The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Iv Part 3

Schiller's speech was not really beautiful, but his mind constantly strove, with ac.u.men and precision, to make new intellectual conquests; he held this effort under control, however, and soared above his subject in perfect liberty. Hence, with a light and delicate touch he utilized any side-issue which presented itself, and this was the reason why his conversation was peculiarly rich in words that are so evidently the inspiration of the moment; yet, in spite of such seeming freedom in the treatment of the subject, the final end was not lost sight of. Schiller always held with firmness the thread which was bound to lead thither, and, if the conversation was not interrupted by any mishap, he was not p.r.o.ne to bring it to a close until he had reached the goal.

And as Schiller in his conversation always aimed to add new ground to the domain of thought, so, in general, it may be said that his intellectual activity was always characterized by an intense spontaneity. His letters demonstrate these traits very perceptibly, and he knew absolutely no other method of working.

He gave himself up to mere reading late in the evening only, and during his frequently sleepless nights. His days were occupied with various labors or with specific preparatory studies in connection with them, his intellect being thus kept at high tension by work and research.

Mere studying undertaken with no immediate end in view save that of acquiring knowledge, and which has such a fascination for those who are familiar with it that they must be constantly on their guard lest it cause them to neglect other more definite duties--such studying, I say, he knew nothing about from experience, nor did he esteem it at its proper value. Knowledge seemed to him too material, and the forces of the intellect too n.o.ble, for him to see in this material anything more than mere stuff to be worked up. It was only because he placed more value upon the higher activity of the intellect, which creates independently out of its own depths, that he had so little sympathy with its efforts of a lower order. It is indeed remarkable from what a small stock of material and how, in spite of wanting the means by which such material is procured by others, Schiller obtained his comprehensive theory of life (_Weltanschauung_), which, when once grasped, fairly startles us by the intuitive truthfulness of genius; for one can give no other name to that which originates without outside aid.

Even in Germany he had traveled only in certain districts, while Switzerland, of which his _William Tell_ contains such vivid descriptions, he had never seen. Any one who has ever stood by the Falls of the Rhine will involuntarily recall, at the sight, the beautiful strophe in _The Diver_ in which this confusing tumult of waters, that so captivates the eye, is depicted; and yet no personal view of these rapids had served as the basis for Schiller's description.

But whatever Schiller did acquire from his own experience he grasped with a clearness which also brought distinctly before him what he learned from the description of others. Besides, he never neglected to prepare himself for every subject by exhaustive reading. Anything that might prove to be of use, even if discovered accidentally, fixed itself firmly in his memory; and his tirelessly-working imagination, which, with constant liveliness, elaborated now this now that part of the material collected from every source, filled out the deficiencies of such second-hand information.

In a manner quite similar he made the spirit of Greek poetry his own, although his knowledge of it was gained exclusively from translations.

In this connection he spared himself no pains. He preferred translations which disclaimed any particular merit in themselves, and his highest consideration was for the literal cla.s.sical paraphrases.

* * * _The Cranes of Ibycus_ and the _Festival of Victory_ wear the colors of antiquity with all the purity and fidelity which could be expected from a modern poet, and they wear them in the most beautiful and most spirited manner. The poet, in these works, has quite absorbed the spirit of the ancient world; he moves about in it with freedom, and thus creates a new form of poetry which, in all its parts, breathes only such a spirit. The two poems, however, are in striking contrast with each other. _The Cranes of Ibycus_ permitted a thoroughly epic development; what made the subject of intrinsic value to the poet was the idea which sprung from it of the power of artistic representation upon the human soul. This power of poetry, of an invisible force created purely by the intellect and vanis.h.i.+ng away when brought into contact with reality, belonged essentially to the sphere of ideas which occupied Schiller so intensely.

As many as eight years before the time when this subject a.s.sumed the ballad form within his mind it had floated before his vision, as is evident in the lines which are taken from his poem _The Artists_--

"Awed by the Furies' chorus dread Murder draws down upon its head The doom of death from their wild song."

This idea, moreover, permitted an exposition in complete harmony with the spirit of antiquity; the latter had all the requisites for bringing it into bold relief in all its purity and strength.

Consequently, every particular in the whole narrative is borrowed immediately from the ancient world, especially the appearance and the song of Eumenides. The chorus as employed by aeschylus is so artistically interwoven with the modern poetic form, both in the matter of rhyme and the length of the metre, that no portion of its quiet grandeur is lost.

_The Festival of Victory_ is of a lyric, of a contemplative nature. In this work the poet was able--indeed was compelled--to lend from his own store an element which did not lie within the sphere of ideas and the sentiments of antiquity; but everything else follows the spirit of the Homeric poem with as great purity as it does in the _Cranes of Ibycus_. The poem as a whole is clearly stamped with a higher, more distinct, spirituality than is usual with the ancient singers; and it is in this particular that it manifests its most conspicuous beauties.

The earlier poems of Schiller are also rich in particular traits borrowed from the poems of the ancients, and into them he has often introduced a higher significance than is found in the original. Let me refer in this connection to his description of death from _The Artists_--"The gentle bow of necessity"--which so beautifully recalls the _gentle darts_ of Homer, where, however, the transfer of the adjective from _darts_ to _bow_ gives to the thought a more tender and a deeper significance.

Confidence in the intellectual power of man heightened to poetic form is expressed in the distichs ent.i.tled _Columbus_, which are among the most peculiar poetic productions that Schiller has given us. Belief in the invisible force inherent in man, in the opinion, which is sublime and deeply true, that there must be an inward mystic harmony between it and the force which orders and governs the entire universe (for all truth can only be a reflection of the eternal primal Truth), was a characteristic feature of Schiller's way of thinking. It harmonized also with the persistence with which he followed up every intellectual task until it was satisfactorily completed. We see the same thought expressed in the same kind of metaphor in the bold but beautiful expression which occurs in the letters from Raphael to Julius in the magazine, _The Thalia_--

"When Columbus made the risky wager with an untraveled sea." * * *

[Ill.u.s.tration: #UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN# With the statues of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt]

Art and poetry were directly joined to what was most n.o.ble in man; they were represented to be the medium by means of which he first awakens to the consciousness of that nature, reaching out beyond the finite, which dwells within him. Both of them were thus placed upon the height from which they really originate. To safeguard them upon this height, to save them from being desecrated by every paltry and belittling view, to rescue them from every sentiment which did not spring from their purity, was really Schiller's aim, and appeared to him as his true life-mission determined for him by the original tendency of his nature.

His first and most urgent demands are, therefore, addressed to the poet himself, from whom he requires not merely genius and talent isolated, as it were, in their activity, but a mood which takes possession of the entire soul and is in harmony with the sublimity of his vocation; it must be not a mere momentary exaltation, but an integral part of character. "Before he undertakes to influence the best among his contemporaries he should make it his first and most important business to elevate his own self to the purest and n.o.blest ideal of humanity." * * * To no one does Schiller apply this demand more rigorously than to himself.

Of him it can truthfully be said that matters which bordered upon the common or even upon the ordinary, never had the slightest hold upon him; that he transferred completely the high and n.o.ble views which filled his thoughts to his mode of feeling and his life; and that in his compositions he was ever, with uniform force, inspired with a striving for the ideal. This was true even of his minor productions.

To a.s.sign to poetry, among human endeavors, the lofty and serious place of which I have spoken above, to defend it from the petty point of view of those who, mistaking its dignity, and the pedantic att.i.tude of those who, mistaking its peculiar character, regard it only as a trifling adornment and embellishment of life or else ask an immediate moral effect and teaching from it--this, as one cannot repeat too often, is deeply rooted in the German habit of thought and feeling.

Schiller in his poetry gave utterance--in his own individual manner, however--to whatever his German nature had implanted in him, to the harmony which rang out to him from the depths of the language, the mysterious effect of which he so cleverly perceived and knew how to use so masterfully. * * *

The deeper and truer trend of the German resides in his highly developed sensibility which keeps him closer to the truths of nature, in his inclination to live in the world of ideas and of emotions dependent upon them, and, in fact, in everything which is connected therewith. * * *

A favorite idea which often engaged Schiller's attention was the need of educating the crude natural man--as he understood him--through art, before he could be left to attain culture through reason. Schiller has enlarged upon this theme on many occasions, both in prose and verse.

His imagination dwelt by preference upon the beginnings of civilization in general, upon the transition from the nomadic life to the agricultural, upon the covenant established in nave faith with pious Mother Earth, as he so beautifully expresses it.

Whatever mythology offered here as kindred material, he grasped with eagerness and firmness. Faithfully following the traces of fable, he made of Demeter, the chief personage in the group of agricultural deities, a figure as wonderful as it was appealing, by uniting in her breast human feelings with divine. It was long a cherished plan with Schiller to treat in epic form the earliest Attic civilization resulting from foreign immigration. _The Eleusinian Festival_, however, replaced this plan, which was never executed. * * *

The merely emotional, the fervid, the simply descriptive, in fact every variety of poetry derived directly from contemplation and feeling, are found in Schiller in countless single pa.s.sages and in whole poems. * * * But the most remarkable evidence of the consummate genius of the poet is seen in _The Song of the Bell_, which, in changing metre, in descriptions full of vivacity where a few touches represent a whole picture, runs through the varied experiences in the life of man and of society; for it expresses the feelings which arise in each of them, and ever adapts the whole, symbolically, to the tones of the bell, the casting and completing of which the poem accompanies throughout in all its various stages. I know of no poem, in any language, which shows so wide a poetic world in so small a compa.s.s, that so runs through the scale of all that is deepest in human feelings, and, in the guise of a lyric, depicts life in its important events and epochs as if in an epic poem confined within natural limits. But the poetic clearness is enhanced by the fact that a subject which is portrayed as actually existing, corresponds with the shadowy visions of the imagination; and the two series thus formed run parallel with each other to the same end. * * *

Schiller was s.n.a.t.c.hed from the world in the full maturity of his intellectual power, though he would undoubtedly have been able to perform an endless amount of additional work. His scope was so unlimited that he would never have been able to find a goal, and the constantly increasing activity of his mind would never have allowed him time for stopping. For long years ahead he would have been able to enjoy the happiness, the rapture, yes, the bliss of his occupation as a poet, as he so inimitably describes it in one of the letters in this collection, written about a plan for an idyl. His life ended indeed before the customary limit had been reached, yet, while it lasted, he worked exclusively and uninterruptedly in the realm of ideas and fancy.

Of no one else, perhaps, can it be said so truthfully that "he had thrown away the fear of that which was earthly and had escaped out of the narrow gloomy life into the realm of the ideal." And it may be observed, in closing, that he had lived surrounded only by the most exalted ideas and the most brilliant visions which it is possible for a mortal to appropriate and to create. One who thus departs from earth cannot be regarded as otherwise than happy.

THE EARLY ROMANTIC SCHOOL

By JAMES TAFT HATFIELD, PH.D.

Professor of the German Language and Literature, Northwestern University.

The latter half of the eighteenth century has been styled the Age of Enlightenment, a convenient name for a period in which there was a noticeable attempt to face the obvious, external facts of life in a clear-eyed and courageous way. The centralizing of political power in the hands of Louis XIV. of France and his successors had been accompanied by a "standardizing" of human affairs which favored practical efficiency and the easier running of the social machine, but which was far from helpful to the self-expression of distinctly-marked individuals.

The French became sovereign arbiters of taste and form, but their canons of art were far from nature and the free impulses of mankind.

The particular development of this spirit of clarity in Berlin, the centre of German influence, lay in the tendency to challenge all historic continuity, and to seek uniformity based upon practical needs.

Rousseau's revolutionary protests against inequality and artificiality--particularly his startling treatise _On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men_ (1754)--and his fervent preaching of the everlasting superiority of the heart to the head, const.i.tute the most important factor in a great revolt against regulated social inst.i.tutions, which led, at length, to the "Storm and Stress" movement in Germany, that boisterous forerunner of Romanticism, yet so unlike it that even Schlegel compared its most typical representatives to the biblical herd of swine which stampeded--into oblivion. Herder, proclaiming the vital connection between the soul of a whole nation and its literature, and preaching a religion of the feelings rather than a gospel of "enlightenment;" young Goethe, by his daring and untrammeled Shakespearian play, _Goetz von Berlichingen_, and by his open defiance, announced in _Werther_, of the authority of all artistic rules and standards; and Burger, a.s.serting the right of the common man to be the only arbiter of literary values, were, each in his own way, upsetting the control of an artificial "cla.s.sicism."

Immanuel Kant, whose deep and dynamic thinking led to a revolution comparable to a cosmic upheaval in the geological world, compelled his generation to discover a vast new moral system utterly disconcerting to the shallow complacency of those who had no sense of higher values than "practical efficiency."

When, in 1794, Goethe and Schiller, now matured and fully seasoned by a deep-going cla.s.sical and philosophical discipline, joined their splendid forces and devoted their highest powers to the building up of a comprehensive esthetic philosophy, the era was fully come for new constructive efforts on German soil. Incalculably potent was the ferment liberated by Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ (1795-1796)--its attacking the problem of life from the emotional and esthetic side; its defense of the "call" of the individual as outweighing the whole social code; its a.s.sertion that genius outranks general laws, and imagination every-day rules; its abundance of "poetic" figures taking their part in the romance.

The birth of the Romantic School can be pretty definitely set at about 1796; its cradle was in the quaint university town of Jena, at that time the home of Schiller and his literary-esthetic enterprises, and only a few miles away from Goethe in Weimar. Five names embody about all that was most significant in the earlier movement: Fichte, the brothers Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis.

The discussion of Fichte belonging to another division of this work, it is enough to recall here that he was already professor of philosophy at Jena when the Schlegel brothers made their home there in 1796, and that it was while there that he published his _Doctrine of Science_, the charter of independence of the Romantic School, announcing the annihilation of physical values, proclaiming the soul as above things perceived, the inner spirit as that alembic in which all objects are produced. With almost insolent freshness Fichte a.s.serted a re-valuation of all values: what had been "enlightenment"

was now to be called shallowness; "ancient crudities" were to be reverenced as deeper perceptions of truth; "fine literature" was to be accounted a frivolous thing. Fichte made a stirring appeal to young men, especially, as being alone able to perceive the meaning of science and poetry.

To take part in the contagion of these ideas, there settled in Jena in 1796 the two phenomenal Schlegel brothers. It is not easy or necessary to separate, at this period, the activities of their agile minds. From their early days, as sons in a most respectable Lutheran parsonage in North Germany, both had shown enormous hunger for cultural information, both had been voracious in exploiting the great libraries within their reach. It is generally a.s.serted that they were lacking in essential virility and stamina; as to the brilliancy of their acquisitions, their fineness of appreciation, and their wit, there can be no question whatever. Madame de Stael called them "the fathers of modern criticism," a t.i.tle which has not been challenged by the best authorities of our time.

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the younger of the two, is counted to be the keener and more original mind. He had a restless and unsettled youth, mostly spent in studies; after various disappointments, he determined to make cla.s.sical antiquity his life-work; while mastering the body of ancient literature, he was a.s.similating, with much the same sort of eagerness, the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte. His first notable publication was an esthetic-philosophic essay, in the ample style of Schiller's later discourses, _Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry_. He found in the Greeks of the age of Sophocles the ideal of a fully developed humanity, and exhibited throughout the discussion a remarkable mastery of the whole field of cla.s.sical literature. Just at this time he removed to Jena to join his older brother, Wilhelm, who was connected with Schiller's monthly _The Hours_ and his annual _Almanac of the Muses_. By a strange condition of things Friedrich was actively engaged at the moment in writing polemic reviews for the organs of Reichardt, one of Schiller's most annoying rivals in literary journalism; these reviews became at once noticeable for their depth and vigorous originality, particularly that one which gave a new and vital characterization of Lessing. In 1797 he moved to Berlin, where he gathered a group about him, including Tieck, and in this way established the external and visible body of the Romantic School, which the brilliant intellectual atmosphere of the Berlin salons, with their wealth of gifted and cultured women, did much to promote. In 1799 both he and Tieck joined the Romantic circle at Jena.

In Berlin he published in 1798 the first volume of the _Athenaeum_, that journal which in a unique way represents the pure Romantic ideal at its actual fountain-head. It survived for three years, the last volume appearing in 1800. Its aim was to "collect all rays of human culture into one focus," and, more particularly, to confute the claim of the party of "enlightenment" that the earlier ages of human development were poor and unworthy of respect on the part of the closing eighteenth century. A very large part of the journal was written by the two brothers, Friedrich furnis.h.i.+ng the most aggressive contributions, more notably being responsible for the epigrammatic _Fragments_, which became, in their, detached brevity and irresponsibility, a very favorite model for the form of Romantic doctrine. "I can talk daggers," he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, though some were contributed by Wilhelm Schlegel, by his admirable wife Caroline, by Schleiermacher, and Novalis. The root of this form lies in French thinking and expression--especially the short deliverances of Chamfort, the epigrammatist of the French Revolution. These Orphic-apocalyptic sentences are a sort of foundation for a new Romantic bible. They are absolutely disconnected, they show a mixture and interpenetration of different spheres of thought and observation, with an unexpected deference to the appraisals of cla.s.sic antiquity. Their range is unlimited: philosophy and psychology, mathematics and esthetics, philosophy and natural science, sociology and society, literature and the theatre are all largely represented in their scope.

Friedrich Schlegel's epigrammatic wit is the direct precursor of Heine's clever conceits in prose: one is instantly reminded of him by such _Athenaeum_-fragments as "Kant, the Copernicus of Philosophy;"

"Plato's philosophy is a worthy preface to the religion of the future;" "So-called 'happy marriages' are related to love, as a correct poem to an improvised song;" "In genuine prose all words should be printed in italics;" "Catholicism is nave Christianity; Protestantism is sentimental." The sheer whimsicality of phrase seems to be at times its own excuse for being, as in an explanation of certain elegiac poems as "the sensation of misery in the contemplation of the silliness of the relations of ba.n.a.lity to craziness;" but there are many sentences which go deep below the surface--none better remembered, perhaps, than the dictum, "The French Revolution, Fichte's _Doctrine of Science_, and Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ are the greatest symptoms of our age."

In the _Athenaeum_ both brothers give splendid testimony to their astonis.h.i.+ng and epoch-making gift in transferring cla.s.sical and Romance metrical forms into elegant, idiomatic German; they give affectionate attention to the insinuating beauty of elegiac verse, and secure charming effects in some of the most alien Greek forms, not to mention _terza rima, ottava rima_, the Spanish gloss, and not a few very notable sonnets.

The literary criticisms of the _Athenaeum_ are characteristically free and aggressive, particularly in the frequent sneers at the flat "homely" poetry of sandy North Germany. At the end of the second volume, the "faked" _Literary Announcements_ are as daring as any attempts of American newspaper humor. When the sum of the contents and tendency of the journal is drawn, it is a strange mixture of discriminating philosophy, devoted Christianity, Greek sensuousness, and p.o.r.nographic mysticism. There is a never-ending esthetic coquetry with the flesh, with a serious defense of some very Greek practices indeed. All of this is thoroughly typical of the spirit of the Romantic school, and it is by no means surprising that Friedrich's first book, the novel _Lucinda_ (1799), should stand as the supreme unsavory cla.s.sic in this field. That excellent divine, Schleiermacher, exalted this doc.u.ment of the Rights of the Flesh as "a paean of Love, in all its completeness," but it is a feeble, tiresome performance, absolutely without structure, quite deserving the saucy epigram on which it was pilloried by the wit of the time:

Pedantry once of Fancy begged the dole Of one brief kiss; she pointed him to Shame.

He, impotent and wanton, then Shame's favors stole.

Into the world at length a dead babe came-- "_Lucinda_" was its name.

The preaching of "religion," "womanliness," and the "holy fire of divine enjoyment" makes an unedifying _melange_: "The holiest thing in any human being is his own mind, his own power, his own will;" "You do all according to your own mind, and refuse to be swayed by what is usual and proper." Schleiermacher admired in it that "highest wisdom and profoundest religion" which lead people to "yield to the rhythm of fellows.h.i.+p and friends.h.i.+p, and to disturb no harmony of love." In more prosaic diction, the upshot of its teaching was the surrender to momentary feelings, quite divorced from Laws or Things. The only morality is "full Humanity;" "Nature alone is worthy of honor, and sound health alone is worthy of love;" "Let the discourse of love,"

counsels Julius, "be bold and free, not more chastened than a Roman elegy"--which is certainly not very much--and the skirmishes of inclination are, in fact, set forth with an almost antique simplicity.