It is undoubtedly in the scenes with his father that Ferdinand appears at his best. Here at least there is manly vigor. The contrast between the wicked father and the good son is effectively brought out, although, as in the case of Karl and Franz Moor, it is carried beyond the limits of easy credibility. How unnatural is the relation of the pair! One would think they had never talked with each other before, and that each had lived in complete ignorance of the other's character and inclinations. The father, by way of founding a claim to his son's grateful affection, declares that he has 'trodden the dangerous path to the heart of the prince' and killed his predecessor,—all for the sake of his son. He admits that he is suffering the 'eternal scorpion-stings of conscience,' and yet he expects Ferdinand to follow him without a whimper, and he is angry when the young man indignantly renounces the usufruct of his father's crimes. Although Ferdinand is a major in the army, his marriage with Lady Milford is arranged for him as if he had no claim to be consulted. The president blurts out his plan with brutal coarseness, and urges it in language which he knows will rouse his son's anger. So when he appears in the Miller house he makes himself as odious as possible. Diplomacy and finesse are weapons not found in his armory, though he is a courtier and a successful politician. He is simply a cynical brute in high office. In truth his conduct is so very inhuman as to convey an impression of burlesque. He seems copied from some ogre in a fairy tale.
But if President von Walter appears now like a melodramatic caricature, it is partly because times have changed; for Schiller was not without his models in the recent history of Württemberg. During the period of Karl Eugen's worst recklessness—the decade beginning with 1755,—he was loyally abetted by two men, Rieger and Montmartin, who made themselves thoroughly odious. Rieger was a man of talent and knowledge, but without heart and without conscience. It was he who managed the cruel and lawless conscriptions whereby Duke Karl raised the desired troops for France.[56] Young men were simply taken wherever they could be found,—pulled from their beds at night, or seized as they came from church,—and forced into the army under brutal conditions of service. Many a Württemberg family could have told a tale of barbarity essentially similar to that recounted by the lackey to Lady Milford in the second act of Schiller's play. Remorseless oppression of the people, for the purpose of raising money to be spent on the duke's costly whims, became the order of the day.
Still more brutal and cynical in his methods than Rieger was Count Montmartin, who was made President of the State Council in 1758. A cunning and wicked intriguer, he lent himself without scruple to the gratification of his master's lusts and caprices. The daughters of the land were unsafe from his machinations if they had had the misfortune to attract the wanton eye of their sovereign. In 1762, wishing to be rid of his powerful rival, Montmartin trumped up a charge that Rieger was engaged in treasonable correspondence with Prussia. The result was that Rieger was publicly disgraced. Meeting him one day on parade the duke angrily tore off his military order, struck him with his cane and then shut him up in the Hohentwiel, where he lay for four years without light, table, chair or bed. In like manner the patriotic publicist, Moser, was imprisoned for five years, without trial and without sentence, because he had withheld his consent to the duke's high-handed proceedings.
Such was the political system that had afflicted Württemberg during Schiller's childhood. It furnished him with his dramatic 'mythology', as it has been called. The name may be allowed to pass, only it should be remembered that this mythology was simply history. The rapier-thrusts of the dramatist were not directed against wind-mills of the imagination, but against political infamies that make one's blood boil in the reading and that would have moved a more spirited people to hang their rulers to the nearest tree. This should be borne in mind by any one who, in the milder light of a later and better era, is disposed to carp at Schiller for caricaturing the nobility. He was not concerned with aristocracy in general, but with the particular kakistocracy that had disgraced his native land. And all that he did was to exhibit it as it was, or lately had been.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 51: 'The New Heloise', Part 1, letter 62.]
[Footnote 52: The adjectives are John Morley's; "Diderot", Chap. VII.]
[Footnote 53: "La première fois que je la vis, ce fut à l'église",—says
Diderot's St. Albin, in recounting the beginning of his infatuation for
Sophie. So with Faust and Margaret, and with Schiller's beautiful Greek
lady in 'The Ghostseer'.]
[Footnote 54: "Schillers Leben und Werke", 15. Aufl. (1900), p. 297. In earlier editions of Palleske's work, which appeared originally in 1858-9, Louise was further characterized as 'the crushed heart of the German people'; and the sentence, 'which had to recover from those wounds', read: 'which is beginning to recover'.]
[Footnote 55: One strophe runs: