The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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The books came from a man named Reinwald, who was in charge of the ducal
library at Meiningen and to whom Schiller, foreseeing his own need, had
made haste to introduce himself. Reinwald was some twenty-two years
older than Schiller, a bit of a poet and a man of some literary
ambition; but he had not got on well in the world. It was fated that he
should marry Christophine Schiller, become peevish and sour in the
course of time and lose the respect of his brother-in-law. For the
present, however, he proved a very useful friend; for he not only
executed orders for books and tobacco (Schiller had learned to smoke and
take snuff), but he served as general intermediary between the
mysterious Dr. Ritter and the outside world. Schiller's nature craved
friendship, and his imagination easily endowed Reinwald with the
qualities of an ideal companion of the soul. After a while we find him
writing in such a strain as this:

Your visit the day before yesterday produced a glorious effect, I
feel my spirits renewed and a warmer life courses through all my
nerves. My situation in this solitude has drawn upon my soul the
fate of stagnant water, which becomes foul unless it Is stirred up a
little now and then. And I too hope to become necessary to your
heart.[48]

As for Reinwald, he had long since passed the effusive age, but it
pleased him to receive the younger man's confidence. He wrote in his
diary: 'To-day Schiller opened his heart to me,--a youth who has already
been through the school of life,--and I found him worthy to be called my
friend. I do not believe that I have given my confidence to an unworthy
man. He has an extraordinary mind and I believe that Germany will some
day name his name with pride.'--Which was not bad guessing in its way.

Excepting Reinwald and the villagers Schiller saw at first but little of
his fellow-mortals. Both on his own account and for the sake of Frau von
Wolzogen he wished that the persons who saw him should not know who he
was. So he continued to scatter false reports with a liberal hand: he
had gone to Hannover, was going to London, to America, and so forth. In
the mean time, with no thought of leaving his nest at Bauerbach, he
devoted himself to his work. For the first time in his life he was the
master of his own movements; he had a chance to collect himself, to
browse among his books, to meditate and to dream. And as for mankind in
general, he felt that he had no cause to love it. 'With the warmest
feeling ', so he wrote after a time, when the first bitterness had
passed away, 'I had embraced half the world and found at last that I had
in my arms a cold lump of ice.'[49] Withal the demands of work were
imperious. He had risked everything upon his chances of literary success
and it was necessary to win. He had broken for good and all with the
Duke of Wuerttemberg and there was nothing to be hoped for in that
quarter. At the same time,--and the fact is characteristic of his
large-mindedness,--he resolved not to air his personal grievance. To
Frau von Wolzogen, who had been admonishing him never to forget his debt
to the Stuttgart Academy, he wrote: 'However it may be with regard to
that, you have my word that I will never belittle the Duke of
Wuerttemberg.'

Toward the end of December the wintry dullness of his Bauerbach cottage
was brightened by the arrival of its owner and her daughter. Lotte von
Wolzogen was a blond school-girl who had not yet passed her seventeenth
birthday. The records do not credit her with exceptional beauty, but she
was sufficiently good-looking and her demure girlish innocence appeared
to Schiller very lovable. Not that his plight was at all desperate; he
hardly knew his own mind and was in no position to make love to any
maiden, least of all to one with that menacing _von_ in her name. Still
he liked Fraeulein Lotte very much, and the tenderness which now began to
manifest itself in his letters to the mother must be credited in part to
the daughter. Were this not so we could hardly account for such
expressions as these, which are contained in a letter written after the
ladies had left Bauerbach for a short sojourn in the neighboring
Waldorf: 'Since your absence I am stolen from myself. To feel a great
and lively rapture is like looking at the sun; it is still before you
long after you have turned away your face, and the eye is blinded to all
weaker rays. But I shall take great care not to extinguish this
agreeable illusion.' And again after they had left the Meiningen region
for Stuttgart, with a promise to return in May: 'Dearest friend--a week
behind me without you. So there is one of the fourteen got rid of. I
could wish that time would put on its utmost speed until May, so as to
move thereafter so much the more slowly.'

Such flutterings of the heart were not altogether favorable to that
austere program of literary industry which the ambitious young
dramatist had set for himself. When a man is in love other things seem
more or less negligible, and it takes resolution to steer a firm
course. Schiller was resolute--by spells. In the first list of books
ordered from Meiningen we find noted, along with works of Shakspere,
Robertson, Hume and Lessing, 'that part of the Abbe St. Real's works
which contains the history of Don Carlos of Spain.' From this we see
that a second historical drama was already under way. At first,
however, it was not 'Don Carlos' that claimed the most attention, but
'Louise Miller ', which had made considerable progress in Oggersheim.
By January 14, 1785, Schiller was able to pronounce the new play
finished, though his letters show that the revision occupied him some
time longer. Meanwhile we hear of other dramatic projects,--a 'Maria
Stuart' and a 'Friedrich Imhof', whatever this last may have been.
Nothing is known of it save that it was to deal with Jesuitical
intrigue, the Inquisition, religious fanaticism, the history of the
Bastille, and the passion for gambling.[50] By the end of March he had
decided, after long vacillation between these two themes, to drop both
of them and proceed with 'Don Carlos'.

He began in prose, identifying himself completely with his hero and
writing with joyous enthusiasm. A letter of April 14 to Reinwald deals
at length with love and friendship and their relation to poetic
creation. All love, we read, is at bottom love of ourselves. We see in
the beloved person the sundered elements of our own being, and the soul
yearns to perfect itself in the process of reunion. Thus love and
friendship are of the nature of poetic imagination,--the waking into
life of a pleasing illusion. Wherefore the poet must love his
characters. He must not be the painter of his hero, but rather his
hero's sweetheart or bosom friend. Then he makes the application to Don
Carlos in these words:

I must confess to you that in a sense he takes the place of my
sweetheart, I carry him in my heart,--_ich schwaerme mit ihm durch
die Gegend um_.... He shall have the soul of Shakspere's Hamlet,
the blood and nerves of Leisewitz's Julius, and his pulse from me.
Besides that I shall make it my duty in this play, in my picture
of the Inquisition, to avenge outraged mankind ... and pierce to
the heart a sort of men whom the dagger of tragedy has hitherto
only grazed.

But the 'bosom friend' of Don Carlos soon had his thoughts pulled in
other directions. In the first place there came, very unexpectedly, a
sugary letter from Dalberg. What led him to make fresh overtures to the
man whom, a few months before, he had treated so shabbily, is not
difficult to make out. He had become convinced that there was after all
nothing to be feared from the Duke of Wuerttemberg. Moreover, since the
peremptory rejection of 'Fiesco' the Mannheim theater had been doing a
very poor business. What more natural than that the shrewd intendant,
with an eye to better houses, should bethink him of the pen that had
written 'The Robbers'? From Schwan and from Streicher, who had remained
in Mannheim, he knew of Schiller's address and occupation. So he wrote
him a gracious letter, inquiring after his welfare and expressing
particular interest in the new play. It was now Schiller's turn to be
foxy. He replied that he was very well, and that as for the play,
'Louise Miller', it was a tragedy with a copious admixture of satirical
and comic elements that would probably render it quite unfit for the
stage. Dalberg replied that the specified defects were merits,--he would
like to see the manuscript. The upshot of the correspondence was that
Schiller, who had been negotiating with a Leipzig publisher but had been
unable to make an acceptable bargain for the publication of 'Louise
Miller', now determined to revise it for the stage and meet the views of
Dalberg if possible. So about the middle of April he laid aside 'Don
Carlos' and, for the third time in his life, devoted himself to the
irksome task of converting a literary drama into a stage-play. On the
3rd of May he wrote to Reinwald:

My L.M. drives me out of bed at five o'clock in the morning. Here I
sit now, sharpening pens and chewing thoughts. It is certain and
true that compulsion clips the wings of the spirit. To write with
such solicitude for the theater, so hastily because I am pressed for
time, and yet without fault, is an art. But I feel that my 'Louise'
is a gainer.... My Lady [Lady Milford in the play] interests me
almost as much as my Dulcinea in Stuttgart [Lotte von Wolzogen].

Ere the revision of the new tragedy was finished Dulcinea herself
arrived in Bauerbach; an event to which Schiller had looked forward with
joyous palpitations and anxious forebodings. For back in March Frau von
Wolzogen had written him that she and her daughter would be accompanied
on their northward journey by a certain Herr Winkelmann, a friend of the
family. Schiller at once divined the approach of a rival and wrote in
great agitation that he would go to Berlin if Winkelmann came. In
justification of his threat he made the diaphanous plea that his
incognito was of the utmost importance to him, and that the inquisitive
Winkelmann (whom he had known at the academy) would be sure to blab. To
this Frau von Wolzogen sent some sort of soothing reply, hinting at the
same time that she, the mother, would not interfere with her daughter's
choice. So Schiller resolved to stand his ground. The ladies arrived in
the latter part of May and soon thereafter he was given to understand
that Lotte's affections were fixed upon the other man. There was nothing
for him now but the role of lofty resignation. To his former schoolmate,
Wilhelm von Wolzogen, he wrote as follows:

You have commended to me your Lotte, whom I know completely, I thank
you for the great proof of your love.... Believe me, my best of
friends, I envy you this amiable sister. Still just as if from the
hands of the Creator, innocent, the fairest, tenderest, most
sensitive soul, and not yet a breath of the general corruption on
the bright mirror of her nature,--thus I know your Lotte, and woe to
him who brings a cloud over this innocent soul!... Your mother has
made me a confidant in a matter that may decide the fate of your
Lotte and has told me how you feel upon the subject. [It appears
that Wilhelm disliked the young man,] I know Herr W--n and ...
believe me, he is not unworthy of your sister.... I really esteem
him, though I cannot at present be called his friend. He loves your
Lotte and I know he loves her like a noble man, and your Lotte loves
him like a girl that loves for the first time.

But the foolish dreams were not so easily to be given their quietus,
especially when he discovered that Lotte was only half in love with
Winkelmann after all. Then there seemed hope for him and he surrendered
himself freely to the intoxication of his little summer romance. What
were the world and a poet's fame in comparison with happiness? Still he
did not declare himself. He often called Frau von Wolzogen 'mother', and
averred in letters that no son could love her better. Probably a word
from her might have led to an engagement. But the word was not spoken.
She was a sensible lady, who knew how to look into the future and to
guard the welfare both of her daughter and of her protege. She saw that
if he was to make his way in the world as a dramatist he must return to
the world; a prolongation of the Bauerbach idyl could lead to nothing
but disappointment and unhappiness. Besides, his incognito had now
become only a conventional fiction; everybody knew who he was.

One day, accordingly, as they were walking together, she suggested that
he pay a visit to Mannheim and see what could be done with Dalberg. He
resolved to follow her advice. Late in July he set out, promising
himself and her a speedy return. But it was not so to be. Becoming
absorbed in the business of a new career he continued, indeed, to think
of her affectionately and to write to her, but at ever-increasing
intervals; and after a few months Bauerbach and the Wolzogens were only
a delightful memory. It is true that after the lapse of nearly a year he
one day took it into his head to suggest to the mother that she take him
for a son-in-law. But the wooing went no further. After all he had not
really been in love with Lotte in particular so much as with an ideal of
domestic bliss.

Shortly before his departure from Bauerbach there had been some talk of
his accompanying Reinwald on a contemplated journey to Weimar, where he
might make the acquaintance of Karl August, Goethe and Wieland. In his
excellent little book upon Schiller, Streicher expresses regret that his
friend had not acted upon this suggestion instead of following the
'siren voice' that led to the Palatinate. But it is difficult to
sympathize with this regret. He was not yet ripe for the role that fate
held in store for him in Thueringen. His education was to proceed yet a
while longer by the process of flaying. He was to suffer and grow
strong; to battle further with the goblins of despair; to tread the
quicksands of adversity and fight his way through to a firm footing
among the sons of men. Who shall say that it was not better so?

The long-cherished hopes of a connection with the Mannheim theater were
destined this time to be fulfilled. In the course of a few weeks
Schiller entered into a contract which assured him, for a year at least,
a respectable status in society and opened a new chapter in his life.
Before we take up that chapter, however, it will be proper to consider
the new play which he had brought with him as a passport to Dalberg's
favor. Thus far he had called it by the name of its heroine, but when it
was put upon the stage it was rechristened, at the suggestion of the
actor Iffland, and has ever since been known as 'Cabal and Love'. The
revision which he had undertaken, after the reopening of correspondence
with Dalberg, was even now not quite finished; so that the final touches
had to be given at Mannheim. It is probable that the political satire,
which was based in part upon veritable history and contained transparent
allusions to well-known personages, was more or less toned down in
deference to the wishes of Dalberg. Minor changes were also made at the
behest of the actors. But while it was not played and not printed until
the spring of 1784, it belongs in its substance and its spirit, not to
the Mannheim period of Schiller's life, but to the period which he had
spent in hiding. It is a freeman's comment upon high life as he had
known it. Scrupulously enough Schiller kept the letter of his promise
not to use his pen in belittling the Duke of Wuerttemberg. But the
_Wirtschaft_ in Stuttgart was fair game, and there were other ways of
masking a dramatic battery than to lay the scene in Italy. In 'Cabal and
Love' the reigning prince does not appear upon the stage.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 48: Letter of March, 1783; in "Schillers Briefe", edited by
Jonas, Vol. I, page 101.]

[Footnote 49: Letter of Jan. 4, 1783, to Frau von Wolzogen. ]

[Footnote 50: Undated letter of March, 1783; "Schillers Briefe", I,
101.]

CHAPTER VI

Cabal and Love

Ich bin ein Edelmann--Lasz doch sehen, ob mein Adelbrief aelter ist
als der Risz zum unendlichen Weltall; oder mein Wappen gueltiger ist
als die Handschrift des Himmels in Louisens Augen: Dieses Weib ist
fuer diesen Mann.--'_Cabal and Love_'.

In 'Cabal and Love' Schiller found again, as he had previously found in
'The Robbers', a thoroughly congenial theme. More properly the theme
found him, took possession of him and would not let him go, until the
inner tumult had subsided and German literature had been enriched with
its most telling tragedy of the social conflict. 'Fiesco' had proved a
disappointment; he had not been able to bring himself into perfect
sympathy with the subject, and at the best his Italian conspiracy was a
far-away matter. Now he set foot again upon his native heath and all
went better. In spite of certain defects which led him to speak of it
later as rather badly designed, 'Cabal and Love' must be pronounced the
most artistic and the most interesting of his early plays.

It is the tragedy of two lovers, an honorable aristocrat and a girl of
humble birth, who are done to death through a vile intrigue which is
dictated by the exigencies of an infamous political regime. By means of
a compromising letter, which is not forged but extorted under duress,
the lover is made to suspect his sweetheart's fidelity; and she, though
innocent, is prevented by scruples of conscience from undeceiving him.
In a jealous fury he gives her poison and then partakes of it himself.
The mischief is wrought not so much by the wickedness of the great,
albeit that comes in for a share of the responsibility, as by the
obstinate class prejudice, amounting to a tragic superstition, of the
heroine and her father. Many of the details were taken over by Schiller
from his predecessors; but he so improved upon them, so vitalized the
familiar conflicts and situations, and threw into his work such a power
of genuine pathos, caught from the pathos of real life, that 'Cabal and
Love' still stands out as a notable document of the revolutionary epoch.
The epoch produced many bourgeois tragedies, but Schiller's is much the
best of them all. Before we look at it more closely it will be worth
while to glance at the history of the type in Germany.

The tragedy of middle-class life first took root, as is well known, in
England. It was in 1732 that Lillo brought upon the Drury Lane stage his
acted tale of George Barnwell, the London 'prentice who is beguiled by a
harlot, robs his master, kills his uncle and ends his career on the
gallows, to the great grief of the doting Maria, his master's daughter.
The prologue tells how the experiment was expected to strike the public
of that day:

The Tragic Muse sublime delights to show
Princes distrest and scenes of royal woe;
In awful pomp majestic to relate
The fall of nations or some hero's fate;
That scepter'd chiefs may by example know
The strange vicissitudes of things below....
Upon our stage indeed, with wished success,
You've sometimes seen her in a humbler dress,
Great only in distress. When she complains,
In Southern's, Rowe's, or Otway's moving strains,
The brilliant drops that fall from each bright eye
The absent pomp with brighter gems supply,
Forgive us then if we attempt to show
In artless strains a tale of private woe.

So it appears that 'Barnwell' was something new, yet not entirely new.
The stately tragedy of solemn edification, at which no one was expected
to weep, had already yielded a part of its sovereignty to the tragedy of
distress. It occurred to Lillo that tears could be drawn for the woes of
the middle class, which had been looked upon as suitable only for
comedy. The event proved that he had reckoned well: the "brilliant
drops" fell copiously, the innovation crossed the Channel, and soon the
bourgeois tragedy,--whence by an easy differentiation the lacrimose,
pathetic, or serious comedy,--had entered upon its European career.

The first German example was 'Miss Sara Sampson', written in 1755,
wherein the daughter of a fond English squire is lured away from her
home, like Clarissa Harlowe, by the profligate Mellefont, who promises
to marry her. The pair take lodgings at a low London inn, where
Mellefont finds pretexts for delaying the marriage ceremony. Presently
his former mistress, Marwood, appears--a proud and passionate woman of
sin. She claims him as the mother of his child, but having now found out
what true love is he spurns her. Bitter interviews follow, with,
spiteful recriminations and awful threats. Marwood tells her story to
Sara and finally ends the tension by poisoning her, whereupon Mellefont
commits suicide. In writing this play Lessing was in no way concerned
with any social question. He constituted himself the champion of the
bourgeoisie before the tribunal of Melpomene, but not before the
conscience of mankind. The woes of hero and heroine are in no way
related to class prejudice or to the great democratic upheaval of the
century. Lessing's atmosphere is the moral and sentimental atmosphere of
Richardson, though his literary power is incomparably greater.

'Miss Sara Sampson' did not long hold the stage, but its influence is
discernible in subsequent developments. The 'man between two women'
became a regular feature of the new domestic tragedy. In play after play
we find a soulful, clinging, romantic creature--usually the
title-heroine--set over against a full-blooded rival whose ways are ways
of wantonness. Lessing himself repeated the group in 'Emilia Galotti',
which in its turn became the mother of a new brood. The tragedy of
lawless passion led by an easy step to the tragedy of social conflict,
which portrayed the depravity of princes and nobles in their relation to
the common people, or called upon mankind to weep for the woes of lovers
separated by the barriers of rank. In Germany the species was very
timely. Nowhere else in Europe had the nobility so little to be proud
of, and nowhere else was the pride of birth so stupidly intolerant. That
fruitful theme of earlier and later poets, the love of nobleman for maid
of low degree, had been lost in the age of gallantry, save in lubricious
tales of intrigue and seduction. The appalling dissoluteness which
characterized the French court during the first half of the eighteenth
century, and was duly copied by the princelings of Germany, had poisoned
the minds of high and low alike and led to a state of affairs in which
there was little room for a noble or even a serious conception of love.
Love was understood to be concupiscence. If an aristocrat stooped to a
bourgeois girl, it was his affair and at the worst only an aberration of
taste; her fate was of no importance.

When the inevitable reaction set in, it took the form of a debauch of
sentimentalism. The poetry of real passion came back into literature and
people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a
frivolous game played for the gratification of lust, but a divine
rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the
beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of
endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,--a part of that
nature to which the world was now resolved to return,--it was sacred,
and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the
rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the
worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself
with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry
of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic
affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a
certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and
publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry
was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and
pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about
the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people
to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts
and cities. It was, however, the passionate eloquence of Rousseau which
first gave to this contrast a revolutionary significance, and it was
Rousseau who first stirred the reading world with a woeful tale of
lovers separated by the prejudices of caste.

In 'The New Heloise' it is the lady who is the aristocrat. Julie
d'Etange, the daughter of a baron, wishes to marry the untitled St.
Preux, to whom in a transport of passion she has yielded up her honor.
But the Baron d'Etange is an implacable stickler for rank and she is a
dutiful daughter; whence her marriage to the elderly infidel, Wolmar,
and the well-known moral ending of the novel. The thought that concerns
us here is best expressed by the enlightened English peer, Lord B., who
thus expostulates with Baron d'Etange:

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