The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 14

And so it was destined to be. His philosophic studies, pursued with tireless zeal for a period of three or four years, gave him the self-a.s.surance that he hoped for. They created for him at least, if not for all men everywhere, a poetical _modus vivendi_ between natural impulse and artistic rule. 'Nature' learned to wear the fetters of art without feeling them as fetters. At last he grew weary of theorizing; but his later plays, produced in rapid succession, each unlike the other and all characterized by a remarkable imaginative breadth and freedom, bear witness to the quant.i.ty of artistic energy stored up during this period of artistic self-repression.

A few words of biography will suffice for the goings and comings of this Kantian period, which was for Schiller a period of quiet study, eager discussion and laborious authorship. At first he continued to reside in Jena. Early in 1792 he started the _New Thalia_, and this he used for the publication of his earlier aesthetic lucubrations. With the perfunctory conclusion of the 'Thirty Years' War', in September, his work as a historian virtually came to an end. He now began to lecture again, but gave only an aesthetic _privatissimum_ in his own room. He went out of the house hardly five times during the whole winter, and when spring came his health was again very precarious. He now determined to try the effect upon body and soul of the milder climate of his native Suabia. He set out in August and took the precaution to halt in Heilbronn, not knowing what brutality the Duke of Wurttemberg might still be capable of. On receiving the blessed a.s.surance that his Highness would 'ignore' him, he continued on his way to Ludwigsburg, where a son was born, to him in September. He remained in Ludwigsburg during the winter in pleasant intercourse with his family and friends.

In October Karl Eugen went to his reward. 'The death of the old Herod', Schiller wrote to Korner, 'does not concern me or my family, except that all who have to do directly, like my father, with the head of the state, are glad that they now have a man before them.'[87]

One of the first important official acts of the new duke was to abolish the Karlschule; but this did not happen until after Schiller had visited the scene of his former woes, in the role of distinguished son, and had received the enthusiastic plaudits of the four hundred students. It was here in Ludwigsburg that his ripest philosophic work, the 'Letters upon Aesthetic Education' came into being. In the spring he spent some weeks in Stuttgart, where Dannecker began to model the famous bust that now adorns the Weimar library. In Stuttgart he made the acquaintance of the enterprising publisher Cotta, who wished him to undertake the editorship of a great political journal. But another plan lay nearer to Schiller's heart, and before he left Suabia he had arranged with Cotta to edit a high-cla.s.s literary magazine to be known as _Die h.o.r.en_. In May, 1794, he returned to Jena, glad to have escaped at last from his dear, distracting fatherland and to be once more at home. His health had not improved, and he had now become reconciled in a measure to the doom of the invalid. But although he knew that the death-mark was upon him, the knowledge only spurred him to more eager activity.[88] He felt that he had a great work to do and that the time might be short. By this time his acquaintance with Humboldt had ripened into a warm friendship. 'What a life it will be', he wrote to Korner, 'when you come here and complete the triad. Humboldt is for me an infinitely agreeable and at the same time useful acquaintance; for in conversation with him all my ideas move happily and move quickly. There is in his character a totality that is rarely seen and that, except in him, I have found only in you.'

After his return to Jena he lectured no more, but threw all his energy into the new journal. He prepared an alluring prospectus and invited the cooperation of all the best writers in Germany. Among these was Goethe, who sent a favorable reply. And thus began a correspondence which presently led, as all the world knows, to an ever memorable friendship.

The activities centering in the _h.o.r.en_ ushered in a new literary epoch, the epoch of Germany's brief leadership in modern literature.

Thus the period of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life, nearly, he had lived with aristocrats, and he himself had the temper of an aristocrat. There is no evidence in his letters that he ever really sympathized with the French people, even during the early days of the revolution, in their practical program of 'liberty, equality and fraternity'. His notion of liberty was at no time a definite political concept, but always a rainbow in the clouds,--something to rave and philosophize over. Of human brotherhood he had sung most affectingly in the 'Song to Joy', but it was only a poetic kiss that he had ready for all mankind. He would have been amazed if any plebeian stranger had proposed to take him at his word. As for equality, there is no evidence that it entered as a factor or an ideal into his scheme of man's better time to come.

It was thus perfectly natural, when the proceedings were Inst.i.tuted against the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth, that Schiller should take the part of the accused. The fierce determination of the French democracy to exact a reckoning from their sovereign, not so much for what _he_ had done as for ages of acc.u.mulated wrong, appeared to him the very madness of injustice. In December, 1792, he planned to write a book or a pamphlet in defence of the king, and have it translated into French for the purpose of influencing public opinion in Paris.[89] He seems actually to have begun the work, but the fate of the unlucky Bourbon was swifter than the pen of his German defender. Schiller's horror of the regicide knew no bounds. 'These two weeks past', he wrote on February 8, 1793, 'I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these wretched executioners.' The ensuing events of the Terror intensified this feeling. In speaking of the year 1793, Karoline von Wolzogen has this to say of her brother-in-law:

He regarded the French Revolution as the effect of pa.s.sion and not as a work of wisdom, which alone could produce true freedom. He admitted, indeed, that many ideas which had previously been found only in books and in the heads of enlightened men, were now matters of public discussion; but, he said, the real principles which must underlie a truly happy civil const.i.tution are not yet so common among men; they are found (pointing to a copy of Kant's 'Critique'

that lay on the table) nowhere else but here. The French Republic will cease as quickly as it has come into being. The republican const.i.tution will give rise to a state of anarchy, and sooner or later a capable strong man will appear from some quarter and make himself master not only of France but also, perhaps, of a large part of Europe.[90]

If this remarkable prediction of Napoleon is rightly reported and rightly dated by the Baroness von Wolzogen, one can hardly suppose that Schiller was very much elated when he read in a paper, towards the close of the year 1792, that he had been made an honorary citizen of the French Republic. Under a law pa.s.sed in August of that year,--_l'an premier de la liberte_,--the name and rights of a French citizen were bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this honor,--the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Koscius...o...b..ing put to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe, Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,--and the bill was about to pa.s.s when a deputy arose,--he must have been an Alsatian,--and proposed to add the name of M. Gille, _publiciste allemand_. The amendment was accepted, and a few weeks later Minister Roland transmitted to 'M. Gille' an official diploma of French citizenship. It took the postal authorities of Germany some six years to deliver the letter, and when at last they succeeded, its recipient was less than ever in a mood to be overjoyed at the well-meant distinction that had been conferred upon him by the French republicans.

The progress of the Revolution appeared to Schiller to endanger the higher interests of civilization. He was too close to it for a serenely impartial view. Had it been an occurrence of the sixteenth century, he would have been just the man to philosophize over it and to show that in this case, again, "the frenzy of the nations was the statesmanship of fate". As it was, the unrest of the people, and their increasing absorption in questions of mere politics, disgusted him. He felt that a counteragent was needed. And so, declining Cotta's offer anent the political journal, and thus leaving the famous _Allgemeine Zeitung_ to begin its career a few years later under other hands, he chose Instead to found the _h.o.r.en_, which was to exclude politics altogether and induce people, if possible, to think of something else. He saw that the times were unpropitious for his enterprise, but felt that it was for that very reason the more urgently needed. In announcing the _h.o.r.en_ to the public in 1795 he wrote:

The more the minds of men are excited, shut in and subjugated by the narrow interests of the present, the more urgent is a general and higher interest in that which is purely human and superior to all influences of the time; an interest which shall set men free again and unite the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty. This is the point of view from which the authors of the _h.o.r.en_ wish it to be regarded. The journal is to be devoted to cheerful and pa.s.sionless entertainment, and to offer the mind and heart of its readers, now angered and depressed by the events of the day, a pleasant diversion. In the midst of this political tumult it will form for the Muses and Graces a little intimate circle, from which everything will be banished that is stamped with the impure spirit of partisanship.

Many a modern reader will be inclined, perhaps, to smile at this deliverance and to see in it a fatuous misjudgment of the relative importance of things. The French Revolution versus a spray of aesthetic rose-water! But we must not be too hasty. Posterity has no better criterion for judging great men than the criterion of service. And service is a question of vocation. As the matter is put by Goethe, who himself a little later took refuge from the _misere_ of the Napoleonic epoch in the contemplative poetry of the Orient: 'Man may seek his higher destiny on earth or in heaven, in the present or in the future; yet for that reason he remains exposed to constant wavering within and to continual disturbance from without, until he once for all makes up his mind to declare that that is right which is in accordance with his own nature,'[91] It was not in Schiller to be a political journalist or a pamphleteer. In that field he would have wasted his splendid energy.

He knew what he could do best; and it was well for his country and for the world that he chose to withdraw from the turmoil of the Revolution and prepare himself for 'Wallenstein' and 'William Tell'.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: So, at least, Schiller states in a letter of March 3, 1791, to Korner.]

[Footnote 85: The original review, together with Burger's reply and Schiller's rejoinder, are printed in Sammtliche Schriften, VI, 314 ff.]

[Footnote 86: The plan is very fully discussed in a letter of March 10, 1789, to Korner.]

[Footnote 87: On the other hand, Wilhelm von Hoven, who was with Schiller at the time, represents him as deeply touched by the death of Duke Karl and as expressing himself thus: "Da ruht er also, dieser rastlos thatig gewesene Mann. Er hatte grosze Fehler als Regent, groszere als Mensch, aber die ersteren wurden vor seinen groszen Eigenschaften weit uberwogen, und das Andenken an die letzteren musz mit dem Toten begraben werden; darum sage ich dir, wenn du, da er nun dort liegt, jetzt noch nachteilig von ihm sprechen horst, traue diesem Menschen nicht: er ist kein guter, wenigstens kein edler Mensch." Cf.

Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften", I, 153, and Karoline von Wolzogen, "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]

[Footnote 88: A letter of May 24, 1791, contains the brave words: "Ich habe mehr als einmal dem Tod ins Gesicht gesehen, und mein Mut ist dadurch gestarkt worden."]

[Footnote 89: Letter of December 21, to Korner.]

[Footnote 90: "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]

[Footnote 91: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", Elftes Buch.]

CHAPTER XIII

Aesthetic Writings

Es ist gewisz von keinem Sterblichen kein groszeres Wort gesprochen als dieses Kantische, was zugleich der Inhalt seiner ganzen Philosophie ist: Bestimme dich aus dir selbst. _Letter of 1793._

From a quotation in the preceding chapter we have seen what Schiller hoped for when he resolved to grapple with the Kantian philosophy. He was in pursuit of that which would help him as a poet. He felt that a little philosophy had done him harm by quenching his inner fire and destroying his artistic spontaneity. The rules were continually coming between him and his creative impulses. His hope was that more philosophy would repair the damage by making the principles of art so clear and so familiar that they would become as second nature, and therefore cease to be felt as a clog or an interference.

This expectation, looking at the matter _a priori,_ was reasonable enough. Looking at it retrospectively, Goethe came to the conclusion, as is well known, that Schiller's philosophic bent had injured his poetry by teaching him to 'regard the idea as higher than all nature'. Goethe thought it 'depressing to see how such an extraordinarily gifted man had tormented himself with philosophic modes of thought that could be of no use to him'.[92] But this does not tell the whole story, notwithstanding the greatness of the authority. To a.s.sert that all philosophy is always harmful to a poet would be to a.s.sert the most patent nonsense. Goethe himself at one time found help and inspiration in Spinoza, the dryest and most abstract of thinkers;[93] and after all, 'nature' comes off about as well in 'Wallenstein' as in 'Faust'. It is a question of personal endowment, of what the mind can a.s.similate and turn to account.

There are many kinds of the poetic temper, the intellectual element blending variously with the emotional, the instinctive and the visional.

For Schiller poetry was not 'somnambulism', but a very deliberate process; wherefore it was quite natural for him to expect that a season of philosophic study would be good for him. So he set out to fathom the laws of beauty; a.s.suming, of course, that there must be such laws and that they must be, in some sense or other, laws of human nature.

To follow him critically in all the by-ways of his theorizing would require a treatise; and the treatise would be dull reading, except, peradventure, to such as might be specially interested in the history of aesthetic discussion. In the end, too, it would shed but little light upon Schiller's later plays, which were in no sense the offspring of theory and were influenced only in a very general way by their author's previous philosophical studies. To understand the poet's development it is nowise necessary to lose one's self with him in the Serbonian bog of metaphysic. On the other hand, it _will_ be useful to know what the problems were that chiefly interested him, and to see how he attacked them and what conclusions he arrived at. With the soundness of his reasoning and the final value of his contributions to the literature of aesthetics we need hardly concern ourselves at all; since the scientific questions involved are differently stated and differently approached at the present time.[94]

The pre-Kantian stage of Schiller's aesthetic philosophy is of quite minor importance. He obtained his original stock of ideas at the Stuttgart academy from Ferguson's 'Inst.i.tutes', as translated by Garve.

In Ferguson, who rested strongly upon Shaftesbury, no line was drawn between the moral and the aesthetic domain. It was taught that all truth is beauty and that 'the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth'. Perfection was made to depend on harmony and proportion; and moral beauty upon the harmony of the individual soul with the general system of things. Wrong action was regarded as discord, imperfection. Virtue, being a disposition toward the general harmony, necessarily meant happiness. Thoughts of this kind, mixed up with vague ideas of a pre-established harmony, const.i.tuted the staple of Schiller's early philosophizing. The ident.i.ty of the good, the true and the beautiful, was for him the highest of all generalizations, though more a matter of pious emotion than of close thinking.

Nor do we observe any noteworthy change of att.i.tude in the minor philosophic writings, such as the letters of Julius and Raphael, and the second book of 'The Ghostseer',--which he published prior to his acquaintance with Kant. In these it is always the moralist that speaks, and the great question is the bearing of skepticism on individual happiness. But by the end of his first year in Weimar the moralist had begun to retreat before the aesthetic philosopher. For the author of 'The G.o.ds of Greece' and 'The Artists', it is evident that the beautiful has become the corner-stone of the temple. He saw before him all at once a new region that invited exploration. If art had played such a commanding role in the history of the world, it was evidently of the greatest importance to understand it. It was this feeling for the dignity of art, as the greatest of factors in human perfectibility, that led him to devote the leisure afforded by his Danish pension to a thorough study of Kantian aesthetics.

He began quite independently, as we have seen, with a course of lectures upon the theory of tragedy. The lectures were never published, but the cream of them is probably contained in two essays, 'On the Rational Basis of Pleasure in Tragic Themes', and 'On the Tragic Art', which were contributed to the _New Thalia_ in 1792. In the former Schiller first combats the idea that art has any higher aim than the giving of pleasure. Its aim, he argues, is not morality but 'free pleasure', the 'free' meaning subject to no law but its own. If morality is made its final aim, it ceases to be 'free'. Then the essay goes on to discuss the _crux_ of our feeling pleasure in painful representations. All pleasure, we read, comes from the perception of _Zweckmaszigkeit_, that is, the quality of being adapted to the furtherance of an end. Since man is meant to be happy and naturally seeks happiness, human suffering affects us primarily as a 'maladaptation', and so gives us pain. But in this very pain our reason recognizes a higher 'adaptation', since we are incited by it to activity. We know that it is good for us and for society; and so we take pleasure in our own pain. The total effect of tragedy depends upon the proportion in which this higher sense of adaptation is present.

The important thing to notice in this argument is that aesthetic judgments are made to depend upon concepts of the mind. The reason, with its abstractions of 'fitness' and what not, is regarded as the prior and the dominating factor. In the second of the two essays, however, we find a distinct recognition of the fact that emotional excitement may give pleasure in and of itself. Ill.u.s.trations are brought in,--such as the pa.s.sion for gaming and for dangerous adventure, and the general love of ghost stories and tales of crime,--which go to show that Schiller by no means overlooked the non-rational element in the pleasure afforded by tragedy. Nevertheless he seems to have attached very little importance to that element, for he goes on to observe that we know only two sources of pleasure, namely, the satisfaction of our bent for happiness (_Gluckseligkeitstrieb_), and the fulfillment of moral laws. As the pleasure we take in acted or narrated suffering cannot proceed from the former, it must spring from the latter and do its work by gratifying the 'bent for activity' _(Thatigkeitstrieb)_, which is a moral bent.--After a long tussle with such hazy abstractions the essayist attempts a working definition and practical discussion of tragedy. This part of the essay is still eminently readable, but need not be a.n.a.lyzed here.

Sufficient to say that Schiller regards the excitation of 'sympathy' as the sole aim of tragedy. He has nothing to say of the Aristotelian 'fear' or 'katharsis'; in fact he did not make the acquaintance of Aristotle until 1797.[95]

It would be next in order to consider the lectures of 1792-93, but unluckily they are known only from the notes of a student.[96] As published in 1806 they bear the impress of Schiller's mind, but are too brief and summary to be counted among his works. They show that by 1793 he had come to feel at home in the field of aesthetic speculation. He had read Kant and Moritz and Burke, and was ready with his criticisms.

In particular, he had found what he regarded as a weak point in the system of Kant, who had not only made no attempt to establish an objective criterion of beauty, but had summarily dismissed the whole problem as obviously hopeless. Schiller felt that, if this were so, there was no firm foundation anywhere, and all aesthetic judgments were reduced to a matter of taste,--which was of course a very unwelcome conclusion. In the belief that he had found the missing link he planned, toward the end of 1792, a treatise to be known as 'Kallias, or Concerning Beauty'. It was to take the form of a dialogue, to be written in a pleasing style, with a plenty of ill.u.s.tration,--merits to which Kant could lay no claim,--and to review the whole history of aesthetic theorizing.

This plan was finally given up, but a series of rather abstruse letters to Korner, beginning in January, 1793, may be regarded as preparatory studies for the contemplated treatise. Schiller's idea was, evidently, to blaze a private trail through the jungle of Kantian theory, with Korner's critical a.s.sistance, and then to return and convert the trail into an agreeable road for the general reader. In the end he chose a different form than that of the Socratic dialogue for the literary presentation of his doctrine, but what he wrote subsequently was based partly at least upon conclusions that he had reached through his correspondence with Korner; wherefore it will be well to look a little more closely, at this point, into his quarrel with the Konigsberg philosophy.

As is well known, Kant placed the aesthetic faculty under the jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we have an interest,--we will the former and desire the latter. The beautiful, on the other hand, is that which pleases without appealing to any interest (_interesseloses Wohlgefalien_). This is its character under the category of quality. Under that of quant.i.ty it is a universal pleasure; under that of relation, a form of adaptation (_Zweckmaszigkeit_), with no end present to the mind. Finally, under the fourth category--modality--it is 'necessary', being determined not by any objective criterion, but by the _sensus communis_ of mankind, that is, their agreement in taste.

For Kant, then, the whole matter of aesthetics is a subjective matter.

He does not inquire what it is that makes objects beautiful, but how it is that we 'judge' them to be beautiful. While his predecessors made the impression of the beautiful to depend upon objective attributes of form, proportion, harmony, completeness and the like, he insisted that the essence of beauty was to please without reference to any such intellectual concept whatever. His terminology was not very happy, since a judgment that has nothing to do with the intellect is not a judgment at all, but a feeling; nevertheless his system brought out clearly,--and this is perhaps his most important merit in the domain of aesthetics,--the necessity of distinguishing more sharply between the beautiful, on the one hand, and the good and agreeable, on the other.

But in expounding his central doctrine, that beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept, he is not quite consistent; for he recognizes 'adaptation' as a form of beauty, and adaptation is a concept of the mind. To meet this difficulty he makes a distinction between free beauty (_pulchritudo vaga_) and adherent beauty (_pulchritudo adhaerens_), the latter being mixed up with the good or the desirable. Even a generic or a normative concept was for him fatal to the idea of pure beauty. Thus pure beauty could not be affirmed of a horse, because one inevitably has in his mind an antecedent notion as to how a horse ought to look. Again, there could be no such thing as pure beauty,--at the best only adherent beauty,--in a moral action, since a moral action does not please in and of itself. At the same time Kant held that the highest use of beauty is to symbolize moral truth, and in ill.u.s.trating the possibilities of this symbolism he indulged in some rather fanciful speculations.

Now we can easily understand that Schiller, notwithstanding all his admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's _sensus communis aestheticus_, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental att.i.tude is clearly brought to view in a letter of February 9, 1793, to the Prince of Augustenburg. After speaking warmly of Kant's great service to philosophy, he describes thus the problem which Kant regarded as impossible of solution and which he himself, Schiller, was bold enough to attempt:

When I consider how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the great is connected with the n.o.blest part of our being, it is impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules. It seems to me that beauty too, as well as truth and right, must rest upon eternal foundations, and that the original laws of the reason must also be the laws of taste. It is true that the circ.u.mstance of our feeling beauty and not cognizing it seems to cut off all hope of our finding a universal law for it, because every judgment emanating from this source is a judgment of experience. As a rule people accept an explanation of beauty only because it harmonizes in particular cases with the verdict of feeling; whereas, if there were really such a thing as the cognition of beauty from principles, we should trust the verdict of feeling because it coincides with our explanation of the beautiful. Instead of testing and correcting our feelings by means of principles, we test aesthetic principles by our feelings.

So then Schiller attacked his problem in the aforementioned letters to Korner and was soon able to announce his solution: Beauty is nothing else than freedom-in-the-appearance (_Freiheit in der Erscheinung_).

To make clear the steps by which he arrived at that formula and the wealth of meaning that it contained for him would require a fuller a.n.a.lysis of his argument than there is s.p.a.ce for in this chapter.

Suffice it to say that he now fully accepts the dogma of Kant that beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept,--the feeling of pleasure is the prior fact. At the same time he has an unshakable conviction that beauty must somehow fall under the laws of reason. He gets rid of the _crux_ by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the 'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality.

Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the object is free, autonomous, self-determined. He then propounds his theory that beauty is simply an a.n.a.logon of moral freedom. On the presentation of an object the practical reason (_i.e._, the will) may banish for the time being all concepts of the pure reason, may a.s.sume complete control and ask no other question than whether the object is free, self-determined, autonomous. If, then, the object appears to be free, to follow no law but its own, the practical reason is satisfied; the effect is pleasurable and we call it beauty. Schiller is careful to point out that it is all a question of appearance: the object is not really free,--since freedom abides only in the supersensual world,--but the practical reason imputes or lends freedom to it. Hence beauty is freedom in the appearance.

In a letter of February 23, 1793, he applies his dogma to an exposition of the relation between nature and art. The problem of the artist in the representation of an object, so the theory runs, is to convey a suggestion of freedom, that is, of not-being-determined-from-without.

This he can only do by making the object appear to be determined from within, in other words, to follow its own law. It must have a law and obey it, while seeming to be free. The law of the object is what is disclosed by technique, which is thus the basis of our impression of freedom. Starting from Kant's saying that nature is beautiful when it looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller gives a large number of concrete ill.u.s.trations of his theory. Thus a vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he concludes his ill.u.s.trations, 'the empire of taste is the empire of freedom; the beautiful world of sense being the happiest symbol of what the moral world should be, and every beautiful object about me being a happy citizen who calls out: Be free like me.'

It did not escape our theorist that his hard-won criterion of beauty was after all, apparently, an idea of the reason. He was however prepared to meet this difficulty and promised to do so in a future letter. But the aesthetic correspondence with Korner was not continued beyond February.

The project of the 'Kallias' continued for some time longer to occupy Schiller's mind, but a fresh attack of illness intervened, and when he was again able to work he turned his mind to an essay upon 'Winsomeness and Dignity' (_Anmut und Wurde_). It was written in May and June, 1793, and printed soon afterwards in the _New Thalia_. In this essay we can observe a growing independence of thought and an amazing gift for the a.n.a.lysis of subtle impressions. In the main it is lucid enough, especially when one calls in the aid of the preceding letters to Korner; but portions are hard reading. To give the gist of it in a few words is next to impossible, because it is so largely taken up with superfine distinctions in the meaning of words for which our language has at best but rough equivalents.