The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa
Ein Diadem erkämpfen ist grosz; es wegwerfen ist göttlich.
_'Fiesco'_.
As we have seen, 'Fiesco' was written during the summer and fall of
1782. The following winter, having been rejected by the Mannheim stage,
it was published as a literary drama. This first edition bore the
sub-title: 'A Republican Tragedy.'
There is a very general agreement that 'Fiesco' is upon the whole the
weakest of Schiller's plays. As a 'republican tragedy' it is a
disappointment, since its political import, though obvious enough to one
acquainted with Schiller from other sources, is not brought out
distinctly in the play itself. Neither the friend nor the enemy of
republicanism, in any historical or human sense of the word, can derive
the slightest edification from 'Fiesco,' The political talk is vague and
unpractical, and we get no clear idea of the contending forces. When the
curtain goes down upon the chaos of intrigue, one is at a loss to know
how one is expected to feel. And yet the play is full of powerful
scenes, developed with masterly dramatic skill. As a mere spectacle it
rivals 'The Robbers', to which as a drama it is decidedly inferior. In
general its defects strike the reader more than the spectator. It is not
the hand of the dramatist but the eye of the historian that is lacking.
In other words the author, with all his seeming profundity of
philosophic reflection, was simply not ripe for historical tragedy.
The bare facts of Fiesco's conspiracy, related with as little
ascription of motive as possible, are these: In the year 1528 Andrea
Doria, who had won great distinction as an admiral in the French
service, but had now quarreled with the King of France and hoisted the
colors of Emperor Charles the Fifth, landed an expedition in Genoa and
captured the city from the French. Historians agree that he could
easily have made himself sovereign, but instead of doing so he restored
the old aristocratic republic, thus winning for himself the enduring
title of 'father and liberator of his country.' Although Doria was
simply an influential citizen of Genoa and enjoyed the general esteem
of his countrymen, his prominence in the state gave rise to animosities
among the noble families, and these were increased when he made his
young and headstrong kinsman, Gianettino, his heir. In the year 1547
the malcontents found a leader in the person of Giovanni Ludovigi
Fiesco, Count of Lavagna. Fiesco was young, handsome, rich and
ambitious--a dashing and unscrupulous cavalier. His first thought was
to restore the French domination and make himself only a viceroy of the
French king; but a fellow conspirator, Verrina, persuaded him to seize
for himself the sovereign power to which his rank and talents entitled
him. The conspiracy was carefully matured, Fiesco meanwhile, to divert
suspicion, acting the part of a giddy spendthrift and man of fashion.
On the night of January 2, 1547, the conspirators made their attack
upon the city. Gianettino Doria was killed, but the aged Andrea made
his escape. The success of Fiesco appeared to be complete, but as he
was going on board a galley the gang-plank turned, he fell into the sea
and his heavy armor bore him down. Without a leader the conspiracy
instantly collapsed. On the following day Andrea returned and the
Genoese republic went on as before,
It was a hint from Rousseau that suggested to Schiller, during his last
year in the academy, the idea of dramatizing this episode of Genoese
history. In the German 'Memoirs of Rousseau' by H.P. Sturz, referred to
in the preceding chapter, he found Rousseau quoted as follows:
The reason why Plutarch wrote such noble biographies is that he
never selected half-great men, such as exist by the thousands in
quiet states, but grand exemplars of virtue or sublime criminals. In
modern history there is a man deserving of his brush, and that is
Count Fiesco, whose training made him the very man to liberate his
country from the rule of the Dorias.... There was no other thought
in his soul than to dethrone the usurper.[42]
Here was a tempting theme for a young dramatist who had fed his own soul
upon Plutarch, was enamored of 'greatness' in whatever form, and had
already tried his hand upon a 'sublime criminal.' What could be better
for his purpose than a daring conspiracy, led by a Plutarchian hero who
was at the same time a single-minded patriot? In his earliest musings it
is probable that Schiller accepted Rousseau's view of Fiesco at its face
value, and when he began to consult the historians he found at first
some support for his preconception. Among his sources was the
'Conjuration du Comte de Fiesque', by De Retz; a book which was written,
according to a somewhat doubtful tradition, when its author was but
eighteen years old, and which, by its clever perversion of history and
its subtle insinuation of revolutionary ideas, is said to have drawn
from Richelieu the comment: 'There is a dangerous man!'[43] In the
sophisticated narrative of De Retz Fiesco appears as a modern Brutus,
whose thought of personal aggrandizement was altogether subordinate to
the thought of his country's welfare. He is made much better than he
really was, and the two Dorias much worse.
Further study of the subject, however, soon opened the eyes of Schiller
to the other side of the question; for in Robertson's 'Charles the
Fifth' he found Fiesco portrayed as an ambitious revolutionist who
sought to overthrow the Dorias only in order that he might make himself
the master of Genoa--in short as a Catiline instead of a Brutus. The
dramatic problem then turned from the first upon the character of
Fiesco. In the 'Dramaturgic' of Lessing the doctrine had been proclaimed
that the dramatist is not bound by the so-called facts of history; that
he may deal with them as suits his artistic purpose. But what was the
purpose to be in this case? Should it be a tragedy of austere patriotism
going down against a relatively bad order too strong to be resisted, or
a tragedy of corrupt ambition dashing itself to death against a
relatively good order too strong to be overthrown? Either conception, if
consistently worked out, might have sufficed for the groundwork of a
good historical tragedy. What Schiller did, however, was to vacillate
between the two, to blend them in a confusing way, and finally to let
the interest of his play turn largely upon the hero's mental struggle
between selfish ambition and unselfish patriotism.
The Catiline conception required an avenger of Genoa, for it was
evident[44] that the accidental drowning of Fiesco in the moment of his
triumph would never do in a play. It was necessary that his death appear
as a punishment, a nemesis. So for the role of avenger Schiller invented
a stern patriot to whom, without historical warrant, he gave the name of
Verrina. Verrina is the real Brutus. To furnish the conspirators with a
definite grievance Gianettino was made to violate the helpless Bertha,
who was then provided with an avenger in the person of the young
Bourgognino. Leonora, the wife of Fiesco, is historical. Robertson
relates that on the night of the uprising Fiesco went to take leave of
his wife, "whom he loved with tender affection." He found her "in all
the anguish of uncertainty and fear"; and her terror was increased when
she learned what was on foot. She endeavored by her tears and entreaties
and her despair to divert him from his purpose. But in vain; he left her
with the exclamation: "Farewell! You shall either never see me more, or
you shall behold to-morrow everything in Genoa subject to your power."
On the other hand, the intrigue of Fiesco and Julia, the sister of
Gianettino, is unhistorical. It was invented by Schiller as a part of
the general scheme of duplicity and frivolity by which Fiesco should
seek to quiet the suspicion of the Dorias. If this particular invention
was upon the whole unfortunate--the matter will be discussed further
on,--the same cannot be said of the Moor Hassan, who becomes Fiesco's
factotum and ends his career on the gallows. The rascally Moor is the
most picturesque figure and the most telling role in the whole piece.
Schiller introduces Fiesco as a seemingly frivolous _roué_, flirting
desperately with the Countess Julia, to the great torment of his wife
Leonora. We soon see, however, that the frivolity is only a mask: he has
a serious purpose and that purpose is to make himself master of Genoa.
At first, indeed, he toys with the idea of a nobler fame. In a soliloquy
at the end of the second act he exclaims: 'To conquer a diadem is grand;
to throw it away is divine. Down, tyrant! Let Genoa be free and me be
its happiest citizen!' But this mood does not long withstand the
intoxication of power. To rule, to rule alone, to feel that Genoa owes
everything to him only,--this soon becomes his all-absorbing ambition.
At the last, when the revolution has succeeded, he puts on the ducal
purple and the people are ready to acquiesce in the new régime. But old
Verrina is not so tractable. When he cannot prevail upon Fiesco to doff
the hateful insignia, he pushes him into the sea and exclaims in
disgust: 'I am going to Andrea!'
Such a scheme, it is evident, does not provide for a 'republican
tragedy', except in a very loose sense. If we had a republican idealist
pitting his strength against a tyrant and going down in the battle,
either because of his adversary's superior strength or because of some
weakness in his own character, that would be a tragedy of republicanism.
In Schiller's play, however, the conflict is not of that character. At
heart Fiesco is never a republican, though he sometimes takes his mouth
full of fine republican phrases. His mainspring of action is not the
welfare of Genoa, but his own aggrandizement. Old Andrea, whose power he
plots to overthrow and whose magnanimity puts him to shame, is actually
a better man than he. If he has a measure of our sympathy in his feud
with the younger Doria, that is only because Gianettino is portrayed as
a vulgar brute deserving of nothing but the gallows. Politically there
is little to choose between the two, so long as we regard virtue as
consisting in an unselfish devotion to an ideal of republican liberty.
The character of Fiesco being what it is, his final catastrophe produces
no very clear impression. One does not see precisely what bearing it is
to have on the political fortunes of Genoa. At first blush the
conclusion seems to mean that the state has been saved from the clutches
of a tyrant who was about to subvert its liberties. But if we look at
the matter in that light we have a tragedy, not of republicanism, but of
the "vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other."
With the usurper Fiesco, and the brute Gianettino, out of the way, the
state returns to the good regimen of Andrea, who represents the only
republicanism then thinkable, democracy in the modern sense being
nowhere in question. But it is doubtful whether Schiller intends Fiesco
to be thus reprobated. The hot-blooded Italian has certain traits that
win sympathy; and even his consuming ambition is so invested with a
glamour of romantic enthusiasm that it is difficult to reckon him among
the dangerous tyrants. If he is false to his better nature, we at any
rate see that he has a better nature. One is thus tempted to regard
Verrina's act as that of a madman who cares more for form than for
substance and sees danger where there is none.
For Verrina, who plays the part of Brutus to his country's Caesar and
seems to represent the sternest type of republican virtue, is a
repulsive fanatic. The horrible curse that he pronounces upon his
daughter when he hears that she has been outraged is significant at once
for his character and for the young Schiller's notion of tragic pathos.
Throwing a black veil over her head he vociferates thus:
Be blind! Accursed be the air that fans your cheek! Accursed be the
sleep that refreshes you! Accursed be every human trace that is
welcome to your misery! Go down into the deepest dungeon of my
house! Moan! Howl! Drag out the time with your woe. Let your life be
the slimy writhing of the dying worm,--the obstinate, crushing
struggle between being and not-being. And this curse shall rest upon
you until Gianettino has gasped out his last breath.
After this it is difficult to look up to Verrina as a competent savior
of society, however much one may sympathize with him in his private
feud. His cynical tergiversation at the end makes his previous conduct
ridiculous. It seems to say that he has been participating in a tragic
farce which is now ended. One might almost get the impression that the
whole play is only a satire upon republican clap-trap.
Satire, however, was very far from Schiller's thoughts. His enthusiasm
for liberty was much too genuine to permit any trifling with the sacred
theme. There is no doubt that he began 'Fiesco' supposing that it would
prove a convenient setting for those inspiring ideas of liberty which he
had absorbed from the reading of ancient history and of modern
revolutionary literature. They were vague and tumultuous ideas, which
had very little relation to a definite theory of government, but he was
very much in earnest with them, especially after his rasping experience
with the Duke of Württemberg. No one can mistake the autobiographic note
in the speech of Bourgognino which closes the first act: 'I have long
felt in my breast something that would not be satisfied. Now of a sudden
I know what it was. (Springing up heroically) I have a tyrant.' But the
young dramatist had not proceeded far before he discovered that his
ideal requirement was out of tune with the facts. To represent Fiesco as
a would-be liberator of his country was impossible without a violent
perversion of history for which he was not prepared. Out of deference to
history he was led to abase his hero into something like a Catilinarian
conspirator. But he could not give up the idea of a republican tragedy;
so he tried to save it by depicting his hero as a man who had it in him
to become a noble liberator, but is corrupted by the dazzling lures of
power and so led on to ruin.
There are those who regard Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic
complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the
knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more
or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how
intelligently he had studied the Italian Renaissance and how correctly
he had grasped its spirit." But this is to give him a credit that he
does not fully deserve. The simple truth is that 'Fiesco' was written
very hastily and that its author had spent precious little time in
studying the Italian Renaissance, though it must be admitted that he
possessed a remarkable gift for visualizing the little that he had
read. Complexity of motive is all very well,--very human and very
Italian; but the difficulty is that in this case it is not properly
subordinated to a luminous dramatic idea. When a man's motives become
so complex and contradictory that one does not know how to take him, he
ceases to be available for the higher purposes of tragedy. That
'Fiesco' produces this bewildering effect is due to the fact that the
inner logic of the piece had not been fully and consistently thought
out when the writing began.
And this is not all. The author seems unable to control and guide the
unruly spirits whom he has conjured into life. There is no lucid
grouping of historical forces. France, Germany and the Pope stand dimly
in the background like mechanical puppets, and we never learn what they
severally represent in relation to Genoese politics, Gianettino pulls a
string and has a sanction for the wholesale murder of his countrymen.
Fiesco pulls another string and gets men and galleys ad libitum. We do
not see an intelligible clash of great political ideas, but a wild
mêlée, in the outcome of which we have no reason to be particularly
interested. It is all as little tragic as a back-country vendetta, or a
factional fight in the halls of a modern parliament.
How loosely the play is articulated, and how little of logical
compulsion there Is in the catastrophe, is shown with fatal clearness by
Schiller's procedure in revising his work for the Mannheim stage. By a
few strokes of the pen at the end he changed its entire character. In
the original draft his vacillating mind had leaned more and more
decisively towards the Catilinarian conception of his hero, and the
book-version of 1783 was accordingly supplied with a motto from
Sallust's 'Catiline.' The sentence runs: _Nam id facinus imprimis ego
memorabile existimo, sceleris atque periculi novitate._ So the
conspiracy was to be a _facinus_ and a _scelus_, and the hero, of
course, another 'exalted criminal' in the style of Karl Moor. In the
stage version we observe that the motto from Sallust has been dropped,
and that while the title of 'tragedy' (_Trauerspiel_) is retained, the
adjective 'republican' is omitted. Furthermore, without any radical
revision of the preceding portraiture taken as a whole, a non-tragical
conclusion has been substituted for the final catastrophe. Fiesco, hard
pressed by the strenuous Verrina, declares that his heart has been right
all along; only he was resolved that Genoa's freedom should be his work
and his alone. So he breaks his scepter, concludes an eternal friendship
with the amazed Verrina, and bids the people embrace their 'happiest
fellow-citizen.' Thus the original version, which had called itself a
republican tragedy and was a tragedy without being republican, became a
play which is truly republican without being called so, but is no longer
a tragedy.
This singular _volte-face_ on the part of our dramatist has of course
been the subject of infinite discussion. The most of the critics appear
to regard it as a mistake, to say the least. One of them,
Bellermann,[46] surmises that Schiller made the change against his will
to meet the views of Dalberg. But of this there is no clear proof; and
surely we cannot suppose that Schiller would have consented even
reluctantly to a change which he himself felt to be utterly absurd
because a complete stultification of the preceding plot. He must have
felt that the new ending was artistically at least possible. And so it
is. It is with 'Fiesco' somewhat as with the Bible: the conclusion that
one reaches must depend upon the particular texts that one selects for
emphasis. If we accent certain passages and pass lightly over others, we
get the impression that it is a tragedy of selfish ambition doomed to
disaster. If we accent a different set of passages, we are sure that it
is a drama of republican idealism, sorely tempted by autocratic
ambition, but destined to triumph finally over the baser motive. In the
one view Verrina is a virtuous patriot; in the other he is a mad fanatic
who does not understand the greatness of his chief. After Fiesco
declares in soliloquy,--when a dramatic character is supposed to speak
his real sentiments if anywhere,--that it is far nobler to renounce a
diadem than to win it, we are certainly justified in expecting that he
will seek the higher glory for himself. Thus either ending is possible,
and which is the better is mainly a question of stage effect. Neither is
historical, and neither gives a republican tragedy.
It would be pedantic indeed to have devoted so many words to a mere
matter of name. If a drama is good it signifies but little what we call
it, or whether its title be exactly appropriate. In this case, however,
we have to do with a vital defect and not merely with a misnomer. A play
may be good in different ways; and what the preceding criticism is
intended to bring out is the fact that the strength of 'Fiesco', such as
it has, does not lie in the intellectual organization of the whole. The
mind of Schiller, but little trained hitherto upon historical studies,
had not yet learned how to extract a clear poetic essence from a
confused medley of recorded facts and opinions. Nature had endowed him
with a vivid imagination for details, but study had not yet fitted him
to exercise in a large and luminous way the sovereignty of the artist.
His facts confused him and pulled him this way and that. And so we miss
in 'Fiesco' that 'monumental fresco-painting', as it has been called,
which constitutes the charm of his riper historical dramas.
But average play-goers are wont to bother their heads but little over
these questions of higher artistic import which are apt to bulk so large
before the mind of the literary critic. There are hundreds of literary
dramas that are impossible or deadly dull upon the stage; and conversely
dramatic talent will often make an interesting play out of a succession
of scenes that lead the philosophic mind no whither. If 'Fiesco' remains
a fairly good stage-play, it is because the interest turns not upon its
ultimate import, but upon its elaborate intrigue, its exciting
situations and its general picturesqueness. The intrigue carries one
along by its very audacity, notwithstanding that in the light of reason
much of it appears rather absurd. Thus we wonder how a mere brute like
Gianettino can have become such a power in the state right under the
eyes of the wise and good Andrea, who is subject to no illusions with
regard to him. No objection can be made to Fiesco's mask of gayety and
cynicism in the first two acts, for that is historical. But was it
necessary for him to deceive and torture the wife to whom in the end he
appears loyally devoted? In any case it is clear that the exposition
should have hinted somehow at the true condition of affairs, for it is a
good old rule that while the people on the stage may disguise themselves
and befool one another as they will, the audience must be kept posted.
As it is, there is no suggestion of make-believe in Fiesco's courting of
Julia. When he exclaims in soliloquy that she loves him and he 'envies
no god', one is justified in assuming that chivalrous devotion to his
wife is not among his virtues. It is to be supposed, apparently, that he
makes love to Julia in order to be seen of men; but as a matter of fact
nothing comes of his flirtation except the torture of his wife. No one
is deceived whom it was important for him to deceive, and the whole
incident serves only to put his character in a dubious light. Is this
what Schiller intended? Did he feel that his hot-blooded Italian should
not be made too much of an idealist in his relation to women? Did he
wish it to be understood that Fiesco is honestly infatuated with the
voluptuous Julia until he learns of her attempt to poison his wife?
These are queries to which the play gives no very clear answer. So far
as the conspiracy is concerned the whole affair with Julia is rather
badly motivated.
Still more dubious, from a rational point of view, is Fiesco's relation
to the Moor. That a man having large political designs requiring secrecy
and fidelity should, on the spur of the moment, choose as his
confidential agent a venal scoundrel who has just tried to murder him,
is, to say the least, a little improbable. Here Schiller was evidently
trying to Shaksperize again; trying, that is, to assert the poet's
sovereign lordship over the petty bonds of Philistine logic. The Moor's
frank exposition of the professional ethics of rascality, the dash with
which he does his work, his ubiquitous serviceableness, and his rogue's
humor make him a picturesque character and account for his having become
on the stage the most popular figure in the piece; but that Fiesco
should be willing to trust himself and his cause to such a scamp, and
that such remarkable results should be achieved by the black man's
kaleidoscopic activity, brings into the play an element of buffoonery
that injures it on the serious side. The daring play of master and man
excites a certain interest in their game, but it is impossible to care
very much who wins. From a dramaturgic point of view, however, the Moor
is a very useful invention, since Fiesco is thereby enabled to direct
the whole conspiracy from his palace, and at the same time, in the
person of his lieutenant, to be in every part of the city. Thus the
action is concentrated and changes of scene are avoided.
As a portrayer of female character the author of 'Fiesco' has clearly
made some progress since his first lame attempt in 'The Robbers', but
the improvement is by no means dazzling. Both Leonora and Julia are
singular creatures, and their unaccountableness is not of the right
feminine kind that offers an attractive rôle to a good actress. Why
should the Countess Fiesco, herself an aristocrat and a woman with
heroic blood in her veins, submit so meekly in her own house to the
coarse effrontery of the woman who has wronged her? We get the
impression that she is only a crushed flower,--a helpless, wan-cheeked
thing, with nothing womanly about her except her jealousy. And then, at
the end, she suddenly develops into a heroine. And what a strange
heroine! No one will chide her for resorting on the fatal night to the
protection of male attire,--a good enough Shaksperian device,--but how
remarkable that a woman wandering crazily in the dark, and already
sufficiently disguised, should borrow a tell-tale cloak and a worse than
useless sword from a corpse that she happens to stumble upon! No wonder
that Schiller in revising for the stage decided to let Leonora live
rather than provide for her death by such a stagy _tour de force_. In
the stage version, however, she does not reappear after the parting
scene, and so we are left to wonder why she was introduced at all.
In Madame Julia we have a type of woman who was meant to be repulsive,
and so far forth the young artist must be admitted to have wrought
successfully. She is somewhat minutely described as a 'tall and plump
widow of twenty-five; a proud coquette, her beauty spoiled by its
oddity; dazzling and not pleasing, and with a wicked, cynical
expression.' That such a woman should befool Fiesco and rejoice in her
triumph is quite thinkable, but her qualities are those which usually go
with a certain amount of discretion. That she should suddenly lose her
head and throw herself away in a voluptuous frenzy hardly comports with
the type. Nor is there anything in the inventory of her qualities that
prepares us for her sudden assumption of the role of poisoner, when she
is already, as she must suppose, the mistress of the situation. In her
altercation with Leonora in the second scene of Act II she uses a number
of coarse expressions befitting a woman of vulgar birth,--wherein some
of the critics see an evidence of Schiller's unfamiliarity with the ways
of refined ladies. It is quite possible, however, that we have to do
instead with a realistic attempt to make her language match the
essential vulgarity of her character. At any rate it is interesting to
know that the scene was offensive to Schiller himself. He worked upon it
with repugnance and was glad to be able to omit it entirely from the
stage version.[47]
In respect of its diction 'Fiesco' is in no way essentially different
from 'The Robbers', albeit some have imagined that a faint improvement
is discernible. There is the same tearing of passion to tatters, the
same predilection for florid rhetoric in the sentimental passages, and
for frenzied talk and action in passages of more violent emotion. When
Fiesco discovers that he has killed his wife, he first thrashes about
him furiously with his sword. Then he gnashes his teeth at God in heaven
and expresses himself thus: 'If I only had His universe between my
teeth, I feel in a mood to tear all nature into a grinning monster
having the semblance of my pain.' In his final expostulation with the
would-be tyrant, Verrina delivers himself of this sentence: 'Had I too
been such an honest dolt as not to recognize the rogue in you, Fiesco,
by all the horrors of eternity, I would twist a cord out of my own
intestines and throttle you with it, so that my fleeing soul should
bespatter you with yeasty foam-bubbles.'
No wonder that critics and actors alike were offended by such insanity
of rant and that Schiller himself soon saw the folly of it. He had got
the idea that when a man is figuratively 'beside himself', the most
effective way to portray his state of feeling is to make him talk and
act like a veritable madman. He had yet to learn the profound wisdom,
for poets as well as actors, of Hamlet's rule to "acquire and beget, in
the whirlwind of passion, a temperance that may give it smoothness."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 42: Schiller refers to the quoted passage in his review of
'The Robbers', Schriften, II, 357. It has not been found in Rousseau's
writings. Sturz drew from unpublished sources.]
[Footnote 43: On the character of De Retz's work, and its relation to
the original of Mascardi, consult the Notes and Introduction by
Chantelauze in Vol. V of the 'Grands Ecrivains' edition of De Retz,
p. 473 ff.]
[Footnote 44: It was evident, that is, to Schiller. In the dedication of
'Fiesco' to Professor Abel he wrote; "Die wahre Katastrophe des
Komplotts, worin der Graf durch einen unglücklichen Zufall am Ziel
seiner Wünsche zu Grunde geht, muszte durchaus verändert werden, denn
die Natur des Dramas duldet den Finger des Ungefährs oder der
unmittelbaren Vorsehung nicht."]
[Footnote 45: H. H. Boyesen, in his biography of Schiller, Chapter III.]
[Footnote 46: "Schillers Dramen," Berlin, 1898, I, III ff. Bellermann,
who defends through thick and thin the unity and consistency of the
original 'Fiesco', thinks that it is from first to last a tragedy of
vaulting ambition,--not a political play at all, but a character
play,--and that no other idea ever entered Schiller's mind. But his
argument is anything but convincing and he carefully refrains from all
discussion of the tell-tale phrase, 'a republican tragedy'.]
[Footnote 47: This appears from a letter of Sept. 29, 1783, to Dalberg.]