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The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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




Let us judge of the past by the present; for two or three citizens
who win distinction by honest means, a thousand knaves every day get
their families ennobled. But to what end serves that nobility of
which their descendants are so proud, unless it be to prove the
robberies and infamy of their ancestor? There are, I confess, a
great number of bad men among the common people; but the odds are
always twenty to one against a gentleman that he is descended from a
scoundrel.... In what consists then the honor of that nobility of
which you are so proud? How does it affect the glory of one's
country or the good of mankind? A mortal enemy to liberty and the
laws, what did it ever produce, in the most of those countries where
it has flourished, but the power of tyranny and the oppression of
the people? Will you presume to boast, in a republic, of a rank that
Is destructive to virtue and humanity? Of a rank that makes its
boast of slavery and wherein men blush to be men?[51]

This is of course the language of passion and prejudice (it would not
else be Rousseau), but there was enough of truth in it, as in the case
of Rousseau's other fervors, to rouse the revolutionary spirit. German
literature began to teem with novels and plays which exhibit the
sufferings of some untitled hero or heroine at the hands of a vicious
aristocracy. The theme is touched upon in 'Werther', but without
becoming an Important issue. It appears in Wagner's 'Infanticide',
wherein a butcher's daughter, Evchen Humbrecht, is violated by a titled
officer, runs away from home in her shame, kills her child and is
finally found by the repentant author of her disgrace. We meet it again
in Lenz's 'Private Tutor', the tragedy of a German St. Preux who falls
in love with his titled pupil and dishonors her, with the result that
she too runs away from home and tries to commit suicide, while her lover
in his chagrin emasculates himself. These are grotesque tragedies, not
devoid of literary power, but devoid of high sentiment and saturated
with a woeful vulgarity. We cannot wonder that the high-minded Schiller
should have condemned Wagner's malodorous play as a mediocre
performance. His incentive came rather from Gemmingen's 'Head of the
House', which in turn carries us back to Diderot.

In the hands of Diderot, democrat, moralist and apostle of the _genre
honnete_, it was natural that the drama of class conflict should end
happily. In his 'Father of the Family', written in 1758 and first played
in 1761, the contrast of high and low is vividly portrayed, but without
bitterness. The aristocratic St. Albin d'Orbisson falls in love with a
poor girl from the country who lives in an attic and earns her own
living. Sophie's beauty and virtue make a man of him and he wishes to
marry her, but is opposed by his kind-hearted, querulous father, who
argues the case with him at great length, confronting passion with
prudential common-sense. St. Albin is also opposed by his rich uncle,
the Commandeur, from whom he has prospects. The uncle plots to get
Sophie away by having her arrested, but is baffled by a
counter-intrigue. Stormy scenes follow the revelation, and in the end it
appears that Sophie is not a plebeian maiden at all, but the niece of
the purse-proud Commandeur, who has neglected his poor relations. With
the literary and dramatic qualities of this play, its absence of humor
and of sparkling dialogue, its tedious moralizing, its hollow pathos and
its general relation to Diderot's dramatic theory, we are not here
directly concerned. What is important to observe is that, as a
contribution to the burning social question, its point is blunted by the
fact that its heroine is not what she seems to be. The whole matter
reduces to a brief misunderstanding in an aristocratic family. Villainy
is thwarted, true love comes into its own, and the foundations of
society remain as they were.

Diderot's 'Father of the Family' enjoyed a short vogue in France and
Italy and met with considerable favor in Germany. Most noteworthy among
minor German plays that were influenced by it is Gemmingen's 'Head of
the House'. Gemmingen was himself an aristocrat, a baron by title, who
was born in 1755. After studying law he settled in Mannheim, where he
became deeply interested in the drama, so that in 1778 he was given the
position of dramatist to the newly established 'national theater'. Two
years later he brought out his 'Head of the House' with great success.
The piece is a pendant of Diderot's, but by no means a slavish
imitation.

Gemmingen's 'head of the house' is an upright German nobleman of the
admirable sort, who returns home after a long absence to find the
affairs of his family very much deranged. His eldest son, Karl, has
fallen madly in love with Lotte Wehrmann, the daughter of an impecunious
artist, gotten her with child, and promised to marry her when his father
shall have returned and given his consent. The younger son, Ferdinand,
an officer, has taken to gaming, lost heavily and has a duel on his
hands. His son-in-law, Monheim, has become infatuated with a dazzling
widow, Countess Amaldi, grown cold toward his wife Sophie, and the
quarreling pair are eager for a divorce. The tangle is further
complicated by the fact that Amaldi, an excellent match, is in love with
Karl. The perplexed father sets at work with the tools of common sense
and rational argument. He urges Karl to break with Lotte for his
career's sake. The irresolute and dutiful Karl consents, saying nothing
of Lotte's approaching motherhood, and the rumor of his intended
marriage to the countess is spread abroad. When Lotte hears it she
rushes to Amaldi and wildly demands her lover in the name of her unborn
child. When the father hears the whole story he no longer thinks of rank
but of honor. He bids Karl marry his true love and retire to the
country, where, as overseer of a large estate, he will be less
encumbered by a plebeian wife than in the career which had been planned
for him. The magnanimous Amaldi furnishes the bride's dowry, the other
domestic complications are easily adjusted and all ends happily.

Dramatically Gemmingen's play is rather tame, though its literary merit
is considerable. He had a fair measure of constructive skill, but very
little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve. His best scenes interest
us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His
nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who
is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in
Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann. Karl is a poor stick,
Amaldi is rather colorless, and Lotte would be quite insipid but for her
impending motherhood, on which everything is made to turn. Such as it
was, however, the play excited the cordial admiration of Schiller, who
read it soon after its appearance. Very likely it may have suggested to
him the thought of trying his own hand upon a drama in the bourgeois
sphere, but it was not until July, 1782,--just after he had finished
reading Wagner's 'Infanticide',--that the plan of 'Louise Miller' began
to take shape in his mind. Gemmingen's poor artist, Wehrmann, became the
poor fiddler, Miller, and the daughter Lotte was rechristened Louise.
The aristocratic lover, Gemmingen's Karl, was named Ferdinand von
Walter, and Amaldi was converted into Lady Milford. One of Gemmingen's
subordinate characters, the foppish nobleman, Dromer, who goes about
making compliments to everybody, reappears in Schiller's play as the
perfumed tale-bearer and exquisite ladies' man, Chamberlain von Kalb.
The places represented are three in number and the same in both plays.
Here, however, the parallel ends. Instead of Gemmingen's high-minded
paterfamilias we have the rascally President von Walter, who, with his
tool Wurm, reminds one of Lessing's Prince and Marinelli. And what is
much more important, the relation of the lovers is so portrayed that we
get the pure poetry of passion, such as it is, without any tinge of
grossness.

In its earliest phase Schiller's plan looked toward a telling
tragi-comedy for the stage, with a plenty of rough humor and caustic
satire at the expense of 'high-born fools and scoundrels'. As he worked,
the possibilities of his theme developed. An abstract enthusiasm for the
rights of man was kindled by honest love of the common people, and by
the lingering smart of a personal wrong, into a holy zeal of vengeance.
President Walter was painted in colors which were taken largely from the
political history and the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the Wuerttemberg
court. As this court had its angel of light in soiled garments, Lady
Milford was fitted out with the benevolent qualities of Franziska von
Hohenheim; and as the portrait grew In firmness its author fell in love
with it, like the young Goethe with his Adelheid. When he came to depict
the jealousy of Ferdinand, he had the advantage of a personal
acquaintance with the green-eyed monster. Thus the play was extracted
from the book of life, as Schiller had been able to read it, and that
accounts for its vitality. But in his details he is nowhere less
original. Not only in the general conception of important characters,
but in particular scenes, situations, motives, contrasts and forms of
expression, we can see the influence of the literary tradition which he
inherited.

To show the exact nature and the full extent of this indebtedness would
be a tedious undertaking, which would require pages of quotation from
works whose chief interest now is that they served as quarry for
Schiller. Three or four illustrations will suffice. Our play begins with
a scene which at once recalls what was originally the opening scene of
Wagner's 'Infanticide'. In both there is a blustering father,--Lessing's
Odoardo reduced to the bourgeois sphere,--discoursing with his silly
wife upon the dangers that threaten their daughter from keeping
aristocratic company. In both the domestic thunderer expresses himself
in rough, strong language, and is only made the more furious by his
wife's efforts to allay his fears. In Wagner's next scene Magister
Humbrecht comes to woo Evchen, just as Schiller's Wurm comes to woo
Louise, and we hear that the girl's head has been turned by reading
novels. Just so Louise, whose father can scarcely find words to express
his detestation of the young baron's infernal, belletristic poison. When
Wurm arrives at Miller's and asks for Louise, he is informed that she
has just gone to church. 'Glad of that, glad of that', he replies, 'I
shall have in her a pious Christian wife'. Here is a reminiscence of the
scene in which Lessing's Count Appiani exclaims, on hearing that Emilia
has just been at church: 'That is right; I shall have in you a pious
wife'. The devout heroine was a hardly less hackneyed figure in the
dramatic literature of the time than the blustering father of whom
Goethe complained.[53] In Schiller's Louise we have the religious
sentiment sublimated into something quite too seraphic for human
nature's daily food. Her high-keyed sense of duty to God, her natural
filial piety and her superstitious reverence for the social order,
combine to produce in her a curious distraction which is the real source
of the tragic conflict. She feels that her love is holy but that
marriage would be sinful; and so she hesitates, responds to her lover's
ardor with tremblings and solicitudes, knows not what to do, does the
foolish thing and atones tragically for her weakness.

Not before Schiller's time had this conflict between love and filial
duty been so powerfully depicted, but it is found in Wagner's 'Remorse
after the Deed' (1775), wherein a coachman's daughter, Friederike Walz,
is loved by the aristocratic Langen, who is opposed by his mother.
Langen goes to his sweetheart, all courage and resolution. He is
prepared, like Leisewitz's Julius, to defy his kin, renounce the lures
of his rank and flee to the ends of the earth with 'Rikchen'. To which
she replies: 'Langen, you are terrible. To marry with the curse of
parents is to make one's whole posterity miserable'. So Louise replies
to Ferdinand's similar entreaty: 'And be followed by your father's
curse! A curse, thoughtless man, which even murderers never utter in
vain, and which like a ghost would pursue us fugitives mercilessly from
sea to sea.'

In the sentimental novel 'Siegwart', the heroine, Therese, loves a young
squire, not for his blue blood, but for the nobility of his heart. Like
Louise she renounces her love for this life, and bids him farewell. In
writing to him she describes a scene between her father and his:

Your father came dashing into our yard with two huntsmen. 'Are you
the ----?' he called up to me. 'Is that Siegwart? He's a scoundrel,
if he knows it. He wants to seduce my son. And this, I suppose, is
the nice creature (here he turned to me again) who has made a fool
of him. A nice little animal, by my soul!'... My father, who can
show heat when he is provoked, told him to stop calling such names;
that he was a decent man and I a decent girl.

Here we seem to have the suggestion of the stirring scene in which the
irate old fiddler threatens to throw President von Walter out of doors
for insulting Louise.

It would be very easy to give further examples of Schiller's talent for
taking what suited his purpose, but such philology is not very
profitable. After all, what one wishes to know is not where the
architect got his materials, but what he made of them. And what he made
was a play abounding in admirable scenes, but ending in a rather
unsatisfactory manner. With even less violence to the inner logic of the
piece than was necessary in the case of 'Fiesco', 'Cabal and Love' might
have been given a happy ending. The whole tragedy hangs by a thread in
the fifth act. Lady Milford has fled and is no longer a factor in the
entanglement. The wicked president has relented and is ready to yield.
Old Miller, released from prison, returns to his house and finds Louise
brooding over her purpose of suicide. He preaches to her upon the sin of
self-destruction and pleads with her to give up her aristocratic lover.
She promises. Then Ferdinand comes and demands an explanation of the
fatal letter. A word from her at this point, a momentary _acces_ or
simple common sense, would undeceive him and end the whole difficulty.
Of course she must not break her oath; and one cannot blame her sweet
simplicity for not taking refuge in the maxim that an oath given under
duress is not binding. But her oath merely pledges her to acknowledge
the letter as her voluntary act. There is no reason why she should not
solemnly assure Ferdinand of her innocence, tell him that they are the
victims of a plot and send him to his father for an explanation. Nothing
prevents her from speaking in time the words that she actually does
speak after she has taken the poison, but before she knows that she has
taken it: 'A horrible fatality has confused the language of our hearts.
If I might open my mouth, Walter, I could tell you things', etc.

If, out of filial piety, Louise is minded to give up her lover, there is
at any rate no reason why she should wish him to despise her forever.
Every natural girlish instinct requires her to clear herself. That she
does not do this, but persists in a course which of all courses is the
most unnatural,--seeing that she now has nothing to fear from any
source,--produces a painful suspense which is anything but tragic. No
skill of the actress can altogether save her from a certain appearance
of fatuous weak-mindedness, or forestall the cynical conclusion that she
dies chiefly in order that it may be fulfilled which was said unto
himself by the author, namely: I will write a tragedy.

And yet such a conclusion would not be perfectly just to Schiller. It is
true that he was all for tragedy and that a happy moral ending, in the
vein of Diderot, would not have been to his taste. But this does not
tell the whole story. The romantic lovers are sacrificed in order that
the guilty president and his vile accomplices may be brought to book and
punished for their sins. The heart of the matter for Schiller was to
free his mind with respect to the infamies of high life. It was this
that tipped his pen with fire.

Of course there are German critics who find Louise's conduct in this
last scene quite 'inevitable' and full of a high tragic pathos. Thus
Palleske says of her:

Her anxious piety, her touching and indeed so intelligible devotion
to her father, her lack of freedom, bring on her fate. A veil of
mourning rests upon all she says. Heroic liberty of action, such as
befits a Juliet, is made impossible to this girl by her birth in the
bourgeoisie; she has only the liberty to perish, not the courage to
be happy. Of guilt there can be no question in this case: her
anxiety, her filial devotion, are her whole guilt; her virtue, her
love for her father, become her ruin. Whoever thoroughly knows the
bourgeoisie, which had yet to recover from these wounds,[54] will
admit that this character is drawn with terrible truthfulness.

This, however, is putting too fine a point upon it; it implies, when
closely analyzed, that Schiller deliberately made his heroine a little
stupid,--a view of her that hardly comports with the rest of the play.
To say that she _must_ die because she belongs to the bourgeoisie is
mere moonshine, for common sense can readily find a number of escapes.
She may cleave to her father and send her lover packing, after proper
explanations; or she may cleave to her lover in the face of her
father's displeasure; or she may temporize in the hope of changing her
father's mind. What she actually does is to goad her lover into a
frenzy by her singular conduct and then come to her senses when it is
too late. The effect is to cast doubt upon the intensity of her
supposed passion for Ferdinand. One gets the impression that her
previous sentimental ecstasies were not perfectly genuine; that she
does not really know what it is to be in love, or how to speak the
veritable language of the heart.

The truth seems to be that when Schiller wrote 'Cabal and Love', he had
not progressed far enough in the knowledge of femininity to be able to
draw a perfectly life-like portrait of a girl in Louise's station. She
is a creature of the same order as Amalia and Leonora,--a sentimental
_Schwaermerin_, very much lacking in character and mother-wit. From the
first the expression of her love does not ring perfectly true. We
suspect her of phrase-making,--she is quite too ethereal and ecstatic
for a plain fiddler's daughter. No trace here of that homely poetic
realism,--Gretchen at the wash-tub, or Lotte cutting bread and
butter,--with which Goethe knew how to invest _his_ bourgeois maidens.
For aught we can learn from her discourse Schiller's Louise might be a
princess, brought up on a diet of Klopstock's odes. That a girl,
returning from church, should inquire of her parents if her lover has
called, is quite in order. That she should then confess that thoughts of
him have come between her and her Creator, is pardonable. But what are
we to think when she goes on to say to her own parents:

This little life of mine, oh that I might breathe it out into a soft
caressing zephyr to cool his face! This little flower of youth, were
it but a violet, that he might step on it, and it might die modestly
beneath his feet! That would be enough for me, my father.... Not
that I want him now. I renounce him for this life. But then, mother,
then, when the barriers of rank are laid low; when all the hateful
wrappings of earthly station fall away from us, and men are only
men,--I shall bring nothing with me save my innocence; but, you
know, father has so often said that pomp and splendid titles will be
cheap when God comes, and that hearts will rise in price. Then I
shall be rich. Then tears will be counted for triumphs, and
beautiful thoughts instead of ancestry. I shall be aristocratic
then, mother. What advantage will he have then over his sweetheart?

What can one think, indeed, except that this supernal maiden has been
reading Klopstock's famous 'Ode to Fanny'?[55]

Louise's passion, then, is no dangerous earthly flame, but a sentimental
dream, a private revel in ecstatic emotion. We opine that she does not
really need her lover, as a mortal entity, at all, and are prepared to
find her fearsome and irresolute in his presence. 'They are going to
separate us,' she exclaims, as if she herself had no voice in the
matter, when really her own timidity is the great obstacle. She is no
Gretchen, or Claerchen, ready to give all for love's sake and Jump the
consequences; still less is she a bourgeois Juliet, prepared to brave a
family tempest provided only that her Romeo's bent be honorable, his
purpose marriage. Those externalities of rank which she expects to drop
out of sight in heaven loom up very large in her earthly field of
vision. She fears her father's displeasure. She pretends to fear the
ruin of her Ferdinand's career, albeit he assures her solemnly that she
is of more importance to him than all else in the world. She is of the
opinion that her marriage to a man with a _von_ in his name and
prospects in life would be 'the violation of a sanctuary'; would
'unjoint the social world and demolish the eternal, universal order'.
Wherefore she is minded to renounce him. 'Let the vain, deluded
girl'--so she sighs--'weep away her grief within lonely walls; no one
will trouble himself about her tears,--empty and dead is my future,--but
I shall still now and then take a smell at the withered nosegay of the
past'--No wonder that before she reaches this awful climax, Ferdinand
smashes the fiddle and bursts into laughter.

On the stage, the scene in which the agonized Louise is compelled to
write the compromising letter is one of the most effective in the piece;
and yet how futile and absurd the whole intrigue would be if the
conspirators were not able to count upon her being a goose! One cannot
blame her, of course, for doing that which appears to be necessary in
order to save her father's life. One may pardon to her distress the
solemn oath that she will acknowledge the letter as her voluntary act.
But if she were really in love with Ferdinand as she has pretended to
be, how easy it would be for her, without violating her oath, to put him
on his guard against the trap that has been laid for him! In the scene
with Lady Milford she appears as a pert little pharisee, caustic,
sententious and philosophical beyond her years; so that one wonders why
a girl that knows so much should not know more. She herself has just
cast her lover off, after meeting his passionate entreaties with cool
prudential argument. In a stagy paroxysm of jealousy she resigns her
Ferdinand to Lady Milford, warning her, however, that her bridal chamber
will be haunted by the ghost of a suicide. But why should Louise wish to
quit this life? She has said farewell to Ferdinand, alleging that duty
bids her remain and endure. She has chosen her part. All that separates
her from her lover is her own chimerical sentiment of duty. Her virtue
is intact. She has not the motive, say of Gemmingen's Lotte, for
self-destruction. It is hard to take her seriously at this point, and we
wonder that Lady Milford takes her seriously.

Truth to tell, Louise makes a rather tame and uninteresting tragic
heroine. Notwithstanding all her fervid phrases, she is essentially
cold. Did Schiller intend this effect, or is it due to the fact that he
could not have portrayed her differently? Did it really spring from his
limited observation of the feminine heart and of girlish ways, or from a
deliberate artistic purpose to account adequately for Ferdinand's
jealousy? Had he taken a lesson from the maidenly reserve of Lotte von
Wolzogen and the prudential scruples of her mother? These are questions
upon which one can only speculate. As matters stand, the whole
catastrophe is made to hinge upon Ferdinand's suspicion. A little
patience, a little faith in his sweetheart, would turn the course of
fate. But her conduct makes faith difficult; so we understand his
jealousy, but not so well his previous infatuation. He is in love with a
beautiful soul and a pair of forget-me-not eyes, but the presuppositions
are a little difficult. He is resolved to marry Louise for better or
worse,--it is all understood, so far as he is concerned. Although there
is no love-scene in the play, we do hear of precedent scenes of
passionate self-surrender (always within the limits of virtue). One
cannot help asking: Where were Louise's scruples then? Was she ignorant
of her father's prejudice or resolved to brave it? Had she never
reflected upon the august foundations of the social order? Had she
resisted Ferdinand's suit and warned him that he must be content with a
yearning friendship on earth and a union of souls in heaven? None of
these suppositions can be said to prepare us fully for her actual
conduct in the play, where she appears all along as a helpless bundle of
tremors, vacillating between an alleged passion in which we do not fully
believe and a sublimated sense of duty that we cannot fully understand.

John Crace digests A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

My English teacher is wearing a barrister's wig. He turns and points towards me as I sit trembling in the dock. "Members of the jury, I put it to you that this man, Tom Robinson, is innocent," he says, rather lugubriously. I want to protest. I want to shout that no, I am not Tom Robinson, but yes, I am innocent! But the words won't come out.

Then I wake up. It's another literary dream – one that's troubled me ever since I studied Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE.

Most of the time I'm disappointed to leave my literary dreams, waking to realise that I'm not really ensconced with with the boozing Welsh pensioners from Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils or haven't really been thrashing Harry Potter's Quidditch team. I remember with fondness a skiing trip with William Shakespeare and the delightful discovery that Don DeLillo was serving drinks behind the bar in my local pub.

It's not all sunshine, though. Tom Wolfe once ruined a trip to New York, shouting at me across Fifth Avenue: "You're not even familiar with my work – get outta town, asshole!" But that's nothing on Howard Jacobson. I spent a summer discovering his novels during my waking hours and bumping into him in my sleep. I'd see him in a local restaurant and tell him how much I was enjoying his novels. "Oh right," he'd snap, "that old chestnut, huh?" When I met him for real last year he was, in fact, charm personified. I didn't tell him about the dreams.

But enough about my subconscious, what about yours? It's Friday: forget about work and tell me all about your literary dreams. Don't hold back – it's not like we'll read anything into it.

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