The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 21

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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionately 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 Suvern, 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 ba.n.a.lity 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 cla.s.ses religion had well-nigh ceased to be reckoned with as a mystic pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 b.u.t.t 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 superst.i.tion.[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 the _ludibrium_ of 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 ent.i.tled 'The Maid of Orleans':

The world brooks not n.o.bility,--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 pa.s.sion that is intensely real, and that has come to be regarded, for better or for worse, as preeminently n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.s 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 role of besotted superst.i.tion and misunderstanding which he subsequently plays in the cathedral scene. La Hire and the Duke of Burgundy and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Orleans, who preserves only a suggestion of the rugged soldier that once bore his name, are there only to ill.u.s.trate 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 G.o.d 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 atoms Erstwhile combined in me for pain and joy.

And of the mighty Talbot, whose renown But now filled all the world, nothing remains Except a handful of light dust. So ends The life of man--and all we bear away, As booty from the battle of existence, Is comprehension of its nothingness And sovereign contempt of all the ends That 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 123: Trevelyan, "The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay", II, 249.]

[Footnote 124: According to Bottiger, 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, that _if_ he should write a second 'Maid of Orleans', Goschen should publish it, is only an author's playful 'jollying' of a friendly publisher. The pa.s.sage from Bottiger is quoted at length by Boxberger in his Introduction to 'The Maid of Orleans' (Kurschners 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.]

CHAPTER XIX

The Bride of Messina

Das Leben ist der Guter hochstes nicht, Der ubel grosztes 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 Korner, '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 Korner 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.bility 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 cla.s.sical 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, there _is_ a 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 surpa.s.s the majesty of the play, and Korner a.s.signed 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 'singular _fata morgana_', and a 'shocking monstrosity'; while F.H. Jacobi characterized it as a 'disgusting spook made by mixing heaven and h.e.l.l'. 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 pa.s.sage 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 Suvern (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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion: 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 G.o.ds, 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' const.i.tutes 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 gla.s.s of water, may end the n.o.blest 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 pa.s.s. He meets a stranger in the road. A quarrel arises over the question of pa.s.sing,--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 had _her_ dream,--of a lion and an eagle bringing their b.l.o.o.d.y prey in sweet concord to a little child playing on the gra.s.s. A pious Christian monk explains this dream as meaning that a daughter will unite the quarrelsome sons in pa.s.sionate 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 atwixt Your bare and reeking swords? In your fierce rage You 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 conduct _he_ can 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 Bottiger, 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 Bottiger, 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 a.s.sume 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 circ.u.mstances 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 n.o.ble 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 himself _feels_ that 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.