The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 03 Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes — Context and Discussion

Henceforth was true as needle to the pole. The vision he had caught remained the goal Of manhood's aspiration and the theme Of those high luminous musings that redeem Our souls from bondage to the general dole Of trivial existence. Calm and free He faced the Sphinx, nor ever knew dismay, Nor bowed to externalities the knee, Nor took a guerdon from the fleeting day; But dwelt on earth in that eternity Where Truth and Beauty shine with blended ray.[2]

Friedrich Schiller, the greatest of German dramatic poets, was born November 10, 1759, at Marbach in Swabia. His father was an officer in the army which the Duke of Württemberg sent out to fight the Prussians in the Seven Years' War. Of his mother, whose maiden name was Dorothea Kodweis, not much is known. She was a devout woman who lived in the cares and duties of a household that sometimes felt the pinch of poverty. After the war the family lived a while at the village of Lorch, where Captain Schiller was employed as recruiting officer. From there they moved, in 1766, to Ludwigsburg, where the extravagant duke Karl Eugen had taken up his residence and was bent on creating a sort of Swabian Versailles. Here little Fritz went to school and was sometimes taken to the gorgeous ducal opera, where he got his first notions of scenic illusion. The hope of his boyhood was to become a preacher, but this pious aspiration was brought to naught by the offer of free tuition in an academy which the duke had started at his Castle Solitude near Stuttgart.

This academy was Schiller's world from his fourteenth to his twenty-first year. It was an educational experiment conceived in a rather liberal spirit as a training-school for public service. At first the duke had the boys taught under his own eye at Castle Solitude, where they were subjected to a strict military discipline. There being no provision for the study of divinity, Schiller was put into law, with the result that he floundered badly for two years. In 1775 the institution was augmented by a faculty of medicine and transferred to Stuttgart, where it was destined to a short-lived career under the name of the Karlschule. Schiller gladly availed himself of the permission to change from law to medicine, which he thought would be more in harmony with his temperament and literary ambitions. And so it proved. As a student of medicine he made himself at home in the doctrines and practices of the day, and for several years after he left school he thought now and then of returning to the profession of medicine.

For posterity the salient fact of his long connection with the Karlschule is that he was there converted into a fiery radical and a banner-bearer of the literary revolution. Just how it came about is hard to explain in detail. The school was designed to produce docile and contented members of the social order; in him it bred up a savage and relentless critic of that order. The result may be ascribed partly, no doubt, to the natural reaction of an ardent, liberty-loving temperament against a system of rigid discipline and petty espionage. The _élèves_--French was the official language of the school--were not supposed to read dangerous books, and their rooms were often searched for contraband literature. But they easily found ways to evade the rule and enjoy the savor of forbidden fruit.

So it was with Schiller: he read Rousseau more or less, the early works of Goethe, Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, and plays by Klinger, Leisewitz, Lenz and Wagner--all more or less revolutionary in spirit. He also made the acquaintance of Shakespeare and steeped himself in the spirit of antique heroism as he found it in Plutarch.

Perhaps this reading would have made a radical of him even if he had just then been enjoying the normal freedom of a German university student. Be that as it may, the time came--it was about 1777--when the young Schiller, faithfully pursuing his medical course and doing loyal birthday orations in praise of the duke or the duke's mistress, was not exactly what he seemed to be. Underneath the calm exterior there was a soul on fire with revolutionary passion.

It was mainly in 1780--his last year in the Karlschule--that Schiller wrote _The Robbers_, altogether the loudest explosion of the Storm and Stress. The hero, Karl Moor, was conceived as a "sublime criminal." Deceived by the machinations of his villainous brother Franz, he becomes the captain of a band of outlaws and attempts by murder, arson and robbery to right the wrongs of the social order. For a while he believes that he is doing a noble work. When he learns how he has been deluded he gives himself up to the law. The effect of the play is that of tremendous power unchecked by any of the restraints of art. The plot is incredible, the language tense with turbulent passion, and the characters are extravagantly overdrawn. But the genius of the born dramatist is there. It is all vividly seen and powerfully bodied forth. What is more important, the play marks the birth of a new type--the tragedy of fanaticism. We are left at the end with a heightened feeling for the mysterious tangle of human destiny which makes it possible for a really noble nature such as Karl Moor to go thus disastrously wrong.

Toward the end of 1780 Schiller left the academy and was made doctor to a regiment of soldiers consisting largely of invalids. He dosed them with drastic medicines according to his light, but the service was disagreeable and the pay very small. To make a stir in the world he borrowed money and published _The Robbers_ as a book for the reader, with a preface in which he spoke rather slightingly of the theatre. The book came out in the spring of 1781--with a rampant lion and the motto _in Tirannos_ on the title-page. Ere long it came to the attention of Dalberg, director of the theatre at Mannheim, who saw its dramatic qualities and requested its author to revise it for the stage. This Schiller readily consented to do. To please Dalberg he set the action back from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century and made many minor changes. The revised play was performed at Mannheim on January 12, 1782, with ever-memorable success. The audience, assembled from far and near, went wild with enthusiasm. No such triumph had been achieved before on a German stage. The author himself saw the performance, having come over from Stuttgart without leave of absence. For this breach of discipline, or rather for a repetition of the offense in May, he was sent to the guardhouse for a fortnight and forbidden to write any more plays. The consequence was a clandestine flight from a situation that had become intolerable. In September, 1782, he escaped from Stuttgart with his loyal friend Streicher and took his way northward toward the Palatinate. He had set his hopes on finding employment in Mannheim.

Before leaving his native Swabia he had virtually completed a second play dealing with the conspiracy of Count Fiesco at Genoa in the year 1547. He had also won his spurs as a poet and a critic. His _Anthology for 1782_ contains a large number of short poems, some of them evincing a rare talent for dramatic story-telling, others foreshadowing the imaginative sweep and the warmth of feeling which characterize the best poetic work of the later Schiller. Such, notably, are the poems to Laura, in which the lover's raptures are linked with the law of gravitation and the preestablished harmony of the world. He also contributed several papers to the Württemberg _Repertorium_, especially a review of _The Robbers_ in which, dissecting his own child with remorseless impartiality, he anticipated nearly everything that critics were destined to urge against the play during the next hundred years. Having left his post of duty and being a military officer, Schiller was technically a deserter and had reason to fear pursuit and arrest. At Mannheim his affairs went badly. The politic Dalberg was not eager to befriend a youth who had offended the powerful Duke of Württemberg; so _Fiesco_ was rejected and its author came into dire straits. Toward the close of the year he found a welcome refuge at Bauerbach, where a house was put at his disposal by his friend Frau von Wolzogen. Here he remained several months, occupied mainly with a new play which came to be known as _Cabal and Love_. He also sketched a historical tragedy, _Don Carlos_, being led to the subject by his reading of St. Réal's historical novel _Don Carlos_. During the first part of his stay at Bauerbach Schiller went by the name of Dr. Ritter and wrote purposely misleading letters as to his intended movements. By the summer of 1783, however, it had become apparent that the Duke of Württemberg was not going to make trouble. Relieved of anxiety on this score, and not having had very good success of late with his theatre, Dalberg reopened negotiations with Schiller, who was easily persuaded to emerge from his hiding-place and become theatre-poet at Mannheim under contract for one year.

During this year at Mannheim _Fiesco_ and _Cabal and Love_ were put on the stage and published. The former is a quasi-historical tragedy of intriguing ambition, ending--in the original version--with the death of Fiesco at the hands of the fanatical republican Verrina. While there is much to admire in its abounding vigor and its picturesque details, _Fiesco_ lacks artistic finality and is the least interesting of Schiller's early plays. Much more important is _Cabal and Love_, a domestic tragedy that has held the stage to this day and is generally regarded as the best of its kind in the eighteenth-century German drama. Class conflict is the tragic element. A maid of low degree and her high-minded, aristocratic lover are done to death by a miserable court intrigue. Far more than in _The Robbers_ Schiller was here writing with his eye on the facts. Much Württemberg history is thinly disguised in this drastic comment on the crimes, follies and banalities of German court life under the Old Régime.

Notwithstanding his success as a playwright and his receipt of the honorable title of Councilor from the Duke of Weimar, Schiller was unhappy at Mannheim. Sickness, debt and loneliness oppressed him, making creative work well-nigh impossible. In June, 1784, when the sky was looking very black, he received a heartening letter from a quartet of unknown admirers in Leipzig, one of whom was Gottfried Körner. Schiller was deeply touched. In his hunger for sympathy and friendship he resolved to leave Mannheim and seek out these good people who had shown such a kindly interest in him. Fortunately Körner was a man of some means and was able to help not only with words but with cash. So it came about that in the spring of 1785 Schiller forsook Mannheim, which had become as a prison to him, and went to Leipzig. Thence, after a short sojourn, he followed Körner to Dresden. The relation between the two men developed into a warm and mutually inspiring friendship. A feeling of jubilant happiness took possession of Schiller and soon found expression in the _Song to Joy_, wherein a kiss of love and sympathy is offered to all mankind.

During his two years' sojourn in Dresden Schiller was mainly occupied with the editing of a magazine, the _Thalia_, and with the completion of _Don Carlos_, the first of his plays in blank verse. Hitherto he had written with his eye on the stage, and in the savage spirit of the Storm and Stress. Now, however, the higher ambition of the dramatic poet began to assert itself. His views of life were changing, and his nature craved a freer and nobler self-expression than was possible in the "three hours' traffic of the stage." He had begun _Don Carlos_ at Bauerbach, intending to make it a love-tragedy in a royal household and incidentally to scourge the Spanish inquisition. Little by little, however, the centre of his interest shifted from the lovesick Carlos to the quixotic dreamer Posa, and the result was that the love-tragedy gradually grew into a tragedy of political idealism with Posa for its hero. As finally completed in the summer of 1787, _Don Carlos_ had twice the length of an ordinary stage-play and, withal, a certain lack of artistic unity. But its sonorous verse, its fine phrasing of large ideas, and its noble dignity of style settled forever the question of Schiller's power as a dramatic poet. The third act especially is instinct with the best idealism of the eighteenth century.

After _Don Carlos_ Schiller wrote no more plays for some nine years, being occupied in the interval chiefly with history and philosophy. His dramatic work had interested him more especially in the sixteenth century. At Dresden he began to read history with great avidity and found it very appetizing. What he most cared for, evidently, was not the annals of warfare or the growth of institutions, but the psychology of the great man. He was an ardent lover of freedom, both political and intellectual, and took keen delight in tracing its progress. On the other hand, play-writing had its disadvantages. Thus far it had brought him more of notoriety than of solid fame, and his income was so small that he was dependent on Körner's generosity. To escape from this irksome position he decided to try his fortune in Thuringia. Going over to Weimar, in the summer of 1787, he was well received by Herder and Wieland--Goethe was just then in Italy--and presently he settled down to write a history of the Dutch Rebellion. His plan looked forward to six volumes, but only one was ever written. It was published in 1788 under the title of _The Defection of the Netherlands_ and led to its author's appointment as unsalaried professor of history at the University of Jena. He began to lecture in the spring of 1789.

Meanwhile he had taken up the study of the Greek poets and found them very edifying and sanative--just the influence that he needed to clarify his judgment and correct his earlier vagaries of taste. He was fascinated by the _Odyssey_ and in a mood of fleeting enthusiasm he resolved to read nothing but the ancients for the next two years. He translated the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ of Euripides and a part of _The Phenician Women_. Out of this newborn ardor grew two important poems, _The Gods of Greece_ and _The Artists_; the former an elegy on the decay of Greek polytheism conceived as a loss of beauty to the world, the latter a philosophic retrospect of human history wherein the evolutionary function of art is glorified. At the same time he revived the dormant _Thalia_ and used its columns for the continued publication of _The Ghost-seer_, a pot-boiling novel which he had begun at Dresden. It is Schiller's one serious attempt at prose fiction. His initial purpose was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue, devised by mysterious agents of the Church of Rome, for the winning over of a Protestant German prince. The story begins in a promising way, and the later portions contain fine passages of narrative and character-drawing. But its author presently began to feel that it was unworthy of him and left it unfinished.

On the 22d of February, 1790, Schiller was married to Lotte von Lengefeld, with whom he lived most happily the rest of his days. His letters of this period tell of a quiet joy such as he had not known before. And then, suddenly, his fair prospects were clouded by the disastrous breakdown of his health. An attack of pneumonia in the winter of 1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he recovered from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse than the first. He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went abroad that he was dead. After a while he rallied, but never again to be strong and well. From this time forth he must be thought of as a semi-invalid, doomed to a very cautious mode of living and expectant of an early death. It was to be a fourteen years' battle between a heroic soul and an ailing body.

For a while, owing to the forced cessation of the literary work on which his small income depended, he was in great distress for lack of money. His wife, while of noble family, had brought nothing but herself to the marriage partnership. And then, just as in the dark days at Mannheim in 1784, help seemed to come from the clouds. Two Danish noblemen, ardent admirers quite unknown to him personally, heard of his painful situation and offered him a pension of a thousand thalers a year for three years. No conditions whatever were attached to the gift; he was simply to follow his inclination, free from all anxiety about a livelihood. Without hesitation he accepted the gift and thus found himself, for the first time in his life, really free to do as he chose. What he chose was to use his freedom for a grapple with Kant's philosophy. Today this seems a strange choice for a sick poet, but let Schiller himself explain what lay in his mind. He wrote to Körner:

"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."

From these words we understand the nature of Schiller's enterprise--he wished to fathom the laws of beauty. It seemed to him that beauty could not be altogether a matter of changing taste, opinion, and fashion; that somehow or other it must be grounded in eternal laws either of the external world or of human nature. He felt, too, that a knowledge of these laws, could it once become second nature, would be very helpful to him as a dramatic poet. Whether he was right in so thinking is a question too large to be discussed here, nor can we follow him in the details of his esthetic speculation. The subject is too abstruse to be dispatched in a few words. Suffice it to say that a number of minor papers, the most important being _On Winsomeness and Dignity (Über Anmut and Würde)_ and _On the Sublime_, prepared the way for a more popular exposition of his views in the _Letters on Esthetic Education_ and in the memorable essay _On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry_, which deserves to be called, next to Lessing's _Laocoon_, the weightiest critical essay of the eighteenth century. The Letters contain a ripe and pleasing statement of Schiller's philosophy in its relation to the culture-problems of his epoch.

Along with these philosophic studies Schiller found time for much work more closely related to his professorship of history. To say nothing of his minor historical writings, he completed, in 1793, his _History of the Thirty Years' War_. It appeared in successive numbers of Göschen's _Ladies' Calendar_, a fact which in itself indicates that it was not conceived and should not be judged as a monument of research. The aim was to tell the story of the great war in a readable style. And in this Schiller succeeded, especially in the parts relating to his hero, the Swedish king Gustav Adolf. Over Schiller's merit as a historian there has been much debate, and good critics have caviled at his sharp contrasts and his lack of care in matters of detail. But the great fact remains that the _Defection of the Netherlands_ and the _Thirty Years' War_ are the earliest historical classics in the German language. Schiller was the first German to make literature out of history.