Read Ebook: The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Thomas Calvin

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The house occupied by Captain Schiller at Ludwigsburg was situated close by the theater, to which the duke's officers had free admission. As a reward of industry little Fritz was allowed an occasional evening in front of the 'boards that signify the world'. The performances, to be sure, were French and Italian operas, wherein the ballet-master, the machinist and the decorator vied with one another for the production of amazing spectacular effects. People went to stare and gasp--the language was of no importance. It was not exactly dramatic art, but from the boy's point of view it was no doubt magnificent. At any rate it made him at home in the dream-world of the imagination, filled his mind with grandiose pictures and gave him his first rudimentary notions of stage effect. We are not surprised to learn, therefore, that in his home amusements playing theater now took the place of playing church. Sister Christophine was a faithful helper. A stage could be made of big books, and actors out of paper. When the puppet-show was outgrown, the young dramatist took to framing plays for living performers of his own age,--with a row of chairs for an audience, and himself as manager and protagonist.

Christophine relates that her brother's fondness for this sort of diversion lasted until he was thirteen years old. In the mean time, however, his chosen career was kept steadily in view. He was sent to the Latin school, from which, if his marks should be good, he might hope to advance in about five years to one of the so-called convent schools of W?rttemberg. After this his theological education would proceed for about nine years more at the expense of the state. The Ludwigsburg school was a place in which the language of Cicero and the religion of Luther were thumped into the memory of boys by means of sticks applied to the skin; Fritz Schiller was a capable scholar, though none of his teachers ever called him, as in the case of the boy Lessing at Meissen, a horse that needed double fodder. The ordinary ration sufficed him, but he memorized his catechism and his hymns diligently, fussed faithfully over his Latin longs and shorts, and took his occasional thrashings with becoming fortitude. On one occasion we hear that he was flogged by mistake and disdained to report the incident at home. Religious instruction consisted of mechanical repetition insisted on with brutal severity,--a mode of presenting divine things that must have contrasted painfully, for the sensitive boy, with his mother's simple religion of the heart. When it is added that he was often nagged and punished by a too exacting father, we get a not very sunny picture of our poet's boyhood. It is told, and it may well be true, that he was subject to fits of moodiness, in which he would complain of his lot and brood gloomily over his prospects. Nevertheless a schoolmate has left it on record that Schiller as a lad was normally high-spirited, a leader in sports as well as in study, and very steadfast in his friendships.

According, to Schiller's own testimony his earliest attempt at German verse was made on the occasion of his confirmation, in April, 1772. On the day before the solemn ceremony he was playing about with his comrades in what seemed to his mother an all too worldly frame of mind. She rebuked him for his unseasonable levity, whereat the youngster went into himself, as the Germans say, and poured out his supposed feelings in a string of verses so tender and soulful as to draw from his amazed father the exclamation: 'Fritz, are you going crazy?'

After such a beginning we are not surprised to learn that German poetry made its first strong appeal to him through the pious muse of Klopstock. His earliest more ambitious note is heard in a 'Hymn to the Sun', written in his fourteenth year. It is the note of supernal religious pathos. In rimeless lines of unequal length he celebrates the glory of God in the firmament, soars into celestial space and winds up with a vision of the last great cataclysm. All this is sufficiently Klopstockian, as is also the boyish dream of an epic about Moses, and of a tragedy to be called 'The Christians'.

But the time came when our young psalmodist of Zion was to be pulled out of his predetermined course and made to sing another song. Were the overruling powers malign or benevolent? Who shall say, remembering the Greek proverb that a man is not educated save by flaying? Let us not pause to speculate; but proceed as quickly as may be across the interval that separates these innocent religious effusions from the opening of a great literary career with the cannon-shot of 'The Robbers'.

About the year 1770 Duke Karl began to undergo a change of heart. Wearying at last of life's vanities and frivolities, the middle-aged sinner took up virtue and philanthropy, as if to show mankind that he too could be a benevolent father to his people. The new departure was due in part to the political success of the Estates in curbing his extravagance, but rather more, no doubt, to the personal influence of his mistress, Franziska von Hohenheim. This lady, whose maiden name was Bernerdin, had been given in marriage as a girl of sixteen to a worthless Baron von Leutrum, who misused her. Escaping from him with thoughts of divorce in her mind, she went to visit friends in Ludwigsburg. Here the inflammable duke fell in love with her, and, after a not very tedious resistance, carried her away to his castle. This was in 1772. Her divorce followed soon after, and she remained at court as the duke's favorite mistress. He presently procured for her an imperial title, that of Countess Hohenheim, and after the death of his duchess, in 1780, he married her. She was not beautiful or talented, but she possessed amiable qualities that made and kept her the object of Karl's honest affection. She knew how to humor his whims without crossing his stubborn will, and she chose to exert her influence in promoting humane enterprises and leading her liege lord in the paths of virtuous frugality. On the whole, the people of W?rttemberg, who had suffered much from mistresses of a different ilk, had reason to bless their ruler's fondness for his amiable 'Franzele'. She was not unworthy to sit for the portrait of Lady Milford.

An educational project, the founding of a school which later came to be known as the Karlschule, marks the beginning of the duke's career in his new r?le. He began very modestly in the year 1770 by gathering a few boys, the sons of officers, at his castle called Solitude, and undertaking to provide for their instruction in gardening and forestry. This Castle Solitude was itself an outcome of the same lordly mood that had led to the removal of the court to Ludwigsburg. It was situated on a wooded height some six miles west of Stuttgart. Here, by means of forced labor and at enormous expense,--and this was only one of many similar building enterprises,--he had cleared a site in the forest and erected a huge palace which, according to the inscription over the door, was to be 'devoted to tranquillity'. But how was a prince to enjoy tranquillity without the necessaries of life? In a short time a score of other buildings, including an opera-house and a barracks, had sprung up about the castle in the woods, while an immense outlying tract had been converted into a park with exotic attractions in the style of the time. Here, then, was need of expert forestry--whence the opening of the school as aforesaid. Once started, it became the duke's special pet and pride. His immense energy had found a new fad--that of the schoolmaster. He was bent on having a model training-school for the public service. In his own house, under his own eye, he proposed to mould the future servants of the state like potter's clay. In this way he would have them as he wanted them. To provide the clay for his experiment he began to look around for promising boys, and thus his eye fell on Friedrich Schiller. Summoning the father and making some gracious inquiries, he offered to provide for the boy's education at the new school. The anxious captain, knowing that divinity was not to be on the program at Castle Solitude, sought to evade his sovereign's kindness by pleading that Fritz had set his heart upon the service of the church. The reply was that something else, law for example, would no doubt do as well. Resistance to the earthly Providence was not to be thought of by a man in Captain Schiller's position; and so the step was taken which deprived some Suabian flock of a shepherd and gave the world instead a great poet.

It was on the 17th of January, 1773, that schoolboy Schiller, with disappointment in his heart, said farewell to his tearful mother and took his cold way up the long avenue which led from Ludwigsburg to Castle Solitude. According to the official record he arrived there with a chillblain, an eruption of the scalp, fourteen Latin books, and forty-three kreutzers in money. Soon afterwards his father signed a document whereby he renounced all control of the boy and left him in the hands of his prince.

A modern reader will be very ready with his criticism of these educational arrangements. The constant and petty surveillance, the deliberate alienation of boys from all ties of home and kindred, the systematic training in duplicity and adulation, were certainly not well calculated for a school of manhood. Schiller himself, after his escape from the academy, was wont to speak very bitterly of the education that he had received there. Nevertheless the school had its good points, especially after the removal to Stuttgart, in 1775. Here it became a combination of university with a school of art, a school of technology and a military academy proper. Several of the professors were inspiring teachers who made friends of their students. The fame of the institution brought together promising young men from all parts of Germany and from foreign parts; and several of them besides Schiller attained distinction in after-life. There was thus intellectual comradeship of the very best kind. And there was much freedom in the choice of studies.

But the solid merits of the academy were the growth of time; in the beginning it was, for Schiller at least, mere chaos and misery. The boy grew rapidly into a lank, awkward youngster for whom the military discipline was a great hardship; he never got entirely rid of the stiff gait and ungainly bearing which resulted from these early struggles with the unattainable. Frequent illness led to a bad record on the books of the faculty. In 'conduite' he made but a poor showing, and he was several times billeted for untidiness. In Latin and religion he got along fairly well, and in Greek he actually took a prize toward the end of the year 1773. But the Greek which procured him this distinction hardly went beyond the rudiments and was mostly brought with him from Ludwigsburg. For mathematics he had but little talent. His bitterest trial, however, came with the law studies which he was obliged to take up in his second year. A dry subject, a dull teacher and an immature, reluctant pupil made a hopeless combination. And so he got the name of a dullard. During the whole of the year 1775 it is recorded that he was at the foot of his class.

In a much longer prose document he portrays the characters of some two score schoolmates and finally his own. He begins modestly with a deprecatory address to his most gracious sovereign, without whose wise order he would never think of setting himself up as a judge of his fellows. The portraits are amusingly ponderous in style, but their substance is very creditable to their author's head and heart. Toward the end he burns more incense to the duke: 'This prince who has enabled my parents to do well by me; this prince through whom God will attain his ends with me; this father who wishes to make me happy, is and must be much more estimable to me than parents who depend upon his favor.' He frankly confesses his own shortcomings: 'You will find me', he writes, 'often overhasty, often frivolous. You will hear that I am obstinate, passionate and impatient; but you will also hear of my sincerity, my fidelity and my good heart.' He owns that he has not thus far made the best use of his gifts, but he pleads illness in excuse. His gracious prince knows how eagerly he has taken up the study of the law and how happy he will be some day to enter the service of his country. But, he ventures to insinuate, he would be very much happier still if he could serve his country as a teacher of religion.

The divinity was out of the question, but relief was at hand. Toward the end of 1775, having come to terms with the Stuttgart people, Duke Karl transferred his academy to more commodious quarters in the city. A department of medicine was added and Schiller gladly availed himself of the duke's permission to enroll in the new faculty. His professional studies were now more to his taste and he applied himself to them with sufficient zeal to make henceforth a decent though never a brilliant record. His heart was already elsewhere. For some time past he had been nourishing his soul on forbidden fruit,--books that had to be smuggled in and were of course all the more seductive for that very reason. With a few intimates--Scharffenstein, the Von Hovens and Petersen--he formed a sort of literary club which read and discussed things. What they read spurred them to imitation and to mutual criticism. Presently they commenced sending their productions to the magazines. Schiller began to indulge in pleasing dreams of literary fame; and with this new-born confidence in himself there came, as his health improved, a firmer step, a more erect bearing and an increased energy of character. To be a poet by grace of God was better than the favor of princes.

The young Schiller was nothing if not intense. When an emotion took possession of him it set him on fire, and the expression of it was like the eruption of a volcano. Toward the end of his course at the academy he had a misunderstanding with his dear friend Scharffenstein, with whom he had sworn eternal brotherhood. The result was a long letter of wild expostulation in this vein:

What was the bond of our friendship? Was it selfishness? Was it frivolity? Was it folly? Was it an earthly, vulgar, or a higher, immortal, celestial bond? Speak! Speak! Oh, a friendship erected like ours might have endured through eternity.... If you or I had died ten times, death should not have filched from us a single hour! What a friendship that might have been! And now! Now! What has become of it?... Hear, Scharffenstein! God is there! God hears me and thee, and may God judge!

And so on for six mortal pages, octavo print. The modern cynic will smile at this ecstatic cultus of friendship, but let him at the same time recall the saying of Goethe that what makes the poet is a heart completely filled with one emotion.

How much of this literature fell into the hands of Schiller at the academy can not be told with perfect certainty, but it would seem that very little of it escaped him. He read and was deeply touched by Gerstenberg's 'Ugolino', with its horrific picture of the agonies of starvation. He read the early writings of Goethe, of Leisewitz and of Klinger, and was touched by the woes of Miller's Siegwart. In 'Emilia Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust, he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy forms of the Celtic bard, big with their indefinable woe, increased the turmoil of his soul. Probably he read Rousseau more or less, though direct evidence of the fact is lacking. At any rate the air was surcharged with Rousseauite feeling. Certainly he read Plutarch and Cervantes, and along with all these came Shakspere, to whom he was introduced--in the Wieland translation--by his favorite teacher, Abel.

The effect of this reading upon the mind of Schiller was prodigious. It changed the native docility of his temper, weaned him completely from his seraphic proclivities and carried him with a rush into the mid-current of the literary revolution. There came a time when the young medical student, faithfully pursuing his routine and on festal occasions spouting fervid panegyrics of the noble Karl and the divine Franziska, was not altogether what he seemed to be. There was another Schiller, burning with literary ambition and privately engaged in forging a thunderbolt.

Just how much progress was made with 'The Robbers' in the year 1777 is not known; probably not much, for Schiller soon decided to drop his literary pursuits for the present and devote himself closely to his medical studies. Perhaps he may have hoped by hard work to finish his course in four years instead of the expected five. At any rate he now bent to his toil and allowed the play to lie dormant in his mind. In 1779 he submitted a thesis on 'The Philosophy of Physiology', but it was judged unfit for print. The professors condemned it variously as tedious, florid, obscure, and, worst of all, disrespectful toward recognized authorities such as Haller. In these judgments the duke concurred. He found that El?ve Schiller had said many fine things and in particular had shown much 'fire'. But the fire was too strong; it needed to be 'subdued' by another year of study.

It has usually been assumed by Schiller's biographers that in his intense longing for liberty he was embittered by this disappointment, and that in his mood of wrath he now took up his neglected play and poured into it, hissing hot, the whole fury of his quarrel with the world. There is, however, no evidence that he really hoped to win his release from the academy in the year 1779, or that the thesis just spoken of was regarded as a graduation thesis. Neither his own letters nor those of his friends indicate that he was angry at being kept in school another year. Probably the critics have made too much out of this factor of personal disgruntlement. Schiller was a poetic artist, and his first play is much more than the wild expression of a plucked student's resentment. Nevertheless it is only natural to suppose that his proud and ambitious spirit chafed more or less under the requirements of an academic routine that his manhood had outgrown. That he succeeded after all, at the end of the year 1779, in capturing a number of prizes and received them in the presence of Goethe and the Duke of Weimar, who happened just then to be visiting Stuttgart, could do but little to sweeten the bitter dose that had been prescribed for him.

He now set about the preparation of a new thesis, and in the intervals of his professional occupation he worked with feverish energy upon 'The Robbers'. To gain time for writing he would often feign illness, and when the duke or an inspector surprised him would hide his manuscript in a big medical treatise kept at hand for the purpose. A few comrades who were in the secret eagerly watched the progress of his work and vociferously applauded the scenes which he now and then read to them. One of these comrades has left it on record that in the excitement of composition Schiller would often stamp and snort and roar.--And thus it was, in the stolen hours of the night and driven by the demon that possessed him, that he bodied forth his titanic drama of revolt. It was virtually finished during the year 1780. In after-time Schiller reasoned himself into the conviction that art must be 'cheerful', but very little of cheerfulness went to the composition of 'The Robbers'. It was the disburthening of an oppressed soul that suffered horribly at times from morbid melancholy--the chicken-pox of youthful genius. A letter of June, 1780, shows how he had battled with the specters of despair. Writing to Captain von Hoven, whose son had lately died, he says:

A thousand times I envied your son as he was wrestling with death, and would have given up my life as calmly as I go to bed. I am not yet twenty-one years old, but I can tell you frankly that the world has no further charm for me. I have no delight in thinking of the world, and the day of my departure from the academy, which a few years ago would have been a day of festal joy, will not be able to force one happy smile from me. With each step, as I grow older, I lose more and more of my contentedness; and the nearer I come to the age of maturity, the more I could wish that I had died in childhood.

In November, 1780, he submitted a new thesis upon 'The Connection between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature'. In this essay he considers the question whether, for the purposes of moral perfection, the body is to be regarded as the enemy and gaoler of the soul, or as its friend and coadjutor. The drift of his argument is to show in detail the dependence of the spirit upon the flesh. Finding that philosophers have been unjust to the body, he comes to its rescue,--expounding good doctrine in an interesting though rather florid and unprofessional style. In the course of his philosophizing he perpetrates the sly joke of quoting from his own manuscript play and ascribing the words to an imaginary 'Life of Moor', by one Krake.--Further comment upon the essay may be dispensed with, seeing that Schiller as a medical man does not greatly interest us at the present time. Enough that it was accepted and procured him his release from bondage toward the close of the year.

Afterwards, in the bitterness of his quarrel with the Duke of W?rttemberg, Schiller took an altogether gloomy view of the training he had received at the Military Academy. He saw only the forcing process to which he had been subjected, the narrow life that had kept him from a knowledge of the world, and the petty restrictions that had prevented his love of poetry from developing in a sane and natural manner. However, it is always the poet's fate to grow strong through his own gifts and his own trials; what schools of any kind can do for him or against him is of comparatively little moment. Had Schiller enjoyed in his youth the freedom of a real university, his literary career would no doubt have opened differently, and with another beginning the whole would have been different; but whether it would then have interested the world after a hundred years, as that of the real Schiller does, is a question for omniscience. Speaking humanly one can only say that the misguided paternalism of Karl Eugen in rousing the tiger proved a blessing in disguise. And the schooling itself was by no means so despicable. Schiller left the academy a good Latinist, though with but little Greek. He had learned to read French, if not English. He had dabbled in such philosophy as there was going and acquired an interest in the fundamental problems. He had read not widely but intensely--which is always better. He had made a number of good friends. And not least important for his future career, he had had an excellent opportunity to observe the forms and usages of high life.

FOOTNOTES:

The Robbers

This is one side of the story. The other side is that 'The Robbers' made an epoch in German dramatic literature. Not only is it the strongest and completest expression of the eighteenth-century storm and stress, but it proved a highly effective stage-play. Nor was its success ephemeral. Its author quickly outgrew it, but it maintained itself during the entire period of Germany's leadership in matters of dramatic art, and even to-day it preserves much of its old vitality. It is true that when a modern audience assembles to see a performance of 'The Robbers', they are not impelled solely by the intrinsic merits of the piece. Loyalty to the great dramatic poet of the nation plays its part. People think: Thus our Schiller began,--and they expect to make allowances. But when all such allowances are made, it remains true that 'The Robbers' is a powerful stage-play which reveals in every scene the hand of the born dramatist. We may call it boyish if we will, but its boyishness is like that of 'Titus Andronicus'. Each is the work of a young giant who in learning the use of his hammer lays about him somewhat wildly and makes a tremendous hubbub. But Thor is Thor, and such boys are not born every day.

The starting-point of Schiller's invention was the conception of the two hostile brothers, and this he had from Schubart, although other writers, notably Klinger and Leisewitz, had already made use of it in dramatic productions. In the Schubart story we hear of a nobleman with two sons, of whom the elder, Karl, is high-minded but dissolute, while the younger, Wilhelm, is a hypocritical zealot. Karl plays the r?le of the prodigal son and his excesses are duly reported at home by his brother. 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 assassins. 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 publishing 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 passivity, are men who have their passions 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 passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the passion 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 passions 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 well enough calls the hot and cold passions. 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 analysis. 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 surpassed 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,--'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 noble 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 Cassius. 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 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 passions 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. 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 he takes it upon himself to wield the avenging bolts of Jove, but finds that Jove rejects his assistance. 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 passions, but the verdict of the gods upon human presumption.

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, assured 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.

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 passengers", and the outlaws reply that they "detest such vile, base practices." He had also read, in 'Don Quixote', of the high-toned robber, Roque Guinart, who had more of compassion, 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." 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 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 constitution 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 nobility 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 God 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 flourishing unavenged in his native W?rttemberg. 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. 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 document; 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 appetite. Karl wears his heart upon his sleeve; Franz is wily and hypocritical. The one is handsome and chivalrous, the other ill-favored and cruel.

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 shore 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 appetite? 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 attitude 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 superstitions 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 nonentity,--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.' 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.

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 r?le of robbers in the Bohemian Forest. In particular we may guess that the blatherskite Jew, Spiegelberg, with his swaggering self-conceit and his bestial 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 leadership 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, classified according to their loyalty. On the one hand, closest to the leader stand the devoted Roller, the sturdy 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 mass.

It will now be in order to look at 'The Robbers' a moment from the point of view of dramatic art. 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 authorship, however, he had aimed at a literary rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were literary dramas. 'G?tz 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 craftsmanship. 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 circumstances 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 assumptions 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 passion, and always with passion 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:

The Stuttgart Medicus

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