Modern Language Notes Volume 24 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ...in at this critical moment will prove fatal. Illo makes this final and supreme appeal to bring Wallenstein to act. Illo is a sagacious man of the world and he can see things here in their true relation. He knows that only an unconditional surrender of Wallenstein's destructive theories in regard to astrology and only an absolutely uncompromising attitude towards his enemies can avert an otherwise inevitable catastrophe. Now is the time to bring Wallenstein out of the darkness into which that mysterious personality was plunged, into the light of resolute action. To act meant victory and glory; to hesitate meant an inglorious death. But how does Illo express this? Certainly not as he has hitherto expressed himself to Wallenstein and his generals. Here he is transformed from a sagacious man of the world into a subtile philosopher. His speech is adorned with highly involved metaphors. His trend of thought has become philosophical and rhetorical rather than persuasive and characterized by a mere practical wisdom. This, to be sure, is out of keeping with Illo's general character. How are we to justify such an abrupt metamorphosis in so important a character as that of Illo? My answer is that Schiller, the philosopher and the poet, has invested his character with an element of his own idealism. Filled with the grandeur of the tragic situation Schiller could not refrain from putting into the mouth of his hero this elevated passage of sublime thought, regardless of the general character of the man. He has perhaps violated a dramatic principle of consistency in the character and temperament of a personality like that of Illo; a violation which Heurik Ibsen, for instance, never would have allowed himself. But he has, thereby, enhanced the dramatic tension...