Up to this point 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation, Schiller had got the idea—and it interested him for personal reasons—of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he thought would give weight and distinction to the book. So the Prince's philosophic demoralization is described at tedious length and the story drops out of sight for a long time. Then it is taken up again and the Prince falls in love with a beautiful Greek religieuse. The portrayal of this woman aroused another flicker of interest on Schiller's part, though she too was finally to be unmasked as one of the conspirators. Then he seems to have tired of 'The Ghostseer' altogether; at any rate he choked it off suddenly with a 'Farewell', in which nothing is concluded save that the Prince goes over to the Catholic Church.

From this description it is evident that Schiller's one attempt at novel-writing is of no great account as a contribution to artistic fiction. It is a torso consisting of two heterogeneous parts. It is not a study of life based upon the observation of life, but a tale of marvelous happenings which are recounted for the purpose of showing their subtle reaction upon the plastic mind of the Prince. The hero is taken over a route that was to become very familiar,—the route from a narrow and gloomy type of Protestantism through liberalism, rationalism, skepticism, Pyrrhonism, and mental exhaustion to the repose of the Catholic Church. Of course the story was not to end there, but what the further developments were to have been one can only guess. Schiller himself did not think it worth while to enlighten the public, even after his 'Ghostseer' began to call out imitations and continuations.

In the 'Letters upon Don Carlos', published in 1788, in Wieland's Merkur, Schiller undertook to defend himself against his critics and to correct some misapprehensions. In temper and style they are admirable, even when they do not convince. They begin by admitting and accounting for that seeming incongruity between the first three and the last two acts, which has always been the gravamen of critical objection to 'Don Carlos'. After this they attempt to show that such a character as Posa might very well have existed in the sixteenth century at the Spanish court. Then we are told that it was not the author's purpose to depict Carlos and Posa as a pair of ideal friends. For Carlos, indeed, friendship is everything, but not for Posa. In him the passion for friendship is everywhere subordinated to the passion for humanity. He is not to be blamed, therefore, for belying the character of a true friend, since that is not his dominant and essential character. He regards Carlos merely as an indispensable tool for his political designs. In his interview with the king he is carried away by a momentary enthusiasm,—what he says there is of no importance, his hopes being really fixed upon Don Carlos. At the beginning of the fourth act he sees not his personal friend, but the instrument of his political plans, in awful danger. He resolves to save him for Flanders and for humanity by sacrificing himself. This is no more unnatural or inconceivable than the self-sacrifice of Regulus. But Posa wishes to save his friend like a god and not like a common level-headed Philistine. He has the soul of a Plutarchian hero, and where two ways present themselves, the most natural is for him the most heroic. Hence his desperate procedure and its disastrous consequences.

To all of which one can give but a qualified assent, the difficulty being that the play is not so constructed as to bring out its author's intention. The character of Posa in Act IV is a surprise, and a disagreeable surprise. His conduct may harmonize with a theory of antique heroism, but it does not grow naturally out of what precedes. There is no exigency that calls for his heroic foolhardiness. The reader or the spectator can hardly be supposed to know that the famous tenth scene in the third act, the longest and most carefully elaborated in the whole play, does not count. One naturally supposes that it does count, and the only way it can count is to create a hopeful situation of which Posa is absolute master. When, therefore, he throws away his advantage and deliberately plunges his friend into a needless danger, in order to make an opportunity for rescuing him at the cost of his own life, one inevitably associates him mentally not with antique heroes but with modern lunatics.

A man capable of conceiving such a hero as Posa, and defending the conception as true to life, could hardly be expected to adjust his mind easily to such a work as Goethe's 'Egmont'. In his review of the play, published in 1788, Schiller found, indeed, much to praise; but his general praise was so mixed up with general fault-finding as to produce upon the Rudolstadt people the impression of a naughty lese-majeste. He divined correctly enough that 'Egmont' was to be regarded as a drama of character, rather than of plot or of passion. But Egmont's character seemed to him painfully lacking in 'greatness'. Egmont, so the criticism runs, really does nothing extraordinary. He is idolized by the people, but the deeds upon which his fame rests have all been done before the curtain rises. In the play he appears as a light-hearted cavalier who affronts us by persistently refusing to take serious things seriously. In particular the review objected to Goethe's perversion of history in representing Egmont not as a married man with a large family of children but as a bachelor with a bourgeois sweetheart. Not that Schiller regarded the departure from history as reprehensible in itself. The dramatist has a right to pervert facts for the purpose of exciting sympathy for his hero; but in this case, Schiller argued, the effect is to degrade the character of Egmont and thus to alienate sympathy. Finally the review took exception to Egmont's vision of Freedom In the form of Claerchen; this, Schiller thought, was a deplorable plunge into opera at the end of a serious drama.

To adjudicate the issue thus sharply drawn between the two great German poets would require some preliminary attention to their fundamental difference of artistic method,—a subject that will concern us in a subsequent chapter. Here suffice it to remark that Schiller was not entirely in the wrong. While Goethe was incomparably the more subtle psychologist, Schiller had the better eye, or rather he cared more, for that which is dramatically effective, average human nature being such, as it is. His dramatic instinct told him that Egmont was not a very powerful stage-play. Its subtle psychology did not impress him so much as its lack of 'greatness'. And then he had his pique against Goethe and wished to show the Weimarians that he at least could perceive the spots on the sun. Goethe's serene comment upon reading the critique was to the effect that the reviewer had analyzed the moral part of the play very well indeed, but in dealing with the poetic aspect of it he had left something to be done by others.[78]

The dramatic fragment, 'The Misanthrope Reconciled', which Schiller fished up out of his drawer in 1790 and used, faute de mieux, to fill space in the eleventh number of the Thalia, was begun, as we have seen, in Dresden. Possibly the theme may have been suggested at Mannheim by the problem of staging Shakspere's 'Timon'. At any rate the theme was congenial for a man who had 'embraced the world in glowing passion and found in his arms a lump of ice'. At Weimar he returned to it several times, puzzled over the general plan, added a little here and there, but finally gave it up as a bad subject for dramatic treatment. The published fragment is certainly of no great account. It introduces a misanthrope, Hutten by name, who, as feudal lord, treats his dependents handsomely out of sheer contempt for them. When they come to thank him on his birthday, he spurns their gratitude and scolds them, having made up his mind never to be duped again by any show of human emotion. He has brought up his beautiful and dutiful daughter to be an angel of mercy and a paragon of perfection, but he insists that she too shall be a misanthrope like himself. He makes her swear that she will never marry, but she shrewdly tacks on the proviso, 'except with papa's consent'. The exposition shows her duly in love with a cheerful and estimable youth named Rosenberg; and the problem is: How will Rosenberg manage the misanthrope? That he was to win somehow is evident from the title.

In his translations from Euripides, which also belong to the period under consideration, Schiller aimed partly at the improvement of his own taste. He hoped to familiarize himself with the spirit of the Greeks and to acquire something of their manner. He thought that they might teach him simplicity both in expression and in the construction of dramatic plots; and he felt that his style was in need of their chastening influence. Of 'The Phoenician Women' he translated about one-third, but omitted the choruses entirely; of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis' he translated nearly the whole text, rendering the choruses very freely in rimed lines of uneven length and varying cadence. His work reads smoothly and gives the general effect of Euripides, but cannot count as good translation. It was not only that his Greek scholarship was deficient, but he lacked patience,—an indispensable virtue for the translator. His real original was not the Greek text at all, but the Latin version of Joshua Barnes; and when this appeared to him jejune and unpoetic he sometimes created an original of his own.

The other minor writings of the years 1788 and 1789 may be passed over as of little significance. On the poetic side there were three or four occasional poems, and also the rimed epistle called 'The Celebrated Wife', in which the unfortunate husband of a literary lady pours out the tale of his domestic woes. In prose there were several perfunctory reviews contributed to the Litteratur-Zeitung, and also an anecdote—exhumed from an old chronicle and retold for the Merkur—relating to a breakfast given to the Duke of Alva by the Countess of Schwarzburg in the year 1547. To these may be added, finally, the short story entitled 'Play of Fate,' also published in the Merkur, which describes, under a thin disguise of fictitious names, the rise and fall and rehabilitation of Karl Eugen's former minister, P.H. Rieger.[79]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: Letter of July 28, 1787, to Koerner.]

[Footnote 74: Letter of Nov. 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 75: In the original, lines 145-8, of the earlier version:

Schoene Welt, wo bist du?—Kehre wieder, Holdes Blueltenalter der Natur! Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder Lebt noch deine goldne Spur.]

[Footnote 76: In the original:

Im Fleisz kann dich die Biene meistern, In der Geschicklichkeit ein Wurm dein Lehrer sein, Dein Wissen teilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern, Die Kunst, O Mensch, hast du allein.]

[Footnote 77: Letter of March 17, to Koerner.]

[Footnote 78: Letter of Oct. 1, 1788, Goethe to Karl August.]

[Footnote 79: See above, page 135.]



CHAPTER XI

Historical Writings

Der Mensch verwandelt sich und flieht von der Buehne, seine Meinungen verwandeln sich und fliehen mit ihm; die Geschichte allein bleibt unausgesetzt auf der Buehne, eine unsterbliche Buergerin aller Nationen und Zeiten.—First lecture at Jena.

Schiller's merit as a writer of history has been much discussed and very differently estimated by high authorities. In general one may say that his historical writings have fared at the hands of experts very much like the scientific writings of Goethe; both being treated as the rather unimportant incursions of a poet into a field which he had not the training or the patience to cultivate with the best results. Niebuhr's adverse opinion is well known and has often been echoed in one form or another by later critics. On the other hand, lovers of the poet are very apt to overestimate the historian, who would probably be seldom heard of to-day If he had not achieved immortal fame by his plays and poems. As it is, his historical writings have become, for better or worse, a part of the classical literature of Germany, and as such we have to reckon with them.

And the best way to reckon with them is to describe them as objectively as possible and to consider them in relation to the intellectual tendencies of Schiller's own time. We shall see that he began a history of the Dutch Rebellion without knowing Dutch or Spanish, and without spending any time in a preliminary study of the original sources of information.[80] His 'History of the Thirty Years' War' was a bread-winning enterprise, hastily executed for a ladies' magazine. For neither work did he draw a full breath. To compare him, therefore, with the modern giants of research, would be quite absurd; and the more absurd since Schiller the historian, unlike Goethe the scientist, was extremely modest in his self-estimate and fully aware of his limitations on the side of scholarship.

Of the qualities that go to the making of a great historian he had two,—the philosophic mind and the vivid imagination. But he lacked the spirit of the investigator and had not a sufficient reverence for the naked fact. History interested him for the sake of his theories and his pictures, and rhetoric was his element. This being so it is not strange that we get from him now and then a distorted image. Great movements and prominent characters are depicted by him in accordance with his freedom-loving, cosmopolitan preconception; and his study was not to correct this preconception by a survey of all the evidence, but rather to select that which would confirm his view in a striking manner. On the whole, however, the tale of his positive error, as brought to light by the critics, is not as large as one might expect. This chapter will not deal with it at all, but rather with his general method and point of view.[81]

'The Defection of the Netherlands' was begun in the summer of 1787 and grew out of the reading of Watson's 'Philip the Second'. This book impressed Schiller strongly and he attributed its fascination to the working of his own imaginative faculty. He wished that others might see and feel what he had seen and felt. So he began to retell the story in his own way, intending at first only a brief sketch. As he proceeded, he found gaps and contradictions and isolated facts of obscure import. He began to consult the authorities, not so much to increase his store of information as to clear up his doubts. In this way the intended sketch expanded ideally into a six-volume treatise which should present the history of the Netherlands from the earliest times down to the establishment of their independence. Of the magnum opus thus planned the first volume, the only one that was ever written, appeared in the autumn of 1788, in three books. The first book sketched the history of the Low Countries down to the Spanish domination; the second dealt with the regency of Margaret of Parma, and the third with the conspiracy of the nobles, ending with the supersession of Margaret by the Duke of Alva, in 1567. Thus the most dramatic period of the great struggle was not reached. Subsequently, however, the narrative was supplemented by two separate pictures, 'The Death of Egmont' and 'The Siege of Antwerp,' which in the edition of 1801 were first printed with the history.

Letters of Schiller indicate that for a while at least he was very enthusiastic in his new pursuit. He found in the seeming capriciousness of history a constant challenge to the philosophic mind, and he enjoyed the imaginative exercise of investing the dry bones with muscles and nerves. It struck him that the inner necessity was much the same in history as in a work of art. He even went so far as to contend that the fame of the historian was on the whole preferable to that of the poet, and to express the opinion that his own nature was more akin to that of Montesquieu than to that of Sophocles. He felt that he was getting new ideas and expanding his soul at every step. 'Really,' he wrote to Koerner in 1788, 'I find each day that I am pretty well suited to the business I am now carrying on. Perhaps there are better men, but where are they? In my hands history is becoming something in many respects different from what it has been.'

And so it really was. In point of readableness 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is vastly superior to any previous historical writing in the German language. The stately march of its paragraphs, each bearing the impress of a serious and lofty mind; the care with which seemingly small matters are logically connected with great issues, the mingling of philosophic reflection with the narrative,—all this gave to the work an air of literary distinction. It was actually interesting, and this was much in a land that had no historical classics whatsoever. To be interesting was what Schiller frankly aimed at; he wished to 'convince one portion of his readers that history might be written with fidelity to the facts, but without becoming a trial to the reader's patience; and another portion that it might borrow something from a kindred art without becoming romance'. And he succeeded. In reading him it is easy to see that the poetic habit of conceiving his characters to fit a preconceived scheme, his vivid imagination, his love of sharp contrasts, telling analogies and broad generalizations, occasionally distort the true relation of things. He was an artist rather than a scholar, and one must e'en accept him as such. A letter to Karoline von Beulwitz puts the matter thus:

I shall always be a poor authority for any future investigator who has the misfortune to consult me. But perhaps at the expense of historic truth I shall find readers, and here and there I may hit upon that other kind of truth which is philosophic. History is in general only a magazine for my fancy, and the objects must content themselves with the form, they take under my hands.

The animating Idea of 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the same that Goethe found running through all the writings of Schiller—the idea of freedom. From the days of his youth 'freedom', however unphilosophically he might think about it, had connoted for his imagination the highest and holiest interest of mankind; and when he began his first historical work his enthusiasm had not yet been sicklied o'er by the events of the Paris Terror. He saw in the Dutch revolt a glorious battle for liberty; the struggle of a small trading population against the proudest, richest and most powerful monarch of the century; a cause seemingly hopeless at first, but growing stronger through pluck, union, tenacity and wise leadership, until the Spanish Goliath was completely beaten. It was magnificent and Schiller desired that his countrymen should feel its magnificence and take to heart its lesson. So he adorned his title-page with an emblem of freedom,—a broad-brimmed hat and a feather upon a pole,—and began his treatise with a bugle-blast that left no doubt of his purpose: 'I have thought it worth while to set up before the world this fair monument of civic strength, in order to waken in the breast of my people a joyous self-consciousness, and to give a fresh and pertinent example of what men may venture for a good cause and may accomplish by united action.'

A remarkable passage of the introduction runs as follows:

Let no one expect to read here of towering, colossal men, or of amazing deeds such as the history of earlier times offers in such abundance. Those times are past, those men are no more. In the soft lap of refinement we have allowed the powers to languish which those ages exercised and made necessary. With humble admiration we gaze now at those gigantic forms, as a nerveless old man at the manly sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit which gives sublimity to even the most paltry action. The pressure of circumstances surprised this people into a knowledge of their own strength, forcing upon them a transitory greatness which did not belong to them and which they perhaps will never again exhibit. So then the strength they manifested has not vanished from among us, and the success which crowned their desperate adventure will not be denied to us if, in the lapse of time, similar occasions call us to similar deeds.

One sees from this that Schiller is, halting between the poetic and the scientific view of the past, uncertain which way to set his face. The poet in him is inclined to idealize the brave days of old and to mourn that the ancient giants are no more. At the same time he finds that the struggle of the Low Countries, while not 'heroic', was very remarkable, very instructive and very inspiring. From this observation it is but a step to the recognition of the truth that it is his own conventional notion of 'heroism' that needs revising; that the giants of yore were no taller than those of to-day and that the world's supply of courage and devotion is not running low. It is an interesting fact that the sentence beginning, 'So then the strength they manifested,' was omitted by Schiller from the edition of 1801, possibly because the horrors of the Revolution had put him out of humor with fighting. But he might well have allowed the words to stand. Their truth was soon to be memorably proved by the German uprising against Napoleon.

A German writer[82] remarks correctly that Schiller occupies with Kant a middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83] pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how. He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating the distant past with patronizing condescension. At the same time he wishes to instruct and does not hesitate to point out where the instruction is to be found. He aims to be impartial to the extent of giving both sides a hearing, but he imputes motives freely and does not pretend to extinguish self. Probably the effort to do so would have seemed to him absurd. His sympathy is of course with the Netherlanders, but he writes as a philosophic champion of freedom rather than as a partisan of Protestantism. His concern is not to excite indignation at the colossal wickedness of Philip and Alva, but to show up their colossal folly. As we should expect he devotes his best powers to his portraits, some of which,—as those of Margaret, Granvella, Egmont and Orange,—are deservedly famous. At the same time they are subject to correction from the documents. Thus the crafty politician, William the Silent, in whom there was very little of the strenuous idealist, is presented as a 'second Brutus, who, far above timid selfishness, magnanimously renounces his princely station, descends to voluntary poverty, becomes a citizen of the world and consecrates himself to the cause of freedom'.

From what has been said it is clear that Schiller regarded the writing of history as essentially an exercise of the creative imagination. And such in a sense it really is and always must be, since no historian can divest himself of his own personality. He will inevitably see the events with his own eyes and put his own construction upon them. His very arrangement of his materials, his distribution of lights and shades, his selection of the matters to be recorded and commented upon, will involve a subjective coloring of his narrative. This being so, one cannot reasonably criticize Schiller for having his point of view, but only for taking too little trouble in the gathering and verification of his facts. He did not think it important to study his subject from first-hand sources of information. He quotes more than a score of authorities in Latin, French and German, but he uses them quite uncritically, and chiefly, it would seem, to give his work a semblance of learning. The facts were for him nothing but the raw material of history; the important thing was their philosophic truth, that is, the intellectual formula that should explain them. In our day we have grown distrustful of the 'philosophy of history', especially of any philosophy that does not rest upon a basis of long and thorough investigation.

'The Defection of the Netherlands' was very favorably received by the German public. Its merits lay on the surface, while its defects were not patent to the casual reader. Every one felt that Schiller had set a new pattern for historical composition. In his hands history had become literature. With such an achievement to his credit it was natural that his debut in Jena should be looked forward to in academic circles as a great occasion. Feeling that much would be expected of him he prepared with great care his inaugural discourse upon the study of universal history. The address, which was subsequently published in the Merkur, begins with a vigorous elucidation of the difference between the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophic thinker. The former is depicted in caustic terms as a narrow, selfish, timorous time-server. He is the enemy of reform and discovery, because he is forever dreading that the enlargement of the human outlook may disturb his little private routine. He cares for truth only so far as it can be turned to his personal gain in the form of money, praise or princely favor. The philosophic thinker, on the other hand, is a joyous lover of his kind. Feeling the essential solidarity of all knowledge he seeks ever for the unifying principle. He loves truth for its own sake. Every advance of knowledge is welcome to him, and he willingly sees his private edifice go to ruin for the joy of building a new and better one. Then the lecture proceeds to describe the splendid progress of the human race. The task of universal history is declared to be the explanation of this evolutionary process. It must show how all things hang together, and, selecting for description those portions of the record which have a more obvious bearing upon the present form of the world, it must seek to bring home to the modern man the full import of his heirship.

In this address we begin to trace the influence of Kant, whose 'Idea of a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Spirit', published in 1784, was read by Schiller with great interest. The leading thoughts of this memorable paper, new then but very familiar now, are that the race and not the individual is nature's concern in her scheme of man's perfectibility; that the only perfection and happiness possible to him are those which he creates for himself by the progressive triumph of reason over instinct; that the fighting-spirit, antagonisms, wars, the madness and the calamity of the individual, are the necessary condition of race-progress; that the goal is a just civil society, which in turn, since man is an animal that needs a master, is inseparable from the idea of a law-governed state. Thus, while Herder's formula for the great evolutionary process was the upbuilding of the individual man to humanity, that of Kant was the preparation of man for a free citizenship which should ultimately embrace the world.

By the general bent of his mind Schiller was nearer to the humane idealism of Herder than to the law-governed collectivism of Kant. At the same time we can see from many a sentence in his inaugural address that the far more rigorous logic of the Koenigsberg philosopher had had its effect upon him. In particular he was captivated by the idea that the individual exists for the sake of the race, and that the gruesome antagonisms of history are therefore to be regarded with composure as the birth-pains of the modern man. A striking passage of the lecture runs thus:

History, like the Homeric Zeus, looks down with the same cheerful countenance upon the bloody works of war and upon the peaceful peoples that innocently nourish themselves upon the milk of their herds. However lawlessly the freedom of man may seem to operate upon the course of the world, she gazes calmly at the confused spectacle; for her far-reaching eye discovers even from a distance where this seemingly lawless freedom is led by the cord of necessity.... History saves us from an exaggerated admiration of antiquity and from a childish longing for the past. Reminded by her of our own possessions we cease to wish for a return of the lauded golden age of Alexander or of Caesar.

From this way of thinking it seems but a span to the modern scientific point of view; for that, however, neither Schiller nor Kant was ripe, since both thought it necessary to assume that human history began about six thousand years ago and began substantially as reported in Genesis, however the original authentic tradition might have been incrusted with spurious supernaturalism. The explanation of society thus resolved itself for them into the problem of a rational interpretation of the Bible. Kant believed, like Rousseau, in an original paradisaic condition, in which man had lived as a happy, peaceful animal. But while man's emergence from that state was regarded by Rousseau as a disaster, the selfish passions, with their resulting antagonisms, were conceived by Kant as the sine qua non of rational development. This thought, with its corollaries, was set forth by Kant in an essay of the year 1786, entitled 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History'. The Fall is there explained as a good thing, the story in Genesis being interpreted as a symbol of the emergence of man from the estate of a peaceful but instinct-governed animal to that of a quarrelsome but rational being. Kant's line of reasoning interested Schiller deeply, and in 1790 he published in the Thalia a paper upon the same general subject. It was entitled 'Something about the First Human Society on the Basis of the Mosaic Record'.

Portions of this essay, with its naive license of affirmation, would make a modern anthropologist shudder. It begins with a description of the original paradise, from which the infant man was to be led forth into life by Providence, his watchful nurse. To quote a few words:

By means of hunger and thirst She showed him [let us keep the feminine providence of the German] the need of nourishment; what he required for the satisfaction of his needs She had placed around him in rich abundance; and by the senses of smell and taste She guided him in his choice. By means of a mild climate She had spared his nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind provision was made in the sexual impulse. As plant and animal man was complete.... If, now, we regard the voice of God which forbade the tree of knowledge as simply the voice of instinct warning man away from this tree, then the eating of the fruit becomes merely a defection from instinct, that is, the first manifestation of rational independence, the origin of moral being; and this defection from instinct, which brought moral evil into the world, but at the same time made moral good possible, was incontestably the happiest and greatest event in the history of mankind.

It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on Schiller's general attitude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain it like any rationalizing professor. The past interests him mainly for the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good opinion,—especially of the Goddess of Reason. He did not know what a terrible trial was preparing for this goddess and her self-complacent worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy of many. For the present, however, it was no inchoate Romanticism, but a publisher's enterprise, that led him into the study of the Middle Ages. He had undertaken to edit a great 'Collection of Historical Memoirs'. There were to be several volumes each year for an indefinite time; the volumes to consist of translations from various languages and to cover European history from the twelfth century down. Schiller was to supervise the undertaking and furnish the needful introductions. His plans were presently thwarted by illness and then by his increasing interest in philosophic studies; so that after the first few volumes had appeared he withdrew and left the continuation of the 'Memoirs' to other hands.

Of his various contributions to the initial volumes of the 'Historical Memoirs' a part are mere hack-work and therefore devoid of biographical interest. Somewhat different is the case with an elaborate account of the crusades, in which he attempts to show that that great medieval madness,—so it was regarded by the Age of Enlightenment,—was 'in its origin too natural to excite our surprise and in its consequences too beneficent to convert our displeasure into a very different feeling'. The general argument is that the ancient civilizations were dominated by the idea of the state; they produced excellent Greeks and Romans but not excellent men. The prestige of the despotic states was destroyed by the great migrations, but it was the crusades which first taught the nations to subordinate patriotism to a higher and broader sentiment. It was then that men learned to fight for an idea of the reason,—for the truth as they saw it. And thus the crusades prepared the way for the Reformation. The interest of the essay lies not in the vigor of its logic, which is lame here and there, but in the evidence it affords of Schiller's increasing respect for the Middle Ages. And he went further still. In a preface which he wrote in 1792, for a German translation of Vertot's work on the Knights of Malta, we find a passage which sounds very much like Inchoate Romanticism:

The contempt we feel for that period of superstition, fanaticism and mental slavery betrays not so much the laudable pride of conscious strength as the petty triumph of weakness avenging itself in unimportant mockery for the shame wrung from it by superior merit.... The advantage of clearer ideas, of vanquished prejudice, of more subdued passions, of freer ways of thinking (if we really can claim this credit), costs us the great sacrifice of active virtue, without which our better knowledge can hardly be counted as a gain. The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,—if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.

We see that Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age of Enlightenment.

In comparison with these disconnected and more or less perfunctory studies, the 'History of the Thirty Years' War' seems like a large undertaking. But it was not so conceived at first. While 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the fragment of a great project, the 'Thirty Years' War' is the expansion of a small one. We first hear of it in a letter of December, 1789, wherein Schiller, just then casting about eagerly for possibilities of income, informs Koerner that he is to have four hundred thalers from Goeschen for an 'essay' upon the Thirty Years' War, to be published in the 'Historical Calendar for Ladies'. He felicitates himself that the labor will be light, since the material is so abundant and he is to write only for amateurs. The following spring he took up his task, which then grew upon his hands as he proceeded. Two books were printed in the 'Calendar' for 1791, a third in 1792, the fourth, and also a separate book-edition, in 1793. It met with great favor, the sales running up to seven thousand, and the author winning the name of Germany's greatest historian.

And, indeed, it does exhibit Schiller's historical style at its best, there being here, in comparison with his earlier work, somewhat less of heavy philosophical ballast. The narrative moves more lightly. There is this time not even a pretense of erudite scholarship. He does not quote authorities, rarely indulges in polemic, avoids tedious 'negotiations' and all political disquisitions which might be dull reading to the 'female fellow-citizens' for whom he writes. He endeavors merely to tell his complicated story in a lucid and interesting manner. The third book, which describes the career of Gustav Adolf from the great battle of Breitenfeld, in 1631, to his death at Luetzen in the following year, is an admirable specimen of vivid historical writing. It may well be doubted whether any successors of Schiller have surpassed him in the art of narrating, though they may have been able to correct him here and there in matters of fact. What a telling description, for example, is that of the desperate charge at Luetzen just after the death of the Swedish king!

In his last historical work, just as in his first, the burden of Schiller's thought is evermore the idea of freedom. The Thirty Years' War is conceived by him as the successful struggle of German liberty against Hapsburg imperialism. Upon the abstract merits of the religious controversy he has little to say; the subject evidently does not interest him. He does indeed make himself the champion of Protestantism, but only because Protestantism is identified in his mind with the august cause of liberty. The Protestant princes fought, he tells us, for what they took to be the truth,—whether it really was the truth does not matter. Their motives were not always lofty and their historian is not in the least concerned to hide or to gloss over their frequent venality and selfishness. His point of view is that they fought for a higher good than that which their eyes were fixed upon, and this higher good was the advancement of free cosmopolitanism, 'Europe', he writes in his introductory reflections, 'emerged unsubdued and free from this terrible war in which, for the first time, it had recognized itself as a connected society of states; and this interest of the states in one another, to which the war first gave rise, would alone be a sufficient gain to reconcile the citizens of the world to its horrors. The hand of industry has gradually obliterated the evil effects of the struggle, but its beneficent consequences have remained.'

Our historian, it is plain, was very firmly convinced that his own cosmopolitanism was a European finality and was worth all that it had cost. What would he have said if he could have looked ahead a hundred years and beheld the nations still snarling at each other's heels in the same old way!

It is pertinent to observe in this connection that Schiller's enthusiasm for liberty is quite unaffected by the 'ideas of 1789'. Neither in his letters nor elsewhere does he manifest any strong sympathy with the revolutionary aims of the French democracy. Liberty is for him the perfect fruitage of the benevolent despotism. It is something that concerns the prince in his relation to some other prince, rather than in relation to his own subjects. Of the German people at the time of the Thirty Years' War he has but little to say, his thoughts being fixed always upon the leaders. His great hero is Gustav Adolf, whom he regards at first as the unselfish champion of German freedom. Little by little, however, the portrait of the king undergoes a change: the ideal knight of Protestantism shades off into the earthy politician and selfish conqueror. And when at last death overtakes him his historian is prepared to admit that the event was fortunate for his own royal renown and for the welfare of Germany. A part of his final estimate runs thus:

Unmistakably the ambition of the Swedish monarch aimed at such power in Germany as was incompatible with the freedom of the Estates, and at a permanent possession in the heart of the Empire. His goal was the Imperial throne; and this dignity, supported and made efficient by his activity, was in his hands liable to far greater abuse than was to be feared from the race of Hapsburg. A foreigner by birth, brought up in the maxims of absolutism, and in his pious enthusiasm a declared enemy of all papists, he was not the man to guard the sanctuary of the German constitution, or to respect the freedom of the Estates.

After the death of Gustav Adolf the focus of interest is Wallenstein, and when Wallenstein is disposed of the history soon becomes a lean and hurried summary, the perfunctory character of which Is quite obvious to the reader.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 80: It is to be taken into consideration that the 'sources', as the word is now understood, were for the most part inaccessible in the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 81: The subject which is here necessarily treated in a general way is discussed much more fully and with admirable balance by K. Tomaschek, "Schiller in seinem Verhaeltnis zur Wissenschaft", Wien, 1862. Another excellent book, if used with some care, is J. Janssen's "Schiller als Historiker", Freiburg, 1879.]

[Footnote 82: Otto Brahm, "Schiller", II, 209.]

[Footnote 83:

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heiszt, Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.—'Faust', lines 577-8.]



CHAPTER XII

Dark Days Within and Without

1791-1794

Zu einer Zeit, wo das Leben anfing, mir seinen ganzen Wert zu zeigen, wo ich nahe dabei war, zwischen Vernunft und Phantasie in mir ein zartes und ewiges Band zu knuepfen,... nahte sich mir der Tod.—Letter of 1791.

The year 1790 was the happiest of Schiller's life. For a little while, at last, fate became supremely kind to him. The reality of wedlock more than fulfilled his dreams, and it seemed as if all his vague malheur d'etre poete were about to be buried in the deep bosom of connubial beatitude. 'We lead the blessedest life together', he wrote to Christophine Reinwald in May, 'and I no longer know my former self.' And a month later to Wilhelm von Wolzogen: 'My Lotte grows dearer to me every day; I can say that I am just beginning to prize my life, since domestic happiness beautifies it for me.' His income, indeed, was pitifully small, but his courage was great, his fame well grounded, and there were prospects here and there. From the first he had regarded the Jena professorship only as a makeshift. To bring variety into his academic routine he began, in the summer term of 1790, to lecture upon the theory of tragedy, developing the subject from his own brain and paying little attention to the authorities. In the autumn these lectures were resumed, and soon the aesthetic philosopher began to prevail over the historian.

And now came his great calamity. In reading the later writings of Schiller, whether philosophical or poetical, it is difficult to imagine them the work of an invalid, produced in the intervals of physical suffering such as would utterly have broken the courage of a less resolute man. But so it was. The early winter of 1791 brought with it a disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him away prematurely at the age of forty-five.

Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt. There were Karoline von Dacheroeden and her lover, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was destined to become Schiller's intimate friend and also his faithful comrade in the field of aesthetic philosophizing. Then there was the influential Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a brother of the Mannheim intendant. This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness, and he enjoyed the role of Maecenas. In Schiller and Lotte he took a deep interest, promising to do something handsome for them when he should come to power at Mainz. While spending his vacation with these Erfurt friends, at the close of the year 1790, Schiller took a cold which brought on an attack of pneumonia. An Erfurt doctor treated the case lightly and unskillfully and sent him back half cured to Jena, where he resumed his lectures. Now came a second and sharper attack, with hemorrhage and other alarming symptoms. The doctors operated upon him as best they knew, with leeches and phlebotomy and purgatives and vomitives, and came very near killing him. For days he lay at the point of death, a few faithful students sharing the young wife's anxious vigil at his bedside. His convalescence was slow and in the end imperfect, leaving him with wasted strength, a pain in the right lung and a serious difficulty in breathing. Of course it was all up with his lecturing; but he easily obtained a release for the summer term from the sympathetic Duke of Weimar. In March he was well enough to take up the reading of Kant's then recently published 'Critique of the Judgment', and a little later to try his hand at translating from the Aeneid in stanzas and to write a rejoinder to the 'anticritique' of the aggrieved Buerger.

This unfortunate feud with Buerger grew out of a magisterial review published by Schiller in 1791; a review which, while dignified in tone and purporting to speak solely in the interest of the lyric art, amounted to a scathing condemnation of Buerger's character. After expatiating upon the high vocation of the poet, the necessity of his thinking and feeling nobly, and the importance of his giving only his idealized self, the anonymous critic proceeded to comment upon Buerger's frequent lapses from good taste, his crudities, indecencies and vulgar ding-dongs, and to refer these things with remorseless directness to personal defects. The criticism was just and had all the other merits save discretion and urbanity, Goethe was pleased with it before he knew who wrote it,[84] and eleven years later Schiller saw nothing in it to change. In writing it, as a matter of fact, he was only breaking the rod over his own early self; for in his Stuttgart 'Anthology' he had committed nearly every sin for which now, from the serene heights of a better artistic insight, he castigated his victim. To poor Buerger, whose life was just then bitter enough at the best, the review was a terrible blow. He at once published a reply, which is also very good reading in its way, but might have been made much more spicy had he known the name of his adversary. Schiller's final rejoinder added nothing of importance to the discussion.[85]

This short digression leads naturally to another. While still at Weimar Schiller received a visit from Buerger, and the two agreed to vie with each other in a translation from Vergil. Schiller chose for his experiment the eight-line stanza which he was proposing to use in an epic upon Frederick the Great. This 'Fredericiad' was much on his mind in the spring of 1789. His plan was to center his story about some ominous juncture in Frederick's career (say the battle of Kollin), and write a poem which should exhibit in lightly-flowing stanzas the 'finest flower' of eighteenth-century civilization.[86] Albeit intensely modern it was to have the indispensable epic 'machinery'. Nothing came of the project, but a year later he was still ruminating upon it and declared that he should not be truly happy until he was again making verses.

Instead of attempting an original epic, however, he now began to translate from the Aeneid, and this light and congenial labor continued to occupy him for a year or more after the break-down of his health. He finally completed two books, the second and fourth. The translation is sonorous and otherwise readable, but it is not Vergil and does not produce the effect of Vergil. The breaking up of the matter into stanzas, each having a unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and perversions,—there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the original,—and substituted an interrupted romantic cadence for the stately continuous roll of the hexameter.

The opening lines of the second book will serve as well as any others to illustrate Schiller's method as a translator:

Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant. Inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto: 'Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem, Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum Eruerint Danai; quaeque ipse miserrima vidi Et quorum pars magna fui.'

Schiller's version runs thus:

Der ganze Saal war Ohr, jedweder Mund verschlossen, Und Fuerst Aeneas, hingegossen Auf hohem Polstersitz, begann: Dein Wille, Koenigin, macht Wunden wieder bluten, Die keine Sprache schildern kann: Wie Trojas Stadt verging in Feuerfluten, Den Jammer willst du wissen, die Gefahr, Wovon ich Zeuge, ach, und meistens Opfer war.

As for the 'Fredericiad', it never got beyond the status of a plan. By November, 1791, Schiller had concluded that Gustav Adolf would be a better subject for an epic,—he could get up no enthusiasm for Unser Fritz and shrank from the 'gigantic labor of idealizing him'. Soon after this he seems to have dropped altogether the idea of writing an epic.

In the spring of 1791, when he had grown strong enough to think of attacking the second installment of the 'Thirty Years' War', Schiller took up his abode in Rudolstadt; and there, in May, he was prostrated by a second illness which was worse than the first. His life was despaired of, he bade his friends farewell and the report went out from Jena that he was dead. After the crisis was past came weary weeks of lassitude and pain, with no possibility of writing or reading. In July he took the waters at Karlsbad, with some slight benefit. By autumn he was well enough to do the promised continuation of his history and to lay plans with Goeschen for a New Thalia to begin with the next year. But he was now in desperate straits for money. His illness had been very costly and the cessation of work had brought a cessation of income. He was in debt to various friends, and the Duke of Weimar was too poor to help him. Saddest of all, his beloved wife's health was broken with anxiety and watching. 'It is a joy to me', he wrote to Koerner in October, 'even when I am busy, to think that she is near me. Her dear life and influence round about me, the childlike purity of her soul and the warmth of her love, give me a repose and serenity that would otherwise be impossible in my hypochondriac condition. If we were only well we should need nothing else to live like the gods.'

It was a dark juncture, darker far than that of 1784, and now as then help came unexpectedly from afar. It came this time from Denmark.

The Danish author Baggesen had visited Jena the previous year and returned home a fervid admirer of Schiller. At Copenhagen he had imparted his enthusiasm to Count Schimmelmann and the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg, who, with their wives, proceeded to found a sort of Schiller-sect. Full of the time's generous ardor for high and humane ideas, they were just about to give a rustic fete in honor of their great German poet, when the news of his death arrived. They met with heavy hearts and sang the 'Song to Joy', with an added stanza by Baggesen, wherein they pledged themselves to 'be faithful to Schiller's spirit until they should meet above'. When they learned a little later that the author of the 'Song' was alive, after all, and very much in need of money, the two noblemen immediately wrote him a joint letter, offering him, in language of admirable delicacy, a gift of a thousand thalers a year for three years, with no conditions whatever. He was simply to give himself needed rest and follow the bent of his mind, free from all anxiety. Should he choose to come to Copenhagen they assured him that he would find loyal friends and admirers, and a position in the government service if he desired it.

This timely windfall 'from the clouds' put an end to the misery of distress about money. For the first time in his life Schiller found himself free to consult inclination in the forming of his plans and the disposition of his time. Without hesitation he gratefully accepted the gift and resolved now at last to take up the study of Kant and fathom him, though it should require three years. A strange resolution, it would seem, for a sick poet! Many have judged it unwise and have deprecated that long immersion in Kantian metaphysic. But Schiller was the best judge of his own needs, and how he felt about the matter appears very clearly from a letter that he wrote to Koerner a few months later:

I am full of eagerness for some poetic task and particularly my pen is itching to be at 'Wallenstein.' Really it is only in art itself that I feel my strength. In theorizing I have to plague myself all the while about principles. There I am only a dilettante. But it is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And it has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule. Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is conscious of being watched. But if I once reach the point where artistic procedure becomes natural, like education for the well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old freedom, and know no bounds but those of its own making.

And so it was destined to be. His philosophic studies, pursued with tireless zeal for a period of three or four years, gave him the self-assurance that he hoped for. They created for him at least, if not for all men everywhere, a poetical modus vivendi between natural impulse and artistic rule. 'Nature' learned to wear the fetters of art without feeling them as fetters. At last he grew weary of theorizing; but his later plays, produced in rapid succession, each unlike the other and all characterized by a remarkable imaginative breadth and freedom, bear witness to the quantity of artistic energy stored up during this period of artistic self-repression.

A few words of biography will suffice for the goings and comings of this Kantian period, which was for Schiller a period of quiet study, eager discussion and laborious authorship. At first he continued to reside in Jena. Early in 1792 he started the New Thalia, and this he used for the publication of his earlier aesthetic lucubrations. With the perfunctory conclusion of the 'Thirty Years' War', in September, his work as a historian virtually came to an end. He now began to lecture again, but gave only an aesthetic privatissimum in his own room. He went out of the house hardly five times during the whole winter, and when spring came his health was again very precarious. He now determined to try the effect upon body and soul of the milder climate of his native Suabia. He set out in August and took the precaution to halt in Heilbronn, not knowing what brutality the Duke of Wuerttemberg might still be capable of. On receiving the blessed assurance that his Highness would 'ignore' him, he continued on his way to Ludwigsburg, where a son was born, to him in September. He remained in Ludwigsburg during the winter in pleasant intercourse with his family and friends. In October Karl Eugen went to his reward. 'The death of the old Herod', Schiller wrote to Koerner, 'does not concern me or my family, except that all who have to do directly, like my father, with the head of the state, are glad that they now have a man before them.'[87]

One of the first important official acts of the new duke was to abolish the Karlschule; but this did not happen until after Schiller had visited the scene of his former woes, in the role of distinguished son, and had received the enthusiastic plaudits of the four hundred students. It was here in Ludwigsburg that his ripest philosophic work, the 'Letters upon Aesthetic Education' came into being. In the spring he spent some weeks in Stuttgart, where Dannecker began to model the famous bust that now adorns the Weimar library. In Stuttgart he made the acquaintance of the enterprising publisher Cotta, who wished him to undertake the editorship of a great political journal. But another plan lay nearer to Schiller's heart, and before he left Suabia he had arranged with Cotta to edit a high-class literary magazine to be known as Die Horen. In May, 1794, he returned to Jena, glad to have escaped at last from his dear, distracting fatherland and to be once more at home. His health had not improved, and he had now become reconciled in a measure to the doom of the invalid. But although he knew that the death-mark was upon him, the knowledge only spurred him to more eager activity.[88] He felt that he had a great work to do and that the time might be short. By this time his acquaintance with Humboldt had ripened into a warm friendship. 'What a life it will be', he wrote to Korner, 'when you come here and complete the triad. Humboldt is for me an infinitely agreeable and at the same time useful acquaintance; for in conversation with him all my ideas move happily and move quickly. There is in his character a totality that is rarely seen and that, except in him, I have found only in you.'

After his return to Jena he lectured no more, but threw all his energy into the new journal. He prepared an alluring prospectus and invited the cooperation of all the best writers in Germany. Among these was Goethe, who sent a favorable reply. And thus began a correspondence which presently led, as all the world knows, to an ever memorable friendship. The activities centering in the Horen ushered in a new literary epoch, the epoch of Germany's brief leadership in modern literature.

Thus the period of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life, nearly, he had lived with aristocrats, and he himself had the temper of an aristocrat. There is no evidence in his letters that he ever really sympathized with the French people, even during the early days of the revolution, in their practical program of 'liberty, equality and fraternity'. His notion of liberty was at no time a definite political concept, but always a rainbow in the clouds,—something to rave and philosophize over. Of human brotherhood he had sung most affectingly in the 'Song to Joy', but it was only a poetic kiss that he had ready for all mankind. He would have been amazed if any plebeian stranger had proposed to take him at his word. As for equality, there is no evidence that it entered as a factor or an ideal into his scheme of man's better time to come.

It was thus perfectly natural, when the proceedings were Instituted against the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth, that Schiller should take the part of the accused. The fierce determination of the French democracy to exact a reckoning from their sovereign, not so much for what he had done as for ages of accumulated wrong, appeared to him the very madness of injustice. In December, 1792, he planned to write a book or a pamphlet in defence of the king, and have it translated into French for the purpose of influencing public opinion in Paris.[89] He seems actually to have begun the work, but the fate of the unlucky Bourbon was swifter than the pen of his German defender. Schiller's horror of the regicide knew no bounds. 'These two weeks past', he wrote on February 8, 1793, 'I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these wretched executioners.' The ensuing events of the Terror intensified this feeling. In speaking of the year 1793, Karoline von Wolzogen has this to say of her brother-in-law:

He regarded the French Revolution as the effect of passion and not as a work of wisdom, which alone could produce true freedom. He admitted, indeed, that many ideas which had previously been found only in books and in the heads of enlightened men, were now matters of public discussion; but, he said, the real principles which must underlie a truly happy civil constitution are not yet so common among men; they are found (pointing to a copy of Kant's 'Critique' that lay on the table) nowhere else but here. The French Republic will cease as quickly as it has come into being. The republican constitution will give rise to a state of anarchy, and sooner or later a capable strong man will appear from some quarter and make himself master not only of France but also, perhaps, of a large part of Europe.[90]

If this remarkable prediction of Napoleon is rightly reported and rightly dated by the Baroness von Wolzogen, one can hardly suppose that Schiller was very much elated when he read in a paper, towards the close of the year 1792, that he had been made an honorary citizen of the French Republic. Under a law passed in August of that year,—l'an premier de la liberte,—the name and rights of a French citizen were bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this honor,—the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Kosciusko being put to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe, Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,—and the bill was about to pass when a deputy arose,—he must have been an Alsatian,—and proposed to add the name of M. Gille, publiciste allemand. The amendment was accepted, and a few weeks later Minister Roland transmitted to 'M. Gille' an official diploma of French citizenship. It took the postal authorities of Germany some six years to deliver the letter, and when at last they succeeded, its recipient was less than ever in a mood to be overjoyed at the well-meant distinction that had been conferred upon him by the French republicans.

The progress of the Revolution appeared to Schiller to endanger the higher interests of civilization. He was too close to it for a serenely impartial view. Had it been an occurrence of the sixteenth century, he would have been just the man to philosophize over it and to show that in this case, again, "the frenzy of the nations was the statesmanship of fate". As it was, the unrest of the people, and their increasing absorption in questions of mere politics, disgusted him. He felt that a counteragent was needed. And so, declining Cotta's offer anent the political journal, and thus leaving the famous Allgemeine Zeitung to begin its career a few years later under other hands, he chose Instead to found the Horen, which was to exclude politics altogether and induce people, if possible, to think of something else. He saw that the times were unpropitious for his enterprise, but felt that it was for that very reason the more urgently needed. In announcing the Horen to the public in 1795 he wrote:

The more the minds of men are excited, shut in and subjugated by the narrow interests of the present, the more urgent is a general and higher interest in that which is purely human and superior to all influences of the time; an interest which shall set men free again and unite the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty. This is the point of view from which the authors of the Horen wish it to be regarded. The journal is to be devoted to cheerful and passionless entertainment, and to offer the mind and heart of its readers, now angered and depressed by the events of the day, a pleasant diversion. In the midst of this political tumult it will form for the Muses and Graces a little intimate circle, from which everything will be banished that is stamped with the impure spirit of partisanship.

Many a modern reader will be inclined, perhaps, to smile at this deliverance and to see in it a fatuous misjudgment of the relative importance of things. The French Revolution versus a spray of aesthetic rose-water! But we must not be too hasty. Posterity has no better criterion for judging great men than the criterion of service. And service is a question of vocation. As the matter is put by Goethe, who himself a little later took refuge from the misere of the Napoleonic epoch in the contemplative poetry of the Orient: 'Man may seek his higher destiny on earth or in heaven, in the present or in the future; yet for that reason he remains exposed to constant wavering within and to continual disturbance from without, until he once for all makes up his mind to declare that that is right which is in accordance with his own nature,'[91] It was not in Schiller to be a political journalist or a pamphleteer. In that field he would have wasted his splendid energy. He knew what he could do best; and it was well for his country and for the world that he chose to withdraw from the turmoil of the Revolution and prepare himself for 'Wallenstein' and 'William Tell'.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: So, at least, Schiller states in a letter of March 3, 1791, to Koerner.]

[Footnote 85: The original review, together with Buerger's reply and Schiller's rejoinder, are printed in Saemmtliche Schriften, VI, 314 ff.]

[Footnote 86: The plan is very fully discussed in a letter of March 10, 1789, to Koerner.]

[Footnote 87: On the other hand, Wilhelm von Hoven, who was with Schiller at the time, represents him as deeply touched by the death of Duke Karl and as expressing himself thus: "Da ruht er also, dieser rastlos thaetig gewesene Mann. Er hatte grosze Fehler als Regent, groeszere als Mensch, aber die ersteren wurden vor seinen groszen Eigenschaften weit ueberwogen, und das Andenken an die letzteren musz mit dem Toten begraben werden; darum sage ich dir, wenn du, da er nun dort liegt, jetzt noch nachteilig von ihm sprechen hoerst, traue diesem Menschen nicht: er ist kein guter, wenigstens kein edler Mensch." Cf. Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften", I, 153, and Karoline von Wolzogen, "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]

[Footnote 88: A letter of May 24, 1791, contains the brave words: "Ich habe mehr als einmal dem Tod ins Gesicht gesehen, und mein Mut ist dadurch gestaerkt worden."]

[Footnote 89: Letter of December 21, to Koerner.]

[Footnote 90: "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]

[Footnote 91: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", Elftes Buch.]



CHAPTER XIII

Aesthetic Writings

Es ist gewisz von keinem Sterblichen kein groeszeres Wort gesprochen als dieses Kantische, was zugleich der Inhalt seiner ganzen Philosophie ist: Bestimme dich aus dir selbst. Letter of 1793.

From a quotation in the preceding chapter we have seen what Schiller hoped for when he resolved to grapple with the Kantian philosophy. He was in pursuit of that which would help him as a poet. He felt that a little philosophy had done him harm by quenching his inner fire and destroying his artistic spontaneity. The rules were continually coming between him and his creative impulses. His hope was that more philosophy would repair the damage by making the principles of art so clear and so familiar that they would become as second nature, and therefore cease to be felt as a clog or an interference.

This expectation, looking at the matter a priori, was reasonable enough. Looking at it retrospectively, Goethe came to the conclusion, as is well known, that Schiller's philosophic bent had injured his poetry by teaching him to 'regard the idea as higher than all nature'. Goethe thought it 'depressing to see how such an extraordinarily gifted man had tormented himself with philosophic modes of thought that could be of no use to him'.[92] But this does not tell the whole story, notwithstanding the greatness of the authority. To assert that all philosophy is always harmful to a poet would be to assert the most patent nonsense. Goethe himself at one time found help and inspiration in Spinoza, the dryest and most abstract of thinkers;[93] and after all, 'nature' comes off about as well in 'Wallenstein' as in 'Faust'. It is a question of personal endowment, of what the mind can assimilate and turn to account. There are many kinds of the poetic temper, the intellectual element blending variously with the emotional, the instinctive and the visional. For Schiller poetry was not 'somnambulism', but a very deliberate process; wherefore it was quite natural for him to expect that a season of philosophic study would be good for him. So he set out to fathom the laws of beauty; assuming, of course, that there must be such laws and that they must be, in some sense or other, laws of human nature.

To follow him critically in all the by-ways of his theorizing would require a treatise; and the treatise would be dull reading, except, peradventure, to such as might be specially interested in the history of aesthetic discussion. In the end, too, it would shed but little light upon Schiller's later plays, which were in no sense the offspring of theory and were influenced only in a very general way by their author's previous philosophical studies. To understand the poet's development it is nowise necessary to lose one's self with him in the Serbonian bog of metaphysic. On the other hand, it will be useful to know what the problems were that chiefly interested him, and to see how he attacked them and what conclusions he arrived at. With the soundness of his reasoning and the final value of his contributions to the literature of aesthetics we need hardly concern ourselves at all; since the scientific questions involved are differently stated and differently approached at the present time.[94]

The pre-Kantian stage of Schiller's aesthetic philosophy is of quite minor importance. He obtained his original stock of ideas at the Stuttgart academy from Ferguson's 'Institutes', as translated by Garve. In Ferguson, who rested strongly upon Shaftesbury, no line was drawn between the moral and the aesthetic domain. It was taught that all truth is beauty and that 'the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth'. Perfection was made to depend on harmony and proportion; and moral beauty upon the harmony of the individual soul with the general system of things. Wrong action was regarded as discord, imperfection. Virtue, being a disposition toward the general harmony, necessarily meant happiness. Thoughts of this kind, mixed up with vague ideas of a pre-established harmony, constituted the staple of Schiller's early philosophizing. The identity of the good, the true and the beautiful, was for him the highest of all generalizations, though more a matter of pious emotion than of close thinking.

Nor do we observe any noteworthy change of attitude in the minor philosophic writings, such as the letters of Julius and Raphael, and the second book of 'The Ghostseer',—which he published prior to his acquaintance with Kant. In these it is always the moralist that speaks, and the great question is the bearing of skepticism on individual happiness. But by the end of his first year in Weimar the moralist had begun to retreat before the aesthetic philosopher. For the author of 'The Gods of Greece' and 'The Artists', it is evident that the beautiful has become the corner-stone of the temple. He saw before him all at once a new region that invited exploration. If art had played such a commanding role in the history of the world, it was evidently of the greatest importance to understand it. It was this feeling for the dignity of art, as the greatest of factors in human perfectibility, that led him to devote the leisure afforded by his Danish pension to a thorough study of Kantian aesthetics.

He began quite independently, as we have seen, with a course of lectures upon the theory of tragedy. The lectures were never published, but the cream of them is probably contained in two essays, 'On the Rational Basis of Pleasure in Tragic Themes', and 'On the Tragic Art', which were contributed to the New Thalia in 1792. In the former Schiller first combats the idea that art has any higher aim than the giving of pleasure. Its aim, he argues, is not morality but 'free pleasure', the 'free' meaning subject to no law but its own. If morality is made its final aim, it ceases to be 'free'. Then the essay goes on to discuss the crux of our feeling pleasure in painful representations. All pleasure, we read, comes from the perception of Zweckmaeszigkeit, that is, the quality of being adapted to the furtherance of an end. Since man is meant to be happy and naturally seeks happiness, human suffering affects us primarily as a 'maladaptation', and so gives us pain. But in this very pain our reason recognizes a higher 'adaptation', since we are incited by it to activity. We know that it is good for us and for society; and so we take pleasure in our own pain. The total effect of tragedy depends upon the proportion in which this higher sense of adaptation is present.

The important thing to notice in this argument is that aesthetic judgments are made to depend upon concepts of the mind. The reason, with its abstractions of 'fitness' and what not, is regarded as the prior and the dominating factor. In the second of the two essays, however, we find a distinct recognition of the fact that emotional excitement may give pleasure in and of itself. Illustrations are brought in,—such as the passion for gaming and for dangerous adventure, and the general love of ghost stories and tales of crime,—which go to show that Schiller by no means overlooked the non-rational element in the pleasure afforded by tragedy. Nevertheless he seems to have attached very little importance to that element, for he goes on to observe that we know only two sources of pleasure, namely, the satisfaction of our bent for happiness (Glueckseligkeitstrieb), and the fulfillment of moral laws. As the pleasure we take in acted or narrated suffering cannot proceed from the former, it must spring from the latter and do its work by gratifying the 'bent for activity' (Thaetigkeitstrieb), which is a moral bent.—After a long tussle with such hazy abstractions the essayist attempts a working definition and practical discussion of tragedy. This part of the essay is still eminently readable, but need not be analyzed here. Sufficient to say that Schiller regards the excitation of 'sympathy' as the sole aim of tragedy. He has nothing to say of the Aristotelian 'fear' or 'katharsis'; in fact he did not make the acquaintance of Aristotle until 1797.[95]

It would be next in order to consider the lectures of 1792-93, but unluckily they are known only from the notes of a student.[96] As published in 1806 they bear the impress of Schiller's mind, but are too brief and summary to be counted among his works. They show that by 1793 he had come to feel at home in the field of aesthetic speculation. He had read Kant and Moritz and Burke, and was ready with his criticisms. In particular, he had found what he regarded as a weak point in the system of Kant, who had not only made no attempt to establish an objective criterion of beauty, but had summarily dismissed the whole problem as obviously hopeless. Schiller felt that, if this were so, there was no firm foundation anywhere, and all aesthetic judgments were reduced to a matter of taste,—which was of course a very unwelcome conclusion. In the belief that he had found the missing link he planned, toward the end of 1792, a treatise to be known as 'Kallias, or Concerning Beauty'. It was to take the form of a dialogue, to be written in a pleasing style, with a plenty of illustration,—merits to which Kant could lay no claim,—and to review the whole history of aesthetic theorizing.

This plan was finally given up, but a series of rather abstruse letters to Koerner, beginning in January, 1793, may be regarded as preparatory studies for the contemplated treatise. Schiller's idea was, evidently, to blaze a private trail through the jungle of Kantian theory, with Koerner's critical assistance, and then to return and convert the trail into an agreeable road for the general reader. In the end he chose a different form than that of the Socratic dialogue for the literary presentation of his doctrine, but what he wrote subsequently was based partly at least upon conclusions that he had reached through his correspondence with Koerner; wherefore it will be well to look a little more closely, at this point, into his quarrel with the Koenigsberg philosophy.

As is well known, Kant placed the aesthetic faculty under the jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we have an interest,—we will the former and desire the latter. The beautiful, on the other hand, is that which pleases without appealing to any interest (interesseloses Wohlgefalien). This is its character under the category of quality. Under that of quantity it is a universal pleasure; under that of relation, a form of adaptation (Zweckmaeszigkeit), with no end present to the mind. Finally, under the fourth category—modality—it is 'necessary', being determined not by any objective criterion, but by the sensus communis of mankind, that is, their agreement in taste.

For Kant, then, the whole matter of aesthetics is a subjective matter. He does not inquire what it is that makes objects beautiful, but how it is that we 'judge' them to be beautiful. While his predecessors made the impression of the beautiful to depend upon objective attributes of form, proportion, harmony, completeness and the like, he insisted that the essence of beauty was to please without reference to any such intellectual concept whatever. His terminology was not very happy, since a judgment that has nothing to do with the intellect is not a judgment at all, but a feeling; nevertheless his system brought out clearly,—and this is perhaps his most important merit in the domain of aesthetics,—the necessity of distinguishing more sharply between the beautiful, on the one hand, and the good and agreeable, on the other. But in expounding his central doctrine, that beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept, he is not quite consistent; for he recognizes 'adaptation' as a form of beauty, and adaptation is a concept of the mind. To meet this difficulty he makes a distinction between free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens), the latter being mixed up with the good or the desirable. Even a generic or a normative concept was for him fatal to the idea of pure beauty. Thus pure beauty could not be affirmed of a horse, because one inevitably has in his mind an antecedent notion as to how a horse ought to look. Again, there could be no such thing as pure beauty,—at the best only adherent beauty,—in a moral action, since a moral action does not please in and of itself. At the same time Kant held that the highest use of beauty is to symbolize moral truth, and in illustrating the possibilities of this symbolism he indulged in some rather fanciful speculations.

Now we can easily understand that Schiller, notwithstanding all his admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's sensus communis aestheticus, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental attitude is clearly brought to view in a letter of February 9, 1793, to the Prince of Augustenburg. After speaking warmly of Kant's great service to philosophy, he describes thus the problem which Kant regarded as impossible of solution and which he himself, Schiller, was bold enough to attempt:

When I consider how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the great is connected with the noblest part of our being, it is impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules. It seems to me that beauty too, as well as truth and right, must rest upon eternal foundations, and that the original laws of the reason must also be the laws of taste. It is true that the circumstance of our feeling beauty and not cognizing it seems to cut off all hope of our finding a universal law for it, because every judgment emanating from this source is a judgment of experience. As a rule people accept an explanation of beauty only because it harmonizes in particular cases with the verdict of feeling; whereas, if there were really such a thing as the cognition of beauty from principles, we should trust the verdict of feeling because it coincides with our explanation of the beautiful. Instead of testing and correcting our feelings by means of principles, we test aesthetic principles by our feelings.

So then Schiller attacked his problem in the aforementioned letters to Koerner and was soon able to announce his solution: Beauty is nothing else than freedom-in-the-appearance (Freiheit in der Erscheinung).

To make clear the steps by which he arrived at that formula and the wealth of meaning that it contained for him would require a fuller analysis of his argument than there is space for in this chapter. Suffice it to say that he now fully accepts the dogma of Kant that beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept,—the feeling of pleasure is the prior fact. At the same time he has an unshakable conviction that beauty must somehow fall under the laws of reason. He gets rid of the crux by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the 'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality. Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the object is free, autonomous, self-determined. He then propounds his theory that beauty is simply an analogon of moral freedom. On the presentation of an object the practical reason (i.e., the will) may banish for the time being all concepts of the pure reason, may assume complete control and ask no other question than whether the object is free, self-determined, autonomous. If, then, the object appears to be free, to follow no law but its own, the practical reason is satisfied; the effect is pleasurable and we call it beauty. Schiller is careful to point out that it is all a question of appearance: the object is not really free,—since freedom abides only in the supersensual world,—but the practical reason imputes or lends freedom to it. Hence beauty is freedom in the appearance.

In a letter of February 23, 1793, he applies his dogma to an exposition of the relation between nature and art. The problem of the artist in the representation of an object, so the theory runs, is to convey a suggestion of freedom, that is, of not-being-determined-from-without. This he can only do by making the object appear to be determined from within, in other words, to follow its own law. It must have a law and obey it, while seeming to be free. The law of the object is what is disclosed by technique, which is thus the basis of our impression of freedom. Starting from Kant's saying that nature is beautiful when it looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller gives a large number of concrete illustrations of his theory. Thus a vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he concludes his illustrations, 'the empire of taste is the empire of freedom; the beautiful world of sense being the happiest symbol of what the moral world should be, and every beautiful object about me being a happy citizen who calls out: Be free like me.'

It did not escape our theorist that his hard-won criterion of beauty was after all, apparently, an idea of the reason. He was however prepared to meet this difficulty and promised to do so in a future letter. But the aesthetic correspondence with Koerner was not continued beyond February. The project of the 'Kallias' continued for some time longer to occupy Schiller's mind, but a fresh attack of illness intervened, and when he was again able to work he turned his mind to an essay upon 'Winsomeness and Dignity' (Anmut und Wuerde). It was written in May and June, 1793, and printed soon afterwards in the New Thalia. In this essay we can observe a growing independence of thought and an amazing gift for the analysis of subtle impressions. In the main it is lucid enough, especially when one calls in the aid of the preceding letters to Koerner; but portions are hard reading. To give the gist of it in a few words is next to impossible, because it is so largely taken up with superfine distinctions in the meaning of words for which our language has at best but rough equivalents.

It will be recalled that Kant had denied pure beauty to the human form, on the ground that the human form expresses the moral dignity of human nature, which is an idea of the reason. Schiller was piqued by this dictum to test his theory of beauty on the human form. He begins, in a manner fitted to make old Homer smile, with a rationalizing account of the girdle of Venus,—the girdle which Venus lends to Juno when the latter wishes to excite the amorous desire of Jove. Venus, we are told, is pure beauty as it comes from the hand of nature. Her girdle makes her 'winsome'. So winsomeness is something distinct from beauty; something transferable, movable. It is then further defined as beauty of motion; as the special prerogative of man; as the element of beauty which is not given by nature but is produced by the object. The essay then goes on to make a distinction between architectonic and technical beauty. The former is defined as a beautiful presentation of the aims of nature, the latter as referring to the aims themselves. The aesthetic faculty is concerned with architectonic beauty. In contemplation of an object it isolates the appearance and is affected by that alone, irrespective of any ideas of purpose or adaptation. At the same time the reason imputes freedom to the object, and when the object is a human form, this imputed freedom, whereby the object seems to assert its own autonomous personality, this which is superadded to the beauty that nature creates by the law-governed adaptation of means to ends, is winsomeness.—All of which seems to mean substantially this: That while Pygmalion's statue was still ivory it was beautiful; but when it became a woman with winsome ways she was winsome.

Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that beauty is really compounded of two elements, first the sensuous pleasure caused by the play of personality, and secondly the rational gratification caused by the idea of adaptation to an end, Schiller takes up the questions of moral beauty and of the ideal of character. He deprecates Kant's strenuous insistence upon the categorical imperative of duty. A man, he urges, must be free; and the slavery of duty is no better than any other slavery. Virtue is inclination to duty, and the ideal is to be found in the perfect equipoise of the sensuous and the rational nature; in other words, when 'thou shalt' and 'I would' pull steadily and harmoniously in the same direction. So he defines 'dignity' (Wuerde) as the expression of a lofty mind, just as winsomeness is the expression of a beautiful soul. Control of impulses by moral strength is intellectual freedom, and dignity is the visible expression of this freedom. Dignity is manifested rather in suffering ([Greek: pathos]), winsomeness in behavior ([Greek: ethos]). Each acts as a check upon the other. We demand that virtue be winsome and that inclination be dignified, and where winsomeness and dignity are present in harmonious equipoise in the same person, there the expression of humanity is complete.

In the essay just spoken of reference is made more than once to a contemplated 'Analytic of the Beautiful', which was to clear up this and that. Instead of attempting a treatise, however, Schiller chose to go on settling his account with Kant through the medium of contributions to the New Thalia. Those published immediately (1793-4) were the essay 'On the Sublime', which included a special chapter 'On the Pathetic'; and 'Scattered Reflections on Various Aesthetic Subjects'. Two other papers of kindred import, dating from this period, were not published until 1801. These were: 'On the Artistic Use of the Vulgar and the Low', and a second disquisition 'On the Sublime'.

Following Kant Schiller defines the sublime as the impression produced by an object which excites in man's sensuous nature a feeling of weakness and dependence, and at the same time in his rational nature a feeling of freedom and superiority. He objects, however, to the Kantian nomenclature. For the two kinds of sublime which Kant called the mathematical and the dynamic, he proposes the names of the theoretical and the practical; meaning by the former that which tends to overawe the mind, by the latter that which tends to overawe the feeling. Then follows a long and juiceless Begriffszergliederung, which may be passed over as containing little that is of importance for the understanding of Schiller's individuality. At last he comes to the subject of tragic pathos, as the most important phase of the practical-sublime. Here he lays down the dogma that the final aim of art is the representation of the supersensuous. The essence of tragic pathos is declared to be the representation of moral superiority under the stress of suffering. The hero's sufferings must seem to be real that he may obtain due credit for his moral triumph. In connection with this thought Schiller takes occasion to deride the genteel sufferers of the French classic tragedy and to commend the Greeks for their fidelity to nature. At the same time he utters his word of warning to those poets who think to gain their end merely by the spectacle of great suffering. The sensuous, he Insists, has in itself no aesthetic value; it is the moral resistance that counts, and the suffering is needed only to show that there really was something to resist. The latter part of the essay is directed against those who would try the creations of the poet by the standards of the moral judgment. It is argued that the moral and the aesthetic spheres of interest are separate and distinct. The poet is concerned with the latter. What he needs for his purpose is the manifestation of strength; whether the strength is put forth to a good or an evil purpose is, in itself, a matter of indifference. The poet cannot serve two masters.