E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
Schiller The Man Who Sees Ghosts
1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-1-908968-69-2
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-908968-69-2
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) was a German dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and historian, as well as a friend and collaborator of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
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NOT LONG AFTER these latter events—Count von O** continues to relate—I began to notice an important change in the Prince’s disposition. Until now the Prince had avoided any close examination of his faith and been content to purify the brutal and materialistic religious notions with which he had been brought up by means of the better ideas which arose in him later; this he did without examining the foundations of his faith. Religious matters altogether, he confessed to me on several occasions, had always seemed to him an enchanted castle into which one does not set foot without some trepidation; one would do far better to pass over the subject with respectful resignation, without running the danger of getting lost in its labyrinths. However, an opposing tendency drew him irresistibly to investigations that were related to it.
A sanctimonious and slavish education was the source of this aversion; it had imprinted on his tender brain nightmare shapes from which, throughout the course of his life, he could never entirely free himself. Religious melancholy was a hereditary disease in his family; the education given to him and his brothers was adapted to this disposition and the people to whom he was entrusted were selected from the same motive, being therefore either fanatics or hypocrites. To suffocate all the boy’s liveliness of spirit beneath stifling stone tablets was the most reliable means of ensuring the unalloyed contentment of the royal parents.
The whole of the Prince’s youth was marked by this dark, night-like character; joy was banished even from his games. All his ideas of religion had something terrifying about them, and it was precisely this, whatever was grisly and coarse, which first seized hold of his lively imagination and survived there longest, too. His God was a gargoyle, a vengeful Being; his reverence of God was the trembling of a slave or a blind submission that smothered all his vitality and sense of adventure. Religion stood there barring the way to all those boyish and youthful inclinations to which his sturdy body and blooming health served to make all the more explosive; it was at loggerheads with everything for which his youthful heart hankered; he came to know it never as a blessing, only as a scourge of his passions. And so a silent rancour against it gradually flared up in his heart, which, along with a reverential faith and blind fear in his head and heart, made for the strangest mixture: a repugnance for a master before whom he felt an equal degree of horror and reverence.
No wonder that he seized the first opportunity to escape from so harsh a yoke—but he fled from it like a bond slave from his cruel master, a slave who even in the midst of liberty still feels the chains about him wherever he goes. This was why—because he did not quietly and freely renounce the faith of his youth, because he had not waited until his maturer reason had slowly freed itself from its hold, because he had escaped it as a runaway over whom his master continued to exercise his proprietary rights—this was why, even after so many distractions, he was obliged to return to it again and again. He had escaped but still wore the manacles and for this reason was doomed to become the prey of each andevery swindler who could see this and was able to use it. That such a man appeared, if the reader has not guessed already, the sequel of this history will show.
The Sicilian’s confessions had long-term consequences, affecting the Prince’s mind more importantly than this whole affair merited, and the small victory that his reason had gained over this feeble piece of trickery had noticeably increased his confidence in that same reason. The ease with which he had succeeded in seeing through the deception seemed to have surprised even himself. In his head there was not yet an exact enough demarcation between truth and error for him to avoid frequently confusing what supported the one with what supported the other; for this reason the blow that demolished his belief in the miraculous also caused the whole edifice of his religious faith to totter. In this respect he was like an inexperienced man who has been deceived in friendship or love because he made a bad choice and who now abandons faith in feeling altogether because he takes what merely appears as feeling for what its true qualities and characteristics are. The unmasking of a lie made him suspicious also of the truth because his understanding of the truth had been built unfortunately on similarly shaky foundations.
The heavier became the sense of oppression from which he only appeared to have freed himself, the more this supposed triumph pleased him. From this time on a scepticism arose in him that did not spare even what men most revere.
Several circumstances combined to keep him in this state of mind and to hold him in it even more firmly. The solitude in which he had hitherto lived now ceased and had to give way to a life full of distractions. His rank had been discovered. Attentions he received which he was obliged to return and the etiquette which he owed to his rank, these pulled him imperceptibly into the hurly-burly of the great world. His rank as well as his personal qualities gave him entrance to the most sophisticated circles in Venice; he soon found himself rubbing shoulders with the most brilliant minds of the Republic, scholars as well as statesmen. This forced him to widen the monotonous and narrow circle in which his spirit had been confined until now. He began to be aware of the narrow-mindedness of his ideas and to feel the need for a more elevated kind of education. The old-fashioned nature of his thinking, however many fine qualities it otherwise came with, fared to his disadvantage when set alongside the prevalent notions of this society, and his unfamiliarity in the most ordinary of matters exposed him on occasions to ridicule. Nothing did he fear so much as ridicule. The unfavourable prejudice held against the land of his birth he saw as a gauntlet challenging him to disprove it in his own person. Then, added to this, was a characteristic peculiar to him whereby every attention paid him that he believed he had to thank to his rank and not his personal worth exasperated him. He felt this humiliation chiefly in the presence of people who shone intellectually and who triumphed, as it were, over their birth through their personal merits. In such society to see himself set apart as Prince was always deeply mortifying to him, because he unfortunately believed that this title excluded him immediately from all chances of competing in it. All this taken together convinced him of the necessity of providing his mind with the education that he had thus far neglected, in order to catch up with those enlightened members of the quick-witted and rational world, who had left him so far behind. To this end he chose the most modern literature, and devoted himself to this with all the earnestness that he applied to everything he undertook. But, as his bad luck would have it, when it came to selecting these books, he always chanced sadly upon ones which did little to improve either head or heart. And here, too, his old inclinations held sway, these drawing him with irresistible fascination, as they had always done, to everything lying beyond the wit of man: it was to matters relating to this alone that he attended to and remembered; his head and his heart remained empty, those parts of his brain being filled instead with muddled ideas. The dazzling style of one captured his imagination, while the subtelty of another ensnared his reason. It became easy for both to subjugate a mind that was prey to everything that forced itself on him with a certain audacity.
A course of reading, pursued enthusiastically for over a year, enriched him with scarcely any salutary notions but rather filled his head with doubts; as he was consistent of character, it unfailingly followed that these doubts soon found their sad way to his heart. In brief, he had entered this labyrinth as a credulous zealot, and he left it as a sceptic—in the end, as an out-and-out freethinker.
Among the circles into which they managed to draw him was a certain closed society called Bucentauro, which, while appearing to foster a high-minded and rational freedom of spirit, promoted in fact unbridled licence both in opinion and manners. Since it numbered among its members many of the clergy, and even had at its head the names of several cardinals, the Prince was all the more easily persuaded to be initiated into it. Certain dangerous truths that reason led to, so he said, could be placed in no better hands than such people’s, whose position obliged them to be moderate and who had the advantage, too, of having heard and questioned the opponents of such truths. The Prince was forgetting here that libertinism of mind and morals spreads far wider amongst persons of this rank precisely because it meets with fewer checks and is not scared off by any aura of godliness that will often dazzle the eyes of the profane. And this was the case with the Bucentauro, the majority of whose members, by means of a damnable philosophy and of the kind of morals this led to, abused not only their rank but also humanity itself.
This society had its secret degrees, and, out of respect for the Prince, I would like to believe he was never found worthy of the innermost sanctuary. Everyone who joined this society had to, for as long as he lived at least, set aside his rank, his nation, his religious affiliation, in short, all conventional distinguishing marks, and adopt a certain condition of universal equality. The election of members was strict, in fact, since only...
