The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 13

In this address we begin to trace the influence of Kant, whose 'Idea of a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Spirit', published in 1784, was read by Schiller with great interest. The leading thoughts of this memorable paper, new then but very familiar now, are that the race and not the individual is nature's concern in her scheme of man's perfectibility; that the only perfection and happiness possible to him are those which he creates for himself by the progressive triumph of reason over instinct; that the fighting-spirit, antagonisms, wars, the madness and the calamity of the individual, are the necessary condition of race-progress; that the goal is a just civil society, which in turn, since man is an animal that needs a master, is inseparable from the idea of a law-governed state. Thus, while Herder's formula for the great evolutionary process was the upbuilding of the individual man to humanity, that of Kant was the preparation of man for a free citizenship which should ultimately embrace the world.

By the general bent of his mind Schiller was nearer to the humane idealism of Herder than to the law-governed collectivism of Kant. At the same time we can see from many a sentence in his inaugural address that the far more rigorous logic of the Konigsberg philosopher had had its effect upon him. In particular he was captivated by the idea that the individual exists for the sake of the race, and that the gruesome antagonisms of history are therefore to be regarded with composure as the birth-pains of the modern man. A striking pa.s.sage of the lecture runs thus:

History, like the Homeric Zeus, looks down with the same cheerful countenance upon the b.l.o.o.d.y works of war and upon the peaceful peoples that innocently nourish themselves upon the milk of their herds. However lawlessly the freedom of man may seem to operate upon the course of the world, she gazes calmly at the confused spectacle; for her far-reaching eye discovers even from a distance where this seemingly lawless freedom is led by the cord of necessity....

History saves us from an exaggerated admiration of antiquity and from a childish longing for the past. Reminded by her of our own possessions we cease to wish for a return of the lauded golden age of Alexander or of Caesar.

From this way of thinking it seems but a span to the modern scientific point of view; for that, however, neither Schiller nor Kant was ripe, since both thought it necessary to a.s.sume that human history began about six thousand years ago and began substantially as reported in Genesis, however the original authentic tradition might have been incrusted with spurious supernaturalism. The explanation of society thus resolved itself for them into the problem of a rational interpretation of the Bible. Kant believed, like Rousseau, in an original paradisaic condition, in which man had lived as a happy, peaceful animal. But while man's emergence from that state was regarded by Rousseau as a disaster, the selfish pa.s.sions, with their resulting antagonisms, were conceived by Kant as the _sine qua non_ of rational development. This thought, with its corollaries, was set forth by Kant in an essay of the year 1786, ent.i.tled 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History'. The Fall is there explained as a good thing, the story in Genesis being interpreted as a symbol of the emergence of man from the estate of a peaceful but instinct-governed animal to that of a quarrelsome but rational being.

Kant's line of reasoning interested Schiller deeply, and in 1790 he published in the _Thalia_ a paper upon the same general subject. It was ent.i.tled 'Something about the First Human Society on the Basis of the Mosaic Record'.

Portions of this essay, with its nave license of affirmation, would make a modern anthropologist shudder. It begins with a description of the original paradise, from which the infant man was to be led forth into life by Providence, his watchful nurse. To quote a few words:

By means of hunger and thirst She showed him [let us keep the feminine providence of the German] the need of nourishment; what he required for the satisfaction of his needs She had placed around him in rich abundance; and by the senses of smell and taste She guided him in his choice. By means of a mild climate She had spared his nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind provision was made in the s.e.xual impulse. As plant and animal man was complete.... If, now, we regard the voice of G.o.d which forbade the tree of knowledge as simply the voice of instinct warning man away from this tree, then the eating of the fruit becomes merely a defection from instinct, that is, the first manifestation of rational independence, the origin of moral being; and this defection from instinct, which brought moral evil into the world, but at the same time made moral good possible, was incontestably the happiest and greatest event in the history of mankind.

It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on Schiller's general att.i.tude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain it like any rationalizing professor. The past interests him mainly for the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good opinion,--especially of the G.o.ddess of Reason. He did not know what a terrible trial was preparing for this G.o.ddess and her self-complacent worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy of many. For the present, however, it was no inchoate Romanticism, but a publisher's enterprise, that led him into the study of the Middle Ages. He had undertaken to edit a great 'Collection of Historical Memoirs'. There were to be several volumes each year for an indefinite time; the volumes to consist of translations from various languages and to cover European history from the twelfth century down. Schiller was to supervise the undertaking and furnish the needful introductions. His plans were presently thwarted by illness and then by his increasing interest in philosophic studies; so that after the first few volumes had appeared he withdrew and left the continuation of the 'Memoirs' to other hands.

Of his various contributions to the initial volumes of the 'Historical Memoirs' a part are mere hack-work and therefore devoid of biographical interest. Somewhat different is the case with an elaborate account of the crusades, in which he attempts to show that that great medieval madness,--so it was regarded by the Age of Enlightenment,--was 'in its origin too natural to excite our surprise and in its consequences too beneficent to convert our displeasure into a very different feeling'.

The general argument is that the ancient civilizations were dominated by the idea of the state; they produced excellent Greeks and Romans but not excellent men. The prestige of the despotic states was destroyed by the great migrations, but it was the crusades which first taught the nations to subordinate patriotism to a higher and broader sentiment. It was then that men learned to fight for an idea of the reason,--for the truth as they saw it. And thus the crusades prepared the way for the Reformation.

The interest of the essay lies not in the vigor of its logic, which is lame here and there, but in the evidence it affords of Schiller's increasing respect for the Middle Ages. And he went further still. In a preface which he wrote in 1792, for a German translation of Vertot's work on the Knights of Malta, we find a pa.s.sage which sounds very much like Inchoate Romanticism:

The contempt we feel for that period of superst.i.tion, fanaticism and mental slavery betrays not so much the laudable pride of conscious strength as the petty triumph of weakness avenging itself in unimportant mockery for the shame wrung from it by superior merit.... The advantage of clearer ideas, of vanquished prejudice, of more subdued pa.s.sions, of freer ways of thinking (if we really can claim this credit), costs us the great sacrifice of active virtue, without which our better knowledge can hardly be counted as a gain. The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,--if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.

We see that Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age of Enlightenment.

In comparison with these disconnected and more or less perfunctory studies, the 'History of the Thirty Years' War' seems like a large undertaking. But it was not so conceived at first. While 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the fragment of a great project, the 'Thirty Years' War' is the expansion of a small one. We first hear of it in a letter of December, 1789, wherein Schiller, just then casting about eagerly for possibilities of income, informs Korner that he is to have four hundred thalers from Goschen for an 'essay' upon the Thirty Years'

War, to be published in the 'Historical Calendar for Ladies'. He felicitates himself that the labor will be light, since the material is so abundant and he is to write only for amateurs. The following spring he took up his task, which then grew upon his hands as he proceeded. Two books were printed in the 'Calendar' for 1791, a third in 1792, the fourth, and also a separate book-edition, in 1793. It met with great favor, the sales running up to seven thousand, and the author winning the name of Germany's greatest historian.

And, indeed, it does exhibit Schiller's historical style at its best, there being here, in comparison with his earlier work, somewhat less of heavy philosophical ballast. The narrative moves more lightly. There is this time not even a pretense of erudite scholarship. He does not quote authorities, rarely indulges in polemic, avoids tedious 'negotiations'

and all political disquisitions which might be dull reading to the 'female fellow-citizens' for whom he writes. He endeavors merely to tell his complicated story in a lucid and interesting manner. The third book, which describes the career of Gustav Adolf from the great battle of Breitenfeld, in 1631, to his death at Lutzen in the following year, is an admirable specimen of vivid historical writing. It may well be doubted whether any successors of Schiller have surpa.s.sed him in the art of narrating, though they may have been able to correct him here and there in matters of fact. What a telling description, for example, is that of the desperate charge at Lutzen just after the death of the Swedish king!

In his last historical work, just as in his first, the burden of Schiller's thought is evermore the idea of freedom. The Thirty Years'

War is conceived by him as the successful struggle of German liberty against Hapsburg imperialism. Upon the abstract merits of the religious controversy he has little to say; the subject evidently does not interest him. He does indeed make himself the champion of Protestantism, but only because Protestantism is identified in his mind with the august cause of liberty. The Protestant princes fought, he tells us, for what they took to be the truth,--whether it really was the truth does not matter. Their motives were not always lofty and their historian is not in the least concerned to hide or to gloss over their frequent venality and selfishness. His point of view is that they fought for a higher good than that which their eyes were fixed upon, and this higher good was the advancement of free cosmopolitanism, 'Europe', he writes in his introductory reflections, 'emerged unsubdued and free from this terrible war in which, for the first time, it had recognized itself as a connected society of states; and this interest of the states in one another, to which the war first gave rise, would alone be a sufficient gain to reconcile the citizens of the world to its horrors. The hand of industry has gradually obliterated the evil effects of the struggle, but its beneficent consequences have remained.'

Our historian, it is plain, was very firmly convinced that his own cosmopolitanism was a European finality and was worth all that it had cost. What would he have said if he could have looked ahead a hundred years and beheld the nations still snarling at each other's heels in the same old way!

It is pertinent to observe in this connection that Schiller's enthusiasm for liberty is quite unaffected by the 'ideas of 1789'. Neither in his letters nor elsewhere does he manifest any strong sympathy with the revolutionary aims of the French democracy. Liberty is for him the perfect fruitage of the benevolent despotism. It is something that concerns the prince in his relation to some other prince, rather than in relation to his own subjects. Of the German people at the time of the Thirty Years' War he has but little to say, his thoughts being fixed always upon the leaders. His great hero is Gustav Adolf, whom he regards at first as the unselfish champion of German freedom. Little by little, however, the portrait of the king undergoes a change: the ideal knight of Protestantism shades off into the earthy politician and selfish conqueror. And when at last death overtakes him his historian is prepared to admit that the event was fortunate for his own royal renown and for the welfare of Germany. A part of his final estimate runs thus:

Unmistakably the ambition of the Swedish monarch aimed at such power in Germany as was incompatible with the freedom of the Estates, and at a permanent possession in the heart of the Empire. His goal was the Imperial throne; and this dignity, supported and made efficient by his activity, was in his hands liable to far greater abuse than was to be feared from the race of Hapsburg. A foreigner by birth, brought up in the maxims of absolutism, and in his pious enthusiasm a declared enemy of all papists, he was not the man to guard the sanctuary of the German const.i.tution, or to respect the freedom of the Estates.

After the death of Gustav Adolf the focus of interest is Wallenstein, and when Wallenstein is disposed of the history soon becomes a lean and hurried summary, the perfunctory character of which Is quite obvious to the reader.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 80: It is to be taken into consideration that the 'sources', as the word is now understood, were for the most part inaccessible in the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 81: The subject which is here necessarily treated in a general way is discussed much more fully and with admirable balance by K.

Tomaschek, "Schiller in seinem Verhaltnis zur Wissenschaft", Wien, 1862.

Another excellent book, if used with some care, is J. Janssen's "Schiller als Historiker", Freiburg, 1879.]

[Footnote 82: Otto Brahm, "Schiller", II, 209.]

[Footnote 83:

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heiszt, Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.--_'Faust', lines 577-8_.]

CHAPTER XII

Dark Days Within and Without

1791-1794

Zu einer Zeit, wo das Leben anfing, mir seinen ganzen Wert zu zeigen, wo ich nahe dabei war, zwischen Vernunft und Phantasie in mir ein zartes und ewiges Band zu knupfen,... nahte sich mir der Tod.--_Letter of 1791._

The year 1790 was the happiest of Schiller's life. For a little while, at last, fate became supremely kind to him. The reality of wedlock more than fulfilled his dreams, and it seemed as if all his vague _malheur d'etre poete_ were about to be buried in the deep bosom of connubial beat.i.tude. 'We lead the blessedest life together', he wrote to Christophine Reinwald in May, 'and I no longer know my former self.' And a month later to Wilhelm von Wolzogen: 'My Lotte grows dearer to me every day; I can say that I am just beginning to prize my life, since domestic happiness beautifies it for me.' His income, indeed, was pitifully small, but his courage was great, his fame well grounded, and there were prospects here and there. From the first he had regarded the Jena professorship only as a makeshift. To bring variety into his academic routine he began, in the summer term of 1790, to lecture upon the theory of tragedy, developing the subject from his own brain and paying little attention to the authorities. In the autumn these lectures were resumed, and soon the aesthetic philosopher began to prevail over the historian.

And now came his great calamity. In reading the later writings of Schiller, whether philosophical or poetical, it is difficult to imagine them the work of an invalid, produced in the intervals of physical suffering such as would utterly have broken the courage of a less resolute man. But so it was. The early winter of 1791 brought with it a disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him away prematurely at the age of forty-five.

Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt. There were Karoline von Dacheroden and her lover, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was destined to become Schiller's intimate friend and also his faithful comrade in the field of aesthetic philosophizing. Then there was the influential Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a brother of the Mannheim intendant. This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness, and he enjoyed the role of Maecenas. In Schiller and Lotte he took a deep interest, promising to do something handsome for them when he should come to power at Mainz. While spending his vacation with these Erfurt friends, at the close of the year 1790, Schiller took a cold which brought on an attack of pneumonia. An Erfurt doctor treated the case lightly and unskillfully and sent him back half cured to Jena, where he resumed his lectures. Now came a second and sharper attack, with hemorrhage and other alarming symptoms. The doctors operated upon him as best they knew, with leeches and phlebotomy and purgatives and vomitives, and came very near killing him. For days he lay at the point of death, a few faithful students sharing the young wife's anxious vigil at his bedside. His convalescence was slow and in the end imperfect, leaving him with wasted strength, a pain in the right lung and a serious difficulty in breathing. Of course it was all up with his lecturing; but he easily obtained a release for the summer term from the sympathetic Duke of Weimar. In March he was well enough to take up the reading of Kant's then recently published 'Critique of the Judgment', and a little later to try his hand at translating from the Aeneid in stanzas and to write a rejoinder to the 'anticritique' of the aggrieved Burger.

This unfortunate feud with Burger grew out of a magisterial review published by Schiller in 1791; a review which, while dignified in tone and purporting to speak solely in the interest of the lyric art, amounted to a scathing condemnation of Burger's character. After expatiating upon the high vocation of the poet, the necessity of his thinking and feeling n.o.bly, and the importance of his giving only his idealized self, the anonymous critic proceeded to comment upon Burger's frequent lapses from good taste, his crudities, indecencies and vulgar ding-dongs, and to refer these things with remorseless directness to personal defects. The criticism was just and had all the other merits save discretion and urbanity, Goethe was pleased with it before he knew who wrote it,[84] and eleven years later Schiller saw nothing in it to change. In writing it, as a matter of fact, he was only breaking the rod over his own early self; for in his Stuttgart 'Anthology' he had committed nearly every sin for which now, from the serene heights of a better artistic insight, he castigated his victim. To poor Burger, whose life was just then bitter enough at the best, the review was a terrible blow. He at once published a reply, which is also very good reading in its way, but might have been made much more spicy had he known the name of his adversary. Schiller's final rejoinder added nothing of importance to the discussion.[85]

This short digression leads naturally to another. While still at Weimar Schiller received a visit from Burger, and the two agreed to vie with each other in a translation from Vergil. Schiller chose for his experiment the eight-line stanza which he was proposing to use in an epic upon Frederick the Great. This 'Fredericiad' was much on his mind in the spring of 1789. His plan was to center his story about some ominous juncture in Frederick's career (say the battle of Kollin), and write a poem which should exhibit in lightly-flowing stanzas the 'finest flower' of eighteenth-century civilization.[86] Albeit intensely modern it was to have the indispensable epic 'machinery'. Nothing came of the project, but a year later he was still ruminating upon it and declared that he should not be truly happy until he was again making verses.

Instead of attempting an original epic, however, he now began to translate from the Aeneid, and this light and congenial labor continued to occupy him for a year or more after the break-down of his health. He finally completed two books, the second and fourth. The translation is sonorous and otherwise readable, but it is not Vergil and does not produce the effect of Vergil. The breaking up of the matter into stanzas, each having a unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and perversions,--there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the original,--and subst.i.tuted an interrupted romantic cadence for the stately continuous roll of the hexameter.

The opening lines of the second book will serve as well as any others to ill.u.s.trate Schiller's method as a translator:

Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant.

Inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto: 'Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem, Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum Eruerint Danai; quaeque ipse miserrima vidi Et quorum pars magna fui.'

Schiller's version runs thus:

Der ganze Saal war Ohr, jedweder Mund verschlossen, Und Furst Aeneas, hingegossen Auf hohem Polstersitz, begann: Dein Wille, Konigin, macht Wunden wieder bluten, Die keine Sprache schildern kann: Wie Trojas Stadt verging in Feuerfluten, Den Jammer willst du wissen, die Gefahr, Wovon ich Zeuge, ach, und meistens Opfer war.

As for the 'Fredericiad', it never got beyond the status of a plan. By November, 1791, Schiller had concluded that Gustav Adolf would be a better subject for an epic,--he could get up no enthusiasm for Unser Fritz and shrank from the 'gigantic labor of idealizing him'. Soon after this he seems to have dropped altogether the idea of writing an epic.

In the spring of 1791, when he had grown strong enough to think of attacking the second installment of the 'Thirty Years' War', Schiller took up his abode in Rudolstadt; and there, in May, he was prostrated by a second illness which was worse than the first. His life was despaired of, he bade his friends farewell and the report went out from Jena that he was dead. After the crisis was past came weary weeks of la.s.situde and pain, with no possibility of writing or reading. In July he took the waters at Karlsbad, with some slight benefit. By autumn he was well enough to do the promised continuation of his history and to lay plans with Goschen for a _New Thalia_ to begin with the next year. But he was now in desperate straits for money. His illness had been very costly and the cessation of work had brought a cessation of income. He was in debt to various friends, and the Duke of Weimar was too poor to help him.

Saddest of all, his beloved wife's health was broken with anxiety and watching. 'It is a joy to me', he wrote to Korner in October, 'even when I am busy, to think that she is near me. Her dear life and influence round about me, the childlike purity of her soul and the warmth of her love, give me a repose and serenity that would otherwise be impossible in my hypochondriac condition. If we were only well we should need nothing else to live like the G.o.ds.'

It was a dark juncture, darker far than that of 1784, and now as then help came unexpectedly from afar. It came this time from Denmark.

The Danish author Baggesen had visited Jena the previous year and returned home a fervid admirer of Schiller. At Copenhagen he had imparted his enthusiasm to Count Schimmelmann and the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg, who, with their wives, proceeded to found a sort of Schiller-sect. Full of the time's generous ardor for high and humane ideas, they were just about to give a rustic fete in honor of their great German poet, when the news of his death arrived. They met with heavy hearts and sang the 'Song to Joy', with an added stanza by Baggesen, wherein they pledged themselves to 'be faithful to Schiller's spirit until they should meet above'. When they learned a little later that the author of the 'Song' was alive, after all, and very much in need of money, the two n.o.blemen immediately wrote him a joint letter, offering him, in language of admirable delicacy, a gift of a thousand thalers a year for three years, with no conditions whatever. He was simply to give himself needed rest and follow the bent of his mind, free from all anxiety. Should he choose to come to Copenhagen they a.s.sured him that he would find loyal friends and admirers, and a position in the government service if he desired it.

This timely windfall 'from the clouds' put an end to the misery of distress about money. For the first time in his life Schiller found himself free to consult inclination in the forming of his plans and the disposition of his time. Without hesitation he gratefully accepted the gift and resolved now at last to take up the study of Kant and fathom him, though it should require three years. A strange resolution, it would seem, for a sick poet! Many have judged it unwise and have deprecated that long immersion in Kantian metaphysic. But Schiller was the best judge of his own needs, and how he felt about the matter appears very clearly from a letter that he wrote to Korner a few months later:

I am full of eagerness for some poetic task and particularly my pen is itching to be at 'Wallenstein.' Really it is only in art itself that I feel my strength. In theorizing I have to plague myself all the while about principles. There I am only a dilettante. But it is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And it has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule. Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is conscious of being watched. But if I once reach the point where artistic procedure becomes natural, like education for the well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old freedom, and know no bounds but those of its own making.