The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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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.

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