During this year at Mannheim Fiesco and Cabal and Love were put on the stage and published.  The former is a quasi-historical tragedy of intriguing ambition, ending—­in the original version—­with the death of Fiesco at the hands of the fanatical republican Verrina.  While there is much to admire in its abounding vigor and its picturesque details, Fiesco lacks artistic finality and is the least interesting of Schiller’s early plays.  Much more important is Cabal and Love, a domestic tragedy that has held the stage to this day and is generally regarded as the best of its kind in the eighteenth-century German drama.  Class conflict is the tragic element.  A maid of low degree and her high-minded, aristocratic lover are done to death by a miserable court intrigue.  Far more than in The Robbers Schiller was here writing with his eye on the facts.  Much Wuerttemberg history is thinly disguised in this drastic comment on the crimes, follies and banalities of German court life under the Old Regime.

Notwithstanding his success as a playwright and his receipt of the honorable title of Councilor from the Duke of Weimar, Schiller was unhappy at Mannheim.  Sickness, debt and loneliness oppressed him, making creative work well-nigh impossible.  In June, 1784, when the sky was looking very black, he received a heartening letter from a quartet of unknown admirers in Leipzig, one of whom was Gottfried Koerner.  Schiller was deeply touched.  In his hunger for sympathy and friendship he resolved to leave Mannheim and seek out these good people who had shown such a kindly interest in him.  Fortunately Koerner was a man of some means and was able to help not only with words but with cash.  So it came about that in the spring of 1785 Schiller forsook Mannheim, which had become as a prison to him, and went to Leipzig.  Thence, after a short sojourn, he followed Koerner to Dresden.  The relation between the two men developed into a warm and mutually inspiring friendship.  A feeling of jubilant happiness took possession of Schiller and soon found expression in the Song to Joy, wherein a kiss of love and sympathy is offered to all mankind.

[Illustration:  1.  SCHILLER’S HOUSE IN WEIMAR]

[Illustration:  2.  SCHILLER’S BIRTHPLACE IN MARBACH]

During his two years’ sojourn in Dresden Schiller was mainly occupied with the editing of a magazine, the Thalia, and with the completion of Don Carlos, the first of his plays in blank verse.  Hitherto he had written with his eye on the stage, and in the savage spirit of the Storm and Stress.  Now, however, the higher ambition of the dramatic poet began to assert itself.  His views of life were changing, and his nature craved a freer and nobler self-expression than was possible in the “three hours’ traffic of the stage.”  He had begun Don Carlos at Bauerbach, intending to make it a love-tragedy in a royal household and incidentally