Aesthetic Writings
Es ist gewisz von keinem Sterblichen kein gröszeres Wort gesprochen
als dieses Kantische, was zugleich der Inhalt seiner ganzen
Philosophie ist: Bestimme dich aus dir selbst. _Letter of 1793._
From a quotation in the preceding chapter we have seen what Schiller
hoped for when he resolved to grapple with the Kantian philosophy. He
was in pursuit of that which would help him as a poet. He felt that a
little philosophy had done him harm by quenching his inner fire and
destroying his artistic spontaneity. The rules were continually coming
between him and his creative impulses. His hope was that more philosophy
would repair the damage by making the principles of art so clear and so
familiar that they would become as second nature, and therefore cease to
be felt as a clog or an interference.
This expectation, looking at the matter _a priori,_ was reasonable
enough. Looking at it retrospectively, Goethe came to the conclusion, as
is well known, that Schiller's philosophic bent had injured his poetry
by teaching him to 'regard the idea as higher than all nature'. Goethe
thought it 'depressing to see how such an extraordinarily gifted man had
tormented himself with philosophic modes of thought that could be of no
use to him'.[92] But this does not tell the whole story, notwithstanding
the greatness of the authority. To assert that all philosophy is always
harmful to a poet would be to assert the most patent nonsense. Goethe
himself at one time found help and inspiration in Spinoza, the dryest
and most abstract of thinkers;[93] and after all, 'nature' comes off
about as well in 'Wallenstein' as in 'Faust'. It is a question of
personal endowment, of what the mind can assimilate and turn to account.
There are many kinds of the poetic temper, the intellectual element
blending variously with the emotional, the instinctive and the visional.
For Schiller poetry was not 'somnambulism', but a very deliberate
process; wherefore it was quite natural for him to expect that a season
of philosophic study would be good for him. So he set out to fathom the
laws of beauty; assuming, of course, that there must be such laws and
that they must be, in some sense or other, laws of human nature.
To follow him critically in all the by-ways of his theorizing would
require a treatise; and the treatise would be dull reading, except,
peradventure, to such as might be specially interested in the history of
aesthetic discussion. In the end, too, it would shed but little light
upon Schiller's later plays, which were in no sense the offspring of
theory and were influenced only in a very general way by their author's
previous philosophical studies. To understand the poet's development it
is nowise necessary to lose one's self with him in the Serbonian bog of
metaphysic. On the other hand, it _will_ be useful to know what the
problems were that chiefly interested him, and to see how he attacked
them and what conclusions he arrived at. With the soundness of his
reasoning and the final value of his contributions to the literature of
aesthetics we need hardly concern ourselves at all; since the scientific
questions involved are differently stated and differently approached at
the present time.[94]
The pre-Kantian stage of Schiller's aesthetic philosophy is of quite
minor importance. He obtained his original stock of ideas at the
Stuttgart academy from Ferguson's 'Institutes', as translated by Garve.
In Ferguson, who rested strongly upon Shaftesbury, no line was drawn
between the moral and the aesthetic domain. It was taught that all truth
is beauty and that 'the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and
moral truth'. Perfection was made to depend on harmony and proportion;
and moral beauty upon the harmony of the individual soul with the
general system of things. Wrong action was regarded as discord,
imperfection. Virtue, being a disposition toward the general harmony,
necessarily meant happiness. Thoughts of this kind, mixed up with vague
ideas of a pre-established harmony, constituted the staple of Schiller's
early philosophizing. The identity of the good, the true and the
beautiful, was for him the highest of all generalizations, though more a
matter of pious emotion than of close thinking.
Nor do we observe any noteworthy change of attitude in the minor
philosophic writings, such as the letters of Julius and Raphael, and the
second book of 'The Ghostseer',--which he published prior to his
acquaintance with Kant. In these it is always the moralist that speaks,
and the great question is the bearing of skepticism on individual
happiness. But by the end of his first year in Weimar the moralist had
begun to retreat before the aesthetic philosopher. For the author of
'The Gods of Greece' and 'The Artists', it is evident that the beautiful
has become the corner-stone of the temple. He saw before him all at once
a new region that invited exploration. If art had played such a
commanding role in the history of the world, it was evidently of the
greatest importance to understand it. It was this feeling for the
dignity of art, as the greatest of factors in human perfectibility, that
led him to devote the leisure afforded by his Danish pension to a
thorough study of Kantian aesthetics.
He began quite independently, as we have seen, with a course of lectures
upon the theory of tragedy. The lectures were never published, but the
cream of them is probably contained in two essays, 'On the Rational
Basis of Pleasure in Tragic Themes', and 'On the Tragic Art', which were
contributed to the _New Thalia_ in 1792. In the former Schiller first
combats the idea that art has any higher aim than the giving of
pleasure. Its aim, he argues, is not morality but 'free pleasure', the
'free' meaning subject to no law but its own. If morality is made its
final aim, it ceases to be 'free'. Then the essay goes on to discuss the
_crux_ of our feeling pleasure in painful representations. All pleasure,
we read, comes from the perception of _Zweckmäszigkeit_, that is, the
quality of being adapted to the furtherance of an end. Since man is
meant to be happy and naturally seeks happiness, human suffering affects
us primarily as a 'maladaptation', and so gives us pain. But in this
very pain our reason recognizes a higher 'adaptation', since we are
incited by it to activity. We know that it is good for us and for
society; and so we take pleasure in our own pain. The total effect of
tragedy depends upon the proportion in which this higher sense of
adaptation is present.
The important thing to notice in this argument is that aesthetic
judgments are made to depend upon concepts of the mind. The reason, with
its abstractions of 'fitness' and what not, is regarded as the prior and
the dominating factor. In the second of the two essays, however, we find
a distinct recognition of the fact that emotional excitement may give
pleasure in and of itself. Illustrations are brought in,--such as the
passion for gaming and for dangerous adventure, and the general love of
ghost stories and tales of crime,--which go to show that Schiller by no
means overlooked the non-rational element in the pleasure afforded by
tragedy. Nevertheless he seems to have attached very little importance
to that element, for he goes on to observe that we know only two sources
of pleasure, namely, the satisfaction of our bent for happiness
(_Glückseligkeitstrieb_), and the fulfillment of moral laws. As the
pleasure we take in acted or narrated suffering cannot proceed from the
former, it must spring from the latter and do its work by gratifying the
'bent for activity' _(Thätigkeitstrieb)_, which is a moral bent.--After
a long tussle with such hazy abstractions the essayist attempts a
working definition and practical discussion of tragedy. This part of the
essay is still eminently readable, but need not be analyzed here.
Sufficient to say that Schiller regards the excitation of 'sympathy' as
the sole aim of tragedy. He has nothing to say of the Aristotelian
'fear' or 'katharsis'; in fact he did not make the acquaintance of
Aristotle until 1797.[95]
It would be next in order to consider the lectures of 1792-93, but
unluckily they are known only from the notes of a student.[96] As
published in 1806 they bear the impress of Schiller's mind, but are too
brief and summary to be counted among his works. They show that by 1793
he had come to feel at home in the field of aesthetic speculation. He
had read Kant and Moritz and Burke, and was ready with his criticisms.
In particular, he had found what he regarded as a weak point in the
system of Kant, who had not only made no attempt to establish an
objective criterion of beauty, but had summarily dismissed the whole
problem as obviously hopeless. Schiller felt that, if this were so,
there was no firm foundation anywhere, and all aesthetic judgments were
reduced to a matter of taste,--which was of course a very unwelcome
conclusion. In the belief that he had found the missing link he planned,
toward the end of 1792, a treatise to be known as 'Kallias, or
Concerning Beauty'. It was to take the form of a dialogue, to be written
in a pleasing style, with a plenty of illustration,--merits to which
Kant could lay no claim,--and to review the whole history of aesthetic
theorizing.
This plan was finally given up, but a series of rather abstruse letters
to Körner, beginning in January, 1793, may be regarded as preparatory
studies for the contemplated treatise. Schiller's idea was, evidently,
to blaze a private trail through the jungle of Kantian theory, with
Körner's critical assistance, and then to return and convert the trail
into an agreeable road for the general reader. In the end he chose a
different form than that of the Socratic dialogue for the literary
presentation of his doctrine, but what he wrote subsequently was based
partly at least upon conclusions that he had reached through his
correspondence with Körner; wherefore it will be well to look a little
more closely, at this point, into his quarrel with the Königsberg
philosophy.
As is well known, Kant placed the aesthetic faculty under the
jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of
connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that
is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according
to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object
is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is
produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we
have an interest,--we will the former and desire the latter. The
beautiful, on the other hand, is that which pleases without appealing to
any interest (_interesseloses Wohlgefalien_). This is its character
under the category of quality. Under that of quantity it is a
universal pleasure; under that of relation, a form of adaptation
(_Zweckmäszigkeit_), with no end present to the mind. Finally, under the
fourth category--modality--it is 'necessary', being determined not by
any objective criterion, but by the _sensus communis_ of mankind, that
is, their agreement in taste.
For Kant, then, the whole matter of aesthetics is a subjective matter.
He does not inquire what it is that makes objects beautiful, but how it
is that we 'judge' them to be beautiful. While his predecessors made the
impression of the beautiful to depend upon objective attributes of form,
proportion, harmony, completeness and the like, he insisted that the
essence of beauty was to please without reference to any such
intellectual concept whatever. His terminology was not very happy, since
a judgment that has nothing to do with the intellect is not a judgment
at all, but a feeling; nevertheless his system brought out clearly,--and
this is perhaps his most important merit in the domain of
aesthetics,--the necessity of distinguishing more sharply between the
beautiful, on the one hand, and the good and agreeable, on the other.
But in expounding his central doctrine, that beauty cannot depend upon a
mental concept, he is not quite consistent; for he recognizes
'adaptation' as a form of beauty, and adaptation is a concept of the
mind. To meet this difficulty he makes a distinction between free beauty
(_pulchritudo vaga_) and adherent beauty (_pulchritudo adhaerens_), the
latter being mixed up with the good or the desirable. Even a generic or
a normative concept was for him fatal to the idea of pure beauty. Thus
pure beauty could not be affirmed of a horse, because one inevitably has
in his mind an antecedent notion as to how a horse ought to look. Again,
there could be no such thing as pure beauty,--at the best only adherent
beauty,--in a moral action, since a moral action does not please in and
of itself. At the same time Kant held that the highest use of beauty is
to symbolize moral truth, and in illustrating the possibilities of this
symbolism he indulged in some rather fanciful speculations.
Now we can easily understand that Schiller, notwithstanding all his
admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching
importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a
philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any
woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some
mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's _sensus
communis aestheticus_, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a
matter of taste. His mental attitude is clearly brought to view in a
letter of February 9, 1793, to the Prince of Augustenburg. After
speaking warmly of Kant's great service to philosophy, he describes thus
the problem which Kant regarded as impossible of solution and which he
himself, Schiller, was bold enough to attempt:
When I consider how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the
great is connected with the noblest part of our being, it is
impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play
of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules. It
seems to me that beauty too, as well as truth and right, must rest
upon eternal foundations, and that the original laws of the reason
must also be the laws of taste. It is true that the circumstance of
our feeling beauty and not cognizing it seems to cut off all hope
of our finding a universal law for it, because every judgment
emanating from this source is a judgment of experience. As a rule
people accept an explanation of beauty only because it harmonizes
in particular cases with the verdict of feeling; whereas, if there
were really such a thing as the cognition of beauty from
principles, we should trust the verdict of feeling because it
coincides with our explanation of the beautiful. Instead of testing
and correcting our feelings by means of principles, we test
aesthetic principles by our feelings.
So then Schiller attacked his problem in the aforementioned letters to
Körner and was soon able to announce his solution: Beauty is nothing
else than freedom-in-the-appearance (_Freiheit in der Erscheinung_).
To make clear the steps by which he arrived at that formula and the
wealth of meaning that it contained for him would require a fuller
analysis of his argument than there is space for in this chapter.
Suffice it to say that he now fully accepts the dogma of Kant that
beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept,--the feeling of pleasure is
the prior fact. At the same time he has an unshakable conviction that
beauty must somehow fall under the laws of reason. He gets rid of the
_crux_ by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of
Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the
'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands
freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality.
Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies
upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the
object is free, autonomous, self-determined. He then propounds his
theory that beauty is simply an analogon of moral freedom. On the
presentation of an object the practical reason (_i.e._, the will) may
banish for the time being all concepts of the pure reason, may assume
complete control and ask no other question than whether the object is
free, self-determined, autonomous. If, then, the object appears to be
free, to follow no law but its own, the practical reason is satisfied;
the effect is pleasurable and we call it beauty. Schiller is careful to
point out that it is all a question of appearance: the object is not
really free,--since freedom abides only in the supersensual world,--but
the practical reason imputes or lends freedom to it. Hence beauty is
freedom in the appearance.
In a letter of February 23, 1793, he applies his dogma to an exposition
of the relation between nature and art. The problem of the artist in the
representation of an object, so the theory runs, is to convey a
suggestion of freedom, that is, of not-being-determined-from-without.
This he can only do by making the object appear to be determined from
within, in other words, to follow its own law. It must have a law and
obey it, while seeming to be free. The law of the object is what is
disclosed by technique, which is thus the basis of our impression of
freedom. Starting from Kant's saying that nature is beautiful when it
looks like art, and art beautiful when it looks like nature, Schiller
gives a large number of concrete illustrations of his theory. Thus a
vase is beautiful when, without prejudice to the vase-idea, it looks
like a free play of nature. A birch is beautiful when it is tall and
slender, an oak when it is crooked; the shape in either case expressing
the nature of the tree when it follows nature's law. 'Therefore', he
concludes his illustrations, 'the empire of taste is the empire of
freedom; the beautiful world of sense being the happiest symbol of what
the moral world should be, and every beautiful object about me being a
happy citizen who calls out: Be free like me.'
It did not escape our theorist that his hard-won criterion of beauty was
after all, apparently, an idea of the reason. He was however prepared to
meet this difficulty and promised to do so in a future letter. But the
aesthetic correspondence with Körner was not continued beyond February.
The project of the 'Kallias' continued for some time longer to occupy
Schiller's mind, but a fresh attack of illness intervened, and when he
was again able to work he turned his mind to an essay upon 'Winsomeness
and Dignity' (_Anmut und Würde_). It was written in May and June, 1793,
and printed soon afterwards in the _New Thalia_. In this essay we can
observe a growing independence of thought and an amazing gift for the
analysis of subtle impressions. In the main it is lucid enough,
especially when one calls in the aid of the preceding letters to Körner;
but portions are hard reading. To give the gist of it in a few words is
next to impossible, because it is so largely taken up with superfine
distinctions in the meaning of words for which our language has at best
but rough equivalents.
It will be recalled that Kant had denied pure beauty to the human form,
on the ground that the human form expresses the moral dignity of human
nature, which is an idea of the reason. Schiller was piqued by this
dictum to test _his_ theory of beauty on the human form. He begins, in a
manner fitted to make old Homer smile, with a rationalizing account of
the girdle of Venus,--the girdle which Venus lends to Juno when the
latter wishes to excite the amorous desire of Jove. Venus, we are told,
is pure beauty as it comes from the hand of nature. Her girdle makes her
'winsome'. So winsomeness is something distinct from beauty; something
transferable, movable. It is then further defined as beauty of motion;
as the special prerogative of man; as the element of beauty which is not
given by nature but is produced by the object. The essay then goes on to
make a distinction between architectonic and technical beauty. The
former is defined as a beautiful presentation of the aims of nature, the
latter as referring to the aims themselves. The aesthetic faculty is
concerned with architectonic beauty. In contemplation of an object it
isolates the appearance and is affected by that alone, irrespective of
any ideas of purpose or adaptation. At the same time the reason imputes
freedom to the object, and when the object is a human form, this imputed
freedom, whereby the object seems to assert its own autonomous
personality, this which is superadded to the beauty that nature creates
by the law-governed adaptation of means to ends, is winsomeness.--All of
which seems to mean substantially this: That while Pygmalion's statue
was still ivory _it_ was beautiful; but when it became a woman with
winsome ways _she_ was winsome.
Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that beauty is really compounded
of two elements, first the sensuous pleasure caused by the play of
personality, and secondly the rational gratification caused by the idea
of adaptation to an end, Schiller takes up the questions of moral beauty
and of the ideal of character. He deprecates Kant's strenuous insistence
upon the categorical imperative of duty. A man, he urges, must be free;
and the slavery of duty is no better than any other slavery. Virtue is
inclination to duty, and the ideal is to be found in the perfect
equipoise of the sensuous and the rational nature; in other words, when
'thou shalt' and 'I would' pull steadily and harmoniously in the same
direction. So he defines 'dignity' (_Würde_) as the expression of a
lofty mind, just as winsomeness is the expression of a beautiful soul.
Control of impulses by moral strength is intellectual freedom, and
dignity is the visible expression of this freedom. Dignity is manifested
rather in suffering ([Greek: pathos]), winsomeness in behavior ([Greek:
ethos]). Each acts as a check upon the other. We demand that virtue be
winsome and that inclination be dignified, and where winsomeness and
dignity are present in harmonious equipoise in the same person, there
the expression of humanity is complete.
In the essay just spoken of reference is made more than once to a
contemplated 'Analytic of the Beautiful', which was to clear up this and
that. Instead of attempting a treatise, however, Schiller chose to go on
settling his account with Kant through the medium of contributions to
the _New Thalia_. Those published immediately (1793-4) were the essay
'On the Sublime', which included a special chapter 'On the Pathetic';
and 'Scattered Reflections on Various Aesthetic Subjects'. Two other
papers of kindred import, dating from this period, were not published
until 1801. These were: 'On the Artistic Use of the Vulgar and the Low',
and a second disquisition 'On the Sublime'.
Following Kant Schiller defines the sublime as the impression produced
by an object which excites in man's sensuous nature a feeling of
weakness and dependence, and at the same time in his rational nature a
feeling of freedom and superiority. He objects, however, to the Kantian
nomenclature. For the two kinds of sublime which Kant called the
mathematical and the dynamic, he proposes the names of the theoretical
and the practical; meaning by the former that which tends to overawe the
mind, by the latter that which tends to overawe the feeling. Then
follows a long and juiceless _Begriffszergliederung_, which may be
passed over as containing little that is of importance for the
understanding of Schiller's individuality. At last he comes to the
subject of tragic pathos, as the most important phase of the
practical-sublime. Here he lays down the dogma that the final aim of art
is the representation of the supersensuous. The essence of tragic pathos
is declared to be the representation of moral superiority under the
stress of suffering. The hero's sufferings must seem to be real that he
may obtain due credit for his moral triumph. In connection with this
thought Schiller takes occasion to deride the genteel sufferers of the
French classic tragedy and to commend the Greeks for their fidelity to
nature. At the same time he utters his word of warning to those poets
who think to gain their end merely by the spectacle of great suffering.
The sensuous, he Insists, has in itself no aesthetic value; it is the
moral resistance that counts, and the suffering is needed only to show
that there really was something to resist. The latter part of the essay
is directed against those who would try the creations of the poet by the
standards of the moral judgment. It is argued that the moral and the
aesthetic spheres of interest are separate and distinct. The poet is
concerned with the latter. What he needs for his purpose is the
manifestation of strength; whether the strength is put forth to a good
or an evil purpose is, in itself, a matter of indifference. The poet
cannot serve two masters.
In all these discussions of the sublime and the pathetic, et cetera,
Schiller exhibits a pathetically sublime faith in the possibility of
settling the questions at issue by the analytic method. He writes as if
the human mind were composed of air-tight compartments, wherein the
various operations of reason, understanding, taste, feeling and what
not, are carried on under immutable laws growing out of the nature of
man. His philosophy is also dualistic. He regards 'man' as consisting of
two parts joined like the Siamese twins. The one part, sensuous man,
which is like unto the animals, is a part of 'nature'; the other part,
the rational man, which is dowered with the birth-right of 'freedom', is
outside of nature and above it. The untenableness of this conception has
become since Schiller's time increasingly evident. Moreover, we have
learned to look upon all things under the aspect of development and to
know that man's reason, like the rest of him, is very much the creature
of time and place. This being so, one finds it difficult, nowadays, to
read the philosophic lucubrations of Schiller with that patience which
their well-meant seriousness really deserves. Indeed he himself seems to
have felt all along that there was some danger of his being carried too
far away into the region of barren speculation; wherefore it was
necessary, as he thought, not only to present his ideas in a popular
form, but also to prove their relevancy to the practical concerns of
human life.
It was with this thought in mind that he finally began, instead of the
'Kallias', a series of letters to his benefactor, the Prince of
Augustenburg. In a long letter of July 13, 1793, he explained his point
of view. The political dream of the century, he declared, that is, the
dream of recreating society upon a foundation of pure reason, had come
to naught. 'Man' had shown himself unfit for freedom. His chains
removed, he stood revealed as a barbarian and a slave,--the slave of
unruly passion. And this notwithstanding all that the century had done
for the enlightenment of his mind! Evidently the need of the hour and of
the future was not so much enlightenment of the mind as discipline of
the feelings. In a number of subsequent letters, admirable in style and
spirit, Schiller set forth his theory of aesthetic education and his
vision of the great good to be accomplished by it in the redemption of
mankind from the dominion of the grosser passions. Objections were duly
considered, especially the discouraging fact that, historically,
aesthetic refinement has too often coincided with supineness of
character and moral degeneracy. This consideration made it an important
part of the problem to show how the dangers of aesthetic culture could
best be counteracted.
The letters to the Danish prince formed the basis of the 'Letters on
Aesthetic Education', which were published in 1795 in the _Horen_, and
constitute the ripest and most pleasing expression of Schiller's
aesthetic philosophy. In the first ten of the 'Letters' he discusses the
spirit of the age, for the purpose of showing that some sort of
educational process is needed in order to fit mankind for the high
calling of the freeman. The problem is to transform the
state-ruled-by-force into a state-ruled-by-reason. To this end man must
learn to resist and subdue the two inveterate enemies of his nobility,
namely, the tyranny of sense which leads to savagery, and the inertness
of mind which leads to barbarism, Schiller defines the savage as a man
whose feelings control his principles, the barbarian as a man whose
principles destroy his feelings. At present, he declares, the mass of
men still oscillate between savagery and barbarism, but the man _comme
il faut_ must establish and preserve a perfect equipoise between his
sensuous and his rational nature. Whither shall he look for help? The
state cannot aid him, for it treats him as if he had no reason; nor can
philosophy save him through the mere cultivation of the reason, for it
treats him as if he had no feelings. His only redeemer is the aesthetic
sense, the love of beauty.
The 'Letters' then take up the desperate task of showing how the
aesthetic sense can do this wonderful work. Descending to the lowest
nadir of abstraction,--Schiller calls it rising to the highest
heights,--he brings up two ultimate instincts or bents of mankind, to
which he gives the appalling names of the 'thing-bent' and the
'form-bent' (_Sachtrieb_ and _Formtrieb_). The former impels to a change
of status, the latter to the preservation of personality. The one is
satisfied with what is mutable and finite, the other demands the
immutable and the rational. To harmonize these two instincts, to take
care that neither gets the better of the other or invades the other's
territory, is the problem of culture. For a driver of the ill-matched
team Schiller calls in the _Spieltrieb_, or play-bent, which is only a
new name for the aesthetic faculty. His idea is that in the moment of
aesthetic contemplation the sensuous and the rational instinct both find
their account. In the act of escaping from the serious pull of thought
and feeling to a mental state which satisfies both without succumbing
completely to either, he finds an analogy to the act of playing. At the
same time he is careful to point out that this kind of play is different
from the sports of common life. As he uses the word, it means surrender
to the illusion of art. Play is thus the symbol of the highest
self-realization. Only in playing is man completely man.
The last ten letters are devoted to what Schiller, following Kant,
calls 'melting beauty' (_schmelzende _Schönheit_), which is opposed to
'energizing beauty' (_energische Schönheit_). The former is the natural
corrective to the emotional excess which leads to savagery, while the
latter (the sublime, the stirring,) is the antidote to the mental
inertness which leads to barbarism. It is admitted that the aesthetic
state is perfectly neutral so far as concerns the influencing of the
will. A good work of art should leave us in a state of lofty serenity
and freedom of mind. If we find ourselves influenced to a particular
course of action, that is a sure sign that the art was bad.
Nevertheless,--and here lies the kernel of the whole discussion, so far
as it bears upon education,--the aesthetic state is a necessary stage
in the restoration of imperilled freedom. It is valuable morally simply
because it _is_ neutral ground. When a man is under the too exclusive
domination of either principles or feelings, he is in danger of
becoming a slave, and needs to be pulled back to the neutral belt of
freedom, in order that he may start afresh. 'In a word', says Schiller,
'there is no other way of making the sensuous man rational except by
first making him aesthetic.' Finally the 'Letters' take up the
evolution of man from the state of savagery and attempt to show
argumentatively and in detail how his progress has been determined by
the development of his aesthetic sense.
Such are the 'Letters on Aesthetic Education', which Schiller regarded,
in the year 1795, as a tract for the times. Years agone he had made Karl
Moor talk of poisoning the ocean; now he himself was thinking to sweeten
a poisoned ocean with a bottle of aesthetic syrup. We see that the gist
of the whole matter is simply this: That sanity and refinement are
pressing needs; that good art makes for these things and in so doing
makes indirectly for progress in right living and right thinking. This
looks like a painfully small result to have been reached by such long
and laborious logic-chopping; so that one is reminded of Carlyle's
cynical observation that the end and aim of the Kantian philosophy "seem
not to make abstruse things simple, but to make simple things abstruse".
It is to be remarked, however, that the real value of the 'Letters' is
not to be found in the logic-chopping, for which their author apologizes
again and again; not in the "dreadful array of first principles, the
forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the panting intellect
of weaker men wanders as in pathless thickets and at length sinks
powerless to the earth, oppressed with fatigue and suffocated with
scholastic miasma",[97]--but in the incidental flashes of luminous and
suggestive comment.
Having himself conquered the Kantian dialect and learned to write it,
Schiller had little patience with those who supposed that philosophic
truth could and should be set forth in the easy manner of a fireside
yarn. It was to free his mind on this subject that he published, in one
of the early numbers of the _Horen_, an essay 'On the Necessary Limits
of the Beautiful'. Here the burden of his thought is that the
philosopher, aiming at truth, must not yield to the seduction of trying
to write beautifully. His concern is with fact and logic; imagination
and feeling have no place in his domain. The lure of beauty may relax
the mind and endanger truth, just as it may relax the will and endanger
morality. This last thought contained the germ of his further essays,
'On the Dangers of Aesthetic Culture' and 'On the Moral Benefit of
Aesthetic Culture'. These, however, are only an amplification of ideas
contained in the 'Letters'.
There remain for consideration, to complete our survey of Schiller's
philosophical writings, his short essay on Matthison's poems and his
long disquisition upon 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. In the review he
discusses the subject of landscape poetry, thus touching upon a question
that had occupied Lessing in the 'Laokoön'. But instead of arguing like
Lessing that detailed description of objects is necessarily out of place
in poetry, Schiller defends it as capable in a high degree of giving
pleasure. The poetic effectiveness of a description he finds to consist,
first, in the truthfulness of the description; secondly, in its power,
analogous to that of music, to excite vague emotion; and finally, in its
power to awaken ideas by the law of association. He distinguishes
between 'true' nature and 'actual' nature. We arrive at true nature when
we take away from actual nature whatever is accidental, peculiar or
unnecessary. This process is precisely what is described in one of the
'Kallias' letters as 'idealization'.
To idealize an object is, then, in Schiller's vocabulary, not to
beautify it, or to make it in any way other than it is, but to portray
the 'idea' of it, that is, its essential truth, apart from all that is
accidental or individual. He lays down the general rule that poetry is
only concerned with true (or ideal) nature in this sense; never with
actual (or historical) nature. 'Every individual man', he declares, 'is
by just so much less a man as he is an individual; every mode of feeling
is by just so much less necessary and purely human as it is peculiar to
a particular person. The grand style consists in the rejection of all
that is accidental and the pure expression of the necessary.'
Of the essay upon 'Naïve and Sentimental Poetry', contributed to the
_Horen_ in 1795, the first part is devoted to the 'Naïve', which is
defined as nature in felt contrast with art. To be naïve an action must
not only be natural but must put us to shame by suggesting a contrast
with our own sophisticated standards. From this it follows that our
pleasure in the naïve, being connected with an idea of the reason, is
not purely aesthetic, but partly moral. The _naïveté_ of children
appeals to us because they are what we were and what we should again
become. They represent an ideal, a theophany. Though we may look down
upon the childish, we can only look up to the childlike. A naïve action
always implies a triumph of nature over art: if it is unintentional
(naïve of surprise) we are amused; if deliberate (naïve of character) we
are touched. Genius is always naïve. Both in its works and in social
intercourse, it manifests the simplicity and directness of nature. It is
modest because nature is modest; but cares nothing for decency, for
decency is the offspring of corruption. It is sensible, but not shrewd.
It expresses its loftiest and deepest thoughts with naive grace: they
are divine oracles from the mouth of a child.
These thoughts duly expounded, the essay goes on to consider the modern
man's feeling for nature. This results, according to Schiller, from our
imputing _naïveté_ to the non-rational world. We are conscious of having
wandered away from the state of innocence, happiness and perfection.
'Nature' represents this state to our imaginations; it is the voice of
the mother calling us back home, or whispering to us of boundless
happiness and perfection. Poetry which expresses this boundless longing
for the ideal is 'sentimental', while that which reflects nature
herself, in some definite part or phase, is 'naïve'. The naïve poet _is_
nature; the sentimental poet seeks a lost nature. The Greeks are
prevailingly naïve, the moderns prevailingly sentimental, but neither in
any exclusive sense. The words are to be understood as expressing only a
mode of feeling. The same poet, the same poem, may be naïve at one
moment and sentimental at another. All sentimental poetry, then, is
concerned with the disparity or contrast between reality and the ideal.
If the poet is mainly interested in the real, we have, in the broad
sense, satire, which may be pathetic or humorous. If he dwells more upon
the ideal, we have elegiac poetry--elegiac in the narrower sense, if the
ideal is conceived as a distant object of longing, idyllic if it is
portrayed as a present reality. The second part of the essay is devoted
to a review of the sentimental poets of modern Germany.
In the third part the naïve and sentimental poets are contrasted. The
former, Schiller contends, is concerned with the definite, the latter
with the infinite. From the realist we turn easily and with pleasure to
actual life; the idealist puts us for the moment out of humor with it.
The one follows the laws of nature, the other those of reason. The one
asks what a thing is good for, the other whether it is good. Withal,
however, Schiller is careful to insist that even the naïve poet, the
realist, is properly concerned only with true nature, and not with
actual nature. Everything that is,--for example, a violent outbreak of
passion,--is actual nature; but this is not true human nature, because
that implies free self-determination. True human nature can never be
anything but noble. 'What disgusting absurdities', exclaims
Schiller,--and the words might well be taken to heart by some of our
modern naturalists--'have resulted both in criticism and in practice
from this confusion of true with actual nature! What trivialities are
permitted, yea even praised, because unfortunately they are actual
nature!' It is a part of Schiller's theory that the true realist and the
sane idealist must finally come together on common ground.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 92: Eckermanns "Gespräche", under date of November 14, 1823.]
[Footnote 93: He also admitted that he himself had profited from the
study of Kant; cf. Eckermann, under date of April 11, 1827.]
[Footnote 94: Schiller's aesthetic writings, and especially his relation
to Kant, have been much discussed in recent years. For a list of the
more important works consult the Appendix.]
[Footnote 95: An oft-repeated assertion to the contrary, which goes back
to Karoline von Wolzogen, "Schillers Leben", Achter Abschnitt, is
contradicted by a letter of Schiller to Goethe, written May 5, 1797.]
[Footnote 96: They are reprinted in Sämmtliche Schriften. X, 41 ff.]
[Footnote 97: Carlyle's "Life of Schiller", page 137 (edition of 1845).]