The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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It tends to provoke a smile to read on in this letter and find It
suddenly turning from such ecstasies to a straightforward confession
that the writer is embarrassed for lack of ready cash. He had met with
disappointments. The Mannheim people had not treated him handsomely, the
subscribers to the _Thalia_ were delinquent, and so forth. Could not
Goeschen be persuaded to undertake a new and authentic edition of the
published plays and to advance a sum of money on the prospects? Koerner's
reply was prompt and characteristic. He enclosed a draft for current
expenses, promised more against the time of need and bade his friend
have no further solicitude about money. He knew very well, so he averred
with politic delicacy, that Schiller could easily earn enough by working
for money; but for a year at least he was to let himself be relieved of
that degrading necessity. They would keep an account and all should be
paid back with interest in the time of abundance; but for the present no
more of pecuniary anxieties! Schiller, to whose brief experience in a
selfish world this sort of conduct was something new, replied that he
would not entrench himself in a false pride, as the great Rousseau had
done on a similar occasion, but would accept the generous offer; this
being the best possible expression of his gratitude. Korner was pleased
to have the business settled by letter. 'I have always despised money',
he wrote, 'to a degree that it disgusts me to talk about it with souls
that are dear to me. I attach no importance to actions that are natural
to people of our sort, and which you would perform for me were the
conditions reversed.'

It was now arranged that after Koerner's marriage Schiller should make
his home in Dresden. The eagerly awaited migration took place in
September, and Schiller entered the Saxon capital, which was to be his
home for the next two years, in a flutter of joyous anticipation. The
Koerners quartered him in their charming suburban cottage at Loschwitz,
in the loveliest region he had known since his childhood. The guest, who
had seen but little of the quiet joys of domestic life and was now
received on the footing of an adopted brother, felt very happy. His
intercourse with Koerner gave him the very kind of intellectual stimulus
that he most needed. Koerner was at this time the more solid character of
the two. He had seen more of the world. While capable of warm affection
and strong enthusiasm, he had adopted, a profession which inevitably
gave to his thoughts a practical bent. Besides this he had taken up the
study of Kant with great earnestness and was thereby more than ever
disposed to see all questions in the white light of pure reason. He was
thus the very man to pour a cool Mephistophelean spray upon Schiller's
emotional fervors. One can easily imagine the general drift of the
philosophical discussions that took place during the lengthening
evenings of September, 1785, when we find Schiller expressing himself to
the absent Huber in such language as this:

The boyhood of our minds is now over, I imagine, and likewise the
honeymoon of our friendship. Let our hearts now cleave to each
other in manly affection, gush little and feel much; plan little
and act the more fruitfully. Enthusiasm and ideals have sunk
incredibly in my estimation. As a rule we make the mistake of
estimating the future from a momentary feeling of enhanced power,
and painting things in the color of our transient exaltation of
feeling. I praise enthusiasm, and love the divine ethereal power of
kindling to a great resolution. It pertains to the better man, but
it is not all of him.

But life at Loschwitz was not lived altogether in the upper altitudes of
solemn philosophy. From this period dates the well-known
'Petition',--one of the few glints of playful humor to be found among
Schiller's poems. He had been left alone one day with 'Don Carlos', and
he found his meditations disturbed by the operations of the washerwoman.
The result was a string of humorous stanzas bewailing the fate of a poet
who is compelled by his vocation to fix his mind upon the love ecstasies
of Princess Eboli, and listen at the same time to the swashy music of
the wash-tub:

I feel my love-lorn lady's hurt,
My fancy waxes hotter;
I hear,--the sound of sock and shirt
A-swishing in the water.

Vanished the dream--the faery chimes--
My Princess, pax vobiscum!
The devil take these wash-day rimes,
I will no longer risk 'em.

When the Koerners occupied their winter residence in the city, Schiller
found rooms hard by, and was presently joined by Huber, who had secured
a position in the diplomatic service. The time was now ripe for that
jubilant song, more frequently set to music than any other of Schiller's
poems, wherein we are introduced to a mystic brotherhood, worshiping in
fiery intoxication at the shrine of the celestial priestess, Joy, whose
other name is Sympathy. A mystic brotherhood; yet not an exclusive one,
since the fraternal kiss is--freely offered to every mortal on the round
earth who has found one soul to love. The lines glorify Joy, just as the
odes to Laura had previously glorified Love, as a mystic attraction
pervading all nature and leading up to God; as that which holds the
stars in their course, inspires the searcher after truth, sustains the
martyr and gives a pledge of immortality. Wherefore the millions are
exhorted to endure patiently for the better world that is coming, when a
great God will reward. Anger and vengeance are to be forgotten, and our
mortal foe forgiven. After these rapturous strophes, culminating in a
health to the good Spirit above, one is just a little surprised to hear
the singer urge, with unabated ardor, a purely militant ideal of
life,--firm courage in heavy trial, succor to the oppressed, manly pride
in the presence of kings, and death to the brood of liars. A final
strophe, urging grace to the criminal on the scaffold, general
forgiveness of sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by
Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to
Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but
its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful
sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship,
virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the
thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the stars is to
pardon everybody, what becomes of the incentive to a militant life? Why
should one strive and cry and get into a feaze about tyrants and liars?

The 'Song to Joy', with music by Koerner, was published in the second
number of the _Thalia_, which, after hanging fire for months, finally
appeared in February, 1786. It contained also the poems 'Radicalism of
Passion' and 'Resignation', and a fresh installment of 'Don Carlos'. Of
the prose contributions the most important was the story, 'The Criminal
from Disgrace', later called 'The Criminal from Lost Honor'. It was
based upon a true story, got from Professor Abel in Stuttgart,
concerning the life and death of a notorious Suabian robber, named
Schwan, who was put to death in 1760. Schiller changed the name to
Christian Wolf and built out of the ugly facts a strumous tale of
criminal psychology,--the autopsy of a depraved soul, as he called it.
His hero is a sort of vulgarized Karl Moor; that is, an enemy of society
who might have been its friend if things had not happened so and so. The
successive steps of his descent from mild resentment to malignant fury,
libertinism and crime, and the reaction of his own increasing depravity
upon his own mind, are described in a manner which is fairly interesting
from a literary point of view, whatever a modern expert criminologist
might think of it. The _crux_ of the ever difficult problem,--the
precise division of responsibility between society and the wretch whom
it spews out of its mouth,--is brought clearly into view, but without
any attempt at an exact solution. The tale is not a homily, but an
object-lesson designed to show how things go. It is too slight an affair
to be worthy of extended comment, but it shows Schiller becoming
interested in the psychological analysis of conduct. Moral goodness and
badness are beginning to appear less simple concepts, and the tangle of
human motive more intricate, than he had supposed.

Along with these contributions there also appeared in the second number
of the _Thalia_ a translation of the 'Precis Historique', prefixed by
Mercier to his recently published 'Portrait de Philippe Second'. The
'portrait' itself was a dramatic picture, in fifty-two scenes, without
division into acts. The work of Mercier, who paints the Spanish king in
the darkest possible colors, furnished a few hints for 'Don Carlos', but
its influence was not very great. What chiefly concerns us here is to
note Schiller's awakening interest in historical studies. In the spring
of 1786, during an absence of the Koerners which deprived him of his
wonted inspiration, he found himself unable to work. Letter after letter
tells of laziness and mental vacuity. As he could do nothing else he
took to desultory reading, and this did not satisfy him. 'Really', he
wrote on the 15th of April:

Really I must turn over a new leaf with my reading. I feel with
pain, that I still have such an astonishing amount to learn; that I
must sow In order to reap.... History is becoming dearer to me every
day. I have this week read a history of the Thirty Years' War, and
my head is still quite feverish from it. That this epoch of the
greatest national misery should have been at the same time the most
brilliant epoch of human power! What a number of great men came
forth from this night! I could wish that for the ten years past I
had done nothing but study history. I believe I should have become a
very different fellow. Do you think I shall yet be able to make up
for lost time?

One sees from this language by what particular hook the study of history
had taken hold of Schiller's mind, and what kind of profit he was
promising himself from further reading. He was interested in the
evolution of great men. For him, as for the poets always, from Homer
down, history resolved itself into the doings of the leaders.

For the time being, however, the new zeal seems to have been a mere
flash in the pan, that set nothing in motion. Nor was Koerner able, for
some time to come, to induce his friend to make a serious study of
Kant's 'Critique', though every third word between them was of
philosophy. Nevertheless their philosophic debates did bear literary
fruit. The third number of the _Thalia_, which came out in May,
contained the first installment of the 'Philosophical Letters', a
fictitious correspondence between two friends, Julius and Raphael, who
have arrived by different routes at the same way of thinking, and are
resolved to tell the world how it all came about. Julius is Schiller;
Raphael is Koerner, who actually contributed one of the later letters. We
learn that Julius was passing through a spiritual crisis. He was happy
but he had not reflected. The little world of his rapturous emotions
sufficed him. Now, however, Raphael has enlightened his mind, made him a
citizen of the world and taught him to comprehend the all-sufficient
majesty of reason; but he has won enlightenment at the expense of peace.
He is miserable and demands back his soul. Raphael rebukes him gently
for his faint-heartedness and asks for a history of his thinking. So
Julius rummages through his papers and sends on a somewhat elaborate
'Theosophy of Julius',--a sort of _precis_, it would seem, of Schiller's
earlier views. It is religious mysticism set forth with warm eloquence.
The universe is a thought of God. The highest aim of thinking is to read
the divine plan. All spirits are attracted by perfection. The supreme
perfection is God, of whom love is an emanation. Love is gain; hate is
loss; pardon, the recovery of lost property; misanthropy a prolonged
suicide; egoism the utmost poverty. If every man loved all mankind,
every man would possess the world. If we comprehend perfection it
becomes ours. If we plant beauty and joy, beauty and joy shall we reap.
If we think clearly we shall love fervently.

To this 'theosophy' Julius adds a few comments, evidently of later
origin, which show that he has now become aware of its intellectual
inadequacy. Still he does not repudiate it. He thinks it may do for a
doctrine, if one's nature is adapted to it.--Herewith, so far as
Schiller was concerned, the 'Philosophic Letters' came to an end; but in
the spring of 1788, Koerner surprised him with a letter by Raphael, which
is, philosophically speaking, by far the best of the entire collection.
But this book is not concerned with the writings of Koerner.

Ere the third number of the _Thalia_ appeared it had become evident that
the enterprise would not be profitable, and its perplexed editor was in
doubt whether to continue it. He finally decided to go on. When the
fourth number came out, early in 1787, it contained the beginning of a
novel, 'The Ghostseer', wherein a mysterious Sicilian, and a still more
mysterious Armenian, dog the footsteps of a German Prince von ----
living at Venice, and do various things suggesting a connection
with occult powers. The first installment of the story broke off at a
very exciting point,--just when the Sicilian has produced his amazing
ghost-scene, but has not yet been unmasked as a vulgar fraud. Schiller
evidently began the novel in no very strenuous frame of mind. He
wished to profit by the popular interest in tales of mysterious
charlatanry which had been aroused by the exploits of Cagliostro. So
he set out to spin a yarn in that vein, but he had no definite plan
and did not himself know where he would bring up. The literary merits
of 'The Ghostseer', Schiller's most noteworthy attempt in prose
fiction, will come up for consideration in connection with the
conclusion, or rather the continuation, which he published some two
years later, when he had left Dresden to seek his fortune in Weimar.

Even now the necessity of seeking his fortune somewhere was daily
becoming more imperious. The _Thalia_ did not pay, though the critics
spoke well of it, and he could not live forever upon Koerner's friendly
advances of money. The sense of his dependence often galled him; and yet
when a proposal, in itself highly attractive, came to him from a distant
city, he could not pluck up courage to leave his friend. Friedrich
Schroeder, the greatest German actor of the time, wished to draw him to
Hamburg. Schiller looked up to Schroeder with genuine admiration and
speculatively promised himself great gain from association with 'the one
man in Germany who could realize all his ideas of art.' In Mannheim,--so
he wrote in October, 1786,--he had lost all his enthusiasm for the
theater; it was now beginning to revive, but he shuddered at the
treatment to which playwrights were exposed by theatrical people.
Moreover he was living at Dresden 'in the bosom of a family to which he
had become necessary'. So nothing came of the negotiations except the
preparation of a stage version of 'Don Carlos' for the Hamburg theater.

An amusing glimpse of domestic conditions in the Koerner household is
afforded by Schiller's dramatic skit, entitled 'Koerner's Forenoon'. It
belongs apparently to the year 1787, but was not published until 1862.
The busy councillor of the Dresden Consistory sees a little leisure
before him and squares off at his desk for a solid forenoon's work. He
begins by ordering his man to shave him. Then he is interrupted by a
procession of callers,--Schiller, in various roles, and Minna, and
Dorchen, and Professor Becker and others--who keep the stream of babble
flowing until one o'clock. Koerner is too late for the consistory and all
that he has accomplished is to get shaved. The piece is a slight affair,
but there is enough of solemn fun in it to make one wish that its author
had seen fit to work his lighter vein more frequently.

About the time when this facetious bagatelle was penned, or a little
earlier perhaps, Schiller became the hero of a comedy in real life. In
the winter of 1787 he attended a masked ball where he met 'a pretty
domino--a plump voluptuous maiden,--who fascinated him. Her name was
Henriette von Arnim. He followed up the acquaintance and was soon quite
seriously interested. As the Arnim family did not enjoy the best of
reputations, the Koerners were annoyed at Schiller's seeming lack of
connoisseurship in women. They contrived to let him know that on the
evenings when Henriette was not at home to him she was at home to a
certain earthy Count Waldstein, or to a certain jew banker, as the case
might be. This was painful, but not immediately decisive, and miserable
days ensued. In the spring he was persuaded to try a few weeks' outing
in the country. Here he was at first frightfully lonesome,--a dejected
Robinson Crusoe, who could neither work nor amuse himself. To his
pathetic demands for reading-matter his friends replied with malicious
humor by sending him Goethe's 'Werther' and Laclos's 'Liaisons
Dangereuses'. After a while the Arnims followed him, but presently the
count came also; and then the course of true love, thus awkwardly
bifurcated, was more troubled than ever. After Henriette's return to
Dresden there was an interchange of letters, wherein love fought a
losing battle with doubt and suspicion.

This half-year of amatory perturbation was of course unfavorable to
literary labor. No further numbers of the _Thalia_ appeared, and 'The
Misanthrope', a new play of excellent promise, made no progress. But
'Don Carlos' did at last get itself completed--after a fashion. It was
published early in the summer. And now, with this burden lifted, the
time seemed to have arrived for carrying out the long-cherished plan of
a visit to Weimar. Who could tell what might come of it? Koerner was just
as loyal as ever, but he was also wise enough to respect his friend's
longing for a more assured and less dependent existence. And so in July
Schiller set out for Thueringen,--to be seen no more in Dresden save as
an occasional visitor. But the letters he wrote to the noble-minded
friend who had done and been so much for him constitute, for several
years to come, our best source of information concerning his outward
fortune and his inner history. Before we follow him to Weimar, however,
it will be in order to consider the play which remains as the most
important achievement of his Dresden period.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 64: Letter of March 25, 1785.]

CHAPTER IX

Don Carlos

Arm in Arm mit dir,
So fordr' ich mein Jahrhundert in die Schranken.
_'Don Carlos'_.

With the publication of 'Don Carlos' Schiller's literary reputation
entered upon a new phase. Hitherto he had been known as a playwright in
whom the passion for strong effects often obscured the sense of artistic
fitness. Of his dramatic power there could be no doubt, but had he the
higher gift of the great poet? Would he ever be able to clothe his
conceptions in a form that would appeal permanently to the general heart
because of high and rare artistic excellence? Doubts of this kind were
quite justifiable up to the year 1787, but they were set at rest by 'Don
Carlos'. However vulnerable it may be as a poetic totality, it has
passages that are magnificent. Its sonorous verse, wedded to a lofty
argument and freighted with the noblest idealism of the century, made
sure its author's title to a place in the Walhalla of the poets.

Except 'Wallenstein' no other work of Schiller cost him such long and
strenuous toil. 'Don Carlos', like Goethe's 'Faust', is a stratified
deposit. The time that went to the making of it, only four years in all,
was comparatively short, but it was for Schiller a time of rapid change;
and the play, intensely subjective from the first, participated in the
ripening process. The result is a certain lack of artistic congruity.
Schiller himself, always his own best critic, felt this and frankly
admitted it in the first of his 'Letters upon Don Carlos'.

It may be [he wrote] that in the first [three] acts I have aroused
expectations which the last do not fulfill. St. Real's novel,
perhaps also my own remarks upon it in the first number of the
_Thalia_, may have suggested to the reader a standpoint from which
the work can no longer be regarded. During the period of
elaboration, which on account of divers interruptions was a pretty
long time, much changed within myself.... What had mainly attracted
me at first, attracted me less later on, and at last hardly at all.
New ideas that came into my mind crowded out the earlier ones.
Carlos himself had declined in my favor, for no other reason perhaps
than that I had outgrown him, and for the opposite reason the
Marquis of Posa had taken his place. So it came about that I brought
a very different heart to the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the first
three were already in the hands of the public, and the plan of the
whole could not be recast; I had either to suppress the piece
entirely (for which very few of my readers would have thanked me),
or else to fit the second half to the first as best I could.

Let us look somewhat closely at the process of evolution here alluded to
in general terms.

The original impulse came from a work of romantic fiction, the 'Dom
Carlos' of St. Real, which was first read by Schiller in the summer of
1782 and drew from him the comment that the story 'deserved the brush of
a dramatist'. St. Real's novel begins by telling how Charles the Fifth
arranged, just before his abdication, that his grandson Carlos should
some day marry Elizabeth of Valois: and how afterwards Philip determined
to take the French princess for his own wife instead of leaving her to
his son. Meanwhile, however, by much gazing at the picture of his
betrothed, young Carlos had learned to love her, and she in turn had
conceived for him a 'disposition to love rather than a veritable
passion'. Arrived at the Spanish court the young queen wins all hearts;
even the white-haired Philip falls in love with her, though he treats
her with stately reserve in the presence of others and surrounds her
with the restraints of Spanish etiquette. Thus the queen comes to feel
that she possesses 'only the body of her husband, his soul being filled
with the designs of his ambition and the meditation of his policy'. As
for Carlos, his love-lorn eyes soon betray to her how it is with him,
but she can only pity him, though she secretly returns his love, for she
is as virtuous as she is beautiful.

Not so the Princess Eboli, wife of Ruy Gomez, the tutor of Carlos.
Having tried to win the love of the king and found her designs thwarted
by the queen's beauty, Eboli makes advances to Prince Carlos, who lets
her know that he cannot love her and thus makes her angry. In this mood
she bestows her favor upon the king's half-brother, Don Juan of Austria,
who is also enamored of the queen and has been watching Carlos
suspiciously. Having thus made enemies of Eboli and Don Juan, Carlos
next draws upon himself the hatred of the powerful Duke of Alva, of Ruy
Gomez, and of the Inquisition. This he does by his outspoken criticism
of their doings and his threats of punishment to be meted out to them
when he shall have become king. Anxious for their own future Alva and
Ruy Gomez conspire together and cause suspicions of Carlos to be
whispered in the ear of the king. At first Philip is not greatly
excited. When Carlos, importuned by Count Egmont, asks for a commission
to the Netherlands, Philip does not refuse, but declares that he will go
too and share the peril of his son. This, however, is a mere ruse to
gain time. While they are waiting, the king meanwhile feigning illness,
Carlos communicates freely with the queen through his bosom friend, the
Marquis of Posa. Hearing of this intimacy the king now becomes really
jealous, but of Posa not of Carlos. Maddened by suspicion he has the
marquis murdered on the street and employs Eboli to watch the queen.
After this Carlos resolves upon independent action and begins to
negotiate with the Netherlanders. His operations are watched and
reported by his enemies, and just as he is about to leave Spain he is
arrested. The king places his case before the Holy Office, which decrees
that he must die. Being allowed to choose the manner of his death he
opens his veins while bathing.

With the actual Don Carlos, whose story bears but little resemblance to
that of St. Real's hero, we are not particularly concerned. The French
Abbe's drift is to exalt the French princess and to give a telling
picture of a pair of high-minded lovers who are brought to their death
by a complicate intrigue begotten of jealousy, political hatred and
religious fanaticism. After the death of Carlos the queen is poisoned
and then, one after the other, all the conspirators meet with poetic
justice. "Ainsi", the Abbe concludes, "furent expiees les morts a jamais
deplorables d'un prince magnanime, et de la plus belle et de la plus
vertueuse princesse qui fut jamais. C'est ainsi que leurs ombres
infortunees furent enfin pleinement appaisees par les funestes destinees
de tous les complices de leur trepas."

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