University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.

The pleasure I derived from Mdlle. Rachel's performance of the French version of Schiller's ‘Mary Stuart,’ induced me to undertake a translation of that piece for the English stage. On comparing it with the work of the great German poet, however, it appeared to me so much less worthy of the labour I was prepared to bestow upon it, that I determined to attempt an English version of the original tragedy, satisfied that it would be easy to reduce it to acting dimensions, and adapt it to the English stage, by following the plan of the French author, and retaining nothing of Schiller's work but what was essentially dramatic and effective, and bore direct relation to the heroine herself.

The French play, though not a work of remarkable poetical merit, does credit to the good taste and judgement of the author as an adaptation to the French stage. M. Mercier has selected with considerable tact, out of the great store of materials opened to him in Schiller's noble work, what would make an effective and touching ‘acting play,’ eminently calculated to display histrionic power, and excite the sympathy of an audience,—perhaps I should have said, eminently favourable to a display of the peculiar genius of any great actress representing Mary Stuart, the

of modern Europe; for of late years that part alone has been deemed worthy of the powers of a first-rate performer, though when the piece was first produced in Paris, and Mdlle. Duchesnois, in spite of her ‘style larmoyant,’ and of her being the ugliest woman in France, charmed and touched all hearts as the representative of Mary, the part of Elizabeth received its due importance from the fine acting of Madame Paradol; and Talma himself did not disdain to represent that type of cowardly courtier craft, Leicester.

In Schiller's play, the interest of Mary's situation is so equally balanced by the consummate skill with which he has drawn the character of Elizabeth, that I do not wonder at the great German actress, who is said to have displayed her varied powers alternately in the two parts. We can imagine Mdlle. Rachel a terribly true Elizabeth, and Madame Ristori has proved by her alternate representation of Schiller's Mary, and the Elizabeth of the curious Italian play founded on the life of the Tudor Queen, that she combines the subtle mental powers and keen intellectual force requisite to impersonate the English princess with all the grace, dignity, and tenderness which are the traditional attributes of her Scottish rival.

With its peculiar fitness for the French stage ends, however, I think, the merit of M. Mercier's tragedy. It no more represents Schiller's noble dramatic chronicle, which may be called history set to poetry, than the adaptation of Hamlet by M. Ducis can claim to represent Shakespeare's great work.

The French ‘Mary Stuart’ is what every other French tragic drama was before the time of M. Victor Hugo's daring inauguration of the so-called École Romantique on the Paris stage; a set of circumstances peculiar to that play, with a set of characters common to all French plays in general—the ‘Mesdames et Seigneurs’ of the Spanish ‘Cid’ of Corneille,

the Jewish ‘Athalie’ of Racine, and the Grecian ‘Merope’ of Voltaire.

In his delineations of Mary Stuart, Schiller has shown the appreciation of genius for the value of truth, and with excellent judgement, by making her in the very opening of the play confess her complicity in the murder of Darnley, and the subsequent disgraceful elevation of Bothwell, he silences the the main accusations that could be brought against her, and to a certain extent disarms the reprobation that might conflict with the interest he wishes us to feel for her.

She pleads guilty at the very outset, and begins with the humility of a penitent the course of patient suffering, which he makes her close with the constancy of a martyr reiterating the same confession of her early guilt. This is masterly; for in the first scene the admission of her crime inclines us to dismiss it with a certain leniency in consideration of the severity of her punishment, and in the last her repetition of the charge, which she admits, strengthens mightily the denial of the subsequent ones brought against her by her enemies.

While thus happily evading the impression of personal detestation for these actions, and insisting with infinite pathos upon the cruelty and injustice of the treatment Mary experienced in England, Schiller shows with the utmost force and truth the circumstances which rendered her imprisonment and execution a political necessity, a measure of inevitable self-preservation on the part of the British Government, and vividly describes the incessant dangers and disturbances with which her mere existence threatened England and Elizabeth.

The scattered rays of historical testimony are gathered into a poetical focus of light by his genius, and the creation of the character of Mortimer is the embodiment of all the sinister and furious antagonism, the unscrupulous and implacable

hatred with which the dawn of our civil and religious liberty, power, and prosperity was menaced by the life of Mary Stuart.

Not Mr. Froude himself, the zealous champion of the Tudor sovereigns (father and daughter), has drawn a more faithful and powerful picture of the perpetual alarms with which the Queen and country were shaken by the pretensions of the Scottish princess and the intrigues of her foreign kindred; and though, in his review of Mignet's damnatory history of Mary, he has treated her with the rancour of a partisan rather than the impartial reprobation of an historian, he has not surpassed, in his estimate of the mischiefs he attributes to her influence, the impression we derive of them from Schiller's play.

On the other hand, nothing short of the poet's vivid illustration of Elizabeth's precarious position could mitigate, to any tolerable degree, the odiousness of the lineaments with which he has pourtrayed her. But while, with infinite skill, he compels us to admit the necessity of Mary's execution, he makes the agency of Elizabeth in it, and her mode of exerting that agency, the result of a combination of personal motives of the basest and most detestable nature; and if Mr. Froude may applaud the German poet's masterly description of Elizabeth's circumstances, Dr. Lingard, and every Roman Catholic chronicler before and since him, might rejoice in the character he has traced of the great heretic sovereign whom they delight to decry.

The admirers of powerful dramatic situations will hardly quarrel with the bold violation of history which procures him the scene of the meeting of the two Queens; and the lover of exquisite poetry will forgive, for the sake of the pathetic beauty of Mary's outburst of ecstasy on finding herself at liberty in the Park of Fotheringay, the inaccurate geographical

knowledge which makes her discover the hills of Scotland and navigable waters that bathe the shores of France in the midland county of Northamptonshire. This scene is generally considered the climax of the play in representation, and throws into comparative insignificance even the melancholy interest of the last act. The one which follows it was judiciously omitted by M. Mercier from his adaptation, and should undoubtedly be omitted in any English acting version of the play; for there is a coarse cruelty in the outrage offered to Mary by the insane fanatic Mortimer of which it would be difficult to make an English audience acquiescent spectators: nor can I imagine the genius of the greatest actress that ever lived investing either with dignity or grace the terror and disgust of a woman helplessly compelled to listen to such insults.

The character of Mortimer is a powerful and true exponent of the peculiar class of men of whom the ranks of the Catholic party in England were then mainly composed, and from whom Mary's unscrupulous foreign partisans recruited their appropriate instruments; but in the treatment of it, and more particularly in the developement of his passion for Mary, we recognise the element of not very legitimate power, by which all Europe was thrilled and fascinated on the first production of Schiller's ‘Robbers;’ an element which betrays itself in some degree in all his plays, and which made the arch-critic Goethe accuse him of a ‘love for the horrible,’ when he resisted Schiller's desire to have Alva introduced in the last scene of ‘Egmont,’ a triumphant and malignant witness of his execution. Schiller had a more poetical nature than Goethe, but he had not the fastidious exquisiteness of taste which the great courtier poet possessed above any man that universal literature can show—a faculty which he had cultivated into such unerring perfection that we are tempted to consider it a natural gift, and to hold it the greatest of all his

great endowments; forgetting, perhaps, that while it checked all excesses of intellectual extravagance, it dwarfed the growth of moral excellence, and ended by substituting the perception of beauty for the love of God and man.

Of the scene between Melville and Mary, where she confesses and receives the sacrament, it can only be said, that it is impossible for English people of the present day to conceive of such subjects being made matters of theatrical representation; for in spite of the violation of all artistic propriety, and propriety much more serious than that which is merely artistic, by the mode in which it is now the fashion to represent the spectacle of human dissolution in all its terrible and revolting details—a sight round which awe and tenderness alike draw the curtains of reverent silence and darkness, and of which common respect for our common mortality should forbid the gross mimicry upon a stage—it is to be presumed, that it will still be long before the most holy sacrament of the Christian religion is considered a legitimate subject for dramatic exhibition in an English theatre.

In reading Schiller's play this scene is one of the most touching, and of course the most solemn, in the whole composition. I think, however, that the objection which I applied to the last scene between Mary and Mortimer of being too horrible and shocking one's sensibility unnecessarily, is applicable also to Leicester's soliloquy after Mary's departure to execution; it jars upon the elevated pathos of her farewell like a harsh and violent discord at the close of some strain of celestial melancholy music. The exit of the Queen to her death after her parting words of tender forgiveness to her lover brings the pathos of the story to its legitimate dramatic climax.

As the stage does not (and very properly) present to us the spectacle of her execution, the description of it by Leicester as

he gathers its process from the sounds beneath the floor, adds nothing to our pity for the Queen, whose moral agony we have witnessed, and whose subsequent physical agony has the effect of a coarse bathos after the keener trial through which we have just seen her triumphant passage, while it disturbs with images of merely material horror the sad and sweet serenity of her heroic acquiescence in her fate. If it is urged that the miserable weakness and worldliness of Leicester deserve the retribution of such a situation, we can only say that he has by this time become as indifferent to us as to Mary, and that his tardy repentance and anguish can excite no sympathy after that which has been called forth by her.

As detached portions of Schiller's work, the finest in every respect, I think, are Mary's entrance in the Park of Fotheringay, when the break of the blank verse into exquisite lyrics is at once most poetical, beautiful, and natural; Mortimer's description, in his first scene with Mary, of his conversion to Romanism; and Elizabeth's soliloquy before signing the death-warrant. The second is a wonderfully beautiful description of the peculiar fascinations of that Church which alone of all Christian Churches warrants and comprehends the application of all means to its own ends; the last is a masterly delineation of the great agony of contending motives to which Schiller represents Elizabeth a prey, and which reaches its overwhelming climax in this scene by the preponderance of those which urge her to sign Mary's sentence.

The beauty of Schiller's plays consists chiefly in the power of the dramatic situations, and in the force with which the characters are delineated; the latter are generally, whether good or bad, of lofty ideal proportions, and the language in which they converse, always elevated and admitting no comic admixture, is rather dignified and declamatory than passionate, imaginative, or poetical. For these reasons Schiller's plays are by no means among the most difficult works that a translator

can attempt to render in another language. The striking situations, the strongly-marked and rather stiffly-outlined characters, and the measured march of the stately style, present fewer difficulties than works in which the form of expression divides the reader's admiration with the thought or feeling expressed,—such as Schiller's exquisite lyrics, of which the grace and sentiment, no less than the peculiar charm of diction, evaporate easily in the process of pouring from one language to another their subtle essence.

The respective merits of free and literal translation have been too often discussed for me to attempt deciding a question which every author naturally answers in favour of the style he has himself adopted; I have not intentionally followed either theory exclusively, but have rendered literally what appeared to me best so rendered, and with more freedom what seemed to lose force and expression by too absolutely verbal translation.

The poetical ‘Thou’ with which Schiller makes all who approach Elizabeth address her, is too opposed to all our ideas to be retained throughout, though I have allowed it to remain in the situations where the excitement of strong feeling might render it less strange and incongruous to the English reader; for though the Queen's Majesty did undoubtedly write letters to my Lord Leicester beginning ‘Dear Rob,’ the most assured persuasion of his great favour with his mistress would hardly have suggested to that nobleman that it might ‘not be amiss if thou thoust her’ occasionally.

To conclude, German scholars, or those who are only so much of German scholars as to be able to read Schiller's plays, will probably not read my translation, and will certainly not be satisfied with it, for I am not; and yet I have done as well as I could, and may perhaps venture to recommend my work to those who cannot read the original, as a tolerably faithful and not altogether inadequate rendering of Schiller's noble play.