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.