The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller Part 17

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 G.o.ds.

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 G.o.ds a G.o.d, 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 antic.i.p.ates 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage from Goethe:

We put one pa.s.sion in place of another; employments, dilettantisms, amus.e.m.e.nts, 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, antic.i.p.ating 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 Part.i.tion of the Earth', wherein Zeus takes pity on the portionless poet by giving him a perpetual _entree_ 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 n.o.blest 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 ent.i.tled '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 alt.i.tude 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 rus.h.i.+ng chariot, like the Hours in Guido's picture. Midway in his course he finds that they have all dropped away, save Friends.h.i.+p and Work,--Friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion, 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 cla.s.sical expression of an old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 begluckendes Band....

Ewig aus der Wahrheit Schranken Schweift des Mannes wilde Kraft, Und die irren Tritte w.a.n.ken 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 s.e.xes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed in the _h.o.r.en_, 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 ant.i.theses 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 G.o.ds and cheered with a draught of Hebe's joy-giving nectar.

These cla.s.sicizing 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 Wuste, Frei im ather herrscht der Gott, Ihrer Brust gewalt'ge l.u.s.te Zahmet das Naturgebot; Doch der Mensch, in ihrer Mitte, Soll sich an den Menschen reihn, Und allein durch seine Sitte Kann er frei und machtig 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 Burger, and the Gottingen 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 superst.i.tion. 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 pa.s.sions and sentiments ill.u.s.trated 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 repet.i.tions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language is dignified and cla.s.sical. 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 _Prachtstuck_, 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 G.o.ds 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 friends.h.i.+p. '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 _navete_ 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 G.o.d. Men are exhorted to cling steadfastly to these eternal verities, whereof only the heart gives knowledge. The other poem is directed against the superst.i.tion 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, n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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-sh.o.r.e.

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 s.e.xes. 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 gla.s.s 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 const.i.tute the joy and the woe of life for an ordinary industrious burgher. Childhood and youth; the pa.s.sion 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 acc.u.mulation 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 h.e.l.lenize 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 'Ca.s.sandra', devoted to the pathos of foreseeing calamity without being able to prevent it, and 'The Festival of Victory', wherein the Greek heroes, a.s.sembled 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: