  Dark Days Within and Without 1791-1794 Zu einer Zeit, wo das Leben anfing, mir seinen ganzen Wert zu zeigen, wo ich nahe dabei war, zwischen Vernunft und Phantasie in mir ein zartes und ewiges Band zu knÜpfen,… nahte sich mir der Tod.—Letter of 1791. The year 1790 was the happiest of Schiller's life. For a little while, at last, fate became supremely kind to him. The reality of wedlock more than fulfilled his dreams, and it seemed as if all his vague malheur d'Être poÈte were about to be buried in the deep bosom of connubial beatitude. 'We lead the blessedest life together', he wrote to Christophine Reinwald in May, 'and I no longer know my former self.' And a month later to Wilhelm von Wolzogen: 'My Lotte grows dearer to me every day; I can say that I am just beginning to prize my life, since domestic happiness beautifies it for me.' His income, indeed, was pitifully small, but his courage was great, his fame well grounded, and there were prospects here and there. From the first he had regarded the Jena professorship only as a makeshift. To bring variety into his academic routine he began, in the summer term of 1790, to lecture upon the theory of tragedy, developing the subject from his own brain and paying little attention to the authorities. In the autumn these lectures were resumed, and soon the aesthetic philosopher began to prevail over the historian. And now came his great calamity. In reading the later writings of Schiller, whether philosophical or poetical, it is difficult to imagine them the work of an invalid, produced in the intervals of physical suffering such as would utterly have broken the courage of a less resolute man. But so it was. The early winter of 1791 brought with it a disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him away prematurely at the age of forty-five. Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt. There were Karoline von DacherÖden and her lover, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was destined to become Schiller's intimate friend and also his faithful comrade in the field of aesthetic philosophizing. Then there was the influential Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a brother of the Mannheim intendant. This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness, and he enjoyed the rÔle of Maecenas. In Schiller and Lotte he took a deep interest, promising to do something handsome for them when he should come to power at Mainz. While spending his vacation with these Erfurt friends, at the close of the year 1790, Schiller took a cold which brought on an attack of pneumonia. An Erfurt doctor treated the case lightly and unskillfully and sent him back half cured to Jena, where he resumed his lectures. Now came a second and sharper attack, with hemorrhage and other alarming symptoms. The doctors operated upon him as best they knew, with leeches and phlebotomy and purgatives and vomitives, and came very near killing him. For days he lay at the point of death, a few faithful students sharing the young wife's anxious vigil at his bedside. His convalescence was slow and in the end imperfect, leaving him with wasted strength, a pain in the right lung and a serious difficulty in breathing. Of course it was all up with his lecturing; but he easily obtained a release for the summer term from the sympathetic Duke of Weimar. In March he was well enough to take up the reading of Kant's then recently published 'Critique of the Judgment', and a little later to try his hand at translating from the Aeneid in stanzas and to write a rejoinder to the 'anticritique' of the aggrieved BÜrger. This unfortunate feud with BÜrger grew out of a magisterial review published by Schiller in 1791; a review which, while dignified in tone and purporting to speak solely in the interest of the lyric art, amounted to a scathing condemnation of BÜrger's character. After expatiating upon the high vocation of the poet, the necessity of his thinking and feeling nobly, and the importance of his giving only his idealized self, the anonymous critic proceeded to comment upon BÜrger's frequent lapses from good taste, his crudities, indecencies and vulgar ding-dongs, and to refer these things with remorseless directness to personal defects. The criticism was just and had all the other merits save discretion and urbanity, Goethe was pleased with it before he knew who wrote it,[84] and eleven years later Schiller saw nothing in it to change. In writing it, as a matter of fact, he was only breaking the rod over his own early self; for in his Stuttgart 'Anthology' he had committed nearly every sin for which now, from the serene heights of a better artistic insight, he castigated his victim. To poor BÜrger, whose life was just then bitter enough at the best, the review was a terrible blow. He at once published a reply, which is also very good reading in its way, but might have been made much more spicy had he known the name of his adversary. Schiller's final rejoinder added nothing of importance to the discussion.[85] This short digression leads naturally to another. While still at Weimar Schiller received a visit from BÜrger, and the two agreed to vie with each other in a translation from Vergil. Schiller chose for his experiment the eight-line stanza which he was proposing to use in an epic upon Frederick the Great. This 'Fredericiad' was much on his mind in the spring of 1789. His plan was to center his story about some ominous juncture in Frederick's career (say the battle of Kollin), and write a poem which should exhibit in lightly-flowing stanzas the 'finest flower' of eighteenth-century civilization.[86] Albeit intensely modern it was to have the indispensable epic 'machinery'. Nothing came of the project, but a year later he was still ruminating upon it and declared that he should not be truly happy until he was again making verses. Instead of attempting an original epic, however, he now began to translate from the Aeneid, and this light and congenial labor continued to occupy him for a year or more after the break-down of his health. He finally completed two books, the second and fourth. The translation is sonorous and otherwise readable, but it is not Vergil and does not produce the effect of Vergil. The breaking up of the matter into stanzas, each having a unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and perversions,—there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the original,—and substituted an interrupted romantic cadence for the stately continuous roll of the hexameter. The opening lines of the second book will serve as well as any others to illustrate Schiller's method as a translator: Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant. Schiller's version runs thus: Der ganze Saal war Ohr, jedweder Mund verschlossen, As for the 'Fredericiad', it never got beyond the status of a plan. By November, 1791, Schiller had concluded that Gustav Adolf would be a better subject for an epic,—he could get up no enthusiasm for Unser Fritz and shrank from the 'gigantic labor of idealizing him'. Soon after this he seems to have dropped altogether the idea of writing an epic. In the spring of 1791, when he had grown strong enough to think of attacking the second installment of the 'Thirty Years' War', Schiller took up his abode in Rudolstadt; and there, in May, he was prostrated by a second illness which was worse than the first. His life was despaired of, he bade his friends farewell and the report went out from Jena that he was dead. After the crisis was past came weary weeks of lassitude and pain, with no possibility of writing or reading. In July he took the waters at Karlsbad, with some slight benefit. By autumn he was well enough to do the promised continuation of his history and to lay plans with GÖschen for a New Thalia to begin with the next year. But he was now in desperate straits for money. His illness had been very costly and the cessation of work had brought a cessation of income. He was in debt to various friends, and the Duke of Weimar was too poor to help him. Saddest of all, his beloved wife's health was broken with anxiety and watching. 'It is a joy to me', he wrote to KÖrner in October, 'even when I am busy, to think that she is near me. Her dear life and influence round about me, the childlike purity of her soul and the warmth of her love, give me a repose and serenity that would otherwise be impossible in my hypochondriac condition. If we were only well we should need nothing else to live like the gods.' It was a dark juncture, darker far than that of 1784, and now as then help came unexpectedly from afar. It came this time from Denmark. The Danish author Baggesen had visited Jena the previous year and returned home a fervid admirer of Schiller. At Copenhagen he had imparted his enthusiasm to Count Schimmelmann and the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg, who, with their wives, proceeded to found a sort of Schiller-sect. Full of the time's generous ardor for high and humane ideas, they were just about to give a rustic fÊte in honor of their great German poet, when the news of his death arrived. They met with heavy hearts and sang the 'Song to Joy', with an added stanza by Baggesen, wherein they pledged themselves to 'be faithful to Schiller's spirit until they should meet above'. When they learned a little later that the author of the 'Song' was alive, after all, and very much in need of money, the two noblemen immediately wrote him a joint letter, offering him, in language of admirable delicacy, a gift of a thousand thalers a year for three years, with no conditions whatever. He was simply to give himself needed rest and follow the bent of his mind, free from all anxiety. Should he choose to come to Copenhagen they assured him that he would find loyal friends and admirers, and a position in the government service if he desired it. This timely windfall 'from the clouds' put an end to the misery of distress about money. For the first time in his life Schiller found himself free to consult inclination in the forming of his plans and the disposition of his time. Without hesitation he gratefully accepted the gift and resolved now at last to take up the study of Kant and fathom him, though it should require three years. A strange resolution, it would seem, for a sick poet! Many have judged it unwise and have deprecated that long immersion in Kantian metaphysic. But Schiller was the best judge of his own needs, and how he felt about the matter appears very clearly from a letter that he wrote to KÖrner a few months later: I am full of eagerness for some poetic task and particularly my pen is itching to be at 'Wallenstein.' Really it is only in art itself that I feel my strength. In theorizing I have to plague myself all the while about principles. There I am only a dilettante. But 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. And so it was destined to be. His philosophic studies, pursued with tireless zeal for a period of three or four years, gave him the self-assurance that he hoped for. They created for him at least, if not for all men everywhere, a poetical modus vivendi between natural impulse and artistic rule. 'Nature' learned to wear the fetters of art without feeling them as fetters. At last he grew weary of theorizing; but his later plays, produced in rapid succession, each unlike the other and all characterized by a remarkable imaginative breadth and freedom, bear witness to the quantity of artistic energy stored up during this period of artistic self-repression. A few words of biography will suffice for the goings and comings of this Kantian period, which was for Schiller a period of quiet study, eager discussion and laborious authorship. At first he continued to reside in Jena. Early in 1792 he started the New Thalia, and this he used for the publication of his earlier aesthetic lucubrations. With the perfunctory conclusion of the 'Thirty Years' War', in September, his work as a historian virtually came to an end. He now began to lecture again, but gave only an aesthetic privatissimum in his own room. He went out of the house hardly five times during the whole winter, and when spring came his health was again very precarious. He now determined to try the effect upon body and soul of the milder climate of his native Suabia. He set out in August and took the precaution to halt in Heilbronn, not knowing what brutality the Duke of WÜrttemberg might still be capable of. On receiving the blessed assurance that his Highness would 'ignore' him, he continued on his way to Ludwigsburg, where a son was born, to him in September. He remained in Ludwigsburg during the winter in pleasant intercourse with his family and friends. In October Karl Eugen went to his reward. 'The death of the old Herod', Schiller wrote to KÖrner, 'does not concern me or my family, except that all who have to do directly, like my father, with the head of the state, are glad that they now have a man before them.'[87] One of the first important official acts of the new duke was to abolish the Karlschule; but this did not happen until after Schiller had visited the scene of his former woes, in the role of distinguished son, and had received the enthusiastic plaudits of the four hundred students. It was here in Ludwigsburg that his ripest philosophic work, the 'Letters upon Aesthetic Education' came into being. In the spring he spent some weeks in Stuttgart, where Dannecker began to model the famous bust that now adorns the Weimar library. In Stuttgart he made the acquaintance of the enterprising publisher Cotta, who wished him to undertake the editorship of a great political journal. But another plan lay nearer to Schiller's heart, and before he left Suabia he had arranged with Cotta to edit a high-class literary magazine to be known as Die Horen. In May, 1794, he returned to Jena, glad to have escaped at last from his dear, distracting fatherland and to be once more at home. His health had not improved, and he had now become reconciled in a measure to the doom of the invalid. But although he knew that the death-mark was upon him, the knowledge only spurred him to more eager activity.[88] He felt that he had a great work to do and that the time might be short. By this time his acquaintance with Humboldt had ripened into a warm friendship. 'What a life it will be', he wrote to Korner, 'when you come here and complete the triad. Humboldt is for me an infinitely agreeable and at the same time useful acquaintance; for in conversation with him all my ideas move happily and move quickly. There is in his character a totality that is rarely seen and that, except in him, I have found only in you.' After his return to Jena he lectured no more, but threw all his energy into the new journal. He prepared an alluring prospectus and invited the cooperation of all the best writers in Germany. Among these was Goethe, who sent a favorable reply. And thus began a correspondence which presently led, as all the world knows, to an ever memorable friendship. The activities centering in the Horen ushered in a new literary epoch, the epoch of Germany's brief leadership in modern literature. Thus the period of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life, nearly, he had lived with aristocrats, and he himself had the temper of an aristocrat. There is no evidence in his letters that he ever really sympathized with the French people, even during the early days of the revolution, in their practical program of 'liberty, equality and fraternity'. His notion of liberty was at no time a definite political concept, but always a rainbow in the clouds,—something to rave and philosophize over. Of human brotherhood he had sung most affectingly in the 'Song to Joy', but it was only a poetic kiss that he had ready for all mankind. He would have been amazed if any plebeian stranger had proposed to take him at his word. As for equality, there is no evidence that it entered as a factor or an ideal into his scheme of man's better time to come. It was thus perfectly natural, when the proceedings were Instituted against the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth, that Schiller should take the part of the accused. The fierce determination of the French democracy to exact a reckoning from their sovereign, not so much for what he had done as for ages of accumulated wrong, appeared to him the very madness of injustice. In December, 1792, he planned to write a book or a pamphlet in defence of the king, and have it translated into French for the purpose of influencing public opinion in Paris.[89] He seems actually to have begun the work, but the fate of the unlucky Bourbon was swifter than the pen of his German defender. Schiller's horror of the regicide knew no bounds. 'These two weeks past', he wrote on February 8, 1793, 'I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these wretched executioners.' The ensuing events of the Terror intensified this feeling. In speaking of the year 1793, Karoline von Wolzogen has this to say of her brother-in-law: He regarded the French Revolution as the effect of passion and not as a work of wisdom, which alone could produce true freedom. He admitted, indeed, that many ideas which had previously been found only in books and in the heads of enlightened men, were now matters of public discussion; but, he said, the real principles which must underlie a truly happy civil constitution are not yet so common among men; they are found (pointing to a copy of Kant's 'Critique' that lay on the table) nowhere else but here. The French Republic will cease as quickly as it has come into being. The republican constitution will give rise to a state of anarchy, and sooner or later a capable strong man will appear from some quarter and make himself master not only of France but also, perhaps, of a large part of Europe.[90] If this remarkable prediction of Napoleon is rightly reported and rightly dated by the Baroness von Wolzogen, one can hardly suppose that Schiller was very much elated when he read in a paper, towards the close of the year 1792, that he had been made an honorary citizen of the French Republic. Under a law passed in August of that year,—l'an premier de la libertÉ,—the name and rights of a French citizen were bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this honor,—the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Kosciusko being put to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe, Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,—and the bill was about to pass when a deputy arose,—he must have been an Alsatian,—and proposed to add the name of M. Gille, publiciste allemand. The amendment was accepted, and a few weeks later Minister Roland transmitted to 'M. Gille' an official diploma of French citizenship. It took the postal authorities of Germany some six years to deliver the letter, and when at last they succeeded, its recipient was less than ever in a mood to be overjoyed at the well-meant distinction that had been conferred upon him by the French republicans. The progress of the Revolution appeared to Schiller to endanger the higher interests of civilization. He was too close to it for a serenely impartial view. Had it been an occurrence of the sixteenth century, he would have been just the man to philosophize over it and to show that in this case, again, "the frenzy of the nations was the statesmanship of fate". As it was, the unrest of the people, and their increasing absorption in questions of mere politics, disgusted him. He felt that a counteragent was needed. And so, declining Cotta's offer anent the political journal, and thus leaving the famous Allgemeine Zeitung to begin its career a few years later under other hands, he chose Instead to found the Horen, which was to exclude politics altogether and induce people, if possible, to think of something else. He saw that the times were unpropitious for his enterprise, but felt that it was for that very reason the more urgently needed. In announcing the Horen to the public in 1795 he wrote: The more the minds of men are excited, shut in and subjugated by the narrow interests of the present, the more urgent is a general and higher interest in that which is purely human and superior to all influences of the time; an interest which shall set men free again and unite the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty. This is the point of view from which the authors of the Horen wish it to be regarded. The journal is to be devoted to cheerful and passionless entertainment, and to offer the mind and heart of its readers, now angered and depressed by the events of the day, a pleasant diversion. In the midst of this political tumult it will form for the Muses and Graces a little intimate circle, from which everything will be banished that is stamped with the impure spirit of partisanship. Many a modern reader will be inclined, perhaps, to smile at this deliverance and to see in it a fatuous misjudgment of the relative importance of things. The French Revolution versus a spray of aesthetic rose-water! But we must not be too hasty. Posterity has no better criterion for judging great men than the criterion of service. And service is a question of vocation. As the matter is put by Goethe, who himself a little later took refuge from the misÈre of the Napoleonic epoch in the contemplative poetry of the Orient: 'Man may seek his higher destiny on earth or in heaven, in the present or in the future; yet for that reason he remains exposed to constant wavering within and to continual disturbance from without, until he once for all makes up his mind to declare that that is right which is in accordance with his own nature,'[91] It was not in Schiller to be a political journalist or a pamphleteer. In that field he would have wasted his splendid energy. He knew what he could do best; and it was well for his country and for the world that he chose to withdraw from the turmoil of the Revolution and prepare himself for 'Wallenstein' and 'William Tell'. FOOTNOTES:[Footnote 84: So, at least, Schiller states in a letter of March 3, 1791, to KÖrner.] [Footnote 85: The original review, together with BÜrger's reply and |
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