Now what must such a character do when required, under penalty of death, by a brutal tyrant whose power is absolute, to hit an apple on his son's head? Naturally his first thought is of the child, and he tries to escape by offering his own life. The reply is that he must shoot or die with his child. Thus there is no recourse; to refuse to shoot at all is worse than to shoot and miss. If he kill Gessler on the spot,—and we must suppose that the thought occurs to him,—he will expose not only himself but his child and his wife and children at home to the fury of the troopers. The only safety lies in making a successful shot. And after all Tell knows that he can make it; it is only a question of nerve, and he has the nerve if he can only find it. And here comes in an important touch which is not in Tschudi—the fearless confidence of Walther Tell in his father's marksmanship. The effect of this is to touch the pride of the bowman, to clear his eye, and to steady his hand. It is also a familiar fact that, with strong natures, a terrible danger, with just one chance of escape, may produce a moment of perfect self-control while the chance is taken.
The whole scene, in addition to its effectiveness on the stage, is psychologically true to life. With all deference to the great qualities of the first Chancellor of the German Empire, one must insist that Schiller was a better playwright than he and found precisely the best solution to his dramatic problem.
And so of the later scene in the 'hollow way'; there is nothing wrong with it, unless it be the great length of the soliloquy. The killing of an enemy from an ambush, without giving him a chance for his life, is of course somewhat repugnant to our ideas of chivalry. We think of it instinctively as the deed of a savage, and not of a man with a pure heart and a good cause. But it must be remembered that such ideas are themselves conventional, and that we have in 'Tell' a reversion to primitive conditions in which 'man stands over against man'. Gessler has forfeited all right to chivalrous treatment, and Tell is no knight engaged in fighting out a gentleman's feud. What is he to do? For himself, perhaps, he might take the chances of a fugitive in the mountains, but he cannot leave his wife and children exposed to Gessler's vengeful malice. There is no law to which he can appeal, the only law of the land being Gessler's will. In such a situation, clearly, there is no place for refined and chivalrous compunctions, or for ethical hair-splitting. Tell does what he must do. He is in the position of a man protecting his family from a savage or a dangerous beast, and is not called upon to risk his own life needlessly. Every reader of the old saga instinctively justifies him. His conduct is not noble or heroic, but natural and right.
If this is so, however, there would seem to be no pressing need of his long soliloquy. He being ex proposito a man of few words, his sudden volubility is a little surprising, though it should be duly noticed that the soliloquy is not a self-defense. There is no casuistry in it. Tell does not argue the case with himself, like one in doubt about the rightness of his conduct. That is as clear as day to him, and he never wavers for a moment. But he has time to think while waiting, and his soliloquy is only his thinking made audible. Delivered with even a slight excess of declamatory fervor, the lines are ridiculously out of keeping with Tell's character; but they can be spoken so as to seem at least tolerably natural,—as natural, perhaps, as any soliloquy. And this is true, let it be remarked in passing, of many and many a passage in Schiller. To some extent, very certainly, his reputation as a rhetorician is due to the histrionic spouting of lines that do not need to be spouted. To some extent, but not entirely: for even in 'Tell' his old fondness for absurdly extravagant forms of expression sometimes reasserted itself. Thus what can one make of a plain fisherman who talks in this wise about a rainstorm?
Rage on, ye winds! Flame down, ye lightning-bolts!
Burst open, clouds! Pour out, ye drenching streams
Of heaven, and drown the land! Annihilate
I' the very germ the unborn brood of men!
Ye furious elements, assert your lordship!
Ye bears, ye ancient wolves o' the wilderness,
Come back again! The land belongs to you.
Who cares to live in it bereft of freedom!
The most serious blemish in 'William Tell' is the introduction of Johannes Parricida in the fifth act,—an idea which Goethe attributed to feminine influence of some sort.[128] The effect of it is to convert the rugged, manly Tell of the preceding acts into a sanctimonious Pharisee with whom one can have little sympathy. No doubt there is a moral difference between his act and that of Parricida, but it is a difference which one does not wish to hear Tell himself dilate upon. Seeing that the murdered emperor was solely responsible for the brutal governors and thus indirectly for all the woes of Switzerland; and seeing, too, that his death is the only guarantee we have at the end that the killing of Gessler will do any good, and not simply have the effect to bring down upon the land, including Tell and his family, the vengeance of some still more fiendish successor,—considering all this, one would rather not hear those horrified ejaculations of Tell about the pollution of the murderer's presence. They may produce a certain stagy effect of contrast, but the effect was not worth producing at the expense of Tell's character.
As for the love-story in 'William Tell', it is hardly of sufficient weight to merit extended discussion. Both Bertha and Rudenz are rather tamely and conventionally drawn, to meet the need of a pair of romantic lovers; they evidently cost their creator no very strenuous communings with the Genius of Art. Their private affair of the heart has nothing to do with the Tell episode and is but loosely related to the popular uprising. Their absence would not be very seriously felt in the drama, save that one would not like to miss Attinghausen as a picturesque representative of the old patriarchal nobility. The two scenes in which he appears are in themselves admirable.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 128: See Eckermann's "Gespräche", under date of March 16, 1831. What Goethe there says, however, is in flat contradiction of the following passage contained in a letter of Schiller to Iffland, written April 14, 1804: "Auch Goethe ist mit mir überzeugt, dasz ohne jenen Monolog und ohne die persönliche Erscheinung des Parricida der Tell sich gar nicht hätte denken lassen.">[