The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III | Page 3

Mannheim, who saw its dramatic
qualities and requested its author to revise it for the stage. This Schiller
readily consented to do. To please Dalberg he set the action back from
the eighteenth to the sixteenth century and made many minor changes.
The revised play was performed at Mannheim on January 12, 1782,
with ever-memorable success. The audience, assembled from far and
near, went wild with enthusiasm. No such triumph had been achieved
before on a German stage. The author himself saw the performance,
having come over from Stuttgart without leave of absence. For this
breach of discipline, or rather for a repetition of the offense in May, he
was sent to the guardhouse for a fortnight and forbidden to write any
more plays. The consequence was a clandestine flight from a situation
that had become intolerable. In September, 1782, he escaped from
Stuttgart with his loyal friend Streicher and took his way northward
toward the Palatinate. He had set his hopes on finding employment in
Mannheim.
[Illustration: SCHILLER'S FATHER AND MOTHER]
Before leaving his native Swabia he had virtually completed a second

play dealing with the conspiracy of Count Fiesco at Genoa in the year
1547. He had also won his spurs as a poet and a critic. His _Anthology
for 1782_ contains a large number of short poems, some of them
evincing a rare talent for dramatic story-telling, others foreshadowing
the imaginative sweep and the warmth of feeling which characterize the
best poetic work of the later Schiller. Such, notably, are the poems to
Laura, in which the lover's raptures are linked with the law of
gravitation and the preestablished harmony of the world. He also
contributed several papers to the Württemberg Repertorium, especially
a review of The Robbers in which, dissecting his own child with
remorseless impartiality, he anticipated nearly everything that critics
were destined to urge against the play during the next hundred years.
Having left his post of duty and being a military officer, Schiller was
technically a deserter and had reason to fear pursuit and arrest. At
Mannheim his affairs went badly. The politic Dalberg was not eager to
befriend a youth who had offended the powerful Duke of Württemberg;
so Fiesco was rejected and its author came into dire straits. Toward the
close of the year he found a welcome refuge at Bauerbach, where a
house was put at his disposal by his friend Frau von Wolzogen. Here he
remained several months, occupied mainly with a new play which came
to be known as Cabal and Love. He also sketched a historical tragedy,
Don Carlos, being led to the subject by his reading of St. Réal's
historical novel Don Carlos. During the first part of his stay at
Bauerbach Schiller went by the name of Dr. Ritter and wrote purposely
misleading letters as to his intended movements. By the summer of
1783, however, it had become apparent that the Duke of Württemberg
was not going to make trouble. Relieved of anxiety on this score, and
not having had very good success of late with his theatre, Dalberg
reopened negotiations with Schiller, who was easily persuaded to
emerge from his hiding-place and become theatre-poet at Mannheim
under contract for one year.
During this year at Mannheim Fiesco and Cabal and Love were put on
the stage and published. The former is a quasi-historical tragedy of
intriguing ambition, ending--in the original version--with the death of
Fiesco at the hands of the fanatical republican Verrina. While there is
much to admire in its abounding vigor and its picturesque details,
Fiesco lacks artistic finality and is the least interesting of Schiller's

early plays. Much more important is Cabal and Love, a domestic
tragedy that has held the stage to this day and is generally regarded as
the best of its kind in the eighteenth-century German drama. Class
conflict is the tragic element. A maid of low degree and her
high-minded, aristocratic lover are done to death by a miserable court
intrigue. Far more than in The Robbers Schiller was here writing with
his eye on the facts. Much Württemberg history is thinly disguised in
this drastic comment on the crimes, follies and banalities of German
court life under the Old Régime.
Notwithstanding his success as a playwright and his receipt of the
honorable title of Councilor from the Duke of Weimar, Schiller was
unhappy at Mannheim. Sickness, debt and loneliness oppressed him,
making creative work well-nigh impossible. In June, 1784, when the
sky was looking very black, he received a heartening letter from a
quartet of unknown admirers in Leipzig, one of whom was Gottfried
Körner. Schiller was deeply touched. In his hunger for sympathy and
friendship he resolved to leave Mannheim and seek out these good
people who had shown such a kindly interest in him. Fortunately
Körner