Historical Writings
Der Mensch verwandelt sich und flieht von der Bühne, seine Meinungen
verwandeln sich und fliehen mit ihm; die Geschichte allein bleibt
unausgesetzt auf der Bühne, eine unsterbliche Bürgerin aller
Nationen und Zeiten.--_First lecture at Jena_.
Schiller's merit as a writer of history has been much discussed and very
differently estimated by high authorities. In general one may say that
his historical writings have fared at the hands of experts very much
like the scientific writings of Goethe; both being treated as the rather
unimportant incursions of a poet into a field which he had not the
training or the patience to cultivate with the best results. Niebuhr's
adverse opinion is well known and has often been echoed in one form or
another by later critics. On the other hand, lovers of the poet are very
apt to overestimate the historian, who would probably be seldom heard of
to-day If he had not achieved immortal fame by his plays and poems. As
it is, his historical writings have become, for better or worse, a part
of the classical literature of Germany, and as such we have to reckon
with them.
And the best way to reckon with them is to describe them as objectively
as possible and to consider them in relation to the intellectual
tendencies of Schiller's own time. We shall see that he began a history
of the Dutch Rebellion without knowing Dutch or Spanish, and without
spending any time in a preliminary study of the original sources of
information.[80] His 'History of the Thirty Years' War' was a
bread-winning enterprise, hastily executed for a ladies' magazine. For
neither work did he draw a full breath. To compare him, therefore, with
the modern giants of research, would be quite absurd; and the more
absurd since Schiller the historian, unlike Goethe the scientist, was
extremely modest in his self-estimate and fully aware of his limitations
on the side of scholarship.
Of the qualities that go to the making of a great historian he had
two,--the philosophic mind and the vivid imagination. But he lacked the
spirit of the investigator and had not a sufficient reverence for the
naked fact. History interested him for the sake of his theories and his
pictures, and rhetoric was his element. This being so it is not strange
that we get from him now and then a distorted image. Great movements
and prominent characters are depicted by him in accordance with his
freedom-loving, cosmopolitan preconception; and his study was not to
correct this preconception by a survey of all the evidence, but rather
to select that which would confirm his view in a striking manner. On
the whole, however, the tale of his positive error, as brought to light
by the critics, is not as large as one might expect. This chapter will
not deal with it at all, but rather with his general method and point
of view.[81]
'The Defection of the Netherlands' was begun in the summer of 1787 and
grew out of the reading of Watson's 'Philip the Second'. This book
impressed Schiller strongly and he attributed its fascination to the
working of his own imaginative faculty. He wished that others might see
and feel what he had seen and felt. So he began to retell the story in
his own way, intending at first only a brief sketch. As he proceeded, he
found gaps and contradictions and isolated facts of obscure import. He
began to consult the authorities, not so much to increase his store of
information as to clear up his doubts. In this way the intended sketch
expanded ideally into a six-volume treatise which should present the
history of the Netherlands from the earliest times down to the
establishment of their independence. Of the _magnum opus_ thus planned
the first volume, the only one that was ever written, appeared in the
autumn of 1788, in three books. The first book sketched the history of
the Low Countries down to the Spanish domination; the second dealt with
the regency of Margaret of Parma, and the third with the conspiracy of
the nobles, ending with the supersession of Margaret by the Duke of
Alva, in 1567. Thus the most dramatic period of the great struggle was
not reached. Subsequently, however, the narrative was supplemented by
two separate pictures, 'The Death of Egmont' and 'The Siege of Antwerp,'
which in the edition of 1801 were first printed with the history.
Letters of Schiller indicate that for a while at least he was very
enthusiastic in his new pursuit. He found in the seeming capriciousness
of history a constant challenge to the philosophic mind, and he enjoyed
the imaginative exercise of investing the dry bones with muscles and
nerves. It struck him that the inner necessity was much the same in
history as in a work of art. He even went so far as to contend that the
fame of the historian was on the whole preferable to that of the poet,
and to express the opinion that his own nature was more akin to that of
Montesquieu than to that of Sophocles. He felt that he was getting new
ideas and expanding his soul at every step. 'Really,' he wrote to Körner
in 1788, 'I find each day that I am pretty well suited to the business I
am now carrying on. Perhaps there are better men, but where are they? In
my hands history is becoming something in many respects different from
what it has been.'
And so it really was. In point of readableness 'The Defection of the
Netherlands' is vastly superior to any previous historical writing in
the German language. The stately march of its paragraphs, each bearing
the impress of a serious and lofty mind; the care with which seemingly
small matters are logically connected with great issues, the mingling of
philosophic reflection with the narrative,--all this gave to the work an
air of literary distinction. It was actually interesting, and this was
much in a land that had no historical classics whatsoever. To be
interesting was what Schiller frankly aimed at; he wished to 'convince
one portion of his readers that history might be written with fidelity
to the facts, but without becoming a trial to the reader's patience; and
another portion that it might borrow something from a kindred art
without becoming romance'. And he succeeded. In reading him it is easy
to see that the poetic habit of conceiving his characters to fit a
preconceived scheme, his vivid imagination, his love of sharp contrasts,
telling analogies and broad generalizations, occasionally distort the
true relation of things. He was an artist rather than a scholar, and one
must e'en accept him as such. A letter to Karoline von Beulwitz puts the
matter thus:
I shall always be a poor authority for any future investigator who
has the misfortune to consult me. But perhaps at the expense of
historic truth I shall find readers, and here and there I may hit
upon that other kind of truth which is philosophic. History is in
general only a magazine for my fancy, and the objects must content
themselves with the form, they take under my hands.
The animating Idea of 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the same
that Goethe found running through all the writings of Schiller--the idea
of freedom. From the days of his youth 'freedom', however
unphilosophically he might think about it, had connoted for his
imagination the highest and holiest interest of mankind; and when he
began his first historical work his enthusiasm had not yet been sicklied
o'er by the events of the Paris Terror. He saw in the Dutch revolt a
glorious battle for liberty; the struggle of a small trading population
against the proudest, richest and most powerful monarch of the century;
a cause seemingly hopeless at first, but growing stronger through pluck,
union, tenacity and wise leadership, until the Spanish Goliath was
completely beaten. It was magnificent and Schiller desired that his
countrymen should feel its magnificence and take to heart its lesson. So
he adorned his title-page with an emblem of freedom,--a broad-brimmed
hat and a feather upon a pole,--and began his treatise with a
bugle-blast that left no doubt of his purpose: 'I have thought it worth
while to set up before the world this fair monument of civic
strength, in order to waken in the breast of my people a joyous
self-consciousness, and to give a fresh and pertinent example of what
men may venture for a good cause and may accomplish by united action.'
A remarkable passage of the introduction runs as follows:
Let no one expect to read here of towering, colossal men, or of
amazing deeds such as the history of earlier times offers in such
abundance. Those times are past, those men are no more. In the soft
lap of refinement we have allowed the powers to languish which those
ages exercised and made necessary. With humble admiration we gaze
now at those gigantic forms, as a nerveless old man at the manly
sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that
we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of
the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic
spirit which gives sublimity to even the most paltry action. The
pressure of circumstances surprised this people into a knowledge of
their own strength, forcing upon them a transitory greatness which
did not belong to them and which they perhaps will never again
exhibit. So then the strength they manifested has not vanished from
among us, and the success which crowned their desperate adventure
will not be denied to us if, in the lapse of time, similar occasions
call us to similar deeds.
One sees from this that Schiller is, halting between the poetic and the
scientific view of the past, uncertain which way to set his face. The
poet in him is inclined to idealize the brave days of old and to mourn
that the ancient giants are no more. At the same time he finds that the
struggle of the Low Countries, while not 'heroic', was very remarkable,
very instructive and very inspiring. From this observation it is but a
step to the recognition of the truth that it is his own conventional
notion of 'heroism' that needs revising; that the giants of yore were no
taller than those of to-day and that the world's supply of courage and
devotion is not running low. It is an interesting fact that the sentence
beginning, 'So then the strength they manifested,' was omitted by
Schiller from the edition of 1801, possibly because the horrors of the
Revolution had put him out of humor with fighting. But he might well
have allowed the words to stand. Their truth was soon to be memorably
proved by the German uprising against Napoleon.
A German writer[82] remarks correctly that Schiller occupies with Kant a
middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83]
pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose
principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how.
He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating
the distant past with patronizing condescension. At the same time he
wishes to instruct and does not hesitate to point out where the
instruction is to be found. He aims to be impartial to the extent of
giving both sides a hearing, but he imputes motives freely and does not
pretend to extinguish self. Probably the effort to do so would have
seemed to him absurd. His sympathy is of course with the Netherlanders,
but he writes as a philosophic champion of freedom rather than as a
partisan of Protestantism. His concern is not to excite indignation at
the colossal wickedness of Philip and Alva, but to show up their
colossal folly. As we should expect he devotes his best powers to his
portraits, some of which,--as those of Margaret, Granvella, Egmont and
Orange,--are deservedly famous. At the same time they are subject to
correction from the documents. Thus the crafty politician, William the
Silent, in whom there was very little of the strenuous idealist, is
presented as a 'second Brutus, who, far above timid selfishness,
magnanimously renounces his princely station, descends to voluntary
poverty, becomes a citizen of the world and consecrates himself to the
cause of freedom'.
From what has been said it is clear that Schiller regarded the writing
of history as essentially an exercise of the creative imagination. And
such in a sense it really is and always must be, since no historian can
divest himself of his own personality. He will inevitably see the events
with his own eyes and put his own construction upon them. His very
arrangement of his materials, his distribution of lights and shades, his
selection of the matters to be recorded and commented upon, will involve
a subjective coloring of his narrative. This being so, one cannot
reasonably criticize Schiller for having his point of view, but only for
taking too little trouble in the gathering and verification of his
facts. He did not think it important to study his subject from
first-hand sources of information. He quotes more than a score of
authorities in Latin, French and German, but he uses them quite
uncritically, and chiefly, it would seem, to give his work a semblance
of learning. The facts were for him nothing but the raw material of
history; the important thing was their philosophic truth, that is, the
intellectual formula that should explain them. In our day we have grown
distrustful of the 'philosophy of history', especially of any philosophy
that does not rest upon a basis of long and thorough investigation.
'The Defection of the Netherlands' was very favorably received by the
German public. Its merits lay on the surface, while its defects were not
patent to the casual reader. Every one felt that Schiller had set a new
pattern for historical composition. In his hands history had become
literature. With such an achievement to his credit it was natural that
his _début_ in Jena should be looked forward to in academic circles as a
great occasion. Feeling that much would be expected of him he prepared
with great care his inaugural discourse upon the study of universal
history. The address, which was subsequently published in the _Merkur_,
begins with a vigorous elucidation of the difference between the
bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophic thinker. The former is
depicted in caustic terms as a narrow, selfish, timorous time-server. He
is the enemy of reform and discovery, because he is forever dreading
that the enlargement of the human outlook may disturb his little private
routine. He cares for truth only so far as it can be turned to his
personal gain in the form of money, praise or princely favor. The
philosophic thinker, on the other hand, is a joyous lover of his kind.
Feeling the essential solidarity of all knowledge he seeks ever for the
unifying principle. He loves truth for its own sake. Every advance of
knowledge is welcome to him, and he willingly sees his private edifice
go to ruin for the joy of building a new and better one. Then the
lecture proceeds to describe the splendid progress of the human race.
The task of universal history is declared to be the explanation of this
evolutionary process. It must show how all things hang together, and,
selecting for description those portions of the record which have a more
obvious bearing upon the present form of the world, it must seek to
bring home to the modern man the full import of his heirship.
In this address we begin to trace the influence of Kant, whose 'Idea of
a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Spirit', published in 1784, was
read by Schiller with great interest. The leading thoughts of this
memorable paper, new then but very familiar now, are that the race and
not the individual is nature's concern in her scheme of man's
perfectibility; that the only perfection and happiness possible to him
are those which he creates for himself by the progressive triumph of
reason over instinct; that the fighting-spirit, antagonisms, wars, the
madness and the calamity of the individual, are the necessary condition
of race-progress; that the goal is a just civil society, which in turn,
since man is an animal that needs a master, is inseparable from the idea
of a law-governed state. Thus, while Herder's formula for the great
evolutionary process was the upbuilding of the individual man to
humanity, that of Kant was the preparation of man for a free citizenship
which should ultimately embrace the world.
By the general bent of his mind Schiller was nearer to the humane
idealism of Herder than to the law-governed collectivism of Kant. At the
same time we can see from many a sentence in his inaugural address that
the far more rigorous logic of the Königsberg philosopher had had its
effect upon him. In particular he was captivated by the idea that the
individual exists for the sake of the race, and that the gruesome
antagonisms of history are therefore to be regarded with composure as
the birth-pains of the modern man. A striking passage of the lecture
runs thus:
History, like the Homeric Zeus, looks down with the same cheerful
countenance upon the bloody works of war and upon the peaceful
peoples that innocently nourish themselves upon the milk of their
herds. However lawlessly the freedom of man may seem to operate upon
the course of the world, she gazes calmly at the confused spectacle;
for her far-reaching eye discovers even from a distance where this
seemingly lawless freedom is led by the cord of necessity....
History saves us from an exaggerated admiration of antiquity and
from a childish longing for the past. Reminded by her of our own
possessions we cease to wish for a return of the lauded golden age
of Alexander or of Caesar.
From this way of thinking it seems but a span to the modern scientific
point of view; for that, however, neither Schiller nor Kant was ripe,
since both thought it necessary to assume that human history began about
six thousand years ago and began substantially as reported in Genesis,
however the original authentic tradition might have been incrusted with
spurious supernaturalism. The explanation of society thus resolved
itself for them into the problem of a rational interpretation of the
Bible. Kant believed, like Rousseau, in an original paradisaic
condition, in which man had lived as a happy, peaceful animal. But while
man's emergence from that state was regarded by Rousseau as a disaster,
the selfish passions, with their resulting antagonisms, were conceived
by Kant as the _sine qua non_ of rational development. This thought,
with its corollaries, was set forth by Kant in an essay of the year
1786, entitled 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History'. The Fall is
there explained as a good thing, the story in Genesis being interpreted
as a symbol of the emergence of man from the estate of a peaceful but
instinct-governed animal to that of a quarrelsome but rational being.
Kant's line of reasoning interested Schiller deeply, and in 1790 he
published in the _Thalia_ a paper upon the same general subject. It was
entitled 'Something about the First Human Society on the Basis of the
Mosaic Record'.
Portions of this essay, with its naïve license of affirmation, would
make a modern anthropologist shudder. It begins with a description of
the original paradise, from which the infant man was to be led forth
into life by Providence, his watchful nurse. To quote a few words:
By means of hunger and thirst She showed him [let us keep the
feminine providence of the German] the need of nourishment; what he
required for the satisfaction of his needs She had placed around him
in rich abundance; and by the senses of smell and taste She guided
him in his choice. By means of a mild climate She had spared his
nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had
secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind
provision was made in the sexual impulse. As plant and animal man
was complete.... If, now, we regard the voice of God which forbade
the tree of knowledge as simply the voice of instinct warning man
away from this tree, then the eating of the fruit becomes merely a
defection from instinct, that is, the first manifestation of
rational independence, the origin of moral being; and this defection
from instinct, which brought moral evil into the world, but at the
same time made moral good possible, was incontestably the happiest
and greatest event in the history of mankind.
It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather
unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on
Schiller's general attitude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in
his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain
it like any rationalizing professor. The past interests him mainly for
the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good
opinion,--especially of the Goddess of Reason. He did not know what a
terrible trial was preparing for this goddess and her self-complacent
worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his
buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy
of many. For the present, however, it was no inchoate Romanticism, but
a publisher's enterprise, that led him into the study of the Middle
Ages. He had undertaken to edit a great 'Collection of Historical
Memoirs'. There were to be several volumes each year for an indefinite
time; the volumes to consist of translations from various languages and
to cover European history from the twelfth century down. Schiller was
to supervise the undertaking and furnish the needful introductions. His
plans were presently thwarted by illness and then by his increasing
interest in philosophic studies; so that after the first few volumes
had appeared he withdrew and left the continuation of the 'Memoirs' to
other hands.
Of his various contributions to the initial volumes of the 'Historical
Memoirs' a part are mere hack-work and therefore devoid of biographical
interest. Somewhat different is the case with an elaborate account of
the crusades, in which he attempts to show that that great medieval
madness,--so it was regarded by the Age of Enlightenment,--was 'in its
origin too natural to excite our surprise and in its consequences too
beneficent to convert our displeasure into a very different feeling'.
The general argument is that the ancient civilizations were dominated by
the idea of the state; they produced excellent Greeks and Romans but not
excellent men. The prestige of the despotic states was destroyed by the
great migrations, but it was the crusades which first taught the nations
to subordinate patriotism to a higher and broader sentiment. It was then
that men learned to fight for an idea of the reason,--for the truth as
they saw it. And thus the crusades prepared the way for the Reformation.
The interest of the essay lies not in the vigor of its logic, which is
lame here and there, but in the evidence it affords of Schiller's
increasing respect for the Middle Ages. And he went further still. In a
preface which he wrote in 1792, for a German translation of Vertot's
work on the Knights of Malta, we find a passage which sounds very much
like Inchoate Romanticism:
The contempt we feel for that period of superstition, fanaticism and
mental slavery betrays not so much the laudable pride of conscious
strength as the petty triumph of weakness avenging itself in
unimportant mockery for the shame wrung from it by superior
merit.... The advantage of clearer ideas, of vanquished prejudice,
of more subdued passions, of freer ways of thinking (if we really
can claim this credit), costs us the great sacrifice of active
virtue, without which our better knowledge can hardly be counted as
a gain. The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the
fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in
our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our
doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the
crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a
return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had
clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was
then,--if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's
dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.
We see that Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade
on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had
had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age of
Enlightenment.
In comparison with these disconnected and more or less perfunctory
studies, the 'History of the Thirty Years' War' seems like a large
undertaking. But it was not so conceived at first. While 'The Defection
of the Netherlands' is the fragment of a great project, the 'Thirty
Years' War' is the expansion of a small one. We first hear of it in a
letter of December, 1789, wherein Schiller, just then casting about
eagerly for possibilities of income, informs Körner that he is to have
four hundred thalers from Göschen for an 'essay' upon the Thirty Years'
War, to be published in the 'Historical Calendar for Ladies'. He
felicitates himself that the labor will be light, since the material is
so abundant and he is to write only for amateurs. The following spring
he took up his task, which then grew upon his hands as he proceeded. Two
books were printed in the 'Calendar' for 1791, a third in 1792, the
fourth, and also a separate book-edition, in 1793. It met with great
favor, the sales running up to seven thousand, and the author winning
the name of Germany's greatest historian.
And, indeed, it does exhibit Schiller's historical style at its best,
there being here, in comparison with his earlier work, somewhat less of
heavy philosophical ballast. The narrative moves more lightly. There is
this time not even a pretense of erudite scholarship. He does not quote
authorities, rarely indulges in polemic, avoids tedious 'negotiations'
and all political disquisitions which might be dull reading to the
'female fellow-citizens' for whom he writes. He endeavors merely to tell
his complicated story in a lucid and interesting manner. The third book,
which describes the career of Gustav Adolf from the great battle of
Breitenfeld, in 1631, to his death at Lützen in the following year, is
an admirable specimen of vivid historical writing. It may well be
doubted whether any successors of Schiller have surpassed him in the art
of narrating, though they may have been able to correct him here and
there in matters of fact. What a telling description, for example, is
that of the desperate charge at Lützen just after the death of the
Swedish king!
In his last historical work, just as in his first, the burden of
Schiller's thought is evermore the idea of freedom. The Thirty Years'
War is conceived by him as the successful struggle of German liberty
against Hapsburg imperialism. Upon the abstract merits of the religious
controversy he has little to say; the subject evidently does not
interest him. He does indeed make himself the champion of Protestantism,
but only because Protestantism is identified in his mind with the august
cause of liberty. The Protestant princes fought, he tells us, for what
they took to be the truth,--whether it really was the truth does not
matter. Their motives were not always lofty and their historian is not
in the least concerned to hide or to gloss over their frequent venality
and selfishness. His point of view is that they fought for a higher good
than that which their eyes were fixed upon, and this higher good was the
advancement of free cosmopolitanism, 'Europe', he writes in his
introductory reflections, 'emerged unsubdued and free from this terrible
war in which, for the first time, it had recognized itself as a
connected society of states; and this interest of the states in one
another, to which the war first gave rise, would alone be a sufficient
gain to reconcile the citizens of the world to its horrors. The hand of
industry has gradually obliterated the evil effects of the struggle, but
its beneficent consequences have remained.'
Our historian, it is plain, was very firmly convinced that his own
cosmopolitanism was a European finality and was worth all that it had
cost. What would he have said if he could have looked ahead a hundred
years and beheld the nations still snarling at each other's heels in the
same old way!
It is pertinent to observe in this connection that Schiller's enthusiasm
for liberty is quite unaffected by the 'ideas of 1789'. Neither in his
letters nor elsewhere does he manifest any strong sympathy with the
revolutionary aims of the French democracy. Liberty is for him the
perfect fruitage of the benevolent despotism. It is something that
concerns the prince in his relation to some other prince, rather than in
relation to his own subjects. Of the German people at the time of the
Thirty Years' War he has but little to say, his thoughts being fixed
always upon the leaders. His great hero is Gustav Adolf, whom he regards
at first as the unselfish champion of German freedom. Little by little,
however, the portrait of the king undergoes a change: the ideal knight
of Protestantism shades off into the earthy politician and selfish
conqueror. And when at last death overtakes him his historian is
prepared to admit that the event was fortunate for his own royal renown
and for the welfare of Germany. A part of his final estimate runs thus:
Unmistakably the ambition of the Swedish monarch aimed at such power
in Germany as was incompatible with the freedom of the Estates, and
at a permanent possession in the heart of the Empire. His goal was
the Imperial throne; and this dignity, supported and made efficient
by his activity, was in his hands liable to far greater abuse than
was to be feared from the race of Hapsburg. A foreigner by birth,
brought up in the maxims of absolutism, and in his pious enthusiasm
a declared enemy of all papists, he was not the man to guard the
sanctuary of the German constitution, or to respect the freedom of
the Estates.
After the death of Gustav Adolf the focus of interest is Wallenstein,
and when Wallenstein is disposed of the history soon becomes a lean and
hurried summary, the perfunctory character of which Is quite obvious to
the reader.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 80: It is to be taken into consideration that the 'sources',
as the word is now understood, were for the most part inaccessible in
the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 81: The subject which is here necessarily treated in a general
way is discussed much more fully and with admirable balance by K.
Tomaschek, "Schiller in seinem Verhältnis zur Wissenschaft", Wien, 1862.
Another excellent book, if used with some care, is J. Janssen's
"Schiller als Historiker", Freiburg, 1879.]
[Footnote 82: Otto Brahm, "Schiller", II, 209.]
[Footnote 83:
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heiszt,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.--_'Faust', lines 577-8_.]