2. Beauty appears to us as an object of general enjoyment, without
awakening in us the consciousness of an abstract idea and of a category
of reason to which we might refer our judgment.
3. Beauty ought to embrace in itself the relation of conformity to its
end, but in such a way that this conformity may be grasped without the
idea of the end being offered to our mind.
4. Though it be not accompanied by an abstract idea, beauty ought be to
acknowledged as the object of a necessary enjoyment.
A special feature of all this system is the indissoluble unity of what
is supposed to be separated in consciousness. This distinction
disappears in the beautiful, because in it the general and the
particular, the end and the means, the idea and the object, mentally
penetrate each other completely. The particular in itself, whether it be
opposed to itself or to what is general, is something accidental. But
here what may be considered as an accidental form is so intimately
connected with the general that it is confounded and identified with it.
By this means the beautiful in art presents thought to us as incarnate.
On the other hand, matter, nature, the sensuous as themselves possessing
measure, end, and harmony, are raised to the dignity of spirit and share
in its general character. Thought not only abandons its hostility
against nature, but smiles in her. Sensation and enjoyment are justified
and sanctified, so that nature and liberty, sense and ideas, find their
justification and their sanctification in this union. Nevertheless this
reconciliation, though seemingly perfect, is stricken with the character
of subjectiveness. It cannot constitute the absolutely true and real.
Such is an outline of the principal results of Kant’s criticism, and
Hegel passes high praise on the profoundly philosophic mind of Schiller,
who demanded the union and reconciliation of the two principles, and who
tried to give a scientific explanation of it before the problem had been
solved by philosophy. In his “Letters on Æsthetic Education,” Schiller
admits that man carries in himself the germ of the ideal man which is
realized and represented by the state. There are two ways for the
individual man to approach the ideal man; first, when the state,
considered as morality, justice, and general reason, absorbs the
individualities in its unity; secondly, when the individual rises to the
ideal of his species by the perfecting of himself. Reason demands unity,
conformity to the species; nature, on the other hand, demands plurality
and individuality; and man is at once solicited by two contrary laws. In
this conflict, æsthetic education must come in to effect the
reconciliation of the two principles; for, according to Schiller, it has
as its end to fashion and polish the inclinations and passions so that
they may become reasonable, and that, on the other hand, reason and
freedom may issue from their abstract character, may unite with nature,
may spiritualize it, become incarnate, and take a body in it. Beauty is
thus given as the simultaneous development of the rational and of the
sensuous, fused together, and interpenetrated one by the other, an union
that constitutes in fact true reality.
This unity of the general and of the particular, of liberty and
necessity of the spiritual and material, which Schiller understood
scientifically as the spirit of art, and which he tried to make appear
in real life by æsthetic art and education, was afterwards put forward
under the name of idea as the principle of all knowledge and existence.
In this way, through the agency of Schelling, science raised itself to
an absolute point of view. It was thus that art began to claim its
proper nature and dignity. From that time its proper place was finally
marked out for it in science, though the mode of viewing it still
labored under certain defects. Its high and true distinction were at
length understood.
In viewing the higher position to which recent philosophical systems
have raised the theory of art in Germany, we must not overlook the
advantages contributed by the study of the ideal of the ancients by such
men as Winckelmann, who, by a kind of inspiration, raised art criticism
from a carping about petty details to seek the true spirit of great
works of art, and their true ideas, by a study of the spirit of the
originals.
It has appeared expedient to conclude this introduction with a summary
of the latest and highest theory of art and æsthetics issuing from Kant
and Schiller, and developed in the later philosophy of Hegel.
Our space only allows us to give a glance, first, at the metaphysics of
the beautiful as developed by Hegel in the first part of his
‘Aesthetik,’ and then at the later development of the same system in
recent writers issuing from his school.
Hegel considers, first, the abstract idea of the beautiful; secondly,
beauty in nature; thirdly, beauty in art or the ideal; and he winds up
with an examination of the qualities of the artist.
His preliminary remarks are directed to show the relations of art to
religion and philosophy, and he shows that man’s destination is an
infinite development. In real life he only satisfies his longing
partially and imperfectly by limited enjoyments. In science he finds a
nobler pleasure, and civil life opens a career for his activity; but he
only finds an imperfect pleasure in these pursuits. He cannot then find
the ideal after which he sighs. Then he rises to a higher sphere, where
all contradictions are effaced and the ideas of good and happiness are
realized in perfect accord and in constant harmony. This deep want of
the soul is satisfied in three ways: in art, in religion, and in
philosophy.
Art is intended to make us contemplate the true and the infinite in
forms of sense. Yet even art does not fully satisfy the deepest need of
the soul. The soul wants to contemplate truth in its inmost
consciousness. Religion is placed above the dominion of art.
First, as to idea of the beautiful, Hegel begins by giving its
characteristics. It is infinite, and it is free; the contemplation of
the beautiful suffices to itself, it awakens no desire. The soul
experiences something like a godlike felicity and is transported into a
sphere remote from the miseries of life. This theory of the beautiful
comes very near that of Plato.
Secondly, as to beauty in nature. Physical beauty, considered
externally, presents itself successively under the aspects of regularity
and of symmetry, of conformity with a law, and of harmony, also of
purity and simplicity of matter.
Thirdly, beauty in art or the ideal is beauty in a higher degree of
perfection than real beauty. The ideal in art is not contrary to the
real, but the real idealized, purified, and perfectly expressed. The
ideal is also the soul arrived at the consciousness of itself, free and
fully enjoying its faculties; it is life, but spiritual life and spirit.
Nor is the ideal a cold abstraction, it is the spiritual principle under
the form of a living individuality freed from the laws of the finite.
The ideal in its highest form is the divine, as expressed in the Greek
divinities; the Christian ideal, as expressed in all its highest purity
in God the Father, the Christ, the Virgin. Its essential features are
calm, majesty, serenity.
At a lower degree the ideal is in man the victory of the eternal
principles that fill the human heart, the triumph of the nobler part of
the soul, the moral and divine principle.
But the ideal manifested in the world becomes _action_, and action
implies a form of society, a determinate situation with collision, and
an action properly so called. The heroic age is the best society for the
ideal in action; in its determinate situation the ideal in action must
appear as the manifestation of moral power, and in action, properly so
called, it must contain three points in the ideal: first, general
principles; secondly, personages; thirdly, their character and their
passions. Hegel winds up by considering the qualities necessary in an
artist: imagination, genius, inspiration, originality, etc.
A recent exponent of Hegel’s æsthetical ideas further developed
expresses himself thus on the nature of beauty:—
“After the bitterness of the world, the sweetness of art soothes and
refreshes us. This is the high value of the beautiful—that it solves the
contradiction of mind and matter, of the moral and sensuous world, in
harmony. Thus the beautiful and its representation in art procures for
intuition what philosophy gives to the cognitive insight and religion to
the believing frame of mind. Hence the delight with which Schiller’s
wonderful poem on the Bell celebrates the accord of the inner and outer
life, the fulfilment of the longing and demands of the soul by the
events in nature. The externality of phenomena is removed in the
beautiful; it is raised into the circle of ideal existence; for it is
recognized as the revelation of the ideal, and thus transfigured it
gives to the latter additional splendor.
“Thus the beautiful is active, living unity, full existence without
defect, as Plato and Schelling have said, or as recent writers describe
it; the idea that is quite present in the appearance, the appearance
which is quite formed and penetrated by the idea.”
“Beauty is the world secret that invites us in image and word,” is the
poetical expression of Plato; and we may add, because it is revealed in
both. We feel in it the harmony of the world; it breaks forth in a
beauty, in a lovely accord, in a radiant point, and starting thence we
penetrate further and yet further, and find as the ground of all
existence the same charm which had refreshed us in individual forms.
Thus Christ pointed to the lilies of the field to knit His followers’
reliance on Providence with the phenomena of nature: and could they jet
forth in royal beauty, exceeding that of Solomon, if the inner ground of
nature were not beauty?
We may also name beauty in a certain sense a mystery, as it mediates to
us in a sensuous sign a heavenly gift of grace, that it opens to us a
view into the Eternal Being, teaching us to know nature in God and God
in nature, that it brings the divine even to the perception of sense,
and establishes the energy of love and freedom as the ground, the bond,
and the end of the world.
In the midst of the temporal the eternal is made palpable and present to
us in the beautiful, and offers itself to our enjoyment. The separation
is suppressed, and the original unity, as it is in God, appears as the
first, as what holds together even the past in the universe, and what
constitutes the aim of the development in a finite accord.
The beautiful not only presents itself to us as mediator of a foreign
excellence or of a remote divinity, but the ideal and the godlike are
present in it. Hence æsthetics requires as its basis the system in which
God is known as indwelling in the world, that He is not far distant from
any one of us, but that He animates us, and that we live in Him.
Æsthetics requires the knowledge that mind is the creative force and
unity of all that is extended and developed in time and space.
The beautiful is thus, according to these later thinkers, the revelation
of God to the mind through the senses; it is the appearance of the idea.
In the beautiful spirit reveals itself to spirit through matter and the
senses; thus the entire man feels himself raised and satisfied by it. By
the unity of the beautiful with us we experience with delight that
thought and the material world are present for our individuality, that
they utter tones and shine forth in it, that both penetrate each other
and blend in it and thus become one with it. We feel one with them and
one in them.
This later view was to a great extent expressed by Schiller in his
“Æsthetical Letters.”
But art and æsthetics, in the sense in which these terms are used and
understood by German philosophical writers, such as Schiller, embrace a
wider field than the line arts. Lessing, in his “Laocoon,” had already
shown the point of contrast between painting and poetry; and æsthetics,
being defined as the science of the beautiful, must of necessity embrace
poetry. Accordingly Schiller’s essays on tragic art, pathos, and
sentimental poetry, contained in this volume, are justly classed under
his æsthetical writings.
This being so, it is important to estimate briefly the transitions of
German poetry before Schiller, and the position that he occupied in its
historic development.
The first classical period of German poetry and literature was contained
between A.D. 1190 and 1300. It exhibits the intimate blending of the
German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid
productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the
“Nibelungenlied,” and of the “Minnegesang.”
This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art
and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and
post-Homeric age of early Greece.
The poetical efforts of that early age may be grouped under—(1) national
epos: the “Nibelungenlied;” (2) art epos: the “Rolandslied,” “Percival,”
etc.; (3) the introduction of antique legends: Veldeck’s “Æneide,” and
Konrad’s “War of Troy;” (4) Christian legends: “Barlaam,” “Sylvester,”
“Pilatus,” &c.; (5) poetical narratives: “Crescentia,” “Graf Rudolf,”
etc.; (6) animal legends; “Reinecke Vos;” (7) didactic poems: “Der
Renner;” (8) the Minne-poetry, and prose.
The fourth group, though introduced from a foreign source, gives the
special character and much of the charm of the period we consider. This
is the sphere of legends derived from ecclesiastical ground. One of the
best German writers on the history of German literature remarks: “If the
aim and nature of all poetry is to let yourself be filled by a subject
and to become penetrated with it; if the simple representation of
unartificial, true, and glowing feelings belongs to its most beautiful
adornments; if the faithful direction of the heart to the invisible and
eternal is the ground on which at all times the most lovely flowers of
poetry have sprouted forth, these legendary poems of early Germany, in
their lovely heartiness, in their unambitious limitation, and their
pious sense, deserve a friendly acknowledgment. What man has considered
the pious images in the prayer-books of the Middle Ages, the unadorned
innocence, the piety and purity, the patience of the martyrs, the calm,
heavenly transparency of the figures of the holy angels, without, being
attracted by the simple innocence and humility of these forms, the
creation of pious artists’ hands? Who has beheld them without tranquil
joy at the soft splendor poured over them, without deep sympathy, nay,
without a certain emotion and tenderness? And the same spirit that
created these images also produced those poetical effusions, the same
spirit of pious belief, of deep devotion, of heavenly longing. If we
make a present reality of the heroic songs of the early German popular
poetry, and the chivalrous epics of the art poetry, the military
expeditions and dress of the Crusades, this legendary poetry appears as
the invention of humble pilgrims, who wander slowly on the weary way to
Jerusalem, with scollop and pilgrim’s staff, engaged in quiet prayer,
till they are all to kneel at the Saviour’s sepulchre; and thus
contented, after touching the holy earth with their lips, they return,
poor as they were, but full of holy comfort, to their distant home.
“While the knightly poetry is the poetry of the splendid secular life,
full of cheerful joy, full of harp-tones and song, full of tournaments
and joyous festivals, the poetry of the earthly love for the earthly
bride, the poetry of the legends is that of the spontaneous life of
poverty, the poetry of the solitary cloister cell, of the quiet,
well-walled convent garden, the poetry of heavenly brides, who without
lamenting the joys of the world, which they need not, have their joy in
their Saviour in tranquil piety and devout resignation—who attend at the
espousals of Anna and Joachim, sing the Magnificat with the Holy Mother
of God, stand weeping beneath the cross, to be pierced also by the
sword, who hear the angel harp with St. Cecilia, and walk with St.
Theresa in the glades of Paradise. While the Minne-poetry was the tender
homage offered to the beauty, the gentleness, the grace, and charm of
noble women of this world, legendary poetry was the homage given to the
Virgin Mother, the Queen of Heaven, transfiguring earthly love into a
heavenly and eternal love.
“For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the time of woman
_cultus_, such as has never been before or since seen; it is also the
time of the deepest and simplest and truest, most enthusiastic and
faithful veneration of the Virgin Mary. If we, by a certain effort,
manage to place ourselves back on the standpoint of childlike poetic
faith of that time, and set aside in thought the materializing and
exaggeration of the hagiology and Mariolatry produced by later
centuries, rendering the reaction of the Reformation unavoidable—if now
in our age, turned exclusively to logical ideas and a negative
dialectic, we live again by thought in those ages of feeling and
poetry—if we acknowledge all these things to be something more than
harmless play of words and fancy, and as the true lifelike contents of
the period, then we can properly appreciate this legendary poetry as a
necessary link in the crown of pearls of our ancient poetry.”
In short, the first classical period of German literature was a time of
youthful freshness, of pure harmony, plunged in verse and song, full of
the richest tones and the noblest rhythm, so that rhyme and song alone
must be looked for as the form of poetic creations. Accordingly it had
no proper prose. Like our own youth, it was a happy, free, and true
youth, it knew no prose; like us it dreamed to speechless songs; and as
we expressed our youthful language and hopes, woes and joys, in rhyme
and song, thus a whole people and age had its beautiful youth full of
song and verse tones. The life was poetry and poetry was the life.
Then came degeneracy and artifice; after that the great shock of the
Reformation; subsequently a servile and pedantic study of classical
forms without imbibing their spirit, but preparing the way for a truer
art spirit, extracted from their study by the masterly criticism of
Winckelmann and Lessing, till the second classical period of German
literature and poetry bloomed forth in full beauty, blending the
national and legendary elements so well expressed by Herder with the
highest effusions of dramatic poetry, partly creative and partly
imitative of the Greek models, in Schiller and Goethe.
Modern German literature presents a very remarkable spectacle, though
far from unique in history, for there we see criticism begetting genius.
Lessing, the founder of the modern German drama, sought to banish all
pomp from the theatre, and in doing so some critics have thought that he
banished the ideal and fell into affectation. At any rate, his
“Dramaturgy” is full of original ideas, and when he drew out the sphere
of poetry contrasted with that of painting in his “Laocoon,” all Germany
resounded with his praise. “With that delight,” says Goethe, “we saluted
this luminous ray which a thinker of the first order caused to break
forth from its clouds. It is necessary to have all the fire of youth to
conceive the effect produced on us by the ‘Laocoon’ of Lessing.” Another
great contemporary, whose name is imperishable as that of art, struck a
mortal blow at a false taste in the study of the antique. Winckelmann
questioned the works of the Greek chisel with an intelligence full of
love, and initiated his countrymen into poetry by a feeling for
sculpture! What an enthusiasm he displayed for classical beauty! what a
worship of the form! what a fervor of paganism is found in its eloquent
pages when he also comments on the admirable group of the Laocoon, or
the still purer masterpiece of the Apollo of Belvedere.
These men were the vanguard of the great Germanic army; Schiller and
Goethe alone formed its main column. In them German poetry shows itself
in its perfection, and completely realizes the ideal designed for it by
the critic. Every factitious precept and conventional law was now
overthrown; these poetical Protestants broke away entirely from the yoke
of tradition. Yet their genius was not without a rule. Every work bears
in itself the organic laws of its development. Thus, although they laugh
at the famous precept of the three unities, it is because they dig still
deeper down to the root of things, to grasp the true principle from
which the precept issued. “Men have not understood,” said Goethe, “the
basis of this law. The law of the comprehensive—‘das Fassliche’—is the
principle; and the three unities have only value as far as they attain
it. When they become an obstacle to the comprehension it is madness to
wish to observe them. The Greeks themselves, from whom the rule is
derived, did not always follow it. In the ‘Phaeton’ of Euripides, and in
other pieces, there was change, place; accordingly they prefer to give a
perfect exposition of their subject, rather than blindly respect a law
never very essential in itself. The pieces of Shakspeare violate in the
highest degree the unity of time and of place; but they are full of
comprehensiveness; nothing is easier to grasp, and for that reason they
would have found favor with the Greeks. The French poets tried to obey
exactly the law of the three unities; but they violate the law of
comprehensiveness, as they do not expound dramatic subjects by dramas
but by recitals.”
Poetical creation was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time
responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of
correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living
characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room
to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible lessons, is
now able to take place on the stage. The whole Thirty Years’ War passes
before us in “Wallenstein.” We hear the tumult of camps, the disorder of
a fanatical and undisciplined army, peasants, recruits, sutlers,
soldiers. The illusion is complete, and enthusiasm breaks out among the
spectators. Similar merits attach to many other of Schiller’s plays.
This new drama, which seemed to give all to the natural sphere, concedes
still more to the ideal. An able critic has said the details which are
the truth of history are also its poetry. Here the German school
professes a principle of the highest learning, and one that seems to be
borrowed from its profoundest philosophers; it is that of the universal
beauty of life, of the identity of beauty and existence. “Our
æsthetics,” says Goethe, “speak a great deal of poetical or antipoetical
subjects; fundamentally there is no subject that has not its poetry; it
is for the poet to find it there.”
Schiller and Goethe divide the empire over modern German poetry, and
represent its two principal powers; the one, Schiller, impassioned and
lyrical, pours his soul over all the subjects he touches; in him every
composition, ode, or drama is always one of his noble ideas, borrowing
its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially
through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you
with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions
with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in
Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and sublime forehead.
After this glance at the position and chief characteristics of Schiller,
it may be useful to offer a few remarks on those of the principal works
in this volume, his Æsthetical Letters and Essays. Schiller, in his
Æsthetical Essays, did not choose the pure abstract method of deduction
and conception like Kant, nor the historical like Herder, who strove
thus to account for the genesis of our ideas of beauty and art. He
struck out a middle path, which presents certain deficiencies to the
advocates of either of these two systems. He leans upon Kantian ideas,
but without scholastic constraint. Pure speculation, which seeks to set
free the form from all contents and matter, was remote from his creative
genius, to which the world of matter and sense was no hinderance, but a
necessary envelop for his forms.
His removal to Jena in 1791, and acquaintance with Reinhold,
familiarized him with the Kantian philosophy, but he only appreciated it
by halves. The bare and bald dealing with fundamental principles was at
this time equally repulsive to Goethe and Schiller, the man of the world
and the man of life. But Schiller did not find anywhere at that time
justice done to the dignity of art, or honor to the substantial value of
beauty.
The Æsthetical Essays in this volume appeared for the most part since
1792, in the “Thalia” and the “Hours” periodicals. The first, “On the
Ground of our Pleasure in Tragic Subjects” (1792), applies Kantian
principles of the sublime to tragedy, and shows Schiller’s lofty
estimate of this class of poetry. With Kant he shows that the source of
all pleasure is suitableness; the touching and sublime elicit this
feeling, implying the existence of unsuitableness. In this article he
makes the aim and source of art to consist in giving enjoyment, in
pleasing. To nature pleasure is a mediate object, to art its main
object. The same proposition appears in Schiller’s paper on Tragic Art
(1792), closely connected with the former. This article contains views
of the affection of pity that seem to approximate the Aristotelian
propositions about tragedy.
His views on the sublime are expressed in two papers, “The Sublime” and
“The Pathetic,” in which we trace considerable influence of Lessing and
Winckelmann. He is led especially to strong antagonism against the
French tragedy, and he indulges in a lengthy consideration of the
passage of Virgil on Laocoon, showing the necessity of suffering and the
pathetic in connection with moral adaptations to interest us deeply.
All these essays bespeak the poet who has tried his hand at tragedy, but
in his next paper, “On Grace and Dignity,” we trace more of the
moralist. Those passages where he takes up a medium position between
sense and reason, between Goethe and Kant, are specially attractive. The
theme of this paper is the conception of grace, or the expression of a
beautiful soul and dignity, or that of a lofty mind. The idea of grace
has been developed more deeply and truly by Schiller than by Wieland or
Winckelmann, but the special value of the paper is its constantly
pointing to the ideal of a higher humanity. In it he does full justice
to the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful
nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason
mere reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in which
grace and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty
(structure), the last supported by power.
The following year, 1795, appeared his most important contribution to
æsthetics, in his Æsthetical Letters.
In these letters he remarks that beauty is the work of free
contemplation, and we enter with it into the world of ideas, but without
leaving the world of sense. Beauty is to us an object, and yet at the
same time a state of our subjectivity, because the feeling of the
conditional is under that which we have of it. Beauty is a form because
we consider it, and life because we feel it; in a word, it is at once
our state and our art. And exactly because it is both it serves us as a
triumphant proof that suffering does not exclude activity, nor matter
form, nor limitation the infinite, for in the enjoyment of beauty both
natures are united, and by this is proved the capacity of the infinite
to be developed in the finite, and accordingly the possibility of the
sublimest humanity.
The free play of the faculty of cognition which had been determined by
Kant is also developed by Schiller. His representation of this matter is
this: Man, as a spirit, is reason and will, self-active, determining,
form-giving; this is described by Schiller as the form-instinct; man, as
a sensuous being, is determinable, receptive, termed to matter; Schiller
describes this as the material instinct, “Stofftrieb.” In the midst
between these two is situated the beautiful, in which reason and the
sensuous penetrate each other, and their enjoyable product is designated
by Schiller the play instinct. This expression is not happily chosen.
Schiller means to describe by it the free play of the forces, activity
according to nature, which is at once a joy and a happiness; he reminds
us of the life of Olympus, and adds: “Man is only quite a man when he
plays.” Personality is that which lasts, the state of feeling is the
changeable in man; he is the fixed unity remaining eternally himself in
the floods of change. Man in contact with the world is to take it up in
himself, but to unite with it the highest freedom and independence, and,
instead of being lost in the world, to subject it to his reason. It is
only by his being independent that there is reality out of him; only by
being susceptible of feeling that there is reality in him. The object of
sensuous instinct is life; that of the purer instinct figure; living
figure or beauty is the object of the play instinct.
Only inasmuch as life is formed in the understanding and form in feeling
does life win a form and form win life, and only thus does beauty arise.
By beauty the sensuous man is led up to reason, the one-sided tension of
special force is strung to harmony, and man made a complete whole.
Schiller adds that beauty knits together thought and feeling; the
fullest unity of spirit and matter. Its freedom is not lack, but
harmony, of laws; its conditions are not exclusions, inclusion of all
infinity determined in itself. A true work of art generates lofty
serenity and freedom of mind. Thus the æsthetic disposition bestows on
us the highest of all gifts, that of a disposition to humanity, and we
may call beauty our second creator.
In these letters Schiller spoke out the mildest and highest sentiments
on art, and in his paper on Simple and Sentimental Poetry (1795) he
constructs the ideal of the perfect poet. This is by far the most
fruitful of Schiller’s essays in its results. It has much that is
practically applicable, and contains a very able estimate of German
poetry. The writing is also very pointed and telling, because it is
based upon actual perceptions, and it is interesting because the
contrast drawn out throughout it between the simple and the sentimental
has been referred to his own contrast with Goethe. He also wished to
vindicate modern poetry, which Goethe seemed to wish to sacrifice to the
antique.
The sentimental poetry is the fruit of quiet and retirement; simple
poetry the child of life. One is a favor of nature; the sentimental
depends on itself, the simple on the world of experience. The
sentimental is in danger of extending the limits of human nature too
far, of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the
ideal of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in
human nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in
thought from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also
are sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth
disastrous results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of
culture, and till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the
individual. The idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the
realist appears far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies
in the proof of a great capacity, but the perfect in the general
attitude of the whole and in the real facts.
On the whole it may be said, taking a survey of these labors, that if
Schiller had developed his ideas systematically and the unity of his
intuition of the world, which were present in his feelings, and if he
had based them scientifically, a new epoch in philosophy might have been
anticipated. For he had obtained a view of such a future field of
thought with the deep clairvoyance of his genius.
A few words may be desirable on Schiller’s religious standpoint,
especially in connection with his philosophical letters.
Schiller came up ten years later than Goethe, and concluded the cyclus
of genius that Goethe had inaugurated. But as he was the last arrival of
that productive period of tempestuous agitation, he retained more of its
elements in his later life and poetry than any others who had passed
through earlier agitations, such as Goethe. For Goethe cast himself free
in a great measure from the early intoxication of his youthful
imagination, devoting himself partly to nobler matter and partly to
purer forms.
Schiller derived from the stormy times of his youth his direction to the
ideal, to the hostility against the narrow spirit of civil relations,
and to all given conditions of society in general. He derived from it
his disposition, not to let himself be moulded by matter, but to place
his own creative and determining impress on matter, not so much to grasp
reality poetically and represent it poetically as to cast ideas into
reality, a disposition for lively representation and strong oratorical
coloring. All this he derived from the genial period, though later on
somewhat modified, and carried it over into his whole life and poetry;
and for this very reason he is not only together with Goethe, but before
Goethe, the favorite poet of the nation, and especially with that part
of the nation which sympathizes with him in the choice of poetic
material and in his mode of feeling.
Gervinus remarks that Schiller had at Weimar long fallen off from
Christianity, and occupied his mind tranquilly for a time with the views
of Spinoza (realistic pantheism). Like Herder and Goethe, he viewed life
in its great entirety, and sacrificed the individual to the species.
Accordingly, through the gods of Greece, he fell out with strict,
orthodox Christians.
But Schiller had deeply religious and even Christian elements, as became
a German and a Kantian. He receives the Godhead in His will, and He
descends from His throne, He dwells in his soul; the poet sees divine
revelations, and as a seer announces them to man. He is a moral educator
of his people, who utters the tones of life in his poetry from youth
upwards. Philosophy was not disclosed to Plato in the highest and purest
thought, nor is poetry to Schiller merely an artificial edifice in the
harmony of speech; philosophy and poetry are to both a vibration of love
in the soul upwards to God, a liberation from the bonds of sense, a
purification of man, a moral art. On this reposes the religious
consecration of the Platonic spirit and of that of Schiller.
Issuing from the philosophical school of Kant, and imbued with the
antagonism of the age against constituted authorities, it is natural
that Schiller should be a rationalist in his religious views. It has
been justly said of him that while Goethe’s system was an apotheosis of
nature Schiller’s was an apotheosis of man.
Historically he was not prepared enough to test and search the question
of evidence as applied to divine things handed down by testimony, and
his Kantian coloring naturally disposed him to include all religions
within the limits of pure reason, and to seek it rather in the subject
than in anything objective.
In conclusion, we may attempt to classify and give Schiller his place in
the progress of the world’s literary history. Progress is no doubt a law
of the individual, of nations, and of the whole race. To grow in
perfection, to exist in some sort at a higher degree, is the task
imposed by God on man, the continuation of the very work of God, the
complement of creation. But this moral growth, this need of increase,
may, like all the forces of nature, yield to a greater force; it is an
impulsion rather than a necessity; it solicits and does not constrain. A
thousand obstacles stay its development in individuals and in societies;
moral liberty may retard or accelerate its effects. Progress is
therefore a law which cannot be abrogated, but which is not invariably
obeyed.
Nevertheless, in proportion to the increase of the mass of individuals,
the caprices of chance and of liberty neutralize each other to allow the
providential action that presides over our destinies to prevail. Looking
at the same total of the life of the world, humanity undoubtedly
advances: there are in our time fewer moral miseries, fewer physical
miseries, than were known in the past.
Consequently art and literature, which express the different states of
society, must share in some degree in this progressive march. But there
are two things in literary work: on the one hand the ideas and social
manners which it expresses, on the other the intelligence, the feeling,
the imagination of the writer who becomes its interpreter. While the
former of these elements tends incessantly to a greater perfection, the
latter is subject to all the hazards of individual genius. Accordingly
the progressive literature is only in the inspiration, and so to speak
in the matter; it may and must therefore not be continuous in form.
But more than this: in very advanced societies the very grandeur of
ideas, the abundance of models, the satiety of the public render the
task of the artist more and more difficult. The artist himself has no
longer the enthusiasm of the first ages, the youth of imagination and of
the heart; he is an old man whose riches have increased, but who enjoys
his wealth less.
If all the epochs of literature are considered as a whole it will be
seen that they succeed each other in a constant order. After the period
when the idea and the form combined in a harmonious manner comes another
where the social idea is superabundant, and destroys the literary form
of the preceding epoch.
The middle ages introduced spiritualism in art; before this new idea the
smiling untruths of Greek poetry fled away frightened. The classical
form so beautiful, so pure, cannot contain high Catholic thought. A new
art is formed; on this side the Alps it does not reach the maturity that
produces masterpieces. But at that time all Europe was one fatherland;
Italy completes what is lacking in France and elsewhere.
The renaissance introduces new ideas into civilization; it resuscitates
the traditions of antique science and seeks to unite them to the truths
of Christianity. The art of the middle ages, as a vessel of too limited
capacity, is broken by the new flood poured into it. These different
ideas are stirred up and in conflict in the sixteenth century; they
became co-ordinate and attain to an admirable expression in the
following age.
In the eighteenth century there is a new invasion of ideas; all is
examined and questioned; religion, government, society, all becomes a
matter of discussion for the school called philosophical. Poetry
appeared dying out, history drying up, till a truer spirit was breathed
into the literary atmosphere by the criticism of Lessing, the philosophy
of Kant, and the poetry of Klopstock. It was at this transition period
that Schiller appeared, retaining throughout his literary career much of
the revolutionary and convulsive spirit of his early days, and
faithfully reflecting much of the dominant German philosophy of his
time.
Part of the nineteenth century seems to take in hand the task of
reconstructing the moral edifice and of giving back to thought a larger
form. The literary result of its effects is the renaissance of lyrical
poetry with an admirable development in history.
Schiller’s most brilliant works were in the former walk, his histories
have inferior merit, and his philosophical writings bespeak a deep
thinking nature with great originality of conception, such as naturally
results from a combination of high poetic inspiration with much
intellectual power.
Schiller, like all great men of genius, was a representative man of his
country and of his age. A German, a Protestant free-thinker, a
worshipper of the classical, he was the expression of these aspects of
national and general thought.
The religious reformation was the work of the North. The instinct of
races came in it to complicate the questions of dogmas. The awakening of
individual nationalities was one of the characters of the epoch.
The nations compressed in the severe unity of the Middle Ages escaped in
the Reformation from the uniform mould that had long enveloped them, and
tended to that other unity, still very distant, which must spring from
the spontaneous view of the same truth by all men, result from the free
and original development of each nation, and, as in a vast concert,
unite harmonious dissonances. Europe, without being conscious of its
aim, seized greedily at the means—insurrection; the only thought was to
overthrow, without yet thinking of a reconstruction. The sixteenth
century was the vanguard of the eighteenth. At all times the North had
fretted under the antipathetic yoke of the South. Under the Romans,
Germany, though frequently conquered, had never been subdued. She had
invaded the Empire and determined its fall. In the Middle Ages the
struggle had continued; not only instincts, but ideas, were in conflict;
force and spirit, violence and polity, feudalism and the Catholic
hierarchy, hereditary and elective forms, represented the opposition of
two races. In the sixteenth century the schism long anticipated took
place. The Catholic dogma had hitherto triumphed over all outbreaks—over
Arnaldo of Brescia, the Waldenses, and Wickliffe. But Luther appeared,
and the work was accomplished: Catholic unity was broken.
And this breaking with authority went on fermenting in the nations till
its last great outburst at the French Revolution; and Schiller was born
at this convulsive period, and bears strong traces of his parentage in
his anti-dogmatic spirit.
Yet there is another side to Germanism which is prone to the ideal and
the mystical, and bears still the trace of those lovely legends of
mediæval growth to which we have adverted. For Christianity was not a
foreign and antagonistic importation in Germany; rather, the German
character obtained its completeness through Christianity. The German
found himself again in the Church of Christ, only raised, transfigured,
and sanctified. The apostolic representation of the Church as the bride
of Christ has found its fullest and truest correspondence in that of
Germany. Hence when the German spirit was thoroughly espoused to the
Christian spirit, we find that character of love, tenderness, and depth
so characteristic of the early classics of German poetry, and
reappearing in glorious afterglow in the second classics, in Klopstock,
Herder, and, above all, Schiller.
It is this special instinct for the ideal and mystical in German nature
that has enabled spirits born of negation and revolution, like Schiller,
to unite with those elements the most genial and creative inspirations
of poetry.