The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

C >> Calvin Thomas >> The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

CHAPTER XXI

The End.--Unfinished Plays, Translations and Adaptations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31