Cabal and Love
Ich bin ein Edelmann—Lasz doch sehen, ob mein Adelbrief älter ist als der Risz zum unendlichen Weltall; oder mein Wappen gültiger ist als die Handschrift des Himmels in Louisens Augen: Dieses Weib ist für diesen Mann.—'Cabal and Love'.
In 'Cabal and Love' Schiller found again, as he had previously found in 'The Robbers', a thoroughly congenial theme. More properly the theme found him, took possession of him and would not let him go, until the inner tumult had subsided and German literature had been enriched with its most telling tragedy of the social conflict. 'Fiesco' had proved a disappointment; he had not been able to bring himself into perfect sympathy with the subject, and at the best his Italian conspiracy was a far-away matter. Now he set foot again upon his native heath and all went better. In spite of certain defects which led him to speak of it later as rather badly designed, 'Cabal and Love' must be pronounced the most artistic and the most interesting of his early plays.
It is the tragedy of two lovers, an honorable aristocrat and a girl of humble birth, who are done to death through a vile intrigue which is dictated by the exigencies of an infamous political régime. By means of a compromising letter, which is not forged but extorted under duress, the lover is made to suspect his sweetheart's fidelity; and she, though innocent, is prevented by scruples of conscience from undeceiving him. In a jealous fury he gives her poison and then partakes of it himself. The mischief is wrought not so much by the wickedness of the great, albeit that comes in for a share of the responsibility, as by the obstinate class prejudice, amounting to a tragic superstition, of the heroine and her father. Many of the details were taken over by Schiller from his predecessors; but he so improved upon them, so vitalized the familiar conflicts and situations, and threw into his work such a power of genuine pathos, caught from the pathos of real life, that 'Cabal and Love' still stands out as a notable document of the revolutionary epoch. The epoch produced many bourgeois tragedies, but Schiller's is much the best of them all. Before we look at it more closely it will be worth while to glance at the history of the type in Germany.
The tragedy of middle-class life first took root, as is well known, in England. It was in 1732 that Lillo brought upon the Drury Lane stage his acted tale of George Barnwell, the London 'prentice who is beguiled by a harlot, robs his master, kills his uncle and ends his career on the gallows, to the great grief of the doting Maria, his master's daughter. The prologue tells how the experiment was expected to strike the public of that day:
The Tragic Muse sublime delights to show
Princes distrest and scenes of royal woe;
In awful pomp majestic to relate
The fall of nations or some hero's fate;
That scepter'd chiefs may by example know
The strange vicissitudes of things below….
Upon our stage indeed, with wished success,
You've sometimes seen her in a humbler dress,
Great only in distress. When she complains,
In Southern's, Rowe's, or Otway's moving strains,
The brilliant drops that fall from each bright eye
The absent pomp with brighter gems supply,
Forgive us then if we attempt to show
In artless strains a tale of private woe.
So it appears that 'Barnwell' was something new, yet not entirely new. The stately tragedy of solemn edification, at which no one was expected to weep, had already yielded a part of its sovereignty to the tragedy of distress. It occurred to Lillo that tears could be drawn for the woes of the middle class, which had been looked upon as suitable only for comedy. The event proved that he had reckoned well: the "brilliant drops" fell copiously, the innovation crossed the Channel, and soon the bourgeois tragedy,—whence by an easy differentiation the lacrimose, pathetic, or serious comedy,—had entered upon its European career.
The first German example was 'Miss Sara Sampson', written in 1755, wherein the daughter of a fond English squire is lured away from her home, like Clarissa Harlowe, by the profligate Mellefont, who promises to marry her. The pair take lodgings at a low London inn, where Mellefont finds pretexts for delaying the marriage ceremony. Presently his former mistress, Marwood, appears—a proud and passionate woman of sin. She claims him as the mother of his child, but having now found out what true love is he spurns her. Bitter interviews follow, with, spiteful recriminations and awful threats. Marwood tells her story to Sara and finally ends the tension by poisoning her, whereupon Mellefont commits suicide. In writing this play Lessing was in no way concerned with any social question. He constituted himself the champion of the bourgeoisie before the tribunal of Melpomene, but not before the conscience of mankind. The woes of hero and heroine are in no way related to class prejudice or to the great democratic upheaval of the century. Lessing's atmosphere is the moral and sentimental atmosphere of Richardson, though his literary power is incomparably greater.
'Miss Sara Sampson' did not long hold the stage, but its influence is discernible in subsequent developments. The 'man between two women' became a regular feature of the new domestic tragedy. In play after play we find a soulful, clinging, romantic creature—usually the title-heroine—set over against a full-blooded rival whose ways are ways of wantonness. Lessing himself repeated the group in 'Emilia Galotti', which in its turn became the mother of a new brood. The tragedy of lawless passion led by an easy step to the tragedy of social conflict, which portrayed the depravity of princes and nobles in their relation to the common people, or called upon mankind to weep for the woes of lovers separated by the barriers of rank. In Germany the species was very timely. Nowhere else in Europe had the nobility so little to be proud of, and nowhere else was the pride of birth so stupidly intolerant. That fruitful theme of earlier and later poets, the love of nobleman for maid of low degree, had been lost in the age of gallantry, save in lubricious tales of intrigue and seduction. The appalling dissoluteness which characterized the French court during the first half of the eighteenth century, and was duly copied by the princelings of Germany, had poisoned the minds of high and low alike and led to a state of affairs in which there was little room for a noble or even a serious conception of love. Love was understood to be concupiscence. If an aristocrat stooped to a bourgeois girl, it was his affair and at the worst only an aberration of taste; her fate was of no importance.
When the inevitable reaction set in, it took the form of a debauch of sentimentalism. The poetry of real passion came back into literature and people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a frivolous game played for the gratification of lust, but a divine rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,—a part of that nature to which the world was now resolved to return,—it was sacred, and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts and cities. It was, however, the passionate eloquence of Rousseau which first gave to this contrast a revolutionary significance, and it was Rousseau who first stirred the reading world with a woeful tale of lovers separated by the prejudices of caste.