In the sentimental novel 'Siegwart', the heroine, Therese, loves a young squire, not for his blue blood, but for the nobility of his heart. Like Louise she renounces her love for this life, and bids him farewell. In writing to him she describes a scene between her father and his:
Your father came dashing into our yard with two huntsmen. 'Are you the ——?' he called up to me. 'Is that Siegwart? He's a scoundrel, if he knows it. He wants to seduce my son. And this, I suppose, is the nice creature (here he turned to me again) who has made a fool of him. A nice little animal, by my soul!'… My father, who can show heat when he is provoked, told him to stop calling such names; that he was a decent man and I a decent girl.
Here we seem to have the suggestion of the stirring scene in which the irate old fiddler threatens to throw President von Walter out of doors for insulting Louise.
It would be very easy to give further examples of Schiller's talent for taking what suited his purpose, but such philology is not very profitable. After all, what one wishes to know is not where the architect got his materials, but what he made of them. And what he made was a play abounding in admirable scenes, but ending in a rather unsatisfactory manner. With even less violence to the inner logic of the piece than was necessary in the case of 'Fiesco', 'Cabal and Love' might have been given a happy ending. The whole tragedy hangs by a thread in the fifth act. Lady Milford has fled and is no longer a factor in the entanglement. The wicked president has relented and is ready to yield. Old Miller, released from prison, returns to his house and finds Louise brooding over her purpose of suicide. He preaches to her upon the sin of self-destruction and pleads with her to give up her aristocratic lover. She promises. Then Ferdinand comes and demands an explanation of the fatal letter. A word from her at this point, a momentary accès or simple common sense, would undeceive him and end the whole difficulty. Of course she must not break her oath; and one cannot blame her sweet simplicity for not taking refuge in the maxim that an oath given under duress is not binding. But her oath merely pledges her to acknowledge the letter as her voluntary act. There is no reason why she should not solemnly assure Ferdinand of her innocence, tell him that they are the victims of a plot and send him to his father for an explanation. Nothing prevents her from speaking in time the words that she actually does speak after she has taken the poison, but before she knows that she has taken it: 'A horrible fatality has confused the language of our hearts. If I might open my mouth, Walter, I could tell you things', etc.
If, out of filial piety, Louise is minded to give up her lover, there is at any rate no reason why she should wish him to despise her forever. Every natural girlish instinct requires her to clear herself. That she does not do this, but persists in a course which of all courses is the most unnatural,—seeing that she now has nothing to fear from any source,—produces a painful suspense which is anything but tragic. No skill of the actress can altogether save her from a certain appearance of fatuous weak-mindedness, or forestall the cynical conclusion that she dies chiefly in order that it may be fulfilled which was said unto himself by the author, namely: I will write a tragedy.
And yet such a conclusion would not be perfectly just to Schiller. It is true that he was all for tragedy and that a happy moral ending, in the vein of Diderot, would not have been to his taste. But this does not tell the whole story. The romantic lovers are sacrificed in order that the guilty president and his vile accomplices may be brought to book and punished for their sins. The heart of the matter for Schiller was to free his mind with respect to the infamies of high life. It was this that tipped his pen with fire.
Of course there are German critics who find Louise's conduct in this last scene quite 'inevitable' and full of a high tragic pathos. Thus Palleske says of her:
Her anxious piety, her touching and indeed so intelligible devotion to her father, her lack of freedom, bring on her fate. A veil of mourning rests upon all she says. Heroic liberty of action, such as befits a Juliet, is made impossible to this girl by her birth in the bourgeoisie; she has only the liberty to perish, not the courage to be happy. Of guilt there can be no question in this case: her anxiety, her filial devotion, are her whole guilt; her virtue, her love for her father, become her ruin. Whoever thoroughly knows the bourgeoisie, which had yet to recover from these wounds,[54] will admit that this character is drawn with terrible truthfulness.
This, however, is putting too fine a point upon it; it implies, when closely analyzed, that Schiller deliberately made his heroine a little stupid,—a view of her that hardly comports with the rest of the play. To say that she must die because she belongs to the bourgeoisie is mere moonshine, for common sense can readily find a number of escapes. She may cleave to her father and send her lover packing, after proper explanations; or she may cleave to her lover in the face of her father's displeasure; or she may temporize in the hope of changing her father's mind. What she actually does is to goad her lover into a frenzy by her singular conduct and then come to her senses when it is too late. The effect is to cast doubt upon the intensity of her supposed passion for Ferdinand. One gets the impression that her previous sentimental ecstasies were not perfectly genuine; that she does not really know what it is to be in love, or how to speak the veritable language of the heart.
The truth seems to be that when Schiller wrote 'Cabal and Love', he had not progressed far enough in the knowledge of femininity to be able to draw a perfectly life-like portrait of a girl in Louise's station. She is a creature of the same order as Amalia and Leonora,—a sentimental Schwärmerin, very much lacking in character and mother-wit. From the first the expression of her love does not ring perfectly true. We suspect her of phrase-making,—she is quite too ethereal and ecstatic for a plain fiddler's daughter. No trace here of that homely poetic realism,—Gretchen at the wash-tub, or Lotte cutting bread and butter,—with which Goethe knew how to invest his bourgeois maidens. For aught we can learn from her discourse Schiller's Louise might be a princess, brought up on a diet of Klopstock's odes. That a girl, returning from church, should inquire of her parents if her lover has called, is quite in order. That she should then confess that thoughts of him have come between her and her Creator, is pardonable. But what are we to think when she goes on to say to her own parents: