And then how singularly Don Manuel behaves! He is the elder son, and as such must be heir to the throne; but of that we hear nothing in the play. He falls in love with Beatrice, sees her often during a period of months, and secures from her a promise of marriage; but he never tells her who he is, nor does he ask her a question about her own lineage. When she tells him of an old man who comes to her occasionally as messenger from her unknown family, and who has at last bidden her prepare for a change of abode, he makes no attempt to see the stranger and find out whither his bride is to be taken. For such conduct he can have no possible reason, but Schiller has one; for were Don Manuel once to set eyes on the old family servant, Diego, a clearing-up would of course be inevitable. Instead of doing the one natural thing, Don Manuel abducts his sweetheart during the night, with her consent, and takes her to a garden in Messina. There he leaves her alone to await his coming,—a singular thing for a prince to do with his bride, but necessary to the tragedy.
More dubious still is the remarkable silence of Beatrice when she is exposed to the stormy wooing of Don Cesar in the garden. The fiction is that he has caught a glimpse of her two months before, on the occasion of his father's funeral, and has since been constantly searching for her. Having now found her, through one of his spies, he makes love to her jubilantly through sixty lines of text, but she answers never a syllable and lets him go away in supposed triumph. A bare word from her, such as a woman could not help saying under the circumstances, would end the complication, since it would send Don Cesar away baffled; and then there would be no occasion for his returning to the garden a little later. Maidenly fright and consternation cannot account rationally for such behavior; one sees that she holds her tongue because to set it in motion would be dramaturgically disastrous.
But the climax of unnaturalness is reached in the scene between the queen and her two sons, when old Diego reports that Beatrice has been abducted from the convent—presumbly by Moorish corsairs. The distracted mother urges her sons to go at once to the rescue of their sister. But here a difficulty presents itself. If the brothers are to have the faintest chance of finding their sister, it is clearly of the first importance that they know something about her, and particularly that they know where she has been kept in hiding. Now this knowledge can be safely imparted to Don Cesar but not to Don Manuel. So Don Cesar is made to rush away hotly, at all adventure, without the slightest clew of any kind,—the reason being that it would not do for him to hear that which Diego is about to tell. The younger brother thus conveniently out of the way, Don Manuel, who has begun to suspect the truth, implores his mother to tell him where the lost Beatrice has been concealed. Evidently the only natural part for the mother is to answer the question. But that would not do; so she interrupts him and urges him away with such senseless exclamations as 'Fly to action!' 'Follow your brother's example!' 'Behold my tears!' And when at last he succeeds in bringing out the fateful inquiry, she only answers:
The bowels of earth were not a safer refuge!
Then Don Manuel ceases to press his question and stands quietly by while Diego tells his remorseful story of Beatrice's visit to the church on the day of her father's funeral. Strangely enough this recital suggests to Don Manuel the hopeful suspicion that his sister and his sweetheart may, after all, not be the same person; so he rushes away to question Beatrice, when he must know that his mother is the one person in the world who can best resolve his doubts. Then, when he is gone, Don Cesar comes back, and the mother very calmly proceeds to give him the all-important information which she has just withheld from Don Manuel.
Such is the device, of convenient silence at critical points where speech would be natural but ruinous, by which Schiller leads up to his climax. There is no other play of his, early or late, the entanglement of which is so palpably artificial; so like a child's house of cards, built up with bated breath lest a breath should topple it over. According to Böttiger, Schiller once took note of what some critic had remarked upon this lavish use of silence in 'The Bride of Messina' and expressed surprise that any one could so misconceive him. He went on to say, if we can trust Böttiger, that it is 'precisely in this closing of the mouth at critical moments, when a saving word might rend the iron net of fate, that the unevadable and demonic power of evil-brooding destiny manifests itself most clearly and sends a gruesome shudder of awe through every spectator.' This is certainly a good defense if we assume that the great object of dramatic poetry is to exhibit the working-out of some abstract scheme of mysterious fate. Under that hypothesis one has no right to complain if the characters are treated like puppets,—pulled hither and thither in unnatural directions and made to speak when they should be silent, and to be silent when they should speak. If one finds the scheme impressive, one will think of that, get his thrill of awe and be thankful. But it is somewhat different if one holds that the verities of human nature are more interesting than any scheme, and that the great object of the serious drama should be to exhibit human beings in the stress of life. One who takes that view will wish, while recognizing the great qualities of 'The Bride of Messina', that its author had not gone quite so far in his contempt of realism.
For, after all, the highest law of the drama is the law of psychological truth, which requires that the characters be humanly conceivable and act as human beings would act under the circumstances imagined. This law is not kept in 'The Bride of Messina', with the result that the first three acts fall short of the effect that they are intended to produce. It is different with the fourth act. There everything is in order, and the simple and noble impressiveness of the tragedy leaves nothing to be desired. And it is an interesting fact that this impressiveness depends only in a slight degree upon the fulfillment of the old dreams and prophecies. To be sure they are fulfilled; but we are not required to put faith in the inspiration either of the Arab soothsayer or of the Christian monk. Their vaticinations might be mere fallible guess-work; Don Cesar might live and give them the lie, so far as any external constraint is concerned. But he himself feels that the heavy hand of fate is upon him and that continued life would be intolerable. The whole pathos of the tragedy is transferred to the inner being of the surviving brother, and one feels that his self-destruction proceeds from the law of his own nature, and not from any fatalistic necessity that is laid upon him.
The truth would seem to be that the fate-idea, while of course it must be taken into consideration in any careful estimate of 'The Bride of Messina', has been made a little too prominent by many of the critics. What the spectator sees, says one writer who is in the main an admirable expounder of Schiller, is "gigantic Fate striding over the stage. He sees a wild, tyrannical race, burdened with ancestral guilt, turning against its own flesh and blood…. He is made to feel that the self-destruction of this race is nothing accidental, that it is a divine visitation, a judgment of eternal justice pronounced against usurpation and lawlessness, that it means the birth of a new spiritual order out of doom and death."[127] But is this what is actually seen? Is it not rather true that Schiller makes but little out of the matter of ancestral guilt? We hear, it is true, that the old prince was of an alien stock that had won the sovereignty of Messina with the sword and held it by force. But this is no very appalling crime as the world goes, and especially as the world went in the Middle Ages. One hardly thinks of William of Normandy, for example, as a revolting criminal deserving of the divine wrath. Then we hear, too, that the old prince had appropriated to himself a wife who was 'his father's choice'. But the whole matter is disposed of in two or three choral lines which leave not even a clear, much less a strong impression. There are no data for an ethical judgment. We are not told wherein the superior right of the father consisted. For aught we know the son may have had the better claim, and the father's curse may have been only the impotent scolding of a disappointed dotard. It is difficult to see anything here which can rationally warrant eternal justice in extirpating the race. And when we pass from the presuppositions to the play itself, we see that none of the characters except Don Cesar does anything seriously blameworthy.
If then it were clearly the central purpose of Schiller to justify the moral government of the world, or to exhibit the workings of an august Fate in itself worthy of reverence, we should have to admit that he has missed the mark; for the fate that he represents is not worthy of reverence at all. But what is the central fact of the play, as seen by the unsophisticated spectator who has never read the Greek poets nor heard of the house of Labdacus? Evidently it is the murder expiated by a voluntary death. A high-minded youth knowingly kills his brother in a moment of blind rage, because he thinks that his brother has deceived him. When he learns the truth, and learns also of the old dreams and prophecies, he feels that he too must die. Here is the real tragedy,—in the resolution of Don Cesar and his steadfast adherence to it in the face of his mother's and his sister's entreaties. The apparatus of dreams and prophecies and fate is meant to work upon the mind of Don Cesar rather than upon that of the spectator. Superstition adds to the burden of his remorse until it becomes unbearable and death appears the only road to peace:
Dying I bring to naught the ancient curse,
A free death only breaks the chain of fate,