The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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Now came a short season of helpless and comical dismay. 'I would take a
thrashing', he wrote to Koerner, 'if I could have you here for
four-and-twenty hours. Goethe quotes his _docendo discitur_, but these
gentlemen do not seem to know how small my learning is.' To Lotte he
declared that he should feel ridiculous in the new situation. 'Many a
student will perhaps know more history than the professor. Nevertheless
I think like Sancho Panza with respect to his governorship: To whom God
gives an office, to him he gives understanding; and when I have my
island I shall rule it like a nabob.' It was not pleasant to drop his
fascinating studies of the Greek poets and bury himself in learned
sawdust, but the thing was not to be helped. So the winter and spring
were devoted mainly to historical reading. At the same time, however,
'The Ghostseer' was carried along in the now resuscitated _Thalia_, and
the long poem, 'The Artists', was slowly and with infinite revision got
ready for publication in the _Merkur_.

During this period he saw little or nothing of Goethe and steadily
nursed a splenetic determination not to like the man. Passages
in his letters are almost comical in their perversity of
misjudgment. He was exasperated by Goethe's reticence, composure and
self-sufficiency,--qualities which seemed to him to spring out of
calculating egotism. Goethe, so the arraignment ran, was a man who went
on his way serenely dispensing favors, winning love and admiration and
putting people under obligation, but always like a god,--without ever
giving his intimate self or surrendering his own freedom. For his part,
he, Schiller, did not wish to live near such a man, much as he admired
his intellect and valued his judgment. This attitude of his was a great
trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with
him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this
short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic
character. If he is really such a very lovable being, I shall find it
out in the next world, when we shall all be angels.' In fine he was not
yet ripe for an understanding of the Weimar sovereign. He did not see
that Goethe's method was after all a giving of himself, and that the
self thus given was not the worse but the better for having outgrown the
effusive raptures of sentimentalism.

In May the lectures at Jena began with great _eclat_. On the first day
students to the number of five or six hundred flocked to hear the author
of 'The Robbers' expound the difference between the philosophic scholar
and the bread-and-butter professor. It was an inspiring discourse, full
of high idealism and well fitted to inspire the souls of ingenuous
youth, even though they might not quite understand it. The students were
enthusiastic and gave the new professor the unusual compliment of a
serenade. Having decided to begin with a course of free public lectures
upon universal history, he took his duties very seriously, and even
after curiosity had abated he continued, during the first term, to
address a large audience. He had hoped only for prestige, and the game
was quickly won. He was the most popular professor in Jena. All this
time, however, his heart was in Rudolstadt,--with the two sisters to
whom, for a year and a half, he had been writing letters of impartial
Platonic devotion. Late in July he received a hint from Karoline to the
effect that her sister was very much in love with him and that an
understanding might be desirable. Then at last the timorous, cunctatory
worshiper of femininity in the abstract declared himself and prayed to
know if the good news could be true. Lotte assured him that it was; if
she could make him happy she was willing to devote herself to the
enterprise during the remainder of her days.

Now the millennium began. Our celestial dreamer, who had thus been
gently pushed over the threshold by a friendly hand, found himself in a
human paradise much more grateful to the soul than the court of Venus
Urania. He was very, very happy. The black phantoms that had beset his
pathway hitherto,--the depressing sense of loneliness, of having missed
the great prize, of being _de trop_ at the banquet of life, the
occasional promptings of pessimism and misanthropy, the baleful pull of
illicit passion, the selfish hugging of an illusory freedom,--all these
took their flight to return no more. He had found what he
needed--salvation from self through a woman's love. But he did not
behave like other sons of Adam. He continued to address his love-letters
to both sisters impartially, as if the possession of Lotte were after
all to be only a subordinate incident in the preservation of a
triangular spiritual friendship. Sometimes it is 'my dearest, dearest
Karoline', again 'my dearest, dearest Lotte', most frequently 'my
dearest dears'.

At first the trio agreed to keep their momentous secret from _chere
mere_. Schiller was poor and his prospects all uncertain. When he began,
in the fall of 1789, to give lectures that were to be paid for, he found
that his income from students' fees would be insignificant. Lotte had
but a slender portion, and then there was that dreadful _von_ in her
name. To meet this difficulty Schiller procured the title of 'Hofrat'
from the Duke of Meiningen. Then he laid the case before Karl August of
Weimar, who was very sympathetic but also very poor. The best he could
do was to promise shamefacedly a pittance of two hundred thalers by way
of professorial salary. This, with love, was enough. In one of the
noblest letters he ever wrote Schiller now addressed himself to _chere
mere_ who made no objections; and on the 22nd of February, 1790, the
impecunious Hofrat Professor Schiller and his courageous, aristocratic
sweetheart were married.

The work of Schiller in the historical field will be considered by
itself in the next chapter. Before passing on to that subject, however,
let us glance at the more important of the minor writings produced
during the period just traversed.

In 'The Gods of Greece' he strikes with almost clangorous emphasis the
note of pagan aestheticism. The poem sees the world under the aspect of
the Beautiful and regards that as its most important aspect. The Greek
religion, we hear, peopled earth and sky and sea with lovely forms that
gave warmth and color to life and fed the imagination with sensuous
poetry. Nature appeared living, spiritual. Rock and stream and tree had
each its tale to tell, its tale of passionate personal history. The gods
were near, intelligible, sympathetic; and divine gifts were more
precious for being shared by the giver. And as the gods were more human,
so man was more divine. In comparison our modern monotheism is cold,
abstract, mechanical. Instead of a radiant Apollo, we have the law of
gravitation. We have lost the many fair gods of old to enrich One who is
remote, unfathomable, self-sufficient.

Where art thou, beauteous world of story?
Fair morning of a vanished day!
Alas! the magic of thine ancient glory
Lives only in the poet's lay.[75]

It was inevitable that such a frank eulogy of the old gods at the
expense of the Christian Demiurgus should give offense. Count Leopold
von Stolberg put himself at the head of a vociferous opposition by
denouncing the poem in a Leipzig journal as blasphemous, and lamenting
that the author of the noble 'Song to Joy' should have fallen so low.
The modern reader finds it easy to acquit him on the religious
arraignment, since he did not profess to present the claims of
monotheism completely. We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry
and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of
this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going
quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks,
Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the
'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied
them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks (gods
and men) were not remarkably strong on the side of gentleness, holiness
and fidelity.

In respect of poetic merit Schiller certainly had the right to his
opinion that 'The Gods of Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To
please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near
hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or
melody of phrasing,--Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of
the ear,--but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles
that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but
suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas have a
stately impressive swing. Goethe was pleased with the poem, but thought
it too long,--a well-founded criticism, since many of the stanzas merely
brought fresh illustrations of the same thought. In his revision
Schiller reduced the twenty-five stanzas of the original version to
sixteen, and at the same time omitted or toned down the lines that had
given offense. In its revised form it is in every way a better poem.

In 'The Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great
teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's
evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a
condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is
here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the
'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as
the 'ripest son of time, free through reason, strong through laws, great
through gentleness'. Then the sublime creature is admonished not to
forget the goddess who made him what he is:

In industry the bee may scorn thy merits,
In cleverness a worm thy teacher be;
Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits,
But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]

After this we hear that man entered the land of knowledge through the
morning gate of the beautiful; it was his inchoate art-sense that
developed his understanding. The heavenly goddess Urania, whom we know
here as Beauty and shall one day known as Truth, accompanied him into
the exile of mortality and became his loving nurse, teaching him to live
by her law, free from wild passion and from the bondage of duty. To aid
her in this work she chose a select body of priests, the artists, and
taught them to imitate the fair forms of nature. In the contemplation of
their work savage man was lifted to the heights of spiritual joy and
forgot his gross appetites. He became acquainted with ideals and made
gods and heroes for himself. Then he began to weigh and compare these
ideals and thus arose philosophy and science, which aim in their slow
and halting way to explain the full import of the primeval revelation.
All truth was given in symbols at the beginning, and the artists still
remain the conservators and prophets of the highest spiritual things.

In case of such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the
poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content,
which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of
several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that
have nothing to do with the goddess Urania, we have learned something of
primitive man, and what we have learned is very much out of tune with
Schiller's dream. He assigns to the aesthetic thrill a larger role than
it has actually played in human history. This, however, is unimportant.
What is more important is that by investing his subject with a nimbus of
poetic mysticism he became one of the founders of the modern Religion of
Art. For the theological revelation of truth he substitutes a secular
revelation of beauty, which, however, was regarded by him as containing
the germs of all truth and virtue. We see him moving toward a theory
that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that Beauty is the one.
To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial,
have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the
hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic
narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the
Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them
powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was
quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very different thing
from the later decorative aestheticism.

As poetry 'The Artists' may be said to come under the head of metrical
rhetoric. It quite lacks the simplicity and sensuousness of Milton's
canon, and as for passion, it is florid rather than passionate. It is
however strong in Schiller's strength,--in its vastness of outlook, its
splendid sweep of thought, its magnificent phrase-making. At first
indeed the reader is disturbed and perplexed by the argument. He is
lifted up into the blue mists, far above the plane of the verifiable,
and borne along hither and thither by successive gusts of the poetic
afflatus. Presently he is lost; there is no north and no south. By dint
of review and cogitation he gets his bearings (if he is lucky), but only
to lose them again as he is wafted on through the empyrean. Not until he
has read the poem many times, knows where he is going and is no longer
pestered by the necessity of thinking, can he hope to enjoy the voyage.

The beginning of 'The Ghostseer,' published while Schiller was still in
Dresden, was spoken of in Chapter VIII. His general idea, it would seem,
was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue devised by
mysterious agents of the Romish Church for the purpose of winning over a
Protestant German prince. But the details had not been very fully
excogitated, and his foremost thought, after all, was simply to
popularize the _Thalia_, which was largely caviare to the general. The
experiment proved moderately successful. Curiosity was excited and
inquiries began to be made. When, therefore, he was ready to resume the
publication of the _Thalia_, in the spring of 1788, he had reason to
regard 'The Ghostseer' as his most valuable asset. He set about
continuing the story, feeling that it was 'miserable daubing' and a
'sinful waste of time'.[77] In this temper he wrote and published a
second installment, which carried the story through what was
subsequently known as the first book. In this installment the hoax of
the ghost scene is cleared up, but the Armenian remains a mystery. The
Prince maintains a sensible, rationalistic attitude, asks many
questions, puts this and that together and finally concludes that
Armenian and Sicilian are two charlatans working In collusion.

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]

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