The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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Nevertheless, the whole trend of Schiller's aesthetic speculations
brought him steadily nearer to Goethe's way of thinking. His intense
Hellenism; his insistence upon the immense importance of art as an
element of culture; his fervid championship of art for art's sake; his
practical identification of the ideal with the typical; his doctrine of
genius in its relation to abstract dogma, and above all his great
earnestness, as of one striving with all his powers towards the better
light,--this and much more could not fail to meet Goethe's approval. And
then came the great project of the _Horen_, which was to unite all the
best writers of Germany in a common effort for the advancement of
letters and the elevation of the public taste. This was an opportunity
not to be despised, for Goethe was at last beginning to be weary of his
isolation at Weimar. Although at heart very desirous of exerting a large
influence, he had well-nigh lost touch with the literary public. For
four years he had done nothing worthy of his great name. People took
little interest in his scientific studies, his 'Grosz-Cophta', and his
'Citizen-General'. He felt the need of rehabilitating himself. So when
he received Schiller's polite invitation anent the _Horen_, he accepted
with alacrity; declaring himself ready not only to contribute, but to
serve on the editorial committee. And a few days later,--it was on June
28, 1794, before he had seen Schiller or exchanged further letters with
him,--he wrote to Charlotte von Kalb that 'since the new epoch Schiller
too was becoming more friendly and trustful towards us Weimarians';
whereat he rejoiced, 'hoping for much good from intercourse with him'.
So we see that, as the matter then lay in Goethe's mind, it was Schiller
who was the distant and distrustful party.

Thus the way was all prepared for the 'Happy Event', as Goethe called it
in an oft-quoted bit of reminiscence published many years later. It
chanced that he and Schiller were both present at a meeting of
naturalists in Jena. As they left the room together Schiller let fall a
remark to the effect that such piecemeal treatment of nature as they had
been listening to was dull business for the layman. Goethe replied that
there were experts who could not approve it either. Then he proceeded to
explain his own views. They reached Schiller's house in earnest
conversation, and Goethe went in to continue his demonstration with the
aid of a drawing--probably of a typical plant. Schiller listened with
seeming comprehension and then shook his head, saying: 'But that is not
an experience; that is an idea.' Goethe was disappointed, perplexed. All
his labor had gone for naught, and the awful chasm was still yawning. He
replied that he was glad if he had ideas without knowing it and could
actually see them with his eyes, Schiller defended himself suavely as a
good Kantian, and the men separated, each in a docile mood with respect
to the other.

Herman Grimm will have it that Schiller now entered upon a crafty
campaign for the conquest of Goethe; and really the facts give some
color to such a view, albeit, as we have seen, the battle was more than
half won before a shot was fired. Schiller had his magazine very much at
heart, and besides that he had always been a very sincere and ungrudging
admirer of Goethe's poetic genius. Very likely he looked upon him as a
weakling in philosophy. To talk of seeing ideas with the bodily eye!
Evidently there was no profit in bombarding such a man with syllogisms.
But it might be useful to show that one understood him. So Schiller sat
him down and wrote out, in the form of a letter, a little essay upon
Goethe's individuality, attributing to him a wonderful intuition whereby
he saw in advance all that philosophy could prove:

Minds of your sort seldom know how far they have advanced, and how
little reason they have to borrow from philosophy, which can only
learn from them.... For a long time, though at a considerable
distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and noticing
with ever-renewed admiration the way that you have marked out for
yourself. You seek the necessary in nature, but by the very hardest
path,--a path which weaker minds would take good care not to
attempt. You take all nature together, in order to get light upon
the particular. In the totality of her manifestations you hope to
find the rationale of the individual.... Had you been born a Greek
or even an Italian, and thus surrounded from infancy with exquisite
scenery and idealizing art, your way would have been infinitely
shortened, perhaps rendered unnecessary.... As it was, having been
born a German, you had to refashion the old inferior nature that was
thrust upon your imagination, after the better pattern which your
imagination had created; and this could only be done by means of
leading principles. But this logical direction which the reflecting
mind is compelled to take does not tally well with the aesthetic
direction of the creating mind. So you had another task; just as you
passed previously from intuition to abstraction, you had now to
convert concepts back into intuitions, and thoughts into feelings;
for only through these can genius create.

For Goethe, whose nature really craved friendship hardly less than
Schiller's, there was something very grateful in this frank homage
combined with rare perspicacity. He saw that Schiller understood him or
was at least concerned to understand him. With all their differences
they were spiritual congeners, and much might be hoped for from this new
connection. So he sent a very cordial reply to the man who had thus
'with friendly hand struck the balance of his existence'; averring that
he too dated a new epoch from their meeting in Jena; expressing the hope
that they might soon find opportunity for a further interchange of views
and that, having mutually cleared up their past course of thinking, they
might proceed on their way together. A few weeks later Schiller spent
two weeks as Goethe's guest in Weimar, where long discussions, spun out
on one occasion from noon to midnight, begot a perfect understanding and
laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. It was a friendship based
upon mutual respect and mutual need, full of high advantage on both
sides and cherished loyally to the end.

Between then and now many and many a writer has compared Goethe with
Schiller and undertaken to reckon up the balance of their respective
merit. The task is not easy, even though the world is now well agreed
that Goethe's was the rarer genius. No doubt he, much more than
Schiller, was destined to be a bringer of light to the coming century;
but the immense prestige of his name is due partly to the happy fate
that gave him a long life and invested his old age with the glamour of
literary kingship. If we compare the actual production of the two men
during the eleven years of their association, it is not at all clear
that the palm should be given to Goethe. The five plays of Schiller,
with the 'Song of the Bell', and the best of his shorter poems, will
bear comparison very well, in the aggregate, with 'Wilhelm Meister',
'Hermann and Dorothea', the 'Natural Daughter' and those portions of
'Faust' which were written at this time. Unquestionably Goethe at his
best was a far greater poet than Schiller; but he was less steadily at
his best, and his artistic conscience was more lax than Schiller's. He
envisaged life more largely and more truly, and he wrote with his eye
upon the object. His nature inclined to placid contemplation; he was no
orator, though something of a preacher. He did not care so much to stir
the depths of feeling as to inform and liberalize. In his imaginative
work he let himself go _mit holdem Irren_ and preferred to avoid
artificial surprises and stagy contrasts. Wherefore his work is the more
illuminative, the more suggestive,--he is the poet of the literary
class. Schiller, on the other hand, was an orator who never lost sight
of the effect he wished to produce. He worked more intensely, more
methodically, and was less dependent upon mood. He is thus the poet of
those who care less for delicacy of workmanship than for sonorous
diction, elevated sentiment and telling effects. There is room in the
world for both kinds of endowment.

It is quite probable that Goethe and Schiller would sooner or later have
come together in a friendly relation even if the _Horen_ had never been
thought of; and in that case their friendship would have lacked the
militant tinge that it presently took on. It was the magazine that
leagued them together as allies against the forces of Philistia and made
Thuringia the storm-center of a new literary movement. But for this it
would probably never have occurred to any one to dub them 'the
Dioscuri'.

Prior to the appearance of the first number, in January, 1795, the new
journal had been well advertised. Cotta was prepared to spend money on
it freely; the contributors were to be handsomely paid, and twenty-five
of the best known writers in Germany had promised their cooperation.
There was every reason to hope for a dashing success; and to make
assurance doubly sure Schiller arranged for 'cooked' reviews of the
_Horen_ to be paid for by its publisher. But when the time came to
launch his enterprise the hopeful editor found himself left very much in
the lurch. 'Lord help me, or I perish' he wrote ruefully to Koerner, on
December 29; 'Goethe does not wish to print his 'Elegies' in the first
number, Herder also prefers to wait, Fichte is busy with his lectures,
Garve is sick, Engel lazy and the others do not answer.'

And so it came about that the first number of the _Horen_ was largely
made up of rather abstruse reading. Schiller did not fully realize that
the philosophy on which he had been feeding with satisfaction for three
years was not a palatable diet for the general literary public. He
regarded his own 'Letters on Aesthetic Education' as a model of lucid
popular exposition,--as indeed they are in comparison with Kant. But the
number was further freighted with a deep-diving article by Fichte, while
Goethe's poetic 'Epistle' in hexameters, and the beginning of his
'Conversations of German Emigres ', though in a lighter vein, were not
of thrilling interest to seekers after entertainment. The public, which
had expected something different, was disappointed; and when succeeding
numbers brought further brain-racking profundities, there was a large
ebullition of disgust. Cotta began to write of complaints and cancelled
subscriptions; and ere long it looked as if the _Horen_ would prove a
big fiasco.

Schiller, who should have been inured by this time to the consequences
of editorial misjudgment, was disgruntled, vexed. He began to feel that
the German public was an indolent, long-eared beast that needed the
education of the scourge rather than of aesthetic letters. He made some
effort, it is true, to enliven his columns with more entertaining
matter, but the abstruse, in prose and verse, continued to preponderate.
By autumn he was minded to give up the whole undertaking, but was
persuaded by Cotta to go on. Meanwhile he had begun to grow weary of
theorizing and to feel the homesickness of the poet. 'Wilhelm Meister',
as it began to issue from the press, excited his unbounded enthusiasm.
'I cannot tell you', he wrote to his new friend,

I cannot tell you how painful it is to me oftentimes to turn from a
work of this character to philosophy. There everything is so bright,
so living, so harmonious and humanly true; here everything is so
strict, so rigid, so very unnatural.... This much is certain: the
poet is the only true human being, and the best philosopher is only
a caricature beside him.

So, in the summer of 1795, he began once more to poetize,--'not
venturing out upon the high sea of invention', as he expressed it, 'but
keeping close to the shore of philosophy'. In other words he wrote a
number of philosophic poems, partly for the _Horen_ and partly for the
new poetic 'Almanac' that he had undertaken to edit, in addition to the
_Horen_. This return to poetry was a joy to him, notwithstanding the ill
health which confined him to the house and cut him off from the
exhilarations of the external world. It must never be forgotten that
those philosophic poems are the effusions of a lonely thinker who was
compelled to draw his inspiration from within, and was not entirely
unaware of the fetters he had forged for himself by his long addiction
to philosophy.

There was, however, one more subject, of literary as well as
philosophic interest, which he was minded to treat before turning his
back finally upon the arid wastes of theory;--the subject of realism
versus idealism, or, as he decided to phrase it, of naive and
sentimental poetry. This essay, published in 1796, was briefly analyzed
in the last chapter. It marks the end of Schiller's one-sided
glorification of the Greeks. In more than one passage he comes to the
rescue of the modern poet--the sentimentalist--as the poet of the
infinite, of the ideal. His contention is that while the realist may be
the more admirable in a limited sphere, the idealist has a larger
sphere, and his perfection is a higher thing. This attempt of
Schiller's to describe, in a scientific spirit, the different kinds of
artistic endowment, and to do full justice to all, grew naturally out
of his intercourse with Goethe. He admired Goethe more and more. The
fifth book of 'Meister' produced in him a 'veritable intoxication'; yet
its quality was strikingly unlike that of 'Werther' or 'Iphigenie', and
totally different from anything that he himself had done or could
possibly do. Perhaps he may have been further influenced by A.W.
Schlegel's sympathetic papers upon Dante, which had been published in
the _Horen_ and which revealed to him a new poetic genius of the
highest order, yet not at all Homeric. So he wrote his famous
disquisition,--next to Lessing's 'Laokooen' the most thoughtful and the
most influential piece of criticism produced anywhere in the eighteenth
century,--and endeavored to make it as readable as possible. Goethe,
who read the manuscript in November, 1795, wrote of it thus:

Since this theory treats me so well, nothing is more natural than
that I should approve its principles and that its conclusions should
seem to me correct. I should be more distrustful, however, if I had
not at first found myself in an attitude of opposition to your
views; for it is not unknown to you that, from an excessive
predilection for the ancient poets, I have often been unjust to the
modern. According to your doctrine I can now be at one with myself,
since I no longer need to contemn that which, under certain
conditions, an irresistible impulse compelled me to produce; and it
is a very pleasant feeling to be not altogether dissatisfied with
one's self and one's contemporaries.

Thus the two men were drawn closer together in mutual sympathy and
appreciation, and found in each other more and more a bulwark against
the whips and scorns of hostile criticism. Of such criticism there was
no lack. The _Horen_ was making enemies rapidly and had become, as
Schiller put it, a veritable _ecclesia militans_. One Jakob in Halle
made an assault upon Schiller's aesthetic writings. Dull old Nicolai in
Berlin complained of the ravages of Kantism in German literature. Pious
souls like Stolberg were scandalized by the lubricity of Goethe's
'Elegies' and 'Wilhelm Meister'. The famous philologist, Wolf, pounced
violently upon one of Herder's Homeric essays. Schiller had now fallen
out with his old friend Goeschen, who was a center of contemptuous
opposition at Leipzig. And Goethe, too, had his quarrel with the world:
he felt absurdly sore over the neglect by scientific men of his optical
theories in opposition to Newton. Friendly voices were scarcely heard
anywhere. There was little opportunity for indulging that pleasant
emotion of 'being satisfied with one's contemporaries'.

And so it came to pass that the two friends waxed wroth and determined
to strike back. At first they thought of a withering review in the
_Horen_, but this idea was given up in favor of another. Goethe had
taken a great fancy to the ancient elegiac meter and for some time past
it had been his favorite form of poetic expression. Schiller, originally
a hater of the hexameter, had caught the fever from Goethe, and used the
elegiac form in a number of poems. In December, 1795, Goethe suggested
that they amuse themselves by making epigrams, in the style of Martial's
'Xenia', upon the various journals against which they had a grudge,
devoting a distich to each. His plan was that each should make a large
number; then they would compare, select the best and publish them in the
second volume of the 'Almanac'. Schiller was captivated by the idea, and
'Xenia' now became the order of the day. It was soon decided not to
restrict them to the offensive journals, but to take a shot wherever
there was a mark. Both conspirators took great delight in the proposed
_Teufelei_,--it would be such sport to stir up the vermin and hear them
buzz. They gave the milder 'Xenia' pet names such as 'jovial brethren',
'little fellows', 'teasing youngsters', while the harsher ones were
likened to stinging insects, or to the foxes of Samson:

You with the blazing tails, away to Philistia, foxes!
Spoil the flourishing crops, crops of paper and ink.

As Goethe was still preoccupied with 'Wilhelm Meister', it happened at
first that Schiller was the more active in the production of these
'kitchen presents', especially such as had pepper in them. With the
lapse of time Goethe's share increased. The two were frequently
together, for days or weeks at a time, and the mass of Xenia grew
rapidly. They determined to swell the number to a thousand and to give
the collection a sort of artistic completeness; to make it, that is, a
sort of general confession of faith. They agreed furthermore that they
would publish the epigrams as a joint production and treat their
separate authorship as an inviolable secret. As a matter of fact, some
of them really were joint productions. One would suggest the idea or the
title, and the other write the verses; or one write the hexameter and
the other the pentameter.

During the first half of 1796 Schiller wrote little else than Xenia. By
the arrival of summer the joint output amounted to nearly a thousand,
but less than half that number found their way into the famous 'Xenia
Almanac' of 1797. Of these the targets were legion and the merit
various. Some few of them were very good, others little short of
atrocious, particularly in the matter of form. As for the general mass,
their piquancy is not so great as to superinduce in the reader of to-day
a dangerously violent cachinnation. Neither Goethe nor Schiller can be
credited with a large vein of sparkling wit. Some of the Xenia are
far-fetched and operose, while others sound rather vacuous. The form of
the monodistich was in itself a safeguard against diffuseness, but not
against the equal peril of inanity.

It would be impossible here to do more than glance at the personalities
involved in this rather inglorious squabble. Many of the Xenia were
personal pin-pricks. Thus several were directed against the musician
Reichardt, who, as editor of two journals, had shown strong sympathy
with the Revolution. Goethe, the courtier, and Schiller, who had no
democratic proclivities, came to the defense of the gentry thus;

Aristocratical dogs will growl at beggars, but mark you
How little democrat Spitz soaps at the stockings of silk.

And again:

Gentlemen, keep your seats! for the curs but covet your places,
Elegant places to hear all the other dogs bark.

A whole broadside was aimed at the garrulous Nicolai, who deserved a
better fate. As the champion of lucidity and reasonableness he stood in
reality for a very good cause,--no preachment more necessary in Germany
then or since. But in his old age he had fallen a prey to the _cacoethes
scribendi;_ he insisted upon having his say about everything, yet his
stock of ideas had long since run out. So he became the bogey of the
Weimar-Jena people. The Xenia assailed him with frank brutality, thus:

What is beyond your reach is bad, you think in your blindness,
Yet whatever you touch, that you cover with dirt.

Other objects of attack were the brothers Stolberg, for their narrow
religiosity; Friedrich Schlegel, for his bumptious self-conceit; and
various small fry for this and that peccadillo.[99]

A large part of the epigrams, however, were of the 'tame' variety, that
is, stingless outgivings of a jocund humor, or grave pronunciamentos
upon religion, philosophy, art and so forth. The authors did not wish to
appear before the world as mere executioners, but as men with a positive
creed, comprising things to be loved as well as things to be hated. They
pleaded for sanity, clearness and moderation, and frowned upon the
fanatics, hypocrites, vulgarians and cranks. The well-known distich
entitled 'My Creed' is representative of many which were directed
against the spirit of blind partisanship:

Which religion is mine? Not one of the many you mention.
'Why', do you venture to ask? Too much religion, I say.

Even virtue was to be cherished temperately,--without too much
talk about it:

Nothing so hateful as Vice, and all the more to be hated,
Since because of it, now, Virtue is really a need.

And so on in endless variety, on all sorts of subjects. Further
illustration shall be dispensed with, seeing that the ancient distich is
a poetic form for which the English language has, at the best, but
little sympathy. In German it goes much better; and for Schiller in
particular, with his natural love of antithesis, it proved a convenient
setting for his opinions.

The effect of the Xenia was to set literary Germany agog with curiosity.
Two editions of the 'Almanac' were quickly bought up and a third became
necessary. There was infinite guessing, speculating, interpreting, and
among those who had been hit there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, A
very few friends of Goethe and Schiller, such as Koerner, Humboldt and
Zelter, watched the commotion with solemn glee. Others were shocked or
grieved at such a mode of warfare. Wieland mildly regretted that he had
come off well in the Xenia, seeing that many other honest people had
fared so badly. Herder was much more outspoken and declared that he
hated the whole accursed species. The replies, protests and
counter-attacks were legion, some in brutal belligerent prose, others in
more or less clever Anti-xenia. Some of the latter were grossly abusive,
and even indecent; a few contained very pretty home-thrusts, as when in
allusion to a well-known poem of Schiller's he was advised to trouble
himself less about the 'Dignity of Women' and more about his own;[100]
or where his 'Realm of Shades' was declared to be so very shadowy that
one could not see the shades for the shadow.[101] But the best of all
perhaps was the oft-quoted gem:

In Weimar and in Jena they make hexameters like this,
But the pentameters are even more excellent.[102]

Historians of German literature are probably right in believing that the
Xenia fusillade produced on the whole a salutary effect, although many
of the objects of attack seem, at this date, to have been hardly worth
the ammunition. But the explosion cleared the muggy air like a
thunder-storm and denned many an issue that it was well to have defined.
Writers of every ilk were shaken out of their somnolence and compelled
to look in the direction of Weimar; and when it was a question of taking
sides, where was the force that could hope to make headway against the
combined strength of Goethe and Schiller? The odds were too great; there
was nothing to do but to grumble a little and then--acquiesce in the new
leadership. As for the Dioscuri, they had the wisdom to see that one
sharp campaign was enough; that for the rest they could further the good
cause much more effectively by admirable creation than by peppery
epigrams. Prod a man for his bad taste or his foolish opinions, and you
harden his heart and provoke him to retaliate; give him something to
admire, and you make him a friend in spite of himself.

In the autumn of 1796 Schiller addressed himself to 'Wallenstein', and
from that time on dramatic poetry continued to be his chief concern. He
led a quiet, laborious life, battling often with disease and depression,
but sustained by high resolution and finding joy enough in domestic
affection and the friendship of Goethe. The _Horen_ lasted three years
and then died an easy death by the mutual consent of editor and
publisher. Of the 'Almanac' five numbers appeared, beginning with 1796.
In these small annual volumes a large part of Schiller's best poems were
originally published. His work upon the 'Almanac' was usually done in
the summer, other activities being then temporarily laid aside. From,
the time of his connection with Cotta, who took over the 'Almanac' after
the first number had appeared, Schiller usually had money enough for his
needs. But his needs were very modest, the demands of social life in
Jena--or even in Weimar under the fiercer but still not very fierce
light of the court--being extremely simple. He had not to reckon with
the Persian apparatus that disturbed the soul of Horace.

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