It may indeed be fairly objected that, in view of what is to come later, the Carlos of the first act is a little too soft even for the sentimental age. We are required to have faith in his heroic capacity for enterprises of great pith and moment. But after his first dialogue with Posa it is as difficult for the reader or spectator to trust him as it is for King Philip. His lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as a youthful friendship; his abject confession of despair and dependence; his long-drawn-out revelation of a sick heart, and his morbid craving for sympathy in a passion which he himself feels to be abominable,--all this suggests a cankered soul of which there can be little hope. Hamlet greets the returning Horatio with the simple words:
Sir, my good friend. I'll change that name with you.
The corresponding passage in Schiller runs:
Can it be? Is't true? Is't possible? 'Tis really thou. I press thee to my heart and feel the beat Of thine omnipotent against my own. Now all is well again.--In this embrace The sickness of my soul is cured. I lie Upon my Roderick's neck.
One does not see how such pitiful weakness is all at once to be converted into manly strength by the mere arrival of a friend; wherefore that fine saying of Carlos which closes the first act,
Arm in arm with thee, I hurl defiance at my century,
So again at his first meeting with Elizabeth, Carlos is distressingly mawkish. She pictures him, in pitying indignation, as succeeding to the throne, undoing his father's work and at last marrying herself. Then he exclaims in sudden horror:
Accursed son! Yes, it is over. Now 'Tis over. Now I see it all so clearly,
and much more of the same purport. But how strange that he should have brooded for eight moons over his passion without ever having considered how it might appear to the object of it! His talk here suggests a mental inadequacy which one is hardly prepared to see change all of a sudden into heroic resolution.
To be sure it was a part of Schiller's design to represent in Carlos a process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason is that Schiller did not foresee the end from the beginning. He thought of Carlos originally as a hapless youth having a sort of natural right to rebel. It was a part of the plan, moreover, that he should renounce and grow strong through renunciation. But this was to come later in the third act; in the beginning he was to dally with the morbid passion which was to be his tragic guilt. Now with this conception of the subject, the portrait of Carlos, just as we have it, fits in very well; but when the main interest of the play had become political, when the lawless love had become of no account and the renunciation everything,--then it was surely an error to introduce Carlos in such a pitiful plight of soul that faith in him is next to impossible, and the next moment require us to accept him as a hero.