‘On the Dangers of Aesthetic Culture’ and ‘On the Moral Benefit of Aesthetic Culture’. These, however, are only an amplification of ideas contained in the ‘Letters’.
There remain for consideration, to complete our survey of Schiller’s philosophical writings, his short essay on Matthison’s poems and his long disquisition upon ‘Naive and Sentimental Poetry’. In the review he discusses the subject of landscape poetry, thus touching upon a question that had occupied Lessing in the ‘Laokooen’. But instead of arguing like Lessing that detailed description of objects is necessarily out of place in poetry, Schiller defends it as capable in a high degree of giving pleasure. The poetic effectiveness of a description he finds to consist, first, in the truthfulness of the description; secondly, in its power, analogous to that of music, to excite vague emotion; and finally, in its power to awaken ideas by the law of association. He distinguishes between ‘true’ nature and ‘actual’ nature. We arrive at true nature when we take away from actual nature whatever is accidental, peculiar or unnecessary. This process is precisely what is described in one of the ‘Kallias’ letters as ‘idealization’.
To idealize an object is, then, in Schiller’s vocabulary, not to beautify it, or to make it in any way other than it is, but to portray the ‘idea’ of it, that is, its essential truth, apart from all that is accidental or individual. He lays down the general rule that poetry is only concerned with true (or ideal) nature in this sense; never with actual (or historical) nature. ‘Every individual man’, he declares, ‘is by just so much less a man as he is an individual; every mode of feeling is by just so much less necessary and purely human as it is peculiar to a particular person. The grand style consists in the rejection of all that is accidental and the pure expression of the necessary.’
Of the essay upon ‘Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, contributed to the _Horen_ in 1795, the first part is devoted to the ‘Naive’, which is defined as nature in felt contrast with art. To be naive an action must not only be natural but must put us to shame by suggesting a contrast with our own sophisticated standards. From this it follows that our pleasure in the naive, being connected with an idea of the reason, is not purely aesthetic, but partly moral. The _naivete_ of children appeals to us because they are what we were and what we should again become. They represent an ideal, a theophany. Though we may look down upon the childish, we can only look up to the childlike. A naive action always implies a triumph of nature over art: if it is unintentional (naive of surprise) we are amused; if deliberate (naive of character) we are touched. Genius is always naive. Both in its works and in social intercourse, it manifests the simplicity and directness of nature. It is modest because nature is modest; but cares nothing for decency, for decency is the offspring of corruption. It is sensible, but not shrewd. It expresses its loftiest and deepest thoughts with naive grace: they are divine oracles from the mouth of a child.
These thoughts duly expounded, the essay goes on to consider the modern man’s feeling for nature. This results, according to Schiller, from our imputing _naivete_ to the non-rational world. We are conscious of having wandered away from the state of innocence, happiness and perfection. ‘Nature’ represents this state to our imaginations; it is the voice of the mother calling us back home, or whispering to us of boundless happiness and perfection. Poetry which expresses this boundless longing for the ideal is ‘sentimental’, while that which reflects nature herself, in some definite part or phase, is ‘naive’. The naive poet _is_ nature; the sentimental poet seeks a lost nature. The Greeks are prevailingly naive, the moderns prevailingly sentimental, but neither in any exclusive sense. The words are to be understood as expressing only a mode of feeling. The same poet, the same poem, may be naive at one moment and sentimental at another. All sentimental poetry, then, is concerned with the disparity or contrast between reality and the ideal. If the poet is mainly interested in the real, we have, in the broad sense, satire, which may be pathetic or humorous. If he dwells more upon the ideal, we have elegiac poetry–elegiac in the narrower sense, if the ideal is conceived as a distant object of longing, idyllic if it is portrayed as a present reality. The second part of the essay is devoted to a review of the sentimental poets of modern Germany.
In the third part the naive and sentimental poets are contrasted. The former, Schiller contends, is concerned with the definite, the latter with the infinite. From the realist we turn easily and with pleasure to actual life; the idealist puts us for the moment out of humor with it. The one follows the laws of nature, the other those of reason. The one asks what a thing is good for, the other whether it is good. Withal, however, Schiller is careful to insist that even the naive poet, the realist, is properly concerned only with true nature, and not with actual nature. Everything that is,–for example, a violent outbreak of passion,–is actual nature; but this is not true human nature, because that implies free self-determination. True human nature can never be anything but noble. ‘What disgusting absurdities’, exclaims Schiller,–and the words might well be taken to heart by some of our modern naturalists–‘have resulted both in criticism and in practice from this confusion of true with actual nature! What trivialities are permitted, yea even praised, because unfortunately they are actual nature!’ It is a part of Schiller’s theory that the true realist and the sane idealist must finally come together on common ground.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 92: Eckermanns “Gespraeche”, under date of November 14, 1823.]
[Footnote 93: He also admitted that he himself had profited from the study of Kant; cf. Eckermann, under date of April 11, 1827.]
[Footnote 94: Schiller’s aesthetic writings, and especially his relation to Kant, have been much discussed in recent years. For a list of the more important works consult the Appendix.]
[Footnote 95: An oft-repeated assertion to the contrary, which goes back to Karoline von Wolzogen, “Schillers Leben”, Achter Abschnitt, is contradicted by a letter of Schiller to Goethe, written May 5, 1797.]
[Footnote 96: They are reprinted in Saemmtliche Schriften. X, 41 ff.]
[Footnote 97: Carlyle’s “Life of Schiller”, page 137 (edition of 1845).]
CHAPTER XIV
The Great Duumvirate
Nun kann ich aber hoffen, dasz wir, so viel von dem Wege noch uebrig sein mag, in Gemeinschaft durchwandeln werden, und mit um so groeszerem Gewinn, da die letzten Gefaehrten auf einer langen Reise sich immer am meisten zu sagen haben. _Letter of 1794_.
The coupled names of Goethe and Schiller denote a literary epoch as well as a peculiarly inspiring personal friendship. What a vista opens before the mind’s eye when one thinks of all the influence that went out from them into the wide world during the nineteenth century! The visitor to Weimar who goes to look at Rietschel’s famous statue in front of the theater has a sensation like that of standing at the source of a mighty river. Of course the men and their time have been greatly idealized; like the sculptor, the imagination of posterity has lifted them above the level of the earth, joined their hands and given them the pose of far-seeing literary heroes. We think of each as increased by the whole strength of the other. As Herman Grimm puts it algebraically, the formula is not G + S, but G(+ S) + S(+ G).[98]
And all this hits an essential truth, albeit the student of the documents–the letters and journals of the duumvirs, and of their friends and enemies–has great difficulty at times to imagine himself in an atmosphere of heroism. No nation, no public life of any account; a complete lack of interest, apparently, in many matters that now bulk very large in the minds of men; a small theater, equal to none but very modest demands; a few engravings and plaster-casts and paintings–many of them very poor–to serve as a basis for theories of art; a little optical apparatus, a few minerals and plants and bones, to aid in the advancement of science; everything material on a small scale,–this was Weimar a hundred years ago. Truly a restricted outlook upon this spacious world as it appears to us to-day!
And then the duumvirs had their struggle with the infinitely little, and they fussed over this and that. This is especially true of Goethe. His journals produce upon the reader now and then not so much an impression of glorious many-sidedness as of precious time wasted in futile puttering. But who shall dare to say that it was so in reality? The genius of life tells every great man what he can do, and it is for posterity to accept him and understand him as he was, without complaint and without sophistication. What Goethe and Schiller did in the midst of all their other doings, was to set their stamp upon the culture of their time; to create a new ideal of letters and of life, and to enrich their country’s literature with a number of masterpieces which have since furnished food and inspiration to countless myriads. This is quite enough to justify a perennial curiosity concerning the details of their alliance.
For six years the two men, though living as neighbors with many friends and many interests in common, had steadily held each other aloof. That they did so was Goethe’s fault, at least in the beginning. We may be very sure that a friendly advance from him would have melted Schiller’s animosity as the sun melts April snow. But he did not say the word. He looked upon Schiller as the spokesman of a new and perverse generation that knew not Joseph; and so he went his own way, serenely indifferent to the personality of the man whose talent he had recognized by helping him to a Jena professorship. He paid some attention, it is true, to Schiller’s philosophic writings, but what he read did not altogether please him. When the essay upon ‘Winsomeness and Dignity’ came out, it seemed to him that Schiller, in his enthusiasm for freedom and self-determination, was inclined to lord it all too proudly over mother Nature. Goethe was no less interested in ‘ideas’ than Schiller, but he had not the same fondness for abstract reasoning from mental premises. His starting-point was always the external fact, and he regarded ideas as possessing a sort of objective reality. His homage was paid to nature and the five senses; Schiller’s to the deductive reason.
Nevertheless, the whole trend of Schiller’s aesthetic speculations brought him steadily nearer to Goethe’s way of thinking. His intense Hellenism; his insistence upon the immense importance of art as an element of culture; his fervid championship of art for art’s sake; his practical identification of the ideal with the typical; his doctrine of genius in its relation to abstract dogma, and above all his great earnestness, as of one striving with all his powers towards the better light,–this and much more could not fail to meet Goethe’s approval. And then came the great project of the _Horen_, which was to unite all the best writers of Germany in a common effort for the advancement of letters and the elevation of the public taste. This was an opportunity not to be despised, for Goethe was at last beginning to be weary of his isolation at Weimar. Although at heart very desirous of exerting a large influence, he had well-nigh lost touch with the literary public. For four years he had done nothing worthy of his great name. People took little interest in his scientific studies, his ‘Grosz-Cophta’, and his ‘Citizen-General’. He felt the need of rehabilitating himself. So when he received Schiller’s polite invitation anent the _Horen_, he accepted with alacrity; declaring himself ready not only to contribute, but to serve on the editorial committee. And a few days later,–it was on June 28, 1794, before he had seen Schiller or exchanged further letters with him,–he wrote to Charlotte von Kalb that ‘since the new epoch Schiller too was becoming more friendly and trustful towards us Weimarians’; whereat he rejoiced, ‘hoping for much good from intercourse with him’. So we see that, as the matter then lay in Goethe’s mind, it was Schiller who was the distant and distrustful party.
Thus the way was all prepared for the ‘Happy Event’, as Goethe called it in an oft-quoted bit of reminiscence published many years later. It chanced that he and Schiller were both present at a meeting of naturalists in Jena. As they left the room together Schiller let fall a remark to the effect that such piecemeal treatment of nature as they had been listening to was dull business for the layman. Goethe replied that there were experts who could not approve it either. Then he proceeded to explain his own views. They reached Schiller’s house in earnest conversation, and Goethe went in to continue his demonstration with the aid of a drawing–probably of a typical plant. Schiller listened with seeming comprehension and then shook his head, saying: ‘But that is not an experience; that is an idea.’ Goethe was disappointed, perplexed. All his labor had gone for naught, and the awful chasm was still yawning. He replied that he was glad if he had ideas without knowing it and could actually see them with his eyes, Schiller defended himself suavely as a good Kantian, and the men separated, each in a docile mood with respect to the other.
Herman Grimm will have it that Schiller now entered upon a crafty campaign for the conquest of Goethe; and really the facts give some color to such a view, albeit, as we have seen, the battle was more than half won before a shot was fired. Schiller had his magazine very much at heart, and besides that he had always been a very sincere and ungrudging admirer of Goethe’s poetic genius. Very likely he looked upon him as a weakling in philosophy. To talk of seeing ideas with the bodily eye! Evidently there was no profit in bombarding such a man with syllogisms. But it might be useful to show that one understood him. So Schiller sat him down and wrote out, in the form of a letter, a little essay upon Goethe’s individuality, attributing to him a wonderful intuition whereby he saw in advance all that philosophy could prove:
Minds of your sort seldom know how far they have advanced, and how little reason they have to borrow from philosophy, which can only learn from them…. For a long time, though at a considerable distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and noticing with ever-renewed admiration the way that you have marked out for yourself. You seek the necessary in nature, but by the very hardest path,–a path which weaker minds would take good care not to attempt. You take all nature together, in order to get light upon the particular. In the totality of her manifestations you hope to find the rationale of the individual…. Had you been born a Greek or even an Italian, and thus surrounded from infancy with exquisite scenery and idealizing art, your way would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps rendered unnecessary…. As it was, having been born a German, you had to refashion the old inferior nature that was thrust upon your imagination, after the better pattern which your imagination had created; and this could only be done by means of leading principles. But this logical direction which the reflecting mind is compelled to take does not tally well with the aesthetic direction of the creating mind. So you had another task; just as you passed previously from intuition to abstraction, you had now to convert concepts back into intuitions, and thoughts into feelings; for only through these can genius create.
For Goethe, whose nature really craved friendship hardly less than Schiller’s, there was something very grateful in this frank homage combined with rare perspicacity. He saw that Schiller understood him or was at least concerned to understand him. With all their differences they were spiritual congeners, and much might be hoped for from this new connection. So he sent a very cordial reply to the man who had thus ‘with friendly hand struck the balance of his existence’; averring that he too dated a new epoch from their meeting in Jena; expressing the hope that they might soon find opportunity for a further interchange of views and that, having mutually cleared up their past course of thinking, they might proceed on their way together. A few weeks later Schiller spent two weeks as Goethe’s guest in Weimar, where long discussions, spun out on one occasion from noon to midnight, begot a perfect understanding and laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. It was a friendship based upon mutual respect and mutual need, full of high advantage on both sides and cherished loyally to the end.
Between then and now many and many a writer has compared Goethe with Schiller and undertaken to reckon up the balance of their respective merit. The task is not easy, even though the world is now well agreed that Goethe’s was the rarer genius. No doubt he, much more than Schiller, was destined to be a bringer of light to the coming century; but the immense prestige of his name is due partly to the happy fate that gave him a long life and invested his old age with the glamour of literary kingship. If we compare the actual production of the two men during the eleven years of their association, it is not at all clear that the palm should be given to Goethe. The five plays of Schiller, with the ‘Song of the Bell’, and the best of his shorter poems, will bear comparison very well, in the aggregate, with ‘Wilhelm Meister’, ‘Hermann and Dorothea’, the ‘Natural Daughter’ and those portions of ‘Faust’ which were written at this time. Unquestionably Goethe at his best was a far greater poet than Schiller; but he was less steadily at his best, and his artistic conscience was more lax than Schiller’s. He envisaged life more largely and more truly, and he wrote with his eye upon the object. His nature inclined to placid contemplation; he was no orator, though something of a preacher. He did not care so much to stir the depths of feeling as to inform and liberalize. In his imaginative work he let himself go _mit holdem Irren_ and preferred to avoid artificial surprises and stagy contrasts. Wherefore his work is the more illuminative, the more suggestive,–he is the poet of the literary class. Schiller, on the other hand, was an orator who never lost sight of the effect he wished to produce. He worked more intensely, more methodically, and was less dependent upon mood. He is thus the poet of those who care less for delicacy of workmanship than for sonorous diction, elevated sentiment and telling effects. There is room in the world for both kinds of endowment.
It is quite probable that Goethe and Schiller would sooner or later have come together in a friendly relation even if the _Horen_ had never been thought of; and in that case their friendship would have lacked the militant tinge that it presently took on. It was the magazine that leagued them together as allies against the forces of Philistia and made Thuringia the storm-center of a new literary movement. But for this it would probably never have occurred to any one to dub them ‘the Dioscuri’.
Prior to the appearance of the first number, in January, 1795, the new journal had been well advertised. Cotta was prepared to spend money on it freely; the contributors were to be handsomely paid, and twenty-five of the best known writers in Germany had promised their cooperation. There was every reason to hope for a dashing success; and to make assurance doubly sure Schiller arranged for ‘cooked’ reviews of the _Horen_ to be paid for by its publisher. But when the time came to launch his enterprise the hopeful editor found himself left very much in the lurch. ‘Lord help me, or I perish’ he wrote ruefully to Koerner, on December 29; ‘Goethe does not wish to print his ‘Elegies’ in the first number, Herder also prefers to wait, Fichte is busy with his lectures, Garve is sick, Engel lazy and the others do not answer.’
And so it came about that the first number of the _Horen_ was largely made up of rather abstruse reading. Schiller did not fully realize that the philosophy on which he had been feeding with satisfaction for three years was not a palatable diet for the general literary public. He regarded his own ‘Letters on Aesthetic Education’ as a model of lucid popular exposition,–as indeed they are in comparison with Kant. But the number was further freighted with a deep-diving article by Fichte, while Goethe’s poetic ‘Epistle’ in hexameters, and the beginning of his ‘Conversations of German Emigres ‘, though in a lighter vein, were not of thrilling interest to seekers after entertainment. The public, which had expected something different, was disappointed; and when succeeding numbers brought further brain-racking profundities, there was a large ebullition of disgust. Cotta began to write of complaints and cancelled subscriptions; and ere long it looked as if the _Horen_ would prove a big fiasco.
Schiller, who should have been inured by this time to the consequences of editorial misjudgment, was disgruntled, vexed. He began to feel that the German public was an indolent, long-eared beast that needed the education of the scourge rather than of aesthetic letters. He made some effort, it is true, to enliven his columns with more entertaining matter, but the abstruse, in prose and verse, continued to preponderate. By autumn he was minded to give up the whole undertaking, but was persuaded by Cotta to go on. Meanwhile he had begun to grow weary of theorizing and to feel the homesickness of the poet. ‘Wilhelm Meister’, as it began to issue from the press, excited his unbounded enthusiasm. ‘I cannot tell you’, he wrote to his new friend,
I cannot tell you how painful it is to me oftentimes to turn from a work of this character to philosophy. There everything is so bright, so living, so harmonious and humanly true; here everything is so strict, so rigid, so very unnatural…. This much is certain: the poet is the only true human being, and the best philosopher is only a caricature beside him.
So, in the summer of 1795, he began once more to poetize,–‘not venturing out upon the high sea of invention’, as he expressed it, ‘but keeping close to the shore of philosophy’. In other words he wrote a number of philosophic poems, partly for the _Horen_ and partly for the new poetic ‘Almanac’ that he had undertaken to edit, in addition to the _Horen_. This return to poetry was a joy to him, notwithstanding the ill health which confined him to the house and cut him off from the exhilarations of the external world. It must never be forgotten that those philosophic poems are the effusions of a lonely thinker who was compelled to draw his inspiration from within, and was not entirely unaware of the fetters he had forged for himself by his long addiction to philosophy.
There was, however, one more subject, of literary as well as philosophic interest, which he was minded to treat before turning his back finally upon the arid wastes of theory;–the subject of realism versus idealism, or, as he decided to phrase it, of naive and sentimental poetry. This essay, published in 1796, was briefly analyzed in the last chapter. It marks the end of Schiller’s one-sided glorification of the Greeks. In more than one passage he comes to the rescue of the modern poet–the sentimentalist–as the poet of the infinite, of the ideal. His contention is that while the realist may be the more admirable in a limited sphere, the idealist has a larger sphere, and his perfection is a higher thing. This attempt of Schiller’s to describe, in a scientific spirit, the different kinds of artistic endowment, and to do full justice to all, grew naturally out of his intercourse with Goethe. He admired Goethe more and more. The fifth book of ‘Meister’ produced in him a ‘veritable intoxication’; yet its quality was strikingly unlike that of ‘Werther’ or ‘Iphigenie’, and totally different from anything that he himself had done or could possibly do. Perhaps he may have been further influenced by A.W. Schlegel’s sympathetic papers upon Dante, which had been published in the _Horen_ and which revealed to him a new poetic genius of the highest order, yet not at all Homeric. So he wrote his famous disquisition,–next to Lessing’s ‘Laokooen’ the most thoughtful and the most influential piece of criticism produced anywhere in the eighteenth century,–and endeavored to make it as readable as possible. Goethe, who read the manuscript in November, 1795, wrote of it thus:
Since this theory treats me so well, nothing is more natural than that I should approve its principles and that its conclusions should seem to me correct. I should be more distrustful, however, if I had not at first found myself in an attitude of opposition to your views; for it is not unknown to you that, from an excessive predilection for the ancient poets, I have often been unjust to the modern. According to your doctrine I can now be at one with myself, since I no longer need to contemn that which, under certain conditions, an irresistible impulse compelled me to produce; and it is a very pleasant feeling to be not altogether dissatisfied with one’s self and one’s contemporaries.
Thus the two men were drawn closer together in mutual sympathy and appreciation, and found in each other more and more a bulwark against the whips and scorns of hostile criticism. Of such criticism there was no lack. The _Horen_ was making enemies rapidly and had become, as Schiller put it, a veritable _ecclesia militans_. One Jakob in Halle made an assault upon Schiller’s aesthetic writings. Dull old Nicolai in Berlin complained of the ravages of Kantism in German literature. Pious souls like Stolberg were scandalized by the lubricity of Goethe’s ‘Elegies’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister’. The famous philologist, Wolf, pounced violently upon one of Herder’s Homeric essays. Schiller had now fallen out with his old friend Goeschen, who was a center of contemptuous opposition at Leipzig. And Goethe, too, had his quarrel with the world: he felt absurdly sore over the neglect by scientific men of his optical theories in opposition to Newton. Friendly voices were scarcely heard anywhere. There was little opportunity for indulging that pleasant emotion of ‘being satisfied with one’s contemporaries’.
And so it came to pass that the two friends waxed wroth and determined to strike back. At first they thought of a withering review in the _Horen_, but this idea was given up in favor of another. Goethe had taken a great fancy to the ancient elegiac meter and for some time past it had been his favorite form of poetic expression. Schiller, originally a hater of the hexameter, had caught the fever from Goethe, and used the elegiac form in a number of poems. In December, 1795, Goethe suggested that they amuse themselves by making epigrams, in the style of Martial’s ‘Xenia’, upon the various journals against which they had a grudge, devoting a distich to each. His plan was that each should make a large number; then they would compare, select the best and publish them in the second volume of the ‘Almanac’. Schiller was captivated by the idea, and ‘Xenia’ now became the order of the day. It was soon decided not to restrict them to the offensive journals, but to take a shot wherever there was a mark. Both conspirators took great delight in the proposed _Teufelei_,–it would be such sport to stir up the vermin and hear them buzz. They gave the milder ‘Xenia’ pet names such as ‘jovial brethren’, ‘little fellows’, ‘teasing youngsters’, while the harsher ones were likened to stinging insects, or to the foxes of Samson:
You with the blazing tails, away to Philistia, foxes! Spoil the flourishing crops, crops of paper and ink.
As Goethe was still preoccupied with ‘Wilhelm Meister’, it happened at first that Schiller was the more active in the production of these ‘kitchen presents’, especially such as had pepper in them. With the lapse of time Goethe’s share increased. The two were frequently together, for days or weeks at a time, and the mass of Xenia grew rapidly. They determined to swell the number to a thousand and to give the collection a sort of artistic completeness; to make it, that is, a sort of general confession of faith. They agreed furthermore that they would publish the epigrams as a joint production and treat their separate authorship as an inviolable secret. As a matter of fact, some of them really were joint productions. One would suggest the idea or the title, and the other write the verses; or one write the hexameter and the other the pentameter.
During the first half of 1796 Schiller wrote little else than Xenia. By the arrival of summer the joint output amounted to nearly a thousand, but less than half that number found their way into the famous ‘Xenia Almanac’ of 1797. Of these the targets were legion and the merit various. Some few of them were very good, others little short of atrocious, particularly in the matter of form. As for the general mass, their piquancy is not so great as to superinduce in the reader of to-day a dangerously violent cachinnation. Neither Goethe nor Schiller can be credited with a large vein of sparkling wit. Some of the Xenia are far-fetched and operose, while others sound rather vacuous. The form of the monodistich was in itself a safeguard against diffuseness, but not against the equal peril of inanity.
It would be impossible here to do more than glance at the personalities involved in this rather inglorious squabble. Many of the Xenia were personal pin-pricks. Thus several were directed against the musician Reichardt, who, as editor of two journals, had shown strong sympathy with the Revolution. Goethe, the courtier, and Schiller, who had no democratic proclivities, came to the defense of the gentry thus;
Aristocratical dogs will growl at beggars, but mark you How little democrat Spitz soaps at the stockings of silk.
And again:
Gentlemen, keep your seats! for the curs but covet your places, Elegant places to hear all the other dogs bark.
A whole broadside was aimed at the garrulous Nicolai, who deserved a better fate. As the champion of lucidity and reasonableness he stood in reality for a very good cause,–no preachment more necessary in Germany then or since. But in his old age he had fallen a prey to the _cacoethes scribendi;_ he insisted upon having his say about everything, yet his stock of ideas had long since run out. So he became the bogey of the Weimar-Jena people. The Xenia assailed him with frank brutality, thus:
What is beyond your reach is bad, you think in your blindness, Yet whatever you touch, that you cover with dirt.
Other objects of attack were the brothers Stolberg, for their narrow religiosity; Friedrich Schlegel, for his bumptious self-conceit; and various small fry for this and that peccadillo.[99]
A large part of the epigrams, however, were of the ‘tame’ variety, that is, stingless outgivings of a jocund humor, or grave pronunciamentos upon religion, philosophy, art and so forth. The authors did not wish to appear before the world as mere executioners, but as men with a positive creed, comprising things to be loved as well as things to be hated. They pleaded for sanity, clearness and moderation, and frowned upon the fanatics, hypocrites, vulgarians and cranks. The well-known distich entitled ‘My Creed’ is representative of many which were directed against the spirit of blind partisanship:
Which religion is mine? Not one of the many you mention. ‘Why’, do you venture to ask? Too much religion, I say.
Even virtue was to be cherished temperately,–without too much talk about it:
Nothing so hateful as Vice, and all the more to be hated, Since because of it, now, Virtue is really a need.
And so on in endless variety, on all sorts of subjects. Further illustration shall be dispensed with, seeing that the ancient distich is a poetic form for which the English language has, at the best, but little sympathy. In German it goes much better; and for Schiller in particular, with his natural love of antithesis, it proved a convenient setting for his opinions.
The effect of the Xenia was to set literary Germany agog with curiosity. Two editions of the ‘Almanac’ were quickly bought up and a third became necessary. There was infinite guessing, speculating, interpreting, and among those who had been hit there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, A very few friends of Goethe and Schiller, such as Koerner, Humboldt and Zelter, watched the commotion with solemn glee. Others were shocked or grieved at such a mode of warfare. Wieland mildly regretted that he had come off well in the Xenia, seeing that many other honest people had fared so badly. Herder was much more outspoken and declared that he hated the whole accursed species. The replies, protests and counter-attacks were legion, some in brutal belligerent prose, others in more or less clever Anti-xenia. Some of the latter were grossly abusive, and even indecent; a few contained very pretty home-thrusts, as when in allusion to a well-known poem of Schiller’s he was advised to trouble himself less about the ‘Dignity of Women’ and more about his own;[100] or where his ‘Realm of Shades’ was declared to be so very shadowy that one could not see the shades for the shadow.[101] But the best of all perhaps was the oft-quoted gem:
In Weimar and in Jena they make hexameters like this, But the pentameters are even more excellent.[102]
Historians of German literature are probably right in believing that the Xenia fusillade produced on the whole a salutary effect, although many of the objects of attack seem, at this date, to have been hardly worth the ammunition. But the explosion cleared the muggy air like a thunder-storm and denned many an issue that it was well to have defined. Writers of every ilk were shaken out of their somnolence and compelled to look in the direction of Weimar; and when it was a question of taking sides, where was the force that could hope to make headway against the combined strength of Goethe and Schiller? The odds were too great; there was nothing to do but to grumble a little and then–acquiesce in the new leadership. As for the Dioscuri, they had the wisdom to see that one sharp campaign was enough; that for the rest they could further the good cause much more effectively by admirable creation than by peppery epigrams. Prod a man for his bad taste or his foolish opinions, and you harden his heart and provoke him to retaliate; give him something to admire, and you make him a friend in spite of himself.
In the autumn of 1796 Schiller addressed himself to ‘Wallenstein’, and from that time on dramatic poetry continued to be his chief concern. He led a quiet, laborious life, battling often with disease and depression, but sustained by high resolution and finding joy enough in domestic affection and the friendship of Goethe. The _Horen_ lasted three years and then died an easy death by the mutual consent of editor and publisher. Of the ‘Almanac’ five numbers appeared, beginning with 1796. In these small annual volumes a large part of Schiller’s best poems were originally published. His work upon the ‘Almanac’ was usually done in the summer, other activities being then temporarily laid aside. From, the time of his connection with Cotta, who took over the ‘Almanac’ after the first number had appeared, Schiller usually had money enough for his needs. But his needs were very modest, the demands of social life in Jena–or even in Weimar under the fiercer but still not very fierce light of the court–being extremely simple. He had not to reckon with the Persian apparatus that disturbed the soul of Horace.
The further relations of Goethe and Schiller, so far as they have any important bearing upon the works of the latter, will be touched on in subsequent chapters. Here let it be remarked in passing that their friendship was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a mere relation of master and disciple. It was rather a spiritual copartnership of equals, each recognizing the other’s strength, respecting the other’s individuality and eager to profit by discussion. In the beginning, it is true, Schiller looked up to Goethe as to a great and wise teacher who was to give everything and receive little or nothing in return. Every one will recall his saying that he was a mere poetic scalawag in comparison with Goethe. But it is worth remembering that this remark was made after the reading of ‘Wilhelm Meister’,–a work which, notwithstanding his admiration, he criticised very sharply. And the justice of his criticism was admitted by Goethe; whereupon Schiller drily observed in a letter to Koerner that Goethe was a man who could be told a great deal of truth. As time passed, Schiller dropped the tone of humble docility and became more and more independent. If he deferred to the superior wisdom of Goethe in dealing with the plastic arts and natural science, there were other matters,–philosophy, poetic theory and the dramatic art,–upon which he felt that he could speak as one having authority. And his authority was respected by Goethe, especially after the completion of ‘Wallenstein’. Goethe saw that Schiller, along with his poetic gift, possessed a practical dramatic talent,–an eye for effect and a power of appealing to the general heart,–such as he, Goethe, could by no means claim for himself. And so the nominal director of the Weimar theater leaned heavily upon his friend and looked to him as the best hope of the German drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 98: “Goethe”, einundzwanzigste Vorlesung.]
[Footnote 99: All the extant Xenia, nine hundred and twenty-six in number,–many of them previously unknown,–were published in 1893 by Erich Schmidt and Bernhard Suphan, with copious introduction and notes, as Volume 8 of the “Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft” in Weimar.]
[Footnote 100:
Lasz doch die Frauen in Ruhe mit ihrer Wuerde, und sorge Fuer die deine, mein Freund. Ihre bewahren sie schon.]
[Footnote 101:
Nun, was denkt ihr vom Reiche der Schatten? Es schattet und schattet Dasz man vor Schatten umher nichts von den Schatten erkennt.]
[Footnote 102:
In Weimar und in Jena macht man Hexameter wie der; Aber die Pentameter sind doch noch excellenter.]
CHAPTER XV
Later Poems
So fuehrt zu seiner Jugend Huetten,
Zu seiner Unschuld reinem Glueck,
Vom fernen Ausland fremder Sitten
Den Fluechtling der Gesang zurueck, In der Natur getreuen Armen
Von kalten Regeln zu erwarmen.
_’The Power of Song’_.
The dominant note of Schiller’s later poetry is intellectual seriousness; wherefore, if there be those for whom intellectual seriousness is not a quality of poetry at all, for them he has not written. The element of reflection is nearly always prominent in his verse, though there are a few of his poems, notably his best ballads, in which it is conspicuously lacking. What we usually hear is the man of culture commenting upon life, and everywhere he makes his appeal to universal sentiments. The spontaneity, or seeming spontaneity, of the great lyrists was no part of his gift. To catch a fleeting fancy, or some eccentricity of private emotion, and fix it in musical verse of a vague suggestiveness, was not in his line. If he had ever, like Heine, imagined himself joining his sweetheart in the grave and defying the resurrection in a rapturous embrace, he would probably have thought it beneath his dignity to versify the whimsy. Of course his verse is self-revelation, without which poetry cannot be; but it is the revelation of a soul dwelling habitually in the upper altitudes of thought and emotion, and always assuming that fellow-mortals who care for poetry at all will be capable of a serious joy in the things of the mind.
One may say that his art as a poet consists not so much in the direct expression of feeling in sensuous and passionate language, as in the transfiguration of thought by means of impassioned imagery. In his poems as elsewhere he is a good deal of a rhetorician, but he is never insincere. His verse came from the heart, only it was the expression of character and convictions rather than of moods and fancies. It seems intended to edify rather than to portray; to impress rather than to delight. Some of it, too, is occupied with ideal sentiments so abstract and sublimated as to possess but languid interest for normally constituted lovers of poetry. For a while, at least, after his return to poetry, he may fairly be said to have cared a little too much for the white radiance of eternity, and not quite enough for the colored reflection beneath the dome.[103]
This last observation has in view more particularly the poems he wrote in the year 1795, while still ‘hugging the shore of philosophy’. Take for example ‘The Veiled Image at Sais’, which tells in rather prosaic pentameters of an ardent young truth-seeker who is escorted by an Egyptian hierophant to a veiled statue and told that whoso lifts the veil shall see the Truth. At the same time he is warned that the veil must not be lifted save by the consecrated hand of the priest himself. Moved by a curiosity which can hardly seem anything but laudable,–unless one is prepared to take the side of the sacerdotal humbug,–the young man returns in the night and raises the veil. In the morning he is found pale and unconscious at the foot of the statue. Soon afterwards he dies; leaving to mankind the message:
Woe unto him who seeks the Truth through Guilt.
This has an unctuous sound, and one gets a vague impression that the old story has been dressed up for the sake of some modern application. One is piqued to reflect upon it; but the more one reflects the more clearly one sees that there is no real instruction in it. But if there is no instruction, there is nothing at all; since the mysticism is of a kind that appeals solely to the intellect.
Far more interesting is the poem which was at first called ‘The Realm of Shades’ and later ‘The Ideal and Life’,–a difficult production, which resembles ‘The Artists’ in its suggestion of a voyage through the imponderable ether. We begin with the blessed gods in Olympus and end with the apotheosis of Hercules; and the intervening stretch is like the vasty realm of the Mothers in ‘Faust’. The poem is intellectual, in the sense that its theme is a concept of the mind, and its structure logical throughout; yet every strophe is surcharged with feeling, and the diction presents a marvelous wealth of imagery. It must be conquered by study before it can yield any great pleasure; but the conquest once made, one finds a noble delight in the gorgeous coloring with which Schiller invests his idealistic rainbow in the clouds. Good critics, favorable to Schiller’s genius, regard ‘The Ideal and Life’ as the greatest of his philosophic poems and the most characteristic expression of his nature. He himself felt a sort of reverence for it. ‘When you receive this letter’, he wrote to Humboldt, ‘put away everything that is profane and read this poem in solemn quiet.’ And Humboldt replied: ‘How shall I thank you for the indescribable pleasure that your poem has given me? Since the day on which I received it, it has in the truest sense possessed me; I have read nothing else, have scarcely thought of anything else.’
The general drift of the wonderfully pregnant verses is that man attains peace only by renouncing the things of sense and living in the realm of shades, that is, among eternal ideals. Here he is free–like the gods.
The Weavers of the Web–the Fates–but sway The matter and the things of clay;
Safe from each change that Time to Matter gives, Nature’s blest playmate, free at will to stray With Gods a god, amidst the fields of Day, The FORM, the ARCHETYPE, serenely lives. Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing? Cast from thee Earth, the bitter and the real, High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring Into the Realm of the Ideal.[104]
Throughout the poem ‘Beauty’ is put for ‘the Ideal’; and we get a reflex of the philosophic doctrine that only the aesthetic faculty can resolve the eternal conflict between the sensuous and the rational man. Life Is and must be struggle, that being its very essence; but by taking refuge in the Realm of the Ideal, man anticipates his apotheosis. There he escapes from the tyranny of the flesh and the bondage of nature’s law. The misery of struggle and defeat no longer vexes him. The warring forces are reconciled and he sees their conflict under the aspect of eternal beauty. Thus, like the new-born god, Alcides, taking leave of the terrestrial battle-ground, he mounts into heaven, while the nightmare of the earthly life ‘sinks and sinks and sinks’.
Behold him spring
Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing, And the dull matter that confined before Sinks downward, downward, downward, as a dream! Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul, And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream, Fills for a God the bowl.[105]
All this may seem, at first blush, to attach excessive importance to the attainment of inward peace and harmony,–as if one’s private comfort were the greatest thing in life. It _seems_ to recommend a quietistic, contemplative life; for how else shall one escape from the actual into the ideal? Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to read into the poem anything like a recommendation of quietism. The ultimate goal is described in terms which suggest now the mythology of Homer, now the Platonic realm of ideals, and again the Christian heaven; but however the blessed existence is imaged, it is always thought of as attainable only through a strenuous grapple with the realities of this life. Thus the essential spirit of the poem is the spirit of energetic, hopeful endeavor. Its doctrine is, to quote the words of Kuno Francke, that “only through work are we delivered from the slavery of the senses”; that “the very trials and sufferings of mankind bring out its divine nature and insure its ultimate transition to an existence of ideal harmony and beauty”.[106]
The doctrine, in its essence, was dear to Goethe, as well as to Schiller, and takes us into the holy-of-holies of their joint philosophy. What else did Goethe mean by his oft-reiterated preachment of renunciation, and by his well-known verses about ‘weaning oneself from the half and living resolutely in the whole, the good and the beautiful’? In his excellent book upon Diderot Mr. John Morley speaks somewhere of “that affectation of culture with which the great Goethe infected part of the world”. Let it not be forgotten, however, in our latter-day contempt of culture, that the Weimar poets were great workers, and also, in their way, great fighters. They did not turn their attention–at least not directly–to the crushing of the Infamous, nor to any battle against social or political wrong. They fought rather for sanity, for good art, for philosophy; for those things which go to enrich and broaden the life of the individual. It was a good fight,–the best which, at their time, with their gifts, they could possibly have engaged in.
Schiller’s fervid verses, recommending an escape from the bondage of sense to the free realm of the mind, correspond of course to nothing that is humanly feasible. The shackles of the flesh are upon us and there is no way to get rid of them. It is only an ideal, a poet’s dream. Nevertheless the subject has a practical aspect which is definable in plain prose. It is found in the following passage from Goethe:
We put one passion in place of another; employments, dilettantisms, amusements, hobbies,–we try them all through to the end only to cry out at last that all is vanity. No one is horrified at this false, this blasphemous saying; indeed it is thought to be wise and irrefutable. But there are a few persons who, anticipating such intolerable feelings, in order to avoid all partial resignations, resign themselves universally once for all. Such persons convince themselves with regard to the eternal, necessary, law-governed order of things, and seek to acquire ideas which are indestructible and are only confirmed by the contemplation of that which is transient.[107]
Other poems of the year 1795 were ‘The Partition of the Earth’, wherein Zeus takes pity on the portionless poet by giving him a perpetual _entree_ to the celestial court; the mildly humorous ‘Deeds of the Philosopher’, a bit of persiflage on the art of proving what everybody knows, and also several pieces in the elegiac form.
Of these last the weightiest is the one at first called simply ‘Elegy’, and later ‘The Walk’. Just as Goethe had used the elegiac meter for his reminiscences of Rome, so Schiller employs it for his impressions of such small travel as fate permitted him,–a summertime walk in field or forest. The verses will bear comparison very well with the ‘Roman Elegies’. Instead of paintings, statues, marble palaces and the troublesome Amor, we have the aspects of nature,–the music of bird and bee, and the toil of the husbandman ‘not yet awakened to freedom’. As our sauntering poet comes in sight of a city,–the locus of the poem is the neighborhood of Jena, with reminiscent and imaginative touches here and there,–he is moved to reflections upon the more eager life of the townspeople. This leads to a retrospective survey of the origins of civilization,–of agriculture, the mechanical crafts, trade, letters, art, science and the social sentiments. Then the darker side of the picture is developed,–the evils, inhumanities, corruptions and vices of civilized life. For some time the wanderer pursues his way completely lost in these sad contemplations; then suddenly he returns to the present and finds himself alone with nature, from whose ‘pure altar’ he receives back again the joyousness of youth. Thus the poem ends, like ‘The Ideal and Life’, upon an idyllic note; the one pointing forward, beyond the warfare of life, to an unimaginable Elysium, the other pointing backward to a happy golden age of which Mother Nature is the living reminder:
Ever the will of man is changing the rule and the purpose, Ever the genius of life alters the form of his deed. But in eternal youth, in ever varying beauty, Thou, O Mother of Men, keepest the ancient law…. Under the selfsame blue, over the same old green, Wander together the near, and wander the far-away races, And old Homer’s sun, lo! it shines on us now.
The inner form of ‘The Walk’–loving contemplation of nature, giving rise to general reflections upon life–is essentially Goethean; one may safely regard it as a conscious experiment in Goethe’s manner. As such it is very good indeed, although its exotic meter has stood in the way of its attaining the popularity of the ballads and the ‘Song of the Bell’. ‘The Walk’ and ‘The Ideal and Life’ are the noblest gifts of Schiller’s didactic muse.
Coming now to the poems of the year 1796, and regarding them first in a general way as a group by themselves, we can observe that Schiller has made progress in weaning himself from abstract modes of thought. The stanzas entitled ‘The Power of Song’ tell of a fugitive in strange lands lured back to warm himself in the embrace of nature from the chill of ‘cold rules’. Another reminds the metaphysician, who boasts of the great height to which he has climbed, that his altitude can do nothing for him except give him a view of the valley below, ‘Pegasus in Harness’ is a humorous apologue intended to enforce the truth that the winged horse is of no use for drudgery and exhibits his proper mettle only when ridden by a poet. Of much greater interest than any of these is ‘The Ideals’. Here the middle-aged poet recalls the fervid dreams of his youth and thinks of them under the image of airy sprites attending his rushing chariot, like the Hours in Guido’s picture. Midway in his course he finds that they have all dropped away, save Friendship and Work,–Friendship that lovingly shares the burdens of life, and Work that only brings grains of sand one by one to the Builder,
Yet from the debt-book of the ages
Erases minutes, days and years.
Most noteworthy in this group, however, is unquestionably that famous tribute to womanhood which goes by the name of ‘Dignity of Women’. Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry,–the chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity. Man is depicted as a wild creature, ever tossing on the sea of passion, or chasing phantoms in the empyrean. Reckless and vehement, he lives by the law of force, or, at the best, by the law of reason and logic. Woman, on the other hand, follows the better light of feeling and gently lures the daring wanderer back to present realities. In her little sphere of intuition she is richer and freer than he in his boundless kingdom of thought and imagination. Her sovereignty is that of a child or an angel, making always for peace, gentleness and goodness.–All of which is extremely interesting as a classical expression of an old-fashioned sentiment that good men used once to believe in. Schiller believed in it ardently, and one loves him none the less for that. The most cogent objection to his verses is their generality. For ‘man’ it is necessary to read ‘Friedrich Schiller’, and for ‘woman’, his wife.
In its metrical form the poem attempts to express the lovableness of the ‘eternal-womanly’ by means of a lightly flowing dactylic measure, while a heavier trochaic cadence is employed to denote the nature of man:
Ehret die Frauen! Sie flechten und weben Himmlische Rosen ins irdische Leben,
Flechten der Liebe beglueckendes Band…. Ewig aus der Wahrheit Schranken
Schweift des Mannes wilde Kraft, Und die irren Tritte wanken
Auf dem Meer der Leidenschaft.[108]
Such a scheme, in the hands of a Schiller, leads inevitably to a crescendo of rhetorical contrasts, which in the end sound somewhat flighty and forced. The poem was an object of ridicule to the Romanticists, and the elder Schlegel wrote a saucy parody of the first two strophes.[109]
The few poems that found a place in the ‘Almanac’ of 1797, along with the luxuriant crop of Xenia, are relatively unimportant. The difference between the sexes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed in the _Horen_, was expounded anew by Schiller in distichs. It is very much the same story as the ‘Dignity of Women’, the distich form lending itself beautifully to those antitheses which were Schiller’s delight. Then there was a poetic riddle, called ‘The Maiden from Afar’,–a slight affair, but pretty in its way; a ‘Lament of Ceres’, in trochaic tetrameters, and a ‘Dithyramb’, wherein a poet is visited by all the Olympian gods and cheered with a draught of Hebe’s joy-giving nectar. These classicizing poems, which purport to express modern feeling in the terms of Greek mythology, sound now a little hollow and conventional. The vein had been worked to excess even in Schiller’s day, and it is no wonder that the Romanticists pined for something new. The best of them all is ‘The Eleusinian Festival’, called originally ‘Song of the Citizen’, in which Schiller returns to his favorite theme–the origin and progress of civilized society. The climactic thought of the twenty-seven sonorous stanzas is contained in the Kantian oracle of Ceres:
Freiheit liebt das Tier der Wueste,
Frei im Aether herrscht der Gott,
Ihrer Brust gewalt’ge Lueste
Zaehmet das Naturgebot;
Doch der Mensch, in ihrer Mitte,
Soll sich an den Menschen reihn,
Und allein durch seine Sitte
Kann er frei und maechtig sein.[110]
In the spring of the year 1797, as ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ was approaching completion, Goethe and Schiller were led to an interchange of views concerning the distinctive qualities of epic poetry. Their discussion begot an interest in the kindred type of the ballad, which may be regarded as a miniature epic in a lyrical form. The result was that both poets began to make ballads for the next year’s ‘Almanac’. Schiller contributed five: ‘The Diver’, ‘The Ring of Polycrates’, ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’, ‘The Errand at the Furnace’ and ‘The Knight of Toggenburg’. In subsequent years he wrote three others: ‘The Pledge’, ‘Hero and Leander’ and ‘The Count of Hapsburg’. To these may be added ‘The Glove ‘, which was not called a ballad because not written in uniform stanzas, and ‘The Fight with the Dragon ‘, which was called a ‘romanza’.
These poems, taken as a whole, owe nothing whatever to the folk-song. The popular ballad, which had once fascinated Goethe and Herder and Buerger, and the Goettingen poets generally, seems never to have appealed to Schiller in any notable degree. If we except ‘The Count of Hapsburg’, his ballad themes are all exotic, that is, they do not deal with German legend or history or superstition. The suggestions came generally from out-of-the-way reading, and in one or two cases his exact source has not been certainly identified. The tales have no odor of the soil, no local color. They make no use of the supernatural, the gruesome or the uncanny. They are not wild roses, but jaqueminots cultivated with an aesthetic end in view. Their aroma is distinctly literary, and they are all eminently serious. Not a smile is provided for in the whole list. There is no element of mystery about them. The passions and sentiments illustrated are of the universal kind. And just as vague, uncanny and bizarre feelings play no part, so there is no resort to verbal tricks, such as meaningless repetitions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language is dignified and classical. Their great merit is the vivid and strong imaginative coloring with which situations and actions are portrayed. While in no sense folk-songs, they have always been great favorites with the German people.
In ‘The Diver’ the stress falls upon the portraiture of the raging deep and its awful horrors. It is a rhetorical _Prachtstueck_, which has done good service to many an elocutionist and declaiming schoolboy. Schiller himself had never seen the sea, nor any body of water remotely resembling the Charybdis of the poem. Observation, as he humbly confessed, had given him nothing more awesome than a mill-dam,–the rest was Homeric and imaginative; wherefore it no doubt gratified him when Goethe reported from Schaffhausen, after a visit to the cataract, that the line
Und es wallet, und siedet, und brauset, und zischt,
was scientifically correct. ‘The Glove’ merely versifies a simple incident of a brave knight whose courage is put to an inhuman test by his lady-love; he brings her glove from among the ‘horrible cats’, and then contemptuously cuts her acquaintance. In these two, the earliest of the ballads, description of the situation preponderates over the epic element, and there is no ‘idea’ except to narrate an extraordinarily brave action. In ‘The Ring of Polycrates’ one can discern progress in the mastery of the ballad form, though the subject was none of the best. Based upon a story in Herodotus, it is a poetic setting of the ancient idea that excessive good fortune provokes the anger of the gods and portends disaster. Strangely enough Schiller’s poem breaks off with the recovery of the ring from the fish’s belly, and the consequent warning and departure of the Egyptian guest. One would expect an additional stanza or two, showing how the forebodings of Amasis were presently realized.
Much better than any of the foregoing is ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’. In the composition of this ballad Goethe took a deep interest, giving several suggestions which were adopted by Schiller to the great advantage of the poem. The Greek legend does not explain, or explains variously, just why the murderers in the theater call out the name of Ibycus when they see the cranes flying over. Schiller supposes that the spectacle just then going on was a solemn chorus of the Eumenides. Thus the unaccountable exclamation of the murderers is connected with the mysterious power of the avenging Furies. It is this use of the nemesis idea that makes the merit of the ballad.
‘The Knight of Toggenburg’ is a sentimental tale of romantic love, while ‘The Pledge’–a captivating and powerful version of the Damon and Pythias story–is a heroic ballad of loyal friendship. ‘The Errand at the Furnace’, wherein a spiteful tale-bearer meets the horrible fate he has prepared for the innocent and devout Fridolin,–may be styled a ballad of pious edification. Here, as a critic observes, Schiller purposely essays a tone of childlike _naivete_ which was foreign to his nature.[111] ‘The Battle with the Dragon’ has for its theme the moral majesty of self-conquest. With ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’ and ‘The Pledge’, it forms a triad which may be regarded as the choicest fruitage of Schiller’s interest in the ballad. The later ones, ‘The Count of Hapsburg’ and ‘Hero and Leander’, are no less finished in the matter of form, but have more of a lyric tinge.
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.
Particularly admirable is the art with which Schiller has contrived to denote the motley variety of human types gathered under Wallenstein’s banner, while giving to each of his figures a fairly distinct individuality. With a little study of costume a painter could paint them all. There is the wretched Peasant, who has been reduced to beggary and is willing to retrieve his fortunes by gambling with loaded dice; the sagacious Sergeant, who always knows more than other people, and prides himself upon ‘the fine touch and the right tone’ that can only be acquired near the person of the commander; the depraved Chasseur, who glories in fighting for its own sake, cares not for whom or what, and objects to discipline; the philosophic Cuirasseur, who argues for a higher ideal and pities the woes of the producing class, but cannot help matters; and the fiery Capuchin, who pronounces his wordy anathema against the whole godless crowd. What a picturesque assembly they make and how admirably they bring out the lights and shadows of the Wallenstein regime! One wonders how an invalid recluse, a bookish philosopher like Schiller, should ever have been able to write such scenes.
The total effect of the prelude is to put one in a very good humor with the personages who figure there. One indeed feels sub-consciously that they are detestable–not a whit better than the angry friar paints them. One sympathizes intellectually with his fierce denunciation and pities the land that is exposed to such a scourge. And yet–such is the poetic glamour thrown over them–feelings of this kind never become dominant. It is like the squalid slums of a great city, when seen through the sun-lit morning mist. The reality is horrible, revolting. The soul of the philanthropist is pained–but not so the eye of the artist. Schiller contrives that we see his vagabonds with the artistic eye and are drawn to them by their very picturesqueness. We quickly impute to them more virtue than their ways betoken; and when in their lusty final song they break out in a strain of lofty idealism:
Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein,
one is hardly conscious of the incongruity.
The dramatic fable devised by Schiller for the tragedy proper carries us back to the winter of 1634. Events extending over several months are concentrated by poetic fiat into the four days preceding the assassination of Wallenstein, which took place on the 25th of February. The prominent characters fall into two groups,–the abettors of Wallenstein in his treason, and the imperialists who work his ruin. The first group consists of historical personages, mainly officers, whom he had bound to him by one or another tie of selfish interest. Foremost among these are Illo, the Count and Countess Terzky, and General Butler, who turns against his chief and becomes the agent of his taking-off. The central figure of the other group is Octavio Piccolomini, whom Schiller converts from a young officer of thirty into an elderly man with a grown-up son. Octavio, in reality the trusted agent of the emperor, is regarded by Wallenstein with a superstitious infatuation as his own most faithful friend. Between these two groups stand the ingenuous lovers, Max and Thekla, imaginary characters who can make their perfect peace with neither side and are done to death in a pathetic struggle between love and duty.
As we have already seen, Schiller found it no easy task to mould the historical Wallenstein into a satisfactory tragic hero. The character was lacking in nobility. To be sure it was not necessary to make him out an infamous traitor; for his character, his motives, the measure of his guilt, were subjects of debate among the historians, and the evidence was, as it still is, inconclusive. It was therefore quite within the license of a dramatic poet to take the part of Wallenstein, so far at least as to throw into strong light all the palliating circumstances that could be urged in his favor. Such were, for example, that he was a prince of the empire and as such had a right to conduct negotiations and to make peace; that he wished to give rest to a torn and bleeding Germany; that he had been ignobly treated by the House of Austria, and so forth. By laying stress upon these things and passing lightly over others, it was easily possible to save Wallenstein from the detestation that is wont to associate itself with the idea of a traitor.
But for an interesting tragic hero it is not enough to fall short of infamy. He must have some sort of distinction. He must be a towering personality. One does not go to the theater to be convinced in a moral or political argument, but to be carried along with a rush of feeling, for which the old term sympathy is perhaps as good a name as any other. A magnificent criminal will serve the purpose very well, as Schiller had discovered in his early years, but he must be magnificent. Now it was precisely this element of greatness that was lacking in the character of the historical Wallenstein. No lofty idealism of any kind could be imputed to him. He was not a religious zealot, like Cromwell or Gustav Adolf, nor was he a strenuous German patriot, like Frederick the Great. He was not even a great soldier; for while, as the head of a great host of marauding mercenaries, he made himself the scourge and the terror of Germany, he never won a decisive battle against an equal enemy. The history of his fighting is largely a history of futilities. And when he formed the plan of a separate peace,–a plan which if promptly and vigorously executed might possibly have succeeded and have caused him to be numbered with the benefactors of Europe,–he dallied with the thought until it was too late, fell into the pit which he had digged for himself, and, in trying to flounder out, met his death at the hands of an assassin who had a grudge against him. Thus even his death was pitiful rather than tragic. It does not appear to be the work of that high Nemesis which Schiller noticed as dominating the career of Shakspere’s Richard the Third.
To have succeeded as Schiller did succeed, in the face of such difficulties, is a memorable triumph of the poetic art. By purely aesthetic means, without any appeal to political or religious passion, without requiring us to take sides in any debatable cause, but simply by the skill and subtlety of his drawing, he has invested Wallenstein with an impressiveness such, as belongs only to the great creations of the great tragic poets. His overruling trait is ambition; and in the denotation of this, as of his whole relation to the Countess Terzky, the influence of ‘Macbeth’ is obvious. And yet he is very far from being a copy of Shakspere’s hero, or a mere embodiment of ambition. On the contrary, he is the most complicate of all Schiller’s creations, and the most difficult to portray on the stage in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. As a good critic observes, he is ‘fascinating and repulsive, admirable and contemptible, fantastic and cunning, cautious and frivolous, a mighty organizer and a helpless child, false and true, touching and terrible, a mixture of all possible qualities, and yet a unity, a totality’.[115] The promise of the Prologue is admirably fulfilled:
But art shall show him in his human form And bring him nearer to your eyes and hearts; She sees the man in all the stress of life, And for the greater portion of his guilt She blames the working of malignant stars.
The last two lines, be it observed, involve much more than a mere allusion to Wallenstein’s superstitious belief in astrology. Schiller’s idea, schooled as he had been for years upon Sophocles and Shakspere, was to blend the fate-tragedy of the ancients with the modern tragedy of character. The two things were not incompatible, since in a broad view of the matter a man’s character is his fate. It is to be observed also that the peculiar effect of Greek tragedy does not depend upon the way in which the external [Greek: moira] was conceived, but upon the fact that the hero seems to be battling, and was by the audience known to be battling, against the inevitable. The situation is not what he supposes, and the event will not be what he intends. He is the subject: of an illusion, an infatuation; and this [Greek: ate] is the principal factor in the tragic effect.[116]
Now Wallenstein’s [Greek: ate] takes the form of a blind and overweening self-conceit. He has the ‘great-man-mania’ hardly less than Karl Moor. Accustomed to follow his own light, to command and to be obeyed, and to look with contempt upon the interference of priests and courtiers in the business of war, he thinks himself omnipotent. There is no power that he fears save that of the stars; and even that he imagines he can bend to his will by studious attention to astrologic portents. He has found it possible to raise and maintain a great army by taking good care of his officers and men; and appealing thus constantly to the lower motives of human nature, he comes to think at last that there are no others. When the Swede Wrangel suggests a suspicion of his Chancellor that it ‘might be an easier thing to create out of nothing an army of sixty thousand men than to lead a sixtieth part of them into an act of treachery’, Wallenstein replies: ‘Your Chancellor judges like a Swede and a Protestant.’ And when he finds that this sentiment of loyalty–_die Treue_, one of the most ancient and powerful of motives–is still a real force in human affairs, he can only account for it as a curious superstition:
‘Tis not the embodiment of living strength That makes the truly terrible. It is
The vulgar brood of all the yesterdays, The eternally recurring commonplace,
That was and therefore is and hence will be. For man is fashioned of the trivial
And customary use he names his nurse.[117]
It would seem as if such a blind and superstitious self-worshiper could have but little chance of winning sympathy, and the less chance for the reason that he really does nothing in the play to justify his grand airs. His mighty deeds are a matter of hearsay. We are obliged to take his greatness on trust, as something growing out of the past. And yet Schiller contrives, with splendid artistic cunning, that we do take him from first to last at his own estimate. His assumption of superiority appears perfectly reasonable; and even in the ticklish astrological scenes, about which Schiller himself was in doubt until reassured by Goethe, he never becomes ridiculous. His belief in destiny and his unctuous palaver about the occult connection of events do not detract from his dignity. One understands that his oracles are fallacious, that it is all a humbug; but so perfect is the illusion that instead of smiling one mentally associates him with other men undoubtedly great,–men like Caesar, Cromwell and Napoleon,–who were haunted by more or less similar hallucinations.
This is effected, in part at least, by bringing Wallenstein into contrast with vulgar and commmonplace natures. In the presence of a real hero he would be a pigmy,–even under the searchlight of the ardent young Max his effulgence pales somewhat,–but surrounded by the Illos, the Terzkys, Isolanis and the rest of them, he is a moral and intellectual giant. One does not wish to belong to _their_ company or to believe in their arguments; and so when they urge him to act one is quite prepared to credit the mysterious oracles which assure him that the time is not yet ripe. Thus even his indecision,–most damning of weaknesses in a great soldier,–does not seem to belittle him. One enters into the spirit of his self-defense, is half inclined to believe in his innocence and to sympathize with him, when the psychological moment arrives and the capture of Sesina compels him to translate a traitorous thought into a traitorous deed. And even after this, when he stands forth as a declared traitor; while his trusted friends are secretly turning against him, and his unsuspected enemies are quietly plotting his doom; when, with a futile energy, he is making the plans that are yet, as he believes, to leave him master of the situation; and when, finally, in his bereavement and isolation, he is brought to face his miserable fate,–everywhere he looms up as a grand figure. Schiller has taken good care that one shall not think of his treason or of his weakness, but rather of his imposing personality.
That Wallenstein produces such an impression is largely due to the character of his chief antagonist. Octavio Piccolomini is certainly one of Schiller’s most notable minor studies. It is he who stands for the cause of loyalty to which one naturally leans; but he is so portrayed that one soon distrusts and in the end almost despises him. And yet he is no villain of the extreme type so dear to Schiller in his early years. Octavio’s conduct and his sentiments are technically correct. He is a faithful servant of the empire, a far-sighted and energetic commander and an affectionate father. The groundwork of his character seems much better entitled to sympathy than that of Wallenstein. In the play, however, from the moment we hear of the secret order making him temporary commander-in-chief, we begin to suspect that he too is playing a game for profit. And when he lays his secret plans against Wallenstein, while openly appearing as his friend; when he craftily works upon the vanity of Butler, and instils into Butler’s small soul the poison of a murderous hate, one is not drawn to the cause which needs such championship.
Rationally and before the bar of politics, Octavio’s conduct is unimpeachable. He does his duty in baffling a powerful traitor in the most effective way. It is not his fault that Wallenstein is deceived in him, and nothing requires that he go and undeceive him. He resorts to no tricks, he feigns no sentiments that are not his. He but tells the truth to Butler in regard to the ancient matter of the title. It is no part of his plan that Butler shall murder his former chief. And when Wallenstein falls, not so much because of his present treason as because of his former duplicity, Octavio is technically guiltless of the deed. And yet so skillfully is the portrait drawn, so subtly are the lights and shadows managed, that when the curtain falls one is little disposed to sympathize with him in his triumph. There is a world of ironical pathos in those last words of the play: ‘To Prince Piccolomini’.
A very important element in the impression produced by Octavio, as also in that produced by Wallenstein himself, is the fact that we are made to try them not at the bar of worldly ethics, but before the tribunal of the heart as represented by the young idealist, Max. It is a weak criticism of Wallenstein which objects to the love-story or regards it as a mere concession to the sentimental demands of the average play-goer. For the reason just stated it must rather be looked upon as a vital element of the plot. No doubt the play can be imagined without it and would in that case be more in accordance with history. But what a relatively cold affair it would be! The tragedy of the lovers is an important part of the Nemesis that follows Wallenstein from the moment of his taking the fateful step. It is this which makes in no small degree the real impressiveness of his final isolation. Without it we should see in Wallenstein a masterful spirit, like Macbeth, playing fast and loose with the higher law and meeting an ignoble fate at the hands of enemies meaner than himself. In a sense the moral law would be vindicated, but how much more effective is the vindication when this masterful spirit first makes havoc of all that should be dearest to him as a man!
It is quite true that the figure of Max, like that of Posa, is out of harmony with the general _milieu_. Schiller was a lover of contrast, and in his skillful use of it lies a large part of his effectiveness as a playwright. To a certain extent his contrasts are made to order; that is, they proceed from the vision of the artist calculating an effect, rather than from the observation of life as it is. Partisans of realism tell us that this propensity is a weakness, a fault; and such it is, beyond question, whenever it leads to forced and stagy contrasts. But surely no general indictment can lie against Schiller for taking advantage of a principle which is perfectly legitimate in itself and has been employed more or less freely by the dramatists of all ages, including realists like Ibsen and Hauptmann. After all life does really offer contrasts of character as glaring as any that poet ever imagined, only they are not apt to be found in juxtaposition. The artist, however, has a perfect right to juxtapose them if it suits his purpose; that is, if it will really enhance the effect that he wishes to produce. If ever he departs too far from the familiar verities of life, he pays the penalty; for the judicious, instead of being thrilled by his pathos (or whatever it may be), are annoyed by his artificiality. This is the whole law of the matter, so far as its general aspect is concerned.
As for Max Piccolomini, he is a perfectly thinkable character–in the time of the Thirty Years’ War or at any other time. There is nothing supernal about him; he is simply the type of a brave and honorable young soldier who tries to walk by the higher law of conscience. There are always such men in the world, and Schiller cannot be blamed for locating one in the camp of Wallenstein, though history omitted to hand down his name. It is perhaps a little surprising that such a youngster as Max should be in command of the great Pappenheim’s regiment; that, however, is a part of the presupposition which one must mentally adjust as best one can. Within the limits of the play everything follows naturally. As a soldier he loves his commander and sides with him instinctively against the courtiers and politicians. His enthusiasm increases the ‘mighty suggestion’ that goes out from Wallenstein; one feels that the object of such idolatry from such a worshiper must indeed be great. In the love-scenes Max is always a man,–no trace here of sentimental weakness, or of any leaning to Quixotic folly. In his relation to Wallenstein, to Octavio, and to Thekla, his character is firmly and naturally drawn. And when his great disillusionment comes and he is forced to choose between love and duty, he makes a man’s choice and his career ends as it must end–in a tragic drama.
The drawing of the female characters in ‘Wallenstein’ bears witness, like all the rest of the play, to the ripening power of the years that had intervened since the writing of ‘Don Carlos’. That indefinable something that infects the earlier heroines of Schiller and gives them an air of sentimental futility, or else of schematic unnaturalness, has disappeared. The Countess Terzky, in particular, is a strong portrait which one can admire without reservation. As for Thekla, while her essence is an all-absorbing love for Max, she has at the same time a will and an energy of resolution which make her the worthy daughter of her father. Upon the whole she is the most lovable of all the heroines of Schiller. It is her tragedy of the heart which renders ‘Wallenstein’ perennially interesting to the young. And this is much; for does not Goethe’s shrewd Merry-Andrew declare that the great object of dramatic art is to please the young,–that _die Werdenden_ are the very ones to be considered?[118]
It is true that critics, speaking more for _die Gewordenen_, have often objected that the love-story in ‘Wallenstein’ is unduly expanded and that the lines have here and there, for a historical tragedy, rather too much of a sentimental, lyrical coloring. In the first of these objections, at any rate, there is some force. It was Schiller’s personal fondness for his pair of lovers that led him to spin out his material until it became necessary to divide it into two plays of five acts each. This, from a dramatic point of view, was unfortunate, albeit the reader who knows the entire work will hardly find it in his heart to wish that any portion of it had remained unwritten. Properly speaking, the entire ‘Piccolomini’ should constitute the first two acts of a five-act tragedy. It has no distinct unity of its own, but it takes an entire evening with what is properly the exposition and the entanglement of a play relating to Wallenstein’s defection and death. The result of a separate performance is that the climax of what should be the third act–Wallenstein’s momentous decision–comes right at the beginning of the second evening, and is thus not adequately led up to, save as one carries over the impressions of a preceding occasion. The effect is like that of dividing any other play between the second and the third act. One could wish, therefore, that Schiller had seen fit in his later years to prepare a stage version which would have made it possible to present the entire play in a single evening. It would have been a difficult task,–hopeless for an ordinary theatrical man working by the process of excision,–but for Schiller it would have been possible. And if he had attempted it, we may be quite certain that the love-story would have been very much abbreviated.
As regards the lyrical and softly-sentimental passages, the cogency of the critical objection is not so clear. Any opinion grounded upon an abstract theory of historical tragedy as such can have but little weight. Schiller had no models for ‘Wallenstein’; and if he had had, there is always more merit in finding new paths than in following the old. Historical tragedy without tender sentiment is possible, but it presupposes a public politically awake and an author upborne and inspired by a vigorous national life. Schiller could appeal to no such public, and his instinct told him that a play based upon cold passions must itself be cold. So he chose to sentimentalize history, at the expense of detracting somewhat from its dignity, rather than to make frigid plays which no one would care to see or to read. And if we grant a _raison d’etre_ to the sentimentalized historical drama, no fault can reasonably be found with lyrical passages like that at the end of the third act of ‘The Piccolomini’. Schiller found the soliloquy at hand as an accepted convention of the stage and he converted it occasionally into a lyric monologue, as Goethe had done before him in ‘Iphigenie’ and ‘Faust’. This looked toward opera, toward Romanticism, toward a mixture of types; but it was effective as a mode of portraying states of feeling. The lyric monologue is of course out of tune with the modern naturalistic dogma, but so is Hamlet’s soliloquy. And then it must be remembered that the naturalistic dogma was no part of Schiller’s creed.
A noteworthy characteristic of ‘Wallenstein’, as of all the plays that followed it, is its pervading seriousness. Humor plays no part. There are no Dogberries or grave-diggers, no quips or quibbles. Schiller had but little of the far-famed quality of ‘irony’. It did not lie in his nature to take a position aloof from the moving panorama of life and depict it impassively as it runs, with its sharp contrasts of grave and gay, of high and low. He is always a part of the world that he creates. For the other and higher method, as exemplified by Shakspere and also by Goethe in ‘Wilhelm Meister’, he showed a keen appreciation, and for a little while he imagined that he himself was catching the trick. That he did not altogether deceive himself is abundantly proved by ‘Wallenstein’s Camp’. After that, however, the ingrained seriousness of his temperament reasserted itself with all-controlling power. The gift of humor was not denied him, but the use of it in a grave drama was repugnant to his sense of style. In this respect he was more a disciple of the French and of the Greeks than of Shakspere.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 113: Let it be said once for all (to avoid frequent references), that the following account of the genesis of ‘Wallenstein’ is based upon Schiller’s letters–chiefly to Koerner and to Goethe–beginning in November, 1796.]
[Footnote 114: “Schiller”, p. 286.]
[Footnote 115: Bulthaupt, “Dramaturgie des Schauspiels”, I, 288.]
[Footnote 116: Notwithstanding frequent references to occult powers and overruling destiny, the Greek idea of fate is quite foreign to “Wallenstein”. It is essentially a modern character-drama. Cf. Fielitz, “Studien zu Schillers Dramen “, page 9 ff.]
[Footnote 117:
Nicht was lebendig, kraftvoll sich verkuendigt, Ist das gefaehrlich Furchtbare. Das ganz Gemeine ist’s, das ewig Gestrige,
Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt, Und morgen gilt, weil’s heute hat gegolten! Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht, Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme. ]
[Footnote 118:
Dann sammelt sich der Jugend schoenste Bluete Vor eurem Spiel und lauscht der Offenbarung, Dann sauget jedes zaertliche Gemuete
Aus eurem Werk sich melanchol’sche Nahrung…. Wer fertig ist, dem ist nichts recht zu machen; Ein Werdender wird immer dankbar sein.–‘_Faust_’.]
CHAPTER XVII
Mary Stuart
Wohlthaetig heilend nahet mir der Tod, Der ernste Freund! Mit seinen schwarzen Fluegeln Bedeckt er meine Schmach–den Menschen adelt, Den tiefstgesunkenen das letzte Schicksal–_’Mary Stuart’_.
After the completion of ‘Wallenstein’, in the spring of 1799, Schiller was not long in selecting a new dramatic theme. The unwonted leisure was irksome to him, so that he felt like one living in a vacuum. At first, being weary of war and politics, he was minded to try his hand upon something altogether imaginary, some unhistorical drama of passion. But the aversion to history and the balancing of attractions did not last long. On the 26th of April he wrote to Goethe as follows:
I have turned my attention to a political episode of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and have begun to study the trial of Mary Stuart. One or two first-rate tragic motives suggested themselves straightway, and these have given me great faith in the subject, which incontestably has much to recommend it. It seems to be especially adapted to the Euripidean method, which consists in the completest possible development of a situation; for I see a possibility of making a side issue out of the trial, and beginning the tragedy directly with the condemnation,
This time the historical orientation proceeded very rapidly. By the 4th of June he was ready to begin the first act, which formed his principal occupation during the next two months. From a letter to Goethe, written June 18, it is clear that he was then thinking especially of the danger of sentimentalizing his heroine. She was to excite sympathy, of course, but, so he averred, it was not to be of the tender, personal kind that moves to tears. It was to be her fate to experience and to arouse vehement passions, but only the nurse was to ‘feel any tenderness for her’. As we shall see, he did not remain entirely faithful to this early conception of Mary’s character. In August, the second act was completed and the third begun. Then came a long interruption, occasioned by the demands of the ‘Almanac’, the dangerous illness of Frau Schiller,–a lingering puerperal fever following the birth of her third child, Caroline, on the 11th of October,–and finally by the distractions incident to a change of residence. For Schiller had now decided to make his winter home in Weimar, so that he might be near the theater. He was heart and soul in the business of play-making, and looked forward to devoting the next six years of his life to that kind of work. To Koerner he did not confide his new plan at first, though he wrote of it often to Goethe.
The removal to Weimar took place early in December, having been made possible by an increase of stipend amounting to two hundred thalers. In granting this increase Karl August intimated that it might be of advantage to Schiller as a dramatic poet if he were to take the Weimarians into his confidence and discuss his plays with them. ‘What is to influence society’, he sagely remarked, ‘can be better fashioned in society than in isolation’; and he added a very gracious expression of his own personal friendliness. Schiller thus found himself once more virtually a theater poet. The Weimar stage, with its little and large problems, became the focus of his activity. As a good repertory was of prime importance, much of his time went to the making of translations and adaptations. Thus he began a version of Shakspere’s ‘Macbeth’, and had not finished it when he was again prostrated by a fresh and dangerous attack of his malady. After the completion of ‘Macbeth, in the spring of 1800, he returned to ‘Mary Stuart’, but found his progress impeded by manifold interruptions. To escape these he retired to the quiet of Ettersburg, and there, early in June, he finished his tragedy of the Scottish queen. A few days later, June 14, it was played at Weimar, and from that time to this it has been one of the accepted favorites of the stage. One who saw the second performance has left it on record that the spectators unanimously declared it to be ‘the most beautiful tragedy ever represented on the German boards’. Madame de Stael characterized it as the most moving and methodical of all German tragedies.