The Bride of Messina
Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht,
Der Übel grösztes aber ist die Schuld.
_'The Bride of Messina'_.
After the completion of 'The Maid of Orleans', in the spring of 1801,
Schiller found himself once more the unhappy victim of leisure. A new
task was needed to make life tolerable, but what should it be? 'At my
time of life', he remarked in a letter to Körner, 'the choice of a
subject is far more difficult; the levity of mind which enables one to
decide so quickly in one's youth is no longer there, and the love,
without which there can be no poetic creation, is harder to arouse.' Ere
long, having a mind to try his hand upon a tragedy in 'the strictest
Greek form', he was musing upon that which in time came to be known as
'The Bride of Messina'.
For the present, however, and for some time to come, he did not advance
beyond very general planning. In the summer he spent several weeks with
Körner in Dresden, during which literary labor was suspended. After his
return to Weimar, in September, he found the conditions without and
within unfavorable to a serious creative effort, so he undertook a
German version of Gozzi's 'Turandot'. This occupied him until January,
1802. Then it was a question whether his next theme should be 'The
Knights of Malta', or 'Warbeck', or 'William Tell', the last having
begun to interest him because of a persistent rumor that he was working
upon a play of that name. But none of the four projects carried the day
immediately, and the winter and spring passed without bringing a
decision. He began to be worried over the 'spirit of distraction' that
had come upon him. In August, however, the long vacillation came to an
end, and 'The Bride of Messina' began to take shape on paper. He found
it more instructive than any of his previous works. It was also, he
remarked in a letter, a more grateful task to amplify a small matter
than to condense a large one. Once begun, the composition proceeded very
steadily,--but little disturbed by the arrival, one day in November, of
a patent of nobility from the chancellery of the Holy Roman
Empire,--until the end was reached, in February, 1803.
The play may be described as an attempt to treat a medieval romantic
theme in such a manner as to convey a suggestion of Greek tragedy.
Although written with enthusiasm it is not the bearer of any heartfelt
message and must be regarded as a study of theory rather than of life.
The highly artificial plot does not reflect any past or present verities
of human existence upon the planet earth. Nor can we call the play an
imitation of the Greeks, its general atmosphere being anything but
Greek. The dialogue is not written in classical trimeters, but in the
modern pentameter; while the speaking chorus, divided into two warring
factions and going about here and there as the scene changes, has little
resemblance to anything found in the Greek drama. On the other hand,
there _is_ a chorus, and there are dreams which take the place of
oracles. There is also a further suggestion of the antique in the
pervading fatalism of the piece.
Of all Schiller's works 'The Bride of Messina' has been the most
variously judged by the critics. Some have seen in it the very
perfection of art, others the climax of artificiality. Schiller himself
reported, after seeing it performed at Weimar, in 1803, that he had
'received for the first time the impression of true tragedy'. There is
also an authentic record to the effect that Goethe was inexpressibly
delighted with it and declared that 'by this production the boards had
been consecrated to higher things'. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote that
nothing could surpass the majesty of the play, and Körner assigned it a
high rank among Schiller's productions. On the other hand it was spoken
of by the satellites of the disgruntled Herder as a 'singular _fata
morgana_', and a 'shocking monstrosity'; while F.H. Jacobi characterized
it as a 'disgusting spook made by mixing heaven and hell'. And these
discordant voices, in all their vehemence of expression, have been
echoed by later critics; so that in the case of this particular drama,
as Bellermann observes, it is hardly possible to speak of a settled
average opinion. On one point, nevertheless, there is very general
agreement: namely, that the diction of the choruses is magnificent in
its kind. Nothing finer in German poetry anywhere.
From the outset critical discussion of 'The Bride of Messina' has turned
mainly upon its antique elements, that is, upon its chorus and its
treatment of the fate-idea. There has been endless comparison of
Sophocles' 'King Oedipus' and endless logomachy about free-will and
predestination in their relation to guilt. And such discussion is
pertinent, because we have Schiller's own word that he wished to vie
with Sophocles. An oft-quoted passage from a letter to Wilhelm von
Humboldt runs as follows:
My first attempt at a tragedy in the strict form will give you
pleasure. From it you will be able to judge whether I could have
carried off a prize as a contemporary of Sophocles. I do not forget
that you have called me the most modern of modern poets, and have
thus thought of me in the sharpest contrast to everything that is
styled antique. I should thus have reason to be doubly pleased if I
could wrest from you the admission that I have been able to make
even this strange spirit my own.
At first blush this looks like an abandonment of the position stated so
clearly and emphatically in the letter to Süvern (page 380). In reality,
however, it is not so. Schiller was not concerned to imitate Sophocles,
nor to revive an ancient form with, pedantic rigor. He was as far as
possible from a one-sided worship of the Greeks. His reference to his
'strict form' hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot,
fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write
'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,--either to reform the
German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an
aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly
'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience,
by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to
that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian
audience by a play of Sophocles,--more especially by the 'King Oedipus'.
For the groundwork of his tragedy he resorted to the well-worn fiction
of the hostile brothers, giving it this form: Two princes grow up in
mutual hatred, but are finally reconciled through the influence of their
mother. Both fall in love, each without the other's knowledge, with a
young woman of whose family they know nothing, and who is in reality
their sister. One day the younger prince finds the object of his passion
in the arms of his brother, who has just learned the secret of the
girl's birth. Instantly the old hate blazes up anew, and in a paroxysm
of blind rage Don Cesar kills his brother. Then, when he discovers the
whole truth, he expiates his crime by a voluntary death.--In this
scheme, it will be observed, the salient point is the fratricide
committed in a sudden frenzy of passion: everything else leads up to
this or grows out of it. From a modern point of view the crime is
adequately accounted for by the character of Don Cesar; but if the story
was to be given a Sophoclean coloring it was necessary that the horrors
appear as the necessary evolution of ineluctable fate.
In employing the fate-idea for dramatic purposes the Greek poet had, in
the first place, the great advantage of a definite mythological
tradition which was known to everybody. In the second place, he wrote
for people who still believed in oracles and received them seriously as
credible manifestations of divine foreknowledge. Again, he could count
on a living belief in the hereditary character of guilt: the belief that
a good man, leading his life without evil intent, might be led to commit
horrible and revolting acts because of some ancient taint in his blood;
or because the gods, in their inscrutable government of the world, had
decreed that he should thus sin and suffer. Just how far the Greek
conception of moral responsibility differed in a general way from the
modern, is a trite question which need not be gone into here. Suffice it
to say that the difference has often been too broadly and too sharply
stated. Not all Greek tragedies were tragedies of fate,--indeed it was a
saying of Schiller that the 'King Oedipus' constitutes a genus by
itself--nor is there any definite unitary conception which can be
described as 'modern' for the purpose of a contrast.
After all, that which affects us in tragedy is very much the same as
that which affected the Greeks, namely, the sense of life's overruling
mystery. And whether we refer the happenings of life to an all-wise
Providence, or to a scientific order which is so because it is so, they
remain alike incommensurable with our ethical feeling. The bullet of a
crazed fanatic, or a lethal germ in a glass of water, may end the
noblest career in horrible suffering. In the drama, it is true, we
prefer that no use be made of such mad calamities and that what befalls
a man shall at least seem to grow out of his character. But then a man's
character is the effect of a hundred subtle causes which began their
operation in part before he was born; so that there is an element of
essential truth in the saying that character is fate. We have become
aware that there is a sense in which it is exactly true that the sins of
the father are visited upon the children.
In short, modern thought has not tended to clear up but rather to deepen
the mystery of life in its relation to antecedent conditions; of fate in
its relation to desert. Our common sense, as embodied in law, treats a
man as responsible for the good or evil that he personally intends. This
is no doubt an excellent practical rule, without which society could
hardly exist at all; but looked at philosophically it does not really
touch the heart of the great mystery which is the theme of 'King
Oedipus' and of 'The Bride of Messina'. The young Oedipus, while living
at Corinth with his foster-father, Polybus, whom he supposes to be his
real father, is told by the oracle that he is destined to kill his
father and marry his mother. What should he do? Commit suicide in order
to stultify the oracle, or resolve to kill no man and to marry no woman?
The story imputes to him no blame for doing neither of these things. He
acts as a man would act who sees himself confronted by an evitable
danger. He leaves Corinth, but the very step that he takes to avoid his
fate brings it surely to pass. He meets a stranger in the road. A
quarrel arises over the question of passing,--a quarrel as to the merit
of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that
antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of
the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He
has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his
foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled
itself, as the spectator knew from the beginning that it would. The
interest of the tragedy turns largely upon the overwhelming remorse of
Oedipus and Jocasta when they discover the truth.
To match these conditions Schiller requires us to imagine a medieval
prince of Messina reigning at some indefinite time in the Middle Ages.
While his two sons are yet children he has a dream in which he sees two
laurel-trees growing out of his marriage-bed, and between them a lily
which changes to flame and consumes his house. An Arabian astrologer,
for whom he has a heathenish partiality, interprets the dream as meaning
that a daughter yet to be born will cause the destruction of his
dynasty. So when a daughter is born he orders her put to death. But the
mother has also had _her_ dream,--of a lion and an eagle bringing their
bloody prey in sweet concord to a little child playing on the grass. A
pious Christian monk explains this dream as meaning that a daughter will
unite the quarrelsome sons in passionate love. So the queen saves the
life of her new-born child and has her secretly brought up in a convent
not far from Messina. As long as the father lives the hostile brothers
are restrained from fighting, but when he dies their feud breaks out in
open war. Each surrounds himself with retainers, Messina is torn by
factional strife, and there is danger from external enemies. Citizens
implore the mother to effect a reconciliation, failing which they
threaten a revolution. At last she succeeds in arranging a peaceful
meeting in her presence.
Such is Schiller's presupposition,--a singular blend of Christianity and
paganism, such as at once gives difficulty to the imagination. A prince
reigning under a Christian order of things, in a city of churches and
convents, yet willing to murder his child on account of a dream
interpreted to him by an Arab soothsayer, is not a very plausible
invention. And the same may be said of much that follows. In
half-a-dozen places the tragedy would come to an untimely end did not
one or another of the characters conveniently refrain from doing or
saying what a human being would inevitably do or say under the
circumstances. Beatrice grows up in the convent without taking vows and
is kept in ignorance of her lineage. Though her mother longs for her,
she never sees her, and communicates with her only through the old
servant, Diego. Such conduct is perhaps intelligible during the life of
the king, but with him out of the way one would expect the mother to
take her daughter home without a moment's delay. Instead of that she
waits two months, merely sending word to Beatrice to prepare for some
unnamed change of fortune. She also keeps the secret from her sons
during these two months, without any sufficient reason. When questioned
on the subject by Don Cesar in the play, she makes the bitter feud of
the brothers her excuse:
How could I place your sister here atwixt
Your bare and reeking swords? In your fierce rage
You would not hearken to a mother's voice;
And could I have brought her, the pledge of peace,
The anchor of my every dearest hope,
To be perchance the victim of your strife?
But this is strange logic. One does not see at all how the sister's life
would have been imperiled; and if she was to be the pledge of peace,--as
the mother's dream seemed to foretell,--then there was the best of
reasons for bringing her home at the earliest possible moment.
And then how singularly Don Manuel behaves! He is the elder son, and as
such must be heir to the throne; but of that we hear nothing in the
play. He falls in love with Beatrice, sees her often during a period of
months, and secures from her a promise of marriage; but he never tells
her who he is, nor does he ask her a question about her own lineage.
When she tells him of an old man who comes to her occasionally as
messenger from her unknown family, and who has at last bidden her
prepare for a change of abode, he makes no attempt to see the stranger
and find out whither his bride is to be taken. For such conduct _he_ can
have no possible reason, but Schiller has one; for were Don Manuel once
to set eyes on the old family servant, Diego, a clearing-up would of
course be inevitable. Instead of doing the one natural thing, Don Manuel
abducts his sweetheart during the night, with her consent, and takes her
to a garden in Messina. There he leaves her alone to await his
coming,--a singular thing for a prince to do with his bride, but
necessary to the tragedy.
More dubious still is the remarkable silence of Beatrice when she is
exposed to the stormy wooing of Don Cesar in the garden. The fiction is
that he has caught a glimpse of her two months before, on the occasion
of his father's funeral, and has since been constantly searching for
her. Having now found her, through one of his spies, he makes love to
her jubilantly through sixty lines of text, but she answers never a
syllable and lets him go away in supposed triumph. A bare word from her,
such as a woman could not help saying under the circumstances, would end
the complication, since it would send Don Cesar away baffled; and then
there would be no occasion for his returning to the garden a little
later. Maidenly fright and consternation cannot account rationally for
such behavior; one sees that she holds her tongue because to set it in
motion would be dramaturgically disastrous.
But the climax of unnaturalness is reached in the scene between the
queen and her two sons, when old Diego reports that Beatrice has been
abducted from the convent--presumbly by Moorish corsairs. The distracted
mother urges her sons to go at once to the rescue of their sister. But
here a difficulty presents itself. If the brothers are to have the
faintest chance of finding their sister, it is clearly of the first
importance that they know something about her, and particularly that
they know where she has been kept in hiding. Now this knowledge can be
safely imparted to Don Cesar but not to Don Manuel. So Don Cesar is made
to rush away hotly, at all adventure, without the slightest clew of any
kind,--the reason being that it would not do for him to hear that which
Diego is about to tell. The younger brother thus conveniently out of the
way, Don Manuel, who has begun to suspect the truth, implores his mother
to tell him where the lost Beatrice has been concealed. Evidently the
only natural part for the mother is to answer the question. But that
would not do; so she interrupts him and urges him away with such
senseless exclamations as 'Fly to action!' 'Follow your brother's
example!' 'Behold my tears!' And when at last he succeeds in bringing
out the fateful inquiry, she only answers:
The bowels of earth were not a safer refuge!
Then Don Manuel ceases to press his question and stands quietly by while
Diego tells his remorseful story of Beatrice's visit to the church on
the day of her father's funeral. Strangely enough this recital suggests
to Don Manuel the hopeful suspicion that his sister and his sweetheart
may, after all, not be the same person; so he rushes away to question
Beatrice, when he must know that his mother is the one person in the
world who can best resolve his doubts. Then, when he is gone, Don Cesar
comes back, and the mother very calmly proceeds to give him the
all-important information which she has just withheld from Don Manuel.
Such is the device, of convenient silence at critical points where
speech would be natural but ruinous, by which Schiller leads up to his
climax. There is no other play of his, early or late, the entanglement
of which is so palpably artificial; so like a child's house of cards,
built up with bated breath lest a breath should topple it over.
According to Böttiger, Schiller once took note of what some critic had
remarked upon this lavish use of silence in 'The Bride of Messina' and
expressed surprise that any one could so misconceive him. He went on to
say, if we can trust Böttiger, that it is 'precisely in this closing of
the mouth at critical moments, when a saving word might rend the iron
net of fate, that the unevadable and demonic power of evil-brooding
destiny manifests itself most clearly and sends a gruesome shudder of
awe through every spectator.' This is certainly a good defense if we
assume that the great object of dramatic poetry is to exhibit the
working-out of some abstract scheme of mysterious fate. Under that
hypothesis one has no right to complain if the characters are treated
like puppets,--pulled hither and thither in unnatural directions and
made to speak when they should be silent, and to be silent when they
should speak. If one finds the scheme impressive, one will think of
that, get his thrill of awe and be thankful. But it is somewhat
different if one holds that the verities of human nature are more
interesting than any scheme, and that the great object of the serious
drama should be to exhibit human beings in the stress of life. One who
takes that view will wish, while recognizing the great qualities of 'The
Bride of Messina', that its author had not gone quite so far in his
contempt of realism.
For, after all, the highest law of the drama is the law of
psychological truth, which requires that the characters be humanly
conceivable and act as human beings would act under the circumstances
imagined. This law is not kept in 'The Bride of Messina', with the
result that the first three acts fall short of the effect that they are
intended to produce. It is different with the fourth act. There
everything is in order, and the simple and noble impressiveness of the
tragedy leaves nothing to be desired. And it is an interesting fact
that this impressiveness depends only in a slight degree upon the
fulfillment of the old dreams and prophecies. To be sure they are
fulfilled; but we are not required to put faith in the inspiration
either of the Arab soothsayer or of the Christian monk. Their
vaticinations might be mere fallible guess-work; Don Cesar might live
and give them the lie, so far as any external constraint is concerned.
But he himself _feels_ that the heavy hand of fate is upon him and that
continued life would be intolerable. The whole pathos of the tragedy is
transferred to the inner being of the surviving brother, and one feels
that his self-destruction proceeds from the law of his own nature, and
not from any fatalistic necessity that is laid upon him.
The truth would seem to be that the fate-idea, while of course it must
be taken into consideration in any careful estimate of 'The Bride of
Messina', has been made a little too prominent by many of the critics.
What the spectator sees, says one writer who is in the main an admirable
expounder of Schiller, is "gigantic Fate striding over the stage. He
sees a wild, tyrannical race, burdened with ancestral guilt, turning
against its own flesh and blood.... He is made to feel that the
self-destruction of this race is nothing accidental, that it is a divine
visitation, a judgment of eternal justice pronounced against usurpation
and lawlessness, that it means the birth of a new spiritual order out of
doom and death."[127] But is this what is actually seen? Is it not
rather true that Schiller makes but little out of the matter of
ancestral guilt? We hear, it is true, that the old prince was of an
alien stock that had won the sovereignty of Messina with the sword and
held it by force. But this is no very appalling crime as the world goes,
and especially as the world went in the Middle Ages. One hardly thinks
of William of Normandy, for example, as a revolting criminal deserving
of the divine wrath. Then we hear, too, that the old prince had
appropriated to himself a wife who was 'his father's choice'. But the
whole matter is disposed of in two or three choral lines which leave not
even a clear, much less a strong impression. There are no data for an
ethical judgment. We are not told wherein the superior right of the
father consisted. For aught we know the son may have had the better
claim, and the father's curse may have been only the impotent scolding
of a disappointed dotard. It is difficult to see anything here which can
rationally warrant eternal justice in extirpating the race. And when we
pass from the presuppositions to the play itself, we see that none of
the characters except Don Cesar does anything seriously blameworthy.
If then it were clearly the central purpose of Schiller to justify the
moral government of the world, or to exhibit the workings of an august
Fate in itself worthy of reverence, we should have to admit that he has
missed the mark; for the fate that he represents is not worthy of
reverence at all. But what is the central fact of the play, as seen by
the unsophisticated spectator who has never read the Greek poets nor
heard of the house of Labdacus? Evidently it is the murder expiated by a
voluntary death. A high-minded youth knowingly kills his brother in a
moment of blind rage, because he thinks that his brother has deceived
him. When he learns the truth, and learns also of the old dreams and
prophecies, he feels that he too must die. Here is the real tragedy,--in
the resolution of Don Cesar and his steadfast adherence to it in the
face of his mother's and his sister's entreaties. The apparatus of
dreams and prophecies and fate is meant to work upon the mind of Don
Cesar rather than upon that of the spectator. Superstition adds to the
burden of his remorse until it becomes unbearable and death appears the
only road to peace:
Dying I bring to naught the ancient curse,
A free death only breaks the chain of fate,
In a prefatory essay upon 'The Use of the Chorus in Tragedy' Schiller
defended his innovation and incidentally set his heel upon the head of
the serpent of naturalism. True art, he insisted, must have a higher aim
than to produce an illusion of the actual. Its object is not to divert
men with a momentary dream of freedom, but to make them truly free by
awakening and developing the power of imaginative objectivation. Nature
itself being only an idea of the mind, and not something that appears to
the senses, art must be ideal in order to represent the reality of
nature. To demand upon the stage an illusion of the actual is absurd,
since dramatic art rests entirely upon ideal conventions of one kind or
another. Therefore, so the argument goes on, it was well when a poetic
diction was substituted for the prose of every-day life, and the next
great step is to reintroduce the chorus and thereby 'declare war openly
and honestly against naturalism in art'. The chorus is likened to a
'living wall which tragedy builds about itself in order completely to
shut out the actual world and to preserve for itself its ideal domain,
its poetic freedom'.
In consonance with these ideas we have a chorus divided into two parts,
one consisting of the elderly retainers of Don Manuel, the other of the
younger retainers of Don Cesar. These two semi-choruses take a certain
part in the action. On the one hand they are like the materialized
shadows of their respective leaders, having no will of their own. When
the brothers compose their feud and embrace each other, the
semi-choruses do likewise,--which comes perilously near to the
ridiculous. On the other hand the semi-choruses have a horizon of their
own and perform, to a certain extent, the old function of the ideal
spectator. They comment in sonorous strains upon present, past and
future, and upon the high matters of life and death and fate.
Schiller's argument on the use of the chorus, while interesting in its
way, does not now sound very convincing; perhaps because we have come to
have less faith than he had in the possibility of settling such
questions by abstract reasoning. Forms of art spring out of local and
temporal conditions; they have their exits and their entrances. Now and
then a reversion to some earlier form may prove acceptable, but in
general it can have only a curious or antiquarian interest. The man of
reading, who knows his Greek poets, will be glad to have seen once or
twice in his life a genuine Greek play,--preferably in the Greek
language, with all the accessories as perfect as possible. Next to that
he will enjoy a perfect imitation, like the first portion of Goethe's
'Helena'. But just in proportion as he is permeated by the Greek spirit
he will feel the spuriousness of Schiller's so-called chorus. For the
effect of the Greek chorus depended not so much upon the meaning of the
words as upon the sensuous charm of the music and the dance. To
sacrifice these is to sacrifice that which is most vital and leave only
the simulacrum of a chorus. Some small effects in the line of the
picturesque can be achieved by means of costuming, marching and
grouping, but the rest can be nothing but elocution,--a frosty appeal to
the ethical sense, offered as a surrogate for the witchery of song and
rhythmic motion. One may be pardoned for thinking that a good ballet
would have served the purpose better.
The reader of the play, however, is not disturbed by any considerations
of this kind. For him the choruses are simply poetry,--admirable poetry,
for the most part, in Schiller's very best vein. What a wealth of
imagery and what a splendor of varying rhythms! And how cunningly the
gorgeous diction twines itself, like ivy about a bare wall, concealing
the nakedness of commonplace and giving an effect of noble sententious
wisdom! This is and must remain the great value of 'The Bride of
Messina',--to delight the reader with the charm of its style. Schiller's
plea for the chorus passed unheeded save by the philologists. His
example was not imitated; indeed he himself probably had no serious hope
that it would be. On the other hand, there did spring up in the next two
decades a most luxuriant crop of so-called fate-tragedies, which, with
their horrors, banalities and puerilities, soon brought the species into
contempt and made it fair game for the telling satire of Platen. The
fashion,--a thoroughly bad fashion in the main,--was undoubtedly set by
'The Bride of Messina'; but we cannot make Schiller answerable for the
hair-raising and blood-curdling inventions of Werner, Houwald, Müllner,
Grillparzer and Heine.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 127: Kuno Francke, "Social Forces in German Literature,"
page 394.]