Don Carlos
Arm in Arm mit dir,
So fordr' ich mein Jahrhundert in die Schranken.
_'Don Carlos'_.
With the publication of 'Don Carlos' Schiller's literary reputation
entered upon a new phase. Hitherto he had been known as a playwright in
whom the passion for strong effects often obscured the sense of artistic
fitness. Of his dramatic power there could be no doubt, but had he the
higher gift of the great poet? Would he ever be able to clothe his
conceptions in a form that would appeal permanently to the general heart
because of high and rare artistic excellence? Doubts of this kind were
quite justifiable up to the year 1787, but they were set at rest by 'Don
Carlos'. However vulnerable it may be as a poetic totality, it has
passages that are magnificent. Its sonorous verse, wedded to a lofty
argument and freighted with the noblest idealism of the century, made
sure its author's title to a place in the Walhalla of the poets.
Except 'Wallenstein' no other work of Schiller cost him such long and
strenuous toil. 'Don Carlos', like Goethe's 'Faust', is a stratified
deposit. The time that went to the making of it, only four years in all,
was comparatively short, but it was for Schiller a time of rapid change;
and the play, intensely subjective from the first, participated in the
ripening process. The result is a certain lack of artistic congruity.
Schiller himself, always his own best critic, felt this and frankly
admitted it in the first of his 'Letters upon Don Carlos'.
It may be [he wrote] that in the first [three] acts I have aroused
expectations which the last do not fulfill. St. Réal's novel,
perhaps also my own remarks upon it in the first number of the
_Thalia_, may have suggested to the reader a standpoint from which
the work can no longer be regarded. During the period of
elaboration, which on account of divers interruptions was a pretty
long time, much changed within myself.... What had mainly attracted
me at first, attracted me less later on, and at last hardly at all.
New ideas that came into my mind crowded out the earlier ones.
Carlos himself had declined in my favor, for no other reason perhaps
than that I had outgrown him, and for the opposite reason the
Marquis of Posa had taken his place. So it came about that I brought
a very different heart to the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the first
three were already in the hands of the public, and the plan of the
whole could not be recast; I had either to suppress the piece
entirely (for which very few of my readers would have thanked me),
or else to fit the second half to the first as best I could.
Let us look somewhat closely at the process of evolution here alluded to
in general terms.
The original impulse came from a work of romantic fiction, the 'Dom
Carlos' of St. Réal, which was first read by Schiller in the summer of
1782 and drew from him the comment that the story 'deserved the brush of
a dramatist'. St. Réal's novel begins by telling how Charles the Fifth
arranged, just before his abdication, that his grandson Carlos should
some day marry Elizabeth of Valois: and how afterwards Philip determined
to take the French princess for his own wife instead of leaving her to
his son. Meanwhile, however, by much gazing at the picture of his
betrothed, young Carlos had learned to love her, and she in turn had
conceived for him a 'disposition to love rather than a veritable
passion'. Arrived at the Spanish court the young queen wins all hearts;
even the white-haired Philip falls in love with her, though he treats
her with stately reserve in the presence of others and surrounds her
with the restraints of Spanish etiquette. Thus the queen comes to feel
that she possesses 'only the body of her husband, his soul being filled
with the designs of his ambition and the meditation of his policy'. As
for Carlos, his love-lorn eyes soon betray to her how it is with him,
but she can only pity him, though she secretly returns his love, for she
is as virtuous as she is beautiful.
Not so the Princess Eboli, wife of Ruy Gomez, the tutor of Carlos.
Having tried to win the love of the king and found her designs thwarted
by the queen's beauty, Eboli makes advances to Prince Carlos, who lets
her know that he cannot love her and thus makes her angry. In this mood
she bestows her favor upon the king's half-brother, Don Juan of Austria,
who is also enamored of the queen and has been watching Carlos
suspiciously. Having thus made enemies of Eboli and Don Juan, Carlos
next draws upon himself the hatred of the powerful Duke of Alva, of Ruy
Gomez, and of the Inquisition. This he does by his outspoken criticism
of their doings and his threats of punishment to be meted out to them
when he shall have become king. Anxious for their own future Alva and
Ruy Gomez conspire together and cause suspicions of Carlos to be
whispered in the ear of the king. At first Philip is not greatly
excited. When Carlos, importuned by Count Egmont, asks for a commission
to the Netherlands, Philip does not refuse, but declares that he will go
too and share the peril of his son. This, however, is a mere ruse to
gain time. While they are waiting, the king meanwhile feigning illness,
Carlos communicates freely with the queen through his bosom friend, the
Marquis of Posa. Hearing of this intimacy the king now becomes really
jealous, but of Posa not of Carlos. Maddened by suspicion he has the
marquis murdered on the street and employs Eboli to watch the queen.
After this Carlos resolves upon independent action and begins to
negotiate with the Netherlanders. His operations are watched and
reported by his enemies, and just as he is about to leave Spain he is
arrested. The king places his case before the Holy Office, which decrees
that he must die. Being allowed to choose the manner of his death he
opens his veins while bathing.
With the actual Don Carlos, whose story bears but little resemblance to
that of St. Réal's hero, we are not particularly concerned. The French
Abbé's drift is to exalt the French princess and to give a telling
picture of a pair of high-minded lovers who are brought to their death
by a complicate intrigue begotten of jealousy, political hatred and
religious fanaticism. After the death of Carlos the queen is poisoned
and then, one after the other, all the conspirators meet with poetic
justice. "Ainsi", the Abbé concludes, "furent expiées les morts à jamais
déplorables d'un prince magnanime, et de la plus belle et de la plus
vertueuse princesse qui fut jamais. C'est ainsi que leurs ombres
infortunées furent enfin pleinement appaisées par les funestes destinées
de tous les complices de leur trépas."
St. Réal's novel was published in 1672 and has been a favorite quarry of
the dramatist. Of the plays of Otway (1676) and Campistron (1685)
Schiller had no knowledge, nor did he receive any suggestions from the
fierce and gloomy 'Filippo' of Alfieri, which appeared in 1783. He
approached the subject in his own way and his first thought was simply
to dramatize St. Réal, who is mainly interested in the love tragedy and
writes as a literary artist rather than as a political or religious
pamphleteer. We possess a prose outline[65] of 'Don Carlos', written
probably at Bauerbach, which shows exactly how the theme first bit into
Schiller's mind. The exposition was to show the secret passion of the
lovers and the dangers threatening them from the jealousy of Philip, the
political hostility of the grandees and the malice of the slighted
Eboli. In the third act the king would become madly suspicious and
resolve upon his son's death. Then there was to be a gleam of hope: the
ambition of Carlos would awaken and begin to prevail over his love,
while Posa would divert the king's suspicion to himself and fall a
sacrifice to friendship. Then a new danger would arise: the king would
discover Don Carlos in a seeming 'rebellion', and decree his death. The
dying declaration of Carlos would prove his innocence and the king would
be left alone to mourn the havoc he had wrought and to punish the
conspirators who had deceived him.
This sketch promises, it will be observed, not a political tragedy,
but, as Schiller himself afterwards phrased it, a 'domestic tragedy in
a royal household'. Springing up from the same soil and at the same
time as 'Cabal and Love', it was to be much the same sort of play. In
both a pair of high-minded lovers belonging together by natural
affinity, but separated by artificial barriers; the rights of passion
battling in the one case with social prejudice, in the other with the
law of Rome and the malice of courtiers; in both a court plot against
the lovers; the hero beset by a fair sinner who receives him in her
private room, lays siege to him, and is angered by the slighting of her
love; in both a tyrannical and headstrong father at enmity with his
son. Of the political ideas which the world associates with 'Don
Carlos' there is here no adumbration. We hear nothing of the
Netherlanders, nor of the Inquisition, nor of the rights of man. Posa
is only a friend of Carlos, not the ambassador of all mankind, and
there is no room for his golden dreams of philanthropic statesmanship.
And yet it is worth noticing that in three points (all in the third
act) Schiller adds to his French source: Carlos's ambition was to waken
and prevail over his love, Posa was to sacrifice himself, and the
lovers were to rise superior to their passion.
However, no sooner did our playwright address himself seriously to his
task than his imagination began to break over the bounds he had set for
it. Even at Bauerbach, as his letters show, his mind was occupied with
the thought of 'avenging mankind' by scourging the gloomy despotism of
Philip, the monstrous cruelty of Alva, the dark intrigues of the Jesuits
and the hideous crimes of the Inquisition. That he made any progress in
the spring of 1783, further than to cogitate upon his general plan and
to fall in love with his hero, is not probable; nor do his Mannheim
letters allude to 'Don Carlos' until June, 1784. In a letter of that
date he assures Dalberg,--mindful of that good man's trials in
connection with 'Cabal and Love',--that the new play will be 'anything
but a political piece'. Whatever could offend the feelings was to be
strictly avoided. August 24 he writes that 'Don Carlos' is a 'splendid,
subject', especially for himself. Four great characters, Carlos, Philip,
the queen, and Alva (no mention of Posa) open before him a boundless
field. He cannot forgive himself for having tried to shine in the
bourgeois drama, where another may easily surpass him (this in allusion
to Iffland), whereas in historical tragedy he need fear no rival. He
adds that he is now fairly master of the iambic form and that the verse
cannot fail to impart splendor and dignity.
So we see that by the end of his first year in Mannheim Schiller had
indeed undergone a change. The _saeva indignatio_ of the dramatic
pamphleteer had given way to the serener mood of the poetic artist. This
change would doubtless have come about under any circumstances, through
the natural ripening of his mind and art, but it was hastened by the
influence of Klein and Wieland, and by the example of Lessing's
'Nathan'. Anton von Klein, a Jesuit _bel esprit_ living at Mannheim, was
a steadfast champion of the regular heroic tragedy. He had written a
searching review of 'The Robbers', pointing out its many faults and
absurdities, but he recognized Schiller's talent and saw in him a man
worth converting. At Mannheim a friendship sprang up between the two,
and Schiller heard much talk about the superior merit of the noble
poetic style,--a region of thought in which he had hitherto wandered but
little. He had written thus far out of the fervor of his soul, and
theory of any sort had touched him but little. From Rousseauite
literature he had caught a fantastic conception of 'nature', and this
had led him to portray men and women who were scarcely more natural than
those of Gottsched himself. In the rush of feeling he had enlisted among
the young revolutionists whose stormy and stressful tendency, curiously
enough, was regarded as 'English'. And now he found that there was after
all something to be said in favor of the classical French type. The
'anglo-maniacs' were not in possession of the whole truth. Might there
not be, perhaps, a _tertium quid_,--a German drama having a character of
its own and combining the literary dignity and artistic finish of the
French with the warmth and variety of the pseudo-English school? As if
in answer to this query, Lessing's 'Nathan', published in 1779, had
already opened a vista of limitless possibilities. And 'Nathan' was in
blank verse.
To this was added the influence of Wieland, who had lately published a
series of 'Letters to a Young Poet',[66] in which he read his
contemporaries a lecture on the absurdity of their boasting over the
French. He wanted to know where the German dramas were that could
compare with the best works of Racine, Corneille and Molière. He
insisted that a perfect drama no less than a perfect epic must be in
verse. Even rime in his opinion was indispensable. Such doctrine coming
from a man of Wieland's immense authority in literary matters could not
fail to influence the groping mind of Schiller, though he could not
stomach the demand for rime. The blank verse of Shakspere and Lessing
seemed to promise best, and so he set about practicing upon it. At first
the meter gave him great difficulty; he could not subdue his strong
passion and his wild tropes to the even tenor of the decasyllabic
cadence. Then followed his decision to publish his play piecemeal in the
_Thalia_,--an unfortunate decision as it proved. His hope was to profit
betimes by what his critics might say. He was in a mood of boundless
docility and boundless confidence in the public. Resolved to write 'no
verses that could not be submitted to the best heads in the nation', he
fondly imagined that the nation would be as eager to help him as he was
eager to be helped. As a matter of fact he got but little assistance
from the critic tribe, and his piecemeal publication only served to
embarrass him when he came to the final redaction of the whole.
In the short preface which introduced the first installment to the
public, Schiller ventured the opinion that the excellence of his tragedy
would depend mainly upon his success in portraying the king. The
situation of Carlos and the queen was interesting, he thought, but not
tragically pathetic; it would be difficult to create sympathy for them.
If, however, King Philip was to be the center of tragic interest, it was
evident that he could not be depicted, in accordance with a one-sided
tradition, as a repellent monster. From these and other expressions in
the same essay we can see that Schiller was growing cool toward his
hero. He felt that the troubles of Carlos and the queen could not be
regarded under the Rousseauite scheme of natural passion battling with
odious convention, but that the passion was itself odious. He felt that
a young prince, pining and whining and plunging himself into disaster
all on account of an illicit and mawkish love for his stepmother, was
not a very inspiring personage to be the hero of a great historical
drama. The solution of the problem seemed for the moment to lie in a
'rescue' of King Philip. So the love-tragedy in a royal household began
to take on more than ever the character of a political tragedy, the
promise to Dalberg being quickly forgotten. When he began to publish,
however, his political program was still rather vague and negative; it
hardly went beyond the intention to bestow an incidental scourging upon
the enemies of mankind in church and state.
Then came the influence of Körner, the effect of which was to give
great prominence to the character of Posa as a positive champion of the
right, and to make him for a while the real hero of the play. There
seems at first blush but little resemblance between the fanatical
idealist of Schiller's imagination and the sensible Dresden lawyer, but
the Körner strain in Posa is unmistakable. In his intercourse with
Schiller he was evermore insisting on the importance of doing something
for mankind. Enthusiasm, love, friendship, sentiment of any kind, were
valuable in his estimation only as sources of inspiration for telling
activity. As matters of mere private ecstasy, of froth and foam rising
and falling to no effect in the turmoil of the individual soul, they
were for him objects of mild derision. And the idea that lay nearest
his heart as a student of Kant was the idea of freedom. And so, as
Schiller worked upon his play at Dresden, Posa was made the exponent of
the new point of view. He became the teacher of the unripe Carlos, even
as Körner had been the teacher of the unripe Schiller; the subduer of
unmanly emotionalism; the apostle of renunciation; the pointer of the
way to great deeds; the prophet of a free humanity to come. In the
brilliant light thus thrown upon Posa the other heroes were somewhat
obscured. The poet's original love, Don Carlos, and his second love,
Don Philip, had to make way for a third passion that was stronger than
either of the others.
The four installments of 'Don Carlos' that were printed in the _Thalia_,
up to the end of 1786, comprised in all three acts. They carried the
action to the point where the king, lonely amid sycophants and
deceivers, sighs for a 'man' to counsel him. The great scene between
Posa and Philip was yet to come in Act IV. The matter already in print
contained more than four thousand verses, and several scenes had only
been sketched in prose. At this rate it was evident that the play would
reach twice the length of a regular tragedy and would be an
impossibility on the stage. Schiller began to see that his impatience of
stage restrictions and his subjective interest in certain situations had
done him an evil turn. He had been deplorably long-winded. And just then
came out a caustic review which showed him that he had committed other
sins than those of prolixity.[67] Nevertheless he did not now have
recourse to that drastic surgery whereby, in the edition of 1801, he
reduced the unwieldy play to more manageable dimensions.[68] Without any
radical revision of the part already in print, he completed the last two
acts as best he could, with Minerva often unwilling. Posa was made to
gain the king's confidence, to become seemingly omnipotent, and in the
pride of his imagined strength to enter upon that desperate game of
intrigue and double-dealing which involves himself and his cause and his
helpless friend, Don Carlos, in final disaster.
Thus St. Réal's pathetic tale of love and intrigue had been left far
behind, and out of it had come a tragedy of amiable political idealism,
growing insolent with self-confidence and losing touch with present
realities in its dazzling dream of things to come.
'The soul of Shakspere's Hamlet, the blood and nerves of Leisewitz's
Julius, the pulse of Schiller himself',--this, it will be recalled, was
the original formula for the composition of Prince Carlos. But, alas,
the soul of one of Shakspere's heroes is not so easily purloined, and
Schiller did not succeed well in his proposed larceny. What we find is
not the soul but the situation of Hamlet: a young prince just returned
from the university,--troubled by a strange melancholy,--a mystery to
king and court,--beset by spies whom he sends packing,--visited by a
dear academic friend,--called to a great work to which he feels himself
unequal, and so forth. The parallel is obvious, but it hardly goes
beyond externalities. Nor does the portrait of Carlos owe very much that
is vital to Leisewitz. He gives us, to be sure, a love-sick prince whose
illicit passion unnerves him, and like Carlos Julius has a friend who
admonishes him to be a man. But there the resemblance ends; he has not
the strength to renounce and remains to the end a sentimental weakling.
The truth is that the soul, pulse, blood and nerves of Carlos are simply
Schiller's own. There is no other creation of his into which he put so
much of himself. That feeling of dark despair and dead ambition to which
Carlos gives expression in his first dialogue with Posa is but a poetic
echo of actual experiences.
I too have known a Carlos in my dreams
Whose cheek flushed crimson when he heard the name
Of Freedom. But that Carl is dead and buried,--
sighs the Spanish prince. 'I might perhaps have become great, but fate
took the field against me too early.... Love and esteem me for that
which I might have become under more favorable stars',--writes the
actual Schiller.[69] And just as Carlos throws himself into the arms of
Posa and thinks to find his all in friendship, so Schiller hoped
ineffable things from Körner. Nowhere else in literature has the
eighteenth-century cult of friendship found such fervid, and in the main
such noble, expression as in 'Don Carlos'.
It may indeed be fairly objected that, in view of what is to come later,
the Carlos of the first act is a little too soft even for the
sentimental age. We are required to have faith in his heroic capacity
for enterprises of great pith and moment. But after his first dialogue
with Posa it is as difficult for the reader or spectator to trust him as
it is for King Philip. His lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as
a youthful friendship; his abject confession of despair and dependence;
his long-drawn-out revelation of a sick heart, and his morbid craving
for sympathy in a passion which he himself feels to be abominable,--all
this suggests a cankered soul of which there can be little hope. Hamlet
greets the returning Horatio with the simple words:
Sir, my good friend. I'll change that name with you.
The corresponding passage in Schiller runs:
Can it be?
Is't true? Is't possible? 'Tis really thou.
I press thee to my heart and feel the beat
Of thine omnipotent against my own.
Now all is well again.--In this embrace
The sickness of my soul is cured. I lie
Upon my Roderick's neck.
One does not see how such pitiful weakness is all at once to be
converted into manly strength by the mere arrival of a friend; wherefore
that fine saying of Carlos which closes the first act,
Arm in arm with thee,
I hurl defiance at my century,
sounds a trifle bombastic.
So again at his first meeting with Elizabeth, Carlos is distressingly
mawkish. She pictures him, in pitying indignation, as succeeding to the
throne, undoing his father's work and at last marrying herself. Then he
exclaims in sudden horror:
Accursed son! Yes, it is over. Now
'Tis over. Now I see it all so clearly,
and much more of the same purport. But how strange that he should have
brooded for eight moons over his passion without ever having considered
how it might appear to the object of it! His talk here suggests a mental
inadequacy which one is hardly prepared to see change all of a sudden
into heroic resolution.
To be sure it was a part of Schiller's design to represent in Carlos a
process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling
sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great
men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at
first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason is
that Schiller did not foresee the end from the beginning. He thought of
Carlos originally as a hapless youth having a sort of natural right to
rebel. It was a part of the plan, moreover, that he should renounce and
grow strong through renunciation. But this was to come later in the
third act; in the beginning he was to dally with the morbid passion
which was to be his tragic guilt. Now with this conception of the
subject, the portrait of Carlos, just as we have it, fits in very well;
but when the main interest of the play had become political, when the
lawless love had become of no account and the renunciation
everything,--then it was surely an error to introduce Carlos in such a
pitiful plight of soul that faith in him is next to impossible, and the
next moment require us to accept him as a hero.
In fine, one may well wish that Carlos had a little more of the soul of
Hamlet,--leastwise of Hamlet's rough energy of character and saving
sense of humor. But the time is past for thinking to dispose of Schiller
by saying that he was no Shakspere. Enough that he was himself. And
nowhere was he more himself than in just this combination of infinite
soft-heartedness with large manly ambition. When Carlos preaches to his
father that 'tears are the eternal credential of humanity', he utters a
genuine oracle of the sentimental age. And when in the final scene he
appears purified by suffering, master of his selfish passion and all
intent upon that higher good of which he has caught a glimpse, he speaks
again from the heart of Schiller. What a noble figure is Carlos in this
last interview with his mother! What matchless poetry in the lines! And
how genuinely, thrillingly tragic is the ending of the scene!
The teacher of Prince Carlos is the amazing Marquis of Posa. In a
cynical foot-note of the year 1845 Carlyle quotes, with seeming
approval, Richter's comparison of Posa to the tower of a
light-house,--"high, far-shining, empty". But what would Jean Paul have
had? Is it not quite enough for a light-house to be high and
far-shining? One does not see how its usefulness would be enhanced by
filling it with the beans and bacon of practical politics. Here surely
one must side with Schiller and never think of criticising him for not
making his Posa an exponent of political ideas that belong to a later
time. Every age has its dream. Ours is of a people to be made happy by
democratic legislation; Schiller's was of a people to be made happy by
the personal goodness and enlightenment of the monarch. That the one
dream, seen _sub specie aeternitatis_, is any more empty and fatuous
than the other, would be very difficult to prove.
The sentimental imagination of the eighteenth century was fond of
dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station. Standing above all
other men, occupied habitually with weighty matters of state, surrounded
by self-seeking flatterers and schemers, how was a ruler ever to hear
the truth or to know the blessedness of disinterested friendship? Awful
fate to be thus cut off from tender human affection and compelled to
tread the wine-press alone! And if a prince should really find a friend,
how fortunate for him and his subjects! It was the simple theory of
idealists under the Old Régime that the happiness of a people depended
altogether upon the wisdom and goodness of the king; and in an age when
'feeling was everything' it was natural that goodness of the heart
should count for more than mere sagacity. What the king was believed to
need pre-eminently, was to keep alive his human sympathies; and how
could he do this better than by having some one to love and confide in?
So Schiller provides his Spanish prince with a friend. Our drama seems
to wish to impute to Posa a lovable personality; else how account for
the spell that he casts over all three of the royal personages?[70]
Looked at closely, however, and judged by his conduct rather than by his
fine phrases, he appears anything but lovable. After his death it comes
to light that he is deeply involved in a conspiracy for which the
ordinary name is treason. He has been organizing a combination of
European powers for the purpose of detaching the Netherlands by force
from the Spanish crown. He returns to Spain as an arch-traitor,--with
his pockets full of letters which if discovered would cost him his head.
When one learns this and then thinks back in the light of this
knowledge, his conduct throughout the play appears absolutely
inconceivable; so that one is driven to the conjecture that Schiller did
not think of him all along as an out-and-out traitor, but added this
touch at the last, along with others, for the purpose of accenting his
character as a Quixotic madman.
Up to the fourth act the impression produced by him is that of an
amiable idealist, who has travelled extensively and acquired liberal
ideas of government. He has been shocked by the regime of persecution
and bloodshed in the Netherlands. He cares nothing for Protestantism as
a creed, but he is an apostle of tolerance in the style of Frederick the
Great. He returns to Spain intent upon securing for the Netherlands not
political independence through revolution, but freedom of thought under
the Spanish crown; and this he thinks to accomplish by procuring the
stadholdership for Prince Carlos. Now this being the presupposition, it
was a great thought of Schiller to bring his humane dreamer face to face
with the somber despot, Philip the Second, Let it be granted that Posa's
views of statesmanship, which belong to the Age of Enlightenment, could
hardly have found lodgment in the brain of a chevalier of the 16th
century. The thing is perhaps supposable only in poetry; but there it is
supposable enough, and Schiller need not have troubled himself to argue
away the anachronism. It is the poet's prerogative to mask himself and
his own age in the forms of the fictitious past. He will do it anyway,
no matter how hard he may strive after historical verisimilitude. It is
just as well, therefore, for him to throw away his scruples and stand
boldly on his rights.
From a dramaturgic point of view, indeed, the long political altercation
between Posa and Philip is out of place; it is magnificent, but it holds
up the action to no purpose, and the play goes on as if it had not been.
Schiller was evidently concerned to produce a pendant to the great scene
in 'Nathan the Wise'. Saladin wants truth, Philip wants a man. Both the
prophets prepare themselves for their ordeal in a brief soliloquy. Both
monarchs get their wish, and a friendly relation ensues. Both scenes are
purple patches of didacticism,--the author preaching a sermon to his
contemporaries. Unfortunately Schiller did not have at hand a matchless
fable to make his doctrine concrete and give it human interest. In
places his language is abstract and difficult to follow, but taken as a
whole the scene is admirable in its denotation of Posa's manly
independence and humane philosophy. For a moment the marquis dreams of
accomplishing his purpose by an appeal to the goodness and enlightenment
of the king; and into his appeal he pours all the eloquence of
eighteenth-century humanitarianism. All that the literature of
generations had garnered up; all that lay on the heart of the young
Schiller, in the way of fair hopes for mankind to be realized by humane
and enlightened rulership, finds here immortal expression through the
mouth of Posa.
And then what a revulsion in the last two acts! The great scene of the
third act leaves an impression that the world's affairs are not in such
bad hands after all. Posa does not convince the king's mind, but he
finds his heart and wins his confidence. One has the feeling that, if he
bide his time and use some tact, he can accomplish all that he desires.
But to our amazement he gives up the king and enters upon a desperate
game of double-dealing in which he deceives everybody. He forms the plan
of sending Carlos to the Netherlands as the leader of a revolt. Of this
plan he says nothing to his friend, nor does he tell him of his own new
relation to the king. Instead he wraps himself in mystery and asks
Carlos for his letter-case. This he turns over to the king, and gets a
warrant for the arrest of Carlos. The young prince, suspecting quite
reasonably that he has been betrayed, goes to Eboli for enlightenment.
Here Posa finds him and draws his dagger upon the woman, as if she were
the possessor of some terrible secret,--which in fact she is not. Then
he relents and arrests Carlos without explanation. He now writes a
compromising letter which he knows will cause his own death. Then, after
some delay, he goes to Carlos and tries to explain his strange conduct,
and while he is telling his story the bullet of the king's assassin
finds him. Carlos mourns the Great Departed as a pattern of unexampled
heroic virtue, but one can have little sympathy with the panegyric,
especially after one learns that Posa was a traitor from the beginning.
There would be little profit in discussing the last two acts of 'Don
Carlos' with respect to their inherent reasonableness. It is possible to
frame an intelligible theory of Posa's conduct, but not one which is
perfectly coherent, and least of all one which shall harmonize with the
impression produced by the first three acts. There we have an amiable
idealist, whom we can at least understand; here a madman smitten, like
Fiesco, with a mania for managing a large and dangerous intrigue all in
his own way, and accomplishing his ends by modes of action which seem to
him heroic, but to the ordinary mind utterly preposterous. Thus he
accounts for his failure to confide his plans to Carlos by saying that
he was 'beguiled by false delicacy',--which seems to mean that his
relation to the king was felt by him as a breach of friendship. But how
strange that a man with public ends in view should feel thus under the
circumstances! So too his self-sacrifice is nothing but heroic folly,
since his death in no way betters the chances of Carlos for escape. The
flight would have had a better chance of success had Posa omitted his
heroics altogether and quietly planned to escape with his friend. In
fine, we have to do here with entirely abnormal psychic processes. The
reader and still more the spectator is bewildered by Posa, and does not
know any better than Carlos and the king know how to take him.[71]
Turning now to the portrait of the king we find there too the traces of
a wavering purpose. The original conception was dark as Erebus. In the
first act, more especially in the first act as originally printed, the
King of Spain is painfully suggestive of a wicked ogre swooping in upon
a nursery of naughty children. Such an insanely jealous, swaggering,
domineering, cruel fanatic is too loathsome to be interesting. Then came
the thought, suggested partly by the reading of Brantôme and Ferrera, of
presenting Philip's character in a more favorable light and making him
the center of tragic interest,--a thought which was neither given up nor
consistently carried out. In October, 1785, Schiller wrote to Körner
that he was reading Watson and that 'weighty reforms were threatening
his own Philip and Alva.' The Rev. Robert Watson's history by no means
idealizes Philip, but it credits him with sincerity, vigilance,
penetration, self-control, administrative capacity and a 'considerable
share of sagacity' in the choice of ministers and generals,--not an
altogether mean list of kingly qualities. On the other hand, in
Mercier's book[72] Philip appears as the embodiment of all those
qualities which the Age of Enlightenment regarded as odious in a ruler.
Thus, just as in the case of Fiesco, Schiller found himself pulled this
way and that by his authorities; and the result of his attempt to graft
an impressive monarch upon the stock furnished by St. Réal's jealous
husband is a Philip who does not fully satisfy either the historic sense
or the poetic imagination.
For Schiller, of course, a truly great monarch needed to have a tender
heart; so Philip was given certain sentimental traits. He feels the
loneliness of his station. In spite of his seeming coldness the pleading
of Carlos for affection touches him, and he gives orders that henceforth
his son is to stand nearer to the throne. For the purpose of exhibiting
the king's magnanimity we have the anachronistic scene in which he is
made to pardon Medina Sidonia for the loss of the great armada,--an
event which happened twenty years later. Then he becomes suspicious of
Domingo and Alva and longs for an honest man to tell him the truth. And
when the man appears the king is most surprisingly open-minded. 'This
fire', he says to Posa,
Is admirable. You would fain do good,
Just _how_ you do it, patriot and sage
Can little care.
So Philip is a patriot and a sage, glowing with the holy fire of
humanity; and as such he even deigns to explain his policy and to enter
into a contest of magnanimity with Posa. But the large-hearted monarch
of whom we get a glimpse in this scene is soon reduced back to the
jealous husband of St. Réal, and his jealousy is closely patterned upon
that of Othello. The Philip of the last two acts is sometimes pitiable,
sometimes repulsive, never great. One is not very much surprised when he
hires an assassin to kill Posa, instead of handing him over to the law.
Of the remaining characters the queen is the most interesting. In her
Schiller for the first time depicts a woman convincingly. His Elizabeth
is perhaps a shade too angelic,--she is an ideal figure like all his
women,--but winsome she certainly is. One is a little startled by the
readiness with which she approves Posa's treasonable plan of a
revolution to be headed by Don Carlos, but in this play the sentiment of
patriotism cuts no figure anywhere. The principal characters are all
occupied with the idea of 'humanity', and are not troubled by any
scruples arising out of national feeling.
Taken as a whole 'Don Carlos' is too complicated to yield an unalloyed
artistic pleasure. It suffers from a lack of simplicity and
concentration. There is material in it for two or three plays. The
double intrigue of love and politics becomes toward the end very
confusing. The confusion is increased by the unexpected turn given to
the character of Posa, and reaches a climax when we learn from the Grand
Inquisitor that _he_ has been pulling all the strings from first to
last, and that the entire tragedy was foreordained in the secret
archives of the Holy Office. The unity of interest is marred by the fact
that in the last two acts the real hero, Don Carlos, drops into the
background as the helpless tool of the incalculable marquis. And Carlos,
too, sometimes acts rather unaccountably; for example, when he supposes
that the wanton _billet-doux_ signed 'E.' can come from the queen, of
whose purity and high-mindedness he has just had convincing evidence.
Then again his conduct toward the Princess Eboli in the love scene is
very singular,--one might say amazing. And there are some other such
defects, which concern the stage more than the reader and which, by
skillful acting and judicious excision, can be reduced to insignificant
proportions. When well played 'Don Carlos' produces a powerful
impression. For the reader it is a noble poem containing a large
ingredient of Schiller's best self.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 65: It is printed in Sämtliche Schriften, III, 180.]
[Footnote 66: In the _Teutsche Merkur_ for October, 1782.]
[Footnote 67: In the _Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften_, Vol.
XXXII; reprinted by Braun, "Schiller und Goethe im Urteile ihrer
Zeitgenossen", I, 152 ff.]
[Footnote 68: The fragments published in the _Thalia_ contained 4140
lines; the _editio princeps_ of 1787, 6283; the edition of 1801, this
being the form in which the play is usually read, 5370.]
[Footnote 69: Letter to Reinwald April 14, 1783.]
[Footnote 70: Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften," I, 217, observes:
"Freilich bedarf die Schauspielkunst um diese Scene [the great scene
between Posa and Philip] so magisch wirken zu lassen, wie das Genie des
Dichters sie erzeugt und gestaltet hat, eines Posa, dem die Natur die
seltensten Gaben verliehen. Jede seiner Bewegungen, jede Geberde, jeder
Ton, ist Anmut und Wohlklang. Er überzeugt den König nicht durch den
Inhalt seiner Rede, er rührt ihn nicht durch seine Ideen, und doch
gewinnt er ihn völlig, weil er ihn persönlich bezaubert." The natural
effect of Schiller's words, however, is to give an impression that the
king is moved not solely by Posa's personal charm, but in part by the
idealism of his character.]
[Footnote 71: Perhaps the best possible account of his death is that of
Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften", I, 215: "Er opfert sich für ein
weltgeschichtliches Ideal, das er idyllisch träumte."]
[Footnote 72: See above, page 169.]