Mimesis (75 page)

Frau Millerin
You didn’t talk him into coming here. You didn’t throw your daughter at his head.

Miller
Didn’t talk him into coming here! Didn’t throw the girl at his head! They won’t inquire into that!—I was the master of the house. I should have told the girl. I should have given the Major a piece of my mind—or put the whole thing up to His Excellency Senior. The young Baron will be let off with a warning. I know how that works. And the full storm breaks over the fiddler.

Frau Millerin
(sips the last drop from her cup). Nonsense! Idle talk! What can break over you? Who can touch you? You are doing your work and must take students where you can get them.

Miller
But tell me, if you can, what is going to come of the whole business?—Marry her … that he can’t, that is out of the question. And a … O my God! Thank you, Madam! Of course, when such a Mr. Sir has helped himself in this place here and that place there, when he has cashed in on the devil knows how much, then it’s only natural that my good man will find it to his taste to go for a change and dig for sweet water. You watch out! You watch out! And if you have an
eye peeping out of every knothole and play at being sentry in front of every drop of blood, he will talk her into it right under your nose. He will let her have what it takes, and then he will clear out, and the girl is disgraced for the rest of her life; she is left on the shelf, or she gets to like the taste of it, goes on with it (his fist against his forehead) … Jesus Christ!

Frau Millerin
God in his Grace protect us!

Miller
And we need it! What else can such a windbag be driving at? The girl is pretty—slender—and dangles a good-looking leg. Let the upstairs be as the upstairs will. That’s easily overlooked in women, as long as the dear Lord didn’t forget anything on the ground floor. Let my young racer find out about this feature of the story—hey there! and he will catch on the way old Rodney does when he smells a Frenchman around, and it’s “Set all sails, and off we go”—and I cannot even blame him for it. A man is a man. I know how that works.

Frau Millerin
…)
*

This opening of Schiller’s “middle-class tragedy”
Luise Millerin
—written 1782-1783—takes place in a petty bourgeois setting, a room in the musician’s home. The stage directions emphasize the point by specifying: Frau Millerin, still in her nightgown, sits at a table and drinks her coffee. In keeping with this is the language of the two speakers, especially of the husband, whose good-natured and blustering character cannot, in these excited moments, do enough in the way of flavorful and hearty petty-bourgeois colloquialisms. Despite his profession, he is by no means an “artist” but rather a better-than-average craftsman, and no violence would be done to the style if an actor made him speak in dialect (Swabian). He has a heart and a head, but his views are completely bourgeois. A few lines further on, in the continuation of the first scene, which we have not included in our quotation, he becomes even more excited at the thought that the Baron’s love may have made his daughter so proud that in the end “she turns me down a fine upright son-in-law who would have fitted in with my clientele so nicely.” This is the atmosphere in which the tragedy takes place. It is not only Miller’s family and Secretary Wurm who breathe this petty-bourgeois air. The conflict as such is bourgeois, and even the
two persons of rank, the President and his son, have nothing about them to remind us of the heroic exaltation, the aloofness from the everyday, which characterized the French tragedy of the great period. The son is noble, full of sentiment, and idealistic. The father is diabolic and imperious, and in the end sentimental too. Neither is sublime in the sense of French classicism. For that the locale—a small German town, the capital of an absolute ruler—is much too narrow.

Schiller was not the first to take such or similar settings and conflicts tragically. The sentimental middle-class novel and the middle-class tragedy (referred to in our preceding chapter as the
comédie larmoyante
) had evolved long before in England and France. In Germany, where the Christian-creatural mixture of styles had survived through the seventeenth century and where even later it had not been completely displaced by the influence of French classicism, the evolution of middle-class realism assumed exceptionally vigorous forms. The influence of Shakespeare joined forces with that of Diderot and Rousseau; the narrow and disrupted domestic conditions furnished arresting subjects; works were produced which were at once sentimental, narrowly middle-class, realistic, and revolutionary. The first German work in this genre, Lessing’s youthful play,
Miss Sara Sampson
(1755), written under English influence and set in England, does not, it is true, contain elements of contemporary politics. But his
Minna von Barnhelm
, published twelve years later, plunges into the most contemporary events. In book 7 of part 2 of
Dichtung und Wahrheit
(
Jubiläumsausgabe
, 23, 80), Goethe calls the play “the first theatrical production drawn from meaningful life and having a specifically contemporary content.” He also points out a particularly timely feature of the play, which a modern reader will hardly notice but which may be assumed to have contributed not a little to the stir which the play made in its time: “the bitter tension with which Prussians and Saxons faced each other during this [the Seven Years’] war,” a tension which “could not be resolved through its [the war’s] termination,” so that Lessing’s work “was to achieve in a picture” the restoration of peace among the people. Now
Minna von Barnhelm
, to be sure, is a comedy and not a middle-class tragedy; its subject matter is distinguished from that of middle-class tragedies by its design, by its setting, by the independence of the leading female character, and the noble rank of both hero and heroine. Nevertheless, in its sentimental seriousness, in the simple straightforwardness of its conception of honor, and in its language
there is something middle class and sometimes almost homespun, so that one tends to think of the noble principals (often also of the German nobles of the time in general) as living in an environment of middle-class domesticity. There is no doubt that Goethe is right when (in accordance with his own direct impression when the work had appeared during his student days at Leipzig) he says in the same passage: “It was this production which successfully opened the prospect into a higher and more meaningful world beyond the literary and bourgeois world to which the art of writing had been confined.” Yet this superior outlook, which sets contemporary history before the reader’s or auditor’s eyes, has by no means caused the abandonment of the simplicity, the almost bourgeois sentiment, of the human attitudes. It is precisely the direct connection of both spheres which gives the work its particular charm. In
Emilia Galotti
the political tone appears in an entirely different but not less significant way. Here the major theme of the middle-class tragedy—the seduction of an innocent victim—is linked to the political phenomenon of absolutism in a petty state. However, the element of contemporary politics in
Emilia Galotti
remains weak and not really revolutionary. The setting is not a German but an Italian principality, and although we are specifically told that the Galotti family has neither rank nor title, their position and behavior, especially in the case of Odoardo, the father, do not impress us as middle class but rather as pronouncedly military and noble.

The final connection of sentimental middle-class realism with idealistic politics and concern for human rights was not established until the
Sturm und Drang
period. Traces of it are to be found in almost all the authors of this latter generation: in Goethe, Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Lenz, Leisewitz, Klinger, and many others, even in Johann Heinrich Voss. Of the works which have remained alive to the present day,
Luise Millerin
is the most significant for our problem because it undertakes to apprehend the practical contemporary present directly and to base the particular case on the general conditions. The sentimentally bourgeois and robust or idyllic realism, which in other cases is often expressed in historical or fantastic or personal and unpolitical subjects, with the result that a basic and direct apprehension of the reality of the time is not achieved, is here applied, unequivocally and without restraint, to the author’s own experience of the political present. A familiar milieu, a timely and indeed revolutionary political interest, distinguish this tragedy from Lessing’s
Emilia Galotti
, as well as from the other middle-class dramas of the period insofar as they are
known to me. In its day and age it represents an extreme case of the literary rendering of reality in terms of principles and problems.

The very first words take us forcefully into the practical situation. The son of the all-powerful minister of a German prince pays court to a girl of petty-bourgeois background. He often comes to the home of her parents. We are later told that he writes her letters which are full of feeling, that he is concerned about her education, and gives her presents. The mother, a woman of limited intelligence, is delighted with her daughter’s aristocratic lover and takes such pride in him that she fails to recognize the danger inherent in the situation. The father does recognize it. He fears he may become involved with the minister; he fears the worst for his daughter’s reputation, for her earthly happiness and eternal bliss; for “marry her … that he can’t!” He can only seduce her. And then “the girl is disgraced for the rest of her life; she is left on the shelf, or she gets to like the taste of it. …” He knows how this sort of thing must end; he knows it by virtue of his homespun common sense. He does not blame the minister’s son. “A man is a man.” But he loves his daughter and wants to save her. He intends to go and see the minister and tell him the whole story, although to do so goes against his nature; he is not the sort of man who meddles in matters of love. But the danger is too great. However, he never takes the desperate step; things go too fast. In the very next scene he is forced to conclude that it is too late; his daughter is too deeply enmeshed.

The world here revealed to the spectator is desperately narrow, both spatially and ethically. A petty-bourgeois parlor; a duchy so small that (as we are repeatedly told) it is only an hour’s drive to the border; and class dictation of propriety and ethics in its most unnatural and pernicious form. In the court circle everything is permissible—not, however, as a noble freedom but as impertinence, corruption, and hypocrisy. Among the people we find the most unenlightened conception of virtue; a girl who yields to a man who cannot marry her according to the rules of the prevailing order of society would be considered a whore and would be despised. The prevailing order of society is viewed by the duke’s subjects—including Luise herself—as “a general and eternal order.” Servile submission is everywhere a matter of Christian duty; and the powers that be take advantage of the situation, especially the minister, a miserable petty tyrant to whom, it is true, Schiller tries to give certain imposing traits, a certain grandeur of conduct; but there is no inner justification whatever for doing so, since
his crimes and intrigues serve nothing but the most narrowly personal goal, namely that of attaining and keeping a position of power simply as such, not as the expression of any will to practical accomplishment or of any feeling of a practical vocation to fill such a position.

The situation of Miller and his family is, then, portrayed tragically, realistically, and in terms of contemporary history. Middle-class realism and tragedy, at least so it seems at first sight, is no longer merely a skimming of the froth from the surface of social life in view of rendering a sentimentally tragic private destiny; instead the whole sociopolitical depth of the age is stirred up. We seem to be dealing with a first attempt to make an individual destiny echo the fullness of contemporary reality. To understand Luise’s tragic fate, the contemporary auditor must visualize the social structure within which he lives. And yet we feel that this tragic realism—compared with either the medieval and figural or the modern and practical type of realism—somehow falls short of genuine and total reality.
Luise Millerin
is much more a political and even a demagogic play than a truly realistic one.

A political play it certainly is. H. A. Korff (
Geist der Goethezeit
, 1, 209-211) has written some excellent pages on the point. I shall summarize his argument; Although the subject matter bears no necessary but only an accidental relation to the idea of political freedom, the play is nevertheless, more than any other, a dagger thrust to the heart of absolutism. A stark light is cast upon the criminal procedures of the tyrannical princely governments; subjects have no rights whatever; they depend upon the arbitrary favor or disfavor of the prince, his favorites, and his mistresses; and from the course of events we infer with dismay the inner bondage and dependence of the ruled and recognize in it the psychological explanation for the possibility of tyrannical princely government.

All this is undeniable, and we can only regret that Schiller knew much more clearly
against
what than
for
what he was fighting, and that one might easily conclude from the play that all would be well if only a few of the leading characters were decent fellows instead of dissipated scoundrels. As it stands, the play could not but exert a significant political influence. But it is precisely the strong and bold coloration of the revolutionary tendency which impairs the genuine character of the realism. By this I do not mean to say that the reality of life in the small absolutistic principalities was better than Schiller represents it to be. But it was different and it presented itself less melodramatically.
At the time when Schiller wrote
Luise Millerin
, he had not yet attained his full stature and maturity in artistic creation. It is a tempestuous, an inspired and inspiring, a very effective, and yet—when we look a little more closely—a fairly bad play. It is a melodramatic hit written by a man of genius. For a serious work the action is too calculated, too full of intrigue, and it is often improbable. To keep it going, the characters (with the exception of Miller) had to be portrayed in an altogether too naive technique of black and white. Utterances and decisions are sometimes unexpected and insufficiently motivated; the dialogue is often excessively rhetorical and sentimental, and when it tries to be witty, pointed, and refined, it usually turns out to be stilted, hard to understand, and quite often unintentionally funny. A case in point is the great scene between the Lady and Luise (4, 7) in which almost every word is unnatural. Yet the fact that Schiller’s artistic sense was not fully developed when the play was written is not the decisive factor. The inadequacy of the realism lies above all in the very genre of middle-class tragedy as it had developed during the eighteenth century. It was a genre wedded to the personal, the domestic, the touching, and the sentimental, and it could not relinquish them. And this, through the tone and level of style which it implied, was unfavorable to a broadening of the social setting and the inclusion of general political and social problems. And yet it was in just this way that the break-through to things political and generally social was achieved: for the touching and, in essence, wholly personal love-alliance now no longer clashed with the opposition of ill-willed relatives, parents, and guardians or with private moral obstacles, but instead with a public enemy, with the unnatural class structure of society. In earlier chapters we have described how, in French classicism of the seventeenth century, love rose to rank highest among tragic subjects withdrawn from everyday reality, and how subsequently, in the Western European beginnings of the novel of manners and of the
comédie larmoyante
, love reestablished contact with the ordinary reality of life, but lost some of its dignity in the process. It became clearly erotic and at the same time touching and sentimental. It was in this form that the revolutionaries of the
Sturm und Drang
seized upon it, and following in Rousseau’s footsteps, again gave it the highest tragic dignity, without abandoning any of its bourgeois, realistic, and sentimental elements. As the most natural and the most immediate of all things, it came to be sublime, in any life and in any setting. Its simplest and purest form appeared to be a condition of natural virtue, and its
freedom in the face of mere convention was considered an inalienable natural right.