The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 12

In industry the bee may scorn thy merits, In cleverness a worm thy teacher be; Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits, But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]

After this we hear that man entered the land of knowledge through the morning gate of the beautiful; it was his inchoate art-sense that developed his understanding. The heavenly G.o.ddess Urania, whom we know here as Beauty and shall one day known as Truth, accompanied him into the exile of mortality and became his loving nurse, teaching him to live by her law, free from wild pa.s.sion and from the bondage of duty. To aid her in this work she chose a select body of priests, the artists, and taught them to imitate the fair forms of nature. In the contemplation of their work savage man was lifted to the heights of spiritual joy and forgot his gross appet.i.tes. He became acquainted with ideals and made G.o.ds and heroes for himself. Then he began to weigh and compare these ideals and thus arose philosophy and science, which aim in their slow and halting way to explain the full import of the primeval revelation.

All truth was given in symbols at the beginning, and the artists still remain the conservators and prophets of the highest spiritual things.

In case of such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content, which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that have nothing to do with the G.o.ddess Urania, we have learned something of primitive man, and what we have learned is very much out of tune with Schiller's dream. He a.s.signs to the aesthetic thrill a larger role than it has actually played in human history. This, however, is unimportant.

What is more important is that by investing his subject with a nimbus of poetic mysticism he became one of the founders of the modern Religion of Art. For the theological revelation of truth he subst.i.tutes a secular revelation of beauty, which, however, was regarded by him as containing the germs of all truth and virtue. We see him moving toward a theory that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that Beauty is the one.

To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial, have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very different thing from the later decorative aestheticism.

As poetry 'The Artists' may be said to come under the head of metrical rhetoric. It quite lacks the simplicity and sensuousness of Milton's canon, and as for pa.s.sion, it is florid rather than pa.s.sionate. It is however strong in Schiller's strength,--in its vastness of outlook, its splendid sweep of thought, its magnificent phrase-making. At first indeed the reader is disturbed and perplexed by the argument. He is lifted up into the blue mists, far above the plane of the verifiable, and borne along hither and thither by successive gusts of the poetic afflatus. Presently he is lost; there is no north and no south. By dint of review and cogitation he gets his bearings (if he is lucky), but only to lose them again as he is wafted on through the empyrean. Not until he has read the poem many times, knows where he is going and is no longer pestered by the necessity of thinking, can he hope to enjoy the voyage.

The beginning of 'The Ghostseer,' published while Schiller was still in Dresden, was spoken of in Chapter VIII. His general idea, it would seem, was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue devised by mysterious agents of the Romish Church for the purpose of winning over a Protestant German prince. But the details had not been very fully excogitated, and his foremost thought, after all, was simply to popularize the _Thalia_, which was largely caviare to the general. The experiment proved moderately successful. Curiosity was excited and inquiries began to be made. When, therefore, he was ready to resume the publication of the _Thalia_, in the spring of 1788, he had reason to regard 'The Ghostseer' as his most valuable a.s.set. He set about continuing the story, feeling that it was 'miserable daubing' and a 'sinful waste of time'.[77] In this temper he wrote and published a second installment, which carried the story through what was subsequently known as the first book. In this installment the hoax of the ghost scene is cleared up, but the Armenian remains a mystery. The Prince maintains a sensible, rationalistic att.i.tude, asks many questions, puts this and that together and finally concludes that Armenian and Sicilian are two charlatans working In collusion.

Up to this point 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation, Schiller had got the idea--and it interested him for personal reasons--of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he thought would give weight and distinction to the book. So the Prince's philosophic demoralization is described at tedious length and the story drops out of sight for a long time. Then it is taken up again and the Prince falls in love with a beautiful Greek _religieuse_. The portrayal of this woman aroused another flicker of interest on Schiller's part, though she too was finally to be unmasked as one of the conspirators.

Then he seems to have tired of 'The Ghostseer' altogether; at any rate he choked it off suddenly with a 'Farewell', in which nothing is concluded save that the Prince goes over to the Catholic Church.

From this description it is evident that Schiller's one attempt at novel-writing is of no great account as a contribution to artistic fiction. It is a torso consisting of two heterogeneous parts. It is not a study of life based upon the observation of life, but a tale of marvelous happenings which are recounted for the purpose of showing their subtle reaction upon the plastic mind of the Prince. The hero is taken over a route that was to become very familiar,--the route from a narrow and gloomy type of Protestantism through liberalism, rationalism, skepticism, Pyrrhonism, and mental exhaustion to the repose of the Catholic Church. Of course the story was not to end there, but what the further developments were to have been one can only guess. Schiller himself did not think it worth while to enlighten the public, even after his 'Ghostseer' began to call out imitations and continuations.

In the 'Letters upon Don Carlos', published in 1788, in Wieland's _Merkur_, Schiller undertook to defend himself against his critics and to correct some misapprehensions. In temper and style they are admirable, even when they do not convince. They begin by admitting and accounting for that seeming incongruity between the first three and the last two acts, which has always been the gravamen of critical objection to 'Don Carlos'. After this they attempt to show that such a character as Posa might very well have existed in the sixteenth century at the Spanish court. Then we are told that it was not the author's purpose to depict Carlos and Posa as a pair of ideal friends. For Carlos, indeed, friendship is everything, but not for Posa. In him the pa.s.sion for friendship is everywhere subordinated to the pa.s.sion for humanity. He is not to be blamed, therefore, for belying the character of a true friend, since that is not his dominant and essential character. He regards Carlos merely as an indispensable tool for his political designs. In his interview with the king he is carried away by a momentary enthusiasm,--what he says there is of no importance, his hopes being really fixed upon Don Carlos. At the beginning of the fourth act he sees not his personal friend, but the instrument of his political plans, in awful danger. He resolves to save him for Flanders and for humanity by sacrificing himself. This is no more unnatural or inconceivable than the self-sacrifice of Regulus. But Posa wishes to save his friend like a G.o.d and not like a common level-headed Philistine. He has the soul of a Plutarchian hero, and where two ways present themselves, the most natural is for him the most heroic. Hence his desperate procedure and its disastrous consequences.

To all of which one can give but a qualified a.s.sent, the difficulty being that the play is not so constructed as to bring out its author's intention. The character of Posa in Act IV is a surprise, and a disagreeable surprise. His conduct may harmonize with a theory of antique heroism, but it does not grow naturally out of what precedes.

There is no exigency that calls for his heroic foolhardiness. The reader or the spectator can hardly be supposed to know that the famous tenth scene in the third act, the longest and most carefully elaborated in the whole play, does not count. One naturally supposes that it does count, and the only way it can count is to create a hopeful situation of which Posa is absolute master. When, therefore, he throws away his advantage and deliberately plunges his friend into a needless danger, in order to make an opportunity for rescuing him at the cost of his own life, one inevitably a.s.sociates him mentally not with antique heroes but with modern lunatics.

A man capable of conceiving such a hero as Posa, and defending the conception as true to life, could hardly be expected to adjust his mind easily to such a work as Goethe's 'Egmont'. In his review of the play, published in 1788, Schiller found, indeed, much to praise; but his general praise was so mixed up with general fault-finding as to produce upon the Rudolstadt people the impression of a naughty _lese-majeste_.

He divined correctly enough that 'Egmont' was to be regarded as a drama of character, rather than of plot or of pa.s.sion. But Egmont's character seemed to him painfully lacking in 'greatness'. Egmont, so the criticism runs, really does nothing extraordinary. He is idolized by the people, but the deeds upon which his fame rests have all been done before the curtain rises. In the play he appears as a light-hearted cavalier who affronts us by persistently refusing to take serious things seriously.

In particular the review objected to Goethe's perversion of history in representing Egmont not as a married man with a large family of children but as a bachelor with a bourgeois sweetheart. Not that Schiller regarded the departure from history as reprehensible in itself. The dramatist has a right to pervert facts for the purpose of exciting sympathy for his hero; but in this case, Schiller argued, the effect is to degrade the character of Egmont and thus to alienate sympathy.

Finally the review took exception to Egmont's vision of Freedom In the form of Clarchen; this, Schiller thought, was a deplorable plunge into opera at the end of a serious drama.

To adjudicate the issue thus sharply drawn between the two great German poets would require some preliminary attention to their fundamental difference of artistic method,--a subject that will concern us in a subsequent chapter. Here suffice it to remark that Schiller was not entirely in the wrong. While Goethe was incomparably the more subtle psychologist, Schiller had the better eye, or rather he cared more, for that which is dramatically effective, average human nature being such, as it is. His dramatic instinct told him that Egmont was not a very powerful stage-play. Its subtle psychology did not impress him so much as its lack of 'greatness'. And then he had his pique against Goethe and wished to show the Weimarians that _he_ at least could perceive the spots on the sun. Goethe's serene comment upon reading the critique was to the effect that the reviewer had a.n.a.lyzed the moral part of the play very well indeed, but in dealing with the poetic aspect of it he had left something to be done by others.[78]

The dramatic fragment, 'The Misanthrope Reconciled', which Schiller fished up out of his drawer in 1790 and used, _faute de mieux_, to fill s.p.a.ce in the eleventh number of the _Thalia_, was begun, as we have seen, in Dresden. Possibly the theme may have been suggested at Mannheim by the problem of staging Shakspere's 'Timon'. At any rate the theme was congenial for a man who had 'embraced the world in glowing pa.s.sion and found in his arms a lump of ice'. At Weimar he returned to it several times, puzzled over the general plan, added a little here and there, but finally gave it up as a bad subject for dramatic treatment. The published fragment is certainly of no great account. It introduces a misanthrope, Hutten by name, who, as feudal lord, treats his dependents handsomely out of sheer contempt for them. When they come to thank him on his birthday, he spurns their grat.i.tude and scolds them, having made up his mind never to be duped again by any show of human emotion. He has brought up his beautiful and dutiful daughter to be an angel of mercy and a paragon of perfection, but he insists that she too shall be a misanthrope like himself. He makes her swear that she will never marry, but she shrewdly tacks on the proviso, 'except with papa's consent'. The exposition shows her duly in love with a cheerful and estimable youth named Rosenberg; and the problem is: How will Rosenberg manage the misanthrope? That he was to win somehow is evident from the t.i.tle.

In his translations from Euripides, which also belong to the period under consideration, Schiller aimed partly at the improvement of his own taste. He hoped to familiarize himself with the spirit of the Greeks and to acquire something of their manner. He thought that they might teach him simplicity both in expression and in the construction of dramatic plots; and he felt that his style was in need of their chastening influence. Of 'The Phoenician Women' he translated about one-third, but omitted the choruses entirely; of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis' he translated nearly the whole text, rendering the choruses very freely in rimed lines of uneven length and varying cadence. His work reads smoothly and gives the general effect of Euripides, but cannot count as good translation.

It was not only that his Greek scholarship was deficient, but he lacked patience,--an indispensable virtue for the translator. His real original was not the Greek text at all, but the Latin version of Joshua Barnes; and when this appeared to him jejune and unpoetic he sometimes created an original of his own.

The other minor writings of the years 1788 and 1789 may be pa.s.sed over as of little significance. On the poetic side there were three or four occasional poems, and also the rimed epistle called 'The Celebrated Wife', in which the unfortunate husband of a literary lady pours out the tale of his domestic woes. In prose there were several perfunctory reviews contributed to the _Litteratur-Zeitung_, and also an anecdote--exhumed from an old chronicle and retold for the _Merkur_--relating to a breakfast given to the Duke of Alva by the Countess of Schwarzburg in the year 1547. To these may be added, finally, the short story ent.i.tled 'Play of Fate,' also published in the _Merkur_, which describes, under a thin disguise of fict.i.tious names, the rise and fall and rehabilitation of Karl Eugen's former minister, P.H. Rieger.[79]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: Letter of July 28, 1787, to Korner.]

[Footnote 74: Letter of Nov. 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 75: In the original, lines 145-8, of the earlier version:

Schone Welt, wo bist du?--Kehre wieder, Holdes Blultenalter der Natur!

Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder Lebt noch deine goldne Spur.]

[Footnote 76: In the original:

Im Fleisz kann dich die Biene meistern, In der Geschicklichkeit ein Wurm dein Lehrer sein, Dein Wissen teilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern, Die Kunst, O Mensch, hast du allein.]

[Footnote 77: Letter of March 17, to Korner.]

[Footnote 78: Letter of Oct. 1, 1788, Goethe to Karl August.]

[Footnote 79: See above, page 135.]

CHAPTER XI

Historical Writings

Der Mensch verwandelt sich und flieht von der Buhne, seine Meinungen verwandeln sich und fliehen mit ihm; die Geschichte allein bleibt unausgesetzt auf der Buhne, eine unsterbliche Burgerin aller Nationen und Zeiten.--_First lecture at Jena_.

Schiller's merit as a writer of history has been much discussed and very differently estimated by high authorities. In general one may say that his historical writings have fared at the hands of experts very much like the scientific writings of Goethe; both being treated as the rather unimportant incursions of a poet into a field which he had not the training or the patience to cultivate with the best results. Niebuhr's adverse opinion is well known and has often been echoed in one form or another by later critics. On the other hand, lovers of the poet are very apt to overestimate the historian, who would probably be seldom heard of to-day If he had not achieved immortal fame by his plays and poems. As it is, his historical writings have become, for better or worse, a part of the cla.s.sical literature of Germany, and as such we have to reckon with them.

And the best way to reckon with them is to describe them as objectively as possible and to consider them in relation to the intellectual tendencies of Schiller's own time. We shall see that he began a history of the Dutch Rebellion without knowing Dutch or Spanish, and without spending any time in a preliminary study of the original sources of information.[80] His 'History of the Thirty Years' War' was a bread-winning enterprise, hastily executed for a ladies' magazine. For neither work did he draw a full breath. To compare him, therefore, with the modern giants of research, would be quite absurd; and the more absurd since Schiller the historian, unlike Goethe the scientist, was extremely modest in his self-estimate and fully aware of his limitations on the side of scholarship.

Of the qualities that go to the making of a great historian he had two,--the philosophic mind and the vivid imagination. But he lacked the spirit of the investigator and had not a sufficient reverence for the naked fact. History interested him for the sake of his theories and his pictures, and rhetoric was his element. This being so it is not strange that we get from him now and then a distorted image. Great movements and prominent characters are depicted by him in accordance with his freedom-loving, cosmopolitan preconception; and his study was not to correct this preconception by a survey of all the evidence, but rather to select that which would confirm his view in a striking manner. On the whole, however, the tale of his positive error, as brought to light by the critics, is not as large as one might expect. This chapter will not deal with it at all, but rather with his general method and point of view.[81]

'The Defection of the Netherlands' was begun in the summer of 1787 and grew out of the reading of Watson's 'Philip the Second'. This book impressed Schiller strongly and he attributed its fascination to the working of his own imaginative faculty. He wished that others might see and feel what he had seen and felt. So he began to retell the story in his own way, intending at first only a brief sketch. As he proceeded, he found gaps and contradictions and isolated facts of obscure import. He began to consult the authorities, not so much to increase his store of information as to clear up his doubts. In this way the intended sketch expanded ideally into a six-volume treatise which should present the history of the Netherlands from the earliest times down to the establishment of their independence. Of the _magnum opus_ thus planned the first volume, the only one that was ever written, appeared in the autumn of 1788, in three books. The first book sketched the history of the Low Countries down to the Spanish domination; the second dealt with the regency of Margaret of Parma, and the third with the conspiracy of the n.o.bles, ending with the supersession of Margaret by the Duke of Alva, in 1567. Thus the most dramatic period of the great struggle was not reached. Subsequently, however, the narrative was supplemented by two separate pictures, 'The Death of Egmont' and 'The Siege of Antwerp,'

which in the edition of 1801 were first printed with the history.

Letters of Schiller indicate that for a while at least he was very enthusiastic in his new pursuit. He found in the seeming capriciousness of history a constant challenge to the philosophic mind, and he enjoyed the imaginative exercise of investing the dry bones with muscles and nerves. It struck him that the inner necessity was much the same in history as in a work of art. He even went so far as to contend that the fame of the historian was on the whole preferable to that of the poet, and to express the opinion that his own nature was more akin to that of Montesquieu than to that of Sophocles. He felt that he was getting new ideas and expanding his soul at every step. 'Really,' he wrote to Korner in 1788, 'I find each day that I am pretty well suited to the business I am now carrying on. Perhaps there are better men, but where are they? In my hands history is becoming something in many respects different from what it has been.'

And so it really was. In point of readableness 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is vastly superior to any previous historical writing in the German language. The stately march of its paragraphs, each bearing the impress of a serious and lofty mind; the care with which seemingly small matters are logically connected with great issues, the mingling of philosophic reflection with the narrative,--all this gave to the work an air of literary distinction. It was actually interesting, and this was much in a land that had no historical cla.s.sics whatsoever. To be interesting was what Schiller frankly aimed at; he wished to 'convince one portion of his readers that history might be written with fidelity to the facts, but without becoming a trial to the reader's patience; and another portion that it might borrow something from a kindred art without becoming romance'. And he succeeded. In reading him it is easy to see that the poetic habit of conceiving his characters to fit a preconceived scheme, his vivid imagination, his love of sharp contrasts, telling a.n.a.logies and broad generalizations, occasionally distort the true relation of things. He was an artist rather than a scholar, and one must e'en accept him as such. A letter to Karoline von Beulwitz puts the matter thus:

I shall always be a poor authority for any future investigator who has the misfortune to consult me. But perhaps at the expense of historic truth I shall find readers, and here and there I may hit upon that other kind of truth which is philosophic. History is in general only a magazine for my fancy, and the objects must content themselves with the form, they take under my hands.

The animating Idea of 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the same that Goethe found running through all the writings of Schiller--the idea of freedom. From the days of his youth 'freedom', however unphilosophically he might think about it, had connoted for his imagination the highest and holiest interest of mankind; and when he began his first historical work his enthusiasm had not yet been sicklied o'er by the events of the Paris Terror. He saw in the Dutch revolt a glorious battle for liberty; the struggle of a small trading population against the proudest, richest and most powerful monarch of the century; a cause seemingly hopeless at first, but growing stronger through pluck, union, tenacity and wise leadership, until the Spanish Goliath was completely beaten. It was magnificent and Schiller desired that his countrymen should feel its magnificence and take to heart its lesson. So he adorned his t.i.tle-page with an emblem of freedom,--a broad-brimmed hat and a feather upon a pole,--and began his treatise with a bugle-blast that left no doubt of his purpose: 'I have thought it worth while to set up before the world this fair monument of civic strength, in order to waken in the breast of my people a joyous self-consciousness, and to give a fresh and pertinent example of what men may venture for a good cause and may accomplish by united action.'

A remarkable pa.s.sage of the introduction runs as follows:

Let no one expect to read here of towering, colossal men, or of amazing deeds such as the history of earlier times offers in such abundance. Those times are past, those men are no more. In the soft lap of refinement we have allowed the powers to languish which those ages exercised and made necessary. With humble admiration we gaze now at those gigantic forms, as a nerveless old man at the manly sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit which gives sublimity to even the most paltry action. The pressure of circ.u.mstances surprised this people into a knowledge of their own strength, forcing upon them a transitory greatness which did not belong to them and which they perhaps will never again exhibit. So then the strength they manifested has not vanished from among us, and the success which crowned their desperate adventure will not be denied to us if, in the lapse of time, similar occasions call us to similar deeds.

One sees from this that Schiller is, halting between the poetic and the scientific view of the past, uncertain which way to set his face. The poet in him is inclined to idealize the brave days of old and to mourn that the ancient giants are no more. At the same time he finds that the struggle of the Low Countries, while not 'heroic', was very remarkable, very instructive and very inspiring. From this observation it is but a step to the recognition of the truth that it is his own conventional notion of 'heroism' that needs revising; that the giants of yore were no taller than those of to-day and that the world's supply of courage and devotion is not running low. It is an interesting fact that the sentence beginning, 'So then the strength they manifested,' was omitted by Schiller from the edition of 1801, possibly because the horrors of the Revolution had put him out of humor with fighting. But he might well have allowed the words to stand. Their truth was soon to be memorably proved by the German uprising against Napoleon.

A German writer[82] remarks correctly that Schiller occupies with Kant a middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83]

pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how.

He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating the distant past with patronizing condescension. At the same time he wishes to instruct and does not hesitate to point out where the instruction is to be found. He aims to be impartial to the extent of giving both sides a hearing, but he imputes motives freely and does not pretend to extinguish self. Probably the effort to do so would have seemed to him absurd. His sympathy is of course with the Netherlanders, but he writes as a philosophic champion of freedom rather than as a partisan of Protestantism. His concern is not to excite indignation at the colossal wickedness of Philip and Alva, but to show up their colossal folly. As we should expect he devotes his best powers to his portraits, some of which,--as those of Margaret, Granvella, Egmont and Orange,--are deservedly famous. At the same time they are subject to correction from the doc.u.ments. Thus the crafty politician, William the Silent, in whom there was very little of the strenuous idealist, is presented as a 'second Brutus, who, far above timid selfishness, magnanimously renounces his princely station, descends to voluntary poverty, becomes a citizen of the world and consecrates himself to the cause of freedom'.

From what has been said it is clear that Schiller regarded the writing of history as essentially an exercise of the creative imagination. And such in a sense it really is and always must be, since no historian can divest himself of his own personality. He will inevitably see the events with his own eyes and put his own construction upon them. His very arrangement of his materials, his distribution of lights and shades, his selection of the matters to be recorded and commented upon, will involve a subjective coloring of his narrative. This being so, one cannot reasonably criticize Schiller for having his point of view, but only for taking too little trouble in the gathering and verification of his facts. He did not think it important to study his subject from first-hand sources of information. He quotes more than a score of authorities in Latin, French and German, but he uses them quite uncritically, and chiefly, it would seem, to give his work a semblance of learning. The facts were for him nothing but the raw material of history; the important thing was their philosophic truth, that is, the intellectual formula that should explain them. In our day we have grown distrustful of the 'philosophy of history', especially of any philosophy that does not rest upon a basis of long and thorough investigation.

'The Defection of the Netherlands' was very favorably received by the German public. Its merits lay on the surface, while its defects were not patent to the casual reader. Every one felt that Schiller had set a new pattern for historical composition. In his hands history had become literature. With such an achievement to his credit it was natural that his _debut_ in Jena should be looked forward to in academic circles as a great occasion. Feeling that much would be expected of him he prepared with great care his inaugural discourse upon the study of universal history. The address, which was subsequently published in the _Merkur_, begins with a vigorous elucidation of the difference between the bread-and-b.u.t.ter scholar and the philosophic thinker. The former is depicted in caustic terms as a narrow, selfish, timorous time-server. He is the enemy of reform and discovery, because he is forever dreading that the enlargement of the human outlook may disturb his little private routine. He cares for truth only so far as it can be turned to his personal gain in the form of money, praise or princely favor. The philosophic thinker, on the other hand, is a joyous lover of his kind.

Feeling the essential solidarity of all knowledge he seeks ever for the unifying principle. He loves truth for its own sake. Every advance of knowledge is welcome to him, and he willingly sees his private edifice go to ruin for the joy of building a new and better one. Then the lecture proceeds to describe the splendid progress of the human race.

The task of universal history is declared to be the explanation of this evolutionary process. It must show how all things hang together, and, selecting for description those portions of the record which have a more obvious bearing upon the present form of the world, it must seek to bring home to the modern man the full import of his heirship.