Anchored in Thuringia

Ich musz ein GeschÖpf um mich haben, das mir gehÖrt. Letter of 1788.

The Weimar of Schiller's first acquaintance—arrived there July 21, 1787—consisted of a petty provincial court plus an unsightly village. The inhabitants numbered about six thousand. Of the space built over about one-third was occupied by the buildings of the court, much of the outlying modern Weimar being then under water. The streets were narrow, muddy lanes, the houses plain and poor. And yet the sluggish little place, so unprepossessing in all material ways, was already beginning to assert that claim to glory which has since been conceded to it by all the world. Princely patronage of art and letters was by no means unknown elsewhere in Germany, but it was usually a matter of gracious condescension on the one side and grateful adulation on the other. Very different in Weimar, where Goethe was not only a member of the Council, but the duke's most intimate friend and trusted adviser. In his heart Karl August cared less for aesthetic matters than is often supposed, but his mother, the Dowager Duchess Amalie, patronized art for the real love of it. Poetry and music were as the breath of life to her, and her taste in poetry had been trained by the greatest living master. Aside from Goethe, two other distinguished writers had found a home in Weimar. The kindly but changeable Wieland, not really one of the dii majores, but so regarded at the time, had lived there since 1772; Herder, much more nobly endowed, but less amiable and less popular, since 1776.

At the time of Schiller's advent Goethe was still in Italy, whither he had gone the previous autumn to find relief from the miseries of duodecimo statesmanship. Karl August and the reigning Duchess Luise were also absent, but several minor notables of the court circle had remained 'in town', and the dowager duchess was giving aesthetic teas as usual in her easily accessible 'castle' at Tiefurt. Wieland and Herder were likewise at home. On his arrival Schiller was taken charge of by the Baroness von Kalb, who was awaiting her soul's affinity with feverish eagerness. Her excitement at seeing him again amounted to a 'paroxysm' which made her ill for a week. Then she grew better and her emotions gradually found the level of a friendliness too passionate to be called Platonic, but not sinful in the lower sense. As for Schiller, he devotedly let himself be loved and introduced to Weimar society, the pair making no concealment of their liking for each other. At first he felt some compunctions on account of the absent husband, who might be annoyed by gossip. It pleased him to observe, therefore, that in Weimar such a friendship was taken as a matter of course and treated with delicacy.[73] 'Charlotte' he wrote to KÖrner, 'is a grand, exceptional, womanly soul, a real study for me and worthy to occupy a greater mind than mine. With each forward step in our intercourse I discover in her new manifestations that surprise and delight me like beautiful spots in a broad landscape.'

For several months he played this unwholesome role of cicisbeo to Charlotte von Kalb. Then another and very different Charlotte crossed his path and quickly taught him the better way.

The story of Schiller's gradual adjustment to the Weimar milieu is told very fully in his frequent letters to KÖrner. He called upon Herder and Wieland, and was received with 'amazing politeness' by the one, with loquacious cordiality by the other. Herder knew nothing of his writings and regaled him with idolatrous talk about Goethe. Wieland knew all about him except that he had not yet seen 'Don Carlos'; criticised his early plays frankly as lacking in correctness and artistic finish, but expressed the utmost confidence in him nevertheless. He was received at Tiefurt, but did not like the dowager duchess: her mind, he reported, was very narrow; nothing interested her but the sensuous. A few days later he heard that 'Don Carlos' had been read to a select assembly at Tiefurt and had not made a good impression; there had been caustic criticism of the piece, particularly the last two acts, and Wieland, who was present, had not stood up for it. This led to a coolness toward Wieland. By the end of three weeks Schiller had despaired of Weimar and was miserable. He thought of leaving the place in disgust.

In August he spent a week at Jena as the guest of Professor Reinhold, who was about to begin lecturing upon Kant and was predicting that after a century the KÖnigsberg philosopher would have a reputation like that of Jesus Christ. Reinhold's enthusiasm led Schiller to read some of Kant's shorter essays, among which a paper upon universal history gave him 'extraordinary satisfaction'. From Reinhold came also the assurance that it would be easy to secure a Jena professorship. The idea did not at once take hold of him in the sense of becoming a definite purpose, but it tallied with his inclination. His experience with 'Don Carlos' had left him in doubt whether the drama was after all his true vocation, and he had already begun to work fitfully upon a history of the Dutch Rebellion.

So he decided to remain a little longer in Weimar and devote himself to historical writing; and, this resolution formed, life at once began to open more pleasantly before him. He saw that he had made the mistake of taking the Weimar magnates too seriously; of imagining that they were all sitting in judgment upon him, and that it was of the greatest importance to win their favor. 'I begin to find life here quite tolerable,' he wrote early in September, 'and the secret of it—you will wonder that it did not occur to me before—is not to bother my head about anybody.' And indeed he had no reason to be disgruntled. Herder was pleased with 'Don Carlos' and came out in its favor before the aesthetic tribunal of Tiefurt. Wieland noticed it favorably in the Merkur, spoke flatteringly of it in conversation and declared himself now convinced that Schiller's forte was the drama. Henceforth the two men were fast friends and presently Schiller was toying with the thought of marrying Wieland's favorite daughter. 'I do not know the girl at all', he wrote, 'but I would ask for her to-day if I thought I deserved her.'[74] His scruple was that he was too much of a cosmopolitan to be permanently contented with 'these people'. A simple-minded, innocent girl of domestic proclivities would not be happy with him.

The autumn passed in quiet work devoted mainly to his 'Defection of the Netherlands'. The Duke of Weimar came home for a few days towards the ist of October, but immediately went away again to Holland. Schiller did not even see him. Evidently there was nothing to be hoped for immediately in that quarter; he would have to rely upon himself. But he was now in demand. The Merkur was eager for contributions from his pen, and so was the Litteratur-Zeitung, whose extensive review factory had been shown him during his sojourn in Jena. Then there was the comatose Thalia, which he determined to revive after New Year's.

In November he spent a few days at Meiningen, where his sister Christophine was now living as the wife of Reinwald. He saw Frau von Wolzogen and Lotte (who was about to be married), but Bauerbach had lost its charm. 'The old magic,' he wrote to Korner, 'had been blown away. I felt nothing. None of all the places that formerly made my solitude interesting had anything to say to me.' On his return fate was lurking for him at Rudolstadt, where his friend, Wilhelm von Wolzogen, introduced him to Frau von Lengefeld and her two daughters, 'Both creatures ', Schiller wrote, 'are attractive, without being beautiful and please me much. You find here considerable acquaintance with recent literature, also refinement, feeling and intelligence. They play the piano well, which gave me a delightful evening.' The elder daughter, Karoline, was married unhappily to a Herr von Beulwitz, from whom she afterwards separated to marry Wilhelm von Wolzogen. She was a woman of much literary talent, which found employment later in a novel, 'Agnes von Lilien', and in her excellent memoir of Schiller. The other daughter was unmarried and bore the auspicious name of Charlotte.

Lotte von Lengefeld, whose memory Is cherished with idealizing tenderness by the Germans, was now twenty-one years old,—a demure maiden whose eyes spake more than her tongue. She had long since won the heart of the Baroness von Stein, who had introduced her at the Weimar court and held out to her the hope of becoming a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess Luise. Goethe was fond of her and did not omit to send her affectionate greetings from distant Italy. Some time before, she had spent a year with her mother and sister in Switzerland for the purpose of improving her French; and on the way home, in the summer of 1784, the party had caught a glimpse of Schiller in Mannheim. Now the sisters were living in a sort of idyllic solitude at Rudolstadt, cut off from the great world, absorbed in their books, their music, and the memories of that happy year in Switzerland. Karoline von Wolzogen writes, in speaking of this occasion:

My sister was seemingly in every respect a desirable match for Schiller. She had a very winsome form and face. An expression of purest goodness of heart enlivened her features, and her eyes flashed only truth and innocence. Thoughtful and susceptible to the good and the beautiful in life and in art, her whole nature was a beautiful harmony. Of even temper, but faithful and tenacious in her affections, she seemed created to enjoy the purest happiness.

Making all needful allowance for the partiality of a sister, one cannot wonder that the visitor went on his way with the feeling that Rudolstadt might be a good place in which to spend the summer.

The condition of his mind was certainly such as to facilitate the designs of Providence. In January, 1788, he wrote to Korner as follows:

I am leading a miserable life, miserable through the condition of my inner being. I must have a creature about me who belongs to me; whom I can and must make happy; in whose existence my own can grow fresh again. You do not know how desolate my soul is, how dark my mind; and all not because of my external fortune,—for I am really very well off so far as that is concerned,—but because of the inward wearing out of my feelings…. I need a medium through which I can enjoy the other blessings. Friendship, taste, truth and beauty will produce a greater effect upon me when a continual succession of sweet, beneficent, domestic feelings attune me to joy and warm up my torpid being.

In mid-winter Lotte von Lengefeld came to Weimar for the social season and Schiller saw her occasionally with steadily increasing interest. Their famous correspondence, beginning in February, 1788, is at first very reserved, very formal and decorous, but soon begins to bewray the beating of the heart. 'You will go, dearest FrÄulein', writes Schiller on the 5th of April, as Lotte was about to return to Rudolstadt, 'and I feel that you take away with you the best part of my present joys.' A month later she had found him lodgings in the neighboring village of Volkstedt, and then came a delightful summer idyl, which prolonged itself until the middle of November,—an idyl not of love-making, for Schiller could not yet pluck up the courage for that, but of spiritual comradeship. To quote Karoline again:

A new life began for Schiller in our house. He had long been denied the delight of a free, friendly intercourse, and he always found us susceptible to the thoughts that filled his soul. He wished to influence us, to teach us what might serve our turn of poetry, art, and philosophy, and this effort gave to himself a gentle harmonious disposition…. When we saw him coming to our house in the shimmer of the sunset, a bright ideal life disclosed itself to our inner sense. Lofty seriousness and the light gracious winsomeness of a pure and open soul were always present in Schiller's conversation; in listening to him one walked as among the changeless stars of heaven and the flowers of the earth…. Schiller became calmer, clearer; his appearance and his character more winsome, his mind more averse to those fantastic views of life which he had hitherto not been able to banish. A new hope and joy dawned in the heart of my sister, and I returned, in the happiness of a new inspiring friendship, to a true enjoyment of life. Our whole social circle shared in the pleasure of this kindly magic.

The discourse of these amiable truth-seekers turned partly at least upon the Greeks. Up to this time Schiller had remained virtually ignorant of the Greek poets, thus missing the best of all sanative influences. He had absorbed indirectly something of the Hellenism that had been diffused through the air by Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder and Goethe, but his knowledge of the Greek language was very rudimentary, and good translations had not been easily procurable. Thus the glory that was Greece now came to him with the charm of a new discovery. The poem, 'The Gods of Greece,' contributed to the Merkur in March, 1788, marks the beginning of his Hellenizing. A little later Homer fascinated him. A letter written in August runs thus:

I now read almost nothing but Homer. I have got Voss' translation of the Odyssey, which is in truth excellent, aside from the hexameters, which I cannot endure…. For the next two years I have made up my mind to read no more modern authors…. Not one of them benefits me. They all lead me away from myself, and the ancients now give me true enjoyment. At the same time I need them most urgently to purify my own taste, which through subtlety, artificiality and smartness was beginning to depart from true simplicity. You will find that familiar intercourse with the ancients will benefit me exceedingly, perhaps give me classicity. I shall first study them in good translations and then, when I almost know them by heart, read the Greek originals. In this way I expect to play at the study of the Greek language.

On the 7th of September, 1788, an event occurred: Goethe, who had now returned from Italy, came to visit the Lengefelds, and Schiller was introduced to him. For a year he had heard Goethe idolized on every hand and felt his spirit brooding over the Weimar atmosphere. What he heard did not please him. The local Goethe-cult, so he wrote to KÖrner, was characterized by a proud, philosophic contempt of all speculation and investigation. This 'child-like simplicity of mind', this 'resigned surrender to the five senses', seemed to him a sort of affectation. Besides this he was irritated by Goethe's prosperity and lordly independence. At the same time he could not help admiring him as a poet. The new 'Iphigenie' gave him a 'happy day', though his pleasure was somewhat marred by the depressing thought that he himself would never be able to produce anything like it. And so he waited with eager expectation to see what a personal acquaintance would bring forth. It brought forth pleasure mixed with dubiety. After that first interview with the great man he wrote to Korner thus:

On the whole, my idea of him, which was in truth very great, has not suffered from this personal acquaintance; but I doubt whether we shall ever come very close to each other. Much that is still interesting to me has had its day with him. He is so far in advance of me,—not so much in years but in self-development and experience of life,—that we shall never come together. And then his whole being is differently organized from mine. His world is not mine; our ways of looking at things seem essentially different. Nevertheless one cannot draw a sure conclusion from such a meeting. Time will tell.

Upon Goethe the meeting made no impression at all. For him Schiller was the author of 'The Robbers', a work whose popularity annoyed him. He did not know, and he took no pains to find out, that Schiller was no longer in sympathy with the ideas that had found expression in the detested play. So he held himself aloof and six years passed ere the two men came together in a friendly intimacy. At the same time there was nothing like ill-will on Goethe's part. He recognized Schiller's talent, praised 'The Gods of Greece' and was half pleased with the review of 'Egmont', which might well have nettled a less Olympian temper. In the fall of 1788 'The Defection of the Netherlands' was published and favorably received. About the same time a vacancy occurred in the Jena faculty, and Schiller's friends proposed him for the position. Goethe took the matter up with the various governments concerned and met with no opposition. And so it came about, one day in December, that Schiller, who had meanwhile taken to translating Euripides and was planning a whole Greek theater in German, was interrupted by an official notice that he had been appointed professor of history at Jena and would be expected to enter upon his duties in the spring. It was only an 'extraordinary' professorship without salary, but its possibilities as a stepping-stone were alluring. He decided to accept.

Now came a short season of helpless and comical dismay. 'I would take a thrashing', he wrote to KÖrner, 'if I could have you here for four-and-twenty hours. Goethe quotes his docendo discitur, but these gentlemen do not seem to know how small my learning is.' To Lotte he declared that he should feel ridiculous in the new situation. 'Many a student will perhaps know more history than the professor. Nevertheless I think like Sancho Panza with respect to his governorship: To whom God gives an office, to him he gives understanding; and when I have my island I shall rule it like a nabob.' It was not pleasant to drop his fascinating studies of the Greek poets and bury himself in learned sawdust, but the thing was not to be helped. So the winter and spring were devoted mainly to historical reading. At the same time, however, 'The Ghostseer' was carried along in the now resuscitated Thalia, and the long poem, 'The Artists', was slowly and with infinite revision got ready for publication in the Merkur.

During this period he saw little or nothing of Goethe and steadily nursed a splenetic determination not to like the man. Passages in his letters are almost comical in their perversity of misjudgment. He was exasperated by Goethe's reticence, composure and self-sufficiency,—qualities which seemed to him to spring out of calculating egotism. Goethe, so the arraignment ran, was a man who went on his way serenely dispensing favors, winning love and admiration and putting people under obligation, but always like a god,—without ever giving his intimate self or surrendering his own freedom. For his part, he, Schiller, did not wish to live near such a man, much as he admired his intellect and valued his judgment. This attitude of his was a great trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic character. If he is really such a very lovable being, I shall find it out in the next world, when we shall all be angels.' In fine he was not yet ripe for an understanding of the Weimar sovereign. He did not see that Goethe's method was after all a giving of himself, and that the self thus given was not the worse but the better for having outgrown the effusive raptures of sentimentalism.

In May the lectures at Jena began with great Éclat. On the first day students to the number of five or six hundred flocked to hear the author of 'The Robbers' expound the difference between the philosophic scholar and the bread-and-butter professor. It was an inspiring discourse, full of high idealism and well fitted to inspire the souls of ingenuous youth, even though they might not quite understand it. The students were enthusiastic and gave the new professor the unusual compliment of a serenade. Having decided to begin with a course of free public lectures upon universal history, he took his duties very seriously, and even after curiosity had abated he continued, during the first term, to address a large audience. He had hoped only for prestige, and the game was quickly won. He was the most popular professor in Jena. All this time, however, his heart was in Rudolstadt,—with the two sisters to whom, for a year and a half, he had been writing letters of impartial Platonic devotion. Late in July he received a hint from Karoline to the effect that her sister was very much in love with him and that an understanding might be desirable. Then at last the timorous, cunctatory worshiper of femininity in the abstract declared himself and prayed to know if the good news could be true. Lotte assured him that it was; if she could make him happy she was willing to devote herself to the enterprise during the remainder of her days.

Now the millennium began. Our celestial dreamer, who had thus been gently pushed over the threshold by a friendly hand, found himself in a human paradise much more grateful to the soul than the court of Venus Urania. He was very, very happy. The black phantoms that had beset his pathway hitherto,—the depressing sense of loneliness, of having missed the great prize, of being de trop at the banquet of life, the occasional promptings of pessimism and misanthropy, the baleful pull of illicit passion, the selfish hugging of an illusory freedom,—all these took their flight to return no more. He had found what he needed—salvation from self through a woman's love. But he did not behave like other sons of Adam. He continued to address his love-letters to both sisters impartially, as if the possession of Lotte were after all to be only a subordinate incident in the preservation of a triangular spiritual friendship. Sometimes it is 'my dearest, dearest Karoline', again 'my dearest, dearest Lotte', most frequently 'my dearest dears'.

At first the trio agreed to keep their momentous secret from chÈre mÈre. Schiller was poor and his prospects all uncertain. When he began, in the fall of 1789, to give lectures that were to be paid for, he found that his income from students' fees would be insignificant. Lotte had but a slender portion, and then there was that dreadful von in her name. To meet this difficulty Schiller procured the title of 'Hofrat' from the Duke of Meiningen. Then he laid the case before Karl August of Weimar, who was very sympathetic but also very poor. The best he could do was to promise shamefacedly a pittance of two hundred thalers by way of professorial salary. This, with love, was enough. In one of the noblest letters he ever wrote Schiller now addressed himself to chÈre mÈre who made no objections; and on the 22nd of February, 1790, the impecunious Hofrat Professor Schiller and his courageous, aristocratic sweetheart were married.

The work of Schiller in the historical field will be considered by itself in the next chapter. Before passing on to that subject, however, let us glance at the more important of the minor writings produced during the period just traversed.

In 'The Gods of Greece' he strikes with almost clangorous emphasis the note of pagan aestheticism. The poem sees the world under the aspect of the Beautiful and regards that as its most important aspect. The Greek religion, we hear, peopled earth and sky and sea with lovely forms that gave warmth and color to life and fed the imagination with sensuous poetry. Nature appeared living, spiritual. Rock and stream and tree had each its tale to tell, its tale of passionate personal history. The gods were near, intelligible, sympathetic; and divine gifts were more precious for being shared by the giver. And as the gods were more human, so man was more divine. In comparison our modern monotheism is cold, abstract, mechanical. Instead of a radiant Apollo, we have the law of gravitation. We have lost the many fair gods of old to enrich One who is remote, unfathomable, self-sufficient.

Where art thou, beauteous world of story?
Fair morning of a vanished day!
Alas! the magic of thine ancient glory
Lives only in the poet's lay.[75]

It was inevitable that such a frank eulogy of the old gods at the expense of the Christian Demiurgus should give offense. Count Leopold von Stolberg put himself at the head of a vociferous opposition by denouncing the poem in a Leipzig journal as blasphemous, and lamenting that the author of the noble 'Song to Joy' should have fallen so low. The modern reader finds it easy to acquit him on the religious arraignment, since he did not profess to present the claims of monotheism completely. We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks, Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the 'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks (gods and men) were not remarkably strong on the side of gentleness, holiness and fidelity.

In respect of poetic merit Schiller certainly had the right to his opinion that 'The Gods of Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or melody of phrasing,—Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of the ear,—but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas have a stately impressive swing. Goethe was pleased with the poem, but thought it too long,—a well-founded criticism, since many of the stanzas merely brought fresh illustrations of the same thought. In his revision Schiller reduced the twenty-five stanzas of the original version to sixteen, and at the same time omitted or toned down the lines that had given offense. In its revised form it is in every way a better poem.

In 'The Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the 'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as the 'ripest son of time, free through reason, strong through laws, great through gentleness'. Then the sublime creature is admonished not to forget the goddess who made him what he is:

In industry the bee may scorn thy merits,
In cleverness a worm thy teacher be;
Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits,
But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]

After this we hear that man entered the land of knowledge through the morning gate of the beautiful; it was his inchoate art-sense that developed his understanding. The heavenly goddess Urania, whom we know here as Beauty and shall one day known as Truth, accompanied him into the exile of mortality and became his loving nurse, teaching him to live by her law, free from wild passion and from the bondage of duty. To aid her in this work she chose a select body of priests, the artists, and taught them to imitate the fair forms of nature. In the contemplation of their work savage man was lifted to the heights of spiritual joy and forgot his gross appetites. He became acquainted with ideals and made gods and heroes for himself. Then he began to weigh and compare these ideals and thus arose philosophy and science, which aim in their slow and halting way to explain the full import of the primeval revelation. All truth was given in symbols at the beginning, and the artists still remain the conservators and prophets of the highest spiritual things.

In case of such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content, which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that have nothing to do with the goddess Urania, we have learned something of primitive man, and what we have learned is very much out of tune with Schiller's dream. He assigns to the aesthetic thrill a larger rÔle than it has actually played in human history. This, however, is unimportant. What is more important is that by investing his subject with a nimbus of poetic mysticism he became one of the founders of the modern Religion of Art. For the theological revelation of truth he substitutes a secular revelation of beauty, which, however, was regarded by him as containing the germs of all truth and virtue. We see him moving toward a theory that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that Beauty is the one. To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial, have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very different thing from the later decorative aestheticism.

As poetry 'The Artists' may be said to come under the head of metrical rhetoric. It quite lacks the simplicity and sensuousness of Milton's canon, and as for passion, it is florid rather than passionate. It is however strong in Schiller's strength,—in its vastness of outlook, its splendid sweep of thought, its magnificent phrase-making. At first indeed the reader is disturbed and perplexed by the argument. He is lifted up into the blue mists, far above the plane of the verifiable, and borne along hither and thither by successive gusts of the poetic afflatus. Presently he is lost; there is no north and no south. By dint of review and cogitation he gets his bearings (if he is lucky), but only to lose them again as he is wafted on through the empyrean. Not until he has read the poem many times, knows where he is going and is no longer pestered by the necessity of thinking, can he hope to enjoy the voyage.

The beginning of 'The Ghostseer,' published while Schiller was still in Dresden, was spoken of in Chapter VIII. His general idea, it would seem, was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue devised by mysterious agents of the Romish Church for the purpose of winning over a Protestant German prince. But the details had not been very fully excogitated, and his foremost thought, after all, was simply to popularize the Thalia, which was largely caviare to the general. The experiment proved moderately successful. Curiosity was excited and inquiries began to be made. When, therefore, he was ready to resume the publication of the Thalia, in the spring of 1788, he had reason to regard 'The Ghostseer' as his most valuable asset. He set about continuing the story, feeling that it was 'miserable daubing' and a 'sinful waste of time'.[77] In this temper he wrote and published a second installment, which carried the story through what was subsequently known as the first book. In this installment the hoax of the ghost scene is cleared up, but the Armenian remains a mystery. The Prince maintains a sensible, rationalistic attitude, asks many questions, puts this and that together and finally concludes that Armenian and Sicilian are two charlatans working In collusion.

Up to this point 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation, Schiller had got the idea—and it interested him for personal reasons—of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he thought would give weight and distinction to the book. So the Prince's philosophic demoralization is described at tedious length and the story drops out of sight for a long time. Then it is taken up again and the Prince falls in love with a beautiful Greek rÉligieuse. The portrayal of this woman aroused another flicker of interest on Schiller's part, though she too was finally to be unmasked as one of the conspirators. Then he seems to have tired of 'The Ghostseer' altogether; at any rate he choked it off suddenly with a 'Farewell', in which nothing is concluded save that the Prince goes over to the Catholic Church.

From this description it is evident that Schiller's one attempt at novel-writing is of no great account as a contribution to artistic fiction. It is a torso consisting of two heterogeneous parts. It is not a study of life based upon the observation of life, but a tale of marvelous happenings which are recounted for the purpose of showing their subtle reaction upon the plastic mind of the Prince. The hero is taken over a route that was to become very familiar,—the route from a narrow and gloomy type of Protestantism through liberalism, rationalism, skepticism, Pyrrhonism, and mental exhaustion to the repose of the Catholic Church. Of course the story was not to end there, but what the further developments were to have been one can only guess. Schiller himself did not think it worth while to enlighten the public, even after his 'Ghostseer' began to call out imitations and continuations.

In the 'Letters upon Don Carlos', published in 1788, in Wieland's Merkur, Schiller undertook to defend himself against his critics and to correct some misapprehensions. In temper and style they are admirable, even when they do not convince. They begin by admitting and accounting for that seeming incongruity between the first three and the last two acts, which has always been the gravamen of critical objection to 'Don Carlos'. After this they attempt to show that such a character as Posa might very well have existed in the sixteenth century at the Spanish court. Then we are told that it was not the author's purpose to depict Carlos and Posa as a pair of ideal friends. For Carlos, indeed, friendship is everything, but not for Posa. In him the passion for friendship is everywhere subordinated to the passion for humanity. He is not to be blamed, therefore, for belying the character of a true friend, since that is not his dominant and essential character. He regards Carlos merely as an indispensable tool for his political designs. In his interview with the king he is carried away by a momentary enthusiasm,—what he says there is of no importance, his hopes being really fixed upon Don Carlos. At the beginning of the fourth act he sees not his personal friend, but the instrument of his political plans, in awful danger. He resolves to save him for Flanders and for humanity by sacrificing himself. This is no more unnatural or inconceivable than the self-sacrifice of Regulus. But Posa wishes to save his friend like a god and not like a common level-headed Philistine. He has the soul of a Plutarchian hero, and where two ways present themselves, the most natural is for him the most heroic. Hence his desperate procedure and its disastrous consequences.

To all of which one can give but a qualified assent, the difficulty being that the play is not so constructed as to bring out its author's intention. The character of Posa in Act IV is a surprise, and a disagreeable surprise. His conduct may harmonize with a theory of antique heroism, but it does not grow naturally out of what precedes. There is no exigency that calls for his heroic foolhardiness. The reader or the spectator can hardly be supposed to know that the famous tenth scene in the third act, the longest and most carefully elaborated in the whole play, does not count. One naturally supposes that it does count, and the only way it can count is to create a hopeful situation of which Posa is absolute master. When, therefore, he throws away his advantage and deliberately plunges his friend into a needless danger, in order to make an opportunity for rescuing him at the cost of his own life, one inevitably associates him mentally not with antique heroes but with modern lunatics.

A man capable of conceiving such a hero as Posa, and defending the conception as true to life, could hardly be expected to adjust his mind easily to such a work as Goethe's 'Egmont'. In his review of the play, published in 1788, Schiller found, indeed, much to praise; but his general praise was so mixed up with general fault-finding as to produce upon the Rudolstadt people the impression of a naughty lÈse-majestÉ. He divined correctly enough that 'Egmont' was to be regarded as a drama of character, rather than of plot or of passion. But Egmont's character seemed to him painfully lacking in 'greatness'. Egmont, so the criticism runs, really does nothing extraordinary. He is idolized by the people, but the deeds upon which his fame rests have all been done before the curtain rises. In the play he appears as a light-hearted cavalier who affronts us by persistently refusing to take serious things seriously. In particular the review objected to Goethe's perversion of history in representing Egmont not as a married man with a large family of children but as a bachelor with a bourgeois sweetheart. Not that Schiller regarded the departure from history as reprehensible in itself. The dramatist has a right to pervert facts for the purpose of exciting sympathy for his hero; but in this case, Schiller argued, the effect is to degrade the character of Egmont and thus to alienate sympathy. Finally the review took exception to Egmont's vision of Freedom In the form of ClÄrchen; this, Schiller thought, was a deplorable plunge into opera at the end of a serious drama.

To adjudicate the issue thus sharply drawn between the two great German poets would require some preliminary attention to their fundamental difference of artistic method,—a subject that will concern us in a subsequent chapter. Here suffice it to remark that Schiller was not entirely in the wrong. While Goethe was incomparably the more subtle psychologist, Schiller had the better eye, or rather he cared more, for that which is dramatically effective, average human nature being such, as it is. His dramatic instinct told him that Egmont was not a very powerful stage-play. Its subtle psychology did not impress him so much as its lack of 'greatness'. And then he had his pique against Goethe and wished to show the Weimarians that he at least could perceive the spots on the sun. Goethe's serene comment upon reading the critique was to the effect that the reviewer had analyzed the moral part of the play very well indeed, but in dealing with the poetic aspect of it he had left something to be done by others.[78]

The dramatic fragment, 'The Misanthrope Reconciled', which Schiller fished up out of his drawer in 1790 and used, faute de mieux, to fill space in the eleventh number of the Thalia, was begun, as we have seen, in Dresden. Possibly the theme may have been suggested at Mannheim by the problem of staging Shakspere's 'Timon'. At any rate the theme was congenial for a man who had 'embraced the world in glowing passion and found in his arms a lump of ice'. At Weimar he returned to it several times, puzzled over the general plan, added a little here and there, but finally gave it up as a bad subject for dramatic treatment. The published fragment is certainly of no great account. It introduces a misanthrope, Hutten by name, who, as feudal lord, treats his dependents handsomely out of sheer contempt for them. When they come to thank him on his birthday, he spurns their gratitude and scolds them, having made up his mind never to be duped again by any show of human emotion. He has brought up his beautiful and dutiful daughter to be an angel of mercy and a paragon of perfection, but he insists that she too shall be a misanthrope like himself. He makes her swear that she will never marry, but she shrewdly tacks on the proviso, 'except with papa's consent'. The exposition shows her duly in love with a cheerful and estimable youth named Rosenberg; and the problem is: How will Rosenberg manage the misanthrope? That he was to win somehow is evident from the title.

In his translations from Euripides, which also belong to the period under consideration, Schiller aimed partly at the improvement of his own taste. He hoped to familiarize himself with the spirit of the Greeks and to acquire something of their manner. He thought that they might teach him simplicity both in expression and in the construction of dramatic plots; and he felt that his style was in need of their chastening influence. Of 'The Phoenician Women' he translated about one-third, but omitted the choruses entirely; of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis' he translated nearly the whole text, rendering the choruses very freely in rimed lines of uneven length and varying cadence. His work reads smoothly and gives the general effect of Euripides, but cannot count as good translation. It was not only that his Greek scholarship was deficient, but he lacked patience,—an indispensable virtue for the translator. His real original was not the Greek text at all, but the Latin version of Joshua Barnes; and when this appeared to him jejune and unpoetic he sometimes created an original of his own.

The other minor writings of the years 1788 and 1789 may be passed over as of little significance. On the poetic side there were three or four occasional poems, and also the rimed epistle called 'The Celebrated Wife', in which the unfortunate husband of a literary lady pours out the tale of his domestic woes. In prose there were several perfunctory reviews contributed to the Litteratur-Zeitung, and also an anecdote—exhumed from an old chronicle and retold for the Merkur—relating to a breakfast given to the Duke of Alva by the Countess of Schwarzburg in the year 1547. To these may be added, finally, the short story entitled 'Play of Fate,' also published in the Merkur, which describes, under a thin disguise of fictitious names, the rise and fall and rehabilitation of Karl Eugen's former minister, P.H. Rieger.[79]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: Letter of July 28, 1787, to KÖrner.]

[Footnote 74: Letter of Nov. 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 75: In the original, lines 145-8, of the earlier version:

SchÖne Welt, wo bist du?—Kehre wieder,
Holdes BlÜltenalter der Natur!
Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder
Lebt noch deine goldne Spur.]

[Footnote 76: In the original:

Im Fleisz kann dich die Biene meistern,
In der Geschicklichkeit ein Wurm dein Lehrer sein,
Dein Wissen teilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern,
Die Kunst, O Mensch, hast du allein.]

[Footnote 77: Letter of March 17, to KÖrner.]

[Footnote 78: Letter of Oct. 1, 1788, Goethe to Karl August.]

[Footnote 79: See above, page 135.]