The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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Particularly admirable is the art with which Schiller has contrived to
denote the motley variety of human types gathered under Wallenstein's
banner, while giving to each of his figures a fairly distinct
individuality. With a little study of costume a painter could paint
them all. There is the wretched Peasant, who has been reduced to
beggary and is willing to retrieve his fortunes by gambling with loaded
dice; the sagacious Sergeant, who always knows more than other people,
and prides himself upon 'the fine touch and the right tone' that can
only be acquired near the person of the commander; the depraved
Chasseur, who glories in fighting for its own sake, cares not for whom
or what, and objects to discipline; the philosophic Cuirasseur, who
argues for a higher ideal and pities the woes of the producing class,
but cannot help matters; and the fiery Capuchin, who pronounces his
wordy anathema against the whole godless crowd. What a picturesque
assembly they make and how admirably they bring out the lights and
shadows of the Wallenstein regime! One wonders how an invalid recluse,
a bookish philosopher like Schiller, should ever have been able to
write such scenes.

The total effect of the prelude is to put one in a very good humor with
the personages who figure there. One indeed feels sub-consciously that
they are detestable--not a whit better than the angry friar paints them.
One sympathizes intellectually with his fierce denunciation and pities
the land that is exposed to such a scourge. And yet--such is the poetic
glamour thrown over them--feelings of this kind never become dominant.
It is like the squalid slums of a great city, when seen through the
sun-lit morning mist. The reality is horrible, revolting. The soul of
the philanthropist is pained--but not so the eye of the artist. Schiller
contrives that we see his vagabonds with the artistic eye and are drawn
to them by their very picturesqueness. We quickly impute to them more
virtue than their ways betoken; and when in their lusty final song they
break out in a strain of lofty idealism:

Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein,

one is hardly conscious of the incongruity.

The dramatic fable devised by Schiller for the tragedy proper carries us
back to the winter of 1634. Events extending over several months are
concentrated by poetic fiat into the four days preceding the
assassination of Wallenstein, which took place on the 25th of February.
The prominent characters fall into two groups,--the abettors of
Wallenstein in his treason, and the imperialists who work his ruin. The
first group consists of historical personages, mainly officers, whom he
had bound to him by one or another tie of selfish interest. Foremost
among these are Illo, the Count and Countess Terzky, and General Butler,
who turns against his chief and becomes the agent of his taking-off. The
central figure of the other group is Octavio Piccolomini, whom Schiller
converts from a young officer of thirty into an elderly man with a
grown-up son. Octavio, in reality the trusted agent of the emperor, is
regarded by Wallenstein with a superstitious infatuation as his own most
faithful friend. Between these two groups stand the ingenuous lovers,
Max and Thekla, imaginary characters who can make their perfect peace
with neither side and are done to death in a pathetic struggle between
love and duty.

As we have already seen, Schiller found it no easy task to mould the
historical Wallenstein into a satisfactory tragic hero. The character
was lacking in nobility. To be sure it was not necessary to make him out
an infamous traitor; for his character, his motives, the measure of his
guilt, were subjects of debate among the historians, and the evidence
was, as it still is, inconclusive. It was therefore quite within the
license of a dramatic poet to take the part of Wallenstein, so far at
least as to throw into strong light all the palliating circumstances
that could be urged in his favor. Such were, for example, that he was a
prince of the empire and as such had a right to conduct negotiations and
to make peace; that he wished to give rest to a torn and bleeding
Germany; that he had been ignobly treated by the House of Austria, and
so forth. By laying stress upon these things and passing lightly over
others, it was easily possible to save Wallenstein from the detestation
that is wont to associate itself with the idea of a traitor.

But for an interesting tragic hero it is not enough to fall short of
infamy. He must have some sort of distinction. He must be a towering
personality. One does not go to the theater to be convinced in a moral
or political argument, but to be carried along with a rush of feeling,
for which the old term sympathy is perhaps as good a name as any other.
A magnificent criminal will serve the purpose very well, as Schiller had
discovered in his early years, but he must be magnificent. Now it was
precisely this element of greatness that was lacking in the character of
the historical Wallenstein. No lofty idealism of any kind could be
imputed to him. He was not a religious zealot, like Cromwell or Gustav
Adolf, nor was he a strenuous German patriot, like Frederick the Great.
He was not even a great soldier; for while, as the head of a great host
of marauding mercenaries, he made himself the scourge and the terror of
Germany, he never won a decisive battle against an equal enemy. The
history of his fighting is largely a history of futilities. And when he
formed the plan of a separate peace,--a plan which if promptly and
vigorously executed might possibly have succeeded and have caused him to
be numbered with the benefactors of Europe,--he dallied with the thought
until it was too late, fell into the pit which he had digged for
himself, and, in trying to flounder out, met his death at the hands of
an assassin who had a grudge against him. Thus even his death was
pitiful rather than tragic. It does not appear to be the work of that
high Nemesis which Schiller noticed as dominating the career of
Shakspere's Richard the Third.

To have succeeded as Schiller did succeed, in the face of such
difficulties, is a memorable triumph of the poetic art. By purely
aesthetic means, without any appeal to political or religious passion,
without requiring us to take sides in any debatable cause, but simply by
the skill and subtlety of his drawing, he has invested Wallenstein with
an impressiveness such, as belongs only to the great creations of the
great tragic poets. His overruling trait is ambition; and in the
denotation of this, as of his whole relation to the Countess Terzky, the
influence of 'Macbeth' is obvious. And yet he is very far from being a
copy of Shakspere's hero, or a mere embodiment of ambition. On the
contrary, he is the most complicate of all Schiller's creations, and the
most difficult to portray on the stage in a thoroughly satisfactory
manner. As a good critic observes, he is 'fascinating and repulsive,
admirable and contemptible, fantastic and cunning, cautious and
frivolous, a mighty organizer and a helpless child, false and true,
touching and terrible, a mixture of all possible qualities, and yet a
unity, a totality'.[115] The promise of the Prologue is admirably
fulfilled:

But art shall show him in his human form
And bring him nearer to your eyes and hearts;
She sees the man in all the stress of life,
And for the greater portion of his guilt
She blames the working of malignant stars.

The last two lines, be it observed, involve much more than a mere
allusion to Wallenstein's superstitious belief in astrology. Schiller's
idea, schooled as he had been for years upon Sophocles and Shakspere,
was to blend the fate-tragedy of the ancients with the modern tragedy of
character. The two things were not incompatible, since in a broad view
of the matter a man's character is his fate. It is to be observed also
that the peculiar effect of Greek tragedy does not depend upon the way
in which the external [Greek: moira] was conceived, but upon the fact
that the hero seems to be battling, and was by the audience known to be
battling, against the inevitable. The situation is not what he supposes,
and the event will not be what he intends. He is the subject: of an
illusion, an infatuation; and this [Greek: ate] is the principal factor
in the tragic effect.[116]

Now Wallenstein's [Greek: ate] takes the form of a blind and overweening
self-conceit. He has the 'great-man-mania' hardly less than Karl Moor.
Accustomed to follow his own light, to command and to be obeyed, and to
look with contempt upon the interference of priests and courtiers in the
business of war, he thinks himself omnipotent. There is no power that he
fears save that of the stars; and even that he imagines he can bend to
his will by studious attention to astrologic portents. He has found it
possible to raise and maintain a great army by taking good care of his
officers and men; and appealing thus constantly to the lower motives of
human nature, he comes to think at last that there are no others. When
the Swede Wrangel suggests a suspicion of his Chancellor that it 'might
be an easier thing to create out of nothing an army of sixty thousand
men than to lead a sixtieth part of them into an act of treachery',
Wallenstein replies: 'Your Chancellor judges like a Swede and a
Protestant.' And when he finds that this sentiment of loyalty--_die
Treue_, one of the most ancient and powerful of motives--is still a real
force in human affairs, he can only account for it as a curious
superstition:

'Tis not the embodiment of living strength
That makes the truly terrible. It is
The vulgar brood of all the yesterdays,
The eternally recurring commonplace,
That was and therefore is and hence will be.
For man is fashioned of the trivial
And customary use he names his nurse.[117]

It would seem as if such a blind and superstitious self-worshiper could
have but little chance of winning sympathy, and the less chance for the
reason that he really does nothing in the play to justify his grand
airs. His mighty deeds are a matter of hearsay. We are obliged to take
his greatness on trust, as something growing out of the past. And yet
Schiller contrives, with splendid artistic cunning, that we do take him
from first to last at his own estimate. His assumption of superiority
appears perfectly reasonable; and even in the ticklish astrological
scenes, about which Schiller himself was in doubt until reassured by
Goethe, he never becomes ridiculous. His belief in destiny and his
unctuous palaver about the occult connection of events do not detract
from his dignity. One understands that his oracles are fallacious, that
it is all a humbug; but so perfect is the illusion that instead of
smiling one mentally associates him with other men undoubtedly
great,--men like Caesar, Cromwell and Napoleon,--who were haunted by
more or less similar hallucinations.

This is effected, in part at least, by bringing Wallenstein into
contrast with vulgar and commmonplace natures. In the presence of a real
hero he would be a pigmy,--even under the searchlight of the ardent
young Max his effulgence pales somewhat,--but surrounded by the Illos,
the Terzkys, Isolanis and the rest of them, he is a moral and
intellectual giant. One does not wish to belong to _their_ company or to
believe in their arguments; and so when they urge him to act one is
quite prepared to credit the mysterious oracles which assure him that
the time is not yet ripe. Thus even his indecision,--most damning of
weaknesses in a great soldier,--does not seem to belittle him. One
enters into the spirit of his self-defense, is half inclined to believe
in his innocence and to sympathize with him, when the psychological
moment arrives and the capture of Sesina compels him to translate a
traitorous thought into a traitorous deed. And even after this, when he
stands forth as a declared traitor; while his trusted friends are
secretly turning against him, and his unsuspected enemies are quietly
plotting his doom; when, with a futile energy, he is making the plans
that are yet, as he believes, to leave him master of the situation; and
when, finally, in his bereavement and isolation, he is brought to face
his miserable fate,--everywhere he looms up as a grand figure. Schiller
has taken good care that one shall not think of his treason or of his
weakness, but rather of his imposing personality.

That Wallenstein produces such an impression is largely due to the
character of his chief antagonist. Octavio Piccolomini is certainly one
of Schiller's most notable minor studies. It is he who stands for the
cause of loyalty to which one naturally leans; but he is so portrayed
that one soon distrusts and in the end almost despises him. And yet he
is no villain of the extreme type so dear to Schiller in his early
years. Octavio's conduct and his sentiments are technically correct. He
is a faithful servant of the empire, a far-sighted and energetic
commander and an affectionate father. The groundwork of his character
seems much better entitled to sympathy than that of Wallenstein. In the
play, however, from the moment we hear of the secret order making him
temporary commander-in-chief, we begin to suspect that he too is playing
a game for profit. And when he lays his secret plans against
Wallenstein, while openly appearing as his friend; when he craftily
works upon the vanity of Butler, and instils into Butler's small soul
the poison of a murderous hate, one is not drawn to the cause which
needs such championship.

Rationally and before the bar of politics, Octavio's conduct is
unimpeachable. He does his duty in baffling a powerful traitor in the
most effective way. It is not his fault that Wallenstein is deceived in
him, and nothing requires that he go and undeceive him. He resorts to no
tricks, he feigns no sentiments that are not his. He but tells the truth
to Butler in regard to the ancient matter of the title. It is no part of
his plan that Butler shall murder his former chief. And when Wallenstein
falls, not so much because of his present treason as because of his
former duplicity, Octavio is technically guiltless of the deed. And yet
so skillfully is the portrait drawn, so subtly are the lights and
shadows managed, that when the curtain falls one is little disposed to
sympathize with him in his triumph. There is a world of ironical pathos
in those last words of the play: 'To Prince Piccolomini'.

A very important element in the impression produced by Octavio, as
also in that produced by Wallenstein himself, is the fact that we are
made to try them not at the bar of worldly ethics, but before the
tribunal of the heart as represented by the young idealist, Max. It is
a weak criticism of Wallenstein which objects to the love-story or
regards it as a mere concession to the sentimental demands of the
average play-goer. For the reason just stated it must rather be looked
upon as a vital element of the plot. No doubt the play can be imagined
without it and would in that case be more in accordance with history.
But what a relatively cold affair it would be! The tragedy of the
lovers is an important part of the Nemesis that follows Wallenstein
from the moment of his taking the fateful step. It is this which makes
in no small degree the real impressiveness of his final isolation.
Without it we should see in Wallenstein a masterful spirit, like
Macbeth, playing fast and loose with the higher law and meeting an
ignoble fate at the hands of enemies meaner than himself. In a sense
the moral law would be vindicated, but how much more effective is the
vindication when this masterful spirit first makes havoc of all that
should be dearest to him as a man!

It is quite true that the figure of Max, like that of Posa, is out of
harmony with the general _milieu_. Schiller was a lover of contrast, and
in his skillful use of it lies a large part of his effectiveness as a
playwright. To a certain extent his contrasts are made to order; that
is, they proceed from the vision of the artist calculating an effect,
rather than from the observation of life as it is. Partisans of realism
tell us that this propensity is a weakness, a fault; and such it is,
beyond question, whenever it leads to forced and stagy contrasts. But
surely no general indictment can lie against Schiller for taking
advantage of a principle which is perfectly legitimate in itself and has
been employed more or less freely by the dramatists of all ages,
including realists like Ibsen and Hauptmann. After all life does really
offer contrasts of character as glaring as any that poet ever imagined,
only they are not apt to be found in juxtaposition. The artist, however,
has a perfect right to juxtapose them if it suits his purpose; that is,
if it will really enhance the effect that he wishes to produce. If ever
he departs too far from the familiar verities of life, he pays the
penalty; for the judicious, instead of being thrilled by his pathos (or
whatever it may be), are annoyed by his artificiality. This is the whole
law of the matter, so far as its general aspect is concerned.

As for Max Piccolomini, he is a perfectly thinkable character--in the
time of the Thirty Years' War or at any other time. There is nothing
supernal about him; he is simply the type of a brave and honorable young
soldier who tries to walk by the higher law of conscience. There are
always such men in the world, and Schiller cannot be blamed for locating
one in the camp of Wallenstein, though history omitted to hand down his
name. It is perhaps a little surprising that such a youngster as Max
should be in command of the great Pappenheim's regiment; that, however,
is a part of the presupposition which one must mentally adjust as best
one can. Within the limits of the play everything follows naturally. As
a soldier he loves his commander and sides with him instinctively
against the courtiers and politicians. His enthusiasm increases the
'mighty suggestion' that goes out from Wallenstein; one feels that the
object of such idolatry from such a worshiper must indeed be great. In
the love-scenes Max is always a man,--no trace here of sentimental
weakness, or of any leaning to Quixotic folly. In his relation to
Wallenstein, to Octavio, and to Thekla, his character is firmly and
naturally drawn. And when his great disillusionment comes and he is
forced to choose between love and duty, he makes a man's choice and his
career ends as it must end--in a tragic drama.

The drawing of the female characters in 'Wallenstein' bears witness,
like all the rest of the play, to the ripening power of the years that
had intervened since the writing of 'Don Carlos'. That indefinable
something that infects the earlier heroines of Schiller and gives them
an air of sentimental futility, or else of schematic unnaturalness, has
disappeared. The Countess Terzky, in particular, is a strong portrait
which one can admire without reservation. As for Thekla, while her
essence is an all-absorbing love for Max, she has at the same time a
will and an energy of resolution which make her the worthy daughter of
her father. Upon the whole she is the most lovable of all the heroines
of Schiller. It is her tragedy of the heart which renders 'Wallenstein'
perennially interesting to the young. And this is much; for does not
Goethe's shrewd Merry-Andrew declare that the great object of dramatic
art is to please the young,--that _die Werdenden_ are the very ones to
be considered?[118]

It is true that critics, speaking more for _die Gewordenen_, have often
objected that the love-story in 'Wallenstein' is unduly expanded and
that the lines have here and there, for a historical tragedy, rather too
much of a sentimental, lyrical coloring. In the first of these
objections, at any rate, there is some force. It was Schiller's personal
fondness for his pair of lovers that led him to spin out his material
until it became necessary to divide it into two plays of five acts each.
This, from a dramatic point of view, was unfortunate, albeit the reader
who knows the entire work will hardly find it in his heart to wish that
any portion of it had remained unwritten. Properly speaking, the entire
'Piccolomini' should constitute the first two acts of a five-act
tragedy. It has no distinct unity of its own, but it takes an entire
evening with what is properly the exposition and the entanglement of a
play relating to Wallenstein's defection and death. The result of a
separate performance is that the climax of what should be the third
act--Wallenstein's momentous decision--comes right at the beginning of
the second evening, and is thus not adequately led up to, save as one
carries over the impressions of a preceding occasion. The effect is like
that of dividing any other play between the second and the third act.
One could wish, therefore, that Schiller had seen fit in his later years
to prepare a stage version which would have made it possible to present
the entire play in a single evening. It would have been a difficult
task,--hopeless for an ordinary theatrical man working by the process of
excision,--but for Schiller it would have been possible. And if he had
attempted it, we may be quite certain that the love-story would have
been very much abbreviated.

As regards the lyrical and softly-sentimental passages, the cogency of
the critical objection is not so clear. Any opinion grounded upon an
abstract theory of historical tragedy as such can have but little
weight. Schiller had no models for 'Wallenstein'; and if he had had,
there is always more merit in finding new paths than in following the
old. Historical tragedy without tender sentiment is possible, but it
presupposes a public politically awake and an author upborne and
inspired by a vigorous national life. Schiller could appeal to no such
public, and his instinct told him that a play based upon cold passions
must itself be cold. So he chose to sentimentalize history, at the
expense of detracting somewhat from its dignity, rather than to make
frigid plays which no one would care to see or to read. And if we grant
a _raison d'etre_ to the sentimentalized historical drama, no fault can
reasonably be found with lyrical passages like that at the end of the
third act of 'The Piccolomini'. Schiller found the soliloquy at hand as
an accepted convention of the stage and he converted it occasionally
into a lyric monologue, as Goethe had done before him in 'Iphigenie' and
'Faust'. This looked toward opera, toward Romanticism, toward a mixture
of types; but it was effective as a mode of portraying states of
feeling. The lyric monologue is of course out of tune with the modern
naturalistic dogma, but so is Hamlet's soliloquy. And then it must be
remembered that the naturalistic dogma was no part of Schiller's creed.

A noteworthy characteristic of 'Wallenstein', as of all the plays that
followed it, is its pervading seriousness. Humor plays no part. There
are no Dogberries or grave-diggers, no quips or quibbles. Schiller had
but little of the far-famed quality of 'irony'. It did not lie in his
nature to take a position aloof from the moving panorama of life and
depict it impassively as it runs, with its sharp contrasts of grave and
gay, of high and low. He is always a part of the world that he creates.
For the other and higher method, as exemplified by Shakspere and also by
Goethe in 'Wilhelm Meister', he showed a keen appreciation, and for a
little while he imagined that he himself was catching the trick. That he
did not altogether deceive himself is abundantly proved by
'Wallenstein's Camp'. After that, however, the ingrained seriousness of
his temperament reasserted itself with all-controlling power. The gift
of humor was not denied him, but the use of it in a grave drama was
repugnant to his sense of style. In this respect he was more a disciple
of the French and of the Greeks than of Shakspere.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 113: Let it be said once for all (to avoid frequent
references), that the following account of the genesis of 'Wallenstein'
is based upon Schiller's letters--chiefly to Koerner and to
Goethe--beginning in November, 1796.]

[Footnote 114: "Schiller", p. 286.]

[Footnote 115: Bulthaupt, "Dramaturgie des Schauspiels", I, 288.]

[Footnote 116: Notwithstanding frequent references to occult powers and
overruling destiny, the Greek idea of fate is quite foreign to
"Wallenstein". It is essentially a modern character-drama. Cf. Fielitz,
"Studien zu Schillers Dramen ", page 9 ff.]

[Footnote 117:

Nicht was lebendig, kraftvoll sich verkuendigt,
Ist das gefaehrlich Furchtbare. Das ganz
Gemeine ist's, das ewig Gestrige,
Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt,
Und morgen gilt, weil's heute hat gegolten!
Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht,
Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme. ]

[Footnote 118:

Dann sammelt sich der Jugend schoenste Bluete
Vor eurem Spiel und lauscht der Offenbarung,
Dann sauget jedes zaertliche Gemuete
Aus eurem Werk sich melanchol'sche Nahrung....
Wer fertig ist, dem ist nichts recht zu machen;
Ein Werdender wird immer dankbar sein.--'_Faust_'.]

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