The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 2

After a while the sinner repents and writes his father a remorseful letter, which is intercepted by Wilhelm. Then the older brother returns to the vicinity of his home and takes service with a poor farmer. Here it falls to his lot to rescue his father from the hands of a.s.sa.s.sins. It turns out that the instigator of the murder was no other than Wilhelm.

When the plot is discovered the magnanimous Karl entreats pardon for his vile brother. His prayer is granted, Wilhelm receives a share of the estate and all ends in happy tears.--In publis.h.i.+ng the sketch Schubart recommended it to the geniuses of the day as an excellent foundation for a novel or a comedy. Here was a chance, he thought, to prove that the Germans, notwithstanding the servility of their pens, were not the spiritless race that foreigners saw in them; 'to show that we too, in spite of our oppressive forms of government, which permit only a condition of pa.s.sivity, are men who have their pa.s.sions and can act, no less than a Frenchman or a Briton.' He therefore cautioned any playwright who might try his hand upon the subject to lay the scene not in a foreign country but in contemporary Germany.

We see here the thought that struck fire in the mind of young Schiller, whose bent was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong pa.s.sion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the pa.s.sion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the very field for a mad Ajax who should make havoc among the cowards and the pigmies. In Schubart's tragi-comedy there are no heroic pa.s.sions whatever. Nothing is conceived in a large and bold way. The characters live and move throughout in the little world of their own selfish interests. Such a piece, in which the penitent hero bends his back to the plow and weakly pardons an abominable crime, did not comport with Schiller's mood of fierce indignation. So he converted the story into a tragedy and turned Schubart's meek and forgiving prodigal into a terrible avenger of mankind.

In the contrasted brothers we see what Minor[20] well enough calls the hot and cold pa.s.sions. Karl is a hotspur whose emotions are always keyed up to the highest pitch; he is never calm and is incapable of sober reasoning. His boiling blood and his insensate ambition are his only oracles. We may say that his motives are lofty, but in trying to set the world right and make it conform to his perfervid dreams of justice and freedom, he becomes a madman and a criminal. Franz, on the other hand, represents the scheming intellect sundered from conscience and natural feeling. He is a monster of cool, calculating, hypocritical villainy. At the end he cowers in abject terror before the phantom conscience that he has reasoned out of existence in the first act. The portrait of the two brothers, as thus conceived, is crudely simple. There are no delicacies of shading, no subtleties of psychological a.n.a.lysis. In short, Robber Moor and his brother give the impression of having been made to a scheme rather than copied from nature. Nevertheless the scheme is conceived with superb audacity and executed with a dramatic power and insight that had never been surpa.s.sed in Germany.

To understand the furore created by 'The Robbers' one should read two other storm-and-stress plays, by writers of no mean dramatic talent, which present the same fundamental situation,[21]--'The Twins', by Klinger, and 'Julius of Tarentum', by Leisewitz. Both these plays came out in the year 1776 and were evidently studied with care by Schiller.

Both follow the timid example which had been set by Lessing of laying the scene in a foreign land, Klinger gives us two brothers, Guelfo and Ferdinando, of whom neither the mother nor her physician can tell which was born first. But Ferdinando has always been treated as the elder, has enjoyed the favor of his father, risen to power and distinction and won the prize in love. He is of a n.o.ble and forgiving temper and plays only a subordinate part. The hero is Guelfo, who, like Schiller's Karl Moor, has read Plutarch and would fain do something great, like Brutus or Ca.s.sius. But he remains after all only a poor knight. His hand is unnerved and his heroic spirit paralyzed by the suspicion that he has been the life-long victim of a conspiracy; that he and not Ferdinando is the elder brother. The whole interest of the play turns upon the portraiture of his morbid, insensate jealousy. In the fourth act he takes a morning ride with his brother and murders him. Then he defiantly reports the deed at home and is himself slain by his father.

In 'Julius of Tarentum' the younger brother, Guido, is, again, the man of action; a _miles gloriosus_ who boasts of his strong arm and dreams of glory. He looks with contempt and hatred upon his gentle, sentimental brother Julius, who, though heir to the throne, prepares to renounce his career because he is thwarted in love. The girl Blanca, upon whom he has fixed his affections, is not deemed a suitable bride for him by his father and has been shut up in a convent. He determines to abduct her by night and flee with her to some romantic spot in the far north. In the execution of this purpose he is killed by his jealous brother Guido, who is then made to suffer death at the hands of his own father.

In both these plays we have, as in 'The Robbers', an aged father whose dynastic hopes center in an excellent son; this son the object of mad jealousy on the part of a younger brother, and both brothers in love with the same girl. The plays exhibit talent of a high order, but talent that always falls short of genius. Psychical states are portrayed by means of talk, and the talk is big enough; but very little actually happens. The mighty pa.s.sions have to be taken largely upon trust and the conversation often drags. Dramatic possibilities are not fully grasped, the situations are felt but not seen, and there is an obvious reluctance to make unusual demands upon the stage. Even Klinger, whose play of 'Storm and Stress' gave a name to the whole contemporary movement in German literature, reads tamely enough in comparison with 'The Robbers'.

But what is most noteworthy of all, Klinger and Leisewitz give us simply dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the larger tangle of human destiny.

This last is what the young Schiller did with masterly insight. He converted the dynastic tragedy of his predecessors into a tragedy of the social revolution; and his work has lived because we can hear in it the preliminary roar of the storm which was soon to burst in the streets of Paris.[22] He laid his scene not in far-off Italy nor in the remote past, but in Germany and in the middle of the century which boasted of its enlightened philosophy and its excellent police regulations. Of the two brothers he took the sentimentalist for his hero, but made him at the same time a man of action, a man of heroic mould and a self-helper.

The logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason, the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to nature,--all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he does not content himself with indignant rhetoric or sentimental repining. He takes arms against the sea of troubles. Instead of an excellent youth pitifully done to death by a jealous brother, we get a towering idealist who is the moulder of his own fate. With sublime [Greek: hubris] he takes it upon himself to wield the avenging bolts of Jove, but finds that Jove rejects his a.s.sistance. He errs disastrously in his judgment, like any short-sighted mortal, and his work goes all agley. But when the end comes it is not depressing. We see no longer a revolting fratricide and the painful sacrifice of virtue to the meanest of pa.s.sions, but the verdict of the G.o.ds upon human presumption.

In making his hero a defiant self-helper and sending him with sword in hand against the minions of the established order, Schiller was obviously influenced by the example of 'Gotz von Berlichingen'. Like Gotz, Karl Moor regards himself as the champion of freedom against the law, which is its enemy. Both are friends of the oppressed and haters of pedantry and pettifoggery. Both fight like lions against tremendous odds. Both a.s.sume the leaders.h.i.+p of a band of outlaws whom they cannot control, and thus become responsible for revolting crimes not foreseen or intended. But along with these and other resemblances that might be pointed out there is an important difference. In the fourth act of the earlier play a Heilbronn Councillor says to Gotz: 'We owe no faith to a robber.' Whereat Gotz exclaims: 'If you did not wear the emperor's emblem, which I honor in the vilest counterfeit, you should take back that word or choke upon it. Mine is an honorable feud.' That is, the knight of the sixteenth century repudiates the name in which Karl Moor glories. Says Schiller's Pater in the second act: 'And you, pretty captain! Duke of cutpurses! King of scoundrels! Great Mogul of all rogues under the sun!' To which Moor replies: 'Very true. Very true.

Just proceed.' In comparison with such a daredevil Goethe's hero seems to roar like a sucking dove. In his own mind Gotz never really burns the bridge behind him. He is at heart a loyalist who recognizes the emperor's claim to his allegiance. As a free imperial knight he feels himself within his right under the feudal system. In resisting his enemies he does not set himself in opposition to governmental authority _per se_, but only to the abuse of authority by subordinates who disgrace their master and his. And in a.s.suming the leaders.h.i.+p of the insurgent rabble he thinks to restrain their ferocity and thus earn the thanks of the supreme authority.--It remained for Schiller to convert this rude self-helper in the age of expiring feudalism into a savage anarchist in the boastful age of enlightenment.

It was a bold idea to be conceived by a youth in a school where every third word was of virtue and philanthropy. Not that there was anything particularly audacious in a strong presentation of the spirit of revolt.

For some time past this spirit had been nourished by the writings of Rousseau and those who followed in his wake, until attacks upon the social order, in some phase of it, had come to be almost the staple of literature. But the attacks had not been very dangerous. Either they were veiled by a distant setting of the scene, or the indictment of the age was presented incidentally in connection with some lacrimose tragedy of the individual. People had learned to sigh and weep that things should be so, but there the matter ended. The German princeling could look on with equanimity, a.s.sured that the rhetoric and the tears did not mean him, or that if they did it did not matter. In real life those who felt themselves oppressed by the civilization of Europe could emigrate, and they did emigrate in large numbers. This was one form of the return to nature. In literature, however, the usual expedient was to let the hero chafe himself to death and go down, without striking a blow, before the irresistible tyranny of the established order. Schiller's hero is of another ilk. Romantic flight with his lady-love does not occur to him.

Surrender to the wrong is out of the question. He finds another form for the return to nature and puts into practice the maxim, Here or nowhere is America. He stays and fights at the head of a troop of bandits. Thus the play which was originally to have been called 'The Lost Son' became 'The Robbers'.

In their way, then, Schiller's outlaws stand for the state of nature.

They represent natural man rising in brute strength against the oppressions of a depraved society. Such at least is Karl Moor's construction of the matter when he says to the Pater: 'Tell them that my business is retribution, that my trade is vengeance.' Under our modern development of the social sentiment we can hardly imagine a really high-minded youth setting out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar in literature. The Thirty Years' War had familiarized Germany with marauding bands who recognized no authority save that of their leader. Even in the eighteenth century the brigandage which was common in the Mediterranean countries continued to flourish in Southern Germany. As late as 1781, the very year in which 'The Robbers' appeared, we hear of the capture in Bavaria of a band of outlaws numbering nearly a thousand men. The year 1771 witnessed the execution of the robber-chieftain Klostermayer, who, under the name of the Bavarian Hiesel, became the subject of an idealizing saga in which we recognize the essential features of Karl Moor.[23]

Schiller's main fiction was thus, in a sense, warranted by the facts; and it gains further in artistic plausibility when we consider that the idealized bandit was already a familiar type in literature. The author of 'The Robbers' was acquainted with Robin Hood, and he had probably read 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona', in which the banished Valentine becomes the captain of a band of outlaws on condition that they "do no outrages on silly women or poor pa.s.sengers", and the outlaws reply that they "detest such vile, base practices."[24] He had also read, in 'Don Quixote', of the high-toned robber, Roque Guinart, who had more of compa.s.sion, in his nature than cruelty. Cervantes makes Roque comment thus upon his mode of life: "Injuries which I could not brook and thirst for revenge first led me into it contrary to my nature; for the savage asperity of my present behavior is a disgrace to my heart, which is gentle and humane." At the end of the episode Roque sends his captives away "admiring his generosity, his gallantry, and his extraordinary conduct, and looking upon him rather as an Alexander the Great than as a notorious robber."[25] Here was a sufficient hint for a criminal in the grand style, who should imagine himself the spiritual congener of Plutarch's heroes.

'A singular Don Quixote whom we abominate and love, admire and pity',--such was Schiller's own formula for his first dramatic hero.

From the standpoint of ordinary logic it must be admitted that Moor's motive for becoming a robber (the lying letter that he receives from Franz) is quite insufficient. He is duped too easily and should have known his brother better. He is too ready to give up everything dear to him, including the dear Amalia. 'I have no sweetheart any more', is a weak surrender for a man of his heroic stamp. In any case the wrong that has been done him is a private wrong that has nothing to do with the const.i.tution of society. One does not see how it is to be righted or how the world is to be purged of such baseness by killing and plundering people in the Bohemian Forest.

The only reply which our drama makes to this objection is to be found in Moor's crazy ambition for distinction. He has the 'great-man-mania'.

What attracts him in the career of crime is not the wickedness but the bigness of it; the opportunity of lifting himself above the common herd and sending his name down to posterity as that of a very extraordinary person. 'I loathe this ink-spattering century', he says, 'when I read in my Plutarch of great men.... I am to squeeze my body into a corset and lace up my will in laws.... Law has never made a great man, but freedom hatches out colossi and extremes, O that the spirit of Hermann were still glowing in the ashes! Place me at the head of an army of fellows like myself, and Germany shall become a republic in comparison with which Rome and Sparta were nunneries.' Such, monstrous egotism needs no motive, but only an occasion, for breaking with the order of civilization. An occasion is furnished by the letter.

But that which marks Karl Moor as a genuine child of Schiller's imagination and of the sentimental age is his combination of virile energy with soft-heartedness and true n.o.bility of feeling. In all his robbings and burnings he does not become vulgarized like his comrades.

He imagines that he is engaged in a righteous work and has G.o.d on his side. For this reason he has a right to his melting moods, as, for example, in the famous and oft-praised scene on the Danube. This delicacy of feeling, which to an American or Englishman is apt to seem absurd in a bandit-chief who is engaged in wholesale crime, is an essential part of Moor's character. It is this which, on German soil, gave to 'The Robbers' tragic interest and insured its immortality. One sees all along that Moor is a wanderer in the dark, and one can sympathize with his purposes and his dreams while detesting his conduct.

This makes him a heroic figure. And when the clearing-up comes and he discovers that he has been the victim not of society but of an individual villain; that his attempt to right wrongs by committing new wrongs, to enforce the laws by lawlessness, and to correct violence by violence, was nothing but presumptuous and criminal folly,--when all this becomes clear to him, we have a tragic situation of the most pathetic character. This element of high tragic pathos was first given to a German drama by Schiller. It had not been given by Goethe and Lessing, nor was it in them to give it. This is why German tragedy in the true sense may be said to have its beginning in 'The Robbers'.

That Schiller in a sense sympathized with his hero is undeniable. What gives vitality to the character is here as always the fact that the author looked into his own heart and then wrote. This, however, only means that the moods of Moor are veritable moods of Schiller, raised to a white heat and translated into action. The young student, dreaming the dreams of youth and pining for freedom and action, had more than once felt his gorge rise to the choking-point as he found himself forced to plod on among the dull, oppressive, unheroic facts of life; and those acts of official villainy against which Moor draws the sword he had himself seen flouris.h.i.+ng unavenged in his native Wurttemberg. But, on the other hand, he was never for a moment insensible to the moral hideousness and the tragic folly of Moor's conduct. It was to be sublime, but insane and calamitous nevertheless. One is justified in thinking, therefore, that Goedeke goes too far, or does not express the truth felicitously, when he says that the author of 'The Robbers' 'felt himself one' with his hero.[26] He felt himself one with certain phases of Moor's thought and feeling; for the rest, however, the robber-chieftain was to be abominated as well as admired. There has been too much of the tendency to see in 'The Robbers' only a personal doc.u.ment; only a youth's incoherent cry for liberty. The piece is a work of art, duly calculated with reference to artistic effects.

Turning now from the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his studies in medicine and philosophy. In the first place we can observe that Franz is studiously contrasted with his brother. Karl is an idealist and a man of sentiment; Franz is a materialist to whom the natural emotions of the heart are objects of cynical derision. For Karl, who knows his Klopstock as well as his Plutarch, love is a transcendental dream foretelling a spiritual union in a world without end; for Franz it is carnal appet.i.te. Karl wears his heart upon his sleeve; Franz is wily and hypocritical. The one is handsome and chivalrous, the other ill-favored and cruel.

The jealous cadet who plots criminally against his more fortunate brother is common to both Leisewitz and Klinger, but in neither is he an intriguing villain. In 'Julius of Tarentum' Guido is really the more masterful man of the two. He despises his brother as a weakling and a.s.serts no other claim than that of the strongest. In Klinger's play, as we have seen, everything is made to turn upon Guido's cankering doubt of his brother's seniority. One gets the impression that if the doubt could be settled by indisputable evidence in favor of Ferdinando, there would be no _casus belli_; the younger son would bow to the law of primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question, the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural greatness; scheming intellect against hot blood.

In working out his conception Schiller took counsel freely of Shakspere, whose name had now become for young Germany the symbol of all things great in dramatic writing. The first soliloquy of Franz Moor reminds one at once of Edmund in 'Lear', though there is none of the kind of borrowing which makes easy prey for the philologist. Both villains covet the wealth and station of a preferred brother; both make use of a specious obstetrical argument and both operate with forged letters. In general, however, the portrait of Franz was more influenced by Richard the Third than by Edmund, or Iago, or any of the other Shaksperian villains. Franz is the British Richard divested of his Shaksperian lordliness, transferred to a humbler sphere of action and provided with the mental outfit of an eighteenth-century _philosophe_, as seen by hostile critics. Both descant on their own deformity and confide to the public their villainous designs. But while Richard speaks in a tone of genial cynicism, as if his princ.i.p.al concern were only to bring a little variety into the tameness of "these fair, well-spoken days", the German villain solemnly turns himself inside out and regales us _ad nauseam_ with the metaphysics of iniquity. This is his mode of reasoning:

Why did nature put upon me this burden of ugliness--this Laplander's nose, this Moorish mouth, these Hottentot eyes? Death and destruction! Why was she such a partisan?--But no, I do her injustice. She gave us wit when she placed us naked and miserable on the sh.o.r.e of this great ocean-world. Swim who can, and whoso is too clumsy let him sink. The right is with him that prevails. Family honor? A valuable capital for him that knows how to profit by it.--Conscience? An excellent scarecrow with which to frighten sparrows from cherry-trees.--Filial love? Where is the obligation?

Did my father beget me because he loved me? Did he think of me at all? Is there anything holy in his gratification of carnal appet.i.te?

Or shall I love him because he loves me? That is mere vanity, the usual predilection of the artist for his own work.

Such is the ethical att.i.tude of Franz Moor, as we gather it from his first soliloquy. One sees that Schiller was concerned to portray a scoundrel who had read deeply and come to the conclusion that in a world like this there is no valid reason why a man should be virtuous.

Evidently the author had himself breathed the mephitic air of eighteenth-century skepticism. His natural goodness of heart safeguarded him from corruption, but it pleased him as artist to dip his pen in the blackest ink and draw the picture of the devil with whom he had wrestled in moments of solitary musing.

In spite of his intellectual subtlety, however, Franz is a rather dull villain. His philosophical and physiological pedantry--for Schiller endows him lavishly with the special lore of the medical man--obfuscates his vision for the ordinary facts of human nature. He has upon the whole a more intelligible motive for his rascality than Iago, but he is much less interesting, much less picturesque, for simple lack of mother-wit.

What a woeful blunder, for example, is his attempt to win Amalia by depicting her absent lover, at great length and with all manner of revolting details, as the victim of the most loathsome of diseases! And why should such a crafty schemer risk his neck and put himself in the hands of a dangerous confederate for the purpose of hastening by a few hours the demise of a childish old man who is already in his power? And in his final agony of terror, when we should expect him to hide himself or try to escape, how absurd that he should summon Pastor Moser merely for the purpose of arguing with him upon immortality and judgment! We see that he is after all a wretched coward who has merely cheated us into the belief that he has put away the superst.i.tions of orthodox belief, while in reality they still linger in his blood. We miss in him the invincible sang-froid of villainy which might have given a touch of Shaksperian grandeur to his character. As it is, he is not grand, but pitiable and revolting. When he strangles himself with his hat-band, one is quite satisfied with the unheroic manner of his taking-off.

The subordinate characters of the piece are hardly worth discussing at any length. The elder Moor is a mere nonent.i.ty,--a dummy in a rocking-chair would have done as well. Evidently Schiller was concerned to make the way as easy as possible for the clumsy villainy of Franz. A more vigorous father, he may have felt, would have necessitated a more subtle and plausible intrigue, which would have diverted attention from the main issue of the contrasted sons. The heroine Amalia has always been recognized, and was immediately recognized by Schiller himself, as the weakest character in the play. But posterity's criticism is hardly that formulated by him, namely, that we miss in Amalia the 'gentle, suffering, pining thing--the maiden.'[27] Of gentle, suffering, pining things there is no dearth in the German drama, and they were not in Schiller's line. Nearly all of his women are made of heroic stuff, and we honor him not the less for that. No one should blame Amalia for boxing the ears of Franz or drawing the sword upon him: it is unladylike conduct, but very good storm-and-stress realism.

What one must deplore, however, is the general mental inadequacy that is paired with this spasmodic energy of scorn. Common sense is not the highest of dramatic qualities, but a modic.u.m of it would have made Schiller's first heroine, to say the least, more interesting. She has no power of initiative and seems made only to be duped. Her inability to recognize her lover in the fourth act is a terrible strain upon one's patience. Indeed the whole love-affair between her and Karl is utterly un-human. What can one think, for example of a pair of ecstatically faithful lovers to whom it has evidently never occurred to write to each other? Here, if anywhere, one recalls Schiller's oft-quoted observation that he had attempted in 'The Robbers' to depict human beings before he had seen any.[28] Aside from his acquaintance with Franziska von Hohenheim, and an occasional nearer view of the coy maidens of the _ecole des demoiselles_, the female s.e.x and the grand pa.s.sion were for him only bookish mysteries.

Of the subordinate outlaws there are several whose portraits are very well drawn. Here Schiller was able to profit by the psychological observations he had made upon his comrades in the academy. There were no cutthroats there, but there were traits and exploits, animosities and fidelities, which only needed to be heated in the poetic crucible in order to befit the role of robbers in the Bohemian Forest. In particular we may guess that the blatherskite Jew, Spiegelberg, with his swaggering self-conceit and his b.e.s.t.i.a.l vulgarity, was copied to some extent from life, though nothing definite is known of his original. Taken as a whole the robbers form a picturesque company, each with his own character.

Shakspere would probably have been content to say 'first robber','second robber', etc.; but for Schiller, accustomed to the pose of leaders.h.i.+p among his fellows, to company drill and to the weighing of men according to their moral qualities, this was not enough. There had to be sheep and goats, cla.s.sified according to their loyalty. On the one hand, closest to the leader stand the devoted Roller, the st.u.r.dy Schweizer and the romantic idealist, Kosinsky; on the other are the envious malcontent, Spiegelberg, and the wretched Schufterle. The others, less distinctly characterized, represent the ma.s.s.

It will now be in order to look at 'The Robbers' a moment from the point of view of dramatic art.[29] In a suppressed preface to the first edition Schiller expressed himself very contemptuously with regard to the stage, declaring that he had essayed a dramatized story and not a stage-play. He would not advise that his work be put upon the boards; for the rabble of the theater would not understand him, would take him for an apologist of vice, and so forth. There seems no good reason to doubt the essential sincerity of these expressions, though their author quickly changed his tune when the staging of 'The Robbers' became a practical question. In the heat of authors.h.i.+p, however, he had aimed at a literary rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were literary dramas. 'Gotz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's day had not yet come.

This being so, it is a fact of interest that 'The Robbers' first captured the public as a stage-play, and that too in a very much modified version, from which all references to contemporary society had been expunged, the action having been dated back into the fifteenth century. This indicates that the initial success of the work was not due mainly to the social 'tendency' which we see in it, but to its dramatic power. And the dramatic power is there. With but slender knowledge of the rules and the conventions, without ever having seen a moderately good play in his life, with little help save from the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, the young student had shown himself at a stroke the coming dramatist of his nation.

Let us freely admit that he had not shown himself a master of dramatic craftsmans.h.i.+p. Faulty the piece no doubt is in several particulars. The soliloquies of Franz are too long-winded, and the same may be said of some of the robber-scenes. Spiegelberg's vulgar tongue is allowed to wag too freely. Contempt of quotidian probability is now and then carried so far as to produce an unintended effect of burlesque: as when the robbers, who are merely dissolute students from Leipzig, fight with twenty times their number of soldiers, lose one man and slay three hundred. Again, one does not quite see the moral necessity of honest Schweizer's killing himself, when he has the misfortune to find Franz dead. He has indeed promised to capture him or die in the attempt, but his promise was never meant to cover the case of the villain's suicide.

Under the circ.u.mstances his shooting himself is mere exuberance of dramatic bloodshed.

But how absurd it would be to dwell upon these things as if they were serious defects! Young Schiller undertook to Shaksperize. His parole was not to be the natural and the probable, but the extraordinary, the tremendous. Why then should he have been more timid than the author of 'Lear' and 'Macbeth'? One who is borne along by a whirlwind may be pardoned for ignoring the rules and the proprieties. Of course it is not intended to compare 'The Robbers' with the riper works of Shakspere. That would be absurd, and yet no more absurd than to gird at Schiller for doing what we pardon or even admire in Shakspere. Like every great dramatist Schiller has an indefeasible right to demand that we take his point of view, make his a.s.sumptions and enter into the spirit of his creation. And when we do this, how magnificently he carries us along! What animation in the dialogue everywhere, and what fire in the robber-scenes! From first to last the play fairly throbs with pa.s.sion, and always with pa.s.sion made visible. It is all action, all meant to be done and seen. Extravagant it is, no doubt; but while there are always hundreds of critics in the world who can see that and say it more or less cleverly, there is but one man in a century who can write such scenes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: The Schubart story is reprinted by Weltrich, I, p. 183 ff., who attempts to trace its provenience. It was not entirely fiction.

Cf. Minor, I, 298, to whom this chapter is indebted in many places.]

[Footnote 19: Eckermann's "Gesprache mit Goethe", under date of Jan.

17, 1827.]

[Footnote 20: "Schiller, sein Leben und seine Werke," I, 299.]

[Footnote 21: Bitter family fends, and particularly the fiction of the hostile brothers,--with motives of rivalry, jealousy and hatred, with paternal curses and parricide and fratricide and filicide,--were just then a literary fas.h.i.+on. It is worth noting in this connection that J.M.R. Lenz published in 1776 a story ent.i.tled "Die beiden Alten", in which a son shuts up his father in a cellar and sends a man to kill him.

But the man's heart fails him and the prisoner escapes,--to reappear like a ghost among his kin. That Schiller read this story is at any rate thinkable, though there is no direct evidence of the fact.]

[Footnote 22: Cf. Minor, I, 300: "Die Rauber des jungen Schiller, welcher sich damals nicht einmal um den nordamerikanischen Freiheitskrieg, geschweige denn um das gewitterschwule Frankreich bek.u.mmerte, waren nur ein Symptom und eine Vorahnung; eine Wirkung im Kleinen vor der groszen Katastrophe."]

[Footnote 23: Cf. Minor, I, 313 ff.]

[Footnote 24: Act IV, scene I.]

[Footnote 25: "Don Quixote," Chapter 89.]

[Footnote 26: "Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung", V, 19.]

[Footnote 27: Sammtliche Schriften, II, 365. Citations from Schiller refer, unless otherwise expressly indicated, to Goedeke's historico-critical edition in 15 vols. Stuttgart, 1867-1876.]

[Footnote 28: Sammtliche Schriften, III, 529.]