the stupendous undertakings which he carried to perfection, and
exhibited to general view. But those who had the advantage of conversing
with him familiarly, and of knowing him well in his private character,
respected him still more for the uniform and unshaken integrity of his
conduct; for his steady attachment to the interest of the community; for
the vast compass of his understanding, which seemed to have a natural
affinity with all grand objects; and likewise for many noble and
beneficent designs, constantly generating in his mind, and which the
multiplicity of his engagements, and the shortness of his life,
prevented him from bringing to maturity.”
[Illustration: [Aqueduct over the Irwell.]]
[Illustration:
_Engraved by J. Posselwhite._
SCHILLER.
_From a Print by Faustin Anderloni, after a Picture by G. von
Kügelgen._
Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.
_London, Published by Charles Knight & C^o. Ludgate Street._
]
[Illustration]
SCHILLER.
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.