In Madame Julia we have a type of woman who was meant to be repulsive, and so far forth the young artist must be admitted to have wrought successfully. She is somewhat minutely described as a 'tall and plump widow of twenty-five; a proud coquette, her beauty spoiled by its oddity; dazzling and not pleasing, and with a wicked, cynical expression.' That such a woman should befool Fiesco and rejoice in her triumph is quite thinkable, but her qualities are those which usually go with a certain amount of discretion. That she should suddenly lose her head and throw herself away in a voluptuous frenzy hardly comports with the type. Nor is there anything in the inventory of her qualities that prepares us for her sudden assumption of the role of poisoner, when she is already, as she must suppose, the mistress of the situation. In her altercation with Leonora in the second scene of Act II she uses a number of coarse expressions befitting a woman of vulgar birth,--wherein some of the critics see an evidence of Schiller's unfamiliarity with the ways of refined ladies. It is quite possible, however, that we have to do instead with a realistic attempt to make her language match the essential vulgarity of her character. At any rate it is interesting to know that the scene was offensive to Schiller himself. He worked upon it with repugnance and was glad to be able to omit it entirely from the stage version.[47]
In respect of its diction 'Fiesco' is in no way essentially different from 'The Robbers', albeit some have imagined that a faint improvement is discernible. There is the same tearing of passion to tatters, the same predilection for florid rhetoric in the sentimental passages, and for frenzied talk and action in passages of more violent emotion. When Fiesco discovers that he has killed his wife, he first thrashes about him furiously with his sword. Then he gnashes his teeth at God in heaven and expresses himself thus: 'If I only had His universe between my teeth, I feel in a mood to tear all nature into a grinning monster having the semblance of my pain.' In his final expostulation with the would-be tyrant, Verrina delivers himself of this sentence: 'Had I too been such an honest dolt as not to recognize the rogue in you, Fiesco, by all the horrors of eternity, I would twist a cord out of my own intestines and throttle you with it, so that my fleeing soul should bespatter you with yeasty foam-bubbles.'