CHAPTER XVII.

THE ROBBERS AND DON CARLOS OF SCHILLER,

SCHILLER, in his earliest youth, possessed a fervor of genius, a kind of intoxication of mind, which misguided him. The Conspiracy of Fiesco, Intrigue and Love, and, lastly, the Robbers, all of which have been performed in the French theatre, are works which the principles of art, as well as those of morality, may condemn; but, from the age of five-and-twenty, his writings were pure and severe. The education of life depraves the frivolous, but perfects, the reflecting mind.

The Robbers has been translated into French, but greatly altered; at first they omitted to take advantage of the date, which affixes an historical interest to the piece. The scene is placed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when the edict of perpetual peace, by which all private challenges were forbidden, was published in the empire. This edict was no doubt productive of great advantage to the repose of Germany; but the young men of birth, accustomed to live in the midst of dangers, and rely upon their personal strength, fancied that they fell into a sort of shameful inertness when they subjected themselves to the authority of the laws. Nothing was more absurd than this conception; yet, as men are generally governed by custom, it is natural to be repugnant even to the best of changes, only because it is a change. Schiller's Captain of the Robbers is less odious than if he were placed in the present times, for there was little difference between the feudal anarchy under which he lived and the bandit life which he adopted; but it is precisely the kind of excuse which the author affords him that renders his piece the more dangerous. It has produced, it must be allowed, a bad effect in Germany. Young men, enthusiastic admirers of the character and mode

of living of the Captain of the Robbers, have tried to imitate him.

Their taste for a licentious life they honored with the name of the love of liberty, and fancied themselves to be indignant against the abuses of social order, when they were only tired of their own private condition. Their essays in rebellion were merely ridiculous, yet have tragedies and romances more importance in Germany than in any other country. Every thing there is done seriously; and the lot of life is influenced by the reading such a work, or the seeing such a performance, What is admired as art, must be introduced into real existence. Werther has occasioned more suicides than the finest woman in the world; and poetry, philosophy, in short, the ideal have often more command over the Germans, than nature and the passions themselves.

The subject of the Robbers is the same with that of so many other fictions, all founded originally on the parable of the Prodigal. There is a hypocritical son, who conducts himself well in outward appearance, and a culpable son, who possesses good feelings among all his faults. This contrast is very fine in a religious point of view, because it bears witness to us that God reads our hearts; but is nevertheless objectionable in inspiring too much interest in favor of a son who has deserted his father's house. It teaches young people with bad heads, universally to boast of the goodness of their hearts, although nothing is more absurd than for men to attribute to themselves virtues, only because they have defects; this negative pledge is very uncertain, since it never can follow from their wanting eason, that they are possessed of sensibility: madness is often only an impetuous egotism.

The character of the hypocritical son, such as Schiller has represented him, is much too odious. It is one of the faults of very young writers, to sketch with too hasty a pencil; the gradual shades in painting are taken for timidity of character, when, in fact, they constitute a proof of the maturity of talent. If the personages of the second rank are not painted with sufficient exactness, the passions of the chief of the robbers are

admirably expressed. The energy of this character manifests itself by turns in incredulity, religion, love, and cruelty; having been unable to find a place where to fix himself in his proper rank, he makes to himself an opening through the commission of crime; existence is for him a sort of delirium, heightened sometimes by rage, and sometimes by remorse.

The love scenes between the young girl and the chief of the robbers, who was to have been her husband, are admirable in point of enthusiasm and sensibility; there are few situation more pathetic than that of this perfectly virtuous woman, al ways attached from the bottom of her soul to him whom she loved before he became criminal. The respect which a woman is accustomed to feel for the man she loves, is changed into a sort of terror and of pity; and one would say that the unfortunate female flatters herself with the thought of becoming the guardian angel of her guilty lover in heaven, now, when she can never more hope to be the happy companion of his pilgrimage on earth.

Schiller's play cannot be fairly appreciated by the French translation. In this, they have preserved only what may be called the pantomime of action; the originality of the characters has vanished, and it is that alone which can give life to fiction; the finest tragedies would degenerate into melodramas, when stripped of the animated coloring of sentiments and passions. The force of events is not enough to unite the spectator with the persons represented; let them love, or let them kill one another, it is all the same to us, if the author has failed of exciting our sympathies in their favor.

Don Carlos is also a work of Schiller's youth, and yet it is considered as a composition of the highest rank. The subjec of this play is one of the most dramatic that history presents to us. A young princess, daughter of Henry the Second, takes leave of France and of the brilliant and chivalrous court of her father, to unite herself to an old tyrant, so gloomy and so severe, that even the Spanish character itself was altered by his government, and the whole nation for a long time afterwards bore the impress of its master. Don Carlos, at first betrothed to

Elizabeth, continues to love her though she has become his stepmother. Those great political events, the Reformation, and the Revolt of the Low Countries, are intermingled with the tragic catastrophe of the condemnation of the son by the father the interests of individuals and of the public, in their highest possible degrees, are united in this tragedy. Many writers have treated this subject in France, but under the ancient régime its representation on the stage was prohibited; it was thought deficient in respect to the Spanish nation to represent this fact in their history. M. d'Aranda, that Spanish ambassador remarkable by so many features which prove the strength of his character and the narrowness of his intellect, was asked permission for the performance of the tragedy of Don Carlos, just finished by its author, who expected great glory from its representation: "Why does he not take another subject?" answered M. d'Aranda. "M. l'Ambassadeur," said they to him, "consider that the piece is finished, and that the author has devoted to it three years of his life." "But, good heavens!" returned the ambassador, "is there no other event in all history but this? Let him choose another." They never could drive him out of this ingenious mode of reasoning, which was supported by a firm resolution.

Historical subjects exercise the genius in an entirely different manner from that in which it is exercised by subjects of invention; yet it requires, perhaps, even more imagination to represent historical fact in a tragedy, than to create situations and personages at will. To alter facts essentially in transferring them to the theatre, is always sure to produce a disagreeable impression; we expect truth; and we are painfully surprised when the author substitutes in the room of it any fiction which it may have pleased him to adopt: nevertheless, history equires to be combined in an artistic manner, in order to produce its effect on the stage, and we must have at once united in tragedy, the talent of painting the truth, and that of rendering it poetical. Difficulties of another nature present themselves when the dramatic art embraces the wide field of invention; it may be said to be then more at liberty, yet nothing

is more rare than the power of characterizing unknown personages in such a manner as to give them the consistency of names already illustrious. Lear, Othello, Orosmane, Tancrède, have received immortality at the hands of Shakspeare and Voltaire, without having ever existed; still, however, subjects o. invention are, generally speaking, dangerous to the poet, through that very independence which they confer upon him. Historical subjects seern to impose restraint; but when the writer avails himself properly of that support which may be derived from certain fixed limits, the career which they pre scribe, and the flights which they permit, even these very limits are favorable to genius. The fidelity of poetry gives a relief to truth, as the sun's rays to colors, and restores to events which it graces the lustre which antiquity had ob scured.

The preference is given in Germany to those historical tragedies in which art displays itself, like the prophet of the past. The author who means to compose such a work as this, must transport himself altogether to the age and manners of the personages represented, and an anachronism in sentiments and ideas is more justly obnoxious to the severity of criticism than in dates.

It is upon these principles that some persons have blamed Schiller for having invented the character of the Marquis de Posa, a noble Spaniard, a partisan of liberty and of toleration, passionately zealous in favor of all the new ideas which then began to ferment in Europe. I imagine that Schiller may be justly reproached with having made the Marquis de Posa the channel for the communication of his own private opinions; but it is not, as is pretended, the philosophical spirit of the eighteenth century that is attributed to him. The Marquis de Posa, such as Schiller has painted him, is a German enthusiast; and this character is so foreign to our own times, that we may as well conceive him a personage of the sixteenth century, as

1 An expression of Frederick Schlegel, on the penetration of a great his orian.