympathy. A mystic brotherhood; yet not an exclusive one, since the fraternal kiss is–freely offered to every mortal on the round earth who has found one soul to love. The lines glorify Joy, just as the odes to Laura had previously glorified Love, as a mystic attraction pervading all nature and leading up to God; as that which holds the stars in their course, inspires the searcher after truth, sustains the martyr and gives a pledge of immortality. Wherefore the millions are exhorted to endure patiently for the better world that is coming, when a great God will reward. Anger and vengeance are to be forgotten, and our mortal foe forgiven. After these rapturous strophes, culminating in a health to the good Spirit above, one is just a little surprised to hear the singer urge, with unabated ardor, a purely militant ideal of life,–firm courage in heavy trial, succor to the oppressed, manly pride in the presence of kings, and death to the brood of liars. A final strophe, urging grace to the criminal on the scaffold, general forgiveness of sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a ‘bad poem’. The ‘Song to Joy’ sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the stars is to pardon everybody, what becomes of the incentive to a militant life? Why should one strive and cry and get into a feaze about tyrants and liars?
The ‘Song to Joy’, with music by Koerner, was published in the second number of the _Thalia_, which, after hanging fire for months, finally appeared in February, 1786. It contained also the poems ‘Radicalism of Passion’ and ‘Resignation’, and a fresh installment of ‘Don Carlos’. Of the prose contributions the most important was the story, ‘The Criminal from Disgrace’, later called ‘The Criminal from Lost Honor’. It was based upon a true story, got from Professor Abel in Stuttgart, concerning the life and death of a notorious Suabian robber, named Schwan, who was put to death in 1760. Schiller changed the name to Christian Wolf and built out of the ugly facts a strumous tale of criminal psychology,–the autopsy of a depraved soul, as he called it. His hero is a sort of vulgarized Karl Moor; that is, an enemy of society who might have been its friend if things had not happened so and so. The successive steps of his descent from mild resentment to malignant fury, libertinism and crime, and the reaction of his own increasing depravity upon his own mind, are described in a manner which is fairly interesting from a literary point of view, whatever a modern expert criminologist might think of it. The _crux_ of the ever difficult problem,–the precise division of responsibility between society and the wretch whom it spews out of its mouth,–is brought clearly into view, but without any attempt at an exact solution. The tale is not a homily, but an object-lesson designed to show how things go. It is too slight an affair to be worthy of extended comment, but it shows Schiller becoming interested in the psychological analysis of conduct. Moral goodness and badness are beginning to appear less simple concepts, and the tangle of human motive more intricate, than he had supposed.
Along with these contributions there also appeared in the second number of the _Thalia_ a translation of the ‘Precis Historique’, prefixed by Mercier to his recently published ‘Portrait de Philippe Second’. The ‘portrait’ itself was a dramatic picture, in fifty-two scenes, without division into acts. The work of Mercier, who paints the Spanish king in the darkest possible colors, furnished a few hints for ‘Don Carlos’, but its influence was not very great. What chiefly concerns us here is to note Schiller’s awakening interest in historical studies. In the spring of 1786, during an absence of the Koerners which deprived him of his wonted inspiration, he found himself unable to work. Letter after letter tells of laziness and mental vacuity. As he could do nothing else he took to desultory reading, and this did not satisfy him. ‘Really’, he wrote on the 15th of April:
Really I must turn over a new leaf with my reading. I feel with pain, that I still have such an astonishing amount to learn; that I must sow In order to reap…. History is becoming dearer to me every day. I have this week read a history of the Thirty Years’ War, and my head is still quite feverish from it. That this epoch of the greatest national misery should have been at the same time the most brilliant epoch of human power! What a number of great men came forth from this night! I could wish that for the ten years past I had done nothing but study history. I believe I should have become a very different fellow. Do you think I shall yet be able to make up for lost time?
One sees from this language by what particular hook the study of history had taken hold of Schiller’s mind, and what kind of profit he was promising himself from further reading. He was interested in the evolution of great men. For him, as for the poets always, from Homer down, history resolved itself into the doings of the leaders.
For the time being, however, the new zeal seems to have been a mere flash in the pan, that set nothing in motion. Nor was Koerner able, for some time to come, to induce his friend to make a serious study of Kant’s ‘Critique’, though every third word between them was of philosophy. Nevertheless their philosophic debates did bear literary fruit. The third number of the _Thalia_, which came out in May, contained the first installment of the ‘Philosophical Letters’, a fictitious correspondence between two friends, Julius and Raphael, who have arrived by different routes at the same way of thinking, and are resolved to tell the world how it all came about. Julius is Schiller; Raphael is Koerner, who actually contributed one of the later letters. We learn that Julius was passing through a spiritual crisis. He was happy but he had not reflected. The little world of his rapturous emotions sufficed him. Now, however, Raphael has enlightened his mind, made him a citizen of the world and taught him to comprehend the all-sufficient majesty of reason; but he has won enlightenment at the expense of peace. He is miserable and demands back his soul. Raphael rebukes him gently for his faint-heartedness and asks for a history of his thinking. So Julius rummages through his papers and sends on a somewhat elaborate ‘Theosophy of Julius’,–a sort of _precis_, it would seem, of Schiller’s earlier views. It is religious mysticism set forth with warm eloquence. The universe is a thought of God. The highest aim of thinking is to read the divine plan. All spirits are attracted by perfection. The supreme perfection is God, of whom love is an emanation. Love is gain; hate is loss; pardon, the recovery of lost property; misanthropy a prolonged suicide; egoism the utmost poverty. If every man loved all mankind, every man would possess the world. If we comprehend perfection it becomes ours. If we plant beauty and joy, beauty and joy shall we reap. If we think clearly we shall love fervently.
To this ‘theosophy’ Julius adds a few comments, evidently of later origin, which show that he has now become aware of its intellectual inadequacy. Still he does not repudiate it. He thinks it may do for a doctrine, if one’s nature is adapted to it.–Herewith, so far as Schiller was concerned, the ‘Philosophic Letters’ came to an end; but in the spring of 1788, Koerner surprised him with a letter by Raphael, which is, philosophically speaking, by far the best of the entire collection. But this book is not concerned with the writings of Koerner.
Ere the third number of the _Thalia_ appeared it had become evident that the enterprise would not be profitable, and its perplexed editor was in doubt whether to continue it. He finally decided to go on. When the fourth number came out, early in 1787, it contained the beginning of a novel, ‘The Ghostseer’, wherein a mysterious Sicilian, and a still more mysterious Armenian, dog the footsteps of a German Prince von —- living at Venice, and do various things suggesting a connection with occult powers. The first installment of the story broke off at a very exciting point,–just when the Sicilian has produced his amazing ghost-scene, but has not yet been unmasked as a vulgar fraud. Schiller evidently began the novel in no very strenuous frame of mind. He wished to profit by the popular interest in tales of mysterious charlatanry which had been aroused by the exploits of Cagliostro. So he set out to spin a yarn in that vein, but he had no definite plan and did not himself know where he would bring up. The literary merits of ‘The Ghostseer’, Schiller’s most noteworthy attempt in prose fiction, will come up for consideration in connection with the conclusion, or rather the continuation, which he published some two years later, when he had left Dresden to seek his fortune in Weimar.
Even now the necessity of seeking his fortune somewhere was daily becoming more imperious. The _Thalia_ did not pay, though the critics spoke well of it, and he could not live forever upon Koerner’s friendly advances of money. The sense of his dependence often galled him; and yet when a proposal, in itself highly attractive, came to him from a distant city, he could not pluck up courage to leave his friend. Friedrich Schroeder, the greatest German actor of the time, wished to draw him to Hamburg. Schiller looked up to Schroeder with genuine admiration and speculatively promised himself great gain from association with ‘the one man in Germany who could realize all his ideas of art.’ In Mannheim,–so he wrote in October, 1786,–he had lost all his enthusiasm for the theater; it was now beginning to revive, but he shuddered at the treatment to which playwrights were exposed by theatrical people. Moreover he was living at Dresden ‘in the bosom of a family to which he had become necessary’. So nothing came of the negotiations except the preparation of a stage version of ‘Don Carlos’ for the Hamburg theater.
An amusing glimpse of domestic conditions in the Koerner household is afforded by Schiller’s dramatic skit, entitled ‘Koerner’s Forenoon’. It belongs apparently to the year 1787, but was not published until 1862. The busy councillor of the Dresden Consistory sees a little leisure before him and squares off at his desk for a solid forenoon’s work. He begins by ordering his man to shave him. Then he is interrupted by a procession of callers,–Schiller, in various roles, and Minna, and Dorchen, and Professor Becker and others–who keep the stream of babble flowing until one o’clock. Koerner is too late for the consistory and all that he has accomplished is to get shaved. The piece is a slight affair, but there is enough of solemn fun in it to make one wish that its author had seen fit to work his lighter vein more frequently.
About the time when this facetious bagatelle was penned, or a little earlier perhaps, Schiller became the hero of a comedy in real life. In the winter of 1787 he attended a masked ball where he met ‘a pretty domino–a plump voluptuous maiden,–who fascinated him. Her name was Henriette von Arnim. He followed up the acquaintance and was soon quite seriously interested. As the Arnim family did not enjoy the best of reputations, the Koerners were annoyed at Schiller’s seeming lack of connoisseurship in women. They contrived to let him know that on the evenings when Henriette was not at home to him she was at home to a certain earthy Count Waldstein, or to a certain jew banker, as the case might be. This was painful, but not immediately decisive, and miserable days ensued. In the spring he was persuaded to try a few weeks’ outing in the country. Here he was at first frightfully lonesome,–a dejected Robinson Crusoe, who could neither work nor amuse himself. To his pathetic demands for reading-matter his friends replied with malicious humor by sending him Goethe’s ‘Werther’ and Laclos’s ‘Liaisons Dangereuses’. After a while the Arnims followed him, but presently the count came also; and then the course of true love, thus awkwardly bifurcated, was more troubled than ever. After Henriette’s return to Dresden there was an interchange of letters, wherein love fought a losing battle with doubt and suspicion.
This half-year of amatory perturbation was of course unfavorable to literary labor. No further numbers of the _Thalia_ appeared, and ‘The Misanthrope’, a new play of excellent promise, made no progress. But ‘Don Carlos’ did at last get itself completed–after a fashion. It was published early in the summer. And now, with this burden lifted, the time seemed to have arrived for carrying out the long-cherished plan of a visit to Weimar. Who could tell what might come of it? Koerner was just as loyal as ever, but he was also wise enough to respect his friend’s longing for a more assured and less dependent existence. And so in July Schiller set out for Thueringen,–to be seen no more in Dresden save as an occasional visitor. But the letters he wrote to the noble-minded friend who had done and been so much for him constitute, for several years to come, our best source of information concerning his outward fortune and his inner history. Before we follow him to Weimar, however, it will be in order to consider the play which remains as the most important achievement of his Dresden period.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 64: Letter of March 25, 1785.]
CHAPTER IX
Don Carlos
Arm in Arm mit dir,
So fordr’ ich mein Jahrhundert in die Schranken. _’Don Carlos’_.
With the publication of ‘Don Carlos’ Schiller’s literary reputation entered upon a new phase. Hitherto he had been known as a playwright in whom the passion for strong effects often obscured the sense of artistic fitness. Of his dramatic power there could be no doubt, but had he the higher gift of the great poet? Would he ever be able to clothe his conceptions in a form that would appeal permanently to the general heart because of high and rare artistic excellence? Doubts of this kind were quite justifiable up to the year 1787, but they were set at rest by ‘Don Carlos’. However vulnerable it may be as a poetic totality, it has passages that are magnificent. Its sonorous verse, wedded to a lofty argument and freighted with the noblest idealism of the century, made sure its author’s title to a place in the Walhalla of the poets.
Except ‘Wallenstein’ no other work of Schiller cost him such long and strenuous toil. ‘Don Carlos’, like Goethe’s ‘Faust’, is a stratified deposit. The time that went to the making of it, only four years in all, was comparatively short, but it was for Schiller a time of rapid change; and the play, intensely subjective from the first, participated in the ripening process. The result is a certain lack of artistic congruity. Schiller himself, always his own best critic, felt this and frankly admitted it in the first of his ‘Letters upon Don Carlos’.
It may be [he wrote] that in the first [three] acts I have aroused expectations which the last do not fulfill. St. Real’s novel, perhaps also my own remarks upon it in the first number of the _Thalia_, may have suggested to the reader a standpoint from which the work can no longer be regarded. During the period of elaboration, which on account of divers interruptions was a pretty long time, much changed within myself…. What had mainly attracted me at first, attracted me less later on, and at last hardly at all. New ideas that came into my mind crowded out the earlier ones. Carlos himself had declined in my favor, for no other reason perhaps than that I had outgrown him, and for the opposite reason the Marquis of Posa had taken his place. So it came about that I brought a very different heart to the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the first three were already in the hands of the public, and the plan of the whole could not be recast; I had either to suppress the piece entirely (for which very few of my readers would have thanked me), or else to fit the second half to the first as best I could.
Let us look somewhat closely at the process of evolution here alluded to in general terms.
The original impulse came from a work of romantic fiction, the ‘Dom Carlos’ of St. Real, which was first read by Schiller in the summer of 1782 and drew from him the comment that the story ‘deserved the brush of a dramatist’. St. Real’s novel begins by telling how Charles the Fifth arranged, just before his abdication, that his grandson Carlos should some day marry Elizabeth of Valois: and how afterwards Philip determined to take the French princess for his own wife instead of leaving her to his son. Meanwhile, however, by much gazing at the picture of his betrothed, young Carlos had learned to love her, and she in turn had conceived for him a ‘disposition to love rather than a veritable passion’. Arrived at the Spanish court the young queen wins all hearts; even the white-haired Philip falls in love with her, though he treats her with stately reserve in the presence of others and surrounds her with the restraints of Spanish etiquette. Thus the queen comes to feel that she possesses ‘only the body of her husband, his soul being filled with the designs of his ambition and the meditation of his policy’. As for Carlos, his love-lorn eyes soon betray to her how it is with him, but she can only pity him, though she secretly returns his love, for she is as virtuous as she is beautiful.
Not so the Princess Eboli, wife of Ruy Gomez, the tutor of Carlos. Having tried to win the love of the king and found her designs thwarted by the queen’s beauty, Eboli makes advances to Prince Carlos, who lets her know that he cannot love her and thus makes her angry. In this mood she bestows her favor upon the king’s half-brother, Don Juan of Austria, who is also enamored of the queen and has been watching Carlos suspiciously. Having thus made enemies of Eboli and Don Juan, Carlos next draws upon himself the hatred of the powerful Duke of Alva, of Ruy Gomez, and of the Inquisition. This he does by his outspoken criticism of their doings and his threats of punishment to be meted out to them when he shall have become king. Anxious for their own future Alva and Ruy Gomez conspire together and cause suspicions of Carlos to be whispered in the ear of the king. At first Philip is not greatly excited. When Carlos, importuned by Count Egmont, asks for a commission to the Netherlands, Philip does not refuse, but declares that he will go too and share the peril of his son. This, however, is a mere ruse to gain time. While they are waiting, the king meanwhile feigning illness, Carlos communicates freely with the queen through his bosom friend, the Marquis of Posa. Hearing of this intimacy the king now becomes really jealous, but of Posa not of Carlos. Maddened by suspicion he has the marquis murdered on the street and employs Eboli to watch the queen. After this Carlos resolves upon independent action and begins to negotiate with the Netherlanders. His operations are watched and reported by his enemies, and just as he is about to leave Spain he is arrested. The king places his case before the Holy Office, which decrees that he must die. Being allowed to choose the manner of his death he opens his veins while bathing.
With the actual Don Carlos, whose story bears but little resemblance to that of St. Real’s hero, we are not particularly concerned. The French Abbe’s drift is to exalt the French princess and to give a telling picture of a pair of high-minded lovers who are brought to their death by a complicate intrigue begotten of jealousy, political hatred and religious fanaticism. After the death of Carlos the queen is poisoned and then, one after the other, all the conspirators meet with poetic justice. “Ainsi”, the Abbe concludes, “furent expiees les morts a jamais deplorables d’un prince magnanime, et de la plus belle et de la plus vertueuse princesse qui fut jamais. C’est ainsi que leurs ombres infortunees furent enfin pleinement appaisees par les funestes destinees de tous les complices de leur trepas.”
St. Real’s novel was published in 1672 and has been a favorite quarry of the dramatist. Of the plays of Otway (1676) and Campistron (1685) Schiller had no knowledge, nor did he receive any suggestions from the fierce and gloomy ‘Filippo’ of Alfieri, which appeared in 1783. He approached the subject in his own way and his first thought was simply to dramatize St. Real, who is mainly interested in the love tragedy and writes as a literary artist rather than as a political or religious pamphleteer. We possess a prose outline[65] of ‘Don Carlos’, written probably at Bauerbach, which shows exactly how the theme first bit into Schiller’s mind. The exposition was to show the secret passion of the lovers and the dangers threatening them from the jealousy of Philip, the political hostility of the grandees and the malice of the slighted Eboli. In the third act the king would become madly suspicious and resolve upon his son’s death. Then there was to be a gleam of hope: the ambition of Carlos would awaken and begin to prevail over his love, while Posa would divert the king’s suspicion to himself and fall a sacrifice to friendship. Then a new danger would arise: the king would discover Don Carlos in a seeming ‘rebellion’, and decree his death. The dying declaration of Carlos would prove his innocence and the king would be left alone to mourn the havoc he had wrought and to punish the conspirators who had deceived him.
This sketch promises, it will be observed, not a political tragedy, but, as Schiller himself afterwards phrased it, a ‘domestic tragedy in a royal household’. Springing up from the same soil and at the same time as ‘Cabal and Love’, it was to be much the same sort of play. In both a pair of high-minded lovers belonging together by natural affinity, but separated by artificial barriers; the rights of passion battling in the one case with social prejudice, in the other with the law of Rome and the malice of courtiers; in both a court plot against the lovers; the hero beset by a fair sinner who receives him in her private room, lays siege to him, and is angered by the slighting of her love; in both a tyrannical and headstrong father at enmity with his son. Of the political ideas which the world associates with ‘Don Carlos’ there is here no adumbration. We hear nothing of the Netherlanders, nor of the Inquisition, nor of the rights of man. Posa is only a friend of Carlos, not the ambassador of all mankind, and there is no room for his golden dreams of philanthropic statesmanship. And yet it is worth noticing that in three points (all in the third act) Schiller adds to his French source: Carlos’s ambition was to waken and prevail over his love, Posa was to sacrifice himself, and the lovers were to rise superior to their passion.
However, no sooner did our playwright address himself seriously to his task than his imagination began to break over the bounds he had set for it. Even at Bauerbach, as his letters show, his mind was occupied with the thought of ‘avenging mankind’ by scourging the gloomy despotism of Philip, the monstrous cruelty of Alva, the dark intrigues of the Jesuits and the hideous crimes of the Inquisition. That he made any progress in the spring of 1783, further than to cogitate upon his general plan and to fall in love with his hero, is not probable; nor do his Mannheim letters allude to ‘Don Carlos’ until June, 1784. In a letter of that date he assures Dalberg,–mindful of that good man’s trials in connection with ‘Cabal and Love’,–that the new play will be ‘anything but a political piece’. Whatever could offend the feelings was to be strictly avoided. August 24 he writes that ‘Don Carlos’ is a ‘splendid, subject’, especially for himself. Four great characters, Carlos, Philip, the queen, and Alva (no mention of Posa) open before him a boundless field. He cannot forgive himself for having tried to shine in the bourgeois drama, where another may easily surpass him (this in allusion to Iffland), whereas in historical tragedy he need fear no rival. He adds that he is now fairly master of the iambic form and that the verse cannot fail to impart splendor and dignity.
So we see that by the end of his first year in Mannheim Schiller had indeed undergone a change. The _saeva indignatio_ of the dramatic pamphleteer had given way to the serener mood of the poetic artist. This change would doubtless have come about under any circumstances, through the natural ripening of his mind and art, but it was hastened by the influence of Klein and Wieland, and by the example of Lessing’s ‘Nathan’. Anton von Klein, a Jesuit _bel esprit_ living at Mannheim, was a steadfast champion of the regular heroic tragedy. He had written a searching review of ‘The Robbers’, pointing out its many faults and absurdities, but he recognized Schiller’s talent and saw in him a man worth converting. At Mannheim a friendship sprang up between the two, and Schiller heard much talk about the superior merit of the noble poetic style,–a region of thought in which he had hitherto wandered but little. He had written thus far out of the fervor of his soul, and theory of any sort had touched him but little. From Rousseauite literature he had caught a fantastic conception of ‘nature’, and this had led him to portray men and women who were scarcely more natural than those of Gottsched himself. In the rush of feeling he had enlisted among the young revolutionists whose stormy and stressful tendency, curiously enough, was regarded as ‘English’. And now he found that there was after all something to be said in favor of the classical French type. The ‘anglo-maniacs’ were not in possession of the whole truth. Might there not be, perhaps, a _tertium quid_,–a German drama having a character of its own and combining the literary dignity and artistic finish of the French with the warmth and variety of the pseudo-English school? As if in answer to this query, Lessing’s ‘Nathan’, published in 1779, had already opened a vista of limitless possibilities. And ‘Nathan’ was in blank verse.
To this was added the influence of Wieland, who had lately published a series of ‘Letters to a Young Poet’,[66] in which he read his contemporaries a lecture on the absurdity of their boasting over the French. He wanted to know where the German dramas were that could compare with the best works of Racine, Corneille and Moliere. He insisted that a perfect drama no less than a perfect epic must be in verse. Even rime in his opinion was indispensable. Such doctrine coming from a man of Wieland’s immense authority in literary matters could not fail to influence the groping mind of Schiller, though he could not stomach the demand for rime. The blank verse of Shakspere and Lessing seemed to promise best, and so he set about practicing upon it. At first the meter gave him great difficulty; he could not subdue his strong passion and his wild tropes to the even tenor of the decasyllabic cadence. Then followed his decision to publish his play piecemeal in the _Thalia_,–an unfortunate decision as it proved. His hope was to profit betimes by what his critics might say. He was in a mood of boundless docility and boundless confidence in the public. Resolved to write ‘no verses that could not be submitted to the best heads in the nation’, he fondly imagined that the nation would be as eager to help him as he was eager to be helped. As a matter of fact he got but little assistance from the critic tribe, and his piecemeal publication only served to embarrass him when he came to the final redaction of the whole.
In the short preface which introduced the first installment to the public, Schiller ventured the opinion that the excellence of his tragedy would depend mainly upon his success in portraying the king. The situation of Carlos and the queen was interesting, he thought, but not tragically pathetic; it would be difficult to create sympathy for them. If, however, King Philip was to be the center of tragic interest, it was evident that he could not be depicted, in accordance with a one-sided tradition, as a repellent monster. From these and other expressions in the same essay we can see that Schiller was growing cool toward his hero. He felt that the troubles of Carlos and the queen could not be regarded under the Rousseauite scheme of natural passion battling with odious convention, but that the passion was itself odious. He felt that a young prince, pining and whining and plunging himself into disaster all on account of an illicit and mawkish love for his stepmother, was not a very inspiring personage to be the hero of a great historical drama. The solution of the problem seemed for the moment to lie in a ‘rescue’ of King Philip. So the love-tragedy in a royal household began to take on more than ever the character of a political tragedy, the promise to Dalberg being quickly forgotten. When he began to publish, however, his political program was still rather vague and negative; it hardly went beyond the intention to bestow an incidental scourging upon the enemies of mankind in church and state.
Then came the influence of Koerner, the effect of which was to give great prominence to the character of Posa as a positive champion of the right, and to make him for a while the real hero of the play. There seems at first blush but little resemblance between the fanatical idealist of Schiller’s imagination and the sensible Dresden lawyer, but the Koerner strain in Posa is unmistakable. In his intercourse with Schiller he was evermore insisting on the importance of doing something for mankind. Enthusiasm, love, friendship, sentiment of any kind, were valuable in his estimation only as sources of inspiration for telling activity. As matters of mere private ecstasy, of froth and foam rising and falling to no effect in the turmoil of the individual soul, they were for him objects of mild derision. And the idea that lay nearest his heart as a student of Kant was the idea of freedom. And so, as Schiller worked upon his play at Dresden, Posa was made the exponent of the new point of view. He became the teacher of the unripe Carlos, even as Koerner had been the teacher of the unripe Schiller; the subduer of unmanly emotionalism; the apostle of renunciation; the pointer of the way to great deeds; the prophet of a free humanity to come. In the brilliant light thus thrown upon Posa the other heroes were somewhat obscured. The poet’s original love, Don Carlos, and his second love, Don Philip, had to make way for a third passion that was stronger than either of the others.
The four installments of ‘Don Carlos’ that were printed in the _Thalia_, up to the end of 1786, comprised in all three acts. They carried the action to the point where the king, lonely amid sycophants and deceivers, sighs for a ‘man’ to counsel him. The great scene between Posa and Philip was yet to come in Act IV. The matter already in print contained more than four thousand verses, and several scenes had only been sketched in prose. At this rate it was evident that the play would reach twice the length of a regular tragedy and would be an impossibility on the stage. Schiller began to see that his impatience of stage restrictions and his subjective interest in certain situations had done him an evil turn. He had been deplorably long-winded. And just then came out a caustic review which showed him that he had committed other sins than those of prolixity.[67] Nevertheless he did not now have recourse to that drastic surgery whereby, in the edition of 1801, he reduced the unwieldy play to more manageable dimensions.[68] Without any radical revision of the part already in print, he completed the last two acts as best he could, with Minerva often unwilling. Posa was made to gain the king’s confidence, to become seemingly omnipotent, and in the pride of his imagined strength to enter upon that desperate game of intrigue and double-dealing which involves himself and his cause and his helpless friend, Don Carlos, in final disaster.
Thus St. Real’s pathetic tale of love and intrigue had been left far behind, and out of it had come a tragedy of amiable political idealism, growing insolent with self-confidence and losing touch with present realities in its dazzling dream of things to come.
‘The soul of Shakspere’s Hamlet, the blood and nerves of Leisewitz’s Julius, the pulse of Schiller himself’,–this, it will be recalled, was the original formula for the composition of Prince Carlos. But, alas, the soul of one of Shakspere’s heroes is not so easily purloined, and Schiller did not succeed well in his proposed larceny. What we find is not the soul but the situation of Hamlet: a young prince just returned from the university,–troubled by a strange melancholy,–a mystery to king and court,–beset by spies whom he sends packing,–visited by a dear academic friend,–called to a great work to which he feels himself unequal, and so forth. The parallel is obvious, but it hardly goes beyond externalities. Nor does the portrait of Carlos owe very much that is vital to Leisewitz. He gives us, to be sure, a love-sick prince whose illicit passion unnerves him, and like Carlos Julius has a friend who admonishes him to be a man. But there the resemblance ends; he has not the strength to renounce and remains to the end a sentimental weakling.
The truth is that the soul, pulse, blood and nerves of Carlos are simply Schiller’s own. There is no other creation of his into which he put so much of himself. That feeling of dark despair and dead ambition to which Carlos gives expression in his first dialogue with Posa is but a poetic echo of actual experiences.
I too have known a Carlos in my dreams Whose cheek flushed crimson when he heard the name Of Freedom. But that Carl is dead and buried,–
sighs the Spanish prince. ‘I might perhaps have become great, but fate took the field against me too early…. Love and esteem me for that which I might have become under more favorable stars’,–writes the actual Schiller.[69] And just as Carlos throws himself into the arms of Posa and thinks to find his all in friendship, so Schiller hoped ineffable things from Koerner. Nowhere else in literature has the eighteenth-century cult of friendship found such fervid, and in the main such noble, expression as in ‘Don Carlos’.
It may indeed be fairly objected that, in view of what is to come later, the Carlos of the first act is a little too soft even for the sentimental age. We are required to have faith in his heroic capacity for enterprises of great pith and moment. But after his first dialogue with Posa it is as difficult for the reader or spectator to trust him as it is for King Philip. His lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as a youthful friendship; his abject confession of despair and dependence; his long-drawn-out revelation of a sick heart, and his morbid craving for sympathy in a passion which he himself feels to be abominable,–all this suggests a cankered soul of which there can be little hope. Hamlet greets the returning Horatio with the simple words:
Sir, my good friend. I’ll change that name with you.
The corresponding passage in Schiller runs:
Can it be?
Is’t true? Is’t possible? ‘Tis really thou. I press thee to my heart and feel the beat Of thine omnipotent against my own.
Now all is well again.–In this embrace The sickness of my soul is cured. I lie Upon my Roderick’s neck.
One does not see how such pitiful weakness is all at once to be converted into manly strength by the mere arrival of a friend; wherefore that fine saying of Carlos which closes the first act,
Arm in arm with thee,
I hurl defiance at my century,
sounds a trifle bombastic.
So again at his first meeting with Elizabeth, Carlos is distressingly mawkish. She pictures him, in pitying indignation, as succeeding to the throne, undoing his father’s work and at last marrying herself. Then he exclaims in sudden horror:
Accursed son! Yes, it is over. Now
‘Tis over. Now I see it all so clearly,
and much more of the same purport. But how strange that he should have brooded for eight moons over his passion without ever having considered how it might appear to the object of it! His talk here suggests a mental inadequacy which one is hardly prepared to see change all of a sudden into heroic resolution.
To be sure it was a part of Schiller’s design to represent in Carlos a process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason is that Schiller did not foresee the end from the beginning. He thought of Carlos originally as a hapless youth having a sort of natural right to rebel. It was a part of the plan, moreover, that he should renounce and grow strong through renunciation. But this was to come later in the third act; in the beginning he was to dally with the morbid passion which was to be his tragic guilt. Now with this conception of the subject, the portrait of Carlos, just as we have it, fits in very well; but when the main interest of the play had become political, when the lawless love had become of no account and the renunciation everything,–then it was surely an error to introduce Carlos in such a pitiful plight of soul that faith in him is next to impossible, and the next moment require us to accept him as a hero.
In fine, one may well wish that Carlos had a little more of the soul of Hamlet,–leastwise of Hamlet’s rough energy of character and saving sense of humor. But the time is past for thinking to dispose of Schiller by saying that he was no Shakspere. Enough that he was himself. And nowhere was he more himself than in just this combination of infinite soft-heartedness with large manly ambition. When Carlos preaches to his father that ‘tears are the eternal credential of humanity’, he utters a genuine oracle of the sentimental age. And when in the final scene he appears purified by suffering, master of his selfish passion and all intent upon that higher good of which he has caught a glimpse, he speaks again from the heart of Schiller. What a noble figure is Carlos in this last interview with his mother! What matchless poetry in the lines! And how genuinely, thrillingly tragic is the ending of the scene!
The teacher of Prince Carlos is the amazing Marquis of Posa. In a cynical foot-note of the year 1845 Carlyle quotes, with seeming approval, Richter’s comparison of Posa to the tower of a light-house,–“high, far-shining, empty”. But what would Jean Paul have had? Is it not quite enough for a light-house to be high and far-shining? One does not see how its usefulness would be enhanced by filling it with the beans and bacon of practical politics. Here surely one must side with Schiller and never think of criticising him for not making his Posa an exponent of political ideas that belong to a later time. Every age has its dream. Ours is of a people to be made happy by democratic legislation; Schiller’s was of a people to be made happy by the personal goodness and enlightenment of the monarch. That the one dream, seen _sub specie aeternitatis_, is any more empty and fatuous than the other, would be very difficult to prove.
The sentimental imagination of the eighteenth century was fond of dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station. Standing above all other men, occupied habitually with weighty matters of state, surrounded by self-seeking flatterers and schemers, how was a ruler ever to hear the truth or to know the blessedness of disinterested friendship? Awful fate to be thus cut off from tender human affection and compelled to tread the wine-press alone! And if a prince should really find a friend, how fortunate for him and his subjects! It was the simple theory of idealists under the Old Regime that the happiness of a people depended altogether upon the wisdom and goodness of the king; and in an age when ‘feeling was everything’ it was natural that goodness of the heart should count for more than mere sagacity. What the king was believed to need pre-eminently, was to keep alive his human sympathies; and how could he do this better than by having some one to love and confide in?
So Schiller provides his Spanish prince with a friend. Our drama seems to wish to impute to Posa a lovable personality; else how account for the spell that he casts over all three of the royal personages?[70] Looked at closely, however, and judged by his conduct rather than by his fine phrases, he appears anything but lovable. After his death it comes to light that he is deeply involved in a conspiracy for which the ordinary name is treason. He has been organizing a combination of European powers for the purpose of detaching the Netherlands by force from the Spanish crown. He returns to Spain as an arch-traitor,–with his pockets full of letters which if discovered would cost him his head. When one learns this and then thinks back in the light of this knowledge, his conduct throughout the play appears absolutely inconceivable; so that one is driven to the conjecture that Schiller did not think of him all along as an out-and-out traitor, but added this touch at the last, along with others, for the purpose of accenting his character as a Quixotic madman.
Up to the fourth act the impression produced by him is that of an amiable idealist, who has travelled extensively and acquired liberal ideas of government. He has been shocked by the regime of persecution and bloodshed in the Netherlands. He cares nothing for Protestantism as a creed, but he is an apostle of tolerance in the style of Frederick the Great. He returns to Spain intent upon securing for the Netherlands not political independence through revolution, but freedom of thought under the Spanish crown; and this he thinks to accomplish by procuring the stadholdership for Prince Carlos. Now this being the presupposition, it was a great thought of Schiller to bring his humane dreamer face to face with the somber despot, Philip the Second, Let it be granted that Posa’s views of statesmanship, which belong to the Age of Enlightenment, could hardly have found lodgment in the brain of a chevalier of the 16th century. The thing is perhaps supposable only in poetry; but there it is supposable enough, and Schiller need not have troubled himself to argue away the anachronism. It is the poet’s prerogative to mask himself and his own age in the forms of the fictitious past. He will do it anyway, no matter how hard he may strive after historical verisimilitude. It is just as well, therefore, for him to throw away his scruples and stand boldly on his rights.
From a dramaturgic point of view, indeed, the long political altercation between Posa and Philip is out of place; it is magnificent, but it holds up the action to no purpose, and the play goes on as if it had not been. Schiller was evidently concerned to produce a pendant to the great scene in ‘Nathan the Wise’. Saladin wants truth, Philip wants a man. Both the prophets prepare themselves for their ordeal in a brief soliloquy. Both monarchs get their wish, and a friendly relation ensues. Both scenes are purple patches of didacticism,–the author preaching a sermon to his contemporaries. Unfortunately Schiller did not have at hand a matchless fable to make his doctrine concrete and give it human interest. In places his language is abstract and difficult to follow, but taken as a whole the scene is admirable in its denotation of Posa’s manly independence and humane philosophy. For a moment the marquis dreams of accomplishing his purpose by an appeal to the goodness and enlightenment of the king; and into his appeal he pours all the eloquence of eighteenth-century humanitarianism. All that the literature of generations had garnered up; all that lay on the heart of the young Schiller, in the way of fair hopes for mankind to be realized by humane and enlightened rulership, finds here immortal expression through the mouth of Posa.
And then what a revulsion in the last two acts! The great scene of the third act leaves an impression that the world’s affairs are not in such bad hands after all. Posa does not convince the king’s mind, but he finds his heart and wins his confidence. One has the feeling that, if he bide his time and use some tact, he can accomplish all that he desires. But to our amazement he gives up the king and enters upon a desperate game of double-dealing in which he deceives everybody. He forms the plan of sending Carlos to the Netherlands as the leader of a revolt. Of this plan he says nothing to his friend, nor does he tell him of his own new relation to the king. Instead he wraps himself in mystery and asks Carlos for his letter-case. This he turns over to the king, and gets a warrant for the arrest of Carlos. The young prince, suspecting quite reasonably that he has been betrayed, goes to Eboli for enlightenment. Here Posa finds him and draws his dagger upon the woman, as if she were the possessor of some terrible secret,–which in fact she is not. Then he relents and arrests Carlos without explanation. He now writes a compromising letter which he knows will cause his own death. Then, after some delay, he goes to Carlos and tries to explain his strange conduct, and while he is telling his story the bullet of the king’s assassin finds him. Carlos mourns the Great Departed as a pattern of unexampled heroic virtue, but one can have little sympathy with the panegyric, especially after one learns that Posa was a traitor from the beginning.
There would be little profit in discussing the last two acts of ‘Don Carlos’ with respect to their inherent reasonableness. It is possible to frame an intelligible theory of Posa’s conduct, but not one which is perfectly coherent, and least of all one which shall harmonize with the impression produced by the first three acts. There we have an amiable idealist, whom we can at least understand; here a madman smitten, like Fiesco, with a mania for managing a large and dangerous intrigue all in his own way, and accomplishing his ends by modes of action which seem to him heroic, but to the ordinary mind utterly preposterous. Thus he accounts for his failure to confide his plans to Carlos by saying that he was ‘beguiled by false delicacy’,–which seems to mean that his relation to the king was felt by him as a breach of friendship. But how strange that a man with public ends in view should feel thus under the circumstances! So too his self-sacrifice is nothing but heroic folly, since his death in no way betters the chances of Carlos for escape. The flight would have had a better chance of success had Posa omitted his heroics altogether and quietly planned to escape with his friend. In fine, we have to do here with entirely abnormal psychic processes. The reader and still more the spectator is bewildered by Posa, and does not know any better than Carlos and the king know how to take him.[71]
Turning now to the portrait of the king we find there too the traces of a wavering purpose. The original conception was dark as Erebus. In the first act, more especially in the first act as originally printed, the King of Spain is painfully suggestive of a wicked ogre swooping in upon a nursery of naughty children. Such an insanely jealous, swaggering, domineering, cruel fanatic is too loathsome to be interesting. Then came the thought, suggested partly by the reading of Brantome and Ferrera, of presenting Philip’s character in a more favorable light and making him the center of tragic interest,–a thought which was neither given up nor consistently carried out. In October, 1785, Schiller wrote to Koerner that he was reading Watson and that ‘weighty reforms were threatening his own Philip and Alva.’ The Rev. Robert Watson’s history by no means idealizes Philip, but it credits him with sincerity, vigilance, penetration, self-control, administrative capacity and a ‘considerable share of sagacity’ in the choice of ministers and generals,–not an altogether mean list of kingly qualities. On the other hand, in Mercier’s book[72] Philip appears as the embodiment of all those qualities which the Age of Enlightenment regarded as odious in a ruler. Thus, just as in the case of Fiesco, Schiller found himself pulled this way and that by his authorities; and the result of his attempt to graft an impressive monarch upon the stock furnished by St. Real’s jealous husband is a Philip who does not fully satisfy either the historic sense or the poetic imagination.
For Schiller, of course, a truly great monarch needed to have a tender heart; so Philip was given certain sentimental traits. He feels the loneliness of his station. In spite of his seeming coldness the pleading of Carlos for affection touches him, and he gives orders that henceforth his son is to stand nearer to the throne. For the purpose of exhibiting the king’s magnanimity we have the anachronistic scene in which he is made to pardon Medina Sidonia for the loss of the great armada,–an event which happened twenty years later. Then he becomes suspicious of Domingo and Alva and longs for an honest man to tell him the truth. And when the man appears the king is most surprisingly open-minded. ‘This fire’, he says to Posa,
Is admirable. You would fain do good, Just _how_ you do it, patriot and sage
Can little care.
So Philip is a patriot and a sage, glowing with the holy fire of humanity; and as such he even deigns to explain his policy and to enter into a contest of magnanimity with Posa. But the large-hearted monarch of whom we get a glimpse in this scene is soon reduced back to the jealous husband of St. Real, and his jealousy is closely patterned upon that of Othello. The Philip of the last two acts is sometimes pitiable, sometimes repulsive, never great. One is not very much surprised when he hires an assassin to kill Posa, instead of handing him over to the law.
Of the remaining characters the queen is the most interesting. In her Schiller for the first time depicts a woman convincingly. His Elizabeth is perhaps a shade too angelic,–she is an ideal figure like all his women,–but winsome she certainly is. One is a little startled by the readiness with which she approves Posa’s treasonable plan of a revolution to be headed by Don Carlos, but in this play the sentiment of patriotism cuts no figure anywhere. The principal characters are all occupied with the idea of ‘humanity’, and are not troubled by any scruples arising out of national feeling.
Taken as a whole ‘Don Carlos’ is too complicated to yield an unalloyed artistic pleasure. It suffers from a lack of simplicity and concentration. There is material in it for two or three plays. The double intrigue of love and politics becomes toward the end very confusing. The confusion is increased by the unexpected turn given to the character of Posa, and reaches a climax when we learn from the Grand Inquisitor that _he_ has been pulling all the strings from first to last, and that the entire tragedy was foreordained in the secret archives of the Holy Office. The unity of interest is marred by the fact that in the last two acts the real hero, Don Carlos, drops into the background as the helpless tool of the incalculable marquis. And Carlos, too, sometimes acts rather unaccountably; for example, when he supposes that the wanton _billet-doux_ signed ‘E.’ can come from the queen, of whose purity and high-mindedness he has just had convincing evidence. Then again his conduct toward the Princess Eboli in the love scene is very singular,–one might say amazing. And there are some other such defects, which concern the stage more than the reader and which, by skillful acting and judicious excision, can be reduced to insignificant proportions. When well played ‘Don Carlos’ produces a powerful impression. For the reader it is a noble poem containing a large ingredient of Schiller’s best self.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 65: It is printed in Saemtliche Schriften, III, 180.]
[Footnote 66: In the _Teutsche Merkur_ for October, 1782.]
[Footnote 67: In the _Neue Bibliothek der schoenen Wissenschaften_, Vol. XXXII; reprinted by Braun, “Schiller und Goethe im Urteile ihrer Zeitgenossen”, I, 152 ff.]
[Footnote 68: The fragments published in the _Thalia_ contained 4140 lines; the _editio princeps_ of 1787, 6283; the edition of 1801, this being the form in which the play is usually read, 5370.]
[Footnote 69: Letter to Reinwald April 14, 1783.]
[Footnote 70: Kuno Fischer, “Schiller-Schriften,” I, 217, observes: “Freilich bedarf die Schauspielkunst um diese Scene [the great scene between Posa and Philip] so magisch wirken zu lassen, wie das Genie des Dichters sie erzeugt und gestaltet hat, eines Posa, dem die Natur die seltensten Gaben verliehen. Jede seiner Bewegungen, jede Geberde, jeder Ton, ist Anmut und Wohlklang. Er ueberzeugt den Koenig nicht durch den Inhalt seiner Rede, er ruehrt ihn nicht durch seine Ideen, und doch gewinnt er ihn voellig, weil er ihn persoenlich bezaubert.” The natural effect of Schiller’s words, however, is to give an impression that the king is moved not solely by Posa’s personal charm, but in part by the idealism of his character.]
[Footnote 71: Perhaps the best possible account of his death is that of Kuno Fischer, “Schiller-Schriften”, I, 215: “Er opfert sich fuer ein weltgeschichtliches Ideal, das er idyllisch traeumte.”]
[Footnote 72: See above, page 169.]
CHAPTER X
Anchored in Thuringia
Ich musz ein Geschoepf um mich haben, das mir gehoert. _Letter of 1788_.
The Weimar of Schiller’s first acquaintance–arrived there July 21, 1787–consisted of a petty provincial court plus an unsightly village. The inhabitants numbered about six thousand. Of the space built over about one-third was occupied by the buildings of the court, much of the outlying modern Weimar being then under water. The streets were narrow, muddy lanes, the houses plain and poor. And yet the sluggish little place, so unprepossessing in all material ways, was already beginning to assert that claim to glory which has since been conceded to it by all the world. Princely patronage of art and letters was by no means unknown elsewhere in Germany, but it was usually a matter of gracious condescension on the one side and grateful adulation on the other. Very different in Weimar, where Goethe was not only a member of the Council, but the duke’s most intimate friend and trusted adviser. In his heart Karl August cared less for aesthetic matters than is often supposed, but his mother, the Dowager Duchess Amalie, patronized art for the real love of it. Poetry and music were as the breath of life to her, and her taste in poetry had been trained by the greatest living master. Aside from Goethe, two other distinguished writers had found a home in Weimar. The kindly but changeable Wieland, not really one of the _dii majores_, but so regarded at the time, had lived there since 1772; Herder, much more nobly endowed, but less amiable and less popular, since 1776.
At the time of Schiller’s advent Goethe was still in Italy, whither he had gone the previous autumn to find relief from the miseries of duodecimo statesmanship. Karl August and the reigning Duchess Luise were also absent, but several minor notables of the court circle had remained ‘in town’, and the dowager duchess was giving aesthetic teas as usual in her easily accessible ‘castle’ at Tiefurt. Wieland and Herder were likewise at home. On his arrival Schiller was taken charge of by the Baroness von Kalb, who was awaiting her soul’s affinity with feverish eagerness. Her excitement at seeing him again amounted to a ‘paroxysm’ which made her ill for a week. Then she grew better and her emotions gradually found the level of a friendliness too passionate to be called Platonic, but not sinful in the lower sense. As for Schiller, he devotedly let himself be loved and introduced to Weimar society, the pair making no concealment of their liking for each other. At first he felt some compunctions on account of the absent husband, who might be annoyed by gossip. It pleased him to observe, therefore, that in Weimar such a friendship was taken as a matter of course and treated with delicacy.[73] ‘Charlotte’ he wrote to Koerner, ‘is a grand, exceptional, womanly soul, a real study for me and worthy to occupy a greater mind than mine. With each forward step in our intercourse I discover in her new manifestations that surprise and delight me like beautiful spots in a broad landscape.’
For several months he played this unwholesome role of cicisbeo to Charlotte von Kalb. Then another and very different Charlotte crossed his path and quickly taught him the better way.
The story of Schiller’s gradual adjustment to the Weimar _milieu_ is told very fully in his frequent letters to Koerner. He called upon Herder and Wieland, and was received with ‘amazing politeness’ by the one, with loquacious cordiality by the other. Herder knew nothing of his writings and regaled him with idolatrous talk about Goethe. Wieland knew all about him except that he had not yet seen ‘Don Carlos’; criticised his early plays frankly as lacking in correctness and artistic finish, but expressed the utmost confidence in him nevertheless. He was received at Tiefurt, but did not like the dowager duchess: her mind, he reported, was very narrow; nothing interested her but the sensuous. A few days later he heard that ‘Don Carlos’ had been read to a select assembly at Tiefurt and had not made a good impression; there had been caustic criticism of the piece, particularly the last two acts, and Wieland, who was present, had not stood up for it. This led to a coolness toward Wieland. By the end of three weeks Schiller had despaired of Weimar and was miserable. He thought of leaving the place in disgust.
In August he spent a week at Jena as the guest of Professor Reinhold, who was about to begin lecturing upon Kant and was predicting that after a century the Koenigsberg philosopher would have a reputation like that of Jesus Christ. Reinhold’s enthusiasm led Schiller to read some of Kant’s shorter essays, among which a paper upon universal history gave him ‘extraordinary satisfaction’. From Reinhold came also the assurance that it would be easy to secure a Jena professorship. The idea did not at once take hold of him in the sense of becoming a definite purpose, but it tallied with his inclination. His experience with ‘Don Carlos’ had left him in doubt whether the drama was after all his true vocation, and he had already begun to work fitfully upon a history of the Dutch Rebellion.
So he decided to remain a little longer in Weimar and devote himself to historical writing; and, this resolution formed, life at once began to open more pleasantly before him. He saw that he had made the mistake of taking the Weimar magnates too seriously; of imagining that they were all sitting in judgment upon him, and that it was of the greatest importance to win their favor. ‘I begin to find life here quite tolerable,’ he wrote early in September, ‘and the secret of it–you will wonder that it did not occur to me before–is not to bother my head about anybody.’ And indeed he had no reason to be disgruntled. Herder was pleased with ‘Don Carlos’ and came out in its favor before the aesthetic tribunal of Tiefurt. Wieland noticed it favorably in the _Merkur_, spoke flatteringly of it in conversation and declared himself now convinced that Schiller’s forte was the drama. Henceforth the two men were fast friends and presently Schiller was toying with the thought of marrying Wieland’s favorite daughter. ‘I do not know the girl at all’, he wrote, ‘but I would ask for her to-day if I thought I deserved her.'[74] His scruple was that he was too much of a cosmopolitan to be permanently contented with ‘these people’. A simple-minded, innocent girl of domestic proclivities would not be happy with him.
The autumn passed in quiet work devoted mainly to his ‘Defection of the Netherlands’. The Duke of Weimar came home for a few days towards the ist of October, but immediately went away again to Holland. Schiller did not even see him. Evidently there was nothing to be hoped for immediately in that quarter; he would have to rely upon himself. But he was now in demand. The _Merkur_ was eager for contributions from his pen, and so was the _Litteratur-Zeitung_, whose extensive review factory had been shown him during his sojourn in Jena. Then there was the comatose _Thalia_, which he determined to revive after New Year’s.
In November he spent a few days at Meiningen, where his sister Christophine was now living as the wife of Reinwald. He saw Frau von Wolzogen and Lotte (who was about to be married), but Bauerbach had lost its charm. ‘The old magic,’ he wrote to Korner, ‘had been blown away. I felt nothing. None of all the places that formerly made my solitude interesting had anything to say to me.’ On his return fate was lurking for him at Rudolstadt, where his friend, Wilhelm von Wolzogen, introduced him to Frau von Lengefeld and her two daughters, ‘Both creatures ‘, Schiller wrote, ‘are attractive, without being beautiful and please me much. You find here considerable acquaintance with recent literature, also refinement, feeling and intelligence. They play the piano well, which gave me a delightful evening.’ The elder daughter, Karoline, was married unhappily to a Herr von Beulwitz, from whom she afterwards separated to marry Wilhelm von Wolzogen. She was a woman of much literary talent, which found employment later in a novel, ‘Agnes von Lilien’, and in her excellent memoir of Schiller. The other daughter was unmarried and bore the auspicious name of Charlotte.
Lotte von Lengefeld, whose memory Is cherished with idealizing tenderness by the Germans, was now twenty-one years old,–a demure maiden whose eyes spake more than her tongue. She had long since won the heart of the Baroness von Stein, who had introduced her at the Weimar court and held out to her the hope of becoming a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess Luise. Goethe was fond of her and did not omit to send her affectionate greetings from distant Italy. Some time before, she had spent a year with her mother and sister in Switzerland for the purpose of improving her French; and on the way home, in the summer of 1784, the party had caught a glimpse of Schiller in Mannheim. Now the sisters were living in a sort of idyllic solitude at Rudolstadt, cut off from the great world, absorbed in their books, their music, and the memories of that happy year in Switzerland. Karoline von Wolzogen writes, in speaking of this occasion:
My sister was seemingly in every respect a desirable match for Schiller. She had a very winsome form and face. An expression of purest goodness of heart enlivened her features, and her eyes flashed only truth and innocence. Thoughtful and susceptible to the good and the beautiful in life and in art, her whole nature was a beautiful harmony. Of even temper, but faithful and tenacious in her affections, she seemed created to enjoy the purest happiness.
Making all needful allowance for the partiality of a sister, one cannot wonder that the visitor went on his way with the feeling that Rudolstadt might be a good place in which to spend the summer.
The condition of his mind was certainly such as to facilitate the designs of Providence. In January, 1788, he wrote to Korner as follows:
I am leading a miserable life, miserable through the condition of my inner being. I must have a creature about me who belongs to me; whom I can and must make happy; in whose existence my own can grow fresh again. You do not know how desolate my soul is, how dark my mind; and all not because of my external fortune,–for I am really very well off so far as that is concerned,–but because of the inward wearing out of my feelings…. I need a medium through which I can enjoy the other blessings. Friendship, taste, truth and beauty will produce a greater effect upon me when a continual succession of sweet, beneficent, domestic feelings attune me to joy and warm up my torpid being.
In mid-winter Lotte von Lengefeld came to Weimar for the social season and Schiller saw her occasionally with steadily increasing interest. Their famous correspondence, beginning in February, 1788, is at first very reserved, very formal and decorous, but soon begins to bewray the beating of the heart. ‘You will go, dearest Fraeulein’, writes Schiller on the 5th of April, as Lotte was about to return to Rudolstadt, ‘and I feel that you take away with you the best part of my present joys.’ A month later she had found him lodgings in the neighboring village of Volkstedt, and then came a delightful summer idyl, which prolonged itself until the middle of November,–an idyl not of love-making, for Schiller could not yet pluck up the courage for that, but of spiritual comradeship. To quote Karoline again: