The Life of Friedrich Schiller | Page 8

Thomas Carlyle
that illuminate the wild scene with a brief and
terrible splendour, and are lost forever in the darkness. The
unsearchable abysses of man's destiny are laid open before us, black
and profound and appalling, as they seem to the young mind when it
first attempts to explore them: the obstacles that thwart our faculties
and wishes, the deceitfulness of hope, the nothingness of existence, are
sketched in the sable colours so natural to the enthusiast when he first
ventures upon life, and compares the world that is without him to the
anticipations that were within.
Karl von Moor is a character such as young poets always delight to
contemplate or delineate; to Schiller the analogy of their situations
must have peculiarly recommended him. Moor is animated into action
by feelings similar to those under which his author was then suffering
and longing to act. Gifted with every noble quality of manhood in
overflowing abundance, Moor's first expectations of life, and of the part
he was to play in it, had been glorious as a poet's dream. But the minor
dexterities of management were not among his endowments; in his
eagerness to reach the goal, he had forgotten that the course is a
labyrinthic maze, beset with difficulties, of which some may be
surmounted, some can only be evaded, many can be neither. Hurried on
by the headlong impetuosity of his temper, he entangles himself in
these perplexities; and thinks to penetrate them, not by skill and
patience, but by open force. He is baffled, deceived, and still more
deeply involved; but injury and disappointment exasperate rather than
instruct him. He had expected heroes, and he finds mean men; friends,
and he finds smiling traitors to tempt him aside, to profit by his
aberrations, and lead him onward to destruction: he had dreamed of

magnanimity and every generous principle, he finds that prudence is
the only virtue sure of its reward. Too fiery by nature, the intensity of
his sufferings has now maddened him still farther: he is himself
incapable of calm reflection, and there is no counsellor at hand to assist
him; none, whose sympathy might assuage his miseries, whose wisdom
might teach him to remedy or to endure them. He is stung by fury into
action, and his activity is at once blind and tremendous. Since the world
is not the abode of unmixed integrity, he looks upon it as a den of
thieves; since its institutions may obstruct the advancement of worth,
and screen delinquency from punishment, he regards the social union as
a pestilent nuisance, the mischiefs of which it is fitting that he in his
degree should do his best to repair, by means however violent. Revenge
is the mainspring of his conduct; but he ennobles it in his own eyes, by
giving it the colour of a disinterested concern for the maintenance of
justice,--the abasement of vice from its high places, and the exaltation
of suffering virtue. Single against the universe, to appeal to the primary
law of the stronger, to 'grasp the scales of Providence in a mortal's
hand,' is frantic and wicked; but Moor has a force of soul which makes
it likewise awful. The interest lies in the conflict of this gigantic soul
against the fearful odds which at length overwhelm it, and hurry it
down to the darkest depths of ruin.
The original conception of such a work as this betrays the inexperience
no less than the vigour of youth: its execution gives a similar testimony.
The characters of the piece, though traced in glowing colours, are
outlines more than pictures: the few features we discover in them are
drawn with elaborate minuteness; but the rest are wanting. Every thing
indicates the condition of a keen and powerful intellect, which had
studied men in books only; had, by self-examination and the perusal of
history, detected and strongly seized some of the leading peculiarities
of human nature; but was yet ignorant of all the minute and more
complex principles which regulate men's conduct in actual life, and
which only a knowledge of living men can unfold. If the hero of the
play forms something like an exception to this remark, he is the sole
exception, and for reasons alluded to above: his character resembles the
author's own. Even with Karl, the success is incomplete: with the other
personages it is far more so. Franz von Moor, the villain of the Piece, is

an amplified copy of Iago and Richard; but the copy is distorted as well
as amplified. There is no air of reality in Franz: he is a villain of theory,
who studies to accomplish his object by the most diabolical expedients,
and soothes his conscience by arguing with the priest in favour of
atheism and materialism; not the genuine villain of Shakspeare
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