The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller

by Calvin Thomas

Except 'Wallenstein' no other work of Schiller cost him such long and strenuous toil. 'Don Carlos', like Goethe's 'Faust', is a stratified deposit. The time that went to the making of it, only four years in all, was comparatively short, but it was for Schiller a time of rapid change; and the play, intensely subjective from the first, participated in the ripening process. The result is a certain lack of artistic congruity. Schiller himself, always his own best critic, felt this and frankly admitted it in the first of his 'Letters upon Don Carlos'.

It may be [he wrote] that in the first [three] acts I have aroused expectations which the last do not fulfill. St. Réal's novel, perhaps also my own remarks upon it in the first number of the Thalia, may have suggested to the reader a standpoint from which the work can no longer be regarded. During the period of elaboration, which on account of divers interruptions was a pretty long time, much changed within myself…. What had mainly attracted me at first, attracted me less later on, and at last hardly at all. New ideas that came into my mind crowded out the earlier ones. Carlos himself had declined in my favor, for no other reason perhaps than that I had outgrown him, and for the opposite reason the Marquis of Posa had taken his place. So it came about that I brought a very different heart to the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the first three were already in the hands of the public, and the plan of the whole could not be recast; I had either to suppress the piece entirely (for which very few of my readers would have thanked me), or else to fit the second half to the first as best I could.

Let us look somewhat closely at the process of evolution here alluded to in general terms.

The original impulse came from a work of romantic fiction, the 'Dom Carlos' of St. Réal, which was first read by Schiller in the summer of 1782 and drew from him the comment that the story 'deserved the brush of a dramatist'. St. Réal's novel begins by telling how Charles the Fifth arranged, just before his abdication, that his grandson Carlos should some day marry Elizabeth of Valois: and how afterwards Philip determined to take the French princess for his own wife instead of leaving her to his son. Meanwhile, however, by much gazing at the picture of his betrothed, young Carlos had learned to love her, and she in turn had conceived for him a 'disposition to love rather than a veritable passion'. Arrived at the Spanish court the young queen wins all hearts; even the white-haired Philip falls in love with her, though he treats her with stately reserve in the presence of others and surrounds her with the restraints of Spanish etiquette. Thus the queen comes to feel that she possesses 'only the body of her husband, his soul being filled with the designs of his ambition and the meditation of his policy'. As for Carlos, his love-lorn eyes soon betray to her how it is with him, but she can only pity him, though she secretly returns his love, for she is as virtuous as she is beautiful.

Not so the Princess Eboli, wife of Ruy Gomez, the tutor of Carlos. Having tried to win the love of the king and found her designs thwarted by the queen's beauty, Eboli makes advances to Prince Carlos, who lets her know that he cannot love her and thus makes her angry. In this mood she bestows her favor upon the king's half-brother, Don Juan of Austria, who is also enamored of the queen and has been watching Carlos suspiciously. Having thus made enemies of Eboli and Don Juan, Carlos next draws upon himself the hatred of the powerful Duke of Alva, of Ruy Gomez, and of the Inquisition. This he does by his outspoken criticism of their doings and his threats of punishment to be meted out to them when he shall have become king. Anxious for their own future Alva and Ruy Gomez conspire together and cause suspicions of Carlos to be whispered in the ear of the king. At first Philip is not greatly excited. When Carlos, importuned by Count Egmont, asks for a commission to the Netherlands, Philip does not refuse, but declares that he will go too and share the peril of his son. This, however, is a mere ruse to gain time. While they are waiting, the king meanwhile feigning illness, Carlos communicates freely with the queen through his bosom friend, the Marquis of Posa. Hearing of this intimacy the king now becomes really jealous, but of Posa not of Carlos. Maddened by suspicion he has the marquis murdered on the street and employs Eboli to watch the queen. After this Carlos resolves upon independent action and begins to negotiate with the Netherlanders. His operations are watched and reported by his enemies, and just as he is about to leave Spain he is arrested. The king places his case before the Holy Office, which decrees that he must die. Being allowed to choose the manner of his death he opens his veins while bathing.

With the actual Don Carlos, whose story bears but little resemblance to that of St. Réal's hero, we are not particularly concerned. The French Abbé's drift is to exalt the French princess and to give a telling picture of a pair of high-minded lovers who are brought to their death by a complicate intrigue begotten of jealousy, political hatred and religious fanaticism. After the death of Carlos the queen is poisoned and then, one after the other, all the conspirators meet with poetic justice. "Ainsi", the Abbé concludes, "furent expiées les morts à jamais déplorables d'un prince magnanime, et de la plus belle et de la plus vertueuse princesse qui fut jamais. C'est ainsi que leurs ombres infortunées furent enfin pleinement appaisées par les funestes destinées de tous les complices de leur trépas."

St. Réal's novel was published in 1672 and has been a favorite quarry of the dramatist. Of the plays of Otway (1676) and Campistron (1685) Schiller had no knowledge, nor did he receive any suggestions from the fierce and gloomy 'Filippo' of Alfieri, which appeared in 1783. He approached the subject in his own way and his first thought was simply to dramatize St. Réal, who is mainly interested in the love tragedy and writes as a literary artist rather than as a political or religious pamphleteer. We possess a prose outline[65] of 'Don Carlos', written probably at Bauerbach, which shows exactly how the theme first bit into Schiller's mind. The exposition was to show the secret passion of the lovers and the dangers threatening them from the jealousy of Philip, the political hostility of the grandees and the malice of the slighted Eboli. In the third act the king would become madly suspicious and resolve upon his son's death. Then there was to be a gleam of hope: the ambition of Carlos would awaken and begin to prevail over his love, while Posa would divert the king's suspicion to himself and fall a sacrifice to friendship. Then a new danger would arise: the king would discover Don Carlos in a seeming 'rebellion', and decree his death. The dying declaration of Carlos would prove his innocence and the king would be left alone to mourn the havoc he had wrought and to punish the conspirators who had deceived him.

This sketch promises, it will be observed, not a political tragedy, but, as Schiller himself afterwards phrased it, a 'domestic tragedy in a royal household'. Springing up from the same soil and at the same time as 'Cabal and Love', it was to be much the same sort of play. In both a pair of high-minded lovers belonging together by natural affinity, but separated by artificial barriers; the rights of passion battling in the one case with social prejudice, in the other with the law of Rome and the malice of courtiers; in both a court plot against the lovers; the hero beset by a fair sinner who receives him in her private room, lays siege to him, and is angered by the slighting of her love; in both a tyrannical and headstrong father at enmity with his son. Of the political ideas which the world associates with 'Don Carlos' there is here no adumbration. We hear nothing of the Netherlanders, nor of the Inquisition, nor of the rights of man. Posa is only a friend of Carlos, not the ambassador of all mankind, and there is no room for his golden dreams of philanthropic statesmanship. And yet it is worth noticing that in three points (all in the third act) Schiller adds to his French source: Carlos's ambition was to waken and prevail over his love, Posa was to sacrifice himself, and the lovers were to rise superior to their passion.

However, no sooner did our playwright address himself seriously to his task than his imagination began to break over the bounds he had set for it. Even at Bauerbach, as his letters show, his mind was occupied with the thought of 'avenging mankind' by scourging the gloomy despotism of Philip, the monstrous cruelty of Alva, the dark intrigues of the Jesuits and the hideous crimes of the Inquisition. That he made any progress in the spring of 1783, further than to cogitate upon his general plan and to fall in love with his hero, is not probable; nor do his Mannheim letters allude to 'Don Carlos' until June, 1784. In a letter of that date he assures Dalberg,—mindful of that good man's trials in connection with 'Cabal and Love',—that the new play will be 'anything but a political piece'. Whatever could offend the feelings was to be strictly avoided. August 24 he writes that 'Don Carlos' is a 'splendid, subject', especially for himself. Four great characters, Carlos, Philip, the queen, and Alva (no mention of Posa) open before him a boundless field. He cannot forgive himself for having tried to shine in the bourgeois drama, where another may easily surpass him (this in allusion to Iffland), whereas in historical tragedy he need fear no rival. He adds that he is now fairly master of the iambic form and that the verse cannot fail to impart splendor and dignity.

So we see that by the end of his first year in Mannheim Schiller had indeed undergone a change. The saeva indignatio of the dramatic pamphleteer had given way to the serener mood of the poetic artist. This change would doubtless have come about under any circumstances, through the natural ripening of his mind and art, but it was hastened by the influence of Klein and Wieland, and by the example of Lessing's 'Nathan'. Anton von Klein, a Jesuit bel esprit living at Mannheim, was a steadfast champion of the regular heroic tragedy. He had written a searching review of 'The Robbers', pointing out its many faults and absurdities, but he recognized Schiller's talent and saw in him a man worth converting. At Mannheim a friendship sprang up between the two, and Schiller heard much talk about the superior merit of the noble poetic style,—a region of thought in which he had hitherto wandered but little. He had written thus far out of the fervor of his soul, and theory of any sort had touched him but little. From Rousseauite literature he had caught a fantastic conception of 'nature', and this had led him to portray men and women who were scarcely more natural than those of Gottsched himself. In the rush of feeling he had enlisted among the young revolutionists whose stormy and stressful tendency, curiously enough, was regarded as 'English'. And now he found that there was after all something to be said in favor of the classical French type. The 'anglo-maniacs' were not in possession of the whole truth. Might there not be, perhaps, a tertium quid,—a German drama having a character of its own and combining the literary dignity and artistic finish of the French with the warmth and variety of the pseudo-English school? As if in answer to this query, Lessing's 'Nathan', published in 1779, had already opened a vista of limitless possibilities. And 'Nathan' was in blank verse.