Foreword
The following Schiller short stories drag us into the intricacies of human destinies as the main characters and events of these novels were all gleaned from real life.
“Lost honour”: This short story made his fame as a sensitive and humanist writer. It tells about the progressive descent to hell of a landlord’s unfortunate son, his enrolment into a secret group and finally, his emancipation from a life of crimes.
In “A walk under the lime trees”, two young men who have recently known their destinies are discussing about some truths they have been made aware of about the world. The first one has fully accepted his destiny and sees the future brightly, the other is still full of thoughts about the whole process.
“The mind reader” relates the tentative of some officers to extirpate one of their fellows from the mental imbroglio woven around him, during a stay in Venice, to incorporate him into a secret society. Intrigues, deceit, crimes are unravelled in this long and original writing which is the only mystery novel written by F. Schiller.
In “A remarkable feminine revenge”, a middle aged woman is abandoned by her younger lover and sets up a subtle and devastating plot to avenge her humiliation.
“The whims of destiny” is a dark and implacable story of revenge among court members. “A good deed” is a surprising love triangle involving two brothers, a short story also based upon real events.
Self redemption, sense of duty, jealousy, friendship, but also treason and revenge. All the seasons of the human heart are displayed in these short stories in remarkable and intense scenes which reveal the author as a fine connoisseur of human motives and feelings.
In these stories as well as in his essays, Schiller positions himself as the writer of destinies: he combines the beautiful with the tragic and makes of each of his narration an incredibly moving assembly of actions and feelings to our most intimate delight.
Lost honour
A true story
In the whole human history, there is not a more informative chapter for the heart and the spirit than the annals of one’s own mistakes. For in every great crime, a proportionately great force was set into movement by its perpetrator.
If the secret game of covetousness remains hidden under the weaker light of common affects; hence, it will become more expressive, more colossal, louder, under the condition of violent passion; the finer human researcher who knows how much may be specifically expected from the human drives for freedom, and how widely one can derive the same conclusion based upon the same principles, will recall many experiences from this field in his mental education, and will use them in his own moral reflections.
The human heart is something so uniform and yet, has so many various aspects. The one and same skill or desire can be displayed in thousand forms and directions, it can act upon thousand contradicting phenomena, it can appear differently in thousand characters and actions, and yet it can again be traced back from the same inclination, especially if the human being about whom we are now discussing, presumes nothing of such a relatedness.
Then appeared a Linnaeus who classified also the human kind in the same way as the other species of Nature, according to its impulses and inclinations: how much one would then be astonished to find, together in the same classification as the monstrous Borgia, so many people whose vice must be contained, for now, in the new sphere of citizenry and in the narrow limitation of laws!
Considered in that aspect, a lot can be said against the use of a story, and here, I suppose, lies also the difficulty which prevent the study of the same story to be yet fruitful for the life of the citizens. Between the fervent mental agitation of the active human being who is the hero, and the calm disposition of the reader to whom these acts will be presented, such an incongruous contrast dominates, such a broad gap exists, that it is difficult, indeed, almost impossible for the reader to presume only of a relatedness with him and the hero.
Between the subject of a story and the reader, there remains a vacuum which removes the reader from any possibility of comparing the subject with himself, or with any application in his life; and instead of arousing this salutary fright which is a sign of a proud vitality, the subject arouses only confusion in him.
We consider the unfortunate person as a creature of a different kind than ourselves who, precisely in the hour when he committed the criminal act, as much as in the one when he repented for the same act, was a human being like us, but whose blood runs differently than ours, whose willpower follows other rules than ours; his destiny moves us lesser, for our emotion toward him grounds itself, indeed, only on a shadowy awareness of a similar danger in ourselves and of which we are far from only guessing the existence.
The lesson is wasted because of the reader's remoteness from the subject; and the story, instead of being a school of education, must content itself with performing a miserable service to our inclination. Should it represent more to us and reach its great, final goal; hence, it must choose necessarily one of these two methods: either the reader must become as inspired as the hero, or the hero must become as uninspired as the reader.
I know that from the best storytellers of recent times and from Antiquity, many have kept themselves to the first method and have fascinated the heart through pleasant talk. However, this manner of proceeding is an usurpation on the writer’s side and damages the republican freedom of the person who reads, who happens to be, in this instance, the judge; it is, at the same time, an offence to the rule of delimitation, for this method belongs exclusively and specifically to the orator and the poet. The storyteller only has the second method left.
The hero must become as uninspired as the reader, or, equally said, in this instance, we must acquaint ourselves with him before he acts; we must not only see him completing his action, but rather also see him wanting the same action. In his thoughts lies, for us, infinitely more than in his acts, and still much more lies in the sources of his thoughts than in the consequences of each of his act.
If people have searched the soil around the Vesuvius to explain its eruption; why should people offer less attention to a moral appearance than to a physical one? Why do people care not, in equal degree, to examine the condition and place which surrounded a man, until the gathered material ignited passion in his inner being?
The dreamer who loves anything wonderful, is precisely attracted by the strangeness and the adventurous side of the appearance; the friend of Truth seeks a mother for these lost children. He seeks her in the unchanged structure of the human soul and in the unchanged circumstances which determined them from outside, and in these two, he finds her certainly. It does not surprise him, now, any more, in the namely parcels where everywhere salutary herbs would grow, to see also the poisonous hemlock thriving, to find together in the same cradle wisdom and foolishness, vice and virtue.
Even if I do not invoke, here, any specifc advantage which psychology possesses when used in weaving a story; hence, psychology alone already retains the preference, just because it annihilates the horrible derision and the proud security with which, usually, the untested, righteous virtue looks down upon the persons who have failed; because it spreads throughout the story the soft spirit of tolerance, spirit of tolerance without which any fugitive may not wish to return back to his homeland any more; without which any reconciliation of law with its offenders cannot happen; without which any infected member of society will not be saved from the whole gangrene.
Would the criminal from whom I will speak about now, still have a right to call for this spirit of tolerance? Was he really lost without any possibility of rescue for the State? Alas, I will not focus the reader's attention on that concern any more. Our gentleness is not of any use to him any more, for he has died by the hand of the executioner; however, the autopsy of his misdeeds may still teach something to Humanity, and yes, it is possible, to Justice.
Christian