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the next tragedy, which is, as most critics readily admit, as true to the spirit of the Greek play as a modern play can well be. With the medieval theme of the hostile brothers and suggestions taken from various plays, Schiller succeeded through the use of certain technical, rhetorical and atmospheric elements that savor of the Greek in building a modern play that creates the illusion of one out of the days of Pericles. Criticism has been at variance as to the merits of this play since its advent on the stage of Weimar in March, 1803. The battle has been waged around a technical point and does not concern us. The ill-starred fate-children that the play begot have run their course, assisted by Plateu and others. We have left to us this finest flower of Schiller's inspired poetic genius. The stage has been ennobled by it. With its lofty wisdom, its beautiful diction, its noble form and restrained feeling, it will ever appeal to a cosmopolitan culture.

Schiller closed his career as he began with a political play, the inspiration of which is freedom. But how different, says one critic, is the wild-eyed bacchante of the earlier day and the decorous muse of Wilhelm Tell! Here we have not the blind self-assertion of the Storm and Stress play, but there is revealed the calm self-mastery of a forceful mass, a lofty and serene folk-destiny working its end in and through its enlightened representatives.

With Wilhelm Tell our little life draws to a close. Schiller never lived to see the end of those splendid plans and half-completed projects like "Warbeck" and "Demetrius," but passed away in the afternoon of the ninth of May, 1805, in the little room of the Schiller house, just around the corner from the stately edifice of the stately Goethe. This may seem like an unnecessary association; if it were, I should deeply regret it. Far be it from me to detract from the merits of Germany's great man. Schiller has had to suffer so much at the hands of the critics from this very association, however. In their cold, pitiless way they so often, when judging Schiller's work, fail to look in at this unpretentious house where death came to carry away, long before his time, Goethe's helpmate and a man in every sense his peer. Schiller has always been the idol of the German people and it is a

grateful acknowledgement that scholars are making in their recent tributes to his genius and noble aspirations. A Homer, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe does not come among us every year! Small praise it be to detract from the merits of the lesser geniuses because they do not always attain the object of their aspiration. To Scherer and Grimm we owe largely the misunderstanding as to Schiller's purpose and message that grew up in Germany and spread from Strassburg and Berlin to other countries. Many of us are the heirs of this cumulative condemnation in criticism. Germany, however, awoke and became alive to its monstrous error; for, as Calvin Thomas says in writing of Schiller's first play, "Extravagant it is, no doubt; but while there are always hundreds of critics in the world who can see that and say it more or less cleverly, there is but one man in a century who can write such scenes." At the moment of greatest depreciation in Germany when it seemed as if Schiller must descend from the Rietschl statue, robbed of his well-earned laurels through an extravagant Goethe worship, sane and wholesome Gottfried Keller, far off in Switzerland, wrote, "If this exaggeration of Goethe at the expense of Schiller continues, I'll form a conspiracy." No conspiracy was necessary; and out of this grievous time came a host of young men deploring their defection. Foremost among these was Otto Brahm, whose words I shall quote in closing in order to give what I believe will always be the final estimate of this man of whom the sculptor Dannecker said: "The godlike man stands continually before my eyes. I will make him lifelike. Schiller must live in sculpture as a colossal form. I intend an apotheosis." Brahm's words are these: "As a student I was a Schiller-hater. I make this preliminary confession not because I attach personal importance to it, but because on the contrary I think I see in my attitude one that is typical of our time. Every one of us, it seems to me, travels this road. After a period of early veneration which is awakened in us by tradition and by the earliest impressions of youth, there comes, as a reaction against an uncritical overestimate and under the influence of changed ideals of art, a defection from Schiller which parades itself in a one-sided and unhistorical emphasis of his weak points.

Then gradually this negative attitude corrects itself to a positive one, and we recognize the folly of that young-and-verdant bumptiousness which would think of consigning the greatest of German dramatists to the realms of the dead. And now at last, after it has passed through doubt, our enthusiasm is imperishable; with clear eye we look up to the greatness of the man, and to the splendid model for all intellectual work which is exhibited in that life of passionate striving for the ideal."

The University of the South.

GLEN LEVIN SWIGGETT.

THE CHARACTERS IN VICTOR HUGO'S "HERNANI"

SECOND PAPER1

Don Ruy Gomez, the principal antagonist or opposing force in Victor Hugo's "Hernani," is, like the hero, a complex individual man, having contradictory qualities. He is represented in the drama as a man of varied experience and of numerous characteristics. He is proud, bombastic, loquacious, inquisitive, impulsive, melancholy, jealous, revengeful, inexorable, avid of honor, lover-like, sympathetic, courteous, loyal, given to hospitality, and possessed of a high sense of honor. We are also informed as to his age, physical qualities, political position, and social standing. He is more than sixty years old, and has not enough hair on his head to fill the hand of the executioner. Though old and rich, he would give all he has for youth, if only to be a shepherd of the fields. Though his body is withered and head bowed, his soul is young, for there are never, he declares, any wrinkles in the heart, which is always young and can always bleed. He is count and grandee of the Castle of Figuère, high counsellor of Aragon, and Duke of Pastraña. The old duke is proud of his old ancestral name of Silva, on which there is no stain. He is the uncle and betrothed of Doña Sol, who lives with him in his castle. This feeble and venerable old man is rich and lives in a patriarchal state far from the court. Princes and pilgrims visit his castle, seek his counsel, obtain his sympathy, and enjoy his splendid hospitality.

The character of the old duke is striking and subtle. At times it appears more lyric or epic than dramatic. It represents an older heroism, when men were possessed of honor and loyalty. It evokes the good old times of the great old men before the decadence of youth. It recalls the heroic manners and virtues of the Cornelian heroes. The old knight is proud of his ancestors who honored old men, protected girls, and were never guilty of treachery. His artificial pride, as seen in the famous portrait scene, recalls the lofty Spanish family pride exhibited by the

1See former article on "The Character of Victor Hugo's Hernani" in THE SEWANEE REVIEW, April 1905, pp. 209–215.

Prince of Aragon, in "The Merchant of Venice," who, in choosing his casket, said:

I will not jump with common spirits,

And rank me with the barbarous multitudes.

As long, however, as Gomez makes love or any other passion yield to his feudal pride, we feel that he is great and deserving of our sympathy.

The old duke is in love with Doña Sol, his niece, who does not return his love. The melancholy love of the rejected old lord is touching. His love is not ludicrous, it is a weakness. While the love of the old man is lyrical and rhetorical, at the same time it is natural and appropriate, for Gomez loves not like a young man but as an old man. He says that one is not master of one's self when one is old and in love. While he would give all he possesses for youth, yet he maintains that his love is not changeable like that of frivolous young men. His love is not like some fragile toy; it is severe, deep, sure, paternal, friendly, solid as the oak of his ducal chair. Characteristically and pathetically he tells Doña Sol that it would be a sacred work for her, a young girl, to care for him, an old man, that she would be to him an angel with a woman's heart. With lyric fervor he declares that he loves her as one loves the aurora, or the flowers, or the skies, and that to see her every day would be to him a perpetual feast. Such love as this, then, does not provoke our laughter, but rather excites our pity, and in that it is truly tragic.

Don Ruy Gomez has also said that when one is old and in love, one is jealous. At first his jealousy is the touching jealousy of the discarded old lover, but when he learns that the king is his rival in love, his jealousy turns to hate and a desire for revenge. His passion then becomes epic, for there is no longer any struggle represented. He is first all love, then all hate. As soon as Gomez learns that Doña Sol has been carried off by his royal rival, his hatred becomes furious, and from that time on he thinks only of hate and revenge. He pursues the king until Carlos surrenders Doña Sol to Hernani, and then he relentlessly pursues the bandit until Hernani is dead. As with Shylock money was nothing in comparison with revenge, so with the old duke the

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