Mary Stuart
Wohlthätig heilend nahet mir der Tod,Der ernste Freund! Mit seinen schwarzen FlügelnBedeckt er meine Schmach—den Menschen adelt,Den tiefstgesunkenen das letzte Schicksal—'Mary Stuart'.
After the completion of 'Wallenstein', in the spring of 1799, Schiller was not long in selecting a new dramatic theme. The unwonted leisure was irksome to him, so that he felt like one living in a vacuum. At first, being weary of war and politics, he was minded to try his hand upon something altogether imaginary, some unhistorical drama of passion. But the aversion to history and the balancing of attractions did not last long. On the 26th of April he wrote to Goethe as follows:
I have turned my attention to a political episode of Queen Elizabeth's reign and have begun to study the trial of Mary Stuart. One or two first-rate tragic motives suggested themselves straightway, and these have given me great faith in the subject, which incontestably has much to recommend it. It seems to be especially adapted to the Euripidean method, which consists in the completest possible development of a situation; for I see a possibility of making a side issue out of the trial, and beginning the tragedy directly with the condemnation,
This time the historical orientation proceeded very rapidly. By the 4th of June he was ready to begin the first act, which formed his principal occupation during the next two months. From a letter to Goethe, written June 18, it is clear that he was then thinking especially of the danger of sentimentalizing his heroine. She was to excite sympathy, of course, but, so he averred, it was not to be of the tender, personal kind that moves to tears. It was to be her fate to experience and to arouse vehement passions, but only the nurse was to 'feel any tenderness for her'. As we shall see, he did not remain entirely faithful to this early conception of Mary's character. In August, the second act was completed and the third begun. Then came a long interruption, occasioned by the demands of the 'Almanac', the dangerous illness of Frau Schiller,—a lingering puerperal fever following the birth of her third child, Caroline, on the 11th of October,—and finally by the distractions incident to a change of residence. For Schiller had now decided to make his winter home in Weimar, so that he might be near the theater. He was heart and soul in the business of play-making, and looked forward to devoting the next six years of his life to that kind of work. To Körner he did not confide his new plan at first, though he wrote of it often to Goethe.
The removal to Weimar took place early in December, having been made possible by an increase of stipend amounting to two hundred thalers. In granting this increase Karl August intimated that it might be of advantage to Schiller as a dramatic poet if he were to take the Weimarians into his confidence and discuss his plays with them. 'What is to influence society', he sagely remarked, 'can be better fashioned in society than in isolation'; and he added a very gracious expression of his own personal friendliness. Schiller thus found himself once more virtually a theater poet. The Weimar stage, with its little and large problems, became the focus of his activity. As a good repertory was of prime importance, much of his time went to the making of translations and adaptations. Thus he began a version of Shakspere's 'Macbeth', and had not finished it when he was again prostrated by a fresh and dangerous attack of his malady. After the completion of 'Macbeth, in the spring of 1800, he returned to 'Mary Stuart', but found his progress impeded by manifold interruptions. To escape these he retired to the quiet of Ettersburg, and there, early in June, he finished his tragedy of the Scottish queen. A few days later, June 14, it was played at Weimar, and from that time to this it has been one of the accepted favorites of the stage. One who saw the second performance has left it on record that the spectators unanimously declared it to be 'the most beautiful tragedy ever represented on the German boards'. Madame de Staël characterized it as the most moving and methodical of all German tragedies.
Schiller conceives Mary Queen of Scots as a beautiful sinner who has repented. Her sins are grievous and she does not deny or extenuate them. But they are in the distant past; so far as the present is concerned, she is in the right. She has come to England seeking an asylum, but instead of being treated as a queen she has been confined in one prison after another and finally brought to Fotheringay, where she is subjected to petty indignities and denied the consolations of the Catholic religion. She has been charged with a crime of which she declares herself innocent, has been brought to trial before a commission of judges whose jurisdiction she indignantly repudiates, and has even been denied the common right to confront the witnesses testifying against her. At the opening of the play she does not yet know the verdict of the court.
This is the substance of Schiller's masterly exposition; and the effect of it, upon the reader or spectator who has not prejudged the case, is to create an attitude of compassion for the prisoner. But the sympathy that one feels for the passive victim of political or legal injustice is not the kind which Schiller regarded as 'tragic'. There had to be some sort of 'guilt', and it was also necessary that this guilt should grow out of the free act of the individual. But what was to be done with a helpless captive who was not free to shape her own fate? From the above-quoted letter to Goethe, of April 26, 1799, it is inferable that Schiller at first thought of representing the trial of Mary. He soon saw, however, that this would make the effect of the drama turn upon political, religious and legal considerations of an abstruse and doubtful character. It would be with the play as it always had been with the historical controversy: the devout Catholic would regard Queen Mary as the victim of brutal tyranny, while the Protestant would think her deserving of her fate. Schiller did not wish to take sides boldly in a partisan controversy, but to make a tragedy the effect of which should grow out of universal human emotions. So he felt happy when a 'possibility' occurred to him of dispensing altogether with the trial and beginning with the last three days of Mary's life.
The expedient that had suggested itself to him involved three unhistorical inventions: first, an attempt to escape, in which Mary and her cause would become involved in the guilt of the murderous fanatic, Mortimer; secondly, a supposititious love for Leicester, who would use his influence with Elizabeth to bring about a meeting of the two queens; and, finally, the meeting itself, in which Mary's long pent-up passion would get the better of her and betray her into a deadly insult of her rival. After this her fate would appear inevitable and incurred by her own act. This concentration of the action brought with it certain other departures from history which are of minor importance. Mary was beheaded in February, 1587, in the forty-fifth year of her age. At the time of her death her captivity in England had lasted about nineteen years. In order to account for the infatuation of Mortimer and the still lingering passion of Leicester, our drama imagines her some twenty years younger than she actually was.[119]
As thus made over by Schiller, Queen Mary is a pathetic rather than a tragically imposing figure. She appeals, after all, to the sentimental side of human nature and does not produce that effect of tragic sublimity which is produced by 'Wallenstein'. The sympathy that she excites is like that one feels for a martyr. We see in her a royalréligieusewho is persecuted by powerful and contemptible enemies and is unable to help herself. Her death is decreed from the beginning and there is no way of averting it. The object of fierce contentions on the part of others, she herself does nothing, and can do nothing, to change the predestined course of events. She is never placed, as the real tragic hero must be, before an alternative where the decision is big with fate. When the end comes there is nothing to do but let her renounce all earthly passion and face the headsman as a purified saint. So far as she is concerned, there is no action at all, but only the dramatic development of a situation.[120]
For, after all, the expedients just spoken of do not hit the mark exactly, in the sense of making the heroine responsible for her own fate. They bring in some new and exciting complications, which, however, do not affect the course of events at all. The catastrophe would have been just the same without them. This, nevertheless, is something that one does not see until we reach the end and look back. Before the two queens come together it seems as if the meeting might be a turning-point in Mary's fate; and this appearance is all that Schiller aimed at. In a letter to Goethe he spoke of this scene as 'impossible', and he was curious to know what success he had had with it. By this he meant, seemingly, that the futility of the scene, as affecting Mary's fate, was predetermined by the nature of the subject[121]. Mary was to die; it was impossible to make Elizabeth pardon her or treat her claims with Indulgence. And yet it was necessary to create the illusion of great possibilities hanging upon this interview of the two queens. This was a very pretty problem for a playwright, and the skill with which it is solved by Schiller is the most admirable feature of the whole piece. The scene is not great dramatic poetry, for there is too little of subtlety in it,—we are simply placed between light and darkness, as one critic says,—but it is the perfection of telling workmanship for the stage.
The preparation for the scene begins back in the first act, where Mary declares to Mortimer that Leicester is the only living man who can effect her release. When she produces her picture and sends it to him for a token of her love, we begin to share her premonition that something may indeed be hoped for if her cause is taken up by the powerful favorite of Elizabeth. The lyric passages at the beginning of the third act fix attention altogether upon Mary's longing for mere physical freedom. There is no room for the suspicion that she wishes to use her liberty for any political purpose whatever. She appears as a noble sufferer whose whole being is absorbed in the delirious joy of breathing once more the free air of heaven. She surmises rightly that her unwonted liberty to walk in the park is due to Leicester, and she imagines that greater favors are in store for her:
They mean to enlarge the confines of my prison,By little favors to lead up to greater,Until at last I see the face of himWhose hand shall set me free forevermore.
And the hope seems reasonable. May not the queen of England—so one is inclined to speculate—be moved to pity? May she not be persuaded that policy is on the side of mercy? May she not at least postpone the execution of the death-sentence and gradually increase her prisoner's liberty?
When Elizabeth appears it is quickly made evident that these hopes are vain. Mary humbles herself to no purpose. Her enemy, a consummate hypocrite herself, sees in her self-abasement nothing but hypocrisy. Mary's earnest pleading, her offer to renounce all for the boon of freedom, are met with bitter taunts and accusations which culminate in the galling insult:
To be the general beauty, it would seem,One needs but to be everybody's beauty.
Then Mary loses her self-control and throws discretion to the winds. In a wild outburst of passionate hate she accuses Elizabeth of secret incontinence and calls her bastard and usurper. Thus she triumphs in the war of words, for her enemy retreats in speechless amazement; but there is no more room for hope in the clemency of Elizabeth. The prisoner's fate is sealed even without the murderous attempt of the fanatic Sauvage.
It must be repeated that the whole famous scene is better contrived for the groundlings in a theater than for the lover of great dramatic poetry. Mary's crescendo of feeling, from humble supplication to reckless defiance, gives an excellent opportunity for a tragic actress, but the whole thing is rather crass. The effect is produced by confronting Mary with a vain and spiteful termagant bearing the name of the great English queen. One could wish, not only in the interest of historical truth, the obligation of which Schiller denied, but also in the interest of poetic beauty, the obligation of which he regarded as paramount, that Elizabeth had been painted here in less repulsive colors. She might have been allowed to show a trace of human, or even of womanly, feeling. She might have been represented as touched for the moment by Mary's entreaty, and as holding out to her some small hope of life and liberty, under conditions which it would have been reasonable to discuss. If she had been so portrayed and then later brought back to a sterner mood by the attempt upon her own life and the discovery of Mortimer's conspiracy, the final result would have been just the same; the meeting of the two queens would have served even better the dramatic purpose which it was meant to serve, and we should have had from it a noble poetic effect instead of a crass theatrical effect. The pathos of Mary's position would have been increased, because it would have been made evident that, whatever her own inner thoughts and purposes might be, she was a standing menace to the English monarchy. Thus her death would have appeared in the play what it was in fact,—a measure of high political expediency with which petty female spite had nothing to do.
It is natural to raise the query whether these considerations, which are so obvious and are of the very kind that would have appealed to Schiller, were overlooked by him or were set aside for reasons of his own. Virtually he takes the Catholic side of the controversy. The ugly traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth are brought into the foreground and made the most of, while her great qualities are hardly more than adumbrated in the picture. The result is a canonization and a caricature; and one cannot help wondering how Schiller was brought thereto, when it would seem that his Protestant sympathies, as we have known him hitherto, should have led him in the contrary direction.
The key to the riddle is, no doubt, that he had begun to feel the influence of the Romantic movement, which was well under way when 'Mary Stuart' was written. The influence is difficult to prove, because Schiller always maintained ostensibly a very cool and critical attitude toward the efforts of the new school. His relations with its leaders were not intimate, and one of them at least, the younger Schlegel, was his particular aversion. Nevertheless he read their works; and while he always professed to be but little edified, there is abundant evidence that his ideas of literary art were considerably affected by the new propaganda. So, too, Goethe was never a partisan of the Romanticists, and he often spoke derisively of them; yet when he published the Second Part of 'Faust', the world saw that he had learned from them all there was to be learned. An author is not always most influenced by that which he consciously approves.
As for Schiller there was much in common between him and the Romanticists. He had worked out an aesthetic religion which completely satisfied him. In religious dogma of any kind he had ceased to take a practical interest. His ethical ideal was an ideal of harmony, of equipoise. His critical studies had cured him of his one-sided Hellenism, and his historical studies had taught him that the Middle Ages were not without their own peculiar greatness. It was thus natural enough that the Catholicizing drift of the Romantic school should appeal to his aesthetic sympathies. When a man of poetic temper drifts away from his theological moorings and becomes indifferent to positive dogma, he is apt to value the historical religions according to their aesthetic qualities. That is best which has the most warmth and color and makes the strongest appeal to the imagination.
It is along this line of reflection that we must seek the explanation of Schiller's Catholicizing tendency in 'Mary Stuart'. Her creed, if reduced to dogma, would have offended his intellect, just as her political claims would have been rejected by his historical judgment. But he saw in her character that which could be poetically transmuted into a type of the noble sufferer, burdened with remorse, fated to contend with injustice, and betrayed by her own rebellious nature; but triumphing at last in the peaceful assurance that her death is the divinely appointed expiation of her sins. The drama was to represent a process of inward purification,—the attainment, after fierce storms and buffetings, of a calm haven for the soul. Queen Mary was to appear at last as the embodiment of all the qualities that seem most noble and enviable in one who "feels the winnowing wings of death". And of this idea what better dramatic setting can be imagined than the ceremony of confession and absolution in accordance with the forms of the Catholic Church? The solemn searching of the heart gives to Mary's character a saintly dignity, as of one already beatified, and invests the whole scene with an incomparable pathos.[122] Swinburne makes his Mary declare, in angry scorn of woman's weakness, that
Even in death,As in the extremest evil of all our lives,We can but curse or pray, but prate and weep,And all our wrath is wind that works no wreck,And all our fire as[*] water.
[* Transcriber's note: So in original.]
Schiller's Mary meets her fate in a nobler mood. She sees in death the 'solemn friend' who comes to lift the ancient burden from her soul. Not only does she forgive and bless her enemies, but she sees in the very injustice of her death a part of the divine benediction:
God deems me fit, through this unmerited death,To expiate my heavy guilt of yore.
Such a sentiment, it must be admitted, is rather too sublimated to harmonize perfectly with the political complications that precede. We seem to have come suddenly into another world; and so we have in truth,—the world of medieval mysticism. That which begins as a drama of conflicting political passions, ends as a drama of mystical edification. The rationalist does not see how the divine order can be vindicated by the triumph of gross injustice; nevertheless he recognizes that the ways of God are inscrutable, and he knows that such ideas, of the winning of peace through blood-atonement, were once intensely real to the Christian world. Schiller requires the rationalist to return in his imagination to this time and place himself in the emotionalmilieuof the medieval church.
Returning now, in the light of these considerations, to the famous quarrel-scene in the third act, we see that a more favorable portrait of Elizabeth, while it would have had the advantage pointed out, would have weakened the final effect which Schiller wished to produce. It was necessary that Mary appear as the victim of injustice in order that her saintly triumph might shine with the greater luster. Moreover, Mary's outburst of passion, for which there would have been no room if her enemy had been given a nobler character, was needed in order to make her earlier sins credible. Without that scene we should have difficulty in believing that so excellent a lady could ever have committed those crimes of hot blood which weigh upon her soul. All this means that a noble-minded Elizabeth would not have fallen in with Schiller's artistic idea, but it hardly justifies him in making her the monster that she appears. In making her heartless he might at least have left her head in the possession of ordinary common sense. Her off-hand employment of the stranger, Mortimer, as an assassin; her stagy signing of the death-warrant, after a speech indicating that she acts from pusillanimous motives of personal spite; her silly comedy with Davison about the execution of the death-sentence; her coquettish airs with the wretched Leicester,—these are repulsive touches which are difficult to justify on any aesthetic grounds, and the total effect of which approaches perilously near to caricature.
'Mary Stuart' may be described, then, as a tragedy of self-conquest in the presence of an undeserved death. The stage climax is the meeting of the two queens in the third act, but the psychological climax occurs in the fifth act, when Queen Mary gives up her hopes of freedom and of life and welcomes the 'solemn friend' who is to lift the burden from her soul. In working out this conception Schiller did not trouble himself greatly about the historical verisimilitude of his chief personages. One who looks for the real Mary, Elizabeth, Burleigh and Leicester, will not find them in his pages. The principal figures are drawn with less impartiality than in 'Wallenstein', the subjective presence of the author is more noticeable. And yet, looked at in a large way, the play is an excellent piece of historical fresco-painting. The whole spirit of the time with its warring passions, its intrigues of fanaticism, is vividly and powerfully brought before us. The author's partisanship is aesthetic only, not religious or political. The many counts in the long indictment of Queen Mary, the motives and arguments of the English government, even the higher traits of Queen Elizabeth, are all brought out in the course of the play. Nothing of importance is neglected, and the whole complicated situation is made admirably clear. The historical background, with its luminous vistas of European politics, really leaves very little to be desired.
Masterly, too, in the main, is the constructive skill with which all this history is brought to view in a dramatic action concentrated into the last three days of Queen Mary's life. The great difficulty which always besets the 'drama of the ripe situation',—to use a modern phrase for a thing as old as Euripides,—is the difficulty of explaining the past without forcing the dialogue into unnatural channels; in other words, of orienting the public without seeming to have that object in view. As regards this merit of good craftsmanship, 'Mary Stuart' is here and there vulnerable. For example: in the fourth scene of the first act, the nurse, Hannah Kennedy, recounts to her mistress at great length the latter's past sins and sufferings, describing her motives, her infatuation, her heart-burnings and much else that the queen must know far better than any one else in the world. Such passages, obviously intended for the instruction of the audience, were permitted by the traditions of the drama, but they are bad for the illusion. In 'Wallenstein' they are much less noticeable,—a fact which indicates that Schiller was now disposed to make his labor easier by availing himself of conventional privileges. In most respects, however, the technique of 'Mary Stuart' is excellent. The scenes are lively, varied and very rarely too long. Everything is well articulated. Dramatic interest is not sacrificed to any sort of private enthusiasm or special pleading.
One who reads the history of Mary Queen of Scots in any good historian, and endeavors to follow the maze of intrigues, uprisings, plots, assassinations and what not, is impressed by no other characteristic of the age more strongly than by its complete dissociation of religion from humane ethics. The religion of love to one's neighbor, though the neighbor be an enemy, had become a fierce fanaticism which scrupled at nothing and recognized no fealty higher than the supposed secular interest of the church. In his 'Mary Stuart in Scotland' Björnson makes the queen put to Bothwell the question: 'You are surely no gloomy Protestant, you are certainly a Catholic, are you not?' To which Bothwell replies: 'As for myself, I have never really figured up the difference, but I have noticed that there are hypocrites on both sides.' For the modern man this is an eminently natural point of view, and we might have expected, from all we know of Schiller, that he would introduce into his play some representative of this sentiment. Or if not that, we might have expected some representative of the religion of love. Instead of either we have a romantic youth who has forsworn the Protestant creed on purely aesthetic grounds.
Mortimer is on the whole the most interesting of the subordinate characters. He was obviously suggested by Babington, but the coarse fanatic of history was too repulsive for a proper champion of Schiller's idealized heroine. So the name was changed, and we get an imaginary youth who has been intoxicated by the glamour of the Catholic forms as he has seen them at Rome. The description of Mortimer's conversion,—his sudden resolve to abjure the dismal, art-hating religion of the incorporeal word, and to go over to the communion of the joyous,—is one of the telling declamatory passages of the play. With the sentiment expressed Schiller can have had, in the bottom of his heart, but little sympathy; but his artistic nature had begun to respond to the Romantic propaganda. For the rest, Mortimer is not a very convincing creation. One is a little surprised that a youth who purports to be so very soft-hearted, so very susceptible to the religion of the beautiful, should undertake so jauntily the rôle of murderer. As for his amorous passion, that is credible enough if, in accordance with Schiller's direction, we think of Queen Mary as twenty-five years old. But in that case one's imagination has difficulty with that perspective of years which have accumulated the ancient burden of guilt.
[Footnote 119: In a letter to Iffland, written June 22, 1800, Schiller directed that his Queen Elizabeth be represented as a woman thirty years old, Mary as twenty-five.]
[Footnote 120: The thought is expressed thus by Harnack, "Schiller", page 324: "Der eigentliche tragische Konflikt, der den Helden vor grosze Entscheidungen stellt und endlich in sein Verhängnis hinabreiszt,fehltin 'Maria Stuart'. Die gefangene Königin befindet sich im Konflikt mit ihrer unwürdigen äuszeren Lage, aber nicht mit sich selbst."]
[Footnote 121: Compare, however, Fielitz, "Studien zu SchillersDramen", page 49.]
[Footnote 122: Even Macaulay, who was certainly not the man to be captivated by anything in the scene save its poetry, thought the "Fotheringay scenes in the fifth act … equal to anything dramatic that had been produced in Europe since Shakspere."—Trevelyan, "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay", II, 182.]
The Maid of Orleans
Die Schönheit ist für ein glückliches Geschlecht; ein unglückliches musz man erhaben zu rühren suchen.—Letter of July 26, 1800.
It was well observed by Wilhelm von Humboldt that Schiller's plays are not repetitions of the same thing, such as talent is wont to produce when it has once met with a success, but the productions of a spirit that ever kept wrestling anew with the demands of art. With each fresh attempt he essayed a really new theme, and taken as a whole his works exhibit a remarkable variety of substance. Each one has its own individuality, its own atmosphere. And he himself wished that this should be so; it was a part of his study to avoid repeating himself. 'One must not become the slave of any general concept',—so he wrote to Goethe in July, 1800,—'but have the courage to invent a new form for each new matter and keep the type-idea flexible in one's mind.'
These words were penned with direct reference to 'The Maid of Orleans', which was begun very soon after the completion of 'Mary Stuart'. Whether Schiller then had in mind all those elements which subsequently led to the sub-title, 'a romantic tragedy', is not at all certain; it would be natural to surmise that he may have thought at first of a drama within the lines of authentic tradition. However, we know very little in detail about the genesis of this particular play. The letter just quoted tells of the usual initial difficulty in concentrating the action, the interesting occurrences being so widely separated in time and place. Later letters hardly do more than occasionally to report progress; they do not discuss artistic questions, nor give any information as to books read. Three acts were finished by mid-winter, and the whole on the 15th of April, 1801. Schiller had now learned his routine; he felt confidence in himself and went ahead in his own way, with but little discussion of his plans. What he finally gave to the world is a tragedy in which he proceeds still further along the path of romantic idealization,—proceeds indeed so far that one can no longer follow him without some rather serious misgivings.
The French peasant girl becomes an ambassadress of heaven, gifted with second sight and the power of working miracles. She not only leads the French troops in battle, but she herself fights with a magic sword and kills English soldiers with the ruthlessness of a veteran in slaughter. Through it all, however, she is supposed to remain a tender-hearted and lovable maiden, such as the highest officers of France may wish to marry. By the command of the Holy Virgin, from whom her mission and power derive, she is bound to refrain from all earthly love. A momentary tenderness for the English general, Lionel, which leads her to spare his life, presents itself to her conscience as an infraction of the divine command. She is overwhelmed with remorse and loses all her power. Arm and soul are paralyzed. Taxed by her superstitious father with witchcraft, she cannot find speech to defend herself and imagines that a thunder-clap is heaven's testimony against her. Then she wanders about as a helpless and disgraced fugitive and is captured by English soldiers. With fettered hands she is compelled to witness a new battle, in which her countrymen, deprived of her aid, are about to be worsted. But through adversity she has been purged of her sin. Her self-confidence returns, and with it her miraculous power. By the efficacy of prayer she breaks her chains and rushes into the fray. Her reappearance brings victory to the French arms, but she herself is mortally wounded and dies in glory on the battle-field.
It is evident that such a conception carries us back into the dreamland of pious romance. It presupposes a world in which things did not happen as they happen now; in which the incredible is assumed to be real and the course of events is shaped by miracle. To be sure, miracle is but sparingly used in the dramatic action itself, and the totality of the play is only a little more wonderful than the Maid's actual history as given by authentic records. Johanna's vision of the Virgin is merely described retrospectively and is parallel to the Voices of the historical Joan. So too her recognition of the King, whom she has never seen before; her reading of his mind; her wonderful influence over the French army, and much more of the kind, are part of a well-authenticated tradition with which the skeptical mind must make its peace as best it can. And the feat is not altogether easy. The modern rationalist will say, and is no doubt right in saying, that if we knew all the pertinent facts accurately from first to last, the Maid's story would fit perfectly into our scheme of scientific knowledge and would appear no more mysterious than other stories of obsession, genius and devotion. Still the fact remains that upon ordinary human nature, without regard to religious prepossessions, the record of the Maid's life, as brought out at her trial, makes an impression of the marvelous. This is quite enough for the purposes of a dramatic poet. But when Schiller introduces a magic sword; when he makes his heroine talk with a ghost upon the battle-field, and break her heavy fetters by the power of prayer; and when we not merely hear these things reported, but see them,—then we are clearly in the realm of pure miracle.
Schiller's ultra-romantic treatment of the Maid's story has often been sharply criticised, even by those who are in the main friendly to his genius; while those who are not friendly have always seen in it the complete flowering of his worst tendencies. Critics have debated at great length the question whether he was 'justified' in introducing the supernatural at all. They have fallen back upon the ghost in 'Hamlet' for a precedent and have tried to illuminate the subject with the light of Lessing's famous comparison of Shakspere's ghost with Voltaire's in 'Semiramis'. Others have been shocked by Schiller's bold departure from history at the close. On a first reading of 'The Maid of Orleans', Macaulay recorded in his journal an opinion that "the last act was absurd beyond description. Schiller might just as well have made Wallenstein dethrone the emperor and reign himself over Germany—or Mary become Queen of England and cut off Elizabeth's head—as make Joan fall in the moment of victory."[123]
Now opinions of this kind have a certain interest for the student of literature, but it is best not to take them too seriously. A dramatist is 'justified' if his intention is good and he succeeds in it. The proof of the pudding is not in the cook's recipe. If any dramatist in the wide world chooses, for reasons of his own, to experiment with an imaginary reversal of the verdict of history, there is no abstract reason why he should not do so. It is just as well, as Schiller said, to 'keep the type-idea flexible in one's mind',—especially when we know that his experiment was received with ecstasy at its first performance and has ever since held its place in the affection of German play-goers. They are not troubled by its irrationalities, but receive them with pious awe, as Schiller intended. For the reader, too, 'The Maid of Orleans' has a deep and perennial fascination. Theorize about it as we may, it is a great popular classic, which has exerted an enormous educative influence and proves how thoroughly its author knew the heart of the German people.
It is perfectly safe to conjecture, even without documentary evidence, that when Schiller began to think of Joan the Maid as the possible heroine of a tragedy, his first perplexity related to the question of her 'guilt'. This was for him an indispensable ingredient of the tragic, whatever later theorists may think of it.
Although, as we have seen, he contemned the bondage of general concepts, he never came to the point of imagining a tragedy without 'tragic guilt'. But the story of Joan offers no suggestion of guilt in any sense whatever,—she was the innocent victim of groveling superstition playing into the hands of insane political hate. For modern sentiment, Catholic and Protestant alike, and quite independently of the view one may take of her claims to divine illumination, her death at the stake was simply a horrible and revolting wrong. In comparison with those who put her to death she was an angel of light. To follow the lines of history here was for Schiller unthinkable, since the end would have been a mad fatality, leaving no room for any feeling of acquiescence in the wise ordering of the world. If the story of Joan was to yield a tragedy at all, it was necessary to have recourse to some bold invention which should bring her fate into harmony with the central tightness of things.[124]
Schiller solves the problem in the terms of religious mysticism: he endows his Johanna with a supernatural power dependent upon her renunciation of earthly love, and then makes her fall in love contrary to the divine command. In one of her lonely vigils under the 'holy oak' the Virgin appears to her and bids her go forth and destroy the enemies of her country and crown the king at Rheims. When Johanna asks how a gentle girl can hope to accomplish such a work, Mary replies,
A maiden chasteCan bring to pass all glorious things on earthIf only she renounces earthly love.
Thus far we are close enough to tradition; for the historical Joan, who habitually called herself the Maid, knew very well that love and marriage would be fatal to her mission. Moreover, the idea of a non-natural power attaching to the state of virginity is sufficiently familiar both to Christian and to Pagan story. From this conception it is no very far cry to the idea that the very thought of love, bringing with it a sense of guilt, might cause an impairment of the maiden's divinely bestowed strength. These are mystical ideas, but the mysticism is of a kind familiar to the imagination of medieval Europe and therefore quite permissible to a poet who had set out to romanticize. If, therefore, Schiller had made his heroine fall in love in human fashion, and had then connected this lapse from virginal ideality a little more clearly with the final catastrophe, there could be no reasonable objection to his fundamental idea, and we should have, probably, the best imaginative basis for a romantic tragedy on the story of Joan of Arc. One has no right to play the rationalist in such a matter and argue that falling in love is no sin and cannot be felt as a sin by the modern mind. It can be so felt by the modern imagination, and that is quite enough.
As the play stands, however, it must be allowed that the demand made upon the imagination is quite too severe. The love-incident is preposterous in itself and a mere episode at that, serving no purpose finally but that of a picturesque contrast. It is a sort of thing which one can put up with very well in a romantic opera, but not so well in a serious drama. To begin with, Schiller makes his heroine a supernatural being. His Johanna is not a peasant girl who imagines herself the bearer of a divine mission, and by the human qualities of purity, bravery, devotion and self-confidence, exerts aseeminglymagic influence upon the French army,—but she is actually endowed with superhuman powers. She carries a charmed sword which, against her will, guides itself miraculously in her hand to the work of slaughter. No enemy can withstand her. To all Englishmen she is incarnate Death. In the full frenzy of combat she meets Lionel—for the first time. They fight and she strikes his sword from his hand. Then, as he closes with her, she seizes his plume from behind, lifts his helmet and draws her sword to cut off his head. As his comely face is bared her heart fails her, her arm sinks and the whole mischief is done. No wonder that an early critic objected to a tragedy turning thus upon the weak fastening of a helmet!
It is difficult to justify such a scene upon any theory of poetic art. The romantic drama since Schiller's time has served up many a greater marvel than this; but it produces a truly poetic effect only by keeping within the limits of tradition. The poet who deals with Siegfried and Brunhilde, or with Lohengrin or Faust, may very properly require us to accept the miracles which pertain in each case to the saga. But such a being as Schiller's Johanna is found in no saga; she is a purely arbitrary creation. A very thoughtful German critic, Bellermann, attempts to defend our love-episode by showing how Schiller took good care in the preceding scenes to depict his heroine as susceptible to the tender emotions of her sex; in other words, to depict her as a maiden who might conceivably love and be loved. But earthly maidens do not suddenly fall in love with their mortal enemies upon the battle-field; and when a celestial amazon like Johanna does so, one can only imagine that she has been mysteriously forsaken by her Protectress in the skies. In that case, however, the fault lies with heaven. It is really quite futile to discuss the artistic reasonableness of this scene, since Johanna's supernatural character takes her outside the range of human psychology. If one likes it and is touched by it, very well; but a prudent poet might well have had some regard for the very large number of people who would find such a scene ridiculous rather than touching.
One could wish, in fine, that Schiller had omitted his disturbing supernaturalism altogether. If it was necessary that his heroine fall in love, one could wish that he had let her affections fasten humanly upon the good Raimond or some other honest Frenchman. And he might well have spared us the Black Knight,—that revenant ghost of Talbot, who comes to frighten Johanna but does not succeed, and whose function in the economy of the play remains in the end somewhat mysterious. Had he left out these things, the real greatness of the play would have suffered not a whit, and the artistic idea which kindled his imagination would have found a no less noble expression. That idea was to reproduce the spirit of the epoch which saw the birth of French patriotism. He wished to bring before his rationalizing contemporaries a picture of the Middle Ages as a time when, to quote the words of a recent American writer, "life was lived passionately and imaginatively under haunted heavens ".[125]
What thoughts were agitating him at the very time when 'The Maid of Orleans' was taking shape in his mind can be seen from an interesting letter which he wrote to a certain Professor Süvern, who had favored him with a critique of 'Wallenstein'. Schiller answered under date of July 26, 1800, and one paragraph of his reply runs as follows:
I share your unconditional admiration of the Sophoclean tragedy, but it was a phenomenon of its time, which cannot come again. It was the living product of a definite, individual present; to force it as a standard and a pattern upon an entirely different epoch would be to kill rather than to quicken art, which must always come into being and do its work as a living dynamic influence. Our tragedy, if we had such a thing, has to wrestle with the time's impotence, laziness and lack of character, and with a vulgar mental habit. It must therefore exhibit force and character. It must endeavor to stir and uplift the feelings, but not to resolve them into calm. Beauty is for a happy race; an unhappy race one must seek to move by sublimity.
These words, which contain implicitly the whole Romantic confession of faith, give the right point of view from which to judge 'The Maid of Orleans'. Schiller felt that the need of the hour was to escape from the banality of conventional ideas and feel the thrill of sympathy with great, overmastering emotions. To-day this seems a very simple and obvious matter, because we have learned to think of the imaginative appeal of poetry as the corner-stone of the temple. But a hundred years ago the outlook was different. Notwithstanding the revolt which Goethe and Schiller had themselves led against the self-complacent rationalism of the century, the old spirit was still potent even in Germany, where the reaction first gathered force. Among the intellectual classes religion had well-nigh ceased to be reckoned with as a mystic passion of the soul. Several decades of tolerance,—practically an excellent method for keeping the sectaries from one another's throats,—had produced a public sentiment which looked with mild contempt upon all religious fervors. When Schleiermacher published his famous 'Discourses on Religion', in the year 1799, he addressed them 'to the cultivated among its despisers',—which was only his phrase for what we should call the general public.
Nor was the case very different with respect to another mystic passion, which derives from the tribal instinct of the primitive savage and which the civilized man calls patriotism. The lesson of Frederick the Great had not been entirely forgotten, but it was lying inert,—waiting to be kindled into fiery zeal by the humiliations of Jena and Tilsit and Wagram. Schiller was no mystic, nor was he, in our narrow sense, a patriot; but he had a poet's feeling for the sublimity of great and passionate devotion. He was a man of the eighteenth century, and as thinker he understood full well its imperishable claims to honor; but as poet it was not for him to fall into that cynical, vulgarizing drift which had led the greatest Frenchman of his day to make Joan of Arc the butt of his lewd wit. Voltaire saw in her one of the pious frauds of that Infamous he was bent on crushing; for her national mission he had little feeling, because of his fixed idea that nothing good could have come from the ages of superstition.[126] Schiller saw in her, and was the first great poet to see what all the world sees now, the heroic deliverer of her country from a hated foreign invader. And so he threw down the gauntlet to his century and lifted theludibriumof the French wits to the pedestal of an inspired savior of France. It was a great deed of poetry; in the presence of which a right-minded critic, after duly airing his little complaints, as critics must, will be disposed to doff his hat and say Bravo! Well might Schiller declare in the stanzas entitled 'The Maid of Orleans':
The world brooks not nobility,—disdaining,Defaming, smirching, goes its vulgar gait;—But fear thou not, true hearts are still remaining,To love thee for the heart that made thee great.
In its inmost essence, then, 'The Maid of Orleans' is a drama of patriotism. It is Johanna's love of country that gives her a measure of human interest, in spite of the supernaturalism that invests her. Were she not thus the representative of a passion that is intensely real, and that has come to be regarded, for better or for worse, as preëminently noble, she would now possess but very languid interest for the sublunary mind. Her mystical attributes and her unthinkable love-affair would place her beyond the range of natural sympathy. As it is, one is made to forget, or at least to pass lightly over, everything else but her love for France. She wins favor by her patriotic devotion, and when the end comes one thinks of her under the familiar rubric of the hero dying for his country. The episode with Lionel and the humiliation of the Cathedral scene have all been forgotten, and one does not mentally connect these things with Johanna's death in any way whatsoever. Her death is sufficiently provided for from the beginning in her own fatalistic prevision:
Johanna goes and never shall return.
It must be admitted that a heroine who excites interest chiefly by virtue of her patriotic sentiments and the bravery of her conduct does not represent the highest type of poetic creation. The muse will always lend virtue and bravery to any common poetaster for the mere asking; but she does not so readily vouchsafe a convincing semblance of complex human nature. A distinctly human Johanna, with a definite girlish individuality and a character all her own,—such as Goethe might have given us had he turned his thoughts in that direction,—would have been a higher and a more difficult achievement than the schematic creature of Schiller's imagination. Such a Johanna, however, would hardly be thinkable on the stage: the final horror of her fate would be intolerable in the visible representation, while to leave it unrepresented would be to admit the reasonableness of Schiller's departure from history. Shall we then take refuge in the position that the Maid's story is not adapted to dramatic treatment at all? Such a position is at once rendered absurd by the perennial popularity and effectiveness of Schiller's play. Until some great realistic poet shall prove the contrary by deeds, the mere critic is certainly justified in holding that, whatever may be thought of his love-episode, the ghost and the miraculous escape from bondage, the general requirements of the theme are best met by Schiller's romantic treatment.
Turning from the heroine to the other characters, one finds but little that invites discussion. Johanna is the central sun of the system, and in the romantic light that goes out from her the others seem rather pale and uninteresting. Father Thibaut impresses one in the Prologue as a little too refined, intelligent and far-sighted for the rôle of besotted superstition and misunderstanding which he subsequently plays in the cathedral scene. La Hire and the Duke of Burgundy and the Bastard of Orleans, who preserves only a suggestion of the rugged soldier that once bore his name, are there only to illustrate the divine magic of the Maid. Two of them wish to marry her, and when we add the Englishman, Lionel, and the French peasant, Raimond, we have a quartet of lovers. Verily the little god Cupido would seem to be something too prominent and ubiquitous for a military drama. History required that the Dauphin should be a weakling, and such he is in the play; but he too is romanticized through his devotion, to the tender and soulful Agnes. More strongly drawn, if not exactly more lifelike, than any of these, are the sensual old fury, Isabeau, and the English general, Talbot, whose fierce valedictory to this folly-ridden earth is deservedly famous:
Soon it is over, and to earth go back—To earth and the eternal sun—the atomsErstwhile combined in me for pain and joy.And of the mighty Talbot, whose renownBut now filled all the world, nothing remainsExcept a handful of light dust. So endsThe life of man—and all we bear away,As booty from the battle of existence,Is comprehension of its nothingnessAnd sovereign contempt of all the endsThat seemed exalted and desirable.
In short, the characters of 'The Maid of Orleans' leave much to be desired on the score of verisimilitude. One has the feeling all along, as in the case of Goethe's 'Helena', of being in an artificial world made to order by an imaginative fiat. To enjoy the play it is necessary to put aside one's rationalism and surrender oneself to the illusion one knows that the author wishes to produce. 'The Maid of Orleans' does not compel the surrender like 'Wallenstein'; one must meet the poet half-way. That done, however, everything is in order, for the technique of the play is faultless. It is not easy to point to a better piece of dramatic exposition than the scenes which precede the appearance of Johanna in the French army. The Prologue is perhaps a trifle too long, but serves admirably to give the tragic keynote, by picturing the shepherd-girl of Dom Remi leading a life apart from that of her family, given to strange brooding, and at last receiving the sign from Heaven, which she prophetically feels to be the call of death. And then the desperate plight of France; the helpless weakness of the king; the disgust and discouragement of the generals; and after this the news of a long unwonted victory, followed quickly by the appearance of Johanna and the magic change of the military situation,—how vividly it is all brought before one! And what a fine scene is that at the end of the second act, in which Burgundy is won over! One who is not touched by this portion of the play; who does not return to it with ever-renewed pleasure after each sojourn in the choking air of naturalism, is—to state the case as gently as possible—unfortunately endowed.
[Footnote 123: Trevelyan, "The Life and Letters of LordMacaulay", II, 249.]
[Footnote 124: According to Böttiger, whose statements are not always trustworthy in matters of detail, Schiller said to him in November, 1801, that he had at one time planned three different plays on the subject of the Maid of Orleans, and that he would have executed all three if he had had time. One of these was to have been a historical tragedy, with Johanna dying at the stake in Rouen.—This can hardly mean anything more than that Schiller was in doubt for a while as to the best treatment of his theme. The idea of his actually making three different plays on the same subject is quite too preposterous. His promise, in a letter of March 1, 1802, thatifhe should write a second 'Maid of Orleans', Göschen should publish it, is only an author's playful 'jollying' of a friendly publisher. The passage from Böttiger is quoted at length by Boxberger in his Introduction to 'The Maid of Orleans' (Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Vol. CXXII, second part, page 211).]
[Footnote 125: Lewis E. Gates, "Studies and Appreciations."]
[Footnote 126: Compare Morley's "Voltaire", Chapter III.]
The Bride of Messina
Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht,Der Übel grösztes aber ist die Schuld.'The Bride of Messina'.
After the completion of 'The Maid of Orleans', in the spring of 1801, Schiller found himself once more the unhappy victim of leisure. A new task was needed to make life tolerable, but what should it be? 'At my time of life', he remarked in a letter to Körner, 'the choice of a subject is far more difficult; the levity of mind which enables one to decide so quickly in one's youth is no longer there, and the love, without which there can be no poetic creation, is harder to arouse.' Ere long, having a mind to try his hand upon a tragedy in 'the strictest Greek form', he was musing upon that which in time came to be known as 'The Bride of Messina'.
For the present, however, and for some time to come, he did not advance beyond very general planning. In the summer he spent several weeks with Körner in Dresden, during which literary labor was suspended. After his return to Weimar, in September, he found the conditions without and within unfavorable to a serious creative effort, so he undertook a German version of Gozzi's 'Turandot'. This occupied him until January, 1802. Then it was a question whether his next theme should be 'The Knights of Malta', or 'Warbeck', or 'William Tell', the last having begun to interest him because of a persistent rumor that he was working upon a play of that name. But none of the four projects carried the day immediately, and the winter and spring passed without bringing a decision. He began to be worried over the 'spirit of distraction' that had come upon him. In August, however, the long vacillation came to an end, and 'The Bride of Messina' began to take shape on paper. He found it more instructive than any of his previous works. It was also, he remarked in a letter, a more grateful task to amplify a small matter than to condense a large one. Once begun, the composition proceeded very steadily,—but little disturbed by the arrival, one day in November, of a patent of nobility from the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire,—until the end was reached, in February, 1803.
The play may be described as an attempt to treat a medieval romantic theme in such a manner as to convey a suggestion of Greek tragedy. Although written with enthusiasm it is not the bearer of any heartfelt message and must be regarded as a study of theory rather than of life. The highly artificial plot does not reflect any past or present verities of human existence upon the planet earth. Nor can we call the play an imitation of the Greeks, its general atmosphere being anything but Greek. The dialogue is not written in classical trimeters, but in the modern pentameter; while the speaking chorus, divided into two warring factions and going about here and there as the scene changes, has little resemblance to anything found in the Greek drama. On the other hand, thereisa chorus, and there are dreams which take the place of oracles. There is also a further suggestion of the antique in the pervading fatalism of the piece.
Of all Schiller's works 'The Bride of Messina' has been the most variously judged by the critics. Some have seen in it the very perfection of art, others the climax of artificiality. Schiller himself reported, after seeing it performed at Weimar, in 1803, that he had 'received for the first time the impression of true tragedy'. There is also an authentic record to the effect that Goethe was inexpressibly delighted with it and declared that 'by this production the boards had been consecrated to higher things'. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote that nothing could surpass the majesty of the play, and Körner assigned it a high rank among Schiller's productions. On the other hand it was spoken of by the satellites of the disgruntled Herder as a 'singularfata morgana', and a 'shocking monstrosity'; while F.H. Jacobi characterized it as a 'disgusting spook made by mixing heaven and hell'. And these discordant voices, in all their vehemence of expression, have been echoed by later critics; so that in the case of this particular drama, as Bellermann observes, it is hardly possible to speak of a settled average opinion. On one point, nevertheless, there is very general agreement: namely, that the diction of the choruses is magnificent in its kind. Nothing finer in German poetry anywhere.
From the outset critical discussion of 'The Bride of Messina' has turned mainly upon its antique elements, that is, upon its chorus and its treatment of the fate-idea. There has been endless comparison of Sophocles' 'King Oedipus' and endless logomachy about free-will and predestination in their relation to guilt. And such discussion is pertinent, because we have Schiller's own word that he wished to vie with Sophocles. An oft-quoted passage from a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt runs as follows:
My first attempt at a tragedy in the strict form will give you pleasure. From it you will be able to judge whether I could have carried off a prize as a contemporary of Sophocles. I do not forget that you have called me the most modern of modern poets, and have thus thought of me in the sharpest contrast to everything that is styled antique. I should thus have reason to be doubly pleased if I could wrest from you the admission that I have been able to make even this strange spirit my own.
At first blush this looks like an abandonment of the position stated so clearly and emphatically in the letter to Süvern (page 380). In reality, however, it is not so. Schiller was not concerned to imitate Sophocles, nor to revive an ancient form with, pedantic rigor. He was as far as possible from a one-sided worship of the Greeks. His reference to his 'strict form' hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot, fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian audience by a play of Sophocles,—more especially by the 'King Oedipus'.
For the groundwork of his tragedy he resorted to the well-worn fiction of the hostile brothers, giving it this form: Two princes grow up in mutual hatred, but are finally reconciled through the influence of their mother. Both fall in love, each without the other's knowledge, with a young woman of whose family they know nothing, and who is in reality their sister. One day the younger prince finds the object of his passion in the arms of his brother, who has just learned the secret of the girl's birth. Instantly the old hate blazes up anew, and in a paroxysm of blind rage Don Cesar kills his brother. Then, when he discovers the whole truth, he expiates his crime by a voluntary death.—In this scheme, it will be observed, the salient point is the fratricide committed in a sudden frenzy of passion: everything else leads up to this or grows out of it. From a modern point of view the crime is adequately accounted for by the character of Don Cesar; but if the story was to be given a Sophoclean coloring it was necessary that the horrors appear as the necessary evolution of ineluctable fate.
In employing the fate-idea for dramatic purposes the Greek poet had, in the first place, the great advantage of a definite mythological tradition which was known to everybody. In the second place, he wrote for people who still believed in oracles and received them seriously as credible manifestations of divine foreknowledge. Again, he could count on a living belief in the hereditary character of guilt: the belief that a good man, leading his life without evil intent, might be led to commit horrible and revolting acts because of some ancient taint in his blood; or because the gods, in their inscrutable government of the world, had decreed that he should thus sin and suffer. Just how far the Greek conception of moral responsibility differed in a general way from the modern, is a trite question which need not be gone into here. Suffice it to say that the difference has often been too broadly and too sharply stated. Not all Greek tragedies were tragedies of fate,—indeed it was a saying of Schiller that the 'King Oedipus' constitutes a genus by itself—nor is there any definite unitary conception which can be described as 'modern' for the purpose of a contrast.
After all, that which affects us in tragedy is very much the same as that which affected the Greeks, namely, the sense of life's overruling mystery. And whether we refer the happenings of life to an all-wise Providence, or to a scientific order which is so because it is so, they remain alike incommensurable with our ethical feeling. The bullet of a crazed fanatic, or a lethal germ in a glass of water, may end the noblest career in horrible suffering. In the drama, it is true, we prefer that no use be made of such mad calamities and that what befalls a man shall at least seem to grow out of his character. But then a man's character is the effect of a hundred subtle causes which began their operation in part before he was born; so that there is an element of essential truth in the saying that character is fate. We have become aware that there is a sense in which it is exactly true that the sins of the father are visited upon the children.
In short, modern thought has not tended to clear up but rather to deepen the mystery of life in its relation to antecedent conditions; of fate in its relation to desert. Our common sense, as embodied in law, treats a man as responsible for the good or evil that he personally intends. This is no doubt an excellent practical rule, without which society could hardly exist at all; but looked at philosophically it does not really touch the heart of the great mystery which is the theme of 'King Oedipus' and of 'The Bride of Messina'. The young Oedipus, while living at Corinth with his foster-father, Polybus, whom he supposes to be his real father, is told by the oracle that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. What should he do? Commit suicide in order to stultify the oracle, or resolve to kill no man and to marry no woman? The story imputes to him no blame for doing neither of these things. He acts as a man would act who sees himself confronted by an evitable danger. He leaves Corinth, but the very step that he takes to avoid his fate brings it surely to pass. He meets a stranger in the road. A quarrel arises over the question of passing,—a quarrel as to the merit of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled itself, as the spectator knew from the beginning that it would. The interest of the tragedy turns largely upon the overwhelming remorse of Oedipus and Jocasta when they discover the truth.
To match these conditions Schiller requires us to imagine a medieval prince of Messina reigning at some indefinite time in the Middle Ages. While his two sons are yet children he has a dream in which he sees two laurel-trees growing out of his marriage-bed, and between them a lily which changes to flame and consumes his house. An Arabian astrologer, for whom he has a heathenish partiality, interprets the dream as meaning that a daughter yet to be born will cause the destruction of his dynasty. So when a daughter is born he orders her put to death. But the mother has also hadherdream,—of a lion and an eagle bringing their bloody prey in sweet concord to a little child playing on the grass. A pious Christian monk explains this dream as meaning that a daughter will unite the quarrelsome sons in passionate love. So the queen saves the life of her new-born child and has her secretly brought up in a convent not far from Messina. As long as the father lives the hostile brothers are restrained from fighting, but when he dies their feud breaks out in open war. Each surrounds himself with retainers, Messina is torn by factional strife, and there is danger from external enemies. Citizens implore the mother to effect a reconciliation, failing which they threaten a revolution. At last she succeeds in arranging a peaceful meeting in her presence.
Such is Schiller's presupposition,—a singular blend of Christianity and paganism, such as at once gives difficulty to the imagination. A prince reigning under a Christian order of things, in a city of churches and convents, yet willing to murder his child on account of a dream interpreted to him by an Arab soothsayer, is not a very plausible invention. And the same may be said of much that follows. In half-a-dozen places the tragedy would come to an untimely end did not one or another of the characters conveniently refrain from doing or saying what a human being would inevitably do or say under the circumstances. Beatrice grows up in the convent without taking vows and is kept in ignorance of her lineage. Though her mother longs for her, she never sees her, and communicates with her only through the old servant, Diego. Such conduct is perhaps intelligible during the life of the king, but with him out of the way one would expect the mother to take her daughter home without a moment's delay. Instead of that she waits two months, merely sending word to Beatrice to prepare for some unnamed change of fortune. She also keeps the secret from her sons during these two months, without any sufficient reason. When questioned on the subject by Don Cesar in the play, she makes the bitter feud of the brothers her excuse:
How could I place your sister here atwixtYour bare and reeking swords? In your fierce rageYou would not hearken to a mother's voice;And could I have brought her, the pledge of peace,The anchor of my every dearest hope,To be perchance the victim of your strife?
But this is strange logic. One does not see at all how the sister's life would have been imperiled; and if she was to be the pledge of peace,—as the mother's dream seemed to foretell,—then there was the best of reasons for bringing her home at the earliest possible moment.
And then how singularly Don Manuel behaves! He is the elder son, and as such must be heir to the throne; but of that we hear nothing in the play. He falls in love with Beatrice, sees her often during a period of months, and secures from her a promise of marriage; but he never tells her who he is, nor does he ask her a question about her own lineage. When she tells him of an old man who comes to her occasionally as messenger from her unknown family, and who has at last bidden her prepare for a change of abode, he makes no attempt to see the stranger and find out whither his bride is to be taken. For such conducthecan have no possible reason, but Schiller has one; for were Don Manuel once to set eyes on the old family servant, Diego, a clearing-up would of course be inevitable. Instead of doing the one natural thing, Don Manuel abducts his sweetheart during the night, with her consent, and takes her to a garden in Messina. There he leaves her alone to await his coming,—a singular thing for a prince to do with his bride, but necessary to the tragedy.
More dubious still is the remarkable silence of Beatrice when she is exposed to the stormy wooing of Don Cesar in the garden. The fiction is that he has caught a glimpse of her two months before, on the occasion of his father's funeral, and has since been constantly searching for her. Having now found her, through one of his spies, he makes love to her jubilantly through sixty lines of text, but she answers never a syllable and lets him go away in supposed triumph. A bare word from her, such as a woman could not help saying under the circumstances, would end the complication, since it would send Don Cesar away baffled; and then there would be no occasion for his returning to the garden a little later. Maidenly fright and consternation cannot account rationally for such behavior; one sees that she holds her tongue because to set it in motion would be dramaturgically disastrous.
But the climax of unnaturalness is reached in the scene between the queen and her two sons, when old Diego reports that Beatrice has been abducted from the convent—presumbly by Moorish corsairs. The distracted mother urges her sons to go at once to the rescue of their sister. But here a difficulty presents itself. If the brothers are to have the faintest chance of finding their sister, it is clearly of the first importance that they know something about her, and particularly that they know where she has been kept in hiding. Now this knowledge can be safely imparted to Don Cesar but not to Don Manuel. So Don Cesar is made to rush away hotly, at all adventure, without the slightest clew of any kind,—the reason being that it would not do for him to hear that which Diego is about to tell. The younger brother thus conveniently out of the way, Don Manuel, who has begun to suspect the truth, implores his mother to tell him where the lost Beatrice has been concealed. Evidently the only natural part for the mother is to answer the question. But that would not do; so she interrupts him and urges him away with such senseless exclamations as 'Fly to action!' 'Follow your brother's example!' 'Behold my tears!' And when at last he succeeds in bringing out the fateful inquiry, she only answers:
The bowels of earth were not a safer refuge!
Then Don Manuel ceases to press his question and stands quietly by while Diego tells his remorseful story of Beatrice's visit to the church on the day of her father's funeral. Strangely enough this recital suggests to Don Manuel the hopeful suspicion that his sister and his sweetheart may, after all, not be the same person; so he rushes away to question Beatrice, when he must know that his mother is the one person in the world who can best resolve his doubts. Then, when he is gone, Don Cesar comes back, and the mother very calmly proceeds to give him the all-important information which she has just withheld from Don Manuel.
Such is the device, of convenient silence at critical points where speech would be natural but ruinous, by which Schiller leads up to his climax. There is no other play of his, early or late, the entanglement of which is so palpably artificial; so like a child's house of cards, built up with bated breath lest a breath should topple it over. According to Böttiger, Schiller once took note of what some critic had remarked upon this lavish use of silence in 'The Bride of Messina' and expressed surprise that any one could so misconceive him. He went on to say, if we can trust Böttiger, that it is 'precisely in this closing of the mouth at critical moments, when a saving word might rend the iron net of fate, that the unevadable and demonic power of evil-brooding destiny manifests itself most clearly and sends a gruesome shudder of awe through every spectator.' This is certainly a good defense if we assume that the great object of dramatic poetry is to exhibit the working-out of some abstract scheme of mysterious fate. Under that hypothesis one has no right to complain if the characters are treated like puppets,—pulled hither and thither in unnatural directions and made to speak when they should be silent, and to be silent when they should speak. If one finds the scheme impressive, one will think of that, get his thrill of awe and be thankful. But it is somewhat different if one holds that the verities of human nature are more interesting than any scheme, and that the great object of the serious drama should be to exhibit human beings in the stress of life. One who takes that view will wish, while recognizing the great qualities of 'The Bride of Messina', that its author had not gone quite so far in his contempt of realism.
For, after all, the highest law of the drama is the law of psychological truth, which requires that the characters be humanly conceivable and act as human beings would act under the circumstances imagined. This law is not kept in 'The Bride of Messina', with the result that the first three acts fall short of the effect that they are intended to produce. It is different with the fourth act. There everything is in order, and the simple and noble impressiveness of the tragedy leaves nothing to be desired. And it is an interesting fact that this impressiveness depends only in a slight degree upon the fulfillment of the old dreams and prophecies. To be sure they are fulfilled; but we are not required to put faith in the inspiration either of the Arab soothsayer or of the Christian monk. Their vaticinations might be mere fallible guess-work; Don Cesar might live and give them the lie, so far as any external constraint is concerned. But he himselffeelsthat the heavy hand of fate is upon him and that continued life would be intolerable. The whole pathos of the tragedy is transferred to the inner being of the surviving brother, and one feels that his self-destruction proceeds from the law of his own nature, and not from any fatalistic necessity that is laid upon him.
The truth would seem to be that the fate-idea, while of course it must be taken into consideration in any careful estimate of 'The Bride of Messina', has been made a little too prominent by many of the critics. What the spectator sees, says one writer who is in the main an admirable expounder of Schiller, is "gigantic Fate striding over the stage. He sees a wild, tyrannical race, burdened with ancestral guilt, turning against its own flesh and blood…. He is made to feel that the self-destruction of this race is nothing accidental, that it is a divine visitation, a judgment of eternal justice pronounced against usurpation and lawlessness, that it means the birth of a new spiritual order out of doom and death."[127] But is this what is actually seen? Is it not rather true that Schiller makes but little out of the matter of ancestral guilt? We hear, it is true, that the old prince was of an alien stock that had won the sovereignty of Messina with the sword and held it by force. But this is no very appalling crime as the world goes, and especially as the world went in the Middle Ages. One hardly thinks of William of Normandy, for example, as a revolting criminal deserving of the divine wrath. Then we hear, too, that the old prince had appropriated to himself a wife who was 'his father's choice'. But the whole matter is disposed of in two or three choral lines which leave not even a clear, much less a strong impression. There are no data for an ethical judgment. We are not told wherein the superior right of the father consisted. For aught we know the son may have had the better claim, and the father's curse may have been only the impotent scolding of a disappointed dotard. It is difficult to see anything here which can rationally warrant eternal justice in extirpating the race. And when we pass from the presuppositions to the play itself, we see that none of the characters except Don Cesar does anything seriously blameworthy.