The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

C >> Calvin Thomas >> The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31

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.

In all these discussions of the sublime and the pathetic, et cetera,
Schiller exhibits a pathetically sublime faith in the possibility of
settling the questions at issue by the analytic method. He writes as if
the human mind were composed of air-tight compartments, wherein the
various operations of reason, understanding, taste, feeling and what
not, are carried on under immutable laws growing out of the nature of
man. His philosophy is also dualistic. He regards 'man' as consisting of
two parts joined like the Siamese twins. The one part, sensuous man,
which is like unto the animals, is a part of 'nature'; the other part,
the rational man, which is dowered with the birth-right of 'freedom', is
outside of nature and above it. The untenableness of this conception has
become since Schiller's time increasingly evident. Moreover, we have
learned to look upon all things under the aspect of development and to
know that man's reason, like the rest of him, is very much the creature
of time and place. This being so, one finds it difficult, nowadays, to
read the philosophic lucubrations of Schiller with that patience which
their well-meant seriousness really deserves. Indeed he himself seems to
have felt all along that there was some danger of his being carried too
far away into the region of barren speculation; wherefore it was
necessary, as he thought, not only to present his ideas in a popular
form, but also to prove their relevancy to the practical concerns of
human life.

It was with this thought in mind that he finally began, instead of the
'Kallias', a series of letters to his benefactor, the Prince of
Augustenburg. In a long letter of July 13, 1793, he explained his point
of view. The political dream of the century, he declared, that is, the
dream of recreating society upon a foundation of pure reason, had come
to naught. 'Man' had shown himself unfit for freedom. His chains
removed, he stood revealed as a barbarian and a slave,--the slave of
unruly passion. And this notwithstanding all that the century had done
for the enlightenment of his mind! Evidently the need of the hour and of
the future was not so much enlightenment of the mind as discipline of
the feelings. In a number of subsequent letters, admirable in style and
spirit, Schiller set forth his theory of aesthetic education and his
vision of the great good to be accomplished by it in the redemption of
mankind from the dominion of the grosser passions. Objections were duly
considered, especially the discouraging fact that, historically,
aesthetic refinement has too often coincided with supineness of
character and moral degeneracy. This consideration made it an important
part of the problem to show how the dangers of aesthetic culture could
best be counteracted.

The letters to the Danish prince formed the basis of the 'Letters on
Aesthetic Education', which were published in 1795 in the _Horen_, and
constitute the ripest and most pleasing expression of Schiller's
aesthetic philosophy. In the first ten of the 'Letters' he discusses the
spirit of the age, for the purpose of showing that some sort of
educational process is needed in order to fit mankind for the high
calling of the freeman. The problem is to transform the
state-ruled-by-force into a state-ruled-by-reason. To this end man must
learn to resist and subdue the two inveterate enemies of his nobility,
namely, the tyranny of sense which leads to savagery, and the inertness
of mind which leads to barbarism, Schiller defines the savage as a man
whose feelings control his principles, the barbarian as a man whose
principles destroy his feelings. At present, he declares, the mass of
men still oscillate between savagery and barbarism, but the man _comme
il faut_ must establish and preserve a perfect equipoise between his
sensuous and his rational nature. Whither shall he look for help? The
state cannot aid him, for it treats him as if he had no reason; nor can
philosophy save him through the mere cultivation of the reason, for it
treats him as if he had no feelings. His only redeemer is the aesthetic
sense, the love of beauty.

The 'Letters' then take up the desperate task of showing how the
aesthetic sense can do this wonderful work. Descending to the lowest
nadir of abstraction,--Schiller calls it rising to the highest
heights,--he brings up two ultimate instincts or bents of mankind, to
which he gives the appalling names of the 'thing-bent' and the
'form-bent' (_Sachtrieb_ and _Formtrieb_). The former impels to a change
of status, the latter to the preservation of personality. The one is
satisfied with what is mutable and finite, the other demands the
immutable and the rational. To harmonize these two instincts, to take
care that neither gets the better of the other or invades the other's
territory, is the problem of culture. For a driver of the ill-matched
team Schiller calls in the _Spieltrieb_, or play-bent, which is only a
new name for the aesthetic faculty. His idea is that in the moment of
aesthetic contemplation the sensuous and the rational instinct both find
their account. In the act of escaping from the serious pull of thought
and feeling to a mental state which satisfies both without succumbing
completely to either, he finds an analogy to the act of playing. At the
same time he is careful to point out that this kind of play is different
from the sports of common life. As he uses the word, it means surrender
to the illusion of art. Play is thus the symbol of the highest
self-realization. Only in playing is man completely man.

The last ten letters are devoted to what Schiller, following Kant,
calls 'melting beauty' (_schmelzende _Schoenheit_), which is opposed to
'energizing beauty' (_energische Schoenheit_). The former is the natural
corrective to the emotional excess which leads to savagery, while the
latter (the sublime, the stirring,) is the antidote to the mental
inertness which leads to barbarism. It is admitted that the aesthetic
state is perfectly neutral so far as concerns the influencing of the
will. A good work of art should leave us in a state of lofty serenity
and freedom of mind. If we find ourselves influenced to a particular
course of action, that is a sure sign that the art was bad.
Nevertheless,--and here lies the kernel of the whole discussion, so far
as it bears upon education,--the aesthetic state is a necessary stage
in the restoration of imperilled freedom. It is valuable morally simply
because it _is_ neutral ground. When a man is under the too exclusive
domination of either principles or feelings, he is in danger of
becoming a slave, and needs to be pulled back to the neutral belt of
freedom, in order that he may start afresh. 'In a word', says Schiller,
'there is no other way of making the sensuous man rational except by
first making him aesthetic.' Finally the 'Letters' take up the
evolution of man from the state of savagery and attempt to show
argumentatively and in detail how his progress has been determined by
the development of his aesthetic sense.

Such are the 'Letters on Aesthetic Education', which Schiller regarded,
in the year 1795, as a tract for the times. Years agone he had made Karl
Moor talk of poisoning the ocean; now he himself was thinking to sweeten
a poisoned ocean with a bottle of aesthetic syrup. We see that the gist
of the whole matter is simply this: That sanity and refinement are
pressing needs; that good art makes for these things and in so doing
makes indirectly for progress in right living and right thinking. This
looks like a painfully small result to have been reached by such long
and laborious logic-chopping; so that one is reminded of Carlyle's
cynical observation that the end and aim of the Kantian philosophy "seem
not to make abstruse things simple, but to make simple things abstruse".
It is to be remarked, however, that the real value of the 'Letters' is
not to be found in the logic-chopping, for which their author apologizes
again and again; not in the "dreadful array of first principles, the
forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the panting intellect
of weaker men wanders as in pathless thickets and at length sinks
powerless to the earth, oppressed with fatigue and suffocated with
scholastic miasma",[97]--but in the incidental flashes of luminous and
suggestive comment.

Having himself conquered the Kantian dialect and learned to write it,
Schiller had little patience with those who supposed that philosophic
truth could and should be set forth in the easy manner of a fireside
yarn. It was to free his mind on this subject that he published, in one
of the early numbers of the _Horen_, an essay 'On the Necessary Limits
of the Beautiful'. Here the burden of his thought is that the
philosopher, aiming at truth, must not yield to the seduction of trying
to write beautifully. His concern is with fact and logic; imagination
and feeling have no place in his domain. The lure of beauty may relax
the mind and endanger truth, just as it may relax the will and endanger
morality. This last thought contained the germ of his further essays,
'On the Dangers of Aesthetic Culture' and 'On the Moral Benefit of
Aesthetic Culture'. These, however, are only an amplification of ideas
contained in the 'Letters'.

There remain for consideration, to complete our survey of Schiller's
philosophical writings, his short essay on Matthison's poems and his
long disquisition upon 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. In the review he
discusses the subject of landscape poetry, thus touching upon a question
that had occupied Lessing in the 'Laokooen'. But instead of arguing like
Lessing that detailed description of objects is necessarily out of place
in poetry, Schiller defends it as capable in a high degree of giving
pleasure. The poetic effectiveness of a description he finds to consist,
first, in the truthfulness of the description; secondly, in its power,
analogous to that of music, to excite vague emotion; and finally, in its
power to awaken ideas by the law of association. He distinguishes
between 'true' nature and 'actual' nature. We arrive at true nature when
we take away from actual nature whatever is accidental, peculiar or
unnecessary. This process is precisely what is described in one of the
'Kallias' letters as 'idealization'.

To idealize an object is, then, in Schiller's vocabulary, not to
beautify it, or to make it in any way other than it is, but to portray
the 'idea' of it, that is, its essential truth, apart from all that is
accidental or individual. He lays down the general rule that poetry is
only concerned with true (or ideal) nature in this sense; never with
actual (or historical) nature. 'Every individual man', he declares, 'is
by just so much less a man as he is an individual; every mode of feeling
is by just so much less necessary and purely human as it is peculiar to
a particular person. The grand style consists in the rejection of all
that is accidental and the pure expression of the necessary.'

Of the essay upon 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry', contributed to the
_Horen_ in 1795, the first part is devoted to the 'Naive', which is
defined as nature in felt contrast with art. To be naive an action must
not only be natural but must put us to shame by suggesting a contrast
with our own sophisticated standards. From this it follows that our
pleasure in the naive, being connected with an idea of the reason, is
not purely aesthetic, but partly moral. The _naivete_ of children
appeals to us because they are what we were and what we should again
become. They represent an ideal, a theophany. Though we may look down
upon the childish, we can only look up to the childlike. A naive action
always implies a triumph of nature over art: if it is unintentional
(naive of surprise) we are amused; if deliberate (naive of character) we
are touched. Genius is always naive. Both in its works and in social
intercourse, it manifests the simplicity and directness of nature. It is
modest because nature is modest; but cares nothing for decency, for
decency is the offspring of corruption. It is sensible, but not shrewd.
It expresses its loftiest and deepest thoughts with naive grace: they
are divine oracles from the mouth of a child.

These thoughts duly expounded, the essay goes on to consider the modern
man's feeling for nature. This results, according to Schiller, from our
imputing _naivete_ to the non-rational world. We are conscious of having
wandered away from the state of innocence, happiness and perfection.
'Nature' represents this state to our imaginations; it is the voice of
the mother calling us back home, or whispering to us of boundless
happiness and perfection. Poetry which expresses this boundless longing
for the ideal is 'sentimental', while that which reflects nature
herself, in some definite part or phase, is 'naive'. The naive poet _is_
nature; the sentimental poet seeks a lost nature. The Greeks are
prevailingly naive, the moderns prevailingly sentimental, but neither in
any exclusive sense. The words are to be understood as expressing only a
mode of feeling. The same poet, the same poem, may be naive at one
moment and sentimental at another. All sentimental poetry, then, is
concerned with the disparity or contrast between reality and the ideal.
If the poet is mainly interested in the real, we have, in the broad
sense, satire, which may be pathetic or humorous. If he dwells more upon
the ideal, we have elegiac poetry--elegiac in the narrower sense, if the
ideal is conceived as a distant object of longing, idyllic if it is
portrayed as a present reality. The second part of the essay is devoted
to a review of the sentimental poets of modern Germany.

In the third part the naive and sentimental poets are contrasted. The
former, Schiller contends, is concerned with the definite, the latter
with the infinite. From the realist we turn easily and with pleasure to
actual life; the idealist puts us for the moment out of humor with it.
The one follows the laws of nature, the other those of reason. The one
asks what a thing is good for, the other whether it is good. Withal,
however, Schiller is careful to insist that even the naive poet, the
realist, is properly concerned only with true nature, and not with
actual nature. Everything that is,--for example, a violent outbreak of
passion,--is actual nature; but this is not true human nature, because
that implies free self-determination. True human nature can never be
anything but noble. 'What disgusting absurdities', exclaims
Schiller,--and the words might well be taken to heart by some of our
modern naturalists--'have resulted both in criticism and in practice
from this confusion of true with actual nature! What trivialities are
permitted, yea even praised, because unfortunately they are actual
nature!' It is a part of Schiller's theory that the true realist and the
sane idealist must finally come together on common ground.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 92: Eckermanns "Gespraeche", under date of November 14, 1823.]

[Footnote 93: He also admitted that he himself had profited from the
study of Kant; cf. Eckermann, under date of April 11, 1827.]

[Footnote 94: Schiller's aesthetic writings, and especially his relation
to Kant, have been much discussed in recent years. For a list of the
more important works consult the Appendix.]

[Footnote 95: An oft-repeated assertion to the contrary, which goes back
to Karoline von Wolzogen, "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt, is
contradicted by a letter of Schiller to Goethe, written May 5, 1797.]

[Footnote 96: They are reprinted in Saemmtliche Schriften. X, 41 ff.]

[Footnote 97: Carlyle's "Life of Schiller", page 137 (edition of 1845).]

CHAPTER XIV

The Great Duumvirate

Nun kann ich aber hoffen, dasz wir, so viel von dem Wege noch uebrig
sein mag, in Gemeinschaft durchwandeln werden, und mit um so
groeszerem Gewinn, da die letzten Gefaehrten auf einer langen Reise
sich immer am meisten zu sagen haben. _Letter of 1794_.

The coupled names of Goethe and Schiller denote a literary epoch as well
as a peculiarly inspiring personal friendship. What a vista opens before
the mind's eye when one thinks of all the influence that went out from
them into the wide world during the nineteenth century! The visitor to
Weimar who goes to look at Rietschel's famous statue in front of the
theater has a sensation like that of standing at the source of a mighty
river. Of course the men and their time have been greatly idealized;
like the sculptor, the imagination of posterity has lifted them above
the level of the earth, joined their hands and given them the pose of
far-seeing literary heroes. We think of each as increased by the whole
strength of the other. As Herman Grimm puts it algebraically, the
formula is not G + S, but G(+ S) + S(+ G).[98]

And all this hits an essential truth, albeit the student of the
documents--the letters and journals of the duumvirs, and of their
friends and enemies--has great difficulty at times to imagine himself in
an atmosphere of heroism. No nation, no public life of any account; a
complete lack of interest, apparently, in many matters that now bulk
very large in the minds of men; a small theater, equal to none but very
modest demands; a few engravings and plaster-casts and paintings--many
of them very poor--to serve as a basis for theories of art; a little
optical apparatus, a few minerals and plants and bones, to aid in the
advancement of science; everything material on a small scale,--this was
Weimar a hundred years ago. Truly a restricted outlook upon this
spacious world as it appears to us to-day!

And then the duumvirs had their struggle with the infinitely little,
and they fussed over this and that. This is especially true of Goethe.
His journals produce upon the reader now and then not so much an
impression of glorious many-sidedness as of precious time wasted in
futile puttering. But who shall dare to say that it was so in reality?
The genius of life tells every great man what he can do, and it is for
posterity to accept him and understand him as he was, without complaint
and without sophistication. What Goethe and Schiller did in the midst
of all their other doings, was to set their stamp upon the culture of
their time; to create a new ideal of letters and of life, and to enrich
their country's literature with a number of masterpieces which have
since furnished food and inspiration to countless myriads. This is
quite enough to justify a perennial curiosity concerning the details of
their alliance.

For six years the two men, though living as neighbors with many friends
and many interests in common, had steadily held each other aloof. That
they did so was Goethe's fault, at least in the beginning. We may be
very sure that a friendly advance from him would have melted Schiller's
animosity as the sun melts April snow. But he did not say the word. He
looked upon Schiller as the spokesman of a new and perverse generation
that knew not Joseph; and so he went his own way, serenely indifferent
to the personality of the man whose talent he had recognized by helping
him to a Jena professorship. He paid some attention, it is true, to
Schiller's philosophic writings, but what he read did not altogether
please him. When the essay upon 'Winsomeness and Dignity' came out, it
seemed to him that Schiller, in his enthusiasm for freedom and
self-determination, was inclined to lord it all too proudly over mother
Nature. Goethe was no less interested in 'ideas' than Schiller, but he
had not the same fondness for abstract reasoning from mental premises.
His starting-point was always the external fact, and he regarded ideas
as possessing a sort of objective reality. His homage was paid to nature
and the five senses; Schiller's to the deductive reason.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31