The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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As already remarked, the lectures of Schlegel were sufficiently urbane
in tone and gave no foretaste of that bitterness with which he
subsequently attacked Schiller in some of his poems. What is here
important to observe is that Schlegel, and the other Romanticists who
took their cue from him, set the vogue of judging Goethe and Schiller
according to their imagined resemblance to Shakspere. Certain catchwords
and phrases, such as universality, objectivity, irony, and what not,
were imported into the literature of discussion, and these concepts were
used as absolute criteria by which to write Goethe up and Schiller down.
This naturally provoked the many friends of Schiller, and they replied
by assailing Goethe. His 'universality' was decried as a lamentable
weakness: it meant lack of character, of principle, of patriotism. His
pleasing form was only the seductive veil of immorality and
pococurantism. And so the controversy raged, becoming at last, in some
cases, mere blind fury. One who would like to get a vivid impression of
the state of German criticism at this time, and of the extent to which
partisanship could obfuscate the vision of an intelligent and
well-meaning man, should read the third volume of Wolfgang Menzel's
'German Literature', published in 1828. Menzel's treatment of Goethe is
one long diatribe of misrepresentation, becoming at times a mere
ululation of malignant hatred. Schiller, on the other hand, is exalted
to the skies as the peerless representative of all that is noble in
human nature and in poetry.

This fierce old battle of pen and ink, which was really a disgrace to
German civilization, is still capable of affording, for the passionate
fury and wrong-headedness of it, a modicum of amusement to the
retrospective scholar of to-day. And it amused Goethe, who as usual
found the sane point of view. Said he to Eckermann, one day in the year
1825: 'These twenty years the public has been contending as to which is
the greater, Schiller or I; they ought rather to be glad that they have
a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with
Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his
friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a
bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said
he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work
of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater
than these gentlemen.' He freely criticized this and that in particular
plays, observing that there was 'something violent' in Schiller's
methods; he even committed himself to the dubious conjecture that
certain weak passages might be due to physical exhaustion or to the
unwholesome stimulation of flagging energies. But the ever recurring
burden of his discourse was--_Er war ein praechtiger Mensch_.

The death of Goethe, in 1832, brought to an end conspicuously the epoch
of the Weimarian poets. Indeed it had ended virtually long before, but
it was not until Goethe too had become a memory that its significance
was fully realized. The Germans now saw, and the rest of the world saw
too, that they had a classical literature which really counted. They
began to speak of 'our classics', and to compare and contrast
them with the newest literary manifestations. Writers of every
kind,--philosophers, literary critics and historians, poets, novelists,
journalists, politicians and agitators,--had now to adjust themselves
mentally to Goethe and Schiller and what they stood for, or were
supposed to stand for. And so the river of literature, which in our day
has become a great Amazon, commenced flowing in a small, but steady and
ever widening stream. Hoffmeister's monumental biography of Schiller, in
five volumes, appeared between 1838 and 1842, and in the ensuing years
there came a procession of less thorough biographers, writing more for
the unlearned public. The criticism of him as a poet and a dramatist was
still subordinated, in a large degree, to the consideration of him as
the prophet of ideas which were to be examined with reference to their
ethical and moral value, or to the degree of their applicability to then
existing conditions.

The period now under consideration is, roughly speaking, the period from
the beginning of acute political agitation, about 1830, to the
realization of national unity in 1871. During the first part of this era
academic philosophy was still largely under the influence of Hegel, but
the reaction had set in and was destined to grow into a widespread
distrust of all speculative philosophy. Not to explain and justify the
existing world by the arachnean method of spinning a _Weltanschauung_
out of one's own interior, but to make the world different,--was the new
watchword. It was widely felt that Germans had speculated and theorized
and dreamed too much; it was time to assert their strength in practical
affairs. Men's minds began to be engaged with questions of political
reform and social regeneration. It was no longer the ideal, the good,
the beautiful and the true, that pressed for consideration, but
constitutional government, the freedom of the press, popular
representation and, above all, German unity. But chaos seemed to reign
in the intellectual sphere. Young Germany, so called, began a noisy
agitation which had no definite goal in view, but was characterized by a
fierce hostility to existing forms in church and state,--to princes,
aristocrats, priests, Christian marriage and conventional morality. And
there were other agitations, doctrines, theories and tendencies
innumerable. Germany had become, to revive a comparison then much in
vogue, an irresolute Hamlet, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought. Talk, talk, everywhere, and nowhere the strong hand of
constructive statesmanship. And so came the abortive revolution of 1848,
with its ensuing disgusts, until finally the man of destiny appeared and
conducted affairs, by way of Sadowa and Sedan, to the new German Empire.

Now in that era of the doctrinaires, of the philosophical break-up and
of seething political passions, it was but natural that those who
thought of Schiller at all thought not so much of the dramatic artist as
of the prophet whose sentiments could be quoted for present edification
or reproof. The men of the middle part of the century judged him
generally from the partisan standpoint of their own political,
philosophical and religious prejudices. This is true not only of the
forgotten criticasters, but of the most famous, the most widely read and
the most authoritative literary historians of the time, such as Gervinus
and Vilmar. And in the domain of pure dramatic criticism, or what
purported to be such, there was quite too much of that captious
dogmatism which had come down from the Romanticists and which had its
origin, as we have seen, in the habit of regarding Shakspere, not as the
great dramatist of a nation and an epoch, but as _the_ universal modern
poet, whose methods and peculiarities must be canonical for
everybody.[132] Instead of looking fairly and squarely at Schiller's
plays and endeavoring to understand and interpret them as the expression
of the life of a past epoch, and of an artistic individuality which had
its own right to be and to grow in its own way, the dogmatic critics
treated him, in many cases, _de haut en bas_, as if they knew everything
better than he. Men who would have thought it a little absurd to assail
Mont Blanc for not being Chimborazo did not scruple to gird at Schiller
for not being something else than that which his nature made him. And so
it was that the great dramatic poet of the nation, whose plays were
daily proving their vitality in scores of theaters and were giving
pleasure to millions of readers, was treated oftentimes with incredible
severity by pompous Rhadamanthine critics who did not see that they were
thereby making themselves and their critical pretensions slightly
ridiculous.

Of course this line of remark is not meant to imply that the works of
anybody should have been regarded as above criticism because they were
popular and had become classical. What is intended is simply to
characterize a past critical epoch which, in dealing with imaginative
literature, cared a little too much for abstract dogmas and
theoretical standpoints; which, instead of trying to enter humanly
into the spirit of an author and to judge him according to the nature
of his intentions and his success in carrying them out, preferred to
lay him on a bed of Procrustes and hack at him with the axe of
philosophy. Literature, like language, goes on its way with very
little tenderness for theories and dogmas. That which meets the needs
of human nature lives and after a while its 'faults' are forgotten; or
mayhap they come to be regarded as merits, and the rules are extended
to include the new case. Not to have seen this quite clearly enough
was a weakness of the vigorous and rigorous German critics of half a
century ago. And yet, some of them did see it dimly now and then.
Reference was made a moment ago to Gervinus,--certainly one of the
most learned, thoughtful and generally meritorious of German literary
historians,--and it was implied that he too was affected by the bias
of his age. It is thus a pleasure to quote a passage from him which
shows him in a different light. It is from the fifth volume of his
'National-Litteratur der Deutschen', published in 1842:

If one insists on condemning 'Wallenstein' as a whole because one
must reject the episode (of Max and Thekla), then one blinds oneself
deliberately to great merits on account of small faults. The
historical critic feels clearly here the disadvantage in which a
living or recently deceased writer is placed, in comparison with an
earlier one whose entire individuality has receded into the distance
and is beyond the strife of the passions. Soon after Shakspere's
death there was the same quarrel about him that we are having now
about Schiller. To-day that which was imputed to him as vice is so
interblended with his virtues that it is regarded as trivial to
waste a serious word upon it. So it may be one day with our poets;
and then people will look at the faults in Schiller's compositions
from other points of view. We shall then manage to get along with
what was done and accepted long ago, and content ourselves with
explaining it; whereas now, at the beginning of its course, though
we cannot unmake it, we think perhaps to prevent its acceptance and
deprive it of immortality by rejecting it unexplained.

Here is certainly a highly interesting modern case of the fulfillment
of prophecy.

Another phase of the Schiller-question which was much discussed in the
middle portion of the nineteenth century was his aesthetic idealism.
While his plays carry one into the rushing currents of life, and while
his ballads are poems of action, it was possible to extract from his
'Letters on Aesthetic Education' and from some of his poems, notably
'The Ideal and Life', what seemed to be a message of aesthetic quietism;
a message which appeared to say that the attainment of inward peace,
freedom and harmony was the highest goal of human effort. Naturally
enough the individualism and aestheticism of the Weimarian poets were
not welcome doctrine to an excited generation that had caught a glimpse
of an immense work to be done for the fatherland. The ever increasing
pressure of social emotions made it seem a selfish and unmanly thing to
be so concerned about one's own spiritual equipoise. This feeling finds
frequent expression in the literature of the time; and so much was it
harped on, and so feebly were the countervailing considerations
presented, that many people, both in Germany and outside of it, got into
their heads a radically wrong conception of the Weimarian Dioscuri; a
conception which quite forgot that both of them, all their lives long,
were very strenuous workers, strongly possessed by the social sentiment.
And even those who were too wise to be thus completely misled as to the
significance and the value of the Weimarian legacy could not help
feeling that for the present, at least, it were better regarded as a
dead issue. One can understand the sentiment with which Gervinus closed
his great history of the national literature: 'The rival contest of the
arts is finished. Now we should set before us the other mark, which no
archer among us has yet hit, and see if peradventure Apollo will grant
us here too the renown that he did not refuse us there.'

But while the critics and doctrinaires were contending thus variously
about the merits of Schiller, his name endeared itself more and more to
the many who were chafing under the regime of princely absolutism and
were longing for a freer Germany. They idealized him as the poet of
liberty,--chiefly, it would seem, on account of 'William Tell', or,
among radical and boisterous youth, on account of 'The Robbers'; for the
'freedom' of his poems is a metaphysical rather than a political
concept. In the year 1844 Freiligrath committed himself definitively to
the cause of 'the people', as he understood it, which proved to be the
cause of the Red Republicans. In announcing his conversion he wrote a
poem called 'Good Morning', the last stanza of which, done into rough
English rime, runs thus:

Good morning then! Behold a freeman here,
Walking henceforward in the people's ways;
For with the people is the poet's sphere,--
'Tis thus I read my Schiller nowadays.[133]

But he read him quite wrongly. For a much saner view of this question
one should go back to honest Eckermann, who reports Goethe as saying to
him in 1824: 'Schiller, who, between ourselves, was much more of an
aristocrat than I, has the remarkable fortune to count as a particular
friend of the people.' This is exactly right. Neither man had in him
much of the stuff that tribunes of the people are made of, but Schiller
had less of it than Goethe. His whole temper was that of an aristocrat.
Had he lived in the forties of the nineteenth century, we may be very
sure that he would have scented a return of the French Terror, and would
have spoken, if at all, as an arch-conservative.

And really there is but cold comfort in 'William Tell' for those who, in
the revolutionary epoch, were clamoring against princes as such. The
play is in no sense anti-monarchical, nor is it either German or
un-German, but simply human. As a curious illustration of the unreason
that men could once be guilty of through their habit of regarding
Schiller as a political poet, it is worth while to quote a passage from
Vilmar, whose history of German literature enjoyed great popularity half
a century ago. Speaking of 'William Tell', Vilmar has this to say:

For the rest it is remarkable that Schiller's contemporaries and a
large part of posterity looked upon 'Tell' as a peculiarly German
play, and that too in respect of its subject-matter. They conceived
it as a glorification of German deeds and held it up to admiration
as a sort of symbol of German sentiment, in opposition to the French
policy of subjugation in 1806-1813; the fact being that Tell's deed,
as it appears in the saga and in Schiller's drama, represents and
glorifies the unfortunate and in part criminal detachment of
Switzerland from the German Empire. Napoleon was in those days the
only one who saw this and expressed his amazement that Germans could
thus praise such a thoroughly anti-German play as a drama glorifying
the German fatherland.

It is sufficient to remark, if the matter were of any importance, that
the Swiss revolution, as portrayed by Schiller, is not directed
against the Empire, but against the brutes sent out by the Hapsburg
dynasty in pursuance of a policy of dynastic aggrandizement. In
numerous passages it is brought out that the very thing the
conspirators are concerned about is to preserve their ancient
_Reichsunmittelbarkeit_. All that they wish is to get back and
perpetuate the liberties they have until lately enjoyed _under the
Empire_. 'Freedom' nowhere means 'independence', and there is no vista
of independence at the end of the play.

The year 1859 was marked by a prodigious ebullition of Schiller
enthusiasm. While the hundredth birthday of Goethe had passed, ten years
before, with but little notice, that of Schiller was made the occasion
of a demonstration the like of which the modern world has hardly seen
made in honor of any other poet whatsoever. In every part of Germany,
and not in Germany only but in Austria, Switzerland, England and the New
World, the memory of Schiller was honored in speech and song, in the
unveiling of monuments, and in commemorative writings large and small.
It was as if the entire German-speaking world, still dreaming the lately
baffled dream of national unity, had turned to him as the noblest of the
spiritual ties that bind Germans together. In the mass of literature
dating from that time of flood-tide in the veneration of Schiller, one
finds a good deal that is interesting in its own way, for one reason or
another, but not very much that is highly valuable for illuminative
criticism of Schiller. The best of the biographies are those of Palleske
and Scherr; of the minor tributes the famous address of Jacob Grimm in
the Berlin Academy. The spirit of the time was not favorable to a calm,
objective view, but it is in itself a fact of immense significance that
a great and critical, doctrine-ridden and passion-distracted people
should have united in honoring a poet as Schiller was honored by the
Germans in the year 1859.

A new epoch may be dated from about 1871,--the epoch of the historical
critics and philologers. With the realization of national unity the
vista of the past rapidly cleared up and new points of view were
gained. It was as if a height had been won from which it was possible
to see over the dust and smoke of the past three decades. The pride of
the new-born nation now looked back with quickened interest to the
great writers of the eighteenth century, but with the feeling that they
had done enough for the glory of the fatherland in simply being great
writers. It was time to see them as they were, without writing them up
or down, according to their supposed attitude toward questions which
were not their questions. It was in 1874 that Herman Grimm remarked, in
a lecture at Berlin, that henceforth there was to be a science called
Goethe. All the world knows how the prediction has been fulfilled.
During the last two decades the science called Goethe has marched
bravely on, enlisting a small army of workers, creating a vast jungle
of literature,--_selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte_,--and making friends
and enemies. And the science called Schiller is like unto it, only not
quite so big.

To attempt any sort of review or conspectus of all this Alexandrian
activity would be, for the purposes of this book, a futile undertaking;
it would lead off into an interminable and dry bibliography, which in
the end would convey little instruction as to Schiller's real
popularity. It would show that he is very extensively studied and
commented on by the academic class, which in Germany constitutes by
itself an enormous public. It would also show that good judges, of
apparently equal competence, still think very differently of the general
merit of his art and are very differently affected by particular works.
This is only to reiterate the familiar truth that literary criticism has
not become, does not tend to become, an exact science. The feeling one
has for poetry, or the effect produced upon one by a particular artistic
individuality, is the result of a hundred subtle influences that combine
to give each one of us his private form and range of susceptibility; and
this susceptibility itself varies with the _Zeitgeist_ and with the age
and nerve-state of the individual. The mere craving for novelty makes
itself felt; so that that which once gave pleasure gives it no longer,
or gives it in a lower degree. There is disputing about tastes, but
there is no settling of the dispute. For A to give logical reasons why B
should admire that which, as a matter of fact, B does not admire, or
vice versa, is always a tempting, and in the long run a useful, form of
literary exertion; only one must not expect B to be convinced or to mend
his ways immediately.

Beyond a doubt there have been strong influences at work in Germany,
during the past two decades, which are unfavorable to Schiller's
prestige. Now and then some cocksure champion of some _nova fede_
announces that the day of poetic idealism is past. There have always
been such voices, and a few years ago they were perhaps a little more
numerous and more shrill than usual. Of late, however, they have seemed
to grow fainter, and there are already signs of the idealistic reaction
that is sure to come. Meanwhile the day of Schiller does not pass and is
not likely to pass. The isms come and go, but his plays retain their
popularity, because they appeal to sentiments that are deeply rooted in
the affections of an immense portion of the German people who care but
little for the doctrines of the doctrinaire. And so it will continue to
be. To talk of returning to Schiller, or to hold up his style and
technique as models for imitation, is foolish. Of such imitation, which
could lead to nothing but the ossification of the German drama, there
has been quite enough in the past. To imitate his spirit is to 'keep the
type-idea flexible in one's mind' and reach out continually after that
which is new, elevating and adapted to the present need. This is the
best form of respect to his memory.

Unquestionably Schiller lacked the supreme qualities that go to the
making of a great world-poet. With all his cosmopolitanism he was a
German of the Germans. For them his work has a meaning and an importance
which it cannot have for others, because he is the organ-voice of their
ethnic instincts and idealisms. Think of a sentiment that Germans love,
and you shall find it, if you search, expressed in sonorous verse in
some poem or play of Schiller. The schools and the theaters keep his
name steadily before the great public, while the intellectual classes,
as Gervinus foresaw, are coming to dwell less on the great qualities
that he lacked than on the great qualities that he possessed. As to the
present attitude of sober German thought, nothing could possibly be more
illuminative than the following words of Otto Brahm:

As a student I was a Schiller-hater. I make this preliminary
confession not because I attach personal importance to it, but
because, on the contrary, I think I see in my attitude one that is
typical for our time. Every one of us, it seems to me, travels this
road: After a period of early veneration, which is awakened in us by
tradition and by the earliest literary impressions of youth, there
comes, as a reaction against an uncritical overestimate, and under
the influence of changed ideals of art, a defection from Schiller,
which parades itself in a one-sided and unhistorical emphasis of his
weak points. Then gradually this negative attitude corrects itself
to a positive one, and we recognize the folly of that
young-and-verdant bumptiousness which would think of consigning the
greatest of German dramatists to the realms of the dead. And now at
last, after it has passed through doubt, our enthusiasm is
imperishable; with clear eye we look up to the greatness of the man,
and to the splendid model for all intellectual work which is
exhibited in that life of passionate striving for the ideal.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 131: The meaning of the famous verses, divested perforce of
much of their German music, may be expressed thus:

For he was ours. So let the note of pride
Hush into silence all the mourner's ruth;
In our safe harbor he was fain to bide
And build for aye, after the storm of youth.
We saw his mighty spirit onward stride
To eternal realms of Beauty and of Truth;
While far behind him lay phantasmally
The vulgar things that fetter you and me.]

[Footnote 132: The disparagement of Schiller on account of his
unlikeness to Shakspere was carried to almost absurd lengths in the
"Shakespeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig. One of Ludwig's critiques, written
about 1858, begins thus: "Ich kenne keine poetische, namentlich keine
dramatische Gestalt, die in ihrem Entwurfe so zufaellig, so krankhaft
individuell, in ihrer Ausfuehrung so unwahr waere, als Schiller's
Wallenstein; keine, die mit ihren eignen Voraussetzungen so im Streite
laege, keine, die sich molluskenhafter der Willkuer des Dichters fuegte."]

[Footnote 133:

Guten Morgen denn! Frei werd' ich stehen
Fuer das Volk und mit ihm in der Zeit;
Mit dem Volke soll der Dichter gehen,--
So les' ich meinen Schiller heut.]

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