The total effect of the prelude is to put one in a very good humor with the personages who figure there. One indeed feels sub-consciously that they are detestable—not a whit better than the angry friar paints them. One sympathizes intellectually with his fierce denunciation and pities the land that is exposed to such a scourge. And yet—such is the poetic glamour thrown over them—feelings of this kind never become dominant. It is like the squalid slums of a great city, when seen through the sun-lit morning mist. The reality is horrible, revolting. The soul of the philanthropist is pained—but not so the eye of the artist. Schiller contrives that we see his vagabonds with the artistic eye and are drawn to them by their very picturesqueness. We quickly impute to them more virtue than their ways betoken; and when in their lusty final song they break out in a strain of lofty idealism:
Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein,
one is hardly conscious of the incongruity.
The dramatic fable devised by Schiller for the tragedy proper carries us back to the winter of 1634. Events extending over several months are concentrated by poetic fiat into the four days preceding the assassination of Wallenstein, which took place on the 25th of February. The prominent characters fall into two groups,—the abettors of Wallenstein in his treason, and the imperialists who work his ruin. The first group consists of historical personages, mainly officers, whom he had bound to him by one or another tie of selfish interest. Foremost among these are Illo, the Count and Countess Terzky, and General Butler, who turns against his chief and becomes the agent of his taking-off. The central figure of the other group is Octavio Piccolomini, whom Schiller converts from a young officer of thirty into an elderly man with a grown-up son. Octavio, in reality the trusted agent of the emperor, is regarded by Wallenstein with a superstitious infatuation as his own most faithful friend. Between these two groups stand the ingenuous lovers, Max and Thekla, imaginary characters who can make their perfect peace with neither side and are done to death in a pathetic struggle between love and duty.
As we have already seen, Schiller found it no easy task to mould the historical Wallenstein into a satisfactory tragic hero. The character was lacking in nobility. To be sure it was not necessary to make him out an infamous traitor; for his character, his motives, the measure of his guilt, were subjects of debate among the historians, and the evidence was, as it still is, inconclusive. It was therefore quite within the license of a dramatic poet to take the part of Wallenstein, so far at least as to throw into strong light all the palliating circumstances that could be urged in his favor. Such were, for example, that he was a prince of the empire and as such had a right to conduct negotiations and to make peace; that he wished to give rest to a torn and bleeding Germany; that he had been ignobly treated by the House of Austria, and so forth. By laying stress upon these things and passing lightly over others, it was easily possible to save Wallenstein from the detestation that is wont to associate itself with the idea of a traitor.
But for an interesting tragic hero it is not enough to fall short of infamy. He must have some sort of distinction. He must be a towering personality. One does not go to the theater to be convinced in a moral or political argument, but to be carried along with a rush of feeling, for which the old term sympathy is perhaps as good a name as any other. A magnificent criminal will serve the purpose very well, as Schiller had discovered in his early years, but he must be magnificent. Now it was precisely this element of greatness that was lacking in the character of the historical Wallenstein. No lofty idealism of any kind could be imputed to him. He was not a religious zealot, like Cromwell or Gustav Adolf, nor was he a strenuous German patriot, like Frederick the Great. He was not even a great soldier; for while, as the head of a great host of marauding mercenaries, he made himself the scourge and the terror of Germany, he never won a decisive battle against an equal enemy. The history of his fighting is largely a history of futilities. And when he formed the plan of a separate peace,—a plan which if promptly and vigorously executed might possibly have succeeded and have caused him to be numbered with the benefactors of Europe,—he dallied with the thought until it was too late, fell into the pit which he had digged for himself, and, in trying to flounder out, met his death at the hands of an assassin who had a grudge against him. Thus even his death was pitiful rather than tragic. It does not appear to be the work of that high Nemesis which Schiller noticed as dominating the career of Shakspere's Richard the Third.
To have succeeded as Schiller did succeed, in the face of such difficulties, is a memorable triumph of the poetic art. By purely aesthetic means, without any appeal to political or religious passion, without requiring us to take sides in any debatable cause, but simply by the skill and subtlety of his drawing, he has invested Wallenstein with an impressiveness such, as belongs only to the great creations of the great tragic poets. His overruling trait is ambition; and in the denotation of this, as of his whole relation to the Countess Terzky, the influence of 'Macbeth' is obvious. And yet he is very far from being a copy of Shakspere's hero, or a mere embodiment of ambition. On the contrary, he is the most complicate of all Schiller's creations, and the most difficult to portray on the stage in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. As a good critic observes, he is 'fascinating and repulsive, admirable and contemptible, fantastic and cunning, cautious and frivolous, a mighty organizer and a helpless child, false and true, touching and terrible, a mixture of all possible qualities, and yet a unity, a totality'.[115] The promise of the Prologue is admirably fulfilled:
But art shall show him in his human form
And bring him nearer to your eyes and hearts;
She sees the man in all the stress of life,
And for the greater portion of his guilt
She blames the working of malignant stars.
The last two lines, be it observed, involve much more than a mere allusion to Wallenstein's superstitious belief in astrology. Schiller's idea, schooled as he had been for years upon Sophocles and Shakspere, was to blend the fate-tragedy of the ancients with the modern tragedy of character. The two things were not incompatible, since in a broad view of the matter a man's character is his fate. It is to be observed also that the peculiar effect of Greek tragedy does not depend upon the way in which the external [Greek: moira] was conceived, but upon the fact that the hero seems to be battling, and was by the audience known to be battling, against the inevitable. The situation is not what he supposes, and the event will not be what he intends. He is the subject: of an illusion, an infatuation; and this [Greek: ate] is the principal factor in the tragic effect.[116]
Now Wallenstein's [Greek: ate] takes the form of a blind and overweening self-conceit. He has the 'great-man-mania' hardly less than Karl Moor. Accustomed to follow his own light, to command and to be obeyed, and to look with contempt upon the interference of priests and courtiers in the business of war, he thinks himself omnipotent. There is no power that he fears save that of the stars; and even that he imagines he can bend to his will by studious attention to astrologic portents. He has found it possible to raise and maintain a great army by taking good care of his officers and men; and appealing thus constantly to the lower motives of human nature, he comes to think at last that there are no others. When the Swede Wrangel suggests a suspicion of his Chancellor that it 'might be an easier thing to create out of nothing an army of sixty thousand men than to lead a sixtieth part of them into an act of treachery', Wallenstein replies: 'Your Chancellor judges like a Swede and a Protestant.' And when he finds that this sentiment of loyalty—die Treue, one of the most ancient and powerful of motives—is still a real force in human affairs, he can only account for it as a curious superstition: