Later Poems
So führt zu seiner Jugend Hütten,
Zu seiner Unschuld reinem Glück,
Vom fernen Ausland fremder Sitten
Den Flüchtling der Gesang zurück,
In der Natur getreuen Armen
Von kalten Regeln zu erwarmen.
_'The Power of Song'_.
The dominant note of Schiller's later poetry is intellectual
seriousness; wherefore, if there be those for whom intellectual
seriousness is not a quality of poetry at all, for them he has not
written. The element of reflection is nearly always prominent in his
verse, though there are a few of his poems, notably his best ballads,
in which it is conspicuously lacking. What we usually hear is the man
of culture commenting upon life, and everywhere he makes his appeal
to universal sentiments. The spontaneity, or seeming spontaneity, of
the great lyrists was no part of his gift. To catch a fleeting fancy,
or some eccentricity of private emotion, and fix it in musical verse
of a vague suggestiveness, was not in his line. If he had ever, like
Heine, imagined himself joining his sweetheart in the grave and
defying the resurrection in a rapturous embrace, he would probably
have thought it beneath his dignity to versify the whimsy. Of course
his verse is self-revelation, without which poetry cannot be; but it
is the revelation of a soul dwelling habitually in the upper
altitudes of thought and emotion, and always assuming that
fellow-mortals who care for poetry at all will be capable of a
serious joy in the things of the mind.
One may say that his art as a poet consists not so much in the direct
expression of feeling in sensuous and passionate language, as in the
transfiguration of thought by means of impassioned imagery. In his poems
as elsewhere he is a good deal of a rhetorician, but he is never
insincere. His verse came from the heart, only it was the expression of
character and convictions rather than of moods and fancies. It seems
intended to edify rather than to portray; to impress rather than to
delight. Some of it, too, is occupied with ideal sentiments so abstract
and sublimated as to possess but languid interest for normally
constituted lovers of poetry. For a while, at least, after his return to
poetry, he may fairly be said to have cared a little too much for the
white radiance of eternity, and not quite enough for the colored
reflection beneath the dome.[103]
This last observation has in view more particularly the poems he wrote
in the year 1795, while still 'hugging the shore of philosophy'. Take
for example 'The Veiled Image at Sais', which tells in rather prosaic
pentameters of an ardent young truth-seeker who is escorted by an
Egyptian hierophant to a veiled statue and told that whoso lifts the
veil shall see the Truth. At the same time he is warned that the veil
must not be lifted save by the consecrated hand of the priest himself.
Moved by a curiosity which can hardly seem anything but
laudable,--unless one is prepared to take the side of the sacerdotal
humbug,--the young man returns in the night and raises the veil. In the
morning he is found pale and unconscious at the foot of the statue. Soon
afterwards he dies; leaving to mankind the message:
Woe unto him who seeks the Truth through Guilt.
This has an unctuous sound, and one gets a vague impression that the old
story has been dressed up for the sake of some modern application. One
is piqued to reflect upon it; but the more one reflects the more clearly
one sees that there is no real instruction in it. But if there is no
instruction, there is nothing at all; since the mysticism is of a kind
that appeals solely to the intellect.
Far more interesting is the poem which was at first called 'The Realm of
Shades' and later 'The Ideal and Life',--a difficult production, which
resembles 'The Artists' in its suggestion of a voyage through the
imponderable ether. We begin with the blessed gods in Olympus and end
with the apotheosis of Hercules; and the intervening stretch is like the
vasty realm of the Mothers in 'Faust'. The poem is intellectual, in the
sense that its theme is a concept of the mind, and its structure logical
throughout; yet every strophe is surcharged with feeling, and the
diction presents a marvelous wealth of imagery. It must be conquered by
study before it can yield any great pleasure; but the conquest once
made, one finds a noble delight in the gorgeous coloring with which
Schiller invests his idealistic rainbow in the clouds. Good critics,
favorable to Schiller's genius, regard 'The Ideal and Life' as the
greatest of his philosophic poems and the most characteristic expression
of his nature. He himself felt a sort of reverence for it. 'When you
receive this letter', he wrote to Humboldt, 'put away everything that is
profane and read this poem in solemn quiet.' And Humboldt replied: 'How
shall I thank you for the indescribable pleasure that your poem has
given me? Since the day on which I received it, it has in the truest
sense possessed me; I have read nothing else, have scarcely thought of
anything else.'
The general drift of the wonderfully pregnant verses is that man attains
peace only by renouncing the things of sense and living in the realm of
shades, that is, among eternal ideals. Here he is free--like the gods.
The Weavers of the Web--the Fates--but sway
The matter and the things of clay;
Safe from each change that Time to Matter gives,
Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray
With Gods a god, amidst the fields of Day,
The FORM, the ARCHETYPE, serenely lives.
Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
Cast from thee Earth, the bitter and the real,
High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring
Into the Realm of the Ideal.[104]
Throughout the poem 'Beauty' is put for 'the Ideal'; and we get a reflex
of the philosophic doctrine that only the aesthetic faculty can resolve
the eternal conflict between the sensuous and the rational man. Life Is
and must be struggle, that being its very essence; but by taking refuge
in the Realm of the Ideal, man anticipates his apotheosis. There he
escapes from the tyranny of the flesh and the bondage of nature's law.
The misery of struggle and defeat no longer vexes him. The warring
forces are reconciled and he sees their conflict under the aspect of
eternal beauty. Thus, like the new-born god, Alcides, taking leave of
the terrestrial battle-ground, he mounts into heaven, while the
nightmare of the earthly life 'sinks and sinks and sinks'.
Behold him spring
Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,
And the dull matter that confined before
Sinks downward, downward, downward, as a dream!
Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,
And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,
Fills for a God the bowl.[105]
All this may seem, at first blush, to attach excessive importance to the
attainment of inward peace and harmony,--as if one's private comfort
were the greatest thing in life. It _seems_ to recommend a quietistic,
contemplative life; for how else shall one escape from the actual into
the ideal? Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to read into the
poem anything like a recommendation of quietism. The ultimate goal is
described in terms which suggest now the mythology of Homer, now the
Platonic realm of ideals, and again the Christian heaven; but however
the blessed existence is imaged, it is always thought of as attainable
only through a strenuous grapple with the realities of this life. Thus
the essential spirit of the poem is the spirit of energetic, hopeful
endeavor. Its doctrine is, to quote the words of Kuno Francke, that
"only through work are we delivered from the slavery of the senses";
that "the very trials and sufferings of mankind bring out its divine
nature and insure its ultimate transition to an existence of ideal
harmony and beauty".[106]
The doctrine, in its essence, was dear to Goethe, as well as to
Schiller, and takes us into the holy-of-holies of their joint
philosophy. What else did Goethe mean by his oft-reiterated preachment
of renunciation, and by his well-known verses about 'weaning oneself
from the half and living resolutely in the whole, the good and the
beautiful'? In his excellent book upon Diderot Mr. John Morley speaks
somewhere of "that affectation of culture with which the great Goethe
infected part of the world". Let it not be forgotten, however, in our
latter-day contempt of culture, that the Weimar poets were great
workers, and also, in their way, great fighters. They did not turn their
attention--at least not directly--to the crushing of the Infamous, nor
to any battle against social or political wrong. They fought rather for
sanity, for good art, for philosophy; for those things which go to
enrich and broaden the life of the individual. It was a good fight,--the
best which, at their time, with their gifts, they could possibly have
engaged in.
Schiller's fervid verses, recommending an escape from the bondage of
sense to the free realm of the mind, correspond of course to nothing
that is humanly feasible. The shackles of the flesh are upon us and
there is no way to get rid of them. It is only an ideal, a poet's dream.
Nevertheless the subject has a practical aspect which is definable in
plain prose. It is found in the following passage from Goethe:
We put one passion in place of another; employments, dilettantisms,
amusements, hobbies,--we try them all through to the end only to cry
out at last that all is vanity. No one is horrified at this false,
this blasphemous saying; indeed it is thought to be wise and
irrefutable. But there are a few persons who, anticipating such
intolerable feelings, in order to avoid all partial resignations,
resign themselves universally once for all. Such persons convince
themselves with regard to the eternal, necessary, law-governed order
of things, and seek to acquire ideas which are indestructible and
are only confirmed by the contemplation of that which is
transient.[107]
Other poems of the year 1795 were 'The Partition of the Earth', wherein
Zeus takes pity on the portionless poet by giving him a perpetual
_entrée_ to the celestial court; the mildly humorous 'Deeds of the
Philosopher', a bit of persiflage on the art of proving what everybody
knows, and also several pieces in the elegiac form.
Of these last the weightiest is the one at first called simply 'Elegy',
and later 'The Walk'. Just as Goethe had used the elegiac meter for his
reminiscences of Rome, so Schiller employs it for his impressions of
such small travel as fate permitted him,--a summertime walk in field or
forest. The verses will bear comparison very well with the 'Roman
Elegies'. Instead of paintings, statues, marble palaces and the
troublesome Amor, we have the aspects of nature,--the music of bird and
bee, and the toil of the husbandman 'not yet awakened to freedom'. As
our sauntering poet comes in sight of a city,--the locus of the poem is
the neighborhood of Jena, with reminiscent and imaginative touches here
and there,--he is moved to reflections upon the more eager life of the
townspeople. This leads to a retrospective survey of the origins of
civilization,--of agriculture, the mechanical crafts, trade, letters,
art, science and the social sentiments. Then the darker side of the
picture is developed,--the evils, inhumanities, corruptions and vices of
civilized life. For some time the wanderer pursues his way completely
lost in these sad contemplations; then suddenly he returns to the
present and finds himself alone with nature, from whose 'pure altar' he
receives back again the joyousness of youth. Thus the poem ends, like
'The Ideal and Life', upon an idyllic note; the one pointing forward,
beyond the warfare of life, to an unimaginable Elysium, the other
pointing backward to a happy golden age of which Mother Nature is the
living reminder:
Ever the will of man is changing the rule and the purpose,
Ever the genius of life alters the form of his deed.
But in eternal youth, in ever varying beauty,
Thou, O Mother of Men, keepest the ancient law....
Under the selfsame blue, over the same old green,
Wander together the near, and wander the far-away races,
And old Homer's sun, lo! it shines on us now.
The inner form of 'The Walk'--loving contemplation of nature, giving
rise to general reflections upon life--is essentially Goethean; one may
safely regard it as a conscious experiment in Goethe's manner. As such
it is very good indeed, although its exotic meter has stood in the way
of its attaining the popularity of the ballads and the 'Song of the
Bell'. 'The Walk' and 'The Ideal and Life' are the noblest gifts of
Schiller's didactic muse.
Coming now to the poems of the year 1796, and regarding them first in a
general way as a group by themselves, we can observe that Schiller has
made progress in weaning himself from abstract modes of thought. The
stanzas entitled 'The Power of Song' tell of a fugitive in strange lands
lured back to warm himself in the embrace of nature from the chill of
'cold rules'. Another reminds the metaphysician, who boasts of the great
height to which he has climbed, that his altitude can do nothing for him
except give him a view of the valley below, 'Pegasus in Harness' is a
humorous apologue intended to enforce the truth that the winged horse is
of no use for drudgery and exhibits his proper mettle only when ridden
by a poet. Of much greater interest than any of these is 'The Ideals'.
Here the middle-aged poet recalls the fervid dreams of his youth and
thinks of them under the image of airy sprites attending his rushing
chariot, like the Hours in Guido's picture. Midway in his course he
finds that they have all dropped away, save Friendship and
Work,--Friendship that lovingly shares the burdens of life, and Work
that only brings grains of sand one by one to the Builder,
Yet from the debt-book of the ages
Erases minutes, days and years.
Most noteworthy in this group, however, is unquestionably that famous
tribute to womanhood which goes by the name of 'Dignity of Women'.
Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry,--the
chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the
utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity. Man is depicted as a wild
creature, ever tossing on the sea of passion, or chasing phantoms in the
empyrean. Reckless and vehement, he lives by the law of force, or, at
the best, by the law of reason and logic. Woman, on the other hand,
follows the better light of feeling and gently lures the daring wanderer
back to present realities. In her little sphere of intuition she is
richer and freer than he in his boundless kingdom of thought and
imagination. Her sovereignty is that of a child or an angel, making
always for peace, gentleness and goodness.--All of which is extremely
interesting as a classical expression of an old-fashioned sentiment that
good men used once to believe in. Schiller believed in it ardently, and
one loves him none the less for that. The most cogent objection to his
verses is their generality. For 'man' it is necessary to read 'Friedrich
Schiller', and for 'woman', his wife.
In its metrical form the poem attempts to express the lovableness of the
'eternal-womanly' by means of a lightly flowing dactylic measure, while
a heavier trochaic cadence is employed to denote the nature of man:
Ehret die Frauen! Sie flechten und weben
Himmlische Rosen ins irdische Leben,
Flechten der Liebe beglückendes Band....
Ewig aus der Wahrheit Schranken
Schweift des Mannes wilde Kraft,
Und die irren Tritte wanken
Auf dem Meer der Leidenschaft.[108]
Such a scheme, in the hands of a Schiller, leads inevitably to a
crescendo of rhetorical contrasts, which in the end sound somewhat
flighty and forced. The poem was an object of ridicule to the
Romanticists, and the elder Schlegel wrote a saucy parody of the first
two strophes.[109]
The few poems that found a place in the 'Almanac' of 1797, along with
the luxuriant crop of Xenia, are relatively unimportant. The difference
between the sexes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed
in the _Horen_, was expounded anew by Schiller in distichs. It is very
much the same story as the 'Dignity of Women', the distich form lending
itself beautifully to those antitheses which were Schiller's delight.
Then there was a poetic riddle, called 'The Maiden from Afar',--a
slight affair, but pretty in its way; a 'Lament of Ceres', in trochaic
tetrameters, and a 'Dithyramb', wherein a poet is visited by all the
Olympian gods and cheered with a draught of Hebe's joy-giving nectar.
These classicizing poems, which purport to express modern feeling in
the terms of Greek mythology, sound now a little hollow and
conventional. The vein had been worked to excess even in Schiller's
day, and it is no wonder that the Romanticists pined for something new.
The best of them all is 'The Eleusinian Festival', called originally
'Song of the Citizen', in which Schiller returns to his favorite
theme--the origin and progress of civilized society. The climactic
thought of the twenty-seven sonorous stanzas is contained in the
Kantian oracle of Ceres:
Freiheit liebt das Tier der Wüste,
Frei im Äther herrscht der Gott,
Ihrer Brust gewalt'ge Lüste
Zähmet das Naturgebot;
Doch der Mensch, in ihrer Mitte,
Soll sich an den Menschen reihn,
Und allein durch seine Sitte
Kann er frei und mächtig sein.[110]
In the spring of the year 1797, as 'Hermann and Dorothea' was
approaching completion, Goethe and Schiller were led to an interchange
of views concerning the distinctive qualities of epic poetry. Their
discussion begot an interest in the kindred type of the ballad, which
may be regarded as a miniature epic in a lyrical form. The result was
that both poets began to make ballads for the next year's 'Almanac'.
Schiller contributed five: 'The Diver', 'The Ring of Polycrates', 'The
Cranes of Ibycus', 'The Errand at the Furnace' and 'The Knight of
Toggenburg'. In subsequent years he wrote three others: 'The Pledge',
'Hero and Leander' and 'The Count of Hapsburg'. To these may be added
'The Glove ', which was not called a ballad because not written in
uniform stanzas, and 'The Fight with the Dragon ', which was called a
'romanza'.
These poems, taken as a whole, owe nothing whatever to the folk-song.
The popular ballad, which had once fascinated Goethe and Herder and
Bürger, and the Göttingen poets generally, seems never to have appealed
to Schiller in any notable degree. If we except 'The Count of Hapsburg',
his ballad themes are all exotic, that is, they do not deal with German
legend or history or superstition. The suggestions came generally from
out-of-the-way reading, and in one or two cases his exact source has not
been certainly identified. The tales have no odor of the soil, no local
color. They make no use of the supernatural, the gruesome or the
uncanny. They are not wild roses, but jaqueminots cultivated with an
aesthetic end in view. Their aroma is distinctly literary, and they are
all eminently serious. Not a smile is provided for in the whole list.
There is no element of mystery about them. The passions and sentiments
illustrated are of the universal kind. And just as vague, uncanny and
bizarre feelings play no part, so there is no resort to verbal tricks,
such as meaningless repetitions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language
is dignified and classical. Their great merit is the vivid and strong
imaginative coloring with which situations and actions are portrayed.
While in no sense folk-songs, they have always been great favorites with
the German people.
In 'The Diver' the stress falls upon the portraiture of the raging deep
and its awful horrors. It is a rhetorical _Prachtstück_, which has done
good service to many an elocutionist and declaiming schoolboy. Schiller
himself had never seen the sea, nor any body of water remotely
resembling the Charybdis of the poem. Observation, as he humbly
confessed, had given him nothing more awesome than a mill-dam,--the
rest was Homeric and imaginative; wherefore it no doubt gratified him
when Goethe reported from Schaffhausen, after a visit to the cataract,
that the line
Und es wallet, und siedet, und brauset, und zischt,
was scientifically correct. 'The Glove' merely versifies a simple
incident of a brave knight whose courage is put to an inhuman test by
his lady-love; he brings her glove from among the 'horrible cats', and
then contemptuously cuts her acquaintance. In these two, the earliest
of the ballads, description of the situation preponderates over the
epic element, and there is no 'idea' except to narrate an
extraordinarily brave action. In 'The Ring of Polycrates' one can
discern progress in the mastery of the ballad form, though the subject
was none of the best. Based upon a story in Herodotus, it is a poetic
setting of the ancient idea that excessive good fortune provokes the
anger of the gods and portends disaster. Strangely enough Schiller's
poem breaks off with the recovery of the ring from the fish's belly,
and the consequent warning and departure of the Egyptian guest. One
would expect an additional stanza or two, showing how the forebodings
of Amasis were presently realized.
Much better than any of the foregoing is 'The Cranes of Ibycus'. In the
composition of this ballad Goethe took a deep interest, giving several
suggestions which were adopted by Schiller to the great advantage of the
poem. The Greek legend does not explain, or explains variously, just why
the murderers in the theater call out the name of Ibycus when they see
the cranes flying over. Schiller supposes that the spectacle just then
going on was a solemn chorus of the Eumenides. Thus the unaccountable
exclamation of the murderers is connected with the mysterious power of
the avenging Furies. It is this use of the nemesis idea that makes the
merit of the ballad.
'The Knight of Toggenburg' is a sentimental tale of romantic love, while
'The Pledge'--a captivating and powerful version of the Damon and
Pythias story--is a heroic ballad of loyal friendship. 'The Errand at
the Furnace', wherein a spiteful tale-bearer meets the horrible fate he
has prepared for the innocent and devout Fridolin,--may be styled a
ballad of pious edification. Here, as a critic observes, Schiller
purposely essays a tone of childlike _naïveté_ which was foreign to his
nature.[111] 'The Battle with the Dragon' has for its theme the moral
majesty of self-conquest. With 'The Cranes of Ibycus' and 'The Pledge',
it forms a triad which may be regarded as the choicest fruitage of
Schiller's interest in the ballad. The later ones, 'The Count of
Hapsburg' and 'Hero and Leander', are no less finished in the matter of
form, but have more of a lyric tinge.
We see that as a balladist Schiller got his inspiration mainly from two
sources: the traditions of Greek antiquity and the traditions of
chivalrous romance. He dwelt habitually in the idealisms of the past,
and his controlling purpose was to make these idealisms live again in
stirring poetic pictures. The present time, with its fierce national
conflicts, the larger meaning of which was not yet apparent, seemed to
him barbarous and depressing. In the prologue to 'Wallenstein', it is
true, he was able to survey the situation with a calm artistic eye and
to see in the 'solemn close of the century' a period in which 'reality
is becoming poetry'. But this is an isolated deliverance. His habitual
mood was one of aversion, from which he sought relief by an escape into
the kingdom of the mind. Thus, in some stanzas on the opening of the new
century, he laments that the English-French war has overspread sea and
land and left no place on earth for 'ten happy mortals'. Then he bids
the friend to whom the verses are addressed take refuge in the holy
temple of the heart, seeing that Freedom and Beauty dwell only in
dreamland. A similar sentiment finds expression in 'The Words of
Illusion', published in 1801, as a sort of pendant to the earlier 'Words
of Faith'. The words of faith are Freedom, Virtue and God. Men are
exhorted to cling steadfastly to these eternal verities, whereof only
the heart gives knowledge. The other poem is directed against the
superstition of believing in a golden age, or in any external
realization of the right, the good and the true. The final stanza runs:
And so, noble soul, forget not the law,
And to the true faith be leal;
What ear never heard and eye never saw,
The Beautiful, the True, they are real.
Look not without, as the fool may do;
It is in thee and ever created anew.
These last-named poems belong to a type which the Germans sometimes
call the 'lyric of thought',--a name which is fairly appropriate to a
goodly number of Schiller's shorter effusions. Other examples--to
mention a few of the best--are 'Light and Warmth', 'Breadth and Depth'
and 'Hope'. They might be called lyrics of culture, since they regard
the perfection of the individual,--the equipoise of heart and head,
steadfast seriousness as opposed to showy sciolism, the preservation of
hope and faith,--as a noble object of emotion. They are not
intellectual in the opprobrious sense of the word as applied to poetry;
they are suffused with warm feeling and their language is simple and
natural. On the other hand they _are_ argumentative: they state
propositions and draw conclusions the value of which must in the end be
gauged by the mind. For this reason one who has no sympathy with
Schiller's idealism,--one who either never felt it or has lost it in
the stress of life,--will not be touched by these poems, but will
regard them as hollow. Yet they are no more hollow than the lyrics of
Goethe or Heine or Shelley, though the illusion of sincerity is less
perfect than in the work of these great lyrists.
A pure lyric effusion, of the kind that seems to sing itself without
help or let from the brooding philosopher, was not often attempted by
Schiller. Perhaps his very best achievement in this sort is 'The
Maiden's Lament', of which the first two stanzas, translated as closely
as possible with reference to both substance and form, run as follows:
The oak-wood moans, the clouds float o'er,
The maiden sits by the green sea-shore.
The waves are breaking with might, with might,
And she breathes out a sigh in the gloom of the night,
And her eyes are dim with weeping.
'My heart is dead, the world is naught,
It brings nothing more to my longing thought,
I have lived and loved,--earth's fortune was mine,
Thou Holy One, take this child of thine,
Take her back into thine own keeping.'[112]
Such verses, and one might adduce further the admirable songs in
'William Tell', show that Schiller had in him, when he could find it and
let it have its way, a lyric gift of a high order. As a rule, however,
when he attempted to sing, the attempt resulted in a philosophic
evaluation of the feelings expressed. Thus in his well-known 'Punch
Song', he is mainly concerned with the ethical symbolism of the four
elements,--the lemon-juice, the sugar, the water and the spirits. In
other cases he suggests an allegorical symbolism, and leaves the reader
puzzling over an intellectual query that may or may not be worth
puzzling over. Examples are 'The Maiden from Afar', 'The Youth at the
Brook', 'The Mountain Song'. He even wrote a number of professed poetic
riddles,--which may be left without commentary to those who like that
sort of poetry.
The cultural poems of Schiller have always enjoyed a high degree of
popularity. A large number of his lines and couplets have become
familiar quotations that come readily to the tongue or pen of the
educated German. There is probably no modern poet who has taken a deeper
hold upon the intellectual life of his countrymen. This is partly
attributable to the fact that his idealistic sentiments appeal
especially to the youthful. No poet that ever lived is better adapted to
the needs of the school; none more infallibly safe and inspiring to the
young of both sexes. For the riper mind and the larger experience his
oracles are apt to lose somewhat of their impressiveness; for it is not
to be denied that his poetry at its best is seldom supremely good. The
divine spark that fuses rare thought and waiting expression in the white
heat of the imagination and gives one the sense of artistic perfection
is not often there. His verse is never cold, never trivial; but; it does
lack artistic distinction. Its highest claim is to give expression to
the maxims of a ripe culture in tuneful verses and pleasing imagery that
impress themselves readily upon the general heart. This is what he does
in the most famous of all his poems, 'The Song of the Bell'. It is not
great poetry, but it is a pleasing production which well deserves its
popularity.
'The Song of the Bell' was first given to the world in the 'Almanac' of
1800, after several years of incubation. Its germ-idea is similar to
that of the 'Punch Song'; that is, we have a mechanical process,--in the
one case the mixing of a glass of punch, in the other the casting of a
bell,--accompanied at its various stages by reflections of an ethical
character. The bell-founder is an idealist with a feeling for the
dignity of man and of man's handiwork. As he orders his workmen to
perform the successive operations involved in the casting of a bell, he
delivers, from the depths of his larger experience, a little homily,
suggested, in each case, by the present stage of the labor. The master's
orders are given in a lively trochaic measure, while the homilies move
at a slower gait in iambic lines of varying length. The fiction is
handled with scrupulous attention to technical details, and is made to
yield at the same time a series of easy and natural starting-points for
a poetic review of life from the cradle to the grave.
The great charm of the 'Song' lies in its vivid pictures of the epochs,
pursuits and occurrences which constitute the joy and the woe of life
for an ordinary industrious burgher. Childhood and youth; the passion of
the lover, sobering into the steadfast love of the husband; the busy
toil of the married pair in field and household; the delight of
accumulation and possession; the calamity of fire that destroys the
labor of years; the blessedness of peaceful industry; the horrors of
revolutionary fanaticism; the benediction of civic concord,--these are
the themes that are brought before us in a series of stirring pictures
that are irresistibly fascinating. To have felt and expressed so
admirably the poetry of every-day life, and that at the very time when
the Romanticists were beginning to fill the air with noise about the
prosaic dullness of the present time as compared with the Middle Ages,
was a great achievement, and all the greater as Schiller himself had not
remained unaffected by the Romantic doctrine. He could Hellenize and
philosophize, and, on occasion, he could Romanticize; but 'The Song of
the Bell' shows how deeply, after all, his feeling was rooted in the
life of the German people.
The 'Almanac' for 1800 was the last volume that appeared, and after the
removal of this exigency Schiller's lyrical production diminished. His
best strength was devoted to his plays, which in themselves, however,
contain a large lyric element. The choral parts of 'The Bride of
Messina' show the final phase of his art in its perfection. Like these,
the few independent poems written by him during the last years of his
life are characterized by great beauty of diction and of rhythmic
cadence, but in their substance they hardly compare with the best of his
previous work. Most noteworthy are 'Cassandra', devoted to the pathos of
foreseeing calamity without being able to prevent it, and 'The Festival
of Victory', wherein the Greek heroes, assembled for departure after the
sack of Troy, discourse amiably and profoundly upon the finer issues of
life. In some of the shorter and more subjective poems there is
discernible a note of sadness, as of a drooping spirit unreconciled,
after all, to the stress of this earthly existence. This is heard, for
example, in 'Longing' and 'The Pilgrim'. But from such sporadic
utterances no large inference should be drawn respecting Schiller's
mental history. They proceeded from a sick man whose days were numbered.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 103:
"The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity."
--_Shelley's "Adonais"_.]
[Footnote 104: Bulwer's Translation.]
[Footnote 105: Bulwer's Translation.]
[Footnote 106: "Social Forces in German Literature", p. 376.]
[Footnote 107: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", sechzehntes Buch.]
[Footnote 108: Buiwer translates the lines, somewhat lamely, thus:
Honour to Woman! To her it is given
To garden the earth with the roses of Heaven!
All blessed, she linketh the Loves in their choir....
From the bounds of Truth careering,
Man's strong spirit wildly sweeps,
With each hasty impulse veering
Down to Passion's troubled deeps.]
[Footnote 109:
Ehret die Frauen! Sie stricken die Strümpfe,
Wollig und warm, zu durchwaten die Sümpfe,
Flicken zerriss'ne Pantalons aus....
Doch der Mann, der tölpelhafte,
Find't am Zarten nicht Geschmack;
Zum gegohrnen Gerstensafte
Raucht er immerfort Taback.]
[Footnote 110:
"In the waste the Beast is free,
And the God upon his throne!
Unto each the curb must be
But the nature each doth own.
Yet the Man--betwixt the two--
Must to man allied belong;
Only law and Custom thro'
Is the Mortal free and strong."
--_Bulwer's Translation._]
[Footnote 111: Otto Harnack, "Schiller", page 274.]
[Footnote 112:
Der Eichwald brauset, die Wolken ziehn,
Das Mägdlein sitzet an Ufers Grün,
Es bricht sich die Welle mit Macht, mit Macht,
Und sie seufzt hinaus in die finstere Nacht,
Das Auge von Weinen getrübet.
"Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,
Und weiter giebt sie dem Wunsche nichts mehr.
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück,
Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet."]