The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 6

You have commended to me your Lotte, whom I know completely, I thank you for the great proof of your love.... Believe me, my best of friends, I envy you this amiable sister. Still just as if from the hands of the Creator, innocent, the fairest, tenderest, most sensitive soul, and not yet a breath of the general corruption on the bright mirror of her nature,--thus I know your Lotte, and woe to him who brings a cloud over this innocent soul!... Your mother has made me a confidant in a matter that may decide the fate of your Lotte and has told me how you feel upon the subject. [It appears that Wilhelm disliked the young man,] I know Herr W--n and ...

believe me, he is not unworthy of your sister.... I really esteem him, though I cannot at present be called his friend. He loves your Lotte and I know he loves her like a n.o.ble man, and your Lotte loves him like a girl that loves for the first time.

But the foolish dreams were not so easily to be given their quietus, especially when he discovered that Lotte was only half in love with Winkelmann after all. Then there seemed hope for him and he surrendered himself freely to the intoxication of his little summer romance. What were the world and a poet's fame in comparison with happiness? Still he did not declare himself. He often called Frau von Wolzogen 'mother', and averred in letters that no son could love her better. Probably a word from her might have led to an engagement. But the word was not spoken.

She was a sensible lady, who knew how to look into the future and to guard the welfare both of her daughter and of her protege. She saw that if he was to make his way in the world as a dramatist he must return to the world; a prolongation of the Bauerbach idyl could lead to nothing but disappointment and unhappiness. Besides, his incognito had now become only a conventional fiction; everybody knew who he was.

One day, accordingly, as they were walking together, she suggested that he pay a visit to Mannheim and see what could be done with Dalberg. He resolved to follow her advice. Late in July he set out, promising himself and her a speedy return. But it was not so to be. Becoming absorbed in the business of a new career he continued, indeed, to think of her affectionately and to write to her, but at ever-increasing intervals; and after a few months Bauerbach and the Wolzogens were only a delightful memory. It is true that after the lapse of nearly a year he one day took it into his head to suggest to the mother that she take him for a son-in-law. But the wooing went no further. After all he had not really been in love with Lotte in particular so much as with an ideal of domestic bliss.

Shortly before his departure from Bauerbach there had been some talk of his accompanying Reinwald on a contemplated journey to Weimar, where he might make the acquaintance of Karl August, Goethe and Wieland. In his excellent little book upon Schiller, Streicher expresses regret that his friend had not acted upon this suggestion instead of following the 'siren voice' that led to the Palatinate. But it is difficult to sympathize with this regret. He was not yet ripe for the role that fate held in store for him in Thuringen. His education was to proceed yet a while longer by the process of flaying. He was to suffer and grow strong; to battle further with the goblins of despair; to tread the quicksands of adversity and fight his way through to a firm footing among the sons of men. Who shall say that it was not better so?

The long-cherished hopes of a connection with the Mannheim theater were destined this time to be fulfilled. In the course of a few weeks Schiller entered into a contract which a.s.sured him, for a year at least, a respectable status in society and opened a new chapter in his life.

Before we take up that chapter, however, it will be proper to consider the new play which he had brought with him as a pa.s.sport to Dalberg's favor. Thus far he had called it by the name of its heroine, but when it was put upon the stage it was rechristened, at the suggestion of the actor Iffland, and has ever since been known as 'Cabal and Love'. The revision which he had undertaken, after the reopening of correspondence with Dalberg, was even now not quite finished; so that the final touches had to be given at Mannheim. It is probable that the political satire, which was based in part upon veritable history and contained transparent allusions to well-known personages, was more or less toned down in deference to the wishes of Dalberg. Minor changes were also made at the behest of the actors. But while it was not played and not printed until the spring of 1784, it belongs in its substance and its spirit, not to the Mannheim period of Schiller's life, but to the period which he had spent in hiding. It is a freeman's comment upon high life as he had known it. Scrupulously enough Schiller kept the letter of his promise not to use his pen in belittling the Duke of Wurttemberg. But the _Wirtschaft_ in Stuttgart was fair game, and there were other ways of masking a dramatic battery than to lay the scene in Italy. In 'Cabal and Love' the reigning prince does not appear upon the stage.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 48: Letter of March, 1783; in "Schillers Briefe", edited by Jonas, Vol. I, page 101.]

[Footnote 49: Letter of Jan. 4, 1783, to Frau von Wolzogen. ]

[Footnote 50: Undated letter of March, 1783; "Schillers Briefe", I, 101.]

CHAPTER VI

Cabal and Love

Ich bin ein Edelmann--Lasz doch sehen, ob mein Adelbrief alter ist als der Risz zum unendlichen Weltall; oder mein Wappen gultiger ist als die Handschrift des Himmels in Louisens Augen: Dieses Weib ist fur diesen Mann.--'_Cabal and Love_'.

In 'Cabal and Love' Schiller found again, as he had previously found in 'The Robbers', a thoroughly congenial theme. More properly the theme found him, took possession of him and would not let him go, until the inner tumult had subsided and German literature had been enriched with its most telling tragedy of the social conflict. 'Fiesco' had proved a disappointment; he had not been able to bring himself into perfect sympathy with the subject, and at the best his Italian conspiracy was a far-away matter. Now he set foot again upon his native heath and all went better. In spite of certain defects which led him to speak of it later as rather badly designed, 'Cabal and Love' must be p.r.o.nounced the most artistic and the most interesting of his early plays.

It is the tragedy of two lovers, an honorable aristocrat and a girl of humble birth, who are done to death through a vile intrigue which is dictated by the exigencies of an infamous political regime. By means of a compromising letter, which is not forged but extorted under duress, the lover is made to suspect his sweetheart's fidelity; and she, though innocent, is prevented by scruples of conscience from undeceiving him.

In a jealous fury he gives her poison and then partakes of it himself.

The mischief is wrought not so much by the wickedness of the great, albeit that comes in for a share of the responsibility, as by the obstinate cla.s.s prejudice, amounting to a tragic superst.i.tion, of the heroine and her father. Many of the details were taken over by Schiller from his predecessors; but he so improved upon them, so vitalized the familiar conflicts and situations, and threw into his work such a power of genuine pathos, caught from the pathos of real life, that 'Cabal and Love' still stands out as a notable doc.u.ment of the revolutionary epoch.

The epoch produced many bourgeois tragedies, but Schiller's is much the best of them all. Before we look at it more closely it will be worth while to glance at the history of the type in Germany.

The tragedy of middle-cla.s.s life first took root, as is well known, in England. It was in 1732 that Lillo brought upon the Drury Lane stage his acted tale of George Barnwell, the London 'prentice who is beguiled by a harlot, robs his master, kills his uncle and ends his career on the gallows, to the great grief of the doting Maria, his master's daughter.

The prologue tells how the experiment was expected to strike the public of that day:

The Tragic Muse sublime delights to show Princes distrest and scenes of royal woe; In awful pomp majestic to relate The fall of nations or some hero's fate; That scepter'd chiefs may by example know The strange vicissitudes of things below....

Upon our stage indeed, with wished success, You've sometimes seen her in a humbler dress, Great only in distress. When she complains, In Southern's, Rowe's, or Otway's moving strains, The brilliant drops that fall from each bright eye The absent pomp with brighter gems supply, Forgive us then if we attempt to show In artless strains a tale of private woe.

So it appears that 'Barnwell' was something new, yet not entirely new.

The stately tragedy of solemn edification, at which no one was expected to weep, had already yielded a part of its sovereignty to the tragedy of distress. It occurred to Lillo that tears could be drawn for the woes of the middle cla.s.s, which had been looked upon as suitable only for comedy. The event proved that he had reckoned well: the "brilliant drops" fell copiously, the innovation crossed the Channel, and soon the bourgeois tragedy,--whence by an easy differentiation the lacrimose, pathetic, or serious comedy,--had entered upon its European career.

The first German example was 'Miss Sara Sampson', written in 1755, wherein the daughter of a fond English squire is lured away from her home, like Clarissa Harlowe, by the profligate Mellefont, who promises to marry her. The pair take lodgings at a low London inn, where Mellefont finds pretexts for delaying the marriage ceremony. Presently his former mistress, Marwood, appears--a proud and pa.s.sionate woman of sin. She claims him as the mother of his child, but having now found out what true love is he spurns her. Bitter interviews follow, with, spiteful recriminations and awful threats. Marwood tells her story to Sara and finally ends the tension by poisoning her, whereupon Mellefont commits suicide. In writing this play Lessing was in no way concerned with any social question. He const.i.tuted himself the champion of the bourgeoisie before the tribunal of Melpomene, but not before the conscience of mankind. The woes of hero and heroine are in no way related to cla.s.s prejudice or to the great democratic upheaval of the century. Lessing's atmosphere is the moral and sentimental atmosphere of Richardson, though his literary power is incomparably greater.

'Miss Sara Sampson' did not long hold the stage, but its influence is discernible in subsequent developments. The 'man between two women'

became a regular feature of the new domestic tragedy. In play after play we find a soulful, clinging, romantic creature--usually the t.i.tle-heroine--set over against a full-blooded rival whose ways are ways of wantonness. Lessing himself repeated the group in 'Emilia Galotti', which in its turn became the mother of a new brood. The tragedy of lawless pa.s.sion led by an easy step to the tragedy of social conflict, which portrayed the depravity of princes and n.o.bles in their relation to the common people, or called upon mankind to weep for the woes of lovers separated by the barriers of rank. In Germany the species was very timely. Nowhere else in Europe had the n.o.bility so little to be proud of, and nowhere else was the pride of birth so stupidly intolerant. That fruitful theme of earlier and later poets, the love of n.o.bleman for maid of low degree, had been lost in the age of gallantry, save in lubricious tales of intrigue and seduction. The appalling dissoluteness which characterized the French court during the first half of the eighteenth century, and was duly copied by the princelings of Germany, had poisoned the minds of high and low alike and led to a state of affairs in which there was little room for a n.o.ble or even a serious conception of love.

Love was understood to be concupiscence. If an aristocrat stooped to a bourgeois girl, it was his affair and at the worst only an aberration of taste; her fate was of no importance.

When the inevitable reaction set in, it took the form of a debauch of sentimentalism. The poetry of real pa.s.sion came back into literature and people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a frivolous game played for the gratification of l.u.s.t, but a divine rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,--a part of that nature to which the world was now resolved to return,--it was sacred, and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy a.s.sociated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts and cities. It was, however, the pa.s.sionate eloquence of Rousseau which first gave to this contrast a revolutionary significance, and it was Rousseau who first stirred the reading world with a woeful tale of lovers separated by the prejudices of caste.

In 'The New Heloise' it is the lady who is the aristocrat. Julie d'Etange, the daughter of a baron, wishes to marry the unt.i.tled St.

Preux, to whom in a transport of pa.s.sion she has yielded up her honor.

But the Baron d'Etange is an implacable stickler for rank and she is a dutiful daughter; whence her marriage to the elderly infidel, Wolmar, and the well-known moral ending of the novel. The thought that concerns us here is best expressed by the enlightened English peer, Lord B., who thus expostulates with Baron d'Etange:

Let us judge of the past by the present; for two or three citizens who win distinction by honest means, a thousand knaves every day get their families enn.o.bled. But to what end serves that n.o.bility of which their descendants are so proud, unless it be to prove the robberies and infamy of their ancestor? There are, I confess, a great number of bad men among the common people; but the odds are always twenty to one against a gentleman that he is descended from a scoundrel.... In what consists then the honor of that n.o.bility of which you are so proud? How does it affect the glory of one's country or the good of mankind? A mortal enemy to liberty and the laws, what did it ever produce, in the most of those countries where it has flourished, but the power of tyranny and the oppression of the people? Will you presume to boast, in a republic, of a rank that Is destructive to virtue and humanity? Of a rank that makes its boast of slavery and wherein men blush to be men?[51]

This is of course the language of pa.s.sion and prejudice (it would not else be Rousseau), but there was enough of truth in it, as in the case of Rousseau's other fervors, to rouse the revolutionary spirit. German literature began to teem with novels and plays which exhibit the sufferings of some unt.i.tled hero or heroine at the hands of a vicious aristocracy. The theme is touched upon in 'Werther', but without becoming an Important issue. It appears in Wagner's 'Infanticide', wherein a butcher's daughter, Evchen Humbrecht, is violated by a t.i.tled officer, runs away from home in her shame, kills her child and is finally found by the repentant author of her disgrace. We meet it again in Lenz's 'Private Tutor', the tragedy of a German St. Preux who falls in love with his t.i.tled pupil and dishonors her, with the result that she too runs away from home and tries to commit suicide, while her lover in his chagrin emasculates himself. These are grotesque tragedies, not devoid of literary power, but devoid of high sentiment and saturated with a woeful vulgarity. We cannot wonder that the high-minded Schiller should have condemned Wagner's malodorous play as a mediocre performance. His incentive came rather from Gemmingen's 'Head of the House', which in turn carries us back to Diderot.

In the hands of Diderot, democrat, moralist and apostle of the _genre honnete_, it was natural that the drama of cla.s.s conflict should end happily. In his 'Father of the Family', written in 1758 and first played in 1761, the contrast of high and low is vividly portrayed, but without bitterness. The aristocratic St. Albin d'Orbisson falls in love with a poor girl from the country who lives in an attic and earns her own living. Sophie's beauty and virtue make a man of him and he wishes to marry her, but is opposed by his kind-hearted, querulous father, who argues the case with him at great length, confronting pa.s.sion with prudential common-sense. St. Albin is also opposed by his rich uncle, the Commandeur, from whom he has prospects. The uncle plots to get Sophie away by having her arrested, but is baffled by a counter-intrigue. Stormy scenes follow the revelation, and in the end it appears that Sophie is not a plebeian maiden at all, but the niece of the purse-proud Commandeur, who has neglected his poor relations. With the literary and dramatic qualities of this play, its absence of humor and of sparkling dialogue, its tedious moralizing, its hollow pathos and its general relation to Diderot's dramatic theory, we are not here directly concerned. What is important to observe is that, as a contribution to the burning social question, its point is blunted by the fact that its heroine is not what she seems to be. The whole matter reduces to a brief misunderstanding in an aristocratic family. Villainy is thwarted, true love comes into its own, and the foundations of society remain as they were.

Diderot's 'Father of the Family' enjoyed a short vogue in France and Italy and met with considerable favor in Germany. Most noteworthy among minor German plays that were influenced by it is Gemmingen's 'Head of the House'. Gemmingen was himself an aristocrat, a baron by t.i.tle, who was born in 1755. After studying law he settled in Mannheim, where he became deeply interested in the drama, so that in 1778 he was given the position of dramatist to the newly established 'national theater'. Two years later he brought out his 'Head of the House' with great success.

The piece is a pendant of Diderot's, but by no means a slavish imitation.

Gemmingen's 'head of the house' is an upright German n.o.bleman of the admirable sort, who returns home after a long absence to find the affairs of his family very much deranged. His eldest son, Karl, has fallen madly in love with Lotte Wehrmann, the daughter of an impecunious artist, gotten her with child, and promised to marry her when his father shall have returned and given his consent. The younger son, Ferdinand, an officer, has taken to gaming, lost heavily and has a duel on his hands. His son-in-law, Monheim, has become infatuated with a dazzling widow, Countess Amaldi, grown cold toward his wife Sophie, and the quarreling pair are eager for a divorce. The tangle is further complicated by the fact that Amaldi, an excellent match, is in love with Karl. The perplexed father sets at work with the tools of common sense and rational argument. He urges Karl to break with Lotte for his career's sake. The irresolute and dutiful Karl consents, saying nothing of Lotte's approaching motherhood, and the rumor of his intended marriage to the countess is spread abroad. When Lotte hears it she rushes to Amaldi and wildly demands her lover in the name of her unborn child. When the father hears the whole story he no longer thinks of rank but of honor. He bids Karl marry his true love and retire to the country, where, as overseer of a large estate, he will be less enc.u.mbered by a plebeian wife than in the career which had been planned for him. The magnanimous Amaldi furnishes the bride's dowry, the other domestic complications are easily adjusted and all ends happily.

Dramatically Gemmingen's play is rather tame, though its literary merit is considerable. He had a fair measure of constructive skill, but very little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve. His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann. Karl is a poor stick, Amaldi is rather colorless, and Lotte would be quite insipid but for her impending motherhood, on which everything is made to turn. Such as it was, however, the play excited the cordial admiration of Schiller, who read it soon after its appearance. Very likely it may have suggested to him the thought of trying his own hand upon a drama in the bourgeois sphere, but it was not until July, 1782,--just after he had finished reading Wagner's 'Infanticide',--that the plan of 'Louise Miller' began to take shape in his mind. Gemmingen's poor artist, Wehrmann, became the poor fiddler, Miller, and the daughter Lotte was rechristened Louise.

The aristocratic lover, Gemmingen's Karl, was named Ferdinand von Walter, and Amaldi was converted into Lady Milford. One of Gemmingen's subordinate characters, the foppish n.o.bleman, Dromer, who goes about making compliments to everybody, reappears in Schiller's play as the perfumed tale-bearer and exquisite ladies' man, Chamberlain von Kalb.

The places represented are three in number and the same in both plays.

Here, however, the parallel ends. Instead of Gemmingen's high-minded paterfamilias we have the rascally President von Walter, who, with his tool Wurm, reminds one of Lessing's Prince and Marinelli. And what is much more important, the relation of the lovers is so portrayed that we get the pure poetry of pa.s.sion, such as it is, without any tinge of grossness.

In its earliest phase Schiller's plan looked toward a telling tragi-comedy for the stage, with a plenty of rough humor and caustic satire at the expense of 'high-born fools and scoundrels'. As he worked, the possibilities of his theme developed. An abstract enthusiasm for the rights of man was kindled by honest love of the common people, and by the lingering smart of a personal wrong, into a holy zeal of vengeance.

President Walter was painted in colors which were taken largely from the political history and the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the Wurttemberg court. As this court had its angel of light in soiled garments, Lady Milford was fitted out with the benevolent qualities of Franziska von Hohenheim; and as the portrait grew In firmness its author fell in love with it, like the young Goethe with his Adelheid. When he came to depict the jealousy of Ferdinand, he had the advantage of a personal acquaintance with the green-eyed monster. Thus the play was extracted from the book of life, as Schiller had been able to read it, and that accounts for its vitality. But in his details he is nowhere less original. Not only in the general conception of important characters, but in particular scenes, situations, motives, contrasts and forms of expression, we can see the influence of the literary tradition which he inherited.

To show the exact nature and the full extent of this indebtedness would be a tedious undertaking, which would require pages of quotation from works whose chief interest now is that they served as quarry for Schiller. Three or four ill.u.s.trations will suffice. Our play begins with a scene which at once recalls what was originally the opening scene of Wagner's 'Infanticide'. In both there is a bl.u.s.tering father,--Lessing's Odoardo reduced to the bourgeois sphere,--discoursing with his silly wife upon the dangers that threaten their daughter from keeping aristocratic company. In both the domestic thunderer expresses himself in rough, strong language, and is only made the more furious by his wife's efforts to allay his fears. In Wagner's next scene Magister Humbrecht comes to woo Evchen, just as Schiller's Wurm comes to woo Louise, and we hear that the girl's head has been turned by reading novels. Just so Louise, whose father can scarcely find words to express his detestation of the young baron's infernal, belletristic poison. When Wurm arrives at Miller's and asks for Louise, he is informed that she has just gone to church. 'Glad of that, glad of that', he replies, 'I shall have in her a pious Christian wife'. Here is a reminiscence of the scene in which Lessing's Count Appiani exclaims, on hearing that Emilia has just been at church: 'That is right; I shall have in you a pious wife'. The devout heroine was a hardly less hackneyed figure in the dramatic literature of the time than the bl.u.s.tering father of whom Goethe complained.[53] In Schiller's Louise we have the religious sentiment sublimated into something quite too seraphic for human nature's daily food. Her high-keyed sense of duty to G.o.d, her natural filial piety and her superst.i.tious reverence for the social order, combine to produce in her a curious distraction which is the real source of the tragic conflict. She feels that her love is holy but that marriage would be sinful; and so she hesitates, responds to her lover's ardor with tremblings and solicitudes, knows not what to do, does the foolish thing and atones tragically for her weakness.

Not before Schiller's time had this conflict between love and filial duty been so powerfully depicted, but it is found in Wagner's 'Remorse after the Deed' (1775), wherein a coachman's daughter, Friederike Walz, is loved by the aristocratic Langen, who is opposed by his mother.

Langen goes to his sweetheart, all courage and resolution. He is prepared, like Leisewitz's Julius, to defy his kin, renounce the lures of his rank and flee to the ends of the earth with 'Rikchen'. To which she replies: 'Langen, you are terrible. To marry with the curse of parents is to make one's whole posterity miserable'. So Louise replies to Ferdinand's similar entreaty: 'And be followed by your father's curse! A curse, thoughtless man, which even murderers never utter in vain, and which like a ghost would pursue us fugitives mercilessly from sea to sea.'

In the sentimental novel 'Siegwart', the heroine, Therese, loves a young squire, not for his blue blood, but for the n.o.bility of his heart. Like Louise she renounces her love for this life, and bids him farewell. In writing to him she describes a scene between her father and his:

Your father came das.h.i.+ng into our yard with two huntsmen. 'Are you the ----?' he called up to me. 'Is that Siegwart? He's a scoundrel, if he knows it. He wants to seduce my son. And this, I suppose, is the nice creature (here he turned to me again) who has made a fool of him. A nice little animal, by my soul!'... My father, who can show heat when he is provoked, told him to stop calling such names; that he was a decent man and I a decent girl.

Here we seem to have the suggestion of the stirring scene in which the irate old fiddler threatens to throw President von Walter out of doors for insulting Louise.

It would be very easy to give further examples of Schiller's talent for taking what suited his purpose, but such philology is not very profitable. After all, what one wishes to know is not where the architect got his materials, but what he made of them. And what he made was a play abounding in admirable scenes, but ending in a rather unsatisfactory manner. With even less violence to the inner logic of the piece than was necessary in the case of 'Fiesco', 'Cabal and Love' might have been given a happy ending. The whole tragedy hangs by a thread in the fifth act. Lady Milford has fled and is no longer a factor in the entanglement. The wicked president has relented and is ready to yield.

Old Miller, released from prison, returns to his house and finds Louise brooding over her purpose of suicide. He preaches to her upon the sin of self-destruction and pleads with her to give up her aristocratic lover.

She promises. Then Ferdinand comes and demands an explanation of the fatal letter. A word from her at this point, a momentary _acces_ or simple common sense, would undeceive him and end the whole difficulty.

Of course she must not break her oath; and one cannot blame her sweet simplicity for not taking refuge in the maxim that an oath given under duress is not binding. But her oath merely pledges her to acknowledge the letter as her voluntary act. There is no reason why she should not solemnly a.s.sure Ferdinand of her innocence, tell him that they are the victims of a plot and send him to his father for an explanation. Nothing prevents her from speaking in time the words that she actually does speak after she has taken the poison, but before she knows that she has taken it: 'A horrible fatality has confused the language of our hearts.

If I might open my mouth, Walter, I could tell you things', etc.

If, out of filial piety, Louise is minded to give up her lover, there is at any rate no reason why she should wish him to despise her forever.

Every natural girlish instinct requires her to clear herself. That she does not do this, but persists in a course which of all courses is the most unnatural,--seeing that she now has nothing to fear from any source,--produces a painful suspense which is anything but tragic. No skill of the actress can altogether save her from a certain appearance of fatuous weak-mindedness, or forestall the cynical conclusion that she dies chiefly in order that it may be fulfilled which was said unto himself by the author, namely: I will write a tragedy.

And yet such a conclusion would not be perfectly just to Schiller. It is true that he was all for tragedy and that a happy moral ending, in the vein of Diderot, would not have been to his taste. But this does not tell the whole story. The romantic lovers are sacrificed in order that the guilty president and his vile accomplices may be brought to book and punished for their sins. The heart of the matter for Schiller was to free his mind with respect to the infamies of high life. It was this that tipped his pen with fire.