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PREFACE

In the time of Aeschylus, Thessaly was in very bad repute. There had been giants there; now there were phantoms. The traveler who ventured beyond Delphi, and traversed the forests which covered the dizzy heights of Mount Cnemis, fancied, when night came on, that he saw on every side the eyes of the Cyclops buried in the marshes of Sperchius open and shoot forth flames at him. The three thousand weeping Oceanides would appear to him in a body in the clouds above the Pindus; in the hundred valleys of the Oeta he would come upon the deep, ghastly imprint of the elbows of the hundred-handed men who long ago fell upon those cliffs; he would contemplate with religious awe the marks of Enceladus’ nails upon the side of Pelion. He would not discover the huge form of Prometheus, lying along the horizon, like a mountain upon a mountain, about whose summits tempests raged, for the gods had made Prometheus invisible; but through the boughs of the aged oaks, the groans of the colossus would reach his cars as he passed; and at intervals he would hear the monstrous vulture wiping his brazen beak upon the sonorous granite cliffs of Mount Othrys. From time to time a peal of thunder would issue from Mount Olympus, whereupon the terrified traveler would see the shapeless head of the giant Hades, god of darkness, arise in the north, in the clefts of the Cambunian Mountains; in the east, beyond Mount Ossa, he would hear the groaning of Ceto, the female whale; and in the west, above Mount Callidrome, across the Halcyone Sea, the wind would waft to his ears from far-off Sicily the terrible, life-like baying of the whirlpool of Scylla. The geologists of to-day see in the irregular, confused mass called Thessaly, nothing more than the effects of earthquakes and the passage of the waters of the Flood; but in the eyes of Aeschylus and his contemporaries those devastated plains, those uprooted forests, those displaced, broken masses of rock, those lakes changed to swamps, those mountains overturned and deprived of all semblance of form were something much more awe-inspiring than a tract of country swept by a flood or upturned by volcanic action; they formed the dread battlefield whereon the Titans fought against Jupiter.

The inventions of fable are sometimes reproduced in history. Fiction and reality often startle us, by the striking parallelisms which they present. For example—and provided always that we do not seek, in those countries and those events with which history deals, the supernatural effects and fantastic exaggerations which the eye of a visionary imparts to facts purely mythological; admitting, if you please, the legend, but preserving the foundation of human probability which is lacking in ‘the gigantean paraphernalia of the fables of the ancients, there is to-day in Europe a locality, which is to us from a poetic standpoint what Thessaly was to Aeschylus, a memorable, awe-inspiring battlefield. The reader will divine that we refer to the shores of the Rhine. There, as in Thessaly, everything is blasted, devastated, torn asunder, destroyed; everything bears the marks of a desperate, deadly, implacable conflict. Not a cliff which is not a fortress, not a fortress which is not a ruin: extermination has passed that way, but the extermination has been so complete, that we feel that the conflict must have been titanic. In truth, six centuries since, other Titans did contend on that battlefield against another Jupiter. Those Titans were the burgraves; that Jupiter was the Emperor of Germany.

He who writes these lines—and he craves forgiveness for setting forth here his thought, which has been so well understood elsewhere that he is almost reduced to-day to the necessity of repeating what others have said before him, and much better than he can say it: —he who writes these lines had for a long time dimly realized that there was much that was new, extraordinary and deeply interesting to us, who are born of the Middle Ages, in this war of the modern Titans, less marvelous, but quite as grand perhaps as the war of the ancient Titans. The Titans are myths, the burgraves are men. There is a deep chasm between us and the Titans, sons of Uranus and Gaza; between us and the burgraves there is only a series of generations; we, of the nations that live along the Rhine, descend from them; they are our fathers. Thence arises that intimate, although distant, connection between them and ourselves, the result of which is that, while we admire them because they are great, we understand them because they are real flesh and blood. The feeling of reality which arouses the interest, the grandeur which awakens the poetic instinct, the novelty which stirs the passions of the vulgar, such is the threefold aspect in which the struggle between the burgraves and the emperor appeals to the imagination of a poet.

The author of the following pages was already absorbed in this great subject, which, as we have said, had been for a long time knocking at the door of his thought, when chance led him to the banks of the Rhine a few years since. That portion of the public which condescends to follow his works with some interest may have read the book entitled Le Rhin; and, if so, they know that this journey of an obscure traveler was nothing else than a long, random excursion of an antiquarian and dreamer.

The life led by the author in those souvenir-haunted regions can be readily imagined. He lived much more among the monuments of the past than among the men of the present. Every day, with the passionate interest which archaeologists and poets will understand, he explored some old ruined edifice. Sometimes it was in the morning; he would climb the mountain to the foot of the ruin, crush the thorns and thistles under his feet, put aside with his hand the curtains of ivy, scale the fragments of the old wall; and there, alone and lost in thought, seated upon some moss-covered rock, or buried up to his knees in the tall dewy grass, oblivious of everything amid the song of birds, in the rays of the rising sun, he would decipher a Roman inscription, or jot down the dimensions of an ogive window, while the flowering shrubs with which the ruin was overgrown, waving joyously in the wind above his head, rained blossoms down upon him. Sometimes it was at evening; just as the twilight transformed the hills into shapeless masses, and gave to the Rhine the sinister whiteness of steel, he would take the path to the mountains, crossed here and there by a rough stairway of lava or slate, and would climb to the dismantled castle at the summit. There, alone as in the morning, yes, more utterly alone—for no goatherd would dare venture into such places at the hour which is held in fear by every superstitious person—lost in the gathering gloom, he would give way to that profound melancholy which invades the heart when one stands at nightfall upon some lonely mountain-top, between the stars of God which shine resplendent over our head, and the paltry stars of man which twinkle in the darkness through the windows of their miserable cabins beneath our feet. The hours would fly by, and sometimes midnight, striking upon all the church-bells in the valley, would find him still there, standing in the breach of a ruined donjon, reflecting, gazing, examining the condition of the ruin, studying, too inquisitively perhaps, the silent work of nature in the solitude and darkness; listening, amid the crawling and creeping of the animals that go abroad at night, to all the strange sounds in which legend hears voices; watching the shapes vaguely outlined in the moonlight, in the corners of the rooms and in the dark corridors—shapes in which legend sees specters. As will be seen, his days and nights were filled with the same thought; and he sought to bear away from these ruins all the information that they can impart to a thinker.

It will readily be understood that the memory of the burgraves came to the mind which was absorbed in contemplation and reveries of this nature. We say again that what we said, in the beginning, of Thessaly may be said of the Rhine; there were formerly giants there, to-day there are phantoms. These phantoms appeared to the author. From the castles which sit upon those hills, his thought passed to the chatelains who live in the old chronicles, in legend and in history. The edifices were before his eyes; he tried to imagine the men who lived in them; from the shell we can reproduce the mollusk, from the dwelling we can conjure up the man.

And what dwellings were these castles on the Rhine! and what men the burgraves! Those giants had three suits of armor; the first was made of courage, their heart; the second of steel, their clothing; the third of granite, their fortress.

One day when the author had paid a visit to the crumbling citadels which cover the Wisperthal, he said to himself that the moment had come. He said to himself without attempting to deceive himself as to his own paltriness and little worth, that that journey of his must give birth to a work of his brain, that from that store of poetic suggestions he must extract a poem. The plan which came to his mind was not, he thinks, altogether without grandeur. It was this: To reconstruct in imagination, in all its amplitude and strength, one of the castles, in which the burgraves, equal to princes, lived an almost royal life. “In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” says Kohlrausch (Vol. 1., 4th Epoch, House of Suabia), “the title of burgrave ranked immediately below the title of king.” To exhibit in the castle the three things which it comprised: a fortress, a palace, a cavern. Within the castle, thus thrown open to the wondering eye of the spectator, to represent four generations living together: the grandfather, the father, the son and the grandson; to make of this whole family the complete living symbol of expiation; to brand the grandfather with the crime of Cain, to plant in the father’s heart the instincts of Nimrod, and in the son’s the vices of Sardanapalus, and to let it be seen that the grandson may some day commit a crime, through passion like his great-grandfather, through ferocity like his grandfather, through corruption like his father. To depict the grandfather’s submission to God, and the father’s to the grandfather; to raise the former by repentance, the other by filial veneration, so that the grandfather may still be august and the father great, while the two generations which follow them, weakened by their growing vices, plunge deeper and deeper into the shadow. To display thus before all, and to render visible to the public this great moral ladder of the degradation of families, which should be a living example constantly held up to the gaze of all men, and which hitherto, alas! has been discerned by none but dreamers and poets; to give reality to this teaching of the sages; to make of this philosophical abstraction a dramatic, palpable, impressive, useful truth.

Such was the first part, the first face, so to speak, of the plan which took shape in his mind. Let it not be thought, however, that he is presumptuous enough to set forth this plan as what he believes that he has done; he confines himself to an exposition of what he sought to do. That said, once for all, let us go on.

That the lesson to be drawn from such a family, developed as we have described, and held up for the public to gaze at and reflect upon, may be complete, two great and mysterious powers should intervene—fatality and Providence; fatality, which seeks to punish, Providence, whose mission it is to forgive.

When the plan we have unfolded came to the author’s mind, it immediately occurred to him, that this twofold intervention was essential to the moral teaching of the work. He said to himself that it was essential that in this frowning, impregnable, joyous, lordly palace, peopled with men of war and men of pleasure, overflowing with princes and soldiers, the towering figure of servitude should stalk, amid the carousals of the young, and the gloomy musing of the old; that this figure must be a woman, for woman alone, dishonored in the flesh as in the soul, can fitly represent absolute slavery; and that this woman, this slave, old, haggard, laden with chains, wild as the landscape upon which her gaze is constantly fixed, cruel as the vengeance which she dreams of by day and night, having in her heart the passion of the regions of darkness, that is to say hatred, and in her brain the science of the regions of darkness, that is to say magic, should personify fatality.

He said to himself, from another standpoint, that if it was essential that the figure of slavery should be represented as trampled underfoot by the burgraves, it was equally essential that the sovereign power should be represented as towering above their heads; that an emperor must be brought upon the stage among these princely bandits; that, in a work of this nature, if the poet has the right, in order truly to depict an epoch, to borrow the teaching of history, he has an equal right to resort to legend for the motives which actuate his characters; that it might, perchance, be well to awaken for a brief space and summon from the mysterious depths in which he is shrouded the glorious military messiah, whose second coming Germany still awaits, the imperial sleeper of Kaiserslautern, and to cast into the midst of the giants of the Rhine the terrible Jupiter tonans of the twelfth century, Frederic Barbarossa. Finally, he said to himself that there was perhaps some grandeur in the design that an emperor should personify Providence, while a slave represented fatality.

These ideas took root in his mind, and he thought that by disposing in this wise the figures by which his thought would be translated, he might lead up to what seemed—in his eyes at least—a grand, moral dénouement, wherein fatality should be overcome by Providence, the slave by the emperor, hatred by pardon.

As in every work, however somber its theme, there should be a ray of light, that is to say, a ray of love, he thought further that it was not enough to depict the contrast between fathers and children, the struggle between the burgraves and the emperor, the meeting of fatality and Providence; but that he must also depict two hearts which loved each other; and that a chaste and pure, devoted and touching couple, placed at the heart of the work and casting light upon it from beginning to end, would give life and soul to the whole plot.

For in our opinion this is an indispensable requisite. Whatever be the drama, whether it contain a legend, a chapter of history, or a poem, let it also contain first of all nature and humanity. Let statues walk through your dramas, if you please—it is the poet’s sovereign right—or let tigers crouch therein; but, between the statues and the tigers, place men.

Depict terror if you will, but do not omit compassion. Beneath those feet of stone, those claws of steel, let it be the human heart that is crushed.

Thus it was that history, legend, fable, reality, nature, the family, love, pure morals, savage faces, princes, soldiers, adventurers, kings, patriarchs as in the Bible, hunters of men as in Homer, Titans as in Aeschylus, all crowded at once upon the dazzled imagination of the author in this vast tableau, and he felt irresistibly drawn toward the work of which he was dreaming, troubled only by his consciousness of his own littleness, and regretting that this great subject should not be dealt with by a great poet. For surely there was an opportunity for a majestic creation; in treating such a subject one could add to the delineation of an old feudal family the delineation of an heroic society, touch at the same time the sublime and the pathetic, begin with the epic and end with the drama.

After he had in the manner indicated, and with full consciousness of his inferiority, sketched. the outline of this poem in his thought, the author asked himself what form he should give to it. In his view the poem should have the same form as the subject.

The rule: Neve minor, neu sit quinto, etc., has only a secondary value in his eyes. The Greeks did not suspect it, and the most imposing chefs d`oeuvres of tragedy, properly so-called, were born outside the limits of that pretended law. The real law is this: Every work of the intellect should come into being with the special form and the special divisions which logically consist with the idea it is intended to enforce. In this work, what the author wished to bring out in bold relief, at the culminating point of his work, between Barbarossa and Guanhumara, between Providence and fatality, was the personality of the centenarian burgrave. Job, the accursed, who, standing on the brink of the tomb, has nothing in his heart with its incurable melancholy save the threefold sentiment: home, Germany, family. This threefold sentiment divides the work naturally into three parts; therefore the author determined that his drama should be so divided. If we replace for a moment in thought the actual titles of these acts, which express only their external aspect, with more metaphysical titles, which would disclose the thought which is embodied in them, we shall see that each of these three acts corresponds to one of the three fundamental sentiments of the old German knight: home, Germany, family. The first act might be entitled, Hospitality, the second, Fatherland; the third, Paternity.

The division and the form of the drama once determined upon, the author resolved to write upon the frontispiece of the work, when it should be completed, the word Trilogy.

Here, as elsewhere, the word signifies only and essentially a poem in three cantos, a drama in three acts. But the author’s purpose in using it was to bring to life a glorious memory, to glorify so far as in him lay, by this unspoken homage, the old poet of the Orestes, who, unappreciated by his contemporaries, wrote with proud melancholy: “I dedicate my works to posterity” and also, perchance, to suggest to the public by this reminder, which may invite comparisons most unfavorable to himself, that what grand old Aeschylus did for the Titans, he, a wretched scribbler of far too little capacity for the task, has dared to try to do for the burgraves.

However, the public, and the press, which is the voice of the public, have generously given him credit, not for any talent displayed, but for his praiseworthy intent.

Every day the sympathetic and intelligent audience, which throngs so eagerly to the glorious theatre of Corneille and Moliere, seeks in this work, not what the author has succeeded in expressing therein, but what he has tried to express. He is proud of the persistent and serious attention which the public is pleased to accord to his works, however trivial they may be, and, without repeating here what he has said elsewhere, he feels that this attention places a heavy burden of responsibility upon him. To strive constantly to attain the great, to offer to the intellect what is true, to the soul what is beautiful, to the heart love, and never to offer the multitude a play which does not inculcate an idea—such is the poet’s duty to the people. Even comedy should teach some useful lesson, and have a philosophy of its own. In our day the public is great; to be understood by it the poet should be sincere. Nothing is more closely connected with greatness than honesty.

The stage should make of thought the bread of the audience.

One word more, and he has done. The Burgraves is not, as some intelligent critics have thought, purely a work of fantasy, the product of a capricious flight of the imagination. Far from that. If so incomplete a work were worth the trouble of discussing from that point of view, many people would be surprised perhaps to learn that the author’s choice of a subject was by no means a mere caprice of the imagination, and he may be allowed to add that the same is true regarding his choice of every subject that he has treated up to this day. There is to-day a European nationality, as there was in the days of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides a Greek nationality. The whole domain of civilization, whatever it may embrace, has always been the true fatherland of the poet. For Aeschylus, it was Greece; for Virgil, it was the Roman world; for us, it is Europe.

Wherever there is enlightenment, there intelligence feels, and is, at home. And so, if the author may be allowed to compare small things with great, if Aeschylus, in narrating the fall of the Titans, produced what was for Greece a national work, the poet who today narrates the fall of the burgraves, produces what is equally for Europe a national work, using the word in the same sense.

Despite momentary antipathies and frontier jealousies, all civilized nations revolve about the same center, and are united to one another by a secret, deep-seated affinity. Civilization gives us all the same vitals, the same mind, the same purpose, the same future. Furthermore, France, which loans to civilization its universal language and its all powerful initiative, —France, even when we join hands with Europe in a sort of all-embracing nationality, is nevertheless our first fatherland, as Athens was of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

They were Athenians as we are Frenchmen, and we are Europeans, as they were Greeks.

This line of thought is worth the trouble of developing. Someday perhaps the author will develop it. When he has done so, the ensemble of all the works he has hitherto brought forth will be more readily understood; the thought which runs through them all will be grasped, and their cohesion appreciated.

This bundle of twigs is bound together.

Meanwhile, he repeats, and he is happy to repeat it, that the whole civilized world is the poet’s fatherland. It has no other frontier than the dark, fatal line where barbarism begins. Someday, let us hope, the whole globe will be civilized, every region inhabited by human beings will be enlightened; then will come true the splendid dream of the enlightened mind: to have the world for one’s country, and the human race for one’s countrymen.

March 25, 1843.

PART FIRST. THE GRANDFATHER

The gallery of family portraits in the Castle of Heppenheff. This gallery, which was circular in form, surrounded the great donjon, and communicated with the other parts of the castle by four great doors at the four cardinal points of the compass. As the curtain rises a part of the gallery is seen, and passes out of sight around the circular wall of the donjon. At the left is one of the four great doors leading to the other parts of the castle. At the right a high, broad door communicating with the interior of the donjon, at the top of a flight of three steps and with a smaller door beside it. At the back of the stage, a semicircular Roman promenade, with low pillars, the capitals of which are carved in strange designs, supporting a second story (made to be used), and communicating with the gallery by a broad flight of six steps. Through the wide arches of the promenade can be seen the sky and the main body of the castle, over the highest tower of which an immense black flag is waving in the wind.

At the left near the great door is a small stained-glass window. Beside the window an arm-chair. The whole gallery wears a dilapidated, uninhabited aspect.

The walls and the stone arches, upon which can be distinguished some vestiges of obliterated frescoes, are green with mold from the constant leaking in of the rain. The portraits hanging against the panels of the gallery all have their faces turned to the wall.

Night is coming on as the curtain rises. That portion of the chateau which can be seen through the arches of the promenade seems to be brilliantly illuminated inside, although it is still broad daylight. From that direction comes the sound of trumpets and clarions, and at intervals loud singing to the accompaniment of clinking glasses. Nearer at hand can be heard the clanking of iron, as if a number of men in chains were going and coming in that portion of the promenade which cannot be seen.

An aged woman, half hidden by a long black veil, dressed in a ragged gray cotton gown, fettered by a chain running from a ring at her waist to a ring upon her bare foot, and with an iron collar about her neck, is leaning against the great door, and apparently listening to the trumpets and singing in the neighboring apartment.

SCENE I

GUANHUMARA (alone, listening).

SONG WITHOUT.

When civil war is raging,

The Burgrave’s reign begins.

—A fig for all their cities,

And a fig for all their kings!

The Burgrave lives in clover,

He rules the land by terror.

A fig for the Holy Father,

A fig for the emperor!

By sword and fire reign we;

We fear not knight or clod.

A fig for the devil, burgraves!

Burgraves, a fig for God!

(Trumpets and clarions.)

GUANHUMARA.

The princes are in joyful mood. The feast it seems is not yet ended.

(She looks toward the other side of the stage.)

Since dawn the captives have been toiling ’neath the lash.

(She listens.)

Yonder the sound of revelry: —and here the clank of fetters.

(She fastens her eyes upon the door at the right leading to the donjon.)

Yonder the father and the grandfather, with wrinkled brows, bending beneath the weight of many winters, seeking the darksome traces of their evil deeds, and meditating on their lives and on their progeny, alone, and far from yon triumphant shouts of laughter, contemplate their crimes, less hideous to gaze on than their children. In their prosperity, unbroken to this day, great are the burgraves. Lords of the marches, sovereign counts and dukes, descendants of the Gothic kings, bow down before them till they reach their level. Resonant with clarions and songs and noise, their castle rears its head among the clouds: on all sides soldiers without number, fierce-eyed bandits, watch with bow and lance in hand, and sword between the teeth. This inaccessible retreat by everything is sheltered and defended. All alone, in a deserted corner of the frowning castle, old and sad, unknown, with bended knee, chains on her feet, and carcan round her neck, in rags and veiled, a slave doth drag herself along. But tremble, O ye princes! that slave’s name is hate!

(She goes to the back of the stage and ascends the steps of the promenade. A party of slaves in chains enters by the gallery at the right, some chained together, and all carrying implements of toil, pickaxes, sledge-hammers, etc. Guanhumara leans against one of the pillars and watches them with a pensive expression. By the soiled and torn garments of the slaves, their former occupations can be distinguished.)

CONTENTS:

PREFACE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

PART FIRST. THE GRANDFATHER

SCENE I