The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

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[Footnote 19: Eckermann's "Gespraeche mit Goethe", under date of Jan.
17, 1827.]

[Footnote 20: "Schiller, sein Leben und seine Werke," I, 299.]

[Footnote 21: Bitter family fends, and particularly the fiction of the
hostile brothers,--with motives of rivalry, jealousy and hatred, with
paternal curses and parricide and fratricide and filicide,--were just
then a literary fashion. It is worth noting in this connection that
J.M.R. Lenz published in 1776 a story entitled "Die beiden Alten", in
which a son shuts up his father in a cellar and sends a man to kill him.
But the man's heart fails him and the prisoner escapes,--to reappear
like a ghost among his kin. That Schiller read this story is at any rate
thinkable, though there is no direct evidence of the fact.]

[Footnote 22: Cf. Minor, I, 300: "Die Raeuber des jungen Schiller,
welcher sich damals nicht einmal um den nordamerikanischen
Freiheitskrieg, geschweige denn um das gewitterschwuele Frankreich
bekuemmerte, waren nur ein Symptom und eine Vorahnung; eine Wirkung im
Kleinen vor der groszen Katastrophe."]

[Footnote 23: Cf. Minor, I, 313 ff.]

[Footnote 24: Act IV, scene I.]

[Footnote 25: "Don Quixote," Chapter 89.]

[Footnote 26: "Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung", V, 19.]

[Footnote 27: Saemmtliche Schriften, II, 365. Citations from Schiller
refer, unless otherwise expressly indicated, to Goedeke's
historico-critical edition in 15 vols. Stuttgart, 1867-1876.]

[Footnote 28: Saemmtliche Schriften, III, 529.]

[Footnote 29: Cf. Bulthaupt, "Dramaturgie des Schauspiels," I, 209, who
has some excellent remarks upon the dramatic qualities of the play and
the histrionic problems connected with it.]

CHAPTER III

The Stuttgart Medicus

So gewisz ich sein Werk verstehe, so musz er starke Dosen in
Emeticis ebenso lieben als in Aestheticis, und ich moechte ihm lieber
zehen Pferde als meine Frau zur Kur uebergeben.--_Review of 'The
Robbers', 1782_.

The career that opened before Schiller on his release from the academy,
in December, 1780, turned out a wretched mockery of his hopes. He had,
or supposed he had, the right to expect a decent position in the public
service and a measure of liberty befitting a man who had served his time
under tutelage. What his august master saw fit to mete out to him,
however, was neither the one nor the other: he was stationed at
Stuttgart as 'medicus' to an ill-famed regiment consisting largely of
invalids. His pay was eighteen florins a month--say seven or eight
dollars. His duties consisted of routine visits to the hospital and
daily appearance at parade, with reports upon the condition of the
luckless patients whom he doctored savagely with drastic medicines.
Withal he was required to wear a stiff, ungainly uniform which did not
carry with it the distinction of an 'officer' and exposed him to the
derision of his friends. A humble petition of Captain Schiller that his
son be permitted to wear the dress of a civilian and extend his practice
among the people of the city met with a curt refusal.

Of Schiller's personal appearance at about this time we have two or
three descriptions by friends who knew him well.[30] Putting them
together we get a picture something like the following: He was about
five feet and nine inches in height, erect of bearing and knock-kneed.
He had reddish hair, a broad forehead, and bushy eyebrows which came
close together over a long, thin, arched nose. He was near-sighted. His
eyes, of a bluish-gray color, were usually inflamed, but very expressive
when he spoke with animation. One friend credits him with an 'eagle's
glance', another with an uncanny, demonic expression. He had a strong
chin, a prominent under-lip, and sunken, freckled cheeks. Altogether his
face and bearing told of immense energy.--One can imagine how the
creator of Karl Moor must have felt in his new situation. The young lion
had escaped from one cage into another that was even worse.

Nevertheless the new life did not altogether preclude an occasional sip
from the cup of earthly cheer. The young medicus found himself within
easy reach of a number of jovial friends whom he had known at the
academy. With one of these, a youth named Kappf, he hired a room of a
certain Frau Vischer, a widow who was to become the muse of his
high-keyed songs to Laura. The furniture consisted of a table and two
benches. In one corner were usually to be seen a pile of potatoes and
some plates. Here the friends feasted upon sausage and potato-salad of
their own make, a bottle of wine being added if the host happened to be
in funds. Sometimes there were convivial card-parties at a local inn,
where more than enough wine was drunk and bills were run up that still
remain unpaid. Tradition tells of a military banquet from which our
medicus had to be assisted home.

A nobler pleasure incident to the new life was the opportunity of
frequent visits to Castle Solitude. For eight years Schiller had been
cut off from intercourse with his parents and sisters, save through the
medium of officially inspected letters. Returning now at last he found
his mother in frail health, but his father still vigorous and active.
Sister Christophine had grown into a strong and self-reliant young
woman, the mainstay of the household. She took an interest in
literature, loved her brother devotedly, had a sister's boundless faith
in his genius, and now became his confidante and amanuensis. Another
sister, Louise, had reached the age of fourteen, two others had died,
and the youngest of all, Nanette, was now three years old. It was a
happy, sensible, affectionate family-circle, in which the long-lost son
and brother found sweet relief from the _misere_ of Stuttgart. The only
cloud in the sky was the mother's anxiety for the welfare of her son's
soul, with the resulting necessity of replying somewhat disingenuously
to her tender inquiries into his religious condition. To his parents and
sister the disgruntled medicus expressed freely his disappointment at
the provision which the duke had made for him. A hard fate, indeed, to
have studied seven years for the privilege of starving one's mind and
body as an insignificant army doctor!

It was partly the hope of earning money that led him to seek a publisher
for 'The Robbers'. Friend Petersen was exhorted to find one, if
possible, and was promised whatever he could get for the piece over and
above fifty florins. But Petersen had no luck and at last the ambitious
author decided, as the author of 'Goetz' had done before him, to print
his drama at his own expense. The money that he borrowed for the
purpose, on the security of a friend, involved him in debts that were to
hang over him for years and cause him endless trouble.

His plan once formed he began to take counsel with friends and revise
his manuscript in the light of their criticisms. Even after the printing
had begun, the revision continued. Things looked differently in the cold
type of the proof-sheet, and he saw that he had occasionally gone too
far in the direction of coarseness and extravagance. Thus the original
draft had provided that Amalia should actually be sent to a convent, and
that the furious Karl should appear with his robbers and threaten to
convert the nunnery into a brothel unless his sweetheart should be
delivered to him. This scene was condemned and the exploit given a more
appropriate place among the _res gestae_ of Spiegelberg. In many places
extravagant diction was toned down. The original preface, which was
mainly occupied with a labored defence of the literary drama as against
the stage-play, was rejected, and a new preface written which was
devoted chiefly to moral considerations. The author here admitted that
he had portrayed characters who would offend the virtuous, but insisted
that he could not do otherwise if he was to copy nature, because in the
real world virtue shines only in contrast with vice. He went on to say:

He who makes it his object to overthrow vice, and to avenge
religion, morality and social law upon their enemies, must unveil
vice in all its naked hideousness and bring it before the eyes of
mankind in colossal size; he must himself wander temporarily through
its nocturnal labyrinths and must be able to force himself into
states of feeling that revolt his soul by their unnaturalness. I may
properly claim for my work, in view of its remarkable catastrophe, a
place among moral books. Vice meets the end that befits it. The
wanderer returns to the track of law. Virtue triumphs. Whoever is
fair enough to read me through and try to understand me, from him I
may expect, not that he admire the poet, but that he respect the
right-minded man.

This attempt to recommend 'The Robbers' as a text-book in morality has
now a curious sound. It is a safe guess that the young attorney for the
defence wrote with his tongue in his cheek and an eye on the censor.

The first edition, which appeared in May, 1781, was styled a
'Schauspiel' and bore the Hippocratic motto: _Quae medicamenta non
sanant, ferrum sanat; quae ferrum non sanat, ignis sanat_. The author's
name was not given and the work purported (fallaciously) to have been
published at Frankfurt and Leipzig. The anonymity was not taken
seriously, however, and the Stuttgart medicus soon found himself a bit
of a literary lion. He was pointed out on the street as the man who had
written 'The Robbers', and distinguished travellers began to call upon
him. The reviewers mingled praise and blame, and the most thoughtful of
them, one Timme, declared in the Erfurt _Zeitung_ that here if anywhere
was the coming Shakspere,--which was a little wild from posterity's
point of view, but not an unpleasant thing for a young author to read in
a newspaper.

Luckily for Schiller his work was not long left to make its way as 'mere
literature'. Among those to whom he had sent the sheets was a Mannheim
bookseller, named Schwan, who had an eye for dramatic merit. Before
Schwan had read many pages it came over him that here was a prize for
the stage, and he hurried with it to Baron Dalberg, intendant of the
Mannheim theater. Dalberg was easily convinced,--only the work would
need to be radically revised. A complimentary letter was addressed to
Schiller, proposing a stage version of 'The Robbers' and offering to
bring out future plays that he might write. Schiller was quite willing,
notwithstanding his preface, and about the middle of August he addressed
himself to his task. Profiting by the suggestions of Dalberg and the
reviewers, he devoted six weeks to adding, subtracting, re-writing, and
re-arranging,--a new masterpiece, he averred, would have cost him less
labor. But Dalberg was not yet satisfied; correspondence ensued about
various points, Schiller showing himself very tractable, and it was not
until the close of the year that the stage version was finally ready. It
was played on the 12th of January, 1782,--its author having stolen away
from Stuttgart to see the performance,--and scored an unheard-of
success.[31] Shortly afterwards the new version, in slightly modified
form, was published by Schwan under the name of a 'Trauerspiel' by
Friedrich Schiller.

The changes made in the new version do not reflect the free play of
Schiller's dramatic instinct so much as his deferential attitude towards
Dalberg. Thus we know that the most important of them all, the shifting
of the action back into the age of expiring feudalism, was made
reluctantly. Schiller felt, and had reason to feel, that the modernity
of his drama was its very life-blood;[32] for the squeamish Dalberg,
however, the robbers in the age of Frederick the Great were a painful
anachronism. So they were put back three centuries and costumed in the
style of the 'Ritterstueck'. Other less dubious changes were also made.
Thus the long soliloquies of Franz and the ribald garrulities of
Spiegelberg were reduced to more tolerable proportions. Robber Schwarz
and Pastor Moser were omitted, and the bastard Hermann was vitalized
into a person of some account by means of his counter-plot against
Franz. The un-lyrical songs by which Schiller had set great store were
dropped, and the catastrophe was so changed as to bring the two brothers
finally face to face. The life of Schweizer was spared and Franz,
instead of being torn limb from limb, was derisively pardoned by his
great-souled brother and then, amid mocking laughter, thrust into the
selfsame dungeon in which he had confined his father. Much against
Schiller's will Amalia was made to kill herself with a dagger snatched
from one of the outlaws, instead of receiving her death at the hands of
her lover.

The prodigious success of 'The Robbers' upon the Mannheim stage, and
upon other stages where it was soon produced in more or less garbled
form, made the work famous. Famous and at the same time notorious. New
editions, most of them pirated, began to appear, and a mania similar to
the Werther-mania of the previous decade spread over Germany. The
newspapers told of conspiring schoolboys whose heads had been turned
toward a career of crime. A well-born youth who had essayed the role of
Robin Hood near Strassburg and was hanged there in October, 1783,
confessed suspiciously that he had been brought to his fate by the
reading of bad books. The sedate authorities of Leipzig forbade the
further performance of the play in their city because they had observed
a sudden increase of burglary and petit larceny. An edition of 1782,
which the publisher, possibly without Schiller's knowledge, had adorned
with a rampant lion and the motto _In Tirannos_, probably added to the
vogue of the piece as a revolutionary document. A French translation
appeared in 1785 and drew the attention of the turbulent Gauls to that
'Monsieur Gille', who was in time to receive the diploma of a French
citizen. The first English translation dates from 1792.

It is not difficult to imagine the emotions with which Schiller, now at
the fervid age of twenty-two, returned to his post after that
intoxicating visit to Mannheim, and, his ears still tingling with the
thunderous plaudits of the theater and the complimentary babble of his
new friends, resumed the dosing of his sick grenadiers in Stuttgart. For
a while things went on very much as before. In order to better his
position in a professional way, he formed the plan of taking his
doctor's degree and then qualifying for a professorship in physiology.
But from the first the poet in him prevailed more and more over the
medical man. Soon after leaving the academy he had published a long
elegy upon the death of a young friend named Weckerlin. It is a
rebellious, declamatory poem, in which the pathos of untimely death is
made the occasion for ventilating radical views as to the goodness of
God and the consolations of religion. Passages like the following show
the young Schiller at his best as a poet:

Liebe wird Dein Auge nie vergolden,
Nie umhalsen Deine Braut wirst Du,
Nie, wenn unsere Thraenen stromweis rollten,
Ewig, ewig, ewig sinkt Dein Auge zu.[33]

For the rest, the death of Weckerlin is a 'discord on the great lute',
and a 'barbarous doom'. And yet, the poem continues, the dead youth has
drawn the better lot; he will sleep calmly in his narrow house,
unmindful of the wretched tragi-comedy going on above his head. So his
friends are bidden 'to clap their hands and shout a loud _plaudite_'. As
for a reunion, there will be one, but it will not be in the 'paradise of
the rabble'.--In another poem dating from this period, 'The Chariot of
Venus,' the love-goddess is put on trial and castigated for her sins.
Her havoc among the sons of men is described in half a hundred
rhetorical stanzas which were evidently inspired by the genius of the
clinic or the hospital, rather than by one of the sacred nine.

Besides these poems a large number of others were written by Schiller
during the year 1781, prior to the time when Dalberg's invitation caused
him to turn his attention to the stage. It was of course important to
acquaint the public with his lucubrations, but poetry in large
quantities was not an easily marketable commodity. The usual mode of
publication was the poetic 'almanac' or 'calendar', in which a number of
ambitious verse-makers would unite their wares in a single volume. Of
such almanacs there were several in Germany and one at least in Suabia.
It was edited by one Staeudlin, a rival whom Schiller thought it would be
both feasible and pleasant to outshine. So he sent out letters to his
friends inviting contributions, and in due time there appeared, after a
fresh outlay of borrowed money, an 'Anthology for the Year 1782'. It
consisted of some four-score poems, signed with all manner of
intentionally misleading symbols and purporting to emanate from
Tobolsko, in Siberia. The most of the verses were the work of
Schiller.[34]

Among the poems of the 'Anthology' there are none that have become very
popular, none that are capable of affording any very keen delight to
the lover of poetry. One sees that their author's lyric gift was not of
the highest order. What is heard is not so much the note of honest
feeling as the effort of an active intellect, searching heaven and
earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from
the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what
he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious
sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he
had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better
opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt
and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in
verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. He sang not as
the bird sings, but as a fervid youth sings who is eager to assert as
strongly as possible his emancipation from conventional modes of
thought and feeling.

The poems of the 'Anthology' are too numerous and in the main too
unimportant for an exhaustive review; it must suffice to glance at a few
of the more noteworthy. Several had been written at the academy and were
now published with more or less of retouching. To this number, it would
seem, belongs the one entitled 'The Glory of Creation', which is a
perfectly serious and devout poem on the grandeur and beauty of the
world. Along with this, however, we find another, entitled 'To God',
which tells of moods like those which had led Werther to characterize
Nature as 'an eternally ruminating monster'. It consists of five unrimed
stanzas, all but one ending with an emphatic 'Thou big thing'.

Thou who didst summon earth and sky,
And earth and sky came forth;
Who sayest the word and worlds arise,
Who art thou, mighty thing?

O big, amazingly big thing!
My head swims when I look;
I shudder and start back afraid
And fall--upon my knees.

These verses--the translation may hold up its head quite unabashed
beside the original--hardly rise above the plane of doggerel; they
signify nothing except that their author has had his little quarrel with
this best of all possible worlds and is not unwilling to shock people.

Of far greater poetic interest are the verses entitled 'Rousseau', whose
neglected grave (he died in 1778) is made the point of departure for a
vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to
place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time
when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There
is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or
pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a
martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,--'he who
makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is
apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into
Charon's boat and go tell the spirits about this 'dream of the war of
frogs and mice, the hand-organ doodle-doodle of this life'.[36]

In this poem there is certainly no lack of that 'fire' which Duke Karl
found in Schiller's dissertation. Indeed fire abounds everywhere in his
youthful versifying. He never contemplates, never dwells upon a
temperate emotion. The poetry of common things and of the gentler
feelings seems to have been nonexistent for him. His imagination likes
to occupy itself with the supernal, the stupendous, or else with the
awful and the revolting. This is seen in the two poems 'Elysium' and 'A
Group from Tartarus'; the one aiming to portray a land of ineffable
happiness, where sorrow has no name and the only pain is a gentle
ecstasy, the other depicting the infinite misery of the inferno. In both
there is a free blending of Christian with pagan conceptions, 'Elysium'
being put for heaven and 'Tartarus' for hell. A similar blending is
noticeable in many of the other poems, ancient mythology being made to
furnish forth the setting and the symbols of modern passion. So it is,
for example, in the lyric operetta 'Semele', the longest and most
pretentious of the 'Anthology' poems. It consists of two scenes in
irregular verses, dealing with Jupiter's love for the mortal Semele' and
Juno's jealousy. Artistically it is much in need of the file, and Its
sustained note of passionate pathos hardly comports, perhaps, with the
type of the operetta. Nevertheless it contains powerful passages and
telling stage effects. One can see that the young student--'Semele'
appears to have been written at the academy--had learned, through, his
occasional visits to the opera, how to manage a conventional theme and
conventional machinery in such a way as to startle and thrill.

More noteworthy, for the characterization of the youthful Schiller, is
the ode entitled 'Friendship', which purports to be taken 'from the
letters of Julius to Raphael, an unpublished novel'. In this poem we
have not so much the expression of a real human affection as a
philosophy of friendship; just as in the Laura poems we have a
philosophy of love. The verses remind one immediately of Rousseau's
saying that he was 'intoxicated with love without an object'. Friendship
is described as a mystic attraction of souls, identical with the
attraction of gravitation. This it is which makes the beauty and the
glory of the spiritual world. 'We are dead groups when we hate, gods
when we love.'

If in creation's All I stood alone,
Souls would I dream into the senseless stone
And kiss them in a fond embrace.

Then we hear of a hierarchy of spirits, ascending 'from the Mongol to
the Greek seer, who precedes the last of the seraphs'; and in this
harmonious ring-dance of souls Raphael and Julius 'sweep onward to where
time and space are submerged in the sea of eternal glory'.

Other poems which rise above the general level are 'The Bad Monarchs', a
poetic castigation (without mention of names) of the type of ruler
perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year
1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with
all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome
tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague,
and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor
of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than any of these,
however, from a poetic point of view, is the 'Funeral Fantasy', which
was occasioned by the death of young Von Hoven in 1780. One may perhaps
doubt the genuineness of the grief that could find expression in such a
pomp of words, but there is no doubting the poetic power of pictures
like this:

Pale, at its ghastly noon,
Pauses above the death-still wood the moon;
The night-sprite sighing, through the dim air stirs;
The clouds descend in rain;
Mourning, the wan stars wane,
Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres!

Haggard as spectres, vision-like and dumb,
Dark with the pomp of Death, and moving slow,
Towards that sad lair the pale Procession come
Where the Grave closes on the Night below.[37]

But the most famous and on the whole the most interesting of the
effusions in the 'Anthology' are the erotic verses addressed to Laura.
Whether Schiller was humanly in love with his landlady, Frau Luise
Vischer, is a rather futile question which German erudition has argued
pro and con these many years without coming to an inexpugnable
conclusion. Probably he was not, though he may have thought that he was.
If he had been we should have heard of it sooner or later in authentic
prose. But she interested him as the first of her sex who had come under
his close observation. There were on his part the small gallantries of
daily life, and on hers the responsiveness of a not very prudish widow
quite willing to be adored. She played the piano. It was enough: the
needy Petrarch had found a sufficient Laura--and never was a poet's
goddess worshiped in such singular strains. We miss in them altogether
that captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young
Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in
pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes
fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His
imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,--so lubricious in its
suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he
had become a libertine,--and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic
conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of
a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently
sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous
element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their
overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched
tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more
than intellectual puzzles: they so occupy the mind in the mere effort of
comprehension that little room is left for any emotion whatever. They
leave one altogether cold.

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