The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 03. Коллектив авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ off the debt of Time, as the exalter of life it contributes to the Building of Eternity.—TRANSLATOR.]

      [Footnote 4: "Die Gesalt"—Form. the Platonic Archetype.]

      [Footnote 5: This idea is often repeated, somewhat more clearly in the haughty philosophy of Schiller. He himself says, elsewhere—"In a fair soul each single action is not properly moral, but the whole character is moral. The fair soul has no other service than the instincts of its own beauty."—Translator]

      [Footnote 6: "Und es wallet, and siedet, und brauset, and zischt," etc. Goethe was particularly struck with the truthfulness of these lines, of which his personal observation at the Falls of the Rhine enabled him to judge. Schiller modestly owns his obligations to Homer's descriptions of Charybdis, Odyss. I., 12. The property of the higher order of imagination to reflect truth, though not familiar to experience, is singularly illustrated in this description. Schiller had never seen even a Waterfall.—TRANSLATOR.]

      [Footnote 7: The same rhyme as the preceding line in the original.]

      [Footnote 8: "—da kroch's heran," etc. The It in the original has been greatly admired. The poet thus vaguely represents the fabulous misshapen monster, the Polypus of the ancients.]

      [Footnote 9: The theatre.]

      [Footnote 10: This simile is nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely. As Hercules contended in vain against Antæus, the Son of Earth,—so long as the Earth gave her giant offspring new strength in every fall,—so the soul contends in vain with evil—the natural earth-born enemy, while the very contact of the earth invigorates the enemy for the struggle. And as Antæus was slain at last, when Hercules lifted him from the earth and strangled him while raised aloft, so can the soul slay the enemy (the desire, the passion, the evil, the earth's offspring), when bearing it from earth itself and stifling it in the higher air.—Translator.]

      [Footnote 11: Translated by Edward, Lord Lytton (Permission George

      Routledge & Sons.)]

      [Footnote 12: "I call the Living—I mourn the Dead—I break the Lightning." These words are inscribed on the Great Bell of the Minster of Schaffhausen—also on that of the Church of Art near Lucerne. There was an old belief in Switzerland that the undulation of air, caused by the sound of a Bell, broke the electric fluid of a thunder-cloud.]

      [Footnote 13: A piece of clay pipe, which becomes vitrified if the metal is sufficiently heated.]

      [Footnote 14: The translator adheres to the original, in forsaking the rhyme in these lines and some others.]

      [Footnote 15: Written in the time of the French war.]

      [Footnote 16: That is—the settled political question—the balance of power.]

      [Footnote 17: Apollo.]

      [Footnote 18: "Everywhere," says Hoffmeister truly, "Schiller exalts Ideal Belief over real wisdom;—everywhere this modern Apostle of Christianity advocates that Ideal, which exists in Faith and emotion, against the wisdom of worldly intellect, the barren experience of life," etc.—TRANSLATOR.]

      [Footnote 19: The office, at the coronation feast, of the Count Palatine of the Rhine (Grand Sewer of the Empire and one of the Seven Electors) was to bear the Imperial Globe and set the dishes on the board; that of the King of Bohemia was cup-bearer. The latter was not, however, present, as Schiller himself observed in a note (omitted in the editions of his collected works), at the coronation of Rudolf.]

      [Footnote 20: Literally, "A. judge (ein Richter) was again upon the earth." The word substituted in the translation is introduced in order to recall to the reader the sublime name given, not without justice, to Rudolf of Hapsburg, viz., "THE LIVING LAW."—TRANSLATOR.]

      [Footnote 21: At the coronation of Rudolf was celebrated the marriage-feast of three of his daughters—to Ludwig of Bavaria, Otto of Brandenburg, and Albrecht of Saxony. His other three daughters married afterward Otto, nephew of Ludwig of Bavaria, Charles Martell, son of Charles of Anjou, and Wenceslaus, son of Ottocar of Bohemia. The royal house of England numbers Rudolf of Hapsburg amongst its ancestors.—TRANSLATOR.]

* * * * *

      DRAMAS

      INTRODUCTION TO WALLENSTEIN'S DEATH

      By WILLIAM H. CARRUTH, PH.D.

      Professor of Comparative Literature, Leland Stanford University

      Schiller wrote in rapid succession, during his Storm and Stress period, The Robbers, Fiesco, Cabal and Love, and the beginning of Don Carlos (finished in 1787). Between this time and his last period, which opens with Wallenstein, he devoted himself assiduously to the study of philosophy, history, and esthetic theory. Even in writing Don Carlos he had felt that he needed to give more care to artistic form and to the deeper questions of dramatic unity. His own dissatisfaction with the results achieved was one of several reasons why for nearly ten years he dropped dramatic composition. He felt, too, that he needed more experience of life. He himself said of the greatest of his Storm and Stress dramas that he had attempted to portray humanity before he really knew humanity.

      In 1788 he published the first part of his History of the Rebellion of the Netherlands, which brought him the appointment to the chair of history in the University of Jena. The occupation with his next historical work, the History of the Thirty Years' War, suggested to him the thought of dramatizing the career of Wallenstein. But he was not yet clear with himself on questions of artistic method. He was studying Homer and dramatizing Euripides, lecturing and writing on dramatic theory. Further delays were due to marriage and to serious illness. It was not until 1796 that Schiller felt ready to begin work on the long planned drama of Wallenstein.

      The first scenes were written in prose, but soon the poet realized that only the dignified heroic verse was suited to his theme. Then "all went better." Constant discussions with Goethe and Christian Gottfried Koerner helped him to clear up his doubts and overcome the difficulties of his subject. He found that history left too little room for sympathy with Wallenstein, for he conceived him as really guilty of treason. He decided early to lighten the gloom of his theme by introducing the love episode of Max and Thekla. He modified also his view of the nature of Wallenstein's guilt. Gradually the material grew upon him. What he had planned as a Prologue became the one-act play, Wallenstein's Camp, which, when it was produced in October, 1798, at the reopening of the Weimar Theatre, was preceded by 138 lines of Dedication, since printed as the Prologue. Already Schiller had foreseen the development into more than five acts, and accordingly The Piccolomini appeared separately, January 30, 1799, and the whole series in order about the middle of April, upon the completion of Wallenstein's Death.

      Wallenstein is a trilogy, but in name rather than in real connection and relation of parts. Wallenstein's Camp is a picture of masses, introducing only common soldiers and none of the chief personages of the other parts of the composition. Its purpose is to present something of the tremendous background of the action proper and to give a realizing sense of the influence upon Wallenstein's career of the soldiery with which he operated—as Schiller expressed it in a line of his Prologue: "His camp alone explains to us his crime." By this he meant that, on the one hand, the blind confidence of the troops in the luck and the destiny of their leader made him arrogant and reckless, and, on the other hand, perhaps, that the mercenary character of these soldiers of fortune forced Wallenstein to steps which his calm judgment would have condemned.

      In a succession of eleven scenes of very unequal length the various arms of the service are introduced, together with camp followers and a Capuchin preacher; in reminiscences the earlier features of the great war and some feats СКАЧАТЬ