The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 3

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

CHAPTER III

The Stuttgart Medicus

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

The career that opened before Schiller on his release from the academy, in December, 1780, turned out a wretched mockery of his hopes. He had, or supposed he had, the right to expect a decent position in the public service and a measure of liberty befitting a man who had served his time under tutelage. What his august master saw fit to mete out to him, however, was neither the one nor the other: he was stationed at Stuttgart as 'medicus' to an ill-famed regiment consisting largely of invalids. His pay was eighteen florins a month--say seven or eight dollars. His duties consisted of routine visits to the hospital and daily appearance at parade, with reports upon the condition of the luckless patients whom he doctored savagely with drastic medicines.

Withal he was required to wear a stiff, ungainly uniform which did not carry with it the distinction of an 'officer' and exposed him to the derision of his friends. A humble pet.i.tion of Captain Schiller that his son be permitted to wear the dress of a civilian and extend his practice among the people of the city met with a curt refusal.

Of Schiller's personal appearance at about this time we have two or three descriptions by friends who knew him well.[30] Putting them together we get a picture something like the following: He was about five feet and nine inches in height, erect of bearing and knock-kneed.

He had reddish hair, a broad forehead, and bushy eyebrows which came close together over a long, thin, arched nose. He was near-sighted. His eyes, of a bluish-gray color, were usually inflamed, but very expressive when he spoke with animation. One friend credits him with an 'eagle's glance', another with an uncanny, demonic expression. He had a strong chin, a prominent under-lip, and sunken, freckled cheeks. Altogether his face and bearing told of immense energy.--One can imagine how the creator of Karl Moor must have felt in his new situation. The young lion had escaped from one cage into another that was even worse.

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

A n.o.bler pleasure incident to the new life was the opportunity of frequent visits to Castle Solitude. For eight years Schiller had been cut off from intercourse with his parents and sisters, save through the medium of officially inspected letters. Returning now at last he found his mother in frail health, but his father still vigorous and active.

Sister Christophine had grown into a strong and self-reliant young woman, the mainstay of the household. She took an interest in literature, loved her brother devotedly, had a sister's boundless faith in his genius, and now became his confidante and amanuensis. Another sister, Louise, had reached the age of fourteen, two others had died, and the youngest of all, Nanette, was now three years old. It was a happy, sensible, affectionate family-circle, in which the long-lost son and brother found sweet relief from the _misere_ of Stuttgart. The only cloud in the sky was the mother's anxiety for the welfare of her son's soul, with the resulting necessity of replying somewhat disingenuously to her tender inquiries into his religious condition. To his parents and sister the disgruntled medicus expressed freely his disappointment at the provision which the duke had made for him. A hard fate, indeed, to have studied seven years for the privilege of starving one's mind and body as an insignificant army doctor!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The changes made in the new version do not reflect the free play of Schiller's dramatic instinct so much as his deferential att.i.tude towards Dalberg. Thus we know that the most important of them all, the shifting of the action back into the age of expiring feudalism, was made reluctantly. Schiller felt, and had reason to feel, that the modernity of his drama was its very life-blood;[32] for the squeamish Dalberg, however, the robbers in the age of Frederick the Great were a painful anachronism. So they were put back three centuries and costumed in the style of the 'Ritterstuck'. Other less dubious changes were also made.

Thus the long soliloquies of Franz and the ribald garrulities of Spiegelberg were reduced to more tolerable proportions. Robber Schwarz and Pastor Moser were omitted, and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Hermann was vitalized into a person of some account by means of his counter-plot against Franz. The un-lyrical songs by which Schiller had set great store were dropped, and the catastrophe was so changed as to bring the two brothers finally face to face. The life of Schweizer was spared and Franz, instead of being torn limb from limb, was derisively pardoned by his great-souled brother and then, amid mocking laughter, thrust into the selfsame dungeon in which he had confined his father. Much against Schiller's will Amalia was made to kill herself with a dagger s.n.a.t.c.hed from one of the outlaws, instead of receiving her death at the hands of her lover.

The prodigious success of 'The Robbers' upon the Mannheim stage, and upon other stages where it was soon produced in more or less garbled form, made the work famous. Famous and at the same time notorious. New editions, most of them pirated, began to appear, and a mania similar to the Werther-mania of the previous decade spread over Germany. The newspapers told of conspiring schoolboys whose heads had been turned toward a career of crime. A well-born youth who had essayed the role of Robin Hood near Stra.s.sburg and was hanged there in October, 1783, confessed suspiciously that he had been brought to his fate by the reading of bad books. The sedate authorities of Leipzig forbade the further performance of the play in their city because they had observed a sudden increase of burglary and pet.i.t larceny. An edition of 1782, which the publisher, possibly without Schiller's knowledge, had adorned with a rampant lion and the motto _In Tirannos_, probably added to the vogue of the piece as a revolutionary doc.u.ment. A French translation appeared in 1785 and drew the attention of the turbulent Gauls to that 'Monsieur Gille', who was in time to receive the diploma of a French citizen. The first English translation dates from 1792.

It is not difficult to imagine the emotions with which Schiller, now at the fervid age of twenty-two, returned to his post after that intoxicating visit to Mannheim, and, his ears still tingling with the thunderous plaudits of the theater and the complimentary babble of his new friends, resumed the dosing of his sick grenadiers in Stuttgart. For a while things went on very much as before. In order to better his position in a professional way, he formed the plan of taking his doctor's degree and then qualifying for a professorship in physiology.

But from the first the poet in him prevailed more and more over the medical man. Soon after leaving the academy he had published a long elegy upon the death of a young friend named Weckerlin. It is a rebellious, declamatory poem, in which the pathos of untimely death is made the occasion for ventilating radical views as to the goodness of G.o.d and the consolations of religion. Pa.s.sages like the following show the young Schiller at his best as a poet:

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

For the rest, the death of Weckerlin is a 'discord on the great lute', and a 'barbarous doom'. And yet, the poem continues, the dead youth has drawn the better lot; he will sleep calmly in his narrow house, unmindful of the wretched tragi-comedy going on above his head. So his friends are bidden 'to clap their hands and shout a loud _plaudite_'. As for a reunion, there will be one, but it will not be in the 'paradise of the rabble'.--In another poem dating from this period, 'The Chariot of Venus,' the love-G.o.ddess is put on trial and castigated for her sins.

Her havoc among the sons of men is described in half a hundred rhetorical stanzas which were evidently inspired by the genius of the clinic or the hospital, rather than by one of the sacred nine.

Besides these poems a large number of others were written by Schiller during the year 1781, prior to the time when Dalberg's invitation caused him to turn his attention to the stage. It was of course important to acquaint the public with his lucubrations, but poetry in large quant.i.ties was not an easily marketable commodity. The usual mode of publication was the poetic 'almanac' or 'calendar', in which a number of ambitious verse-makers would unite their wares in a single volume. Of such almanacs there were several in Germany and one at least in Suabia.

It was edited by one Staudlin, a rival whom Schiller thought it would be both feasible and pleasant to outshine. So he sent out letters to his friends inviting contributions, and in due time there appeared, after a fresh outlay of borrowed money, an 'Anthology for the Year 1782'. It consisted of some four-score poems, signed with all manner of intentionally misleading symbols and purporting to emanate from Tobolsko, in Siberia. The most of the verses were the work of Schiller.[34]

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

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

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

O big, amazingly big thing!

My head swims when I look; I shudder and start back afraid And fall--upon my knees.

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

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

In this poem there is certainly no lack of that 'fire' which Duke Karl found in Schiller's dissertation. Indeed fire abounds everywhere in his youthful versifying. He never contemplates, never dwells upon a temperate emotion. The poetry of common things and of the gentler feelings seems to have been nonexistent for him. His imagination likes to occupy itself with the supernal, the stupendous, or else with the awful and the revolting. This is seen in the two poems 'Elysium' and 'A Group from Tartarus'; the one aiming to portray a land of ineffable happiness, where sorrow has no name and the only pain is a gentle ecstasy, the other depicting the infinite misery of the inferno. In both there is a free blending of Christian with pagan conceptions, 'Elysium'

being put for heaven and 'Tartarus' for h.e.l.l. A similar blending is noticeable in many of the other poems, ancient mythology being made to furnish forth the setting and the symbols of modern pa.s.sion. So it is, for example, in the lyric operetta 'Semele', the longest and most pretentious of the 'Anthology' poems. It consists of two scenes in irregular verses, dealing with Jupiter's love for the mortal Semele' and Juno's jealousy. Artistically it is much in need of the file, and Its sustained note of pa.s.sionate pathos hardly comports, perhaps, with the type of the operetta. Nevertheless it contains powerful pa.s.sages and telling stage effects. One can see that the young student--'Semele'

appears to have been written at the academy--had learned, through, his occasional visits to the opera, how to manage a conventional theme and conventional machinery in such a way as to startle and thrill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the most famous and on the whole the most interesting of the effusions in the 'Anthology' are the erotic verses addressed to Laura.

Whether Schiller was humanly in love with his landlady, Frau Luise Vischer, is a rather futile question which German erudition has argued pro and con these many years without coming to an inexpugnable conclusion. Probably he was not, though he may have thought that he was.

If he had been we should have heard of it sooner or later in authentic prose. But she interested him as the first of her s.e.x who had come under his close observation. There were on his part the small gallantries of daily life, and on hers the responsiveness of a not very prudish widow quite willing to be adored. She played the piano. It was enough: the needy Petrarch had found a sufficient Laura--and never was a poet's G.o.ddess worshiped in such singular strains. We miss in them altogether that captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,--so lubricious in its suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he had become a libertine,--and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more than intellectual puzzles: they so occupy the mind in the mere effort of comprehension that little room is left for any emotion whatever. They leave one altogether cold.

A 'Fantasie to Laura' identifies the rapturous pa.s.sion with the force of gravitation which holds planets and systems in order. 'Blot it out from the mechanism of nature and the All bursts asunder in fragments; your worlds thunder into chaos; weep, Newtons, for their giant fall!' And then Laura's kiss!

Aus den Schranken schwellen alle Sehnen, Seine Ufer uberwallt das Blut; Korper will in Korper ubersturzen, Lodern Seelen in vereinter Glut.[38]

When Laura plays the piano, her adorer stands there, one moment an exanimate statue, the next a disembodied spirit,--while the listening zephyrs murmur more softly in reverence. In a 'Reproach to Laura' she is taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains', that he had 'rolled up' to the sunny heights of glory. In another poem, 'Mystery of Reminiscence', we hear of a cosmic golden age in which Laura, one with her poet, was a part of the G.o.dhead. One and yet two, they swept through s.p.a.ce in unimaginable ecstasy. Somehow,--the point is not made very clear,--there came a great cataclysm and separated them.

Now they are beautiful fragments of the G.o.d, evermore yearning to restore the lost unity:

Darum Laura dieses Wutverlangen, Ewig starr an deinen Mund zu hangen, Und die Woll.u.s.t deinen Hauch zu trinken, In dein Wesen, wenn sich Blicke winken, Sterbend zu versinken.[39]

Without lingering longer over the erotic poems of the 'Anthology', one may say that they are characterized, like 'The Robbers', by a fiery intensity of expression which, in the search after the sublime, occasionally pa.s.ses the bounds of good taste. Their author already has at his command a gorgeous poetic diction that is all his own. One is often amazed at his mere command of words, the audacity of his tropes, the sweep of his imagination. But he does not convince. When at his best he only produces an impression of magnificent feigning. The reader soon sees that, notwithstanding all the impa.s.sioned hyperboles, it is really intellectual poetry,--a youth philosophizing about his pa.s.sion. And the philosophy is little more than a matter of fine-sounding but vacuous a.n.a.logies that have no root in the facts of experience.[40] And so the poetry does not take hold of one. Nor does it charm with its music; there is vigor and sweep and swing, but the subtler elements of melodious verse are lacking.

These qualities of the youthful Schiller's poetry foretell that he will never be a great lyrist, but they promise well enough for the poetic tale. This promise is seen notably in the poem called 'The Infanticide'. It is a gruesome thing, with the pathos here and there overstrained, but what a power of vivid narration! What a gift for the portraiture of frenzied pa.s.sion! For the rest, it should not go unrecorded that certain poems of the 'Anthology' went altogether too far in the defiance of conventional morality. The study of medicine, combined with the ardor of youthful revolt and the seductions of a new bohemian life, had so sensualized the mind of Schiller that, for a brief period in his career, he found pleasure in exploiting the indecent. It was but a pa.s.sing phase, and not very bad at its worst.

Still, if Heine, and the other emanc.i.p.ators of the flesh who came later, had felt the need of supporting their cause by an appeal to distinguished authority, they might have referred quite unabashed to the youthful sins of the idealist Schiller.

Little notice was taken of the 'Anthology' even in Suabia, and none at all, apparently, in the outside German world. The investment brought no immediate returns in fame or in money, and other experiments of a different character turned out but little better.