The Robbers
O über mich Narren, der ich wähnete die Welt durch Greuel zu
verschönern und die Gesetze durch Gesetzlosigkeit aufrecht zu
erhalten.--'_The Robbers_'.
After leaving the academy Schiller soon began to look about for a
publisher of his precious manuscript. Not finding one he presently
decided to borrow money and print the play at his own expense. It
appeared in the spring of 1781, accompanied by a modest preface in which
the anonymous author pronounced his work unsuited to the stage but hoped
it would be acceptable as a moral contribution to literature. In less
than a year it had been played with ever memorable success and ere long
it was the talk of Germany.
In dealing with 'The Robbers' it has always been much easier to point
out faults than to do justice. Schiller himself set the fashion of a
drastic criticism which had the effect of advertising 'The Robbers' as a
violent youthful explosion containing more to be apologized for than to
be admired. And indeed it is not a masterpiece of good taste. Upon an
adult mind possessing some knowledge of the world's dramatic literature
at its best, and particularly if the piece be read and not seen,
Schiller's first play is very apt to produce the impression of a boyish
extravaganza. The sentimental bandit who nourishes his mighty soul on
the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by
running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure
upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in
our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful.
Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair.
When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes
his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the
villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless
sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not
produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the
violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger,
the shooting and stabbing,--all this seems at first calculated for the
entertainment of young savages, and moves one to approve the oft-quoted
_mot_ of the German prince who said to Goethe: 'If I had been God and
about to create the world, and had I foreseen that Schiller would write
'The Robbers' in it, I should not have created it.'[18]
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[19] 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 rôle 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[20] 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,[21]--'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 'Julius of Tarentum' the younger brother, Guido, is, again, the man
of action; a _miles gloriosus_ who boasts of his strong arm and dreams
of glory. He looks with contempt and hatred upon his gentle, sentimental
brother Julius, who, though heir to the throne, prepares to renounce his
career because he is thwarted in love. The girl Blanca, upon whom he has
fixed his affections, is not deemed a suitable bride for him by his
father and has been shut up in a convent. He determines to abduct her by
night and flee with her to some romantic spot in the far north. In the
execution of this purpose he is killed by his jealous brother Guido, who
is then made to suffer death at the hands of his own 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.[22] 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 [Greek: hubris] 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.
In making his hero a defiant self-helper and sending him with sword in
hand against the minions of the established order, Schiller was
obviously influenced by the example of 'Götz von Berlichingen'. Like
Götz, Karl Moor regards himself as the champion of freedom against the
law, which is its enemy. Both are friends of the oppressed and haters of
pedantry and pettifoggery. Both fight like lions against tremendous
odds. Both assume the leadership of a band of outlaws whom they cannot
control, and thus become responsible for revolting crimes not foreseen
or intended. But along with these and other resemblances that might be
pointed out there is an important difference. In the fourth act of the
earlier play a Heilbronn Councillor says to Götz: 'We owe no faith to a
robber.' Whereat Götz exclaims: 'If you did not wear the emperor's
emblem, which I honor in the vilest counterfeit, you should take back
that word or choke upon it. Mine is an honorable feud.' That is, the
knight of the sixteenth century repudiates the name in which Karl Moor
glories. Says Schiller's Pater in the second act: 'And you, pretty
captain! Duke of cutpurses! King of scoundrels! Great Mogul of all
rogues under the sun!' To which Moor replies: 'Very true. Very true.
Just proceed.' In comparison with such a daredevil Goethe's hero seems
to roar like a sucking dove. In his own mind Götz never really burns the
bridge behind him. He is at heart a loyalist who recognizes the
emperor's claim to his allegiance. As a free imperial knight he feels
himself within his right under the feudal system. In resisting his
enemies he does not set himself in opposition to governmental authority
_per se_, but only to the abuse of authority by subordinates who
disgrace their master and his. And in assuming the leadership of the
insurgent rabble he thinks to restrain their ferocity and thus earn the
thanks of the supreme authority.--It remained for Schiller to convert
this rude self-helper in the age of expiring feudalism into a savage
anarchist in the boastful age of enlightenment.
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.[23]
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."[24] 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."[25] 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 (the lying letter that he receives from
Franz) 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 Württemberg. 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.[26] 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.
The jealous cadet who plots criminally against his more fortunate
brother is common to both Leisewitz and Klinger, but in neither is he an
intriguing villain. In 'Julius of Tarentum' Guido is really the more
masterful man of the two. He despises his brother as a weakling and
asserts no other claim than that of the strongest. In Klinger's play, as
we have seen, everything is made to turn upon Guido's cankering doubt of
his brother's seniority. One gets the impression that if the doubt could
be settled by indisputable evidence in favor of Ferdinando, there would
be no _casus belli_; the younger son would bow to the law of
primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the
need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a
colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question,
the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural
greatness; scheming intellect against hot blood.
In working out his conception Schiller took counsel freely of Shakspere,
whose name had now become for young Germany the symbol of all things
great in dramatic writing. The first soliloquy of Franz Moor reminds one
at once of Edmund in 'Lear', though there is none of the kind of
borrowing which makes easy prey for the philologist. Both villains covet
the wealth and station of a preferred brother; both make use of a
specious obstetrical argument and both operate with forged letters. In
general, however, the portrait of Franz was more influenced by Richard
the Third than by Edmund, or Iago, or any of the other Shaksperian
villains. Franz is the British Richard divested of his Shaksperian
lordliness, transferred to a humbler sphere of action and provided with
the mental outfit of an eighteenth-century _philosophe_, as seen by
hostile critics. Both descant on their own deformity and confide to the
public their villainous designs. But while Richard speaks in a tone of
genial cynicism, as if his principal concern were only to bring a little
variety into the tameness of "these fair, well-spoken days", the German
villain solemnly turns himself inside out and regales us _ad nauseam_
with the metaphysics of iniquity. This is his mode of reasoning:
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.'[27] 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.
What one must deplore, however, is the general mental inadequacy that is
paired with this spasmodic energy of scorn. Common sense is not the
highest of dramatic qualities, but a modicum of it would have made
Schiller's first heroine, to say the least, more interesting. She has no
power of initiative and seems made only to be duped. Her inability to
recognize her lover in the fourth act is a terrible strain upon one's
patience. Indeed the whole love-affair between her and Karl is utterly
un-human. What can one think, for example of a pair of ecstatically
faithful lovers to whom it has evidently never occurred to write to each
other? Here, if anywhere, one recalls Schiller's oft-quoted observation
that he had attempted in 'The Robbers' to depict human beings before he
had seen any.[28] Aside from his acquaintance with Franziska von
Hohenheim, and an occasional nearer view of the coy maidens of the
_école des demoiselles_, the female sex and the grand passion were for
him only bookish mysteries.
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 rôle 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.[29] 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. 'Götz 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:
[Footnote 18: The Schubart story is reprinted by Weltrich, I, p. 183
ff., who attempts to trace its provenience. It was not entirely fiction.
Cf. Minor, I, 298, to whom this chapter is indebted in many places.]
[Footnote 19: Eckermann's "Gespräche mit Goethe", under date of Jan.
17, 1827.]
[Footnote 20: "Schiller, sein Leben und seine Werke," I, 299.]
[Footnote 21: Bitter family fends, and particularly the fiction of the
hostile brothers,--with motives of rivalry, jealousy and hatred, with
paternal curses and parricide and fratricide and filicide,--were just
then a literary fashion. It is worth noting in this connection that
J.M.R. Lenz published in 1776 a story entitled "Die beiden Alten", in
which a son shuts up his father in a cellar and sends a man to kill him.
But the man's heart fails him and the prisoner escapes,--to reappear
like a ghost among his kin. That Schiller read this story is at any rate
thinkable, though there is no direct evidence of the fact.]
[Footnote 22: Cf. Minor, I, 300: "Die Räuber des jungen Schiller,
welcher sich damals nicht einmal um den nordamerikanischen
Freiheitskrieg, geschweige denn um das gewitterschwüle Frankreich
bekümmerte, waren nur ein Symptom und eine Vorahnung; eine Wirkung im
Kleinen vor der groszen Katastrophe."]
[Footnote 23: Cf. Minor, I, 313 ff.]
[Footnote 24: Act IV, scene I.]
[Footnote 25: "Don Quixote," Chapter 89.]
[Footnote 26: "Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung", V, 19.]
[Footnote 27: Sämmtliche Schriften, II, 365. Citations from Schiller
refer, unless otherwise expressly indicated, to Goedeke's
historico-critical edition in 15 vols. Stuttgart, 1867-1876.]
[Footnote 28: Sämmtliche Schriften, III, 529.]
[Footnote 29: Cf. Bulthaupt, "Dramaturgie des Schauspiels," I, 209, who
has some excellent remarks upon the dramatic qualities of the play and
the histrionic problems connected with it.]