Dark Days Within and Without
1791-1794
Zu einer Zeit, wo das Leben anfing, mir seinen ganzen Wert zu
zeigen, wo ich nahe dabei war, zwischen Vernunft und Phantasie in
mir ein zartes und ewiges Band zu knüpfen,... nahte sich mir der
Tod.--_Letter of 1791._
The year 1790 was the happiest of Schiller's life. For a little while,
at last, fate became supremely kind to him. The reality of wedlock more
than fulfilled his dreams, and it seemed as if all his vague _malheur
d'être poète_ were about to be buried in the deep bosom of connubial
beatitude. 'We lead the blessedest life together', he wrote to
Christophine Reinwald in May, 'and I no longer know my former self.' And
a month later to Wilhelm von Wolzogen: 'My Lotte grows dearer to me
every day; I can say that I am just beginning to prize my life, since
domestic happiness beautifies it for me.' His income, indeed, was
pitifully small, but his courage was great, his fame well grounded, and
there were prospects here and there. From the first he had regarded the
Jena professorship only as a makeshift. To bring variety into his
academic routine he began, in the summer term of 1790, to lecture upon
the theory of tragedy, developing the subject from his own brain and
paying little attention to the authorities. In the autumn these lectures
were resumed, and soon the aesthetic philosopher began to prevail over
the historian.
And now came his great calamity. In reading the later writings of
Schiller, whether philosophical or poetical, it is difficult to imagine
them the work of an invalid, produced in the intervals of physical
suffering such as would utterly have broken the courage of a less
resolute man. But so it was. The early winter of 1791 brought with it a
disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest
of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him
away prematurely at the age of forty-five.
Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the
Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt. There were
Karoline von Dacheröden and her lover, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was
destined to become Schiller's intimate friend and also his faithful
comrade in the field of aesthetic philosophizing. Then there was the
influential Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a brother of the Mannheim
intendant. This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously
prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was
now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and
expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was
an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness,
and he enjoyed the rôle of Maecenas. In Schiller and Lotte he took a
deep interest, promising to do something handsome for them when he
should come to power at Mainz. While spending his vacation with these
Erfurt friends, at the close of the year 1790, Schiller took a cold
which brought on an attack of pneumonia. An Erfurt doctor treated the
case lightly and unskillfully and sent him back half cured to Jena,
where he resumed his lectures. Now came a second and sharper attack,
with hemorrhage and other alarming symptoms. The doctors operated upon
him as best they knew, with leeches and phlebotomy and purgatives and
vomitives, and came very near killing him. For days he lay at the point
of death, a few faithful students sharing the young wife's anxious vigil
at his bedside. His convalescence was slow and in the end imperfect,
leaving him with wasted strength, a pain in the right lung and a serious
difficulty in breathing. Of course it was all up with his lecturing; but
he easily obtained a release for the summer term from the sympathetic
Duke of Weimar. In March he was well enough to take up the reading of
Kant's then recently published 'Critique of the Judgment', and a little
later to try his hand at translating from the Aeneid in stanzas and to
write a rejoinder to the 'anticritique' of the aggrieved Bürger.
This unfortunate feud with Bürger grew out of a magisterial review
published by Schiller in 1791; a review which, while dignified in tone
and purporting to speak solely in the interest of the lyric art,
amounted to a scathing condemnation of Bürger's character. After
expatiating upon the high vocation of the poet, the necessity of his
thinking and feeling nobly, and the importance of his giving only his
idealized self, the anonymous critic proceeded to comment upon Bürger's
frequent lapses from good taste, his crudities, indecencies and vulgar
ding-dongs, and to refer these things with remorseless directness to
personal defects. The criticism was just and had all the other merits
save discretion and urbanity, Goethe was pleased with it before he knew
who wrote it,[84] and eleven years later Schiller saw nothing in it to
change. In writing it, as a matter of fact, he was only breaking the rod
over his own early self; for in his Stuttgart 'Anthology' he had
committed nearly every sin for which now, from the serene heights of a
better artistic insight, he castigated his victim. To poor Bürger, whose
life was just then bitter enough at the best, the review was a terrible
blow. He at once published a reply, which is also very good reading in
its way, but might have been made much more spicy had he known the name
of his adversary. Schiller's final rejoinder added nothing of importance
to the discussion.[85]
This short digression leads naturally to another. While still at Weimar
Schiller received a visit from Bürger, and the two agreed to vie with
each other in a translation from Vergil. Schiller chose for his
experiment the eight-line stanza which he was proposing to use in an
epic upon Frederick the Great. This 'Fredericiad' was much on his mind
in the spring of 1789. His plan was to center his story about some
ominous juncture in Frederick's career (say the battle of Kollin), and
write a poem which should exhibit in lightly-flowing stanzas the 'finest
flower' of eighteenth-century civilization.[86] Albeit intensely modern
it was to have the indispensable epic 'machinery'. Nothing came of the
project, but a year later he was still ruminating upon it and declared
that he should not be truly happy until he was again making verses.
Instead of attempting an original epic, however, he now began to
translate from the Aeneid, and this light and congenial labor continued
to occupy him for a year or more after the break-down of his health. He
finally completed two books, the second and fourth. The translation is
sonorous and otherwise readable, but it is not Vergil and does not
produce the effect of Vergil. The breaking up of the matter into
stanzas, each having a unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and
perversions,--there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the
original,--and substituted an interrupted romantic cadence for the
stately continuous roll of the hexameter.
The opening lines of the second book will serve as well as any others to
illustrate Schiller's method as a translator:
Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant.
Inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto:
'Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,
Trojanas ut opes et lamentabile regnum
Eruerint Danai; quaeque ipse miserrima vidi
Et quorum pars magna fui.'
Schiller's version runs thus:
Der ganze Saal war Ohr, jedweder Mund verschlossen,
Und Fürst Aeneas, hingegossen
Auf hohem Polstersitz, begann:
Dein Wille, Königin, macht Wunden wieder bluten,
Die keine Sprache schildern kann:
Wie Trojas Stadt verging in Feuerfluten,
Den Jammer willst du wissen, die Gefahr,
Wovon ich Zeuge, ach, und meistens Opfer war.
As for the 'Fredericiad', it never got beyond the status of a plan. By
November, 1791, Schiller had concluded that Gustav Adolf would be a
better subject for an epic,--he could get up no enthusiasm for Unser
Fritz and shrank from the 'gigantic labor of idealizing him'. Soon after
this he seems to have dropped altogether the idea of writing an epic.
In the spring of 1791, when he had grown strong enough to think of
attacking the second installment of the 'Thirty Years' War', Schiller
took up his abode in Rudolstadt; and there, in May, he was prostrated by
a second illness which was worse than the first. His life was despaired
of, he bade his friends farewell and the report went out from Jena that
he was dead. After the crisis was past came weary weeks of lassitude and
pain, with no possibility of writing or reading. In July he took the
waters at Karlsbad, with some slight benefit. By autumn he was well
enough to do the promised continuation of his history and to lay plans
with Göschen for a _New Thalia_ to begin with the next year. But he was
now in desperate straits for money. His illness had been very costly and
the cessation of work had brought a cessation of income. He was in debt
to various friends, and the Duke of Weimar was too poor to help him.
Saddest of all, his beloved wife's health was broken with anxiety and
watching. 'It is a joy to me', he wrote to Körner in October, 'even when
I am busy, to think that she is near me. Her dear life and influence
round about me, the childlike purity of her soul and the warmth of her
love, give me a repose and serenity that would otherwise be impossible
in my hypochondriac condition. If we were only well we should need
nothing else to live like the gods.'
It was a dark juncture, darker far than that of 1784, and now as then
help came unexpectedly from afar. It came this time from Denmark.
The Danish author Baggesen had visited Jena the previous year and
returned home a fervid admirer of Schiller. At Copenhagen he had
imparted his enthusiasm to Count Schimmelmann and the Duke of
Holstein-Augustenburg, who, with their wives, proceeded to found a sort
of Schiller-sect. Full of the time's generous ardor for high and humane
ideas, they were just about to give a rustic fête in honor of their
great German poet, when the news of his death arrived. They met with
heavy hearts and sang the 'Song to Joy', with an added stanza by
Baggesen, wherein they pledged themselves to 'be faithful to Schiller's
spirit until they should meet above'. When they learned a little later
that the author of the 'Song' was alive, after all, and very much in
need of money, the two noblemen immediately wrote him a joint letter,
offering him, in language of admirable delicacy, a gift of a thousand
thalers a year for three years, with no conditions whatever. He was
simply to give himself needed rest and follow the bent of his mind, free
from all anxiety. Should he choose to come to Copenhagen they assured
him that he would find loyal friends and admirers, and a position in the
government service if he desired it.
This timely windfall 'from the clouds' put an end to the misery of
distress about money. For the first time in his life Schiller found
himself free to consult inclination in the forming of his plans and
the disposition of his time. Without hesitation he gratefully accepted
the gift and resolved now at last to take up the study of Kant and
fathom him, though it should require three years. A strange
resolution, it would seem, for a sick poet! Many have judged it unwise
and have deprecated that long immersion in Kantian metaphysic. But
Schiller was the best judge of his own needs, and how he felt about
the matter appears very clearly from a letter that he wrote to Körner
a few months later:
I am full of eagerness for some poetic task and particularly my pen
is itching to be at 'Wallenstein.' Really it is only in art itself
that I feel my strength. In theorizing I have to plague myself all
the while about principles. There I am only a dilettante. But it is
precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to
philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And
it has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many
years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a
rule. Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I
observe the play of inspiration, and my imagination works less
freely, since it is conscious of being watched. But if I once reach
the point where artistic procedure becomes natural, like education
for the well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old
freedom, and know no bounds but those of its own making.
And so it was destined to be. His philosophic studies, pursued with
tireless zeal for a period of three or four years, gave him the
self-assurance that he hoped for. They created for him at least, if not
for all men everywhere, a poetical _modus vivendi_ between natural
impulse and artistic rule. 'Nature' learned to wear the fetters of art
without feeling them as fetters. At last he grew weary of theorizing;
but his later plays, produced in rapid succession, each unlike the other
and all characterized by a remarkable imaginative breadth and freedom,
bear witness to the quantity of artistic energy stored up during this
period of artistic self-repression.
A few words of biography will suffice for the goings and comings of this
Kantian period, which was for Schiller a period of quiet study, eager
discussion and laborious authorship. At first he continued to reside in
Jena. Early in 1792 he started the _New Thalia_, and this he used for
the publication of his earlier aesthetic lucubrations. With the
perfunctory conclusion of the 'Thirty Years' War', in September, his
work as a historian virtually came to an end. He now began to lecture
again, but gave only an aesthetic _privatissimum_ in his own room. He
went out of the house hardly five times during the whole winter, and
when spring came his health was again very precarious. He now determined
to try the effect upon body and soul of the milder climate of his native
Suabia. He set out in August and took the precaution to halt in
Heilbronn, not knowing what brutality the Duke of Württemberg might
still be capable of. On receiving the blessed assurance that his
Highness would 'ignore' him, he continued on his way to Ludwigsburg,
where a son was born, to him in September. He remained in Ludwigsburg
during the winter in pleasant intercourse with his family and friends.
In October Karl Eugen went to his reward. 'The death of the old Herod',
Schiller wrote to Körner, 'does not concern me or my family, except that
all who have to do directly, like my father, with the head of the state,
are glad that they now have a man before them.'[87]
One of the first important official acts of the new duke was to abolish
the Karlschule; but this did not happen until after Schiller had visited
the scene of his former woes, in the role of distinguished son, and had
received the enthusiastic plaudits of the four hundred students. It was
here in Ludwigsburg that his ripest philosophic work, the 'Letters upon
Aesthetic Education' came into being. In the spring he spent some weeks
in Stuttgart, where Dannecker began to model the famous bust that now
adorns the Weimar library. In Stuttgart he made the acquaintance of the
enterprising publisher Cotta, who wished him to undertake the editorship
of a great political journal. But another plan lay nearer to Schiller's
heart, and before he left Suabia he had arranged with Cotta to edit a
high-class literary magazine to be known as _Die Horen_. In May, 1794,
he returned to Jena, glad to have escaped at last from his dear,
distracting fatherland and to be once more at home. His health had not
improved, and he had now become reconciled in a measure to the doom of
the invalid. But although he knew that the death-mark was upon him, the
knowledge only spurred him to more eager activity.[88] He felt that he
had a great work to do and that the time might be short. By this time
his acquaintance with Humboldt had ripened into a warm friendship. 'What
a life it will be', he wrote to Korner, 'when you come here and complete
the triad. Humboldt is for me an infinitely agreeable and at the same
time useful acquaintance; for in conversation with him all my ideas move
happily and move quickly. There is in his character a totality that is
rarely seen and that, except in him, I have found only in you.'
After his return to Jena he lectured no more, but threw all his energy
into the new journal. He prepared an alluring prospectus and invited the
cooperation of all the best writers in Germany. Among these was Goethe,
who sent a favorable reply. And thus began a correspondence which
presently led, as all the world knows, to an ever memorable friendship.
The activities centering in the _Horen_ ushered in a new literary epoch,
the epoch of Germany's brief leadership in modern literature.
Thus the period of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political
excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense
thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse
questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected
him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all
his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for
republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life,
nearly, he had lived with aristocrats, and he himself had the temper of
an aristocrat. There is no evidence in his letters that he ever really
sympathized with the French people, even during the early days of the
revolution, in their practical program of 'liberty, equality and
fraternity'. His notion of liberty was at no time a definite political
concept, but always a rainbow in the clouds,--something to rave and
philosophize over. Of human brotherhood he had sung most affectingly in
the 'Song to Joy', but it was only a poetic kiss that he had ready for
all mankind. He would have been amazed if any plebeian stranger had
proposed to take him at his word. As for equality, there is no evidence
that it entered as a factor or an ideal into his scheme of man's better
time to come.
It was thus perfectly natural, when the proceedings were Instituted
against the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth, that Schiller should take the
part of the accused. The fierce determination of the French democracy to
exact a reckoning from their sovereign, not so much for what _he_ had
done as for ages of accumulated wrong, appeared to him the very madness
of injustice. In December, 1792, he planned to write a book or a
pamphlet in defence of the king, and have it translated into French for
the purpose of influencing public opinion in Paris.[89] He seems
actually to have begun the work, but the fate of the unlucky Bourbon was
swifter than the pen of his German defender. Schiller's horror of the
regicide knew no bounds. 'These two weeks past', he wrote on February 8,
1793, 'I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these
wretched executioners.' The ensuing events of the Terror intensified
this feeling. In speaking of the year 1793, Karoline von Wolzogen has
this to say of her brother-in-law:
He regarded the French Revolution as the effect of passion and not
as a work of wisdom, which alone could produce true freedom. He
admitted, indeed, that many ideas which had previously been found
only in books and in the heads of enlightened men, were now matters
of public discussion; but, he said, the real principles which must
underlie a truly happy civil constitution are not yet so common
among men; they are found (pointing to a copy of Kant's 'Critique'
that lay on the table) nowhere else but here. The French Republic
will cease as quickly as it has come into being. The republican
constitution will give rise to a state of anarchy, and sooner or
later a capable strong man will appear from some quarter and make
himself master not only of France but also, perhaps, of a large part
of Europe.[90]
If this remarkable prediction of Napoleon is rightly reported and
rightly dated by the Baroness von Wolzogen, one can hardly suppose that
Schiller was very much elated when he read in a paper, towards the close
of the year 1792, that he had been made an honorary citizen of the
French Republic. Under a law passed in August of that year,--_l'an
premier de la liberté_,--the name and rights of a French citizen were
bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and
their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism
of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this
honor,--the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Kosciusko being put
to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe,
Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,--and the bill was about to pass when a
deputy arose,--he must have been an Alsatian,--and proposed to add the
name of M. Gille, _publiciste allemand_. The amendment was accepted, and
a few weeks later Minister Roland transmitted to 'M. Gille' an official
diploma of French citizenship. It took the postal authorities of Germany
some six years to deliver the letter, and when at last they succeeded,
its recipient was less than ever in a mood to be overjoyed at the
well-meant distinction that had been conferred upon him by the French
republicans.
The progress of the Revolution appeared to Schiller to endanger the
higher interests of civilization. He was too close to it for a serenely
impartial view. Had it been an occurrence of the sixteenth century, he
would have been just the man to philosophize over it and to show that in
this case, again, "the frenzy of the nations was the statesmanship of
fate". As it was, the unrest of the people, and their increasing
absorption in questions of mere politics, disgusted him. He felt that a
counteragent was needed. And so, declining Cotta's offer anent the
political journal, and thus leaving the famous _Allgemeine Zeitung_ to
begin its career a few years later under other hands, he chose Instead
to found the _Horen_, which was to exclude politics altogether and
induce people, if possible, to think of something else. He saw that the
times were unpropitious for his enterprise, but felt that it was for
that very reason the more urgently needed. In announcing the _Horen_ to
the public in 1795 he wrote:
The more the minds of men are excited, shut in and subjugated by the
narrow interests of the present, the more urgent is a general and
higher interest in that which is purely human and superior to all
influences of the time; an interest which shall set men free again
and unite the politically divided world under the banner of truth
and beauty. This is the point of view from which the authors of the
_Horen_ wish it to be regarded. The journal is to be devoted to
cheerful and passionless entertainment, and to offer the mind and
heart of its readers, now angered and depressed by the events of the
day, a pleasant diversion. In the midst of this political tumult it
will form for the Muses and Graces a little intimate circle, from
which everything will be banished that is stamped with the impure
spirit of partisanship.
Many a modern reader will be inclined, perhaps, to smile at this
deliverance and to see in it a fatuous misjudgment of the relative
importance of things. The French Revolution versus a spray of aesthetic
rose-water! But we must not be too hasty. Posterity has no better
criterion for judging great men than the criterion of service. And
service is a question of vocation. As the matter is put by Goethe, who
himself a little later took refuge from the _misère_ of the Napoleonic
epoch in the contemplative poetry of the Orient: 'Man may seek his
higher destiny on earth or in heaven, in the present or in the future;
yet for that reason he remains exposed to constant wavering within and
to continual disturbance from without, until he once for all makes up
his mind to declare that that is right which is in accordance with his
own nature,'[91] It was not in Schiller to be a political journalist or
a pamphleteer. In that field he would have wasted his splendid energy.
He knew what he could do best; and it was well for his country and for
the world that he chose to withdraw from the turmoil of the Revolution
and prepare himself for 'Wallenstein' and 'William Tell'.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 84: So, at least, Schiller states in a letter of March 3,
1791, to Körner.]
[Footnote 85: The original review, together with Bürger's reply and
Schiller's rejoinder, are printed in Sämmtliche Schriften, VI, 314 ff.]
[Footnote 86: The plan is very fully discussed in a letter of March 10,
1789, to Körner.]
[Footnote 87: On the other hand, Wilhelm von Hoven, who was with
Schiller at the time, represents him as deeply touched by the death of
Duke Karl and as expressing himself thus: "Da ruht er also, dieser
rastlos thätig gewesene Mann. Er hatte grosze Fehler als Regent,
gröszere als Mensch, aber die ersteren wurden vor seinen groszen
Eigenschaften weit überwogen, und das Andenken an die letzteren musz mit
dem Toten begraben werden; darum sage ich dir, wenn du, da er nun dort
liegt, jetzt noch nachteilig von ihm sprechen hörst, traue diesem
Menschen nicht: er ist kein guter, wenigstens kein edler Mensch." Cf.
Kuno Fischer, "Schiller-Schriften", I, 153, and Karoline von Wolzogen,
"Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]
[Footnote 88: A letter of May 24, 1791, contains the brave words: "Ich
habe mehr als einmal dem Tod ins Gesicht gesehen, und mein Mut ist
dadurch gestärkt worden."]
[Footnote 89: Letter of December 21, to Körner.]
[Footnote 90: "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt.]
[Footnote 91: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", Elftes Buch.]