The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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We see that as a balladist Schiller got his inspiration mainly from two
sources: the traditions of Greek antiquity and the traditions of
chivalrous romance. He dwelt habitually in the idealisms of the past,
and his controlling purpose was to make these idealisms live again in
stirring poetic pictures. The present time, with its fierce national
conflicts, the larger meaning of which was not yet apparent, seemed to
him barbarous and depressing. In the prologue to 'Wallenstein', it is
true, he was able to survey the situation with a calm artistic eye and
to see in the 'solemn close of the century' a period in which 'reality
is becoming poetry'. But this is an isolated deliverance. His habitual
mood was one of aversion, from which he sought relief by an escape into
the kingdom of the mind. Thus, in some stanzas on the opening of the new
century, he laments that the English-French war has overspread sea and
land and left no place on earth for 'ten happy mortals'. Then he bids
the friend to whom the verses are addressed take refuge in the holy
temple of the heart, seeing that Freedom and Beauty dwell only in
dreamland. A similar sentiment finds expression in 'The Words of
Illusion', published in 1801, as a sort of pendant to the earlier 'Words
of Faith'. The words of faith are Freedom, Virtue and God. Men are
exhorted to cling steadfastly to these eternal verities, whereof only
the heart gives knowledge. The other poem is directed against the
superstition of believing in a golden age, or in any external
realization of the right, the good and the true. The final stanza runs:

And so, noble soul, forget not the law,
And to the true faith be leal;
What ear never heard and eye never saw,
The Beautiful, the True, they are real.
Look not without, as the fool may do;
It is in thee and ever created anew.

These last-named poems belong to a type which the Germans sometimes
call the 'lyric of thought',--a name which is fairly appropriate to a
goodly number of Schiller's shorter effusions. Other examples--to
mention a few of the best--are 'Light and Warmth', 'Breadth and Depth'
and 'Hope'. They might be called lyrics of culture, since they regard
the perfection of the individual,--the equipoise of heart and head,
steadfast seriousness as opposed to showy sciolism, the preservation of
hope and faith,--as a noble object of emotion. They are not
intellectual in the opprobrious sense of the word as applied to poetry;
they are suffused with warm feeling and their language is simple and
natural. On the other hand they _are_ argumentative: they state
propositions and draw conclusions the value of which must in the end be
gauged by the mind. For this reason one who has no sympathy with
Schiller's idealism,--one who either never felt it or has lost it in
the stress of life,--will not be touched by these poems, but will
regard them as hollow. Yet they are no more hollow than the lyrics of
Goethe or Heine or Shelley, though the illusion of sincerity is less
perfect than in the work of these great lyrists.

A pure lyric effusion, of the kind that seems to sing itself without
help or let from the brooding philosopher, was not often attempted by
Schiller. Perhaps his very best achievement in this sort is 'The
Maiden's Lament', of which the first two stanzas, translated as closely
as possible with reference to both substance and form, run as follows:

The oak-wood moans, the clouds float o'er,
The maiden sits by the green sea-shore.
The waves are breaking with might, with might,
And she breathes out a sigh in the gloom of the night,
And her eyes are dim with weeping.

'My heart is dead, the world is naught,
It brings nothing more to my longing thought,
I have lived and loved,--earth's fortune was mine,
Thou Holy One, take this child of thine,
Take her back into thine own keeping.'[112]

Such verses, and one might adduce further the admirable songs in
'William Tell', show that Schiller had in him, when he could find it and
let it have its way, a lyric gift of a high order. As a rule, however,
when he attempted to sing, the attempt resulted in a philosophic
evaluation of the feelings expressed. Thus in his well-known 'Punch
Song', he is mainly concerned with the ethical symbolism of the four
elements,--the lemon-juice, the sugar, the water and the spirits. In
other cases he suggests an allegorical symbolism, and leaves the reader
puzzling over an intellectual query that may or may not be worth
puzzling over. Examples are 'The Maiden from Afar', 'The Youth at the
Brook', 'The Mountain Song'. He even wrote a number of professed poetic
riddles,--which may be left without commentary to those who like that
sort of poetry.

The cultural poems of Schiller have always enjoyed a high degree of
popularity. A large number of his lines and couplets have become
familiar quotations that come readily to the tongue or pen of the
educated German. There is probably no modern poet who has taken a deeper
hold upon the intellectual life of his countrymen. This is partly
attributable to the fact that his idealistic sentiments appeal
especially to the youthful. No poet that ever lived is better adapted to
the needs of the school; none more infallibly safe and inspiring to the
young of both sexes. For the riper mind and the larger experience his
oracles are apt to lose somewhat of their impressiveness; for it is not
to be denied that his poetry at its best is seldom supremely good. The
divine spark that fuses rare thought and waiting expression in the white
heat of the imagination and gives one the sense of artistic perfection
is not often there. His verse is never cold, never trivial; but; it does
lack artistic distinction. Its highest claim is to give expression to
the maxims of a ripe culture in tuneful verses and pleasing imagery that
impress themselves readily upon the general heart. This is what he does
in the most famous of all his poems, 'The Song of the Bell'. It is not
great poetry, but it is a pleasing production which well deserves its
popularity.

'The Song of the Bell' was first given to the world in the 'Almanac' of
1800, after several years of incubation. Its germ-idea is similar to
that of the 'Punch Song'; that is, we have a mechanical process,--in the
one case the mixing of a glass of punch, in the other the casting of a
bell,--accompanied at its various stages by reflections of an ethical
character. The bell-founder is an idealist with a feeling for the
dignity of man and of man's handiwork. As he orders his workmen to
perform the successive operations involved in the casting of a bell, he
delivers, from the depths of his larger experience, a little homily,
suggested, in each case, by the present stage of the labor. The master's
orders are given in a lively trochaic measure, while the homilies move
at a slower gait in iambic lines of varying length. The fiction is
handled with scrupulous attention to technical details, and is made to
yield at the same time a series of easy and natural starting-points for
a poetic review of life from the cradle to the grave.

The great charm of the 'Song' lies in its vivid pictures of the epochs,
pursuits and occurrences which constitute the joy and the woe of life
for an ordinary industrious burgher. Childhood and youth; the passion of
the lover, sobering into the steadfast love of the husband; the busy
toil of the married pair in field and household; the delight of
accumulation and possession; the calamity of fire that destroys the
labor of years; the blessedness of peaceful industry; the horrors of
revolutionary fanaticism; the benediction of civic concord,--these are
the themes that are brought before us in a series of stirring pictures
that are irresistibly fascinating. To have felt and expressed so
admirably the poetry of every-day life, and that at the very time when
the Romanticists were beginning to fill the air with noise about the
prosaic dullness of the present time as compared with the Middle Ages,
was a great achievement, and all the greater as Schiller himself had not
remained unaffected by the Romantic doctrine. He could Hellenize and
philosophize, and, on occasion, he could Romanticize; but 'The Song of
the Bell' shows how deeply, after all, his feeling was rooted in the
life of the German people.

The 'Almanac' for 1800 was the last volume that appeared, and after the
removal of this exigency Schiller's lyrical production diminished. His
best strength was devoted to his plays, which in themselves, however,
contain a large lyric element. The choral parts of 'The Bride of
Messina' show the final phase of his art in its perfection. Like these,
the few independent poems written by him during the last years of his
life are characterized by great beauty of diction and of rhythmic
cadence, but in their substance they hardly compare with the best of his
previous work. Most noteworthy are 'Cassandra', devoted to the pathos of
foreseeing calamity without being able to prevent it, and 'The Festival
of Victory', wherein the Greek heroes, assembled for departure after the
sack of Troy, discourse amiably and profoundly upon the finer issues of
life. In some of the shorter and more subjective poems there is
discernible a note of sadness, as of a drooping spirit unreconciled,
after all, to the stress of this earthly existence. This is heard, for
example, in 'Longing' and 'The Pilgrim'. But from such sporadic
utterances no large inference should be drawn respecting Schiller's
mental history. They proceeded from a sick man whose days were numbered.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 103:

"The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity."
--_Shelley's "Adonais"_.]

[Footnote 104: Bulwer's Translation.]

[Footnote 105: Bulwer's Translation.]

[Footnote 106: "Social Forces in German Literature", p. 376.]

[Footnote 107: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", sechzehntes Buch.]

[Footnote 108: Buiwer translates the lines, somewhat lamely, thus:

Honour to Woman! To her it is given
To garden the earth with the roses of Heaven!
All blessed, she linketh the Loves in their choir....
From the bounds of Truth careering,
Man's strong spirit wildly sweeps,
With each hasty impulse veering
Down to Passion's troubled deeps.]

[Footnote 109:

Ehret die Frauen! Sie stricken die Struempfe,
Wollig und warm, zu durchwaten die Suempfe,
Flicken zerriss'ne Pantalons aus....
Doch der Mann, der toelpelhafte,
Find't am Zarten nicht Geschmack;
Zum gegohrnen Gerstensafte
Raucht er immerfort Taback.]

[Footnote 110:

"In the waste the Beast is free,
And the God upon his throne!
Unto each the curb must be
But the nature each doth own.
Yet the Man--betwixt the two--
Must to man allied belong;
Only law and Custom thro'
Is the Mortal free and strong."
--_Bulwer's Translation._]

[Footnote 111: Otto Harnack, "Schiller", page 274.]

[Footnote 112:

Der Eichwald brauset, die Wolken ziehn,
Das Maegdlein sitzet an Ufers Gruen,
Es bricht sich die Welle mit Macht, mit Macht,
Und sie seufzt hinaus in die finstere Nacht,
Das Auge von Weinen getruebet.

"Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,
Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr.
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurueck,
Ich habe genossen das irdische Glueck,
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet."]

CHAPTER XVI

Wallenstein

So hab' ich
Mit eignem Netz verderblich mich umstrickt,
Und nur Gewaltthat kann es reiszend loesen.
_'Wallenstein'._

The great play which signalizes the return of Schiller to dramatic
poetry must be accounted upon the whole his masterpiece. To be sure it
is less popular than 'Tell' and less immediately effective than 'Mary
Stuart'. It has not the romantic soulfulness of 'The Maid of Orleans',
nor the splendid diction of 'The Bride of Messina'. On the stage, too,
its effectiveness is somewhat impaired by its great length. But in the
imaginative power whereby history is made into drama; in the triumph of
artistic genius over a vast and refractory mass of material, and in the
skill with which the character of the hero is conceived and denoted,
'Wallenstein' is unrivaled. Well might Goethe pronounce it 'so great
that nothing could be compared with it'. Its chief figure is by far the
stateliest and most impressive of German tragic heroes.

Since the completion of 'Don Carlos' Schiller had written nothing of any
moment in the dramatic form. For nine years he had been occupied with
historical and philosophic studies which he himself regarded as
preparatory to some new and nobler flight of artistic creation. Of
course he had been aware all along, none better than he, that great
poetry cometh not by theorizing; that theory could have at the best only
a general regulative value. At the same time, with the example of
Lessing before him, he could not but feel that this regulative value
might be very great. And so he had gone resolutely on his way, even
after the dread truth had come home to him that he had not long to live
and might never be able to reap the fruit of what he was sowing.

He had studied certain epochs of history very carefully and had
acquired a deeper insight into that tangled interplay of inward motive
and outward circumstance which determines the course of events.
Philosophy had only deepened his early conviction that man's dignity,
his heroism, consists in his free self-determination; but who knew
better than he the infinite pathos of the battle between 'will' and
'must'? He had become familiar with the spirit and the technique of the
Greek drama and learned to admire its simple and stately architecture.
Latterly, however, he had been drawn toward the moderns and had found
in the expression of the modern spirit-with all its idealisms, its
heights and depths and mysteries of feeling--a higher artistic goal
than antiquity had ever imagined. Finally, his association with Goethe
had taught him the importance of looking fairly at life and portraying
it not indeed just as it is, but in its essential human spirit. This,
for him, was to idealize.

Two themes had been suggested by his historical studies, and both had
haunted his thoughts for years,--'The Knights of Malta' and
'Wallenstein'. The former, if his plan had been carried out, would have
yielded a play of the classical type, with few characters and a severely
simple structure. In the final balancing of the two subjects
'Wallenstein' prevailed, no doubt because it seemed in advance the
easier and the more promising. It pointed to a familiar field where
history itself had already shaped in the rough a stupendous and
fascinating tragedy. To reproduce the form and pressure of the Thirty
Years' War, at one of its most exciting moments, was an alluring problem
to a dramatist who had written a history of the struggle, and who had
always felt that his strength lay in the historical drama.

Serious musings upon 'Wallenstein' began, as we have seen, in the autumn
of 1796.[113] The first great problem was, of course, the general plan
of the piece,--how to select, dispose and concentrate. To quicken his
imagination Schiller commenced reading again upon the history of the
period and soon perceived that what he already knew would be quite
inadequate; that it would be necessary to go over the whole ground anew
and more thoroughly. He found the material dry, chaotic and abstract; in
short, lacking in nearly all the poetic elements which he would have
thought indispensable a few years before. He could not treat it in his
earlier manner. He had no love for any of his personages except Max and
Thekla, whom he had invented for the purpose of infusing a little warm
blood into an action which would otherwise have been dominated
altogether by the cold passions of ambition, vindictiveness and fear.
Wallenstein was not great or noble; at best he could only be made
terrible. The basis of his power was his army, and this--so it seemed to
Schiller at first--was too large and complex a thing to be effectively
portrayed. Then, too, his enterprise failed chiefly because of bad
management, and he himself rather than fate was to blame for his
catastrophe. This Schiller regarded as the weak point of the whole
subject; but he took some comfort from the example of 'Macbeth'.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, he worked at his task
with great eagerness, feeling that just such a subject as
'Wallenstein' would prove the crucial test of his powers. His old
theory that love is what makes the artist was now completely outgrown,
and he was gratified to observe that he had learned to keep himself
out of his work. So much for the influence of Goethe, to whom he
wrote, in November, 1796, as follows:

With the general spirit of my work you will probably be satisfied. I
might almost say that the subject does not interest me at all. I
have never combined such coolness toward my theme with such a warmth
of feeling for my work. My principal character, and the most of my
subordinate characters, I have treated up to this time with the pure
love of the artist.

After some hesitation between prose and verse he began in prose, being
led thereto partly by the advice of Wilhelm von Humboldt and partly by
his own desire to produce this time an acceptable stage-play. His
progress was at first very slow. There was endless reading to be done
and endless rumination over the plot. In the winter season, with its
close confinement and its lowered vitality, the invalid could accomplish
but little. He fixed his hopes longingly upon the return of spring and
decided to buy a house with a garden, so that he could muse and write in
the open air. In May, 1797, the purchase was made, but by this time work
on 'Wallenstein' had completely stagnated and other interests were at
the fore. He was back among the Greeks. Renewed study of Sophocles,
particularly of the 'Trachiniae' and the 'Philoctetes', had convinced
him that everything hinges upon the invention of a poetic fable. To
quote again from a letter to Goethe:

The modern poet wrestles laboriously and anxiously with accidental
and subordinate matters and, in his effort to be very realistic,
loads himself down with the vacuous and the trivial. Thus he runs a
risk of losing the deep-lying truth which constitutes the real
nature of the poetical. He would fain imitate an actual occurrence,
and does not consider that a poetic representation can never
coincide with actuality, because it is absolutely true.

A little later he took up the study of Aristotle's 'Poetics' and was
delighted to find that the dread Rhadamanthus was after all so very
liberal and sensible. He had now reached a firm footing and was not to
be dislodged even by Aristotle, whose whole body of doctrine, as he did
not fail to observe, was deduced empirically from concrete specimens of
a particular type of play. It could not be canonical for all the world,
but it was very instructive. Schiller was glad that he had finally
discovered Aristotle, but glad also that he had never read him before.

On returning to 'Wallenstein' in October, after the summer claims of the
'Almanac' had been satisfied, he noticed that what he had written was
characterized by a certain dryness. It was evident that, in his
strenuous effort to avoid his besetting sin of rhetoric, he was in
danger of becoming trivial. He had still a sustaining faith in the
goodness of his subject, but the great problem would be to make it
poetical. It was necessary to find the middle way between the rhetorical
and the prosaic. The practical result of these cogitations was a
decision to write 'Wallenstein' in verse. In versifying the completed
scenes he found himself, so he wrote to Goethe, before a different
tribunal. Much that had seemed very good in prose would not do at all;
for verse tended to invest everything with an imaginative nimbus which
rendered triviality and mere logic intolerable.

But the new form brought with it a new danger--that of prolixity. It was
necessary that the exposition account for Wallenstein's conduct by
exhibiting the sources of his power. This meant a dramatic picture of
his wild and irresponsible soldatesca. The theme was boundless and
Schiller was a facile verse-maker. Ere long he reported ruefully to
Goethe that his first act was already longer than three acts of
'Iphigenie'. He was in doubt whether his friend had not infected him
with a 'certain epic spirit' which tended to diffuseness. In his
embarrassment of riches he decided to give the preliminary picture the
form of a dramatic prologue having but a loose connection with the play
proper, which was still conceived as a five-act tragedy.

During the winter of 1797-8 he worked as he could, steadily upborne by
the friendly encouragement of Goethe. When summer arrived the last two
acts were still unfinished, and the first three had grown to portentous
dimensions. It was now that he decided to divide his unmanageable
tragedy into two parts, 'The Piccolomini' and 'Wallenstein's Death'; his
idea being that 'The Piccolomini', preceded by the dramatic prologue,
which was now christened 'Wallenstein's Camp', would fill up an evening
and prepare the way for the real tragedy of 'Wallenstein's Defection and
Death'. This plan, involving a reconstruction of the whole, was carried
out in the ensuing months. At the urgent request of Goethe, preparations
were made to reopen the newly-renovated Weimar theater with a
performance of the 'Camp' alone. As the piece was too short for this
purpose, Schiller hastily amplified it to a sufficient size and wrote
for it a noble prologue, which ranks among the best of his poems. When
played at Weimar, in October, 1798, the 'Camp' was well received as a
picturesque novelty, but that was all. It gave no clew to what was
coming, and there was nothing in it to stir the depths of human nature.

'The Piccolomini' was completed in December and put upon the Weimar
stage, under Schiller's personal direction, on January 30, 1799. As then
performed it included two acts of 'Wallenstein's Death'. The first
performance was a great success. The Weimarians, with Goethe at their
head, were enthusiastic; and Schiller, who had of late known but little
of popular favor, found himself suddenly invested with a new renown. He
was pleased, elated; from this time on he felt sure of his vocation as
dramatic poet. Returning to Jena he applied himself steadily to
'Wallenstein's Death', completing it finally in March. It was first
played on the 20th of April, preceded at short intervals by the 'Camp'
and 'The Piccolomini'. And great indeed was the poet's triumph, now that
his achievement could be judged as a whole. He had given his best after
years of preparation, and the world saw at once that it was very good.
The animosities aroused by the Xenia lingered for a while in a few small
minds, but it was of no use to fight genius with the missiles of petty
malice. The Germans had accepted Schiller as their great dramatist.

To form a right estimate of 'Wallenstein' one must first look at it in a
large way, remembering that structurally it forms a class all by itself.
The name 'trilogy', in the technical sense of the Greeks, does not apply
to it, seeing that the 'Camp' is not an integral part of the whole, but
a dramatic prelude in an entirely different key. In a loose sense, to be
sure, it forms a part of the exposition; but it can be omitted entirely,
if one chooses, since everything technically necessary to be known is
repeated in 'The Piccolomini'. Its characters are different and nothing
is said or done that is vitally related to the ensuing complication. Its
purpose is to show the nature of Wallenstein's soldiers and the grounds
of their attachment to their commander. Their loyalty is of course the
great factor in Wallenstein's position; it is because he relies upon
their fidelity that he dares to dally with the thought of treason. But
this fidelity of theirs, their sturdy _esprit du corps_, their
unwillingness to be separated, could have been indicated in a scene, or
in the report of a messenger; in fact it _is_ indicated in the memorial
which they place in the hands of Max Piccolomini.

The 'Camp', then, with its eleven-hundred verses, is to be regarded as a
military genre-picture, elaborated for its own sake into an independent
piece. As a prelude it transports us into the _milieu_ of the tragedy,
but without anywhere striking its key-note; for the tragedy is intensely
serious, while the note of the 'Camp',--notwithstanding an undertone of
seriousness without which it could not have been the work of
Schiller,--is that of jovial humor. And the poet's scheme required just
this effect in the prelude. One can hardly assent, therefore, to the
suggestion of Harnack[114] that it would have been well if the sentiment
of loyalty to the emperor had been made more prominent and given a more
worthy champion than the stolid Tiefenbachers, who have nothing to say.
Had this been attempted it must have led to an adumbration of the coming
tragic conflict,--which is what Schiller wished to avoid. He wished that
spectator and reader should accept the prelude as a thing of its own
kind, complete in itself. It was for this reason that he gave it a
distinctive meter, having convinced himself that meter of some kind was
essential if he would avoid banality. With a wise instinct he chose the
old free-and-easy tetrameter, which Goethe had used with excellent
effect in some of his early plays. In German this meter lends itself
beautifully to the bluff, off-hand discourse of soldiers. It gives an
illusion of realism while preserving the effect of poetry.

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