The Life of Friedrich Schiller Comprehending an Examination of His Works · Thomas Carlyle
ACT III. SCENE X.
The KING and MARQUIS DE POSA. [_The latter, on noticing the King, advances towards him, and kneels, then rises, and waits without any symptom of embarrassment._] KING. [_looks at him with surprise_]. We have met before, then? MAR. No. KING. You did my crown Some service: wherefore have you shunn'd my thanks? Our memory is besieged by crowds of suitors; Omniscient is none but He in Heaven. You should have sought my looks: why did you not? MAR. 'Tis scarcely yet two days, your Majesty, Since I returned to Spain. KING. I am not used To be my servants' debtor; ask of me Some favour. MAR. I enjoy the laws. KING. That right The very murd'rer has. MAR. And how much more The honest citizen!--Sire, I'm content. KING [_aside_]. Much self-respect indeed, and lofty daring! But this was to be looked for: I would have My Spaniards haughty; better that the cup Should overflow than not be full.--I hear You left my service, Marquis. MAR. Making way For men more worthy, I withdrew. KING. 'Tis wrong: When spirits such as yours play truant, My state must suffer. You conceive, perhaps, Some post unworthy of your merits Might be offer'd you? MAR. No, Sire, I cannot doubt But that a judge so skilful, and experienced In the gifts of men, has at a glance discover'd Wherein I might do him service, wherein not. I feel with humble gratitude the favour, With which your Majesty is loading me By thoughts so lofty: yet I can-- [_He stops._
KING. You pause? MAR. Sire, at the moment I am scarce prepar'd To speak, in phrases of a Spanish subject, What as a citizen o' th' world I've thought. Truth is, in parting from the Court forever, I held myself discharged from all necessity Of troubling it with reasons for my absence. KING. Are your reasons bad, then? Dare you not risk Disclosing them? MAR. My life, and joyfully, Were scope allow'd me to disclose them _all_. 'Tis not myself but Truth that I endanger, Should the King refuse me a full hearing. Your anger or contempt I fain would shun; But forced to choose between them, I had rather Seem to you a man deserving punishment Than pity. KING [_with a look of expectation_]. Well? MAR. The servant of a prince I cannot be. [_The King looks at him with astonishment._ I will not cheat my merchant: If you deign to take me as your servant, You expect, you wish, my actions only; You wish my arm in fight, my thought in counsel; Nothing more you will accept of: not my actions, Th' approval they might find at Court becomes The object of my acting. Now for me Right conduct has a value of its own: The happiness my king might cause me plant I would myself produce; and conscious joy, And free selection, not the force of duty, Should impel me. Is it thus your Majesty Requires it? Could you suffer new creators In your own creation? Or could I Consent with patience to become the chisel, When I hoped to be the statuary? I love mankind; and in a monarchy, Myself is all that I can love.
KING. This fire Is laudable. You would do good to others; How you do it, patriots, wise men think Of little moment, so it be but done. Seek for yourself the office in my kingdoms That will give you scope to gratify This noble zeal. MAR. There is not such an office. KING. How? MAR. What the king desires to spread abroad Through these weak hands, is it the good of men? That good which my unfetter'd love would wish them? Pale majesty would tremble to behold it! No! Policy has fashioned in her courts Another sort of human good; a sort Which _she_ is rich enough to give away, Awakening with it in the hearts of men New cravings, such as _it_ can satisfy. Truth she keeps coining in her mints, such truth As she can tolerate; and every die Except her own she breaks and casts away. But is the royal bounty wide enough For me to wish and work in? Must the love I hear my brother pledge itself to be My brother's jailor? Can I call him happy When he dare not think? Sire, choose some other To dispense the good which _you_ have stamped for us. With me it tallies not; a prince's servant I cannot be. KING [_rather quickly_]. You are a Protestant.
MAR. [_after some reflection_] Sire, your creed is also mine. [_After a pause._ I find I am misunderstood: 'tis as I feared. You see me draw the veil from majesty, And view its mysteries with steadfast eye: How should you know if I regard as holy What I no more regard as terrible? Dangerous I seem, for bearing thoughts too high: My King, I am not dangerous: my wishes Lie buried here. [_Laying his hand on his breast._ The poor and purblind rage Of innovation, that but aggravates The weight o' th' fetters which it cannot break, Will never heat _my_ blood. The century Admits not my ideas: I live a citizen Of those that are to come. Sire, can a picture Break your rest? Your breath obliterates it. KING. No other knows you harbour such ideas? MAR. Such, no one. KING [_rises, walks a few steps, then stops opposite the Marquis. --Aside_]. New at least, this dialect! Flattery exhausts itself: a man of parts Disdains to imitate. For once let's have A trial of the opposite! Why not? The strange is oft the lucky.--If so be This is your principle, why let it pass! I will conform; the crown shall have a servant New in Spain,--a liberal!
MAR. Sire, I see How very meanly you conceive of men; How, in the language of the frank true spirit You find but another deeper artifice Of a more practis'd coz'ner: I can also Partly see what causes this. 'Tis men; 'Tis men that force you to it: they themselves Have cast away their own nobility, Themselves have crouch'd to this degraded posture. Man's innate greatness, like a spectre, frights them; Their poverty seems safety; with base skill They ornament their chains, and call it virtue To wear them with an air of grace. Twas thus You found the world; thus from your royal father Came it to you: how in this distorted, Mutilated image could you honour man? KING. Some truth there is in this. MAR. Pity, however, That in taking man from the Creator, And changing him into _your_ handiwork, And setting up yourself to be the god Of this new-moulded creature, you should have Forgotten one essential; you yourself Remained a man, a very child of Adam! You are still a suffering, longing mortal, You call for sympathy, and to a god We can but sacrifice, and pray, and tremble! O unwise exchange! unbless'd perversion! When you have sunk your brothers to be play'd As harp-strings, who will join in harmony With you the player? KING [_aside_]. By Heaven, he touches me!
MAR. For you, however, this is unimportant; It but makes you separate, peculiar; 'Tis the price you pay for being a god. And frightful were it if you failed in this! If for the desolated good of millions, You the Desolator should gain--nothing! If the very freedom you have blighted And kill'd were that alone which could exalt Yourself!--Sire, pardon me, I must not stay: The matter makes me rash: my heart is full, Too strong the charm of looking on the one Of living men to whom I might unfold it. [_The Count de Lerma enters, and whispers a few words to the King. The latter beckons to him to withdraw, and continues sitting in his former posture._ KING [_to the Marquis, after Lerma is gone_]. Speak on! MAR. [_after a pause_] I feel, Sire, all the worth-- KING. Speak on! Y' had something more to say. MAR. Not long since, Sire, I chanced to pass through Flanders and Brabant. So many rich and flourishing provinces; A great, a mighty people, and still more, An honest people!--And this people's Father! That, thought I, must be divine: so thinking, I stumbled on a heap of human bones. [_He pauses; his eyes rest on the King, who endeavours to return his glance, but with an air of embarrassment is forced to look upon the ground._
You are in the right, you _must_ proceed so. That you _could_ do, what you saw you _must_ do, Fills me with a shuddering admiration. Pity that the victim welt'ring in its blood Should speak so feeble an eulogium On the spirit of the priest! That mere men, Not beings of a calmer essence, write The annals of the world! Serener ages Will displace the age of Philip; these will bring A milder wisdom; the subject's good will then Be reconcil'd to th' prince's greatness; The thrifty State will learn to prize its children, And necessity no more will be inhuman. KING. And when, think you, would those blessed ages Have come round, had I recoil'd before The curse of this? Behold my Spain! Here blooms The subject's good, in never-clouded peace: _Such_ peace will I bestow on Flanders. MAR. Peace of a churchyard! And you hope to end What you have entered on? Hope to withstand The timeful change of Christendom; to stop The universal Spring that shall make young The countenance o' th' Earth? _You_ purpose, single In all Europe, alone, to fling yourself Against the wheel of Destiny that rolls For ever its appointed course; to clutch Its spokes with mortal arm? You may not, Sire! Already thousands have forsook your kingdoms, Escaping glad though poor: the citizen You lost for conscience' sake, he was your noblest. With mother's arms Elizabeth receives The fugitives, and rich by foreign skill, In fertile strength her England blooms. Forsaken Of its toilsome people, lies Grenada Desolate; and Europe sees with glad surprise Its enemy faint with self-inflicted wounds.
KING [_after a long pause_]. I have heard you to an end. Not as in common heads, the world is painted In that head of yours: nor will I mete you By the common standard. I am the first To whom your heart has been disclosed: I know this, so believe it. For the sake Of such forbearance; for your having kept Ideas, embraced with such devotion, secret Up to this present moment, for the sake Of that reserve, young man, I will forget That I have learned them, and how I learned them. Arise. The headlong youth I will set right, Not as his sovereign, but as his senior. I will, because I will. So! bane itself, I find, in generous natures may become Ennobled into something better. But Beware my Inquisition! It would grieve me If you-- MAR. Would it? would it? KING [_gazing at him, and lost in surprise_]. Such a mortal Till this hour I never saw. No, Marquis! No! You do me wrong. To you I will not Be a Nero, not to you. _All_ happiness Shall not be blighted by me: you yourself Shall be permitted to remain a man Beside me. MAR. [_quickly_] And my fellow-subjects, Sire? Oh, not for _me_, not _my_ cause was I pleading. And your subjects, Sire? KING. You see so clearly How posterity will judge of me; yourself Shall teach it how I treated men so soon As I had found one.
MAR. O Sire! in being The most just of kings, at the same instant Be not the most unjust! In your Flanders Are many thousands worthier than I. 'Tis but yourself,--shall I confess it, Sire?-- That under this mild form first truly see What freedom is. KING [_with softened earnestness_]. Young man, no more of this. Far differently will you think of men, When you have seen and studied them as I have. Yet our first meeting must not be our last; How shall I try to make you mine? MAR. Sire, let me Continue as I am. What good were it To you, if I like others were corrupted? KING. This pride I will not suffer. From this moment You are in my service. No remonstrance! I will have it so. * * * * * Had the character of Posa been drawn ten years later, it would have been imputed, as all things are, to the 'French Revolution;' and Schiller himself perhaps might have been called a Jacobin. Happily, as matters stand, there is room for no such imputation. It is pleasing to behold in Posa the deliberate expression of a great and good man's sentiments on these ever-agitated subjects: a noble monument, embodying the liberal ideas of his age, in a form beautified by his own genius, and lasting as its other products.[16]
Connected with the superior excellence of Posa, critics have remarked a dramatic error, which the author himself was the first to acknowledge and account for. The magnitude of Posa throws Carlos into the shade; the hero of the first three acts is no longer the hero of the other two. The cause of this, we are informed, was that Schiller kept the work too long upon his own hands: 'In composing the piece,' he observes, 'many interruptions occurred; so that a considerable time elapsed between beginning and concluding it; and, in the mean while, much within myself had changed. The various alterations which, during this period, my way of thinking and feeling underwent, naturally told upon the work I was engaged with. What parts of it had at first attracted me, began to produce this effect in a weaker degree, and, in the end, scarcely at all. New ideas, springing up in the interim, displaced the former ones; Carlos himself had lost my favour, perhaps for no other reason than because I had become his senior; and, from the opposite cause, Posa had occupied his place. Thus I commenced the fourth and fifth acts with quite an altered heart. But the first three were already in the hands of the public; the plan of the whole could not now be re-formed; nothing therefore remained but to suppress the piece entirely, or to fit the second half to the first the best way I could.'
The imperfection alluded to is one of which the general reader will make no great account; the second half is fitted to the first with address enough for his purposes. Intent not upon applying the dramatic gauge, but on being moved and exalted, we may peruse the tragedy without noticing that any such defect exists in it. The pity and love we are first taught to feel for Carlos abide with us to the last; and though Posa rises in importance as the piece proceeds, our admiration of his transcendent virtues does not obstruct the gentler feelings with which we look upon the fate of his friend. A certain confusion and crowding together of events, about the end of the play, is the only fault in its plan that strikes us with any force. Even this is scarcely prominent enough to be offensive. An intrinsic and weightier defect is the want of ease and lightness in the general composition of the piece; a defect which, all its other excellencies will not prevent us from observing. There is action enough in the plot, energy enough in the dialogue, and abundance of individual beauties in both; but there is throughout a certain air of stiffness and effort, which abstracts from the theatrical illusion. The language, in general impressive and magnificent, is now and then inflated into bombast. The characters do not, as it were, verify their human nature, by those thousand little touches and nameless turns, which distinguish the genius essentially dramatic from the genius merely poetical; the Proteus of the stage from the philosophic observer and trained imitator of life. We have not those careless felicities, those varyings from high to low, that air of living freedom which Shakspeare has accustomed us, like spoiled children, to look for in every perfect work of this species. Schiller is too elevated, too regular and sustained in his elevation, to be altogether natural.
Yet with all this, _Carlos_ is a noble tragedy. There is a stately massiveness about the structure of it; the incidents are grand and affecting; the characters powerful, vividly conceived, and impressively if not completely delineated. Of wit and its kindred graces Schiller has but a slender share: nor among great poets is he much distinguished for depth or fineness of pathos. But what gives him a place of his own, and the loftiest of its kind, is the vastness and intense vigour of his mind; the splendour of his thoughts and imagery, and the bold vehemence of his passion for the true and the sublime, under all their various forms. He does not thrill, but he exalts us. His genius is impetuous, exuberant, majestic; and a heavenly fire gleams through all his creations. He transports us into a holier and higher world than our own; everything around us breathes of force and solemn beauty. The looks of his heroes may be more staid than those of men, the movements of their minds may be slower and more calculated; but we yield to the potency of their endowments, and the loveliness of the scene which they animate. The enchantments of the poet are strong enough to silence our scepticism; we forbear to inquire whether it is true or false.
The celebrity of Alfieri generally invites the reader of _Don Carlos_ to compare it with _Filippo_. Both writers treat the same subject; both borrow their materials from the same source, the _nouvelle historique_ of St. Real: but it is impossible that two powerful minds could have handled one given idea in more diverse manners. Their excellencies are, in fact, so opposite, that they scarcely come in competition. Alfieri's play is short, and the characters are few. He describes no scene: his personages are not the King of Spain and his courtiers, but merely men; their place of action is not the Escurial or Madrid, but a vacant, objectless platform anywhere in space. In all this, Schiller has a manifest advantage. He paints manners and opinions, he sets before us a striking pageant, which interests us of itself, and gives a new interest to whatever is combined with it. The principles of the antique, or perhaps rather of the French drama, upon which Alfieri worked, permitted no such delineation. In the style there is the same diversity. A severe simplicity uniformly marks Alfieri's style; in his whole tragedy there is not a single figure. A hard emphatic brevity is all that distinguishes his language from that of prose.
Schiller, we have seen, abounds with noble metaphors, and all the warm exciting eloquence of poetry. It is only in expressing the character of Philip that Alfieri has a clear superiority. Without the aid of superstition, which his rival, especially in the catastrophe, employs to such advantage, Alfieri has exhibited in his Filippo a picture of unequalled power. Obscurity is justly said to be essential to terror and sublimity; and Schiller has enfeebled the effect of his Tyrant, by letting us behold the most secret recesses of his spirit: we understand him better, but we fear him less. Alfieri does not show us the internal combination of Filippo: it is from its workings alone that we judge of his nature. Mystery, and the shadow of horrid cruelty, brood over his Filippo: it is only a transient word or act that gives us here and there a glimpse of his fierce, implacable, tremendous soul; a short and dubious glimmer that reveals to us the abysses of his being, dark, lurid, and terrific, 'as the throat of the infernal Pool.' Alfieri's Filippo is perhaps the most wicked man that human imagination has conceived.
Alfieri and Schiller were again unconscious competitors in the history of Mary Stuart. But the works before us give a truer specimen of their comparative merits. Schiller seems to have the greater genius; Alfieri the more commanding character. Alfieri's greatness rests on the stern concentration of fiery passion, under the dominion of an adamantine will: this was his own make of mind; and he represents it, with strokes in themselves devoid of charm, but in their union terrible as a prophetic scroll. Schiller's moral force is commensurate with his intellectual gifts, and nothing more. The mind of the one is like the ocean, beautiful in its strength, smiling in the radiance of summer, and washing luxuriant and romantic shores: that of the other is like some black unfathomable lake placed far amid the melancholy mountains; bleak, solitary, desolate; but girdled with grim sky-piercing cliffs, overshadowed with storms, and illuminated only by the red glare of the lightning. Schiller is magnificent in his expansion, Alfieri is overpowering in his condensed energy; the first inspires us with greater admiration, the last with greater awe.
This tragedy of _Carlos_ was received with immediate and universal approbation. In the closet and on the stage, it excited the warmest applauses equally among the learned and unlearned. Schiller's expectations had not been so high: he knew both the excellencies and the faults of his work; but he had not anticipated that the former would be recognised so instantaneously. The pleasure of this new celebrity came upon him, therefore, heightened by surprise. Had dramatic eminence been his sole object, he might now have slackened his exertions; the public had already ranked him as the first of their writers in that favourite department. But this limited ambition was not his moving principle; nor was his mind of that sort for which rest is provided in this world. The primary disposition of his nature urged him to perpetual toil: the great aim of his life, the unfolding of his mental powers, was one of those which admit but a relative not an absolute progress. New ideas of perfection arise as the former have been reached; the student is always attaining, never has attained.
Schiller's worldly circumstances, too, were of a kind well calculated to prevent excess of quietism. He was still drifting at large on the tide of life; he was crowned with laurels, but without a home. His heart, warm and affectionate, fitted to enjoy the domestic blessings which it longed for, was allowed to form no permanent attachment: he felt that he was unconnected, solitary in the world; cut off from the exercise of his kindlier sympathies; or if tasting such pleasures, it was 'snatching them rather than partaking of them calmly.' The vulgar desire of wealth and station never entered his mind for an instant: but as years were added to his age, the delights of peace and continuous comfort were fast becoming more acceptable than any other; and he looked with anxiety to have a resting-place amid his wanderings, to be a man among his fellow-men.
For all these wishes, Schiller saw that the only chance of fulfilment depended on unwearied perseverance in his literary occupations. Yet though his activity was unabated, and the calls on it were increasing rather than diminished, its direction was gradually changing. The Drama had long been stationary, and of late been falling in his estimation: the difficulties of the art, as he viewed it at present, had been overcome, and new conquests invited him in other quarters. The latter part of _Carlos_ he had written as a task rather than a pleasure; he contemplated no farther undertaking connected with the Stage. For a time, indeed, he seems to have wavered among a multiplicity of enterprises; now solicited to this, and now to that, without being able to fix decidedly on any. The restless ardour of his mind is evinced by the number and variety of his attempts; its fluctuation by the circumstance that all of them are either short in extent, or left in the state of fragments. Of the former kind are his lyrical productions, many of which were composed about this period, during intervals from more serious labours. The character of these performances is such as his former writings gave us reason to expect.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.