Sir, my good friend. I'll change that name with you.
The corresponding passage in Schiller runs:
Can it be?
Is't true? Is't possible? 'Tis really thou.
I press thee to my heart and feel the beat
Of thine omnipotent against my own.
Now all is well again.—In this embrace
The sickness of my soul is cured. I lie
Upon my Roderick's neck.
One does not see how such pitiful weakness is all at once to be converted into manly strength by the mere arrival of a friend; wherefore that fine saying of Carlos which closes the first act,
Arm in arm with thee,
I hurl defiance at my century,
sounds a trifle bombastic.
So again at his first meeting with Elizabeth, Carlos is distressingly mawkish. She pictures him, in pitying indignation, as succeeding to the throne, undoing his father's work and at last marrying herself. Then he exclaims in sudden horror:
Accursed son! Yes, it is over. Now
'Tis over. Now I see it all so clearly,
and much more of the same purport. But how strange that he should have brooded for eight moons over his passion without ever having considered how it might appear to the object of it! His talk here suggests a mental inadequacy which one is hardly prepared to see change all of a sudden into heroic resolution.
To be sure it was a part of Schiller's design to represent in Carlos a process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason is that Schiller did not foresee the end from the beginning. He thought of Carlos originally as a hapless youth having a sort of natural right to rebel. It was a part of the plan, moreover, that he should renounce and grow strong through renunciation. But this was to come later in the third act; in the beginning he was to dally with the morbid passion which was to be his tragic guilt. Now with this conception of the subject, the portrait of Carlos, just as we have it, fits in very well; but when the main interest of the play had become political, when the lawless love had become of no account and the renunciation everything,—then it was surely an error to introduce Carlos in such a pitiful plight of soul that faith in him is next to impossible, and the next moment require us to accept him as a hero.