Schiller is as universally acknowledged to be the second of German, as Milton is of English poets: and these great names, after those of Goethe and Shakspeare, denote the chiefs of the national literature of their respective countries. But the German poets were not merely contemporaries, but associated in friendship and congenial pursuits; and so much light is thrown upon the character of each by its being contemplated in connexion with that of the other, that in our endeavour to compress within very narrow limits the pregnant matter which this great man’s name suggests, we shall take leave to call in aid our attempted characteristics of his greater friend, and request that this article may be considered as a sequel to the former.

Frederick Christopher von Schiller was born at Marbach, in the duchy of Wurtemburg, November 10, 1759. His father held the rank of captain in the service of the duke, and was in fortune so low, that he was glad to place his son, in 1773, after an ordinary school-education, in the ducal academy of Stuttgard, which, partaking of an eleemosynary character, subjected the pupils to military discipline, though training for arts and professions called liberal. Schiller had early in life manifested the sensibilities common to the religious and poetic temperament, but was compelled to forego the study of theology, because this institution made no provision for it. He began with law, but finally went through a course of medical study, so as to obtain the post of regimental surgeon in 1780. These pursuits were against his inclination. During eight years, as he said, his genius was in conflict with military subjection. He ought rather to have said, that thereby his genius received the direction which determined the course of his life. For it was while under the sad impressions produced by a life of restraint within the walls of the academy, that he composed his tragedy of The Robbers, which he found means to print in 1781. Germany was at that period without a national theatre; scarcely half-a-dozen original stock-plays could be now produced which were then popular. Hence this juvenile work, with all its faults and extravagances (perhaps on account of these), was received with a tumult of applause in many parts of Germany. He was invited to adapt it to the stage, and it was performed the following year at Manheim. Of this most faulty and most famous maiden-play, it will be sufficient to remark that it exhibits, in over-charged colours, relations of life and character most likely to strike a youthful imagination. It represents in contrast two brothers. One, originally noble and heroic, becomes the perpetrator of those crimes against society, which law punishes with its severest penalties. The other betrays a character far more odious and revolting to the moral sense of mankind. The result is a catastrophe of appalling horror. The young poet solicited for leave of absence to witness the representation of his first play, which was refused him. He therefore, in defiance, made a journey to Manheim, and was punished by a fortnight’s arrest in his own house. He was also found guilty of having in his play uttered a national reflection on the people of the Grisons. For this he was reprimanded, ordered by his sovereign not to write on any subject but medicine, or at least to submit any literary work to the inspection and correction of his Serenity, and threatened with imprisonment in a fortress. While he was compelled to submit to a tyranny so humiliating, he learned that beyond the limits of the petty state to which he belonged, his work was the subject of loud and even extravagant applause. After a severe conflict, he abandoned his parents and the friends of his youth, and in October of the same year made his escape from an intolerable servitude. It has been gravely stated, to the credit of the duke, that he suffered his disobedient subject, some ten years afterwards, when he had acquired celebrity, to visit his family unmolested. That is, he was not seized and shot as a deserter.

When Schiller thus threw himself on the world, he had no other friends than those whom these early fruits of his talents had raised, no other support than the consciousness of those talents, nor other immediate resource than the unwrought materials of two other tragedies in prose, which he produced almost immediately, and which established his character as a dramatic poet. These were the Conspiracy of Fiesco, a political play taken from the romantic tale of St. Real, in which the intrigues of republican faction were picturesquely exhibited, and Cabal and Love, in which the tragic distress arises from the conflict between the natural passion of love, and the conventional social duties which originate in the relations of birth and station. During the completion of these juvenile works, which appeared in 1783 and 1784, his first asylum was Manheim, where he even deliberated about becoming an actor; and his first patron was the munificent ecclesiastic Baron von Dalberg, who became at a future period, under the French government, Prince-primate of Catholic Germany. Schiller also became the editor of the Rhenish Mercury, a monthly miscellany devoted to literature and the arts, and engaged in manifold literary labours, for which he had to qualify himself by supplying the defects of a very imperfect education. He early felt the necessity of studying history as indispensable to the cultivation of the serious drama, and so he became an historian by profession. At that time, it was a fashionable opinion that all sciences and arts were to be founded on metaphysics, and he became also a metaphysician. But in order to pursue these studies, it was not on the north-western frontier of Germany that he could profitably remain.

Saxony was already become the seat of literature as well as philosophy. He removed thither, and during the years 1785–1789, he resided at Leipzic, Dresden, Rudolstadt, and Weimar. At the latter place he gained the favour of Wieland and Herder, during the absence of Goethe in Italy. It was in 1787 that these great poets met. Though mutually repelled at first by obvious dissimilarities of character and genius, they were soon attracted and united by their common love of art and poetry. Under the auspices of his new friend, Schiller obtained, in 1789, the professorship of history at the neighbouring University of Jena, where he cultivated, as a teacher and as a writer, both history and philosophy, which in that university were followed with great celebrity: he himself lectured on history and Æsthetics (the science of taste). In the year 1790 he united himself in a happy marriage with a lady of good family but small fortune, FraÛlein Lengenfeld. But at this early period he was attacked by disease; and the state of his health compelled his removal to Weimar, whence he never departed. Here he lived in the closest intimacy with Goethe. Their union was a memorable incident, even in the life of Goethe. But it was the one great event in the life of Schiller, by which his education was consummated, and he was enabled to execute nearly all the great works on which his reputation rests. A few years were now spent in intense intellectual labour, rendered painful by the attacks of disease. He edited first the Thalia, and then a monthly work of higher pretensions, ‘Die Horen’ [the Hours]. He published for several years an Almanac of the Muses, and with unwearied assiduity devoted himself to the drama as literary manager, translator, editor, and author. The eagerness with which he pursued these various avocations, it has been generally thought, undermined his constitution. For several years before his death he devoted his nights, not days, to poetic composition; and his pale and emaciated countenance, and the lassitude and debility of his frame, announced the ravages of disease which carried him off, May 9, 1805, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He left a widow and several children, who were enabled to occupy an honourable station in society. During his latter years, Schiller enjoyed a pension from the Duke of Weimar, sufficient, in addition to the profits of his works, to enable him to live in comfort; and a patent of nobility was procured for him by the Duke, to replace his lady in her station at the court of Weimar, from which her marriage with a commoner had excluded her. Schiller was in figure tall and thin. The characteristic features of his feeling and melancholy countenance are admirably represented on the colossal bust executed in marble, by Dannecker, which is preserved at Stuttgard.

Schiller’s numerous works may be classed under the heads of criticism, history, lyrical poetry, and the drama. We shall endeavour to characterise them, in the inverse order of their importance. In all of these departments his writings acquired immediate popularity. And in the latter they will enjoy permanent distinction, more from the vigorous style, warm sensibility, and fine moral feeling which are diffused over all his compositions, than from the development of the peculiar genius which any one class especially requires. When Schiller emancipated himself from the thraldom of his youth, the Kantian metaphysics were become popular among students. With characteristic ardour he became a disciple of the new school, and laboured to apply the critical philosophy to poetry and the arts. His first writings were scholastic exercises performed in public. But as the philosophy of his country, like his own mind, was in a state of transition, his metaphysical dissertations on Æsthetical education, on naive and sentimental poetry, &c., deserve notice chiefly as appertaining to the literary history of a memorable philosophical crisis. They did not serve even to lay the foundation of a system of poetics, which was reserved for the Schlegels. These constitute three volumes.

The historical works of Schiller originated in his dramatic studies. These led him to the subjects of his histories; and his mode of treating these subjects as a dramatist, and an historian, is such that we must blend the consideration of his two historical works with two of his most famous tragedies. The first of his elaborate dramas in blank verse was Don Carlos, in connexion with which was written the commencement of a history of the successful insurrection of the Dutch against the Spanish despotism. In his play he has not, like Otway in his forgotten tragedy, and Alfieri in his Filippo, rendered the real or supposed love of the young prince to his step-mother the most important incident. The heroic reformer, Marquis Posa, is the character that most excites the sympathy of the reader. And it is the sort of prophetic prelude to the reformation that engrosses his attention. So in the history, the author addresses himself rhetorically to the patriotism, the love of religious and civil liberty, and other virtuous feelings of his reader. Schiller is no where the critical investigator of doubtful facts, nor is he an authority to decide the merits of a doubtful character. His other great subject was the Thirty Years’ War. This narrative also is a series of eloquent dissertations, splendid descriptions, and pregnant moral reflections, rather than a philosophic development of the chain of events. His Wallenstein, which dramatises a chapter of that history, is the most laboured of his dramas; and it obtained for him the honour of a translation from a man of kindred genius, Coleridge. In the half comic prelude, called The Camp, and the two parts of the tragedy, all the varieties of the military character and of military cabal are unfolded. Besides the hero himself, the subtle intriguer the elder Piccolomini, is finely contrasted with his high-minded, enthusiastic son, the lover of Thekla, the exquisite daughter of the heroic victim.

Besides the four volumes of these histories, there are two others of minor historical treatises. And it may be noticed here, in connexion with this class of his writings, that he began a romance called the Ghost-Seer, the historical foundation of which lay in the tragi-comic absurdities, and mischievous vagaries of the German illuminati and freemasons, a strange compound of superstition and infidelity, with which were blended political fanaticism, fraud, and sentimental philanthropy. This disease was partly cured by, and partly absorbed in the events of the French Revolution.

But it was as a philosophic and lyric poet that Schiller’s peculiar genius developed itself, and in this class of his works chiefly do we find those qualities which characterise him morally and intellectually, and exhibit him in striking contrast to his friend Goethe. As in his philosophical and historical writings, Schiller never wrote under the influence of the mere love of truth, but was impelled by moral feelings, always generous and noble; so it was in his poems. They neither mainly originated in, nor were addressed especially to the imagination. A large portion of them were metaphysical exercises in verse. There were scattered, even among these, the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” but they were not poetical, because they were addressed either to the mere intellect, the faculty of solving philosophical problems, or to the will, under the excitement of passions, which, however exalted in their character, are far remote from the exercise of imagination, and do not originate in the sense of beauty. Even the ballads of Schiller are didactic and moral, and therein strikingly contrasted with those of Goethe. Each poet idealised in his own way; but the ideal of the one was framed according to a law of natural, that of the other, according to a law of moral beauty. Goethe avowed his creed, “faults as well as virtue look well in song.” He therefore, availing himself of a style incomparably graceful, exhibits the passions of humanity in all their natural charm, and so fascinates the sense of natural beauty in the reader, that he is content to disregard what a severe moral sense might require. Schiller’s ballads, on the contrary, originate in, and have no other object than to excite, a passionate sympathy with virtuous and heroic affections and actions. But though there is “a pomp and prodigality of phrase,” there is seldom that magic of style that leaves the most fastidious taste gratified. Among these lyric poems, a considerable portion originated in his political and patriotic, or rather philanthropic feelings. To appreciate these, we must bear in mind that Schiller was brought up in a country, the people of which possessed no political power, nor any civil liberty but under sufferance; and that during the more important period of his life, his country suffered under the aggravated oppression of a foreign yoke. No English reader can form a correct judgment of any German political work of the last age, be it of thought or imagination, who for an instant forgets either of these two facts; and in the study of the works of Goethe and Schiller, it is especially necessary to keep them always before us. It must otherwise appear unaccountable, that since the youth of Schiller had been passed in the suffering incident to oppressed poverty; since he had the consciousness of not occupying that station in society to which his natural superiority over others entitled him; since he had the constitutional ardour of a man of genius, and was, by his position in society, led to feel, as a reformer, not to say agitator, on every polemical question that could arise between the people and the privileged orders; there should, notwithstanding all this, be so little that is stimulating and practical in his writings. But the wonder ceases, when it is borne in mind, that while in Britain the French Revolution was an object of hope or fear, and was held up as party feelings prompted, either as a warning or an example, in Germany it was seldom more than a problem for the exercise of the talents of speculative men: and whatever susceptibility to insurrectional excitements there might be among any class of the people, was repressed, not merely by the utter extinction of all liberty in France, but by all the humiliations and oppressions endured in every part of Germany from an imperious conquering enemy. Hence, while the German people went far beyond the British in the intensity of their hatred towards France, the privileged order of thinkers among them, from their habits of abstract speculation, were able to contemplate the events of the day, as well as the principles set afloat, with an unsympathising coolness unknown either in England or France. Hence, even in Schiller, whose earliest writings betrayed tendencies from which it might be feared that a German Jacobin would be formed, the love of liberty soon subsided from a passion into a taste. It became a quiet, moral sentiment, like the love of religion, of virtue, of country: he never could indeed lay aside his essentially moral and sentimental nature; nor during the period of his country’s abasement, which to the irretrievable loss of the nation he did not survive, could he, like Goethe, devoting himself to the studies of pure art and science, dismiss by an effort from his mind the consideration of the painful incidents of the day. On the contrary, they entirely filled his soul; they formed the background of all his speculations and feelings, in his dramas, histories, disquisitions, and poems. A sentiment which for years pressed on him, and which appropriately terminates the collection of his poems in two volumes, we will venture to render in prose, as most expressive of the sort of philosophic resignation to which he at length brought himself at the close of the century. “Two mighty nations are wrestling for the sole possession of the world. To annihilate freedom in every country, they wield the trident and the thunderbolt. To them every land must pay tribute. The Gaul, like Brennus, throws his iron sword into the scale of justice, and the Briton greedily stretches out his polypus arms on every side, and will shut up the free realm of Amphitrite, as if it were his own mansion.... Into the still and sacred recesses of the heart you must fly from the pressure of life. Freedom is only in the realm of dreams, and the beautiful blooms only in song.”

But it was not as a lyric poet that Schiller exercised the widest influence over his countrymen. It was in the more popular form of the drama, to which perhaps his genius was less adapted, that he sought and acquired a fame that has already reached the utmost limits of European civilization.

His dramatic works fill seven volumes. Not to repeat our remarks on the three juvenile prose tragedies, and on Don Carlos and Wallenstein, we proceed to enumerate the master-pieces which he produced during the last years of his life; but we must, for want of space, pass over unnoticed his less successful attempts at comedy, his translations of Shakspeare’s Macbeth, Racine’s Phaedra, and Gozzi’s Turandot; and his labours on the works of other authors. The result of these, his various studies, was the production of a form of tragedy, which, to be fairly appreciated, must be compared with the French, not the English, drama: for Schiller stands at an immeasurable distance, not merely from Shakspeare, but from the great body of the romantic dramatists of the English and Spanish schools, in whom are to be found either profound development of character, or elaborate skill in the entanglement and management of incident. Schiller has however, on the other hand, enhanced the dignity, and poetically enriched that form of tragedy which the French gratify their vanity by claiming as peculiarly their own, and which they do not hesitate to proclaim an improvement on the Greek! This class is essentially rhetorical. The French public seem to estimate the master-pieces of their favourite tragic poets, chiefly by the number of fine quotable passages they supply; while their critics estimate their worth by their conformity with certain purely artificial rules. One of them says, “Though the English stage has not one perfect tragedy [we had thought Cato to be perfect in their eyes], yet it has many fine scenes: we cannot say so much for the German.” In this the critic is wrong on his own principle. The great works of Schiller contain, relatively, as many splendid declamatory passages as are to be met with in the tragedies of Corneille, Racine, or Voltaire: and he has in the structure of his pieces amply made up for his disregard of the dramatic unities, by the infusion of higher beauties, both of sentiment and character, than the French school can boast of. In the enumeration of his later tragedies, we can merely point out the subjects to which his taste and opinions naturally led him.

In 1800 he attained the summit of his dramatic reputation by Maria Stuart. This tragedy exhibits, not the early and guilty love, but the late sufferings and death of the Queen of Scots. The author, as becomes the poet, takes no part in the controversies which her ambiguous character has produced. With an allowable departure from historic truth, he brings together the rival queens, and succeeds in rendering Mary an object of admiration and pity, and Elizabeth, not of disgust. He finely opposes the heroic enthusiasm of the youthful Mortimer to the flagitious wiles of the practised courtier Leicester, and avails himself of the most solemn rite of the Roman Catholic church to enhance the picturesque effect, and clothe poetically the religious feeling that adorns and sanctifies the character of the heroine.

In 1801 he produced the most poetical of his historic dramas, the Jungfrau von Orleans. It was reserved for a German to render due honour to the most romantic of French heroines, who was degraded, perhaps, by Shakspeare. The unworthy caricature which passes under his name at least, only shows the virulence of national prejudices. Joan of Arc has been not only shut out from the temple of Fame erected in her own country, but her name has been polluted by the impurities so vilely cast on it by Voltaire: while French literature has only its infamous Pucelle, the German stage has its Virgin of Orleans. In this romantic play, Schiller has poured a richer stream of poetry over the camp and military glory than in his Wallenstein; and has exquisitely contrasted with the sacred virago, the frail, tender, most lovely, and admirable Agnes Sorel.

In 1803 appeared the Braut von Messina, a lyrical play, in which the author has introduced not only a chorus, but other prominent ingredients of the Grecian tragedy, oracles, dreams, an overwhelming fate, and a Nemesis, whose vengeance falls alike on the evil and good; by means of which pity and terror are excited. The odes are splendid, but the dramatic effect on the stage is weak.

In 1804, in the year preceding his death, Schiller produced the most picturesque of his dramas, Wilhelm Tell. The name sufficiently announces the plot, in which well-known incidents are inartificially exhibited. The characters display all the varieties of moral beauty which harmonize with the scene, and those virtues which the incidents are likely to call forth. Throughout there is an exhilarating predominance of good over evil, which forms a pleasing contrast to the fierce passions and barbarous themes which attracted the author in his youth. It was the fit termination of his short career, for it impresses the spectator and reader with the feeling that the poet ended his labours a happier and better man than he began. His untimely death while his last work was in the enjoyment of its fresh popularity, spread a universal sorrow over Germany, which had never yet beheld so powerful an intellect devoted to interests of such high morality, and in such perfect harmony, with the wants and wishes of his age and country.

For a further account, we refer to the life by Thomas Carlyle—Leben von DÖring; and the brief memoir by KÖrner, prefixed to the edition in eighteen volumes, Vienna and Stuttgard 1819. Of English translations we may enumerate, besides two of Wallenstein, The Maid of Orleans, printed, but not yet published, by Mr. Drinkwater; Maria Stuart, by Mr. Mellish; and also Don Carlos, and the three prose tragedies by we know not whom. Translations have also been published of the Ghost Seer, and the two historical works; and also of a number of the poems in periodical works, besides several of the ballads, and the Song of the Bell, with illustrations by Retsch.