The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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How much of this literature fell into the hands of Schiller at the
academy can not be told with perfect certainty, but it would seem that
very little of it escaped him. He read and was deeply touched by
Gerstenberg's 'Ugolino', with its horrific picture of the agonies of
starvation. He read the early writings of Goethe, of Leisewitz and of
Klinger, and was touched by the woes of Miller's Siegwart. In 'Emilia
Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust,
he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in
which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the
Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy
forms of the Celtic bard, big with their indefinable woe, increased the
turmoil of his soul. Probably he read Rousseau more or less, though
direct evidence of the fact is lacking. At any rate the air was
surcharged with Rousseauite feeling. Certainly he read Plutarch and
Cervantes, and along with all these came Shakspere,[12] to whom he was
introduced--in the Wieland translation--by his favorite teacher, Abel.

The effect of this reading upon the mind of Schiller was prodigious. It
changed the native docility of his temper, weaned him completely from
his seraphic proclivities and carried him with a rush into the
mid-current of the literary revolution. There came a time when the young
medical student, faithfully pursuing his routine and on festal occasions
spouting fervid panegyrics of the noble Karl and the divine Franziska,
was not altogether what he seemed to be. There was another Schiller,
burning with literary ambition and privately engaged in forging a
thunderbolt.

Two dramatic attempts preceded 'The Robbers'. The first had to do with
Cosmo dei Medici; the second, called 'The Student of Nassau', was based
upon a newspaper story of suicide. Both were destroyed by their
disgusted author, in what stage of progress we do not know. Still he was
not discouraged; the tragic drama was clearly his field and he might
succeed better the next time. But where to find a subject? His
perplexity became so great that, as he said later, he would have given
his last shirt for a good theme. Finally, in the year 1777, his friend
Hoven drew his attention to a story by Schubart that had lately been
published in the _Suabian Magazine_,--a story of a father and his two
dissimilar sons, one of them frank and noble-minded but wild, the other
a plausible moralist but at heart a scoundrel. Schiller took the hint
and began to write, his interest being no doubt increased by the
miserable fate of Schubart, who was then languishing in the Hohenasperg
as the helpless victim of Karl Eugen's pusillanimous tyranny.[13]

Just how much progress was made with 'The Robbers' in the year 1777 is
not known; probably not much, for Schiller soon decided to drop his
literary pursuits for the present and devote himself closely to his
medical studies. Perhaps he may have hoped by hard work to finish his
course in four years instead of the expected five. At any rate he now
bent to his toil and allowed the play to lie dormant in his mind. In
1779 he submitted a thesis on 'The Philosophy of Physiology', but it was
judged unfit for print. The professors condemned it variously as
tedious, florid, obscure, and, worst of all, disrespectful toward
recognized authorities such as Haller. In these judgments the duke
concurred. He found that Eleve Schiller had said many fine things and in
particular had shown much 'fire'. But the fire was too strong; it needed
to be 'subdued' by another year of study.

It has usually been assumed by Schiller's biographers that in his
intense longing for liberty he was embittered by this disappointment,
and that in his mood of wrath he now took up his neglected play and
poured into it, hissing hot, the whole fury of his quarrel with the
world. There is, however, no evidence that he really hoped to win his
release from the academy in the year 1779, or that the thesis just
spoken of was regarded as a graduation thesis.[14] Neither his own
letters nor those of his friends indicate that he was angry at being
kept in school another year. Probably the critics have made too much
out of this factor of personal disgruntlement. Schiller was a poetic
artist, and his first play is much more than the wild expression of a
plucked student's resentment. Nevertheless it is only natural to
suppose that his proud and ambitious spirit chafed more or less under
the requirements of an academic routine that his manhood had
outgrown. That he succeeded after all, at the end of the year 1779,
in capturing a number of prizes and received them in the presence of
Goethe and the Duke of Weimar, who happened just then to be visiting
Stuttgart, could do but little to sweeten the bitter dose that had
been prescribed for him.

He now set about the preparation of a new thesis, and in the intervals
of his professional occupation he worked with feverish energy upon 'The
Robbers'. To gain time for writing he would often feign illness, and
when the duke or an inspector surprised him would hide his manuscript in
a big medical treatise kept at hand for the purpose. A few comrades who
were in the secret eagerly watched the progress of his work and
vociferously applauded the scenes which he now and then read to them.
One of these comrades has left it on record that in the excitement of
composition Schiller would often stamp and snort and roar.--And thus it
was, in the stolen hours of the night and driven by the demon that
possessed him, that he bodied forth his titanic drama of revolt. It was
virtually finished during the year 1780. In after-time Schiller reasoned
himself into the conviction that art must be 'cheerful',[15] but very
little of cheerfulness went to the composition of 'The Robbers'. It was
the disburthening of an oppressed soul that suffered horribly at times
from morbid melancholy--the chicken-pox of youthful genius. A letter of
June, 1780, shows how he had battled with the specters of despair.
Writing to Captain von Hoven, whose son had lately died, he says:

A thousand times I envied your son as he was wrestling with death,
and would have given up my life as calmly as I go to bed. I am not
yet twenty-one years old, but I can tell you frankly that the world
has no further charm for me. I have no delight in thinking of the
world, and the day of my departure from the academy, which a few
years ago would have been a day of festal joy, will not be able to
force one happy smile from me. With each step, as I grow older, I
lose more and more of my contentedness; and the nearer I come to the
age of maturity, the more I could wish that I had died in childhood.

This sounds gloomy enough, but the desperate mood did not last long, A
number of medical reports written in the summer of 1780 indicate that
Schiller was able to take the calm professional view of a case very
similar to his own. A fellow-student named Grammont was afflicted with
hypochondria, and Schiller was set to watch him. His analysis of the
case is eminently sane. He finds it difficult to decide whether the
young man's malady has its seat in the mind or in the bowels: whether
too much brooding over hard problems has ruined his digestion and
given him a headache, or whether a physical derangement has confused
his ideas of duty and religion. He thinks there is a fair chance of
curing the patient by means of medicine and good advice.--A youth who
can talk thus of another's _Weltschmerz_ is himself in no great danger
from the malady.

In November, 1780, he submitted a new thesis upon 'The Connection
between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature'. In this essay he considers
the question whether, for the purposes of moral perfection, the body is
to be regarded as the enemy and gaoler of the soul, or as its friend and
coadjutor. The drift of his argument is to show in detail the dependence
of the spirit upon the flesh. Finding that philosophers have been unjust
to the body, he comes to its rescue,--expounding good doctrine in an
interesting though rather florid and unprofessional style. In the course
of his philosophizing he perpetrates the sly joke of quoting from his
own manuscript play and ascribing the words to an imaginary 'Life of
Moor', by one Krake.--Further comment upon the essay may be dispensed
with,[16] seeing that Schiller as a medical man does not greatly
interest us at the present time. Enough that it was accepted and
procured him his release from bondage toward the close of the year.

Afterwards, in the bitterness of his quarrel with the Duke of
Wuerttemberg, Schiller took an altogether gloomy view of the training he
had received at the Military Academy. He saw only the forcing process to
which he had been subjected, the narrow life that had kept him from a
knowledge of the world, and the petty restrictions that had prevented
his love of poetry from developing in a sane and natural manner.
However, it is always the poet's fate to grow strong through his own
gifts and his own trials; what schools of any kind can do for him or
against him is of comparatively little moment. Had Schiller enjoyed in
his youth the freedom of a real university, his literary career would no
doubt have opened differently, and with another beginning the whole
would have been different; but whether it would then have interested the
world after a hundred years, as that of the real Schiller does, is a
question for omniscience. Speaking humanly one can only say that the
misguided paternalism of Karl Eugen in rousing the tiger proved a
blessing in disguise. And the schooling itself was by no means so
despicable. Schiller left the academy a good Latinist, though with but
little Greek. He had learned to read French, if not English. He had
dabbled in such philosophy as there was going and acquired an interest
in the fundamental problems. He had read not widely but intensely--which
is always better. He had made a number of good friends. And not least
important for his future career, he had had an excellent opportunity to
observe the forms and usages of high life.[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: What is known of her has been put together by Ernst Mueller,
in "Schillers Mutter, ein Lebensbild", Leipzig, 1894.]

[Footnote 2: "Unsere Mutter naehrt sich gleichsam von bestaendiger Sorge",
wrote her son to his sister in 1784.]

[Footnote 3: As quoted by Schiller's sister-in-law, Karoline von
Wolzogen, in her 'Life of Schiller', first published in 1830. The
Baroness von Wolzogen quoted from a manuscript by Christophine, which
was at that time in the family archives and has since been published in
the _Archiv fuer Litteraturgeschichte_, I, 452. Christophine wrote down
her recollections in order to counteract the false stories of Schiller's
childhood which began to get into print soon after his death. Of this
character, for example, is the oft-repeated tale of his climbing a tree
during a thunder-storm in order to see where the lightning came from.
This is an invention of Oemler, his earliest biographer, who invented
much besides.]

[Footnote 4: An excellent account of him is to be found in Vol. 15 of
"Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie".]

[Footnote 5: By Schiller's youthful friend Petersen, _Morgenblatt_,
1807; quoted by Weltrich, "Friedrich Schiller", I, 77, and by other
biographers.]

[Footnote 6: Wilhelm von Hoven, quoted by Karoline von Wolzogen.]

[Footnote 7: As reported by his friend Conz, _Morgenblatt_, 1807. Cf.
Weltrich, p. 80, foot-note.]

[Footnote 8: For example: Cuvier, Dannecker and the musician Zumsteeg.
The pros and cons of the Karlschule are discussed very fully by Weltrich
and also by Minor in their biographies of Schiller.]

[Footnote 9: For example:

Und mit offenem Schlund, welcher Gebirge schluckt,
Ihn das Weltmeer mir nach,--ihn mir der Orkus nach
Durch die Hallen des Todes--
Deinen Namen, Eroberer!]

[Footnote 10: Weltrich, p. 182, argues that the poem is spurious. The
question is hard to decide.]

[Footnote 11: "Goetz von Berlichingen", Act I.]

[Footnote 12: The acquaintance began, it would seem, in 1775 or 1776. At
first Schiller was repelled by Shakspere's 'coldness',--his intermixture
of humor and buffoonery with pathos. Of this first impression he wrote
many years later, in his essay on 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry', as
follows: "Durch die Bekanntschaft mit neueren Poeten verleitet, in den
Werken den _Dichter_ zuerst aufzusuchen, _seinem Herzen_ zu begegnen ...
war es mir unertraglich, dasz der Poet sich hier gar nirgends fassen
liesz und mir nirgends Rede stehen wollte. Mehrere Jahre hatte er meine
ganze Verehrung, und war mein Studium, ehe ich sein Individuum lieb
gewinnen konnte. Ich war noch nicht faehig, die Natur aus erster Hand zu
verstehen."]

[Footnote 13: Schubart's crime was the utterance of a mild poetic
lampoon to the effect that 'when Dionysius of Syracuse was compelled to
go out of the tyranny business he became a Schulmeisterlein.' He had
also commented too frankly on the duke's relation to Franziska. Angered
by these things Karl caused him to be tricked over the borders into
Wuerttemberg, seized, and without trial shut up in the dungeon of
Hohenasperg, where he was kept for ten years (1777-1787). Schiller
visited him in November, 1781, and was received with tears of joy as the
author of 'The Robbers'.]

[Footnote 14: Cf. Weltrich, I, 278.]

[Footnote 15: "Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst."--_Prologue to
'Wallenstein'_.]

[Footnote 16: Weltrich, I, 298 ff., analyzes it and discusses its
scientific value at some length.]

[Footnote 17: Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften", I, 139, has some very
interesting remarks on this subject. "Woher gewann er [says Fischer],
der Sohn eines Dorfbarbiers,... eine solche sichere und eingelebte
Anschauung, ich moechte sagen, Fuehlung fuerstlichen Wesens, wenn nicht
Herzog Karl, ein Meister in der Kunst fuerstlichen Repraesentierens, ihn
zum Modell gedient haette?"]

CHAPTER II

The Robbers

O ueber mich Narren, der ich waehnete die Welt durch Greuel zu
verschoenern und die Gesetze durch Gesetzlosigkeit aufrecht zu
erhalten.--'_The Robbers_'.

After leaving the academy Schiller soon began to look about for a
publisher of his precious manuscript. Not finding one he presently
decided to borrow money and print the play at his own expense. It
appeared in the spring of 1781, accompanied by a modest preface in which
the anonymous author pronounced his work unsuited to the stage but hoped
it would be acceptable as a moral contribution to literature. In less
than a year it had been played with ever memorable success and ere long
it was the talk of Germany.

In dealing with 'The Robbers' it has always been much easier to point
out faults than to do justice. Schiller himself set the fashion of a
drastic criticism which had the effect of advertising 'The Robbers' as a
violent youthful explosion containing more to be apologized for than to
be admired. And indeed it is not a masterpiece of good taste. Upon an
adult mind possessing some knowledge of the world's dramatic literature
at its best, and particularly if the piece be read and not seen,
Schiller's first play is very apt to produce the impression of a boyish
extravaganza. The sentimental bandit who nourishes his mighty soul on
the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by
running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure
upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in
our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful.
Emotionally we have lost touch with him as we have with Byron's Corsair.
When he stalks across the serious stage and rages and fumes and wipes
his bloody sword, we are inclined to smile or to yawn. As for the
villain Franz, with his abysmal depravity, and Amalia, with her witless
sentimentalism, we find it hard to take them seriously; they do not
produce a good illusion. And then the whole style of the piece, the
violent and ribald language, the savage action, the rant and swagger,
the shooting and stabbing,--all this seems at first calculated for the
entertainment of young savages, and moves one to approve the oft-quoted
_mot_ of the German prince who said to Goethe: 'If I had been God and
about to create the world, and had I foreseen that Schiller would write
'The Robbers' in it, I should not have created it.'[18]

This is one side of the story. The other side is that 'The Robbers'
made an epoch in German dramatic literature. Not only is it the
strongest and completest expression of the eighteenth-century storm and
stress, but it proved a highly effective stage-play. Nor was its
success ephemeral. Its author quickly outgrew it, but it maintained
itself during the entire period of Germany's leadership in matters of
dramatic art, and even to-day it preserves much of its old vitality. It
is true that when a modern audience assembles to see a performance of
'The Robbers', they are not impelled solely by the intrinsic merits of
the piece. Loyalty to the great dramatic poet of the nation plays its
part. People think: Thus our Schiller began,--and they expect to make
allowances. But when all such allowances are made, it remains true that
'The Robbers' is a powerful stage-play which reveals in every scene the
hand of the born dramatist. We may call it boyish if we will, but its
boyishness is like that of 'Titus Andronicus'. Each is the work of a
young giant who in learning the use of his hammer lays about him
somewhat wildly and makes a tremendous hubbub. But Thor is Thor, and
such boys are not born every day.

The starting-point of Schiller's invention was the conception of the two
hostile brothers, and this he had from Schubart, although other writers,
notably Klinger and Leisewitz, had already made use of it in dramatic
productions. In the Schubart story[19] we hear of a nobleman with two
sons, of whom the elder, Karl, is high-minded but dissolute, while the
younger, Wilhelm, is a hypocritical zealot. Karl plays the role of the
prodigal son and his excesses are duly reported at home by his brother.
After a while the sinner repents and writes his father a remorseful
letter, which is intercepted by Wilhelm. Then the older brother returns
to the vicinity of his home and takes service with a poor farmer. Here
it falls to his lot to rescue his father from the hands of assassins. It
turns out that the instigator of the murder was no other than Wilhelm.
When the plot is discovered the magnanimous Karl entreats pardon for his
vile brother. His prayer is granted, Wilhelm receives a share of the
estate and all ends in happy tears.--In publishing the sketch Schubart
recommended it to the geniuses of the day as an excellent foundation for
a novel or a comedy. Here was a chance, he thought, to prove that the
Germans, notwithstanding the servility of their pens, were not the
spiritless race that foreigners saw in them; 'to show that we too, in
spite of our oppressive forms of government, which permit only a
condition of passivity, are men who have their passions and can act, no
less than a Frenchman or a Briton.' He therefore cautioned any
playwright who might try his hand upon the subject to lay the scene not
in a foreign country but in contemporary Germany.

We see here the thought that struck fire in the mind of young Schiller,
whose bent was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong
passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the
degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the
passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become
vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the
very field for a mad Ajax who should make havoc among the cowards and
the pigmies. In Schubart's tragi-comedy there are no heroic passions
whatever. Nothing is conceived in a large and bold way. The characters
live and move throughout in the little world of their own selfish
interests. Such a piece, in which the penitent hero bends his back to
the plow and weakly pardons an abominable crime, did not comport with
Schiller's mood of fierce indignation. So he converted the story into a
tragedy and turned Schubart's meek and forgiving prodigal into a
terrible avenger of mankind.

In the contrasted brothers we see what Minor[20] well enough calls the
hot and cold passions. Karl is a hotspur whose emotions are always keyed
up to the highest pitch; he is never calm and is incapable of sober
reasoning. His boiling blood and his insensate ambition are his only
oracles. We may say that his motives are lofty, but in trying to set the
world right and make it conform to his perfervid dreams of justice and
freedom, he becomes a madman and a criminal. Franz, on the other hand,
represents the scheming intellect sundered from conscience and natural
feeling. He is a monster of cool, calculating, hypocritical villainy. At
the end he cowers in abject terror before the phantom conscience that he
has reasoned out of existence in the first act. The portrait of the two
brothers, as thus conceived, is crudely simple. There are no delicacies
of shading, no subtleties of psychological analysis. In short, Robber
Moor and his brother give the impression of having been made to a scheme
rather than copied from nature. Nevertheless the scheme is conceived
with superb audacity and executed with a dramatic power and insight that
had never been surpassed in Germany.

To understand the furore created by 'The Robbers' one should read two
other storm-and-stress plays, by writers of no mean dramatic talent,
which present the same fundamental situation,[21]--'The Twins', by
Klinger, and 'Julius of Tarentum', by Leisewitz. Both these plays came
out in the year 1776 and were evidently studied with care by Schiller.
Both follow the timid example which had been set by Lessing of laying
the scene in a foreign land, Klinger gives us two brothers, Guelfo and
Ferdinando, of whom neither the mother nor her physician can tell which
was born first. But Ferdinando has always been treated as the elder, has
enjoyed the favor of his father, risen to power and distinction and won
the prize in love. He is of a noble and forgiving temper and plays only
a subordinate part. The hero is Guelfo, who, like Schiller's Karl Moor,
has read Plutarch and would fain do something great, like Brutus or
Cassius. But he remains after all only a poor knight. His hand is
unnerved and his heroic spirit paralyzed by the suspicion that he has
been the life-long victim of a conspiracy; that he and not Ferdinando is
the elder brother. The whole interest of the play turns upon the
portraiture of his morbid, insensate jealousy. In the fourth act he
takes a morning ride with his brother and murders him. Then he defiantly
reports the deed at home and is himself slain by his father.

In 'Julius of Tarentum' the younger brother, Guido, is, again, the man
of action; a _miles gloriosus_ who boasts of his strong arm and dreams
of glory. He looks with contempt and hatred upon his gentle, sentimental
brother Julius, who, though heir to the throne, prepares to renounce his
career because he is thwarted in love. The girl Blanca, upon whom he has
fixed his affections, is not deemed a suitable bride for him by his
father and has been shut up in a convent. He determines to abduct her by
night and flee with her to some romantic spot in the far north. In the
execution of this purpose he is killed by his jealous brother Guido, who
is then made to suffer death at the hands of his own father.

In both these plays we have, as in 'The Robbers', an aged father whose
dynastic hopes center in an excellent son; this son the object of mad
jealousy on the part of a younger brother, and both brothers in love
with the same girl. The plays exhibit talent of a high order, but talent
that always falls short of genius. Psychical states are portrayed by
means of talk, and the talk is big enough; but very little actually
happens. The mighty passions have to be taken largely upon trust and the
conversation often drags. Dramatic possibilities are not fully grasped,
the situations are felt but not seen, and there is an obvious reluctance
to make unusual demands upon the stage. Even Klinger, whose play of
'Storm and Stress' gave a name to the whole contemporary movement in
German literature, reads tamely enough in comparison with 'The Robbers'.
But what is most noteworthy of all, Klinger and Leisewitz give us simply
dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a
single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life
with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the
larger tangle of human destiny.

This last is what the young Schiller did with masterly insight. He
converted the dynastic tragedy of his predecessors into a tragedy of the
social revolution; and his work has lived because we can hear in it the
preliminary roar of the storm which was soon to burst in the streets of
Paris.[22] He laid his scene not in far-off Italy nor in the remote
past, but in Germany and in the middle of the century which boasted of
its enlightened philosophy and its excellent police regulations. Of the
two brothers he took the sentimentalist for his hero, but made him at
the same time a man of action, a man of heroic mould and a self-helper.
The logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What
the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the
badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason,
the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to
nature,--all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he does not content
himself with indignant rhetoric or sentimental repining. He takes arms
against the sea of troubles. Instead of an excellent youth pitifully
done to death by a jealous brother, we get a towering idealist who is
the moulder of his own fate. With sublime [Greek: hubris] he takes it
upon himself to wield the avenging bolts of Jove, but finds that Jove
rejects his assistance. He errs disastrously in his judgment, like any
short-sighted mortal, and his work goes all agley. But when the end
comes it is not depressing. We see no longer a revolting fratricide and
the painful sacrifice of virtue to the meanest of passions, but the
verdict of the gods upon human presumption.

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