FROM HIS SETTLEMENT
AT JENA TO HIS DEATH.
(1790-1805.)
The duties of his new office naturally
called upon Schiller to devote himself with double
zeal to History: a subject, which from choice
he had already entered on with so much eagerness.
In the study of it, we have seen above how his strongest
faculties and tastes were exercised and gratified:
and new opportunities were now combined with new motives
for persisting in his efforts. Concerning the
plan or the success of his academical prelections,
we have scarcely any notice: in his class, it
is said, he used most frequently to speak extempore;
and his delivery was not distinguished by fluency
or grace, a circumstance to be imputed to the agitation
of a public appearance; for, as Woltmann assures us,
’the beauty, the elegance, ease, and true instructiveness
with which he could continuously express himself in
private, were acknowledged and admired by all his friends.’
His matter, we suppose, would make amends for these
deficiencies of manner: to judge from his introductory
lecture, preserved in his works, with the title, What
is Universal History, and with what views should it
be studied, there perhaps has never been in Europe
another course of history sketched out on principles
so magnificent and philosophical. But college
exercises were far from being his ultimate object,
nor did he rest satisfied with mere visions of perfection:
the compass of the outline he had traced, for a proper
Historian, was scarcely greater than the assiduity
with which he strove to fill it up. His letters
breathe a spirit not only of diligence but of ardour;
he seems intent with all his strength upon this fresh
pursuit; and delighted with the vast prospects of untouched
and attractive speculation, which were opening around
him on every side. He professed himself to be
’exceedingly contented with his business;’
his ideas on the nature of it were acquiring both extension
and distinctness; and every moment of his leisure was
employed in reducing them to practice. He was
now busied with the History of the Thirty-Years
War.
This work, which appeared in 1791,
is considered by the German critics as his chief performance
in this department of literature: The Revolt
of the Netherlands, the only one which could have
vied with it, never was completed; otherwise, in our
opinion, it might have been superior. Either
of the two would have sufficed to secure for Schiller
a distinguished rank among historians, of the class
denominated philosophical; though even both together,
they afford but a feeble exemplification of the ideas
which he entertained on the manner of composing history.
In his view, the business of history is not merely
to record, but to interpret; it involves not only a
clear conception and a lively exposition of events
and characters, but a sound, enlightened theory of
individual and national morality, a general philosophy
of human life, whereby to judge of them, and measure
their effects. The historian now stands on higher
ground, takes in a wider range than those that went
before him; he can now survey vast tracts of human
action, and deduce its laws from an experience extending
over many climes and ages. With his ideas, moreover,
his feelings ought to be enlarged: he should
regard the interests not of any sect or state, but
of mankind; the progress not of any class of arts or
opinions, but of universal happiness and refinement.
His narrative, in short, should be moulded according
to the science, and impregnated with the liberal spirit
of his time.
Voltaire is generally conceived to
have invented and introduced a new method of composing
history; the chief historians that have followed him
have been by way of eminence denominated philosophical.
This is hardly correct. Voltaire wrote history
with greater talent, but scarcely with a new species
of talent: he applied the ideas of the eighteenth
century to the subject; but in this there was nothing
radically new. In the hands of a thinking writer
history has always been ‘philosophy teaching
by experience;’ that is, such philosophy as
the age of the historian has afforded. For a Greek
or Roman, it was natural to look upon events with
an eye to their effect on his own city or country;
and to try them by a code of principles, in which the
prosperity or extension of this formed a leading object.
For a monkish chronicler, it was natural to estimate
the progress of affairs by the number of abbeys founded;
the virtue of men by the sum-total of donations to
the clergy. And for a thinker of the present day,
it is equally natural to measure the occurrences of
history by quite a different standard: by their
influence upon the general destiny of man, their tendency
to obstruct or to forward him in his advancement towards
liberty, knowledge, true religion and dignity of mind.
Each of these narrators simply measures by the scale
which is considered for the time as expressing the
great concerns and duties of humanity.
Schiller’s views on this matter
were, as might have been expected, of the most enlarged
kind. ‘It seems to me,’ said he in
one of his letters, ’that in writing history
for the moderns, we should try to communicate to it
such an interest as the History of the Peloponnesian
War had for the Greeks. Now this is the problem:
to choose and arrange your materials so that, to interest,
they shall not need the aid of decoration. We
moderns have a source of interest at our disposal,
which no Greek or Roman was acquainted with, and which
the patriotic interest does not nearly equal.
This last, in general, is chiefly of importance for
unripe nations, for the youth of the world. But
we may excite a very different sort of interest if
we represent each remarkable occurrence that happened
to men as of importance to man.
It is a poor and little aim to write for one nation;
a philosophic spirit cannot tolerate such limits,
cannot bound its views to a form of human nature so
arbitrary, fluctuating, accidental. The most
powerful nation is but a fragment; and thinking minds
will not grow warm on its account, except in so far
as this nation or its fortunes have been influential
on the progress of the species.’
That there is not some excess in this
comprehensive cosmopolitan philosophy, may perhaps
be liable to question. Nature herself has, wisely
no doubt, partitioned us into ’kindreds, and
nations, and tongues:’ it is among our
instincts to grow warm in behalf of our country, simply
for its own sake; and the business of Reason seems
to be to chasten and direct our instincts, never to
destroy them. We require individuality in our
attachments: the sympathy which is expanded over
all men will commonly be found so much attenuated by
the process, that it cannot be effective on any.
And as it is in nature, so it is in art, which ought
to be the image of it. Universal philanthropy
forms but a precarious and very powerless rule of
conduct; and the ‘progress of the species’
will turn out equally unfitted for deeply exciting
the imagination. It is not with freedom that
we can sympathise, but with free men. There ought,
indeed, to be in history a spirit superior to petty
distinctions and vulgar partialities; our particular
affections ought to be enlightened and purified; but
they should not be abandoned, or, such is the condition
of humanity, our feelings must evaporate and fade away
in that extreme diffusion. Perhaps, in a certain
sense, the surest mode of pleasing and instructing
all nations is to write for one.
This too Schiller was aware of, and
had in part attended to. Besides, the Thirty-Years
War is a subject in which nationality of feeling may
be even wholly spared, better than in almost any other.
It is not a German but a European subject; it forms
the concluding portion of the Reformation, and this
is an event belonging not to any country in particular,
but to the human race. Yet, if we mistake not,
this over-tendency to generalisation, both in thought
and sentiment, has rather hurt the present work.
The philosophy, with which it is embued, now and then
grows vague from its abstractness, ineffectual from
its refinement: the enthusiasm which pervades
it, elevated, strong, enlightened, would have told
better on our hearts, had it been confined within
a narrower space, and directed to a more specific
class of objects. In his extreme attention to
the philosophical aspects of the period, Schiller
has neglected to take advantage of many interesting
circumstances, which it offered under other points
of view. The Thirty-Years War abounds with what
may be called picturesqueness in its events, and still
more in the condition of the people who carried it
on. Harte’s History of Gustavus,
a wilderness which mere human patience seems unable
to explore, is yet enlivened here and there with a
cheerful spot, when he tells us of some scalade or
camisado, or speculates on troopers rendered bullet-proof
by art-magic. His chaotic records have, in fact,
afforded to our Novelist the raw materials of Dugald
Dalgetty, a cavalier of the most singular equipment,
of character and manners which, for many reasons, merit
study and description. To much of this, though,
as he afterwards proved, it was well known to him,
Schiller paid comparatively small attention; his work
has lost in liveliness by the omission, more than
it has gained in dignity or instructiveness.
Yet, with all its imperfections, this
is no ordinary history. The speculation, it is
true, is not always of the kind we wish; it excludes
more moving or enlivening topics, and sometimes savours
of the inexperienced theorist who had passed his days
remote from practical statesmen; the subject has not
sufficient unity; in spite of every effort, it breaks
into fragments towards the conclusion: but still
there is an energy, a vigorous beauty in the work,
which far more than redeems its failings. Great
thoughts at every turn arrest our attention, and make
us pause to confirm or contradict them; happy metaphors,
some vivid descriptions of events and men, remind us
of the author of Fiesco and Don Carlos.
The characters of Gustavus and Wallenstein are finely
developed in the course of the narrative. Tilly’s
passage of the Lech, the battles of Leipzig and Luetzen
figure in our recollection, as if our eyes had witnessed
them: the death of Gustavus is described in terms
which might draw ‘iron tears’ from the
eyes of veterans. If Schiller had inclined to dwell
upon the mere visual or imaginative department of
his subject, no man could have painted it more graphically,
or better called forth our emotions, sympathetic or
romantic. But this, we have seen, was not by any
means his leading aim.
On the whole, the present work is
still the best historical performance which Germany
can boast of. Mueller’s histories are distinguished
by merits of another sort; by condensing, in a given
space, and frequently in lucid order, a quantity of
information, copious and authentic beyond example:
but as intellectual productions, they cannot rank
with Schiller’s. Woltmann of Berlin has
added to the Thirty-Years War another work
of equal size, by way of continuation, entitled History
of the Peace of Munster; with the first negotiations
of which treaty the former concludes. Woltmann
is a person of ability; but we dare not say of him,
what Wieland said of Schiller, that by his first historical
attempt he ’has discovered a decided capability
of rising to a level with Hume, Robertson and Gibbon.’
He will rather rise to a level with Belsham or Smollett.
This first complete specimen of Schiller’s
art in the historical department, though but a small
fraction of what he meant to do, and could have done,
proved in fact to be the last he ever undertook.
At present very different cares awaited him:
in 1791, a fit of sickness overtook him; he had to
exchange the inspiring labours of literature for the
disgusts and disquietudes of physical disease.
His disorder, which had its seat in the chest, was
violent and threatening; and though nature overcame
it in the present instance, the blessing of entire
health never more returned to him. The cause of
this severe affliction seemed to be the unceasing
toil and anxiety of mind, in which his days had hitherto
been passed: his frame, which, though tall, had
never been robust, was too weak for the vehement and
sleepless soul that dwelt within it; and the habit
of nocturnal study had, no doubt, aggravated all the
other mischiefs. Ever since his residence at
Dresden, his constitution had been weakened: but
this rude shock at once shattered its remaining strength;
for a time the strictest precautions were required
barely to preserve existence. A total cessation
from every intellectual effort was one of the most
peremptory laws prescribed to him. Schiller’s
habits and domestic circumstances equally rebelled
against this measure; with a beloved wife depending
on him for support, inaction itself could have procured
him little rest. His case seemed hard; his prospects
of innocent felicity had been too banefully obscured.
Yet in this painful and difficult position, he did
not yield to despondency; and at length, assistance,
and partial deliverance, reached him from a very unexpected
quarter. Schiller had not long been sick, when
the hereditary Prince, now reigning Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg,
jointly with the Count Von Schimmelmann, conferred
on him a pension of a thousand crowns for three years.
No stipulation was added, but merely that he should
be careful of his health, and use every attention
to recover. This speedy and generous aid, moreover,
was presented with a delicate politeness, which, as
Schiller said, touched him more than even the gift
itself. We should remember this Count and this
Duke; they deserve some admiration and some envy.
This disorder introduced a melancholy
change into Schiller’s circumstances: he
had now another enemy to strive with, a secret and
fearful impediment to vanquish, in which much resolute
effort must be sunk without producing any positive
result. Pain is not entirely synonymous with
Evil; but bodily pain seems less redeemed by good than
almost any other kind of it. From the loss of
fortune, of fame, or even of friends, Philosophy pretends
to draw a certain compensating benefit; but in general
the permanent loss of health will bid defiance to
her alchymy. It is a universal diminution; the
diminution equally of our resources and of our capacity
to guide them; a penalty unmitigated, save by love
of friends, which then first becomes truly dear and
precious to us; or by comforts brought from beyond
this earthly sphere, from that serene Fountain of
peace and hope, to which our weak Philosophy cannot
raise her wing. For all men, in itself, disease
is misery; but chiefly for men of finer feelings and
endowments, to whom, in return for such superiorities,
it seems to be sent most frequently and in its most
distressing forms. It is a cruel fate for the
poet to have the sunny land of his imagination, often
the sole territory he is lord of, disfigured and darkened
by the shades of pain; for one whose highest happiness
is the exertion of his mental faculties, to have them
chained and paralysed in the imprisonment of a distempered
frame. With external activity, with palpable pursuits,
above all, with a suitable placidity of nature, much
even in certain states of sickness may be performed
and enjoyed. But for him whose heart is already
over-keen, whose world is of the mind, ideal, internal;
when the mildew of lingering disease has struck that
world, and begun to blacken and consume its beauty,
nothing seems to remain but despondency and bitterness
and desolate sorrow, felt and anticipated, to the
end.
Woe to him if his will likewise falter,
if his resolution fail, and his spirit bend its neck
to the yoke of this new enemy! Idleness and a
disturbed imagination will gain the mastery of him,
and let loose their thousand fiends to harass him,
to torment him into madness. Alas! the bondage
of Algiers is freedom compared with this of the sick
man of genius, whose heart has fainted and sunk beneath
its load. His clay dwelling is changed into a
gloomy prison; every nerve is become an avenue of
disgust or anguish; and the soul sits within, in her
melancholy loneliness, a prey to the spectres of despair,
or stupefied with excess of suffering, doomed as it
were to a ‘life in death,’ to a consciousness
of agonised existence, without the consciousness of
power which should accompany it. Happily, death,
or entire fatuity, at length puts an end to such scenes
of ignoble misery; which, however, ignoble as they
are, we ought to view with pity rather than contempt.
Such are frequently the fruits of
protracted sickness, in men otherwise of estimable
qualities and gifts, but whose sensibility exceeds
their strength of mind. In Schiller, its worst
effects were resisted by the only availing antidote,
a strenuous determination to neglect them. His
spirit was too vigorous and ardent to yield even in
this emergency: he disdained to dwindle into a
pining valetudinarian; in the midst of his infirmities,
he persevered with unabated zeal in the great business
of his life. As he partially recovered, he returned
as strenuously as ever to his intellectual occupations;
and often, in the glow of poetical conception, he
almost forgot his maladies. By such resolute
and manly conduct, he disarmed sickness of its cruelest
power to wound; his frame might be in pain, but his
spirit retained its force, unextinguished, almost
unimpeded; he did not lose his relish for the beautiful,
the grand, or the good, in any of their shapes; he
loved his friends as formerly, and wrote his finest
and sublimest works when his health was gone.
Perhaps no period of his life displayed more heroism
than the present one.
After this severe attack, and the
kind provision which he had received from Denmark,
Schiller seems to have relaxed his connexion with the
University of Jena: the weightiest duties of his
class appear to have been discharged by proxy, and
his historical studies to have been forsaken.
Yet this was but a change, not an abatement, in the
activity of his mind. Once partially free from
pain, all his former diligence awoke; and being also
free from the more pressing calls of duty and economy,
he was now allowed to turn his attention to objects
which attracted it more. Among these one of the
most alluring was the Philosophy of Kant.
The transcendental system of the Koenigsberg
Professor had, for the last ten years, been spreading
over Germany, which it had now filled with the most
violent contentions. The powers and accomplishments
of Kant were universally acknowledged; the high pretensions
of his system, pretensions, it is true, such as had
been a thousand times put forth, a thousand times
found wanting, still excited notice, when so backed
by ability and reputation. The air of mysticism
connected with these doctrines was attractive to the
German mind, with which the vague and the vast are
always pleasing qualities; 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, seemed sublime rather than
appalling to the Germans; men who shrink not at toil,
and to whom a certain degree of darkness appears a
native element, essential for giving play to that
deep meditative enthusiasm which forms so important
a feature in their character. Kant’s Philosophy,
accordingly, found numerous disciples, and possessed
them with a zeal unexampled since the days of Pythagoras.
This, in fact, resembled spiritual fanaticism rather
than a calm ardour in the cause of science; Kant’s
warmest admirers seemed to regard him more in the
light of a prophet than of a mere earthly sage.
Such admiration was of course opposed by corresponding
censure; the transcendental neophytes had to encounter
sceptical gainsayers as determined as themselves.
Of this latter class the most remarkable were Herder
and Wieland. Herder, then a clergyman of Weimar,
seems never to have comprehended what he fought against
so keenly: he denounced and condemned the Kantean
metaphysics, because he found them heterodox.
The young divines came back from the University of
Jena with their minds well nigh delirious; full of
strange doctrines, which they explained to the examinators
of the Weimar Consistorium in phrases that excited
no idea in the heads of these reverend persons, but
much horror in their hearts. Hence reprimands,
and objurgations, and excessive bitterness between
the applicants for ordination and those appointed
to confer it: one young clergyman at Weimar shot
himself on this account; heresy, and jarring, and
unprofitable logic, were universal. Hence Herder’s
vehement attacks on this ‘pernicious quackery;’
this delusive and destructive ’system of words.’
Wieland strove against it for another reason.
He had, all his life, been labouring to give currency
among his countrymen to a species of diluted epicurism;
to erect a certain smooth, and elegant, and very slender
scheme of taste and morals, borrowed from our Shaftesbury
and the French. All this feeble edifice the new
doctrine was sweeping before it to utter ruin, with
the violence of a tornado. It grieved Wieland
to see the work of half a century destroyed:
he fondly imagined that but for Kant’s philosophy
it might have been perennial. With scepticism
quickened into action by such motives, Herder and
he went forth as brother champions against the transcendental
metaphysics; they were not long without a multitude
of hot assailants. The uproar produced among thinking
men by the conflict, has scarcely been equalled in
Germany since the days of Luther. Fields were
fought, and victories lost and won; nearly all the
minds of the nation were, in secret or openly, arrayed
on this side or on that. Goethe alone seemed
altogether to retain his wonted composure; he was
clear for allowing the Kantean scheme to ’have
its day, as all things have.’ Goethe has
already lived to see the wisdom of this sentiment,
so characteristic of his genius and turn of thought.
In these controversies, soon pushed
beyond the bounds of temperate or wholesome discussion,
Schiller took no part: but the noise they made
afforded him a fresh inducement to investigate a set
of doctrines, so important in the general estimation.
A system which promised, even with a very little plausibility,
to accomplish all that Kant asserted his complete
performance of; to explain the difference between Matter
and Spirit, to unravel the perplexities of Necessity
and Free-will; to show us the true grounds of our
belief in God, and what hope nature gives us of the
soul’s immortality; and thus at length, after
a thousand failures, to interpret the enigma of our
being, hardly needed that additional inducement
to make such a man as Schiller grasp at it with eager
curiosity. His progress also was facilitated by
his present circumstances; Jena had now become the
chief well-spring of Kantean doctrine, a distinction
or disgrace it has ever since continued to deserve.
Reinhold, one of Kant’s ablest followers, was
at this time Schiller’s fellow-teacher and daily
companion: he did not fail to encourage and assist
his friend in a path of study, which, as he believed,
conducted to such glorious results. Under this
tuition, Schiller was not long in discovering, that
at least the ’new philosophy was more poetical
than that of Leibnitz, and had a grander character;’
persuasions which of course confirmed him in his resolution
to examine it.
How far Schiller penetrated into the
arcana of transcendentalism it is impossible for us
to say. The metaphysical and logical branches
of it seem to have afforded him no solid satisfaction,
or taken no firm hold of his thoughts; their influence
is scarcely to be traced in any of his subsequent
writings. The only department to which he attached
himself with his ordinary zeal was that which relates
to the principles of the imitative arts, with their
moral influences, and which in the Kantean nomenclature
has been designated by the term AEsthetics,
or the doctrine of sentiments and emotions. On
these subjects he had already amassed a multitude
of thoughts; to see which expressed by new symbols,
and arranged in systematic form, and held together
by some common theory, would necessarily yield enjoyment
to his intellect, and inspire him with fresh alacrity
in prosecuting such researches. The new light
which dawned, or seemed to dawn, upon him, in the
course of these investigations, is reflected, in various
treatises, evincing, at least, the honest diligence
with which he studied, and the fertility with which
he could produce. Of these the largest and most
elaborate are the essays on Grace and Dignity;
on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry; and the Letters
on the AEsthetic Culture of Man: the other
pieces are on Tragic Art; on the Pathetic;
on the Cause of our Delight in Tragic Objects;
on Employing the Low and Common in Art.
Being cast in the mould of Kantism,
or at least clothed in its garments, these productions,
to readers unacquainted with that system, are encumbered
here and there with difficulties greater than belong
intrinsically to the subject. In perusing them,
the uninitiated student is mortified at seeing so
much powerful thought distorted, as he thinks, into
such fantastic forms: the principles of reasoning,
on which they rest, are apparently not those of common
logic; a dimness and doubt overhangs their conclusions;
scarcely anything is proved in a convincing manner.
But this is no strange quality in such writings.
To an exoteric reader the philosophy of Kant almost
always appears to invert the common maxim; its end
and aim seem not to be ’to make abstruse things
simple, but to make simple things abstruse.’
Often a proposition of inscrutable and dread aspect,
when resolutely grappled with, and torn from its shady
den, and its bristling entrenchments of uncouth terminology,
and dragged forth into the open light of day, to be
seen by the natural eye, and tried by merely human
understanding, proves to be a very harmless truth,
familiar to us from of old, sometimes so familiar
as to be a truism. Too frequently, the anxious
novice is reminded of Dryden in the Battle of the
Books: there is a helmet of rusty iron, dark,
grim, gigantic; and within it, at the farthest corner,
is a head no bigger than a walnut. These are the
general errors of Kantean criticism; in the present
works, they are by no means of the worst or most pervading
kind; and there is a fundamental merit which does
more than counterbalance them. By the aid of
study, the doctrine set before us can, in general,
at length be comprehended; and Schiller’s fine
intellect, recognisable even in its masquerade, is
ever and anon peering forth in its native form, which
all may understand, which all must relish, and presenting
us with passages that show like bright verdant islands
in the misty sea of metaphysics.
We have been compelled to offer these
remarks on Kant’s Philosophy; but it is right
to add that they are the result of only very limited
acquaintance with the subject. We cannot wish
that any influence of ours should add a note, however
feeble, to the loud and not at all melodious cry which
has been raised against it in this country. When
a class of doctrines so involved in difficulties,
yet so sanctioned by illustrious names, is set before
us, curiosity must have a theory respecting them,
and indolence and other humbler feelings are too ready
to afford her one. To call Kant’s system
a laborious dream, and its adherents crazy mystics,
is a brief method, brief but false. The critic,
whose philosophy includes the craziness of men
like these, so easily and smoothly in its formulas,
should render thanks to Heaven for having gifted him
with science and acumen, as few in any age or country
have been gifted. Meaner men, however, ought to
recollect that where we do not understand, we should
postpone deciding, or, at least, keep our decision
for our own exclusive benefit. We of England may
reject this Kantean system, perhaps with reason; but
it ought to be on other grounds than are yet before
us. Philosophy is science, and science, as Schiller
has observed, cannot always be explained in ‘conversations
by the parlour fire,’ or in written treatises
that resemble such. The cui bono of these
doctrines may not, it is true, be expressible by arithmetical
computations: the subject also is perplexed with
obscurities, and probably with manifold delusions;
and too often its interpreters with us have been like
‘tenebrific stars,’ that ‘did ray
out darkness’ on a matter itself sufficiently
dark. But what then? Is the jewel always
to be found among the common dust of the highway,
and always to be estimated by its value in the common
judgment? It lies embosomed in the depths of the
mine; rocks must be rent before it can be reached;
skilful eyes and hands must separate it from the rubbish
where it lies concealed, and kingly purchasers alone
can prize it and buy it. This law of ostracism
is as dangerous in science as it was of old in politics.
Let us not forget that many things are true which
cannot be demonstrated by the rules of Watts’s
Logic; that many truths are valuable, for which
no price is given in Paternoster Row, and no preferment
offered at St. Stephen’s! Whoever reads
these treatises of Schiller with attention, will perceive
that they depend on principles of an immensely higher
and more complex character than our ‘Essays
on Taste,’ and our ’Inquiries concerning
the Freedom of the Will.’ The laws of criticism,
which it is their purpose to establish, are derived
from the inmost nature of man; the scheme of morality,
which they inculcate, soars into a brighter region,
very far beyond the ken of our ‘Utilities’
and ‘Reflex-senses.’ They do not
teach us ’to judge of poetry and art as we judge
of dinner,’ merely by observing the impressions
it produced in us; and they do derive the duties
and chief end of man from other grounds than the philosophy
of Profit and Loss. These Letters on AEsthetic
Culture, without the aid of anything which the
most sceptical could designate as superstition, trace
out and attempt to sanction for us a system of morality,
in which the sublimest feelings of the Stoic and the
Christian are represented but as stages in our progress
to the pinnacle of true human grandeur; and man, isolated
on this fragment of the universe, encompassed with
the boundless desolate Unknown, at war with Fate,
without help or the hope of help, is confidently called
upon to rise into a calm cloudless height of internal
activity and peace, and be, what he has fondly
named himself, the god of this lower world. When
such are the results, who would not make an effort
for the steps by which they are attained? In Schiller’s
treatises, it must be owned, the reader, after all
exertions, will be fortunate if he can find them.
Yet a second perusal will satisfy him better than
the first; and among the shapeless immensities which
fill the Night of Kantism, and the meteoric coruscations,
which perplex him rather than enlighten, he will fancy
he descries some streaks of a serener radiance, which
he will pray devoutly that time may purify and ripen
into perfect day. The Philosophy of Kant is probably
combined with errors to its very core; but perhaps
also, this ponderous unmanageable dross may bear in
it the everlasting gold of truth! Mighty spirits
have already laboured in refining it: is it wise
in us to take up with the base pewter of Utility,
and renounce such projects altogether? We trust,
not.
That Schiller’s genius
profited by this laborious and ardent study of AEsthetic
Metaphysics, has frequently been doubted, and sometimes
denied. That, after such investigations, the process
of composition would become more difficult, might
be inferred from the nature of the case. That
also the principles of this critical theory were in
part erroneous, in still greater part too far-fetched
and fine-spun for application to the business of writing,
we may farther venture to assert. But excellence,
not ease of composition, is the thing to be desired;
and in a mind like Schiller’s, so full of energy,
of images and thoughts and creative power, the more
sedulous practice of selection was little likely to
be detrimental. And though considerable errors
might mingle with the rules by which he judged himself,
the habit of judging carelessly, or not at all, is
far worse than that of sometimes judging wrong.
Besides, once accustomed to attend strictly to the
operations of his genius, and rigorously to try its
products, such a man as Schiller could not fail in
time to discover what was false in the principles
by which he tried them, and consequently, in the end,
to retain the benefits of this procedure without its
evils. There is doubtless a purism in taste,
a rigid fantastical demand of perfection, a horror
at approaching the limits of impropriety, which obstructs
the free impulse of the faculties, and if excessive,
would altogether deaden them. But the excess
on the other side is much more frequent, and, for
high endowments, infinitely more pernicious. After
the strongest efforts, there may be little realised;
without strong efforts, there must be little.
That too much care does hurt in any of our tasks is
a doctrine so flattering to indolence, that we ought
to receive it with extreme caution. In works
impressed with the stamp of true genius, their quality,
not their extent, is what we value: a dull man
may spend his lifetime writing little; better so than
writing much; but a man of powerful mind is liable
to no such danger. Of all our authors, Gray is
perhaps the only one that from fastidiousness of taste
has written less than he should have done: there
are thousands that have erred the other way.
What would a Spanish reader give, had Lope de Vega
composed a hundred times as little, and that little
a hundred times as well!
Schiller’s own ideas on these
points appear to be sufficiently sound: they
are sketched in the following extract of a letter,
interesting also as a record of his purposes and intellectual
condition at this period:
’Criticism must now make good
to me the damage she herself has done. And damaged
me she most certainly has; for the boldness, the living
glow which I felt before a rule was known to me, have
for several years been wanting. I now see
myself create and form: I watch
the play of inspiration; and my fancy, knowing she
is not without witnesses of her movements, no longer
moves with equal freedom. I hope, however, ultimately
to advance so far that art shall become a second
nature, as polished manners are to well-bred
men; then Imagination will regain her former freedom,
and submit to none but voluntary limitations.’
Schiller’s subsequent writings
are the best proof that in these expectations he had
not miscalculated.
The historical and critical studies,
in which he had been so extensively and seriously
engaged, could not remain without effect on Schiller’s
general intellectual character. He had spent five
active years in studies directed almost solely to
the understanding, or the faculties connected with
it; and such industry united to such ardour had produced
an immense accession of ideas. History had furnished
him with pictures of manners and events, of strange
conjunctures and conditions of existence; it had given
him more minute and truer conceptions of human nature
in its many forms, new and more accurate opinions
on the character and end of man. The domain of
his mind was both enlarged and enlightened; a multitude
of images and detached facts and perceptions had been
laid up in his memory; and his intellect was at once
enriched by acquired thoughts, and strengthened by
increased exercise on a wider circle of knowledge.
But to understand was not enough for
Schiller; there were in him faculties which this could
not employ, and therefore could not satisfy.
The primary vocation of his nature was poetry:
the acquisitions of his other faculties served but
as the materials for his poetic faculty to act upon,
and seemed imperfect till they had been sublimated
into the pure and perfect forms of beauty, which it
is the business of this to elicit from them.
New thoughts gave birth to new feelings: and
both of these he was now called upon to body forth,
to represent by visible types, to animate and adorn
with the magic of creative genius. The first
youthful blaze of poetic ardour had long since passed
away; but this large increase of knowledge awakened
it anew, refined by years and experience into a steadier
and clearer flame. Vague shadows of unaccomplished
excellence, gleams of ideal beauty, were now hovering
fitfully across his mind: he longed to turn them
into shape, and give them a local habitation and a
name. Criticism, likewise, had exalted his notions
of art: the modern writers on subjects of taste,
Aristotle, the ancient poets, he had lately studied;
he had carefully endeavoured to extract the truth from
each, and to amalgamate their principles with his own;
in choosing, he was now more difficult to satisfy.
Minor poems had all along been partly occupying his
attention; but they yielded no space for the intensity
of his impulses, and the magnificent ideas that were
rising in his fancy. Conscious of his strength,
he dreaded not engaging with the highest species of
his art: the perusal of the Greek tragedians
had given rise to some late translations; the perusal
of Homer seems now to have suggested the idea of an
epic poem. The hero whom he first contemplated
was Gustavus Adolphus; he afterwards changed to Frederick
the Great of Prussia.
Epic poems, since the time of the
Epigoniad, and Leonidas, and especially
since that of some more recent attempts, have with
us become a mighty dull affair. That Schiller
aimed at something infinitely higher than these faint
and superannuated imitations, far higher than even
Klopstock has attained, will appear by the following
extract from one of his letters:
’An epic poem in the eighteenth
century should be quite a different thing from such
a poem in the childhood of the world. And it is
that very circumstance which attracts me so much towards
this project. Our manners, the finest essence
of our philosophies, our politics, economy, arts,
in short, of all we know and do, would require to be
introduced without constraint, and interwoven in such
a composition, to live there in beautiful harmonious
freedom, as all the branches of Greek culture live
and are made visible in Homer’s Iliad.
Nor am I disinclined to invent a species of machinery
for this purpose; being anxious to fulfil, with hairsbreadth
accuracy, all the requisitions that are made of epic
poets, even on the side of form. Besides, this
machinery, which, in a subject so modern, in an age
so prosaic, appears to present the greatest difficulty,
might exalt the interest in a high degree, were it
suitably adapted to this same modern spirit.
Crowds of confused ideas on this matter are rolling
to and fro within my head; something distinct will
come out of them at last.
’As for the sort of metre I
would choose, this I think you will hardly guess:
no other than ottave rime. All the rest,
except iambic, are become insufferable to me.
And how beautifully might the earnest and the lofty
be made to play in these light fetters! What attractions
might the epic substance gain by the soft yielding
form of this fine rhyme! For, the poem
must, not in name only, but in very deed, be capable
of being sung; as the Iliad was sung
by the peasants of Greece, as the stanzas of Jerusalem
Delivered are still sung by the Venetian gondoliers.
’The epoch of Frederick’s
life that would fit me best, I have considered also.
I should wish to select some unhappy situation; it
would allow me to unfold his mind far more poetically.
The chief action should, if possible, be very simple,
perplexed with no complicated circumstances, that
the whole might easily be comprehended at a glance,
though the episodes were never so numerous. In
this respect there is no better model than the Iliad.’
Schiller did not execute, or even
commence, the project he has here so philosophically
sketched: the constraints of his present situation,
the greatness of the enterprise compared with the uncertainty
of its success, were sufficient to deter him.
Besides, he felt that after all his wide excursions,
the true home of his genius was the Drama, the department
where its powers had first been tried, and were now
by habit or nature best qualified to act. To
the Drama he accordingly returned. The History
of the Thirty-Years War had once suggested the
idea of Gustavus Adolphus as the hero of an epic poem;
the same work afforded him a subject for a tragedy:
he now decided on beginning Wallenstein.
In this undertaking it was no easy task that he contemplated;
a common play did not now comprise his aim; he required
some magnificent and comprehensive object, in which
he could expend to advantage the new poetical and
intellectual treasures which he had for years been
amassing; something that should at once exemplify his
enlarged ideas of art, and give room and shape to his
fresh stores of knowledge and sentiment. As he
studied the history of Wallenstein, and viewed its
capabilities on every side, new ideas gathered round
it: the subject grew in magnitude, and often
changed in form. His progress in actual composition
was, of course, irregular and small. Yet the
difficulties of the subject, increasing with his own
wider, more ambitious conceptions, did not abate his
diligence: Wallenstein, with many interruptions
and many alterations, sometimes stationary, sometimes
retrograde, continued on the whole, though slowly,
to advance.
This was for several years his chosen
occupation, the task to which he consecrated his brightest
hours, and the finest part of his faculties.
For humbler employments, demanding rather industry
than inspiration, there still remained abundant leisure,
of which it was inconsistent with his habits to waste
a single hour. His occasional labours, accordingly,
were numerous, varied, and sometimes of considerable
extent. In the end of 1792, a new object seemed
to call for his attention; he once about this time
seriously meditated mingling in politics. The
French Revolution had from the first affected him with
no ordinary hopes; which, however, the course of events,
particularly the imprisonment of Louis, were now fast
converting into fears. For the ill-fated monarch,
and the cause of freedom, which seemed threatened
with disgrace in the treatment he was likely to receive,
Schiller felt so deeply interested, that he had determined,
in his case a determination not without its risks,
to address an appeal on these subjects to the French
people and the world at large. The voice of reason
advocating liberty as well as order might still, he
conceived, make a salutary impression in this period
of terror and delusion; the voice of a distinguished
man would at first sound like the voice of the nation,
which he seemed to represent. Schiller was inquiring
for a proper French translator, and revolving in his
mind the various arguments that might be used, and
the comparative propriety of using or forbearing to
use them; but the progress of things superseded the
necessity of such deliberation. In a few months,
Louis perished on the scaffold; the Bourbon family
were murdered, or scattered over Europe; and the French
government was changed into a frightful chaos, amid
the tumultuous and bloody horrors of which, calm truth
had no longer a chance to be heard. Schiller turned
away from these repulsive and appalling scenes, into
other regions where his heart was more familiar, and
his powers more likely to produce effect. The
French Revolution had distressed and shocked him; but
it did not lessen his attachment to liberty, the name
of which had been so desecrated in its wild convulsions.
Perhaps in his subsequent writings we can trace a
more respectful feeling towards old establishments;
more reverence for the majesty of Custom; and with
an equal zeal, a weaker faith in human perfectibility:
changes indeed which are the common fruit of years
themselves, in whatever age or climate of the world
our experience may be gathered.
Among the number of fluctuating engagements,
one, which for ten years had been constant with him,
was the editing of the Thalia. The principles
and performances of that work he had long looked upon
as insufficient: in particular, ever since his
settlement at Jena, it had been among his favourite
projects to exchange it for some other, conducted
on a more liberal scheme, uniting more ability in its
support, and embracing a much wider compass of literary
interests. Many of the most distinguished persons
in Germany had agreed to assist him in executing such
a plan; Goethe, himself a host, undertook to go hand
in hand with him. The Thalia was in consequence
relinquished at the end of 1793: and the first
number of the Horen came out early in the following
year. This publication was enriched with many
valuable pieces on points of philosophy and criticism;
some of Schiller’s finest essays first appeared
here: even without the foreign aids which had
been promised him, it already bade fair to outdo, as
he had meant it should, every previous work of that
description.
The Musen-Almanach, of which
he likewise undertook the superintendence, did not
aim so high: like other works of the same title,
which are numerous in Germany, it was intended for
preserving and annually delivering to the world, a
series of short poetical effusions, or other
fugitive compositions, collected from various quarters,
and often having no connexion but their juxtaposition.
In this work, as well as in the Horen, some
of Schiller’s finest smaller poems made their
first appearance; many of these pieces being written
about this period, especially the greater part of his
ballads, the idea of attempting which took its rise
in a friendly rivalry with Goethe. But the most
noted composition sent forth in the pages of the Musen-Almanach,
was the Xenien; a collection of epigrams
which originated partly, as it seems, in the mean
or irritating conduct of various contemporary authors.
In spite of the most flattering promises, and of its
own intrinsic character, the Horen, at its
first appearance, instead of being hailed with welcome
by the leading minds of the country, for whom it was
intended as a rallying point, met in many quarters
with no sentiment but coldness or hostility. The
controversies of the day had sown discord among literary
men; Schiller and Goethe, associating together, had
provoked ill-will from a host of persons, who felt
the justice of such mutual preference, but liked not
the inferences to be drawn from it; and eyed this intellectual
duumvirate, however meek in the discharge of its functions
and the wearing of its honours, with jealousy and
discontent.
The cavilling of these people, awkwardly
contrasted with their personal absurdity and insipidity,
at length provoked the serious notice of the two illustrious
associates: the result was this German Dunciad;
a production of which the plan was, that it should
comprise an immense multitude of detached couplets,
each conveying a complete thought within itself, and
furnished by one of the joint operators. The
subjects were of unlimited variety; ‘the most,’
as Schiller says, ’were wild satire, glancing
at writers and writings, intermixed with here and
there a flash of poetical or philosophic thought.’
It was at first intended to provide about a thousand
of these pointed monodistichs; unity in such a work
appearing to consist in a certain boundlessness of
size, which should hide the heterogeneous nature of
the individual parts: the whole were then to be
arranged and elaborated, till they had acquired the
proper degree of consistency and symmetry; each sacrificing
something of its own peculiar spirit to preserve the
spirit of the rest. This number never was completed:
and, Goethe being now busy with his Wilhelm Meister,
the project of completing it was at length renounced;
and the Xenien were published as unconnected
particles, not pretending to constitute a whole.
Enough appeared to create unbounded commotion among
the parties implicated: the Xenien were
exclaimed against, abused, and replied to, on all
hands; but as they declared war not on persons but
on actions; not against Gleim, Nicolai, Manso, but
against bad taste, dulness, and affectation, nothing
criminal could be sufficiently made out against them.
The Musen-Almanach, where they appeared in 1797,
continued to be published till the time of Schiller’s
leaving Jena: the Horen ceased some months
before.
The cooeperation of Goethe, which
Schiller had obtained so readily in these pursuits,
was of singular use to him in many others. Both
possessing minds of the first order, yet constructed
and trained in the most opposite modes, each had much
that was valuable to learn of the other, and suggest
to him. Cultivating different kinds of excellence,
they could joyfully admit each other’s merit;
connected by mutual services, and now by community
of literary interests, few unkindly feelings could
have place between them. For a man of high equalities,
it is rare to find a meet companion; painful and injurious
to want one. Solitude exasperates or deadens the
heart, perverts or enervates the faculties; association
with inferiors leads to dogmatism in thought, and
self-will even in affections. Rousseau never should
have lived in the Val de Montmorenci; it had been good
for Warburton that Hurd had not existed; for Johnson
never to have known Boswell or Davies. From such
evils Schiller and Goethe were delivered; their intimacy
seems to have been equal, frank and cordial; from the
contrasts and the endowments of their minds, it must
have had peculiar charms. In his critical theories,
Schiller had derived much profit from communicating
with an intellect as excursive as his own, but far
cooler and more sceptical: as he lopped off from
his creed the excrescences of Kantism, Goethe and
he, on comparing their ideas, often found in them
a striking similarity; more striking and more gratifying,
when it was considered from what diverse premises these
harmonious conclusions had been drawn. On such
subjects they often corresponded when absent, and
conversed when together. They were in the habit
of paying long visits to each other’s houses;
frequently they used to travel in company between
Jena and Weimar. ’At Triesnitz, a couple
of English miles from Jena, Goethe and he,’ we
are told, ’might sometimes be observed sitting
at table, beneath the shade of a spreading tree; talking,
and looking at the current of passengers.’ There
are some who would have ‘travelled fifty miles
on foot’ to join the party!
Besides this intercourse with Goethe,
he was happy in a kindly connexion with many other
estimable men, both in literary and in active life.
Dalberg, at a distance, was to the last his friend
and warmest admirer. At Jena, he had Schuetz,
Paul, Hufland, Reinhold. Wilhelm von Humboldt,
also, brother of the celebrated traveller, had come
thither about this time, and was now among his closest
associates. At Weimar, excluding less important
persons, there were still Herder and Wieland, to divide
his attention with Goethe. And what to his affectionate
heart must have been the most grateful circumstance
of all, his aged parents were yet living to participate
in the splendid fortune of the son whom they had once
lamented and despaired of, but never ceased to love.
In 1793 he paid them a visit in Swabia, and passed
nine cheerful months among the scenes dearest to his
recollection: enjoying the kindness of those unalterable
friends whom Nature had given him; and the admiring
deference of those by whom it was most delightful
to be honoured, those who had known him
in adverse and humbler circumstances, whether they
might have respected or contemned him. By the
Grand Duke, his ancient censor and patron, he was
not interfered with; that prince, in answer to a previous
application on the subject, having indirectly engaged
to take no notice of this journey. The Grand
Duke had already interfered too much with him, and
bitterly repented of his interference. Next year
he died; an event which Schiller, who had long forgotten
past ill-treatment, did not learn without true sorrow,
and grateful recollections of bygone kindness.
The new sovereign, anxious to repair the injustice
of his predecessor, almost instantly made offer of
a vacant Tuebingen professorship to Schiller; a proposal
flattering to the latter, but which, by the persuasion
of the Duke of Weimar, he respectfully declined.
Amid labours and amusements so multiplied,
amid such variety of intellectual exertion and of
intercourse with men, Schiller, it was clear, had
not suffered the encroachments of bodily disease to
undermine the vigour of his mental or moral powers.
No period of his life displayed in stronger colours
the lofty and determined zeal of his character.
He had already written much; his fame stood upon a
firm basis; domestic wants no longer called upon him
for incessant effort; and his frame was pining under
the slow canker of an incurable malady. Yet he
never loitered, never rested; his fervid spirit, which
had vanquished opposition and oppression in his youth;
which had struggled against harassing uncertainties,
and passed unsullied through many temptations, in
his earlier manhood, did not now yield to this last
and most fatal enemy. The present was the busiest,
most productive season of his literary life; and with
all its drawbacks, it was probably the happiest.
Violent attacks from his disorder were of rare occurrence;
and its constant influence, the dark vapours with which
it would have overshadowed the faculties of his head
and heart, were repelled by diligence and a courageous
exertion of his will. In other points, he had
little to complain of, and much to rejoice in.
He was happy in his family, the chosen scene of his
sweetest, most lasting satisfaction; by the world
he was honoured and admired; his wants were provided
for; he had tasks which inspired and occupied him;
friends who loved him, and whom he loved. Schiller
had much to enjoy, and most of it he owed to himself.
In his mode of life at Jena, simplicity
and uniformity were the most conspicuous qualities;
the single excess which he admitted being that of
zeal in the pursuits of literature, the sin which all
his life had most easily beset him. His health
had suffered much, and principally, it was thought,
from the practice of composing by night: yet the
charms of this practice were still too great for his
self-denial; and, except in severe fits of sickness,
he could not discontinue it. The highest, proudest
pleasure of his mind was that glow of intellectual
production, that ‘fine frenzy,’ which makes
the poet, while it lasts, a new and nobler creature;
exalting him into brighter regions, adorned by visions
of magnificence and beauty, and delighting all his
faculties by the intense consciousness of their exerted
power. To enjoy this pleasure in perfection,
the solitary stillness of night, diffusing its solemn
influence over thought as well as earth and air, had
at length in Schiller’s case grown indispensable.
For this purpose, accordingly, he was accustomed,
in the present, as in former periods, to invert the
common order of things: by day he read, refreshed
himself with the aspect of nature, conversed or corresponded
with his friends; but he wrote and studied in the night.
And as his bodily feelings were too often those of
languor and exhaustion, he adopted, in impatience
of such mean impediments, the pernicious expedient
of stimulants, which yield a momentary strength, only
to waste our remaining fund of it more speedily and
surely.
’During summer, his place of
study was in a garden, which at length he purchased,
in the suburbs of Jena, not far from the Weselhoefts’
house, where at that time was the office of the Allgemeine
Litteratur-Zeitung. Reckoning from the market-place
of Jena, it lies on the south-west border of the town,
between the Engelgatter and the Neuthor, in a hollow
defile, through which a part of the Leutrabach flows
round the city. On the top of the acclivity,
from which there is a beautiful prospect into the
valley of the Saal, and the fir mountains of the neighbouring
forest, Schiller built himself a small house, with
a single chamber. It was his favourite abode during
hours of composition; a great part of the works he
then wrote were written here. In winter he likewise
dwelt apart from the noise of men; in the Griesbachs’
house, on the outside of the city-trench. On
sitting down to his desk at night, he was wont to
keep some strong coffee, or wine-chocolate, but more
frequently a flask of old Rhenish, or Champagne, standing
by him, that he might from time to time repair the
exhaustion of nature. Often the neighbours used
to hear him earnestly declaiming, in the silence of
the night: and whoever had an opportunity of
watching him on such occasions, a thing very easy to
be done from the heights lying opposite his little
garden-house, on the other side of the dell, might
see him now speaking aloud and walking swiftly to
and fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself
down into his chair and writing; and drinking the
while, sometimes more than once, from the glass standing
near him. In winter he was to be found at his
desk till four, or even five o’clock in the morning;
in summer, till towards three. He then went to
bed, from which he seldom rose till nine or ten.’
Had prudence been the dominant quality
in Schiller’s character, this practice would
undoubtedly have been abandoned, or rather never taken
up. It was an error so to waste his strength;
but one of those which increase rather than diminish
our respect; originating, as it did, in generous ardour
for what was best and grandest, they must be cold
censurers that can condemn it harshly. For ourselves,
we but lament and honour this excess of zeal; its
effects were mournful, but its origin was noble.
Who can picture Schiller’s feelings in this
solitude, without participating in some faint reflection
of their grandeur! The toil-worn but devoted
soul, alone, under the silent starry canopy of Night,
offering up the troubled moments of existence on the
altar of Eternity! For here the splendour that
gleamed across the spirit of a mortal, transient as
one of us, was made to be perpetual; these images
and thoughts were to pass into other ages and distant
lands; to glow in human hearts, when the heart that
conceived them had long been mouldered into common
dust. To the lovers of genius, this little garden-house
might have been a place to visit as a chosen shrine;
nor will they learn without regret that the walls of
it, yielding to the hand of time, have already crumbled
into ruin, and are now no longer to be traced.
The piece of ground that it stood on is itself hallowed
with a glory that is bright, pure and abiding; but
the literary pilgrim could not have surveyed, without
peculiar emotion, the simple chamber, in which Schiller
wrote the Reich der Schatten, the Spaziergang,
the Ideal, and the immortal scenes of Wallenstein.
The last-named work had cost him many
an anxious, given him many a pleasant, hour.
For seven years it had continued in a state of irregular,
and oft-suspended progress; sometimes ’lying
endless and formless’ before him; sometimes
on the point of being given up altogether. The
multitude of ideas, which he wished to incorporate
in the structure of the piece, retarded him; and the
difficulty of contenting his taste, respecting the
manner of effecting this, retarded him still more.
In Wallenstein he wished to embody the more
enlarged notions which experience had given him of
men, especially which history had given him of generals
and statesmen; and while putting such characters in
action, to represent whatever was, or could be made,
poetical, in the stormy period of the Thirty-Years
War. As he meditated on the subject, it continued
to expand; in his fancy, it assumed successively a
thousand forms; and after all due strictness of selection,
such was still the extent of materials remaining on
his hands, that he found it necessary to divide the
play into three parts, distinct in their arrangements,
but in truth forming a continuous drama of eleven
acts. In this shape it was sent forth to the world,
in 1799; a work of labour and persevering anxiety,
but of anxiety and labour, as it then appeared, which
had not been bestowed in vain. Wallenstein
is by far the best performance he had yet produced;
it merits a long chapter of criticism by itself; and
a few hurried pages are all that we can spend on it.
As a porch to the great edifice stands
Part first, entitled Wallenstein’s Camp,
a piece in one act. It paints, with much humour
and graphical felicity, the manners of that rude tumultuous
host which Wallenstein presided over, and had made
the engine of his ambitious schemes. Schiller’s
early experience of a military life seems now to have
stood him in good stead; his soldiers are delineated
with the distinctness of actual observation; in rugged
sharpness of feature, they sometimes remind us of
Smollett’s seamen. Here are all the wild
lawless spirits of Europe assembled within the circuit
of a single trench. Violent, tempestuous, unstable
is the life they lead. Ishmaelites, their hands
against every man, and every man’s hand against
them; the instruments of rapine; tarnished with almost
every vice, and knowing scarcely any virtue but those
of reckless bravery and uncalculating obedience to
their leader, their situation still presents some
aspects which affect or amuse us; and these the poet
has seized with his accustomed skill. Much of
the cruelty and repulsive harshness of these soldiers,
we are taught to forget in contemplating their forlorn
houseless wanderings, and the practical magnanimity,
with which even they contrive to wring from Fortune
a tolerable scantling of enjoyment. Their manner
of existence Wallenstein has, at an after period of
the action, rather movingly expressed:
’Our life was but a
battle and a march,
And, like the wind’s
blast, never-resting, homeless,
We storm’d across
the war-convulsed Earth.’
Still farther to soften the asperities
of the scene, the dialogue is cast into a rude Hudibrastic
metre, full of forced rhymes, and strange double-endings,
with a rhythm ever changing, ever rough and lively,
which might almost be compared to the hard, irregular,
fluctuating sound of the regimental drum. In
this ludicrous doggrel, with phrases and figures of
a correspondent cast, homely, ridiculous, graphic,
these men of service paint their hopes and doings.
There are ranks and kinds among them; representatives
of all the constituent parts of the motley multitude,
which followed this prince of Condottieri.
The solemn pedantry of the ancient Wachtmeister
is faithfully given; no less so are the jocund ferocity
and heedless daring of Holky’s Jaegers, or the
iron courage and stern camp-philosophy of Pappenheim’s
Cuirassiers. Of the Jaeger the sole principle
is military obedience; he does not reflect or calculate;
his business is to do whatever he is ordered, and
to enjoy whatever he can reach. ‘Free wished
I to live,’ he says,
’Free wished I to live,
and easy and gay,
And see something new
on each new day;
In the joys of the moment
lustily sharing,
’Bout the past
or the future not thinking or caring:
To the Kaiser, therefore,
I sold my bacon,
And by him good charge
of the whole is taken.
Order me on ’mid
the whistling fiery shot,
Over the Rhine-stream
rapid and roaring wide,
A third of the troop
must go to pot,
Without loss of time,
I mount and ride;
But farther, I beg very
much, do you see,
That in all things else
you would leave me free.’
The Pappenheimer is an older
man, more sedate and more indomitable; he has wandered
over Europe, and gathered settled maxims of soldierly
principle and soldierly privilege: he is not without
a rationale of life; the various professions
of men have passed in review before him, but no coat
that he has seen has pleased him like his own ’steel
doublet,’ cased in which, it is his wish,
’Looking down on the
world’s poor restless scramble,
Careless, through it,
astride of his nag to ramble.’
Yet at times with this military stoicism
there is blended a dash of homely pathos; he admits,
’This sword of ours
is no plough or spade,
You cannot delve or
reap with the iron blade;
For us there falls no
seed, no corn-field grows,
Neither home nor kindred
the soldier knows:
Wandering over the face
of the earth,
Warming his hands at
another’s hearth:
From the pomp of towns
he must onward roam;
In the village-green
with its cheerful game,
In the mirth of the
vintage or harvest-home,
No part or lot can the
soldier claim.
Tell me then, in the
place of goods or pelf,
What has he unless to
honour himself?
Leave not even this
his own, what wonder
The man should burn
and kill and plunder?
But the camp of Wallenstein is fall
of bustle as well as speculation; there are gamblers,
peasants, sutlers, soldiers, recruits, capuchin friars,
moving to and fro in restless pursuit of their several
purposes. The sermon of the Capuchin is an unparalleled
composition; a medley of texts, puns, nicknames,
and verbal logic, conglutinated by a stupid judgment,
and a fiery catholic zeal. It seems to be delivered
with great unction, and to find fit audience in the
camp: towards the conclusion they rush upon him,
and he narrowly escapes killing or ducking, for having
ventured to glance a censure at the General.
The soldiers themselves are jeering, wrangling, jostling;
discussing their wishes and expectations; and, at last,
they combine in a profound deliberation on the state
of their affairs. A vague exaggerated outline
of the coming events and personages is imaged to us
in their coarse conceptions. We dimly discover
the precarious position of Wallenstein; the plots
which threaten him, which he is meditating: we
trace the leading qualities of the principal officers;
and form a high estimate of the potent spirit which,
binds this fierce discordant mass together, and seems
to be the object of universal reverence where nothing
else is revered.
In the Two Piccolomini, the
next division of the work, the generals for whom we
have thus been prepared appear in person on the scene,
and spread out before us their plots and counterplots;
Wallenstein, through personal ambition and evil counsel,
slowly resolving to revolt; and Octavio Piccolomini,
in secret, undermining his influence among the leaders,
and preparing for him that pit of ruin, into which,
in the third Part, Wallenstein’s Death,
we see him sink with all his fortunes. The military
spirit which pervades the former piece is here well
sustained. The ruling motives of these captains
and colonels are a little more refined, or more disguised,
than those of the Cuirassiers and Jaegers; but
they are the same in substance; the love of present
or future pleasure, of action, reputation, money, power;
selfishness, but selfishness distinguished by a superficial
external propriety, and gilded over with the splendour
of military honour, of courage inflexible, yet light,
cool and unassuming. These are not imaginary
heroes, but genuine hired men of war: we do not
love them; yet there is a pomp about their operations,
which agreeably fills up the scene. This din
of war, this clash of tumultuous conflicting interests,
is felt as a suitable accompaniment to the affecting
or commanding movements of the chief characters whom
it envelops or obeys.
Of the individuals that figure in
this world of war, Wallenstein himself, the strong
Atlas which supports it all, is by far the most imposing.
Wallenstein is the model of a high-souled, great,
accomplished man, whose ruling passion is ambition.
He is daring to the utmost pitch of manhood; he is
enthusiastic and vehement; but the fire of his soul
burns hid beneath a deep stratum of prudence, guiding
itself by calculations which extend to the extreme
limits of his most minute concerns. This prudence,
sometimes almost bordering on irresolution, forms
the outward rind of his character, and for a while
is the only quality which we discover in it. The
immense influence which his genius appears to exert
on every individual of his many followers, prepares
us to expect a great man; and, when Wallenstein, after
long delay and much forewarning, is in fine presented
to us, we at first experience something like a disappointment.
We find him, indeed, possessed of a staid grandeur;
yet involved in mystery; wavering between two opinions;
and, as it seems, with all his wisdom, blindly credulous
in matters of the highest import. It is only when
events have forced decision on him, that he rises in
his native might, that his giant spirit stands unfolded
in its strength before us;
‘Night must it be, ere
Friedland’s star will beam:’
amid difficulties, darkness and impending
ruin, at which the boldest of his followers grow pale,
he himself is calm, and first in this awful crisis
feels the serenity and conscious strength of his soul
return. Wallenstein, in fact, though preeminent
in power, both external and internal, of high intellect
and commanding will, skilled in war and statesmanship
beyond the best in Europe, the idol of sixty thousand
fearless hearts, is not yet removed above our sympathy.
We are united with him by feelings, which he reckons
weak, though they belong to the most generous parts
of his nature. His indecision partly takes its
rise in the sensibilities of his heart, as well as
in the caution of his judgment: his belief in
astrology, which gives force and confirmation to this
tendency, originates in some soft kindly emotions,
and adds a new interest to the spirit of the warrior;
it humbles him, to whom the earth is subject, before
those mysterious Powers which weigh the destinies
of man in their balance, in whose eyes the greatest
and the least of mortals scarcely differ in littleness.
Wallenstein’s confidence in the friendship of
Octavio, his disinterested love for Max Piccolomini,
his paternal and brotherly kindness, are feelings
which cast an affecting lustre over the harsher, more
heroic qualities wherewith they are combined.
His treason to the Emperor is a crime, for which,
provoked and tempted as he was, we do not greatly
blame him; it is forgotten in our admiration of his
nobleness, or recollected only as a venial trespass.
Schiller has succeeded well with Wallenstein, where
it was not easy to succeed. The truth of history
has been but little violated; yet we are compelled
to feel that Wallenstein, whose actions individually
are trifling, unsuccessful, and unlawful, is a strong,
sublime, commanding character; we look at him with
interest, our concern at his fate is tinged with a
shade of kindly pity.
In Octavio Piccolomini, his war-companion,
we can find less fault, yet we take less pleasure.
Octavio’s qualities are chiefly negative:
he rather walks by the letter of the moral law, than
by its spirit; his conduct is externally correct,
but there is no touch of generosity within. He
is more of the courtier than of the soldier: his
weapon is intrigue, not force. Believing firmly
that ‘whatever is, is best,’ he distrusts
all new and extraordinary things; he has no faith in
human nature, and seems to be virtuous himself more
by calculation than by impulse. We scarcely thank
him for his loyalty; serving his Emperor, he ruins
and betrays his friend: and, besides, though he
does not own it, personal ambition is among his leading
motives; he wishes to be general and prince, and Wallenstein
is not only a traitor to his sovereign, but a bar
to this advancement. It is true, Octavio does
not personally tempt him towards his destruction;
but neither does he warn him from it; and perhaps
he knew that fresh temptation was superfluous.
Wallenstein did not deserve such treatment from a man
whom he had trusted as a brother, even though such
confidence was blind, and guided by visions and starry
omens. Octavio is a skilful, prudent, managing
statesman; of the kind praised loudly, if not sincerely,
by their friends, and detested deeply by their enemies.
His object may be lawful or even laudable; but his
ways are crooked; we dislike him but the more that
we know not positively how to blame him.
Octavio Piccolomini and Wallenstein
are, as it were, the two opposing forces by which
this whole universe of military politics is kept in
motion. The struggle of magnanimity and strength
combined with treason, against cunning and apparent
virtue, aided by law, gives rise to a series of great
actions, which are here vividly presented to our view.
We mingle in the clashing interests of these men of
war; we see them at their gorgeous festivals and stormy
consultations, and participate in the hopes or fears
that agitate them. The subject had many capabilities;
and Schiller has turned them all to profit. Our
minds are kept alert by a constant succession of animating
scenes of spectacle, dialogue, incident: the
plot thickens and darkens as we advance; the interest
deepens and deepens to the very end.
But among the tumults of this busy
multitude, there are two forms of celestial beauty
that solicit our attention, and whose destiny, involved
with that of those around them, gives it an importance
in our eyes which it could not otherwise have had.
Max Piccolomini, Octavio’s son, and Thekla,
the daughter of Wallenstein, diffuse an ethereal radiance
over all this tragedy; they call forth the finest feelings
of the heart, where other feelings had already been
aroused; they superadd to the stirring pomp of scenes,
which had already kindled our imaginations, the enthusiasm
of bright unworn humanity, ’the bloom of young
desire, the purple light of love.’ The history
of Max and Thekla is not a rare one in poetry; but
Schiller has treated it with a skill which is extremely
rare. Both of them are represented as combining
every excellence; their affection is instantaneous
and unbounded; yet the coolest, most sceptical reader
is forced to admire them, and believe in them.
Of Max we are taught from the first
to form the highest expectations: the common
soldiers and their captains speak of him as of a perfect
hero; the Cuirassiers had, at Pappenheim’s
death, on the field of Luetzen, appointed him their
colonel by unanimous election. His appearance
answers these ideas: Max is the very spirit of
honour, and integrity, and young ardour, personified.
Though but passing into maturer age, he has already
seen and suffered much; but the experience of the
man has not yet deadened or dulled the enthusiasm of
the boy. He has lived, since his very childhood,
constantly amid the clang of war, and with few ideas
but those of camps; yet here, by a native instinct,
his heart has attracted to it all that was noble and
graceful in the trade of arms, rejecting all that was
repulsive or ferocious. He loves Wallenstein
his patron, his gallant and majestic leader:
he loves his present way of life, because it is one
of peril and excitement, because he knows no other,
but chiefly because his young unsullied spirit can
shed a resplendent beauty over even the wastest region
in the destiny of man. Yet though a soldier, and
the bravest of soldiers, he is not this alone.
He feels that there are fairer scenes in life, which
these scenes of havoc and distress but deform or destroy;
his first acquaintance with the Princess Thekla unveils
to him another world, which till then he had not dreamed
of; a land of peace and serene elysian felicity, the
charms of which he paints with simple and unrivalled
eloquence. Max is not more daring than affectionate;
he is merciful and gentle, though his training has
been under tents; modest and altogether unpretending,
though young and universally admired. We conceive
his aspect to be thoughtful but fervid, dauntless
but mild: he is the very poetry of war, the essence
of a youthful hero. We should have loved him anywhere;
but here, amid barren scenes of strife and danger,
he is doubly dear to us.
His first appearance wins our favour;
his eloquence in sentiment prepares us to expect no
common magnanimity in action. It is as follows:
Octavio and Questenberg are consulting
on affairs of state; Max enters: he is
just returned from convoying the Princess Thekla
and her mother, the daughter and the wife of Friedland,
to the camp at Pilsen.
MAX PICCOLOMINI, OCTAVIO PICCOLOMINI, QUESTENBERG.
MAX. ’Tis he himself! My father, welcome,
welcome!
[He embraces him: on turning
round, he observes Questenberg, and draws coldly back.
Busied, I perceive? I will not interrupt you.
OCT. How now, Max? View this stranger better!
An old friend deserves regard and kindness;
The Kaiser’s messenger should be rever’d!
MAX. [drily] Von Questenberg! If it is
good that brings you
To our head-quarters, welcome!
QUEST. [has taken his hand] Nay, draw not
Your hand away, Count Piccolomini!
Not on mine own account alone I grasp it,
And nothing common will I say therewith.
Octavio, Max, Piccolomini! [Taking both their
hands.
Names of benignant solemn import! Never
Can Austria’s fortune fail while two such stars,
To guide and guard her, gleam above our hosts.
MAX. You play it wrong, Sir Minister! To
praise,
I wot, you come not hither; to blame and censure
You are come. Let me be no exception.
OCT. [to Max.] He comes from Court, where every
one is not
So well contented with the Duke as here.
MAX. And what new fault have they to charge him
with?
That he alone decides what he alone
Can understand? Well! Should it not be so?
It should and must! This man was never made
To ply and mould himself like wax to others:
It goes against his heart; he cannot do it,
He has the spirit of a ruler, and
The station of a ruler. Well for us
It is so! Few can rule themselves, can use
Their wisdom wisely: happy for the whole
Where there is one among them that can be
A centre and a hold for many thousands;
That can plant himself like a firm column,
For the whole to lean on safely! Such a one
Is Wallenstein; some other man might better
Serve the Court, none else could serve the Army.
QUEST. The Army, truly!
MAX. And it is a pleasure
To behold how all awakes and strengthens
And revives around him; how men’s faculties
Come forth; their gifts grow plainer to themselves!
From each he can elicit his endowment,
His peculiar power; and does it wisely;
Leaving each to be the man he found him,
Watching only that he always be so.
I’ th’ proper place: and thus he
makes the talents
Of all mankind his own.
QUEST. No one denies him
Skill in men, and skill to use them. His fault
is
That in the ruler he forgets the servant,
As if he had been born to be commander.
MAX. And is he not? By birth he is invested
With all gifts for it, and with the farther gift
Of finding scope to use them; of acquiring
For the ruler’s faculties the ruler’s
office.
QUEST. So that how far the rest of us have rights
Or influence, if any, lies with Friedland?
MAX. He is no common person; he requires
No common confidence: allow him space;
The proper limit he himself will set.
QUEST. The trial shows it!
MAX. Ay! Thus it
is with them!
Still so! All frights them that has any depth;
Nowhere are they at ease but in the shallows.
OCT. [to Quest.] Let him have his way, my friend!
The argument
Will not avail us.
MAX. They invoke the spirit
I’ th’ hour of need, and shudder when
he rises.
The great, the wonderful, must be accomplished
Like a thing of course! In war, in battle,
A moment is decisive; on the spot
Must be determin’d, in the instant done.
With ev’ry noble quality of nature
The leader must be gifted: let him live, then,
In their noble sphere! The oracle within him,
The living spirit, not dead books, old forms,
Not mould’ring parchments must he take to counsel.
OCT. My Son! despise not these old narrow forms!
They are as barriers, precious walls and fences,
Which oppressed mortals have erected
To mod’rate the rash will of their oppressors.
For the uncontrolled has ever been destructive.
The way of Order, though it lead through windings,
Is the best. Right forward goes the lightning
And the cannon-ball: quick, by the nearest path,
They come, op’ning with murderous crash their
way,
To blast and ruin! My Son! the quiet road
Which men frequent, where peace and blessings travel,
Follows the river’s course, the valley’s
bendings;
Modest skirts the cornfield and the vineyard,
Revering property’s appointed bounds;
And leading safe though slower to the mark.
QUEST. O, hear your Father! him who is at once
A hero and a man!
OCT. It is the child
O’ th’ camp that speaks in thee, my Son:
a war
Of fifteen years has nursed and taught thee; peace
Thou hast never seen. My Son, there is a worth
Beyond the worth of warriors: ev’n in war
itself
The object is not war. The rapid deeds
Of power, th’ astounding wonders of the moment
It is not these that minister to man
Aught useful, aught benignant or enduring.
In haste the wandering soldier comes, and builds
With canvas his light town: here in a moment
Is a rushing concourse; markets open;
Roads and rivers crowd with merchandise
And people; Traffic stirs his hundred arms.
Ere long, some morning, look, and it is
gone!
The tents are struck, the host has marched away;
Dead as a churchyard lies the trampled seed-field,
And wasted is the harvest of the year.
MAX. O Father! that the Kaiser would make
peace!
The bloody laurel I would gladly change
For the first violet Spring should offer us,
The tiny pledge that Earth again was young!
OCT. How’s this? What is it that affects
thee so?
MAX. Peace I have never seen? Yes, I have
seen it!
Ev’n now I come from it: my journey led
me
Through lands as yet unvisited by war.
O Father! life has charms, of which we know not:
We have but seen the barren coasts of life;
Like some wild roving crew of lawless pirates,
Who, crowded in their narrow noisome ship,
Upon the rude sea, with rude manners dwell;
Naught of the fair land knowing but the bays,
Where they may risk their hurried thievish landing.
Of the loveliness that, in its peaceful dales,
The land conceals O Father! O,
of this,
In our wild voyage we have seen no glimpse.
OCT. [gives increased attention]
And did this journey show thee much of it?
MAX. ’Twas the first holiday of my existence.
Tell me, where’s the end of all this labour,
This grinding labour that has stolen my youth,
And left my heart uncheer’d and void, my spirit
Uncultivated as a wilderness?
This camp’s unceasing din; the neighing steeds;
The trumpet’s clang; the never-changing round
Of service, discipline, parade, give nothing
To the heart, the heart that longs for nourishment.
There is no soul in this insipid bus’ness;
Life has another fate and other joys.
OCT. Much hast thou learn’d, my Son, in
this short journey!
MAX. O blessed bright day, when at last the soldier
Shall turn back to life, and be again a man!
Through th’ merry lines the colours are unfurl’d,
And homeward beats the thrilling soft peace-march;
All hats and helmets deck’d with leafy sprays,
The last spoil of the fields! The city’s
gates
Fly up; now needs not the petard to burst them:
The walls are crowded with rejoicing people;
Their shouts ring through the air: from every
tower
Blithe bells are pealing forth the merry vesper
Of that bloody day. From town and hamlet
Flow the jocund thousands; with their hearty
Kind impetuosity our march impeding.
The old man, weeping that he sees this day,
Embraces his long-lost son: a stranger
He revisits his old home; with spreading boughs
The tree o’ershadows him at his return,
Which waver’d as a twig when he departed;
And modest blushing comes a maid to meet him,
Whom on her nurse’s breast he left. O happy,
For whom some kindly door like this, for whom
Soft arms to clasp him shall be open’d!
QUEST. [with emotion] O that
The times you speak of should be so far distant!
Should not be tomorrow, be today!
MAX. And who’s to blame for it but you
at Court?
I will deal plainly with you, Questenberg:
When I observ’d you here, a twinge of spleen
And bitterness went through me. It is you
That hinder peace; yes, you. The General
Must force it, and you ever keep tormenting him,
Obstructing all his steps, abusing him;
For what? Because the good of Europe lies
Nearer his heart, than whether certain acres
More or less of dirty land be Austria’s!
You call him traitor, rebel, God knows what,
Because he spares the Saxons; as if that
Were not the only way to peace; for how
If during war, war end not, can peace follow?
Go to! go to! As I love goodness, so I hate
This paltry work of yours: and here I vow to
God,
For him, this rebel, traitor Wallenstein,
To shed my blood, my heart’s blood, drop by
drop,
Ere I will see you triumph in his fall!
The Princess Thekla is perhaps still
dearer to us. Thekla, just entering on life,
with ‘timid steps,’ with the brilliant
visions of a cloister yet undisturbed by the contradictions
of reality, beholds in Max, not merely her protector
and escort to her father’s camp, but the living
emblem of her shapeless yet glowing dreams. She
knows not deception, she trusts and is trusted:
their spirits meet and mingle, and ‘clasp each
other firmly and forever.’ All this is described
by the poet with a quiet inspiration, which finds
its way into our deepest sympathies. Such beautiful
simplicity is irresistible. ’How long,’
the Countess Terzky asks,
How long is it since you disclosed your heart?
MAX. This morning first I risked a word of it.
COUN. Not till this morning during twenty days?
MAX. ’Twas at the castle where you met
us, ’twixt this
And Nepomuk, the last stage of the journey.
On a balcony she and I were standing, our looks
In silence turn’d upon the vacant landscape;
And before us the dragoons were riding,
Whom the Duke had sent to be her escort.
Heavy on my heart lay thoughts of parting,
And with a faltering voice at last I said:
All this reminds me, Fraeulein, that today
I must be parted from my happiness;
In few hours you will find a father,
Will see yourself encircled by new friends;
And I shall be to you nought but a stranger,
Forgotten in the crowd “Speak with
Aunt Terzky!”
Quick she interrupted me; I noticed
A quiv’ring in her voice; a glowing blush
Spread o’er her cheeks; slow rising from the
ground,
Her eyes met mine: I could control myself
No longer
[The Princess appears at the door,
and stops; the Countess, but not Piccolomini, observing
her.
I clasp’d her wildly
in my arms,
My lips were join’d with hers. Some footsteps
stirring
I’ th’ next room parted us; ’twas
you; what then
Took place, you know.
COUN. And can you be so modest,
Or incurious, as not once to ask me
For my secret, in return?
MAX. Your secret?
COUN. Yes, sure! On coming in the moment
after,
How my niece receiv’d me, what i’ th’
instant
Of her first surprise she
MAX. Ha?
THEKLA [enters hastily].
Spare yourself
The trouble, Aunt! That he can learn from me.
We rejoice in the ardent, pure and
confiding affection of these two angelic beings:
but our feeling is changed and made more poignant,
when we think that the inexorable hand of Destiny is
already lifted to smite their world with blackness
and desolation. Thekla has enjoyed ‘two
little hours of heavenly beauty;’ but her native
gaiety gives place to serious anticipations and alarms;
she feels that the camp of Wallenstein is not a place
for hope to dwell in. The instructions and explanations
of her aunt disclose the secret: she is not to
love Max; a higher, it may be a royal, fate awaits
her; but she is to tempt him from his duty, and make
him lend his influence to her father, whose daring
projects she now for the first time discovers.
From that moment her hopes of happiness have vanished,
never more to return. Yet her own sorrows touch
her less than the ruin which she sees about to overwhelm
her tender and affectionate mother. For herself,
she waits with gloomy patience the stroke that is
to crush her. She is meek, and soft, and maiden-like;
but she is Friedland’s daughter, and does not
shrink from what is unavoidable. There is often
a rectitude, and quick inflexibility of resolution
about Thekla, which contrasts beautifully with her
inexperience and timorous acuteness of feeling:
on discovering her father’s treason, she herself
decides that Max ’shall obey his first impulse,’
and forsake her.
There are few scenes in poetry more
sublimely pathetic than this. We behold the sinking
but still fiery glory of Wallenstein, opposed to the
impetuous despair of Max Piccolomini, torn asunder
by the claims of duty and of love; the calm but broken-hearted
Thekla, beside her broken-hearted mother, and surrounded
by the blank faces of Wallenstein’s desponding
followers. There is a physical pomp corresponding
to the moral grandeur of the action; the successive
revolt and departure of the troops is heard without
the walls of the Palace; the trumpets of the Pappenheimers
reecho the wild feelings of their leader. What
follows too is equally affecting. Max being forced
away by his soldiers from the side of Thekla, rides
forth at their head in a state bordering on frenzy.
Next day come tidings of his fate, which no heart
is hard enough to hear unmoved. The effect it
produces upon Thekla displays all the hidden energies
of her soul. The first accidental hearing of
the news had almost overwhelmed her; but she summons
up her strength: she sends for the messenger,
that she may question him more closely, and listen
to his stern details with the heroism of a Spartan
virgin.
THEKLA; THE SWEDISH CAPTAIN; FRAeULEIN NEUBRUNN.
CAPT. [approaches respectfully]
Princess I must pray you to
forgive me
My most rash unthinking words: I could not
THEKLA [with noble dignity].
You saw me in my grief; a sad chance made you
At once my confidant, who were a stranger.
CAPT. I fear the sight of me is hateful to you:
They were mournful tidings I brought hither.
THEKLA. The blame was mine! ’Twas
I that forced them from you;
Your voice was but the voice of Destiny.
My terror interrupted your recital:
Finish it, I pray you.
CAPT. ’Twill renew your
grief!
THEKLA. I am prepared for’t, I will be
prepared.
Proceed! How went the action? Let me hear.
CAPT. At Neustadt, dreading no surprise, we lay
Slightly entrench’d; when towards night a cloud
Of dust rose from the forest, and our outposts
Rush’d into the camp, and cried: The foe
was there!
Scarce had we time to spring on horseback, when
The Pappenheimers, coming at full gallop,
Dash’d o’er the palisado, and next moment
These fierce troopers pass’d our camp-trench
also.
But thoughtlessly their courage had impelled them
To advance without support; their infantry
Was far behind; only the Pappenheimers
Boldly following their bold leader
[Thekla makes a movement.
The Captain pauses for a moment, till she beckons
him to proceed.
On front and flank with all our horse we charged them;
And ere long forc’d them back upon the trench,
Where rank’d in haste our infantry presented
An iron hedge of pikes to stop their passage.
Advance they could not, nor retreat a step,
Wedg’d in this narrow prison, death on all sides.
Then the Rheingraf call’d upon their leader,
In fair battle, fairly to surrender:
But Colonel Piccolomini [Thekla,
tottering, catches by a seat.
We
knew him
By’s helmet-plume and his long flowing hair,
The rapid ride had loosen’d it: to th’
trench
He points; leaps first himself his gallant steed
Clean over it; the troop plunge after him:
But in a twinkle it was done! his
horse
Run through the body by a partisan,
Rears in its agony, and pitches far
Its rider; and fierce o’er him tramp the steeds
O’ th’ rest, now heeding neither bit nor
bridle.
[Thekla, who has listened to the
last words with increasing anguish, falls into a violent
tremor; she is sinking to the ground; Fraeulein Neubrunn
hastens to her, and receives her in her arms.
NEU. Lady, dearest mistress
CAPT. [moved] Let me begone.
THEKLA. ’Tis past; conclude it.
CAPT. Seeing their leader
fall,
A grim inexorable desperation
Seiz’d the troops: their own escape forgotten,
Like wild tigers they attack us; their fury
Provokes our soldiers, and the battle ends not
Till the last man of the Pappenheimers falls.
THEKLA [with a quivering voice].
And where where is You have
not told me all.
CAPT. [after a pause]
This morning we interr’d him. He was borne
By twelve youths of the noblest families,
And all our host accompanied the bier.
A laurel deck’d his coffin; and upon it
The Rheingraf laid his own victorious sword.
Nor were tears wanting to his fate: for many
Of us had known his noble-mindedness,
And gentleness of manners; and all hearts
Were mov’d at his sad end. Fain would the
Rheingraf
Have sav’d him; but himself prevented it;
’Tis said he wish’d to die.
NEU. [with emotion, to Thekla, who hides her face]
O!
dearest mistress,
Look up! O, why would you insist on this?
THEKLA. Where is his grave?
CAPT. I’ th’ chapel
of a cloister
At Neustadt is he laid, till we receive
Directions from his father.
THEKLA. What is its name?
CAPT. St. Catharine’s.
THEKLA. Is’t far from
this?
CAPT.
Seven leagues.
THEKLA. How goes the way?
CAPT. You come by
Tirschenreit
And Falkenberg, and through our farthest outposts.
THEKLA. Who commands them?
CAPT. Colonel Seckendorf.
THEKLA [steps to a table, and takes a ring from
her jewel-box].
You have seen me in my grief, and shown me
A sympathising heart: accept a small
Memorial of this hour [giving him the ring].
Now leave me.
CAPT. [overpowered]
Princess!
[Thekla silently makes him a sign
to go, and turns from him. He lingers, and attempts
to speak; Neubrunn repeats the sign; he goes.
NEUBRUNN; THEKLA.
THEKLA [falls on Neubrunn’s neck].
Now, good Neubrunn, is the time to show the love
Which thou hast always vow’d me. Prove
thyself
A true friend and attendant! We must go,
This very night.
NEU. Go! This very night!
And whither?
THEKLA. Whither? There is but one place
in the world,
The place where he lies buried: to his grave.
NEU. Alas, what would you there, my dearest mistress?
THEKLA. What there? Unhappy girl! Thou
wouldst not ask
If thou hadst ever lov’d. There, there,
is all
That yet remains of him; that one small spot
Is all the earth to me. Do not detain me!
O, come! Prepare, think how we may escape.
NEU. Have you reflected on your father’s
anger?
THEKLA. I dread no mortal’s anger
now.
NEU. The mockery
Of the world, the wicked tongue of slander!
THEKLA. I go to seek one that is cold and low:
Am I, then, hast’ning to my lover’s arms?
O God! I am but hast’ning to his grave!
NEU. And we alone? Two feeble, helpless
women?
THEKLA. We will arm ourselves; my hand shall
guard thee.
NEU. In the gloomy night-time?
THEKLA. Night will hide
us.
NEU. In this rude storm?
THEKLA. Was his bed made
of down,
When the horses’ hoofs went o’er him?
NEU. O Heaven!
And then the many Swedish posts! They will not
Let us pass.
THEKLA. Are they not men? Misfortune
Passes free through all the earth.
NEU. So far!
So
THEKLA. Does the pilgrim count the miles, when
journeying
To the distant shrine of grace?
NEU. How shall we
Even get out of Eger?
THEKLA. Gold opens gates.
Go! Do go!
NEU. If they should recognise us?
THEKLA. In a fugitive despairing woman
No one will look to meet with Friedland’s daughter.
NEU. And where shall we get horses for our flight?
THEKLA. My Equerry will find them. Go and
call him.
NEU. Will he venture without his master’s
knowledge?
THEKLA. He will, I tell thee. Go! O,
linger not!
NEU. Ah! And what will your mother do when
you
Are vanish’d?
THEKLA [recollecting this, and gazing with a look
of anguish].
O
my mother!
NEU. Your good mother!
She has already had so much to suffer.
Must this last heaviest stroke too fall on her?
THEKLA. I cannot help it. Go, I prithee,
go!
NEU. Think well what you are doing.
THEKLA. All is thought
That can be thought, already.
NEU. Were we there,
What would you do?
THEKLA. God will direct me, there.
NEU. Your heart is full of trouble: O my
lady!
This way leads not to peace.
THEKLA. To that deep
peace
Which he has found. O, hasten! Go!
No words!
There is some force, I know not what to call it,
Pulls me irresistibly, and drags me
On to his grave: there I shall find some solace
Instantly; the strangling band of sorrow
Will be loosen’d; tears will flow. O, hasten!
Long time ago we might have been o’ th’
road.
No rest for me till I have fled these walls:
They fall upon me, some dark power repels me
From them Ha! What’s this?
The chamber’s filling
With pale gaunt shapes! No room is left for me!
More! more! The crowding spectres press on me,
And push me forth from this accursed house.
NEU. You frighten me, my lady: I dare stay
No longer; quickly I’ll call Rosenberg.
THEKLA.
It is his spirit calls me! ’Tis the host
Of faithful souls that sacrificed themselves
In fiery vengeance for him. They upbraid me
For this loit’ring: they in death
forsook him not,
Who in their life had led them; their rude hearts
Were capable of this: and I can live?
No! No! That laurel-garland which they laid
Upon his bier was twined for both of us!
What is this life without the light of love?
I cast it from me, since its worth is gone.
Yes, when we found and lov’d each other, life
Was something! Glittering lay before me
The golden morn: I had two hours of Heaven.
Thou stoodest at the threshold of the scene
Of busy life; with timid steps I cross’d it:
How fair it lay in solemn shade and sheen!
And thou beside me, like some angel, posted
To lead me out of childhood’s fairy land
On to life’s glancing summit, hand in hand!
My first thought was of joy no tongue can tell,
My first look on thy spotless spirit fell.
[She sinks into a reverie, then
with signs of horror proceeds.
And Fate put forth his hand: inexorable, cold,
My friend it grasp’d and clutch’d with
iron hold,
And under th’ hoofs of their wild
horses hurl’d:
Such is the lot of loveliness i’ th’ world!
Thekla has yet another pang to encounter;
the parting with her mother: but she persists
in her determination, and goes forth, to die beside
her lover’s grave. The heart-rending emotions,
which this amiable creature has to undergo, are described
with an almost painful effect: the fate of Max
and Thekla might draw tears from the eyes of a stoic.
Less tender, but not less sublimely
poetical, is the fate of Wallenstein himself.
We do not pity Wallenstein; even in ruin he seems
too great for pity. His daughter having vanished
like a fair vision from the scene, we look forward
to Wallenstein’s inevitable fate with little
feeling save expectant awe:
This kingly Wallenstein, whene’er
he falls,
Will drag a world to ruin
down with him;
And as a ship that in the
midst of ocean
Catches fire, and shiv’ring
springs into the air,
And in a moment scatters between
sea and sky
The crew it bore, so will
he hurry to destruction
Ev’ry one whose fate
was join’d with his.
Yet still there is some touch of pathos
in his gloomy fall; some visitings of nature in the
austere grandeur of his slowly-coming, but inevitable
and annihilating doom. The last scene of his life
is among the finest which poetry can boast of.
Thekla’s death is still unknown to him; but
he thinks of Max, and almost weeps. He looks at
the stars: dim shadows of superstitious dread
pass fitfully across his spirit, as he views these
fountains of light, and compares their glorious and
enduring existence with the fleeting troubled life
of man. The strong spirit of his sister is subdued
by dark forebodings; omens are against him; his astrologer
entreats, one of the relenting conspirators entreats,
his own feelings call upon him, to watch and beware.
But he refuses to let the resolution of his mind be
overmastered; he casts away these warnings, and goes
cheerfully to sleep, with dreams of hope about his
pillow, unconscious that the javelins are already grasped
which will send him to his long and dreamless sleep.
The death of Wallenstein does not cause tears; but
it is perhaps the most high-wrought scene of the play.
A shade of horror, of fateful dreariness, hangs over
it, and gives additional effect to the fire of that
brilliant poetry, which glows in every line of it.
Except in Macbeth or the conclusion of Othello,
we know not where to match it. Schiller’s
genius is of a kind much narrower than Shakspeare’s;
but in his own peculiar province, the exciting of lofty,
earnest, strong emotion, he admits of no superior.
Others are finer, more piercing, varied, thrilling,
in their influence: Schiller, in his finest mood,
is overwhelming.
This tragedy of Wallenstein,
published at the close of the eighteenth century,
may safely be rated as the greatest dramatic work
of which that century can boast. France never
rose into the sphere of Schiller, even in the days
of her Corneille: nor can our own country, since
the times of Elizabeth, name any dramatist to be compared
with him in general strength of mind, and feeling,
and acquired accomplishment. About the time of
Wallenstein’s appearance, we of this
gifted land were shuddering at The Castle Spectre!
Germany, indeed, boasts of Goethe: and on some
rare occasions, it must be owned that Goethe has shown
talents of a higher order than are here manifested;
but he has made no equally regular or powerful exertion
of them: Faust is but a careless effusion
compared with Wallenstein. The latter
is in truth a vast and magnificent work. What
an assemblage of images, ideas, emotions, disposed
in the most felicitous and impressive order!
We have conquerors, statesmen, ambitious generals,
marauding soldiers, heroes, and heroines, all acting
and feeling as they would in nature, all faithfully
depicted, yet all embellished by the spirit of poetry,
and all made conducive to heighten one paramount impression,
our sympathy with the three chief characters of the
piece.
Soon after the publication of Wallenstein,
Schiller once more changed his abode. The ‘mountain
air of Jena’ was conceived by his physicians
to be prejudicial in disorders of the lungs; and partly
in consequence of this opinion, he determined henceforth
to spend his winters in Weimar. Perhaps a weightier
reason in favour of this new arrangement was the opportunity
it gave him of being near the theatre, a constant
attendance on which, now that he had once more become
a dramatist, seemed highly useful for his farther
improvement. The summer he, for several years,
continued still to spend in Jena; to which, especially
its beautiful environs, he declared himself particularly
attached. His little garden-house was still his
place of study during summer; till at last he settled
constantly at Weimar. Even then he used frequently
to visit Jena; to which there was a fresh attraction
in later years, when Goethe chose it for his residence,
which, we understand, it still occasionally is.
With Goethe he often stayed for months.
This change of place produced little
change in Schiller’s habits or employment:
he was now as formerly in the pay of the Duke of Weimar;
now as formerly engaged in dramatic composition as
the great object of his life. What the amount
of his pension was, we know not: that the Prince
behaved to him in a princely manner, we have proof
sufficient. Four years before, when invited to
the University of Tuebingen, Schiller had received
a promise, that, in case of sickness or any other
cause preventing the continuance of his literary labour,
his salary should be doubled. It was actually
increased on occasion of the present removal; and
again still farther in 1804, some advantageous offers
being made to him from Berlin. Schiller seems
to have been, what he might have wished to be, neither
poor nor rich: his simple unostentatious economy
went on without embarrassment: and this was all
that he required. To avoid pecuniary perplexities
was constantly among his aims: to amass wealth,
never. We ought also to add that, in 1802, by
the voluntary solicitation of the Duke, he was ennobled;
a fact which we mention, for his sake by whose kindness
this honour was procured; not for the sake of Schiller,
who accepted it with gratitude, but had neither needed
nor desired it.
The official services expected of
him in return for so much kindness seem to have been
slight, if any. Chiefly or altogether of his own
accord, he appears to have applied himself to a close
inspection of the theatre, and to have shared with
Goethe the task of superintending its concerns.
The rehearsals of new pieces commonly took place at
the house of one of these friends; they consulted
together on all such subjects, frankly and copiously.
Schiller was not slow to profit by the means of improvement
thus afforded him; in the mechanical details of his
art he grew more skilful: by a constant observation
of the stage, he became more acquainted with its capabilities
and its laws. It was not long till, with his
characteristic expansiveness of enterprise, he set
about turning this new knowledge to account. In
conjunction with Goethe, he remodelled his own Don
Carlos and his friend’s Count Egmont,
altering both according to his latest views of scenic
propriety. It was farther intended to treat, in
the same manner, the whole series of leading German
plays, and thus to produce a national stock of dramatic
pieces, formed according to the best rules; a vast
project, in which some progress continued to be made,
though other labours often interrupted it. For
the present, Schiller was engaged with his Maria
Stuart: it appeared in 1800.
This tragedy will not detain us long.
It is upon a subject, the incidents of which are now
getting trite, and the moral of which has little that
can peculiarly recommend it. To exhibit the repentance
of a lovely but erring woman, to show us how her soul
may be restored to its primitive nobleness, by sufferings,
devotion and death, is the object of Maria Stuart.
It is a tragedy of sombre and mournful feelings; with
an air of melancholy and obstruction pervading it;
a looking backward on objects of remorse, around on
imprisonment, and forward on the grave. Its object
is undoubtedly attained. We are forced to pardon
and to love the heroine; she is beautiful, and miserable,
and lofty-minded; and her crimes, however dark, have
been expiated by long years of weeping and woe.
Considering also that they were the fruit not of calculation,
but of passion acting on a heart not dead, though
blinded for a time, to their enormity, they seem less
hateful than the cold premeditated villany of which
she is the victim. Elizabeth is selfish, heartless,
envious; she violates no law, but she has no virtue,
and she lives triumphant: her arid, artificial
character serves by contrast to heighten our sympathy
with her warm-hearted, forlorn, ill-fated rival.
These two Queens, particularly Mary, are well delineated:
their respective qualities are vividly brought out,
and the feelings they were meant to excite arise within
us. There is also Mortimer, a fierce, impetuous,
impassioned lover; driven onward chiefly by the heat
of his blood, but still interesting by his vehemence
and unbounded daring. The dialogue, moreover,
has many beauties; there are scenes which have merited
peculiar commendation. Of this kind is the interview
between the Queens; and more especially the first
entrance of Mary, when, after long seclusion, she
is once more permitted to behold the cheerful sky.
In the joy of a momentary freedom, she forgets that
she is still a captive; she addresses the clouds,
the ’sailors of the air, who ’are not
subjects of Elizabeth,’ and bids them carry tidings
of her to the hearts that love her in other lands.
Without doubt, in all that he intended, Schiller has
succeeded; Maria Stuart is a beautiful tragedy;
it would have formed the glory of a meaner man, but
it cannot materially alter his. Compared with
Wallenstein, its purpose is narrow, and its
result is common. We have no manners or true
historical delineation. The figure of the English
court is not given; and Elizabeth is depicted more
like one of the French Medici, than like our own politic,
capricious, coquettish, imperious, yet on the whole
true-hearted, ‘good Queen Bess.’ With
abundant proofs of genius, this tragedy produces a
comparatively small effect, especially on English
readers. We have already wept enough for Mary
Stuart, both over prose and verse; and the persons
likely to be deeply touched with the moral or the
interest of her story, as it is recorded here, are
rather a separate class than men in general. Madame
de Stael, we observe, is her principal admirer.
Next year, Schiller took possession
of a province more peculiarly his own: in 1801,
appeared his Maid of Orleans (Jungfrau von
Orleans); the first hint of which was suggested
to him by a series of documents, relating to the sentence
of Jeanne d’Arc, and its reversal, first published
about this time by De l’Averdy of the Academie
des Inscriptions. Schiller had been moved
in perusing them: this tragedy gave voice to
his feelings.
Considered as an object of poetry
or history, Jeanne d’Arc, the most singular
personage of modern times, presents a character capable
of being viewed under a great variety of aspects,
and with a corresponding variety of emotions.
To the English of her own age, bigoted in their creed,
and baffled by her prowess, she appeared inspired
by the Devil, and was naturally burnt as a sorceress.
In this light, too, she is painted in the poems of
Shakspeare. To Voltaire, again, whose trade it
was to war with every kind of superstition, this child
of fanatic ardour seemed no better than a moonstruck
zealot; and the people who followed her, and believed
in her, something worse than lunatics. The glory
of what she had achieved was forgotten, when the means
of achieving it were recollected; and the Maid of Orleans
was deemed the fit subject of a poem, the wittiest
and most profligate for which literature has to blush.
Our illustrious Don Juan hides his head when
contrasted with Voltaire’s Pucelle:
Juan’s biographer, with all his zeal, is but
an innocent, and a novice, by the side of this arch-scorner.
Such a manner of considering the Maid
of Orleans is evidently not the right one. Feelings
so deep and earnest as hers can never be an object
of ridicule: whoever pursues a purpose of any
sort with such fervid devotedness, is entitled to
awaken emotions, at least of a serious kind, in the
hearts of others. Enthusiasm puts on a different
shape in every different age: always in some
degree sublime, often it is dangerous; its very essence
is a tendency to error and exaggeration; yet it is
the fundamental quality of strong souls; the true nobility
of blood, in which all greatness of thought or action
has its rise. Quicquid vult valde vult is ever
the first and surest test of mental capability.
This peasant girl, who felt within her such fiery
vehemence of resolution, that she could subdue the
minds of kings and captains to her will, and lead
armies on to battle, conquering, till her country
was cleared of its invaders, must evidently have possessed
the elements of a majestic character. Benevolent
feelings, sublime ideas, and above all an overpowering
will, are here indubitably marked. Nor does the
form, which her activity assumed, seem less adapted
for displaying these qualities, than many other forms
in which we praise them. The gorgeous inspirations
of the Catholic religion are as real as the phantom
of posthumous renown; the love of our native soil
is as laudable as ambition, or the principle of military
honour. Jeanne d’Arc must have been a creature
of shadowy yet far-glancing dreams, of unutterable
feelings, of ’thoughts that wandered through
Eternity.’ Who can tell the trials and the
triumphs, the splendours and the terrors, of which
her simple spirit was the scene! ’Heartless,
sneering, god-forgetting French!’ as old Suwarrow
called them, they are not worthy of this
noble maiden. Hers were errors, but errors which
a generous soul alone could have committed, and which
generous souls would have done more than pardon.
Her darkness and delusions were of the understanding
only; they but make the radiance of her heart more
touching and apparent; as clouds are gilded by the
orient light into something more beautiful than azure
itself.
It is under this aspect that Schiller
has contemplated the Maid of Orleans, and endeavoured
to make us contemplate her. For the latter purpose,
it appears that more than one plan had occurred to
him. His first idea was, to represent Joanna,
and the times she lived in, as they actually were:
to exhibit the superstition, ferocity, and wretchedness
of the period, in all their aggravation; and to show
us this patriotic and religious enthusiast beautifying
the tempestuous scene by her presence; swaying the
fierce passions of her countrymen; directing their
fury against the invaders of France; till at length,
forsaken and condemned to die, she perished at the
stake, retaining the same steadfast and lofty faith,
which had ennobled and redeemed the errors of her
life, and was now to glorify the ignominy of her death.
This project, after much deliberation, he relinquished,
as too difficult. By a new mode of management,
much of the homeliness and rude horror, that defaced
and encumbered the reality, is thrown away. The
Dauphin is not here a voluptuous weakling, nor is his
court the centre of vice and cruelty and imbecility:
the misery of the time is touched but lightly, and
the Maid of Arc herself is invested with a certain
faint degree of mysterious dignity, ultimately represented
as being in truth a preternatural gift; though whether
preternatural, and if so, whether sent from above
or from below, neither we nor she, except by faith,
are absolutely sure, till the conclusion.
The propriety of this arrangement
is liable to question; indeed, it has been more than
questioned. But external blemishes are lost in
the intrinsic grandeur of the piece: the spirit
of Joanna is presented to us with an exalting and
pathetic force sufficient to make us blind to far
greater improprieties. Joanna is a pure creation,
of half-celestial origin, combining the mild charms
of female loveliness with the awful majesty of a prophetess,
and a sacrifice doomed to perish for her country.
She resembled, in Schiller’s view, the Iphigenia
of the Greeks; and as such, in some respects, he has
treated her.
The woes and desolation of the land
have kindled in Joanna’s keen and fervent heart
a fire, which the loneliness of her life, and her deep
feelings of religion, have nourished and fanned into
a holy flame. She sits in solitude with her flocks,
beside the mountain chapel of the Virgin, under the
ancient Druid oak, a wizard spot, the haunt of evil
spirits as well as of good; and visions are revealed
to her such as human eyes behold not. It seems
the force of her own spirit, expressing its feelings
in forms which react upon itself. The strength
of her impulses persuades her that she is called from
on high to deliver her native France; the intensity
of her own faith persuades others; she goes forth
on her mission; all bends to the fiery vehemence of
her will; she is inspired because she thinks herself
so. There is something beautiful and moving in
the aspect of a noble enthusiasm, fostered in the
secret soul, amid obstructions and depressions, and
at length bursting forth with an overwhelming force
to accomplish its appointed end: the impediments
which long hid it are now become testimonies of its
power; the very ignorance, and meanness, and error,
which still in part adhere to it, increase our sympathy
without diminishing our admiration; it seems the triumph,
hardly contested, and not wholly carried, but still
the triumph, of Mind over Fate, of human volition
over material necessity.
All this Schiller felt, and has presented
with even more than his usual skill. The secret
mechanism of Joanna’s mind is concealed from
us in a dim religious obscurity; but its active movements
are distinct; we behold the lofty heroism of her feelings;
she affects us to the very heart. The quiet,
devout innocence of her early years, when she lived
silent, shrouded in herself, meek and kindly though
not communing with others, makes us love her:
the celestial splendour which illuminates her after-life
adds reverence to our love. Her words and actions
combine an overpowering force with a calm unpretending
dignity: we seem to understand how they must have
carried in their favour the universal conviction.
Joanna is the most noble being in tragedy. We
figure her with her slender lovely form, her mild but
spirit-speaking countenance; ‘beautiful and terrible;’
bearing the banner of the Virgin before the hosts
of her country; travelling in the strength of a rapt
soul; irresistible by faith; ’the lowly herdsmaid,’
greater in the grandeur of her simple spirit than the
kings and queens of this world. Yet her breast
is not entirely insensible to human feeling, nor her
faith never liable to waver. When that inexorable
vengeance, which had shut her ear against the voice
of mercy to the enemies of France, is suspended at
the sight of Lionel, and her heart experiences the
first touch of mortal affection, a baleful cloud overspreads
the serene of her mind; it seems as if Heaven had
forsaken her, or from the beginning permitted demons
or earthly dreams to deceive her. The agony of
her spirit, involved in endless and horrid labyrinths
of doubt, is powerfully portrayed. She has crowned
the king at Rheims; and all is joy, and pomp, and jubilee,
and almost adoration of Joanna: but Joanna’s
thoughts are not of joy. The sight of her poor
but kind and true-hearted sisters in the crowd, moves
her to the soul. Amid the tumult and magnificence
of this royal pageant, she sinks into a reverie; her
small native dale of Arc, between its quiet hills,
rises on her mind’s eye, with its straw-roofed
huts, and its clear greensward; where the sun is even
then shining so brightly, and the sky is so blue, and
all is so calm and motherly and safe. She sighs
for the peace of that sequestered home; then shudders
to think that she shall never see it more. Accused
of witchcraft, by her own ascetic melancholic father,
she utters no word of denial to the charge; for her
heart is dark, it is tarnished by earthly love, she
dare not raise her thoughts to Heaven. Parted
from her sisters; cast out with horror by the people
she had lately saved from despair, she wanders forth,
desolate, forlorn, not knowing whither. Yet she
does not sink under this sore trial: as she suffers
from without, and is forsaken of men, her mind grows
clear and strong, her confidence returns. She
is now more firmly fixed in our admiration than before;
tenderness is united to our other feelings; and her
faith has been proved by sharp vicissitudes. Her
countrymen recognise their error; Joanna closes her
career by a glorious death; we take farewell of her
in a solemn mood of heroic pity.
Joanna is the animating principle
of this tragedy; the scenes employed in developing
her character and feelings constitute its great charm.
Yet there are other personages in it, that leave a
distinct and pleasing impression of themselves in
our memory. Agnes Sorel, the soft, languishing,
generous mistress of the Dauphin, relieves and heightens
by comparison the sterner beauty of the Maid.
Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, the lover of Joanna,
is a blunt, frank, sagacious soldier, and well described.
And Talbot, the gray veteran, delineates his dark,
unbelieving, indomitable soul, by a few slight but
expressive touches: he sternly passes down to
the land, as he thinks, of utter nothingness, contemptuous
even of the fate that destroys him, and
’On the soil of France
he sleeps, as does
A hero on the shield
he would not quit.’
A few scattered extracts may in part
exhibit some of these inferior personages to our readers,
though they can afford us no impression of the Maid
herself. Joanna’s character, like every
finished piece of art, to be judged of must be seen
in all its bearings. It is not in parts, but
as a whole, that the delineation moves us; by light
and manifold touches, it works upon our hearts, till
they melt before it into that mild rapture, free alike
from the violence and the impurities of Nature, which
it is the highest triumph of the Artist to communicate.
[The Dauphin Charles,
with
his suite: afterwards Joanna. She is in
armour, but without her helmet; and wears a garland
in her hair.
DUNOIS [steps forward].
My heart made choice of her while she was lowly;
This new honour raises not her merit
Or my love. Here, in the presence of my King
And of this holy Archbishop, I offer her
My hand and princely rank, if she regard me
As worthy to be hers.
CHARLES. Resistless Maid,
Thou addest miracle to miracle!
Henceforward I believe that nothing is
Impossible to thee. Thou hast subdued
This haughty spirit, that till now defied
Th’ omnipotence of Love.
LA HIRE [steps forward]. If I mistake
not
Joanna’s form of mind, what most adorns her
Is her modest heart. The rev’rence of the
great
She merits; but her thoughts will never rise
So high. She strives not after giddy splendours:
The true affection of a faithful soul
Contents her, and the still, sequester’d lot
Which with this hand I offer her.
CHARLES. Thou too,
La Hire? Two valiant suitors, equal in
Heroic virtue and renown of war!
Wilt thou, that hast united my dominions,
Soften’d my opposers, part my firmest friends?
Both may not gain thee, each deserving thee:
Speak, then! Thy heart must here be arbiter.
AGNES SOREL [approaches].
Joanna is embarrass’d and surprised;
I see the bashful crimson tinge her cheeks.
Let her have time to ask her heart, to open
Her clos’d bosom in trustful confidence
With me. The moment is arriv’d when I
In sisterly communion also may
Approach the rigorous Maid, and offer her
The solace of my faithful, silent breast.
First let us women sit in secret judgment
On this matter that concerns us; then expect
What we shall have decided.
CHARLES [about to go]. Be it so, then!
JOANNA. Not so, Sire! ’Twas not the
embarrassment
Of virgin shame that dy’d my cheeks in crimson:
To this lady I have nothing to confide,
Which I need blush to speak of before men.
Much am I honour’d by the preference
Of these two noble Knights; but it was not
To chase vain worldly grandeurs, that I left
The shepherd moors; not in my hair to bind
The bridal garland, that I girt myself
With warlike armour. To far other work
Am I appointed: and the spotless virgin
Alone can do it. I am the soldier
Of the God of Battles; to no living man
Can I be wife.
ARCHBISHOP. As kindly help to man
Was woman born; and in obeying Nature
She best obeys and révérences Heaven.
When the command of God who summon’d thee
To battle is fulfull’d, thou wilt lay down
Thy weapons, and return to that soft sex
Which thou deny’st, which is not call’d
to do
The bloody work of war.
JOANNA. Father, as yet
I know not how the Spirit will direct me:
When the needful time comes round, His voice
Will not be silent, and I will obey it.
For the present, I am bid complete the task.
He gave me. My sov’reign’s brow is
yet uncrown’d,
His head unwetted by the holy oil,
He is not yet a King.
CHARLES. We are journeying
Towards Rheims.
JOANNA. Let us not linger by the way.
Our foes are busy round us, shutting up
Thy passage: I will lead thee through them all.
DUNOIS. And when the work shall be fulfill’d,
when we
Have marched in triumph into Rheims,
Will not Joanna then
JOANNA. If God see meet
That I return with life and vict’ry from
These broils, my task is ended, and the herdsmaid
Has nothing more to do in her King’s palace.
CHARLES [taking her hand].
It is the Spirit’s voice impels thee now,
And Love is mute in thy inspired bosom.
Believe me, it will not be always mute!
Our swords will rest; and Victory will lead
Meek Peace by th’ hand, and Joy will come again
To ev’ry breast, and softer feelings waken
In every heart: in thy heart also waken;
And tears of sweetest longing wilt thou weep,
Such as thine eyes have never shed. This heart,
Now fill’d by Heav’n, will softly open
To some terrestrial heart. Thou hast begun
By blessing thousands; but thou wilt conclude
By blessing one.
JOANNA. Dauphin! Art thou weary
Of the heavenly vision, that thou seekest
To deface its chosen vessel, wouldst degrade
To common dust the Maid whom God has sent thee?
Ye blind of heart! O ye of little faith!
Heaven’s brightness is about you, before your
eyes
Unveils its wonders; and ye see in me
Nought but a woman. Dare a woman, think ye,
Clothe herself in iron harness, and mingle
In the wreck of battle? Woe, woe to me,
If bearing in my hand th’ avenging sword
Of God, I bore in my vain heart a love
To earthly man! Woe to me! It were better
That I never had been born. No more,
No more of this! Unless ye would awake the wrath
Of HIM that dwells in me! The eye of man
Desiring me is an abomination
And a horror.
CHARLES. Cease! ’Tis vain to
urge her.
JOANNA. Bid the trumpets sound! This loit’ring
grieves
And harasses me. Something chases me
From sloth, and drives me forth to do my mission,
Stern beck’ning me to my appointed doom.
A KNIGHT [in haste].
CHARLES. How now?
KNIGHT. The enemy has pass’d the
Marne;
Is forming as for battle.
JOANNA [as if inspired]. Arms and battle!
My soul has cast away its bonds! To arms!
Prepare yourselves, while I prepare the rest!
[She hastens out
[Trumpets sound with a piercing
tone, and while the scene is changing pass into a
wild tumultuous sound of battle.]
[The scene changes to an open space
encircled with trees. During the music, soldiers
are seen hastily retreating across the background.]
TALBOT, leaning upon FASTOLF,
and accompanied by Soldiers. Soon after,
LIONEL.
TALBOT. Here set me down beneath this tree, and
you
Betake yourselves again to battle: quick!
I need no help to die.
FASTOLF. O day of woe! [Lionel
enters.
Look, what a sight awaits you, Lionel!
Our General expiring of his wounds!
LIONEL. Now God forbid! Rise, noble Talbot!
This
Is not a time for you to faint and sink.
Yield not to Death; force faltering Nature
By your strength of soul, that life depart not!
TALBOT. In vain! The day of Destiny is come
That prostrates with the dust our power in France.
In vain, in the fierce clash of desp’rate battle,
Have I risk’d our utmost to withstand it:
The bolt has smote and crush’d me, and I lie
To rise no more forever. Rheims is lost;
Make haste to rescue Paris.
LIONEL. Paris has surrender’d
To the Dauphin: an express is just arriv’d
With tidings.
TALBOT [tears away his bandages].
Then
flow out, ye life-streams;
I am grown to loathe this Sun.
LIONEL. They want me!
Fastolf, bear him to a place of safety:
We can hold this post few instants longer,
The coward knaves are giving way on all sides,
Irresistible the Witch is pressing on.
TALBOT. Madness, thou conquerest, and I must
yield:
Stupidity can baffle the very gods.
High Reason, radiant Daughter of God’s Head,
Wise Foundress of the system of the Universe,
Conductress of the stars, who art thou, then,
If, tied to th’ tail o’ th’ wild
horse Superstition,
Thou must plunge, eyes open, vainly shrieking,
Sheer down with that drunk Beast to the Abyss?
Cursed who sets his life upon the great
And dignified; and with forecasting spirit
Forms wise projects! The Fool-king rules this
world.
LIONEL. O, Death is near you! Think of your
Creator!
TALBOT. Had we as brave men been defeated
By brave men, we might have consoled ourselves
With common thoughts of Fortune’s fickleness:
But that a sorry farce should be our ruin!
Did our earnest toilsome struggle merit
No graver end than this?
LIONEL [grasps his hand]. Talbot, farewell!
The meed of bitter tears I’ll duly pay you,
When the fight is done, should I outlive it.
Now Fate calls me to the field, where yet
She wav’ring sits, and shakes her doubtful urn.
Farewell! we meet beyond the unseen shore.
Brief parting for long friendship! God be with
you! [Exit.
TALBOT. Soon it is over, and to th’ Earth
I render,
To the everlasting Sun, the atoms,
Which for pain and pleasure join’d to form me;
And of the mighty Talbot, whose renown
Once fill’d the world, remains nought but a
handful
Of light dust. Thus man comes to his end;
And our one conquest in this fight of life
Is the conviction of life’s nothingness,
And deep disdain of all that sorry stuff
We once thought lofty and desirable.
Enter CHARLES; BURGUNDY; DUNOIS;
DU CHATEL; and Soldiers.
BURGUN. The trench is storm’d.
DUNOIS. The victory is
ours.
CHARLES [observing Talbot].
Ha! who is this that to the light of day
Is bidding his constrained and sad farewell?
His bearing speaks no common man: go, haste,
Assist him, if assistance yet avail.
[Soldiers from the Dauphin’s suite step forward.
FASTOLF. Back! Keep away! Approach
not the Departing,
Whom in life ye never wish’d too near you.
BURGUN. What do I see? Lord Talbot in his
blood!
[He goes towards him. Talbot
gazes fixedly at him, and dies.
FASTOLF. Off, Burgundy! With th’ aspect
of a traitor
Poison not the last look of a hero.
DUNOIS. Dreaded Talbot! stern, unconquerable!
Dost thou content thee with a space so narrow,
And the wide domains of France once could not
Stay the striving of thy giant spirit?
Now for the first time, Sire, I call you King:
The crown but totter’d on your head, so long
As in this body dwelt a soul.
CHARLES [after looking at the dead in silence].
It was
A higher hand that conquer’d him, not we.
Here on the soil of France he sleeps, as does
A hero on the shield he would not quit.
Bring him away. [Soldiers lift the corpse,
and carry it off.
And
peace be with his dust!
A fair memorial shall arise to him
I’ th’ midst of France: here, where
the hero’s course
And life were finished, let his bones repose.
Thus far no other foe has e’er advanced.
His epitaph shall be the place he fell on.
Another empty space in the field
of battle. In the distance are seen the towers
of Rheims illuminated by the sun.
A Knight, cased in black armour,
with his visor shut. JOANNA follows him to
the front of the scene, where he stops and awaits
her.
JOANNA. Deceiver! Now I see thy craft.
Thou hast,
By seeming flight, enticed me from the battle,
And warded death and destiny from off the head
Of many a Briton. Now they reach thy own.
KNIGHT. Why dost thou follow me, and track my
stops
With murd’rous fury? I am not appointed
To die by thee.
JOANNA. Deep in my lowest soul
I hate thee as the Night, which is thy colour.
To sweep thee from the face of Earth, I feel
Some irresistible desire impelling me.
Who art thou? Lift thy visor: had not I
Seen Talbot fall, I should have named thee Talbot.
KNIGHT. Speaks not the prophesying Spirit in
thee?
JOANNA. It tells me loudly, in my inmost bosom,
That Misfortune is at hand.
KNIGHT. Joanna d’Arc!
Up to the gates of Rheims hast thou advanced,
Led on by victory. Let the renown
Already gain’d suffice thee! As a slave
Has Fortune serv’d thee: emancipate her,
Ere in wrath she free herself; fidelity
She hates; no one obeys she to the end.
JOANNA. How say’st thou, in the middle
of my course,
That I should pause and leave my work unfinish’d?
I will conclude it, and fulfil my vow.
KNIGHT. Nothing can withstand thee; thou art
most strong;
In ev’ry battle thou prevailest. But go
Into no other battle. Hear my warning!
JOANNA. This sword I quit not, till the English
yield.
KNIGHT. Look! Yonder rise the towers of
Rheims, the goal
And purpose of thy march; thou seest the dome
Of the cathedral glittering in the sun:
There wouldst thou enter in triumphal pomp,
To crown thy sov’reign and fulfil thy vow.
Enter not there. Turn homewards. Hear my
warning!
JOANNA. Who art thou, false, double-tongued betrayer,
That wouldst frighten and perplex me? Dar’st
thou
Utter lying oracles to me?
[The Black Knight attempts to go;
she steps in his way.
No!
Thou shalt answer me, or perish by me!
[She lifts her arm to strike him.
KNIGHT [touches her with his hand: she stands
immovable].
Kill what is mortal!
[Darkness, lightning and thunder. The Knight
sinks.
JOANNA [stands at first amazed: but soon recovers
herself].
It
was nothing earthly.
Some delusive form of Hell, some spirit
Of Falsehood, sent from th’ everlasting Pool
To tempt and terrify my fervent soul!
Bearing the sword of God, what do I fear?
Victorious will I end my fated course;
Though Hell itself with all its fiends assail me,
My heart and faith shall never faint or fail me.
[She is going.
LIONEL, JOANNA.
LIONEL. Accursed Sorceress, prepare for battle:
Not both of us shall leave the place alive.
Thou hast destroyed the chosen of my host;
Brave Talbot has breath’d out his mighty spirit
In my bosom. I will avenge the Dead,
Or share his fate. And wouldst thou know the
man
Who brings thee glory, let him die or conquer,
I am Lionel, the last survivor
Of our chiefs; and still unvanquish’d is this
arm.
[He rushes towards her; after a
short contest, she strikes the sword from his hand.
Faithless fortune! [He struggles with her.
JOANNA [seizes him by the plume from behind,
and tears his helmet
violently down,
so that his face is exposed: at
the same time
she lifts her sword with the right
hand].
Suffer
what thou soughtest!
The Virgin sacrifices thee through me!
[At this moment she looks in his
face; his aspect touches her; she stands immovable,
and then slowly drops her arm.
LIONEL. Why lingerest thou, and stayest the stroke
of death?
My honour thou hast taken, take my life:
’Tis in thy hands to take it; I want not mercy.
[She
gives him a sign with her hand to depart.
Fly from thee? Owe thee my life?
Die rather!
JOANNA [her face turned away].
I will not remember that thou owedst
Thy life to me.
LIONEL. I hate thee and thy gift.
I want not mercy. Kill thy enemy,
Who meant to kill thee, who abhors thee!
JOANNA. Kill me, and fly!
LIONEL. Ha! How is this?
JOANNA [hides her face].
Woe’s me!
LIONEL [approaches her].
Thou killest every Briton, I have heard,
Whom thou subdu’st in battle: why spare
me?
JOANNA [lifts her sword with
a rapid movement against him, but quickly lets it
sink again, when she observes his face].
O Holy Virgin!
LIONEL. Wherefore namest thou
The Virgin? She knows nothing of thee; Heaven
Has nought to say to thee.
JOANNA [in violent anguish]. What have
I done!
My vow, my vow is broke! [Wrings her hands
in despair.
LIONEL [looks at her with sympathy, and comes nearer].
Unhappy
girl!
I pity thee; thou touchest me; thou showedst
Mercy to me alone. My hate is going:
I am constrain’d to feel for thee. Who
art thou?
Whence comest thou?
JOANNA. Away! Begone!
LIONEL. Thy youth,
Thy beauty melt and sadden me; thy look
Goes to my heart: I could wish much to save thee;
Tell me how I may! Come, come with me! Forsake
This horrid business; cast away those arms!
JOANNA. I no more deserve to bear them!
LIONEL. Cast
them
Away, then, and come with me!
JOANNA [with horror]. Come with
thee!
LIONEL. Thou mayst be sav’d: come
with me! I will save thee.
But delay not. A strange sorrow for thee
Seizes me, and an unspeakable desire
To save thee. [Seizes her arm.
JOANNA. Ha! Dunois! ’Tis
they!
If they should find thee!
LIONEL. Fear not; I will
guard thee.
JOANNA. I should die, were they to kill thee.
LIONEL.
Am I
Dear to thee?
JOANNA. Saints of Heaven!
LIONEL. Shall I ever
See thee, hear of thee, again?
JOANNA. Never! Never!
LIONEL. This sword for pledge that I will see
thee!
[He wrests the sword from her.
JOANNA.
Madman!
Thou dar’st?
LIONEL. I yield to force; again I’ll
see thee. [Exit.
The introduction of supernatural agency
in this play, and the final aberration from the truth
of history, have been considerably censured by the
German critics: Schlegel, we recollect, calls
Joanna’s end a ‘rosy death.’
In this dramaturgic discussion, the mere reader need
take no great interest. To require our belief
in apparitions and miracles, things which we cannot
now believe, no doubt for a moment disturbs our submission
to the poet’s illusions: but the miracles
in this story are rare and transient, and of small
account in the general result: they give our
reason little trouble, and perhaps contribute to exalt
the heroine in our imaginations. It is still the
mere human grandeur of Joanna’s spirit that
we love and reverence; the lofty devotedness with
which she is transported, the generous benevolence,
the irresistible determination. The heavenly mandate
is but the means of unfolding these qualities, and
furnishing them with a proper passport to the minds
of her age. To have produced, without the aid
of fictions like these, a Joanna so beautified and
exalted, would undoubtedly have yielded greater satisfaction:
but it may be questioned whether the difficulty would
not have increased in a still higher ratio. The
sentiments, the characters, are not only accurate,
but exquisitely beautiful; the incidents, excepting
the very last, are possible, or even probable:
what remains is but a very slender evil.
After all objections have been urged,
and this among others has certainly a little weight,
the Maid of Orleans will remain one of the
very finest of modern dramas. Perhaps, among all
Schiller’s plays, it is the one which evinces
most of that quality denominated genius in
the strictest meaning of the word. Wallenstein
embodies more thought, more knowledge, more conception;
but it is only in parts illuminated by that ethereal
brightness, which shines over every part of this.
The spirit of the romantic ages is here imaged forth;
but the whole is exalted, embellished, ennobled.
It is what the critics call idealised. The heart
must be cold, the imagination dull, which the Jungfrau
von Orleans will not move.
In Germany this case did not occur:
the reception of the work was beyond example flattering.
The leading idea suited the German mind; the execution
of it inflamed the hearts and imaginations of the
people; they felt proud of their great poet, and delighted
to enthusiasm with his poetry. At the first exhibition
of the play in Leipzig, Schiller being in the theatre,
though not among the audience, this feeling was displayed
in a rather singular manner. When the curtain
dropped at the end of the first act, there arose on
all sides a shout of “Es lebe Friedrich Schiller!”
accompanied by the sound of trumpets and other military
music: at the conclusion of the piece, the whole
assembly left their places, went out, and crowded
round the door through which the poet was expected
to come; and no sooner did he show himself, than his
admiring spectators, uncovering their heads, made
an avenue for him to pass; and as he waited along,
many, we are told, held up their children, and exclaimed,
“That is he!"
This must have been a proud moment
for Schiller; but also an agitating, painful one;
and perhaps on the whole, the latter feeling, for
the time, prevailed. Such noisy, formal, and tumultuous
plaudits were little to his taste: the triumph
they confer, though plentiful, is coarse; and Schiller’s
modest nature made him shun the public gaze, not seek
it. He loved men, and did not affect to despise
their approbation; but neither did this form his leading
motive. To him art, like virtue, was its own
reward; he delighted in his tasks for the sake of
the fascinating feelings which they yielded him in
their performance. Poetry was the chosen gift
of his mind, which his pleasure lay in cultivating:
in other things he wished not that his habits or enjoyments
should be different from those of other men.
At Weimar his present way of life
was like his former one at Jena: his business
was to study and compose; his recreations were in the
circle of his family, where he could abandon himself
to affections, grave or trifling, and in frank and
cheerful intercourse with a few friends. Of the
latter he had lately formed a social club, the meetings
of which afforded him a regular and innocent amusement.
He still loved solitary walks: in the Park at
Weimar he might frequently be seen wandering among
the groves and remote avenues, with a note-book in
his hand; now loitering slowly along, now standing
still, now moving rapidly on; if any one appeared
in sight, he would dart into another alley, that his
dream might not be broken. ‘One of his favourite
resorts,’ we are told, ’was the thickly-overshadowed
rocky path which leads to the Roemische Haus,
a pleasure-house of the Duke’s, built under the
direction of Goethe. There he would often sit
in the gloom of the crags, overgrown with cypresses
and boxwood; shady hedges before him; not far from
the murmur of a little brook, which there gushes in
a smooth slaty channel, and where some verses of Goethe
are cut upon a brown plate of stone, and fixed in
the rock.’ He still continued to study
in the night: the morning was spent with his children
and his wife, or in pastimes such as we have noticed;
in the afternoon he revised what had been last composed,
wrote letters, or visited his friends. His evenings
were often passed in the theatre; it was the only
public place of amusement which he ever visited; nor
was it for the purpose of amusement that he visited
this: it was his observatory, where he watched
the effect of scenes and situations; devised new schemes
of art, or corrected old ones. To the players
he was kind, friendly: on nights when any of
his pieces had been acted successfully or for the
first time, he used to invite the leaders of the company
to a supper in the Stadthaus, where the time was spent
in mirthful diversions, one of which was frequently
a recitation, by Genast, of the Capuchin’s sermon
in Wallenstein’s Camp. Except on
such rare occasions, he returned home directly from
the theatre, to light his midnight lamp, and commence
the most earnest of his labours.
The assiduity, with which he struggled
for improvement in dramatic composition, had now produced
its natural result: the requisitions of his taste
no longer hindered the operation of his genius; art
had at length become a second nature. A new proof
at once of his fertility, and of his solicitude for
farther improvement, appeared in 1803. The Braut
von Messina was an experiment; an attempt to exhibit
a modern subject and modern sentiments in an antique
garb. The principle on which the interest of
this play rests is the Fatalism of the ancients:
the plot is of extreme simplicity; a Chorus also is
introduced, an elaborate discussion of the nature
and uses of that accompaniment being prefixed by way
of preface. The experiment was not successful:
with a multitude of individual beauties this Bride
of Messina is found to be ineffectual as a whole:
it does not move us; the great object of every tragedy
is not attained. The Chorus, which Schiller,
swerving from the Greek models, has divided into two
contending parts, and made to enter and depart with
the principals to whom they are attached, has in his
hands become the medium of conveying many beautiful
effusions of poetry; but it retards the progress
of the plot; it dissipates and diffuses our sympathies;
the interest we should take in the fate and prospects
of Manuel and Cæsar, is expended on the fate and
prospects of man. For beautiful and touching
delineations of life; for pensive and pathetic reflections,
sentiments, and images, conveyed in language simple
but nervous and emphatic, this tragedy stands high
in the rank of modern compositions. There is
in it a breath of young tenderness and ardour, mingled
impressively with the feelings of gray-haired experience,
whose recollections are darkened with melancholy,
whose very hopes are chequered and solemn. The
implacable Destiny which consigns the brothers to
mutual enmity and mutual destruction, for the guilt
of a past generation, involving a Mother and a Sister
in their ruin, spreads a sombre hue over all the poem;
we are not unmoved by the characters of the hostile
Brothers, and we pity the hapless and amiable Beatrice,
the victim of their feud. Still there is too little
action in the play; the incidents are too abundantly
diluted with reflection; the interest pauses, flags,
and fails to produce its full effect. For its
specimens of lyrical poetry, tender, affecting, sometimes
exquisitely beautiful, the Bride of Messina
will long deserve a careful perusal; but as exemplifying
a new form of the drama, it has found no imitators,
and is likely to find none.
The slight degree of failure or miscalculation
which occurred in the present instance, was next year
abundantly redeemed. Wilhelm Tell, sent out
in 1804, is one of Schiller’s very finest dramas;
it exhibits some of the highest triumphs which his
genius, combined with his art, ever realised.
The first descent of Freedom to our modern world, the
first unfurling of her standard on the rocky pinnacle
of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it
deserved. There is no false timsel-decoration
about Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory
sentimentality. All is downright, simple, and
agreeable to Nature; yet all is adorned and purified
and rendered beautiful, without losing its resemblance.
An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over
it; we are among honest, inoffensive, yet fearless
peasants, untainted by the vices, undazzled by the
theories, of more complex and perverted conditions
of society. The opening of the first scene sets
us down among the Alps. It is ’a high rocky
shore of the Luzern Lake, opposite to Schwytz.
The lake makes a little bight in the land, a hut stands
at a short distance from the bank, the fisher-boy
is rowing himself about in his boat. Beyond the
lake, on the other side, we see the green meadows,
the hamlets and farms of Schwytz, lying in the
clear sunshine. On our left are observed the
peaks of the Hacken surrounded with clouds: to
the right, and far in the distance, appear the glaciers.
We hear the rance des vaches and the tinkling
of cattle-bells.’ This first impression
never leaves us; we are in a scene where all is grand
and lovely; but it is the loveliness and grandeur
of unpretending, unadulterated Nature. These Switzers
are not Arcadian shepherds or speculative patriots;
there is not one crook or beechen bowl among them,
and they never mention the Social Contract, or the
Rights of Man. They are honest people, driven
by oppression to assert their privileges; and they
go to work like men in earnest, bent on the despatch
of business, not on the display of sentiment.
They are not philosophers or tribunes; but frank,
stalwart landmen: even in the field of Ruetli,
they do not forget their common feelings; the party
that arrive first indulge in a harmless little ebullition
of parish vanity: “We are first
here!” they say, “we Unterwaldeners!”
They have not charters or written laws to which they
can appeal; but they have the traditionary rights
of their fathers, and bold hearts and strong arms
to make them good. The rules by which they steer
are not deduced from remote premises, by a fine process
of thought; they are the accumulated result of experience,
transmitted from peasant sire to peasant son.
There is something singularly pleasing in this exhibition
of genuine humanity; of wisdom, embodied in old adages
and practical maxims of prudence; of magnanimity,
displayed in the quiet unpretending discharge of the
humblest every-day duties. Truth is superior
to Fiction: we feel at home among these brave
good people; their fortune interests us more than
that of all the brawling, vapid, sentimental heroes
in creation. Yet to make them interest us was
the very highest problem of art; it was to copy lowly
Nature, to give us a copy of it embellished and refined
by the agency of genius, yet preserving the likeness
in every lineament. The highest quality of art
is to conceal itself: these peasants of Schiller’s
are what every one imagines he could imitate successfully;
yet in the hands of any but a true and strong-minded
poet they dwindle into repulsive coarseness or mawkish
insipidity. Among our own writers, who have tried
such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded
equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated
genius has, in far different circumstances and with
far other means, shown that he could have equalled
him: the Cotter’s Saturday Night
of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful,
as simplex munditiis, as the scenes of Tell.
No other has even approached them; though some gifted
persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is
no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers,
and dalesmen, without their attractions and their
moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside
Roesselmann the Priest, Ulric the Smith,
Hans of the Wall, and the other sturdy confederates
of Ruetli.
The skill with which the events are
concatenated in this play corresponds to the truth
of its delineation of character. The incidents
of the Swiss Revolution, as detailed in Tschudi or
Mueller, are here faithfully preserved, even to their
minutest branches. The beauty of Schiller’s
descriptions all can relish; their fidelity is what
surprises every reader who has been in Switzerland.
Schiller never saw the scene of his play; but his
diligence, his quickness and intensity of conception,
supplied this defect. Mountain and mountaineer,
conspiracy and action, are all brought before us in
their true forms, all glowing in the mild sunshine
of the poet’s fancy. The tyranny of Gessler,
and the misery to which it has reduced the land; the
exasperation, yet patient courage of the people; their
characters, and those of their leaders, Fuerst, Stauffacher,
and Melchthal; their exertions and ultimate success,
described as they are here, keep up a constant interest
in the piece. It abounds in action, as much as
the Bride of Messina is defective in that point.
But the finest delineation is undoubtedly
the character of Wilhelm Tell, the hero of the Swiss
Revolt, and of the present drama. In Tell are
combined all the attributes of a great man, without
the help of education or of great occasions to develop
them. His knowledge has been gathered chiefly
from his own experience, and this is bounded by his
native mountains: he has had no lessons or examples
of splendid virtue, no wish or opportunity to earn
renown: he has grown up to manhood, a simple
yeoman of the Alps, among simple yeomen; and has never
aimed at being more. Yet we trace in him a deep,
reflective, earnest spirit, thirsting for activity,
yet bound in by the wholesome dictates of prudence;
a heart benevolent, generous, unconscious alike of
boasting or of fear. It is this salubrious air
of rustic, unpretending honesty that forms the great
beauty in Tell’s character: all is native,
all is genuine; he does not declaim: he dislikes
to talk of noble conduct, he exhibits it. He
speaks little of his freedom, because he has always
enjoyed it, and feels that he can always defend it.
His reasons for destroying Gessler are not drawn from
jurisconsults and writers on morality, but from the
everlasting instincts of Nature: the Austrian
Vogt must die; because if not, the wife and children
of Tell will be destroyed by him. The scene, where
the peaceful but indomitable archer sits waiting for
Gessler in the hollow way among the rocks of Kuessnacht,
presents him in a striking light. Former scenes
had shown us Tell under many amiable and attractive
aspects; we knew that he was tender as well as brave,
that he loved to haunt the mountain tops, and inhale
in silent dreams the influence of their wild and magnificent
beauty: we had seen him the most manly and warm-hearted
of fathers and husbands; intrepid, modest, and decisive
in the midst of peril, and venturing his life to bring
help to the oppressed. But here his mind is exalted
into stern solemnity; its principles of action come
before us with greater clearness, in this its fiery
contest. The name of murder strikes a damp across
his frank and fearless spirit; while the recollection
of his children and their mother proclaims emphatically
that there is no remedy. Gessler must perish:
Tell swore it darkly in his secret soul, when the
monster forced him to aim at the head of his boy; and
he will keep his oath. His thoughts wander to
and fro, but his volition is unalterable; the free
and peaceful mountaineer is to become a shedder of
blood: woe to them that have made him so!
Travellers come along the pass; the
unconcern of their every-day existence is strikingly
contrasted with the dark and fateful purposes of Tell.
The shallow innocent garrulity of Stuessi the Forester,
the maternal vehemence of Armgart’s Wife, the
hard-hearted haughtiness of Gessler, successively
presented to us, give an air of truth to the delineation,
and deepen the impressiveness of the result.
The hollow way at Kuessnacht.
You descend from behind amid rocks; and travellers,
before appearing on the scene, are seen from the height
above. Rocks encircle the whole space; on one
of the foremost is a projecting crag overgrown with
brushwood.
TELL [enters with his bow].
Here through the hollow way he’ll pass; there
is
No other road to Kuessnacht: here I’ll
do it!
The opportunity is good; the bushes
Of alder there will hide me; from that point
My arrow hits him; the strait pass prevents
Pursuit. Now, Gessler, balance thy account
With Heaven! Thou must be gone: thy sand
is run.
Remote and harmless I have liv’d; my bow
Ne’er bent save on the wild beast of the forest;
My thoughts were free of murder. Thou hast scar’d
me
From my peace; to fell asp-poison hast thou
Changed the milk of kindly temper in me;
Thou hast accustom’d me to horrors. Gessler!
The archer who could aim at his boy’s head
Can send an arrow to his enemy’s heart.
Poor little boys! My kind true wife! I
will
Protect them from thee, Landvogt! When I drew
That bowstring, and my hand was quiv’ring,
And with devilish joy thou mad’st me point it
At the child, and I in fainting anguish
Entreated thee in vain; then with a grim
Irrevocable oath, deep in my soul,
I vow’d to God in Heav’n, that the next
aim
I took should be thy heart. The vow I made
In that despairing moment’s agony
Became a holy debt; and I will pay it.
Thou art my master, and my Kaiser’s Vogt;
Yet would the Kaiser not have suffer’d thee
To do as thou hast done. He sent thee hither
To judge us; rigorously, for he is angry;
But not to glut thy savage appetite
With murder, and thyself be safe, among us:
There is a God to punish them that wrong us.
Come forth, thou bringer once of bitter sorrow,
My precious jewel now, my trusty yew!
A mark I’ll set thee, which the cry of woe
Could never penetrate: to thee it shall
not
Be impenetrable. And, good bowstring!
Which so oft in sport hast serv’d me truly,
Forsake me not in this last awful earnest;
Yet once hold fast, thou faithful cord; thou oft
For me hast wing’d the biting arrow;
Now send it sure and piercing, now or never!
Fail this, there is no second in my quiver.
[Travellers
cross the scene.
Here let me sit on this stone bench, set up
For brief rest to the wayfarer; for here
There is no home. Each pushes on quick, transient,
Regarding not the other or his sorrows.
Here goes the anxious merchant, and the light
Unmoneyed pilgrim; the pale pious monk,
The gloomy robber, and the mirthful showman;
The carrier with his heavy-laden horse,
Who comes from far-off lands; for every road
Will lead one to the end o’ th’ World.
They pass; each hastening forward on his path,
Pursuing his own business: mine is death!
[Sits down.
Erewhile, my children, were your father out,
There was a merriment at his return;
For still, on coming home, he brought you somewhat,
Might be an Alpine flower, rare bird, or elf-bolt,
Such as the wand’rer finds upon the mountains:
Now he is gone in quest of other spoil
On the wild way he sits with thoughts of murder:
’Tis for his enemy’s life he lies in wait
And yet on you, dear children, you alone
He thinks as then: for your sake is he here;
To guard you from the Tyrant’s vengeful mood,
He bends his peaceful bow for work of blood.
[Rises.
No common game I watch for. Does the hunter
Think it nought to roam the livelong day,
In winter’s cold; to risk the desp’rate
leap
From crag to crag, to climb the slipp’ry face
O’ th’ dizzy steep, glueing his steps
in’s blood;
And all to catch a pitiful chamois?
Here is a richer prize afield: the heart
Of my sworn enemy, that would destroy me.
[A sound of gay music is heard
in the distance; it approaches.
All my days, the bow has been my comrade,
I have trained myself to archery; oft
Have I took the bull’s-eye, many a prize
Brought home from merry shooting; but today
I will perform my master-feat, and win me
The best prize in the circuit of the hills.
[A wedding company crosses the
scene, and mounts up through the Pass. Tell looks
at them, leaning on his bow; Stuessi the Forester joins
him.
STUeSSI. ’Tis Klostermey’r of Morlischachen
holds
His bridal feast today: a wealthy man;
Has half a score of glens i’ th’ Alps.
They’re going
To fetch the bride from Imisee; tonight
There will be mirth and wassail down at Kuessnacht.
Come you! All honest people are invited.
TELL. A serious guest befits not bridal feasts.
STUeSSI. If sorrow press you, dash it from your
heart!
Seize what you can: the times are hard; one needs
To snatch enjoyment nimbly while it passes.
Here ’tis a bridal, there ’twill be a
burial.
TELL. And oftentimes the one leads to the other.
STUeSSI. The way o’ th’ world at
present! There is nought
But mischief everywhere: an avalanche
Has come away in Glarus; and, they tell me,
A side o’ th’ Glarnish has sunk under
ground.
TELL. Do, then, the very hills give way!
On earth
Is nothing that endures.
STUeSSI. In foreign parts, too,
Are strange wonders. I was speaking with a man
From Baden: a Knight, it seems, was riding
To the King; a swarm of hornets met him
By the way, and fell on’s horse, and stung
it
Till it dropt down dead of very torment,
And the poor Knight was forced to go afoot.
TELL. Weak creatures too have stings.
[Armgart’s Wife enters with
several children, and places herself at the entrance
of the Pass.
STUeSSI. ’Tis
thought to bode
Some great misfortune to the land; some black
Unnatural action.
TELL. Ev’ry day such actions
Occur in plenty: needs no sign or wonder
To foreshow them.
STUeSSI. Ay, truly! Well for him
That tills his field in peace, and undisturb’d
Sits by his own fireside!
TELL. The peacefulest
Dwells not in peace, if wicked neighbours hinder.
[Tell looks often, with restless
expectation, towards the top of the Pass.
STUeSSI. Too true. Good b’ye! You’re
waiting here for some one?
TELL. That am I.
STUeSSI. Glad meeting with your friends!
You are from Uri? His Grace the Landvogt
Is expected thence today.
TRAVELLER [enters]. Expect not
The Landvogt now. The waters, from the rain,
Are flooded, and have swept down all the bridges.
[Tell stands up.
ARMGART [coming forward].
The Vogt not come!
STUeSSI. Did you want aught with him?
ARMGART. Ah! yes, indeed!
STUeSSI. Why have you placed
yourself
In this strait pass to meet him?
ARMGART. In the pass
He cannot turn aside from me, must hear me.
FRIESSHARDT [comes hastily down the Pass, and calls
into the Scene].
Make way! make way! My lord the Landvogt
Is riding close at hand.
ARMGART. The Landvogt coming!
[She goes with her children to
the front of the Scene. Gessler and Rudolph der
Harras appear on horseback at the top of the Pass.
STUeSSI [to Friesshardt].
How got you through the water, when the flood
Had carried down the bridges?
FRIESS. We have battled
With the billows, friend; we heed no Alp-flood.
STUeSSI. Were you o’ board i’ th’
storm?
FRIESS. That
were we;
While I live, I shall remember ’t.
STUeSSI. Stay, stay!
O, tell me!
FRIESS. Cannot; must run on t’ announce
His lordship in the Castle.
[Exit.
STUeSSI. Had these fellows
I’ th’ boat been honest people, ’t
would have sunk
With ev’ry soul of them. But for such rakehells,
Neither fire nor flood will kill them. [He looks
round.] Whither
Went the Mountain-man was talking with me?
[Exit.
GESSLER and RUDOLPH DER HARRAS on horseback.
GESSLER. Say what you like, I am the Kaiser’s
servant,
And must think of pleasing him. He sent me
Not to caress these hinds, to soothe or nurse them:
Obedience is the word! The point at issue is
Shall Boor or Kaiser here be lord o’ th’
land.
ARMGART. Now is the moment! Now for my petition!
[Approaches
timidly.
GESSLER. This Hat at Aldorf, mark you, I set
up
Not for the joke’s sake, or to try the hearts
O’ th’ people; these I know of old:
but that
They might be taught to bend their necks to me,
Which are too straight and stiff: and in the
way
Where they are hourly passing, I have planted
This offence, that so their eyes may fall on’t,
And remind them of their lord, whom they forget.
RUDOLPH. But yet the people have some rights
GESSLER.
Which now
Is not a time for settling or admitting.
Mighty things are on the anvil. The house
Of Hapsburg must wax powerful; what the Father
Gloriously began, the Son must forward:
This people is a stone of stumbling, which
One way or t’other must be put aside.
[They are about to pass along.
The Woman throws herself before the Landvogt.
ARMGART. Mercy, gracious Landvogt! Justice!
Justice!
GESSLER. Why do you plague me here, and stop
my way,
I’ th’ open road? Off! Let me
pass!
ARMGART. My husband
Is in prison; these orphans cry for bread.
Have pity, good your Grace, have pity on us!
RUDOLPH. Who or what are you, then? Who
is your husband?
ARMGART. A poor wild-hay-man of the Rigiberg,
Whose trade is, on the brow of the abyss,
To mow the common grass from craggy shelves
And nooks to which the cattle dare not climb.
RUDOLPH [to Gessler]. By Heaven, a wild
and miserable life!
Do now! do let the poor drudge free, I pray you!
Whatever be his crime, that horrid trade
Is punishment enough.
[To
the Woman] You shall have justice:
In the Castle there, make your petition;
This is not the place.
ARMGART. No, no! I stir not
From the spot till you give up my husband!
‘Tis the sixth month he has lain i’ th’
dungeon,
Waiting for the sentence of some judge, in vain.
GESSLER. Woman! Wouldst’ lay hands
on me? Begone!
ARMGART. Justice, Landvogt! thou art judge o’
th’ land here,
I’ th’ Kaiser’s stead and God’s.
Perform thy duty!
As thou expectest justice from above,
Show it to us.
GESSLER. Off! Take the mutinous rabble
From my sight.
ARMGART [catches the bridle of the horse].
No,
no! I now have nothing
More to lose. Thou shalt not move a step, Vogt,
Till thou hast done me right. Ay, knit thy brows,
And roll thy eyes as sternly as thou wilt;
We are so wretched, wretched now, we care not
Aught more for thy anger.
GESSLER. Woman, make way!
Or else my horse shall crush thee.
ARMGART. Let it! there
[She pulls her children to the
ground, and throws herself along with them in his
way.
Here am I with my children: let the orphans
Be trodden underneath thy horse’s hoofs!
’Tis not the worst that thou hast done.
RUDOLPH. Woman! Art’ mad?
ARMGART [with still greater violence].
’Tis
long that thou hast trodden.
The Kaiser’s people under foot. Too long!
O, I am but a woman; were I a man,
I should find something else to do than lie
Here crying in the dust.
[The music of the Wedding is heard
again, at the top of the Pass, but softened by distance.
GESSLER. Where are my servants?
Quick! Take her hence! I may forget myself,
And do the thing I shall repent.
RUDOLPH. My lord,
The servants cannot pass; the place above
Is crowded by a bridal company.
GESSLER. I’ve been too mild a ruler to
this people;
They are not tamed as they should be; their tongues
Are still at liberty. This shall be alter’d!
I will break that stubborn humour; Freedom
With its pert vauntings shall no more be heard of:
I will enforce a new law in these lands;
There shall not
[An arrow pierces him; he claps
his hand upon his heart, and is about to sink.
With a faint voice
God be merciful to
me!
RUDOLPH. Herr Landvogt God! What
is it? Whence came it?
ARMGART [springing up].
Dead! dead! He totters, sinks! ’T
has hit him!
RUDOLPH [springs from his horse].
Horrible! O God of Heaven! Herr
Ritter,
Cry to God for mercy! You are dying.
GESSLER. ’Tis Tell’s arrow.
[Has slid down from his horse into
Rudolph’s arms, who sets him on the stone bench.
TELL [appears above, on the point of the rock].
Thou
hast found the archer;
Seek no other. Free are the cottages,
Secure is innocence from thee; thou wilt
Torment the land no more.
[Disappears from the height. The people rush
in.
STUeSSI [foremost]. What?
What has happen’d?
ARMGART. The Landvogt shot, kill’d by an
arrow.
PEOPLE [rushing in].
Who?
Who is shot?
[Whilst the foremost of the wedding
company enter on the Scene, the hindmost are still
on the height, and the music continues.
RUDOLPH. He’s bleeding, bleeding to
death.
Away! Seek help; pursue the murderer!
Lost man! Must it so end with thee? Thou
wouldst not
Hear my warning!
STUeSSI. Sure enough! There lies
he
Pale and going fast.
MANY VOICES. Who was it killed him?
RUDOLPH. Are the people mad, that they make music
Over murder? Stop it, I say!
[The music ceases suddenly; more
people come crowding round.
Herr Landvogt,
Can you not speak to me? Is there nothing
You would entrust me with?
[Gessler makes signs with his hand,
and vehemently repeats them, as they are not understood.
Where shall I run?
To Kuessnacht! I cannot understand you:
O, grow not angry! Leave the things of Earth,
And think how you shall make your peace with Heaven!
[The whole bridal company surround
the dying man with an expression of unsympathising
horror.
STUeSSI. Look there! How pale he grows!
Now! Death is coming
Round his heart: his eyes grow dim and fixed.
ARMGART [lifts up one of her children].
See, children, how a miscreant departs!
RUDOLPH. Out on you, crazy hags! Have ye
no touch
Of feeling in you, that ye feast your eyes
On such an object? Help me, lend your hands!
Will no one help to pull the tort’ring arrow
From his breast?
WOMEN [start back]. We touch him whom
God has smote!
RUDOLPH. My curse upon you! [Draws his
sword.
STUeSSI [lays his hand on Rudolph’s arm].
Softly, my good Sir!
Your government is at an end. The Tyrant
Is fallen: we will endure no farther violence:
We are free.
ALL [tumultuously]. The land is free!
RUDOLPH. Ha! runs
it so?
Are rev’rence and obedience gone already?
[To the armed Attendants, who press in.
You see the murd’rous deed that has been done.
Our help is vain, vain to pursue the murd’rer;
Other cares demand us. On! To Kuessnacht!
To save the Kaiser’s fortress! For at present
All bonds of order, duty, are unloosed,
No man’s fidelity is to be trusted.
[Whilst he departs with the Attendants,
appear six Fratres Misericordiae.
ARMGART. Room! Room! Here come the
Friars of Mercy.
STUeSSI. The victim slain, the ravens are assembling!
FRATRES MISERICORDIAE [form a half-circle
round the dead body,
and
sing in a deep tone].
With noiseless tread death
comes on man,
No plea, no prayer delivers him;
From midst of busy life’s unfinished
plan,
With sudden hand, it severs him:
And ready or not ready, no delay,
Forth to his Judge’s bar he must away!
The death of Gessler, which forms
the leading object of the plot, happens at the end
of the fourth act; the fifth, occupied with representing
the expulsion of his satellites, and the final triumph
and liberation of the Swiss, though diversified with
occurrences and spectacles, moves on with inferior
animation. A certain want of unity is, indeed,
distinctly felt throughout all the piece; the incidents
do not point one way; there is no connexion, or a
very slight one, between the enterprise of Tell and
that of the men of Ruetli. This is the principal,
or rather sole, deficiency of the present work; a
deficiency inseparable from the faithful display of
the historical event, and far more than compensated
by the deeper interest and the wider range of action
and delineation, which a strict adherence to the facts
allows. By the present mode of management, Alpine
life in all its length and breadth is placed before
us: from the feudal halls of Attinghausen to
Ruodi the Fisher of the Luzern Lake, and Armgart,
The poor wild-hay-man of the
Rigiberg,
Whose trade is, on the brow
of the abyss,
To mow the common grass from
craggy shelves
And nooks to which the cattle
dare not climb,
we stand as if in presence of the
Swiss, beholding the achievement of their freedom
in its minutest circumstances, with all its simplicity
and unaffected greatness. The light of the poet’s
genius is upon the Four Forest Cantons, at the opening
of the Fourteenth Century: the whole time and
scene shine as with the brightness, the truth, and
more than the beauty, of reality.
The tragedy of Tell wants unity
of interest and of action; but in spite of this, it
may justly claim the high dignity of ranking with
the very best of Schiller’s plays. Less
comprehensive and ambitious than Wallenstein,
less ethereal than the Jungfrau, it has a look
of nature and substantial truth, which neither of its
rivals can boast of. The feelings it inculcates
and appeals to are those of universal human nature,
and presented in their purest, most unpretending form.
There is no high-wrought sentiment, no poetic love.
Tell loves his wife as honest men love their wives;
and the episode of Bertha and Rudenz, though beautiful,
is very brief, and without effect on the general result.
It is delightful and salutary to the heart to wander
among the scenes of Tell: all is lovely,
yet all is real. Physical and moral grandeur
are united; yet both are the unadorned grandeur of
Nature. There are the lakes and green valleys
beside us, the Schreckhorn, the Jungfrau, and their
sister peaks, with their avalanches and their palaces
of ice, all glowing in the southern sun; and dwelling
among them are a race of manly husbandmen, heroic without
ceasing to be homely, poetical without ceasing to be
genuine.
We have dwelt the longer on this play,
not only on account of its peculiar fascinations,
but also as it is our last! Schiller’s
faculties had never been more brilliant than at present:
strong in mature age, in rare and varied accomplishments,
he was now reaping the full fruit of his studious
vigils; the rapidity with which he wrote such noble
poems, at once betokened the exuberant riches of his
mind and the prompt command which he enjoyed of them.
Still all that he had done seemed but a fraction of
his appointed task: a bold imagination was carrying
him forward into distant untouched fields of thought
and poetry, where triumphs yet more glorious were
to be gained. Schemes of new writings, new kinds
of writing, were budding in his fancy; he was yet,
as he had ever been, surrounded by a multitude of projects,
and full of ardour to labour in fulfilling them.
But Schiller’s labours and triumphs were drawing
to a close. The invisible Messenger was already
near, which overtakes alike the busy and the idle,
which arrests man in the midst of his pleasures or
his occupations, and changes his countenance and
sends him away.
In 1804, having been at Berlin witnessing
the exhibition of his Wilhelm Tell, he was
seized, while returning, with a paroxysm of that malady
which for many years had never wholly left him.
The attack was fierce and violent; it brought him
to the verge of the grave; but he escaped once more;
was considered out of danger, and again resumed his
poetical employments. Besides various translations
from the French and Italian, he had sketched a tragedy
on the history of Perkin Warbeck, and finished two
acts of one on that of a kindred but more fortunate
impostor, Dimitri of Russia. His mind, it would
appear, was also frequently engaged with more solemn
and sublime ideas. The universe of human thought
he had now explored and enjoyed; but he seems to have
found no permanent contentment in any of its provinces.
Many of his later poems indicate an incessant and increasing
longing for some solution of the mystery of life;
at times it is a gloomy resignation to the want and
the despair of any. His ardent spirit could not
satisfy itself with things seen, though gilded with
all the glories of intellect and imagination; it soared
away in search of other lands, looking with unutterable
desire for some surer and brighter home beyond the
horizon of this world. Death he had no reason
to regard as probably a near event; but we easily perceive
that the awful secrets connected with it had long
been familiar to his contemplation. The veil
which hid them from his eyes was now shortly, when
he looked not for it, to be rent asunder.
The spring of 1805, which Schiller
had anticipated with no ordinary hopes of enjoyment
and activity, came on in its course, cold, bleak,
and stormy; and along with it his sickness returned.
The help of physicians was vain; the unwearied services
of trembling affection were vain: his disorder
kept increasing; on the 9th of May it reached a crisis.
Early in the morning of that day, he grew insensible,
and by degrees delirious. Among his expressions,
the word Lichtenberg was frequently noticed;
a word of no import; indicating, as some thought,
the writer of that name, whose works he had lately
been reading; according to others, the castle of Leuchtenberg,
which, a few days before his sickness, he had been
proposing to visit. The poet and the sage was
soon to lie low; but his friends were spared the farther
pain of seeing him depart in madness. The fiery
canopy of physical suffering, which had bewildered
and blinded his thinking faculties, was drawn aside;
and the spirit of Schiller looked forth in its wonted
serenity, once again before it passed away forever.
After noon his delirium abated; about four o’clock
he fell into a soft sleep, from which he ere long
awoke in full possession of his senses. Restored
to consciousness in that hour, when the soul is cut
off from human help, and man must front the King of
Terrors on his own strength, Schiller did not faint
or fail in this his last and sharpest trial. Feeling
that his end was come, he addressed himself to meet
it as became him; not with affected carelessness or
superstitious fear, but with the quiet unpretending
manliness which had marked the tenor of his life.
Of his friends and family he took a touching but a
tranquil farewell: he ordered that his funeral
should be private, without pomp or parade. Some
one inquiring how he felt, he said “Calmer
and calmer;” simple but memorable words,
expressive of the mild heroism of the man. About
six he sank into a deep sleep; once for a moment he
looked up with a lively air, and said, “Many
things were growing plain and clear to him!”
Again he closed his eyes; and his sleep deepened and
deepened, till it changed into the sleep from which
there is no awakening; and all that remained of Schiller
was a lifeless form, soon to be mingled with the clods
of the valley.
The news of Schiller’s death
fell cold on many a heart: not in Germany alone,
but over Europe, it was regarded as a public loss,
by all who understood its meaning. In Weimar
especially, the scene of his noblest efforts, the
abode of his chosen friends, the sensation it produced
was deep and universal. The public places of amusement
were shut; all ranks made haste to testify their feelings,
to honour themselves and the deceased by tributes
to his memory. It was Friday when Schiller died;
his funeral was meant to be on Sunday; but the state
of his remains made it necessary to proceed before.
Doering thus describes the ceremony:
’According to his own directions,
the bier was to be borne by private burghers of the
city; but several young artists and students, out of
reverence for the deceased, took it from them.
It was between midnight and one in the morning, when
they approached the churchyard. The overclouded
heaven threatened rain. But as the bier was set
down beside the grave, the clouds suddenly split asunder,
and the moon, coming forth in peaceful clearness,
threw her first rays on the coffin of the Departed.
They lowered him into the grave; and the moon again
retired behind her clouds. A fierce tempest of
wind began to howl, as if it were reminding the bystanders
of their great, irreparable loss. At this moment
who could have applied without emotion the poet’s
own words:
Alas, the ruddy morning tinges
A
silent, cold, sepulchral stone;
And evening throws her crimson
fringes
But
round his slumber dark and lone!’
So lived and so died Friedrich Schiller;
a man on whose history other men will long dwell with
a mingled feeling of reverence and love. Our
humble record of his life and writings is drawing to
an end: yet we still linger, loth to part with
a spirit so dear to us. From the scanty and too
much neglected field of his biography, a few slight
facts and indications may still be gleaned; slight,
but distinctive of him as an individual, and not to
be despised in a penury so great and so unmerited.
Schiller’s age was forty-five
years and a few months when he died. Sickness
had long wasted his form, which at no time could boast
of faultless symmetry. He was tall and strongly
boned; but unmuscular and lean: his body, it
might be perceived, was wasting under the energy of
a spirit too keen for it. His face was pale, the
cheeks and temples rather hollow, the chin somewhat
deep and slightly projecting, the nose irregularly
aquiline, his hair inclined to auburn. Withal
his countenance was attractive, and had a certain
manly beauty. The lips were curved together in
a line, expressing delicate and honest sensibility;
a silent enthusiasm, impetuosity not unchecked by
melancholy, gleamed in his softly kindled eyes and
pale cheeks, and the brow was high and thoughtful.
To judge from his portraits, Schiller’s face
expressed well the features of his mind: it is
mildness tempering strength; fiery ardour shining through
the clouds of suffering and disappointment, deep but
patiently endured. Pale was its proper tint;
the cheeks and temples were best hollow. There
are few faces that affect us more than Schiller’s;
it is at once meek, tender, unpretending, and heroic.
In his dress and manner, as in all
things, he was plain and unaffected. Among strangers,
something shy and retiring might occasionally be observed
in him: in his own family, or among his select
friends, he was kind-hearted, free, and gay as a little
child. In public, his external appearance had
nothing in it to strike or attract. Of an unpresuming
aspect, wearing plain apparel, his looks as he walked
were constantly bent on the ground; so that frequently,
as we are told, ’he failed to notice the salutation
of a passing acquaintance; but if he heard it, he
would catch hastily at his hat, and give his cordial
“Guten Tag."’ Modesty, simplicity,
a total want of all parade or affectation were conspicuous
in him. These are the usual concomitants of true
greatness, and serve to mitigate its splendour.
Common things he did as a common man. His conduct
in such matters was uncalculated, spontaneous; and
therefore natural and pleasing.
Concerning his mental character, the
greater part of what we had to say has been already
said, in speaking of his works. The most cursory
perusal of these will satisfy us that he had a mind
of the highest order; grand by nature, and cultivated
by the assiduous study of a lifetime. It is not
the predominating force of any one faculty that impresses
us in Schiller; but the general force of all.
Every page of his writings bears the stamp of internal
vigour; new truths, new aspects of known truth, bold
thought, happy imagery, lofty emotion. Schiller
would have been no common man, though he had altogether
wanted the qualities peculiar to poets. His intellect
is clear, deep, and comprehensive; its deductions,
frequently elicited from numerous and distant premises,
are presented under a magnificent aspect, in the shape
of theorems, embracing an immense multitude of minor
propositions. Yet it seems powerful and vast,
rather than quick or keen; for Schiller is not notable
for wit, though his fancy is ever prompt with its
metaphors, illustrations, comparisons, to decorate
and point the perceptions of his reason. The
earnestness of his temper farther disqualified him
for this: his tendency was rather to adore the
grand and the lofty than to despise the little and
the mean. Perhaps his greatest faculty was a
half-poetical, half-philosophical imagination:
a faculty teeming with magnificence and brilliancy;
now adorning, or aiding to erect, a stately pyramid
of scientific speculation; now brooding over the abysses
of thought and feeling, till thoughts and feelings,
else unutterable, were embodied in expressive forms,
and palaces and landscapes glowing in ethereal beauty
rose like exhalations from the bosom of the deep.
Combined and partly of kindred with
these intellectual faculties was that vehemence of
temperament which is necessary for their full development.
Schiller’s heart was at once fiery and tender;
impetuous, soft, affectionate, his enthusiasm clothed
the universe with grandeur, and sent his spirit forth
to explore its secrets and mingle warmly in its interests.
Thus poetry in Schiller was not one but many gifts.
It was not the ‘lean and flashy song’
of an ear apt for harmony, combined with a maudlin
sensibility, or a mere animal ferocity of passion,
and an imagination creative chiefly because unbridled:
it was, what true poetry is always, the quintessence
of general mental riches, the purified result of strong
thought and conception, and of refined as well as
powerful emotion. In his writings, we behold him
a moralist, a philosopher, a man of universal knowledge:
in each of these capacities he is great, but also
in more; for all that he achieves in these is brightened
and gilded with the touch of another quality; his maxims,
his feelings, his opinions are transformed from the
lifeless shape of didactic truths, into living shapes
that address faculties far finer than the understanding.
The gifts by which such transformation
is effected, the gift of pure, ardent, tender sensibility,
joined to those of fancy and imagination, are perhaps
not wholly denied to any man endowed with the power
of reason; possessed in various degrees of strength,
they add to the products of mere intellect corresponding
tints of new attractiveness; in a degree great enough
to be remarkable they constitute a poet. Of this
peculiar faculty how much had fallen to Schiller’s
lot, we need not attempt too minutely to explain.
Without injuring his reputation, it may be admitted
that, in general, his works exhibit rather extraordinary
strength than extraordinary fineness or versatility.
His power of dramatic imitation is perhaps never of
the very highest, the Shakspearean kind; and in its
best state, it is farther limited to a certain range
of characters. It is with the grave, the earnest,
the exalted, the affectionate, the mournful, that
he succeeds: he is not destitute of humour, as
his Wallenstein’s Camp will show, but
neither is he rich in it; and for sprightly ridicule
in any of its forms he has seldom shown either taste
or talent. Chance principally made the drama
his department; he might have shone equally in many
others. The vigorous and copious invention, the
knowledge of life, of men and things, displayed in
his theatrical pieces, might have been available in
very different pursuits; frequently the charm of his
works has little to distinguish it from the charm of
intellectual and moral force in general; it is often
the capacious thought, the vivid imagery, the impetuous
feeling of the orator, rather than the wild pathos
and capricious enchantment of the poet. Yet that
he was capable of rising to the loftiest regions of
poetry, no reader of his Maid of Orleans, his
character of Thekla, or many other of his pieces, will
hesitate to grant. Sometimes we suspect that it
is the very grandeur of his general powers which prevents
us from exclusively admiring his poetic genius.
We are not lulled by the syren song of poetry, because
her melodies are blended with the clearer, manlier
tones of serious reason, and of honest though exalted
feeling.
Much laborious discussion has been
wasted in defining genius, particularly by the countrymen
of Schiller, some of whom have narrowed the conditions
of the term so far, as to find but three men of
genius since the world was created: Homer,
Shakspeare, and Goethe! From such rigid precision,
applied to a matter in itself indefinite, there may
be an apparent, but there is no real, increase of accuracy.
The creative power, the faculty not only of imitating
given forms of being, but of imagining and representing
new ones, which is here attributed with such distinctness
and so sparingly, has been given by nature in complete
perfection to no man, nor entirely denied to any.
The shades of it cannot be distinguished by so loose
a scale as language. A definition of genius which
excludes such a mind as Schiller’s will scarcely
be agreeable to philosophical correctness, and it
will tend rather to lower than to exalt the dignity
of the word. Possessing all the general mental
faculties in their highest degree of strength, an
intellect ever active, vast, powerful, far-sighted;
an imagination never weary of producing grand or beautiful
forms; a heart of the noblest temper, sympathies comprehensive
yet ardent, feelings vehement, impetuous, yet full
of love and kindliness and tender pity; conscious
of the rapid and fervid exercise of all these powers
within him, and able farther to present their products
refined and harmonised, and ’married to immortal
verse,’ Schiller may or may not be called a man
of genius by his critics; but his mind in either case
will remain one of the most enviable which can fall
to the share of a mortal.
In a poet worthy of that name, the
powers of the intellect are indissolubly interwoven
with the moral feelings, and the exercise of his art
depends not more on the perfection of the one than
of the other. The poet, who does not feel nobly
and justly, as well as passionately, will never permanently
succeed in making others feel: the forms of error
and falseness, infinite in number, are transitory
in duration; truth, of thought and sentiment, but chiefly
of sentiment, truth alone is eternal and unchangeable.
But, happily, a delight in the products of reason
and imagination can scarcely ever be divided from,
at least, a love for virtue and genuine greatness.
Our feelings are in favour of heroism; we wish
to be pure and perfect. Happy he whose resolutions
are so strong, or whose temptations are so weak, that
he can convert these feelings into action! The
severest pang, of which a proud and sensitive nature
can be conscious, is the perception of its own debasement.
The sources of misery in life are many: vice
is one of the surest. Any human creature, tarnished
with guilt, will in general be wretched; a man of
genius in that case will be doubly so, for his ideas
of excellence are higher, his sense of failure is
more keen. In such miseries, Schiller had no share.
The sentiments, which animated his poetry, were converted
into principles of conduct; his actions were as blameless
as his writings were pure. With his simple and
high predilections, with his strong devotedness to
a noble cause, he contrived to steer through life,
unsullied by its meanness, unsubdued by any of its
difficulties or allurements. With the world,
in fact, he had not much to do; without effort, he
dwelt apart from it; its prizes were not the wealth
which could enrich him. His great, almost his
single aim, was to unfold his spiritual faculties,
to study and contemplate and improve their intellectual
creations. Bent upon this, with the steadfastness
of an apostle, the more sordid temptations of the
world passed harmlessly over him. Wishing not
to seem, but to be, envy was a feeling of which he
knew but little, even before he rose above its level.
Wealth or rank he regarded as a means, not an end;
his own humble fortune supplying him with all the
essential conveniences of life, the world had nothing
more that he chose to covet, nothing more that it could
give him. He was not rich; but his habits were
simple, and, except by reason of his sickness and
its consequences, unexpensive. At all times he
was far above the meanness of self-interest, particularly
in its meanest shape, a love of money. Doering
tells us, that a bookseller having travelled from
a distance expressly to offer him a higher price for
the copyright of Wallenstein, at that time in
the press, and for which he was on terms with Cotta
of Tuebingen, Schiller answering, “Cotta deals
steadily with me, and I with him,” sent away
this new merchant, without even the hope of a future
bargain. The anecdote is small; but it seems
to paint the integrity of the man, careless of pecuniary
concerns in comparison with the strictest uprightness
in his conduct. In fact, his real wealth lay
in being able to pursue his darling studies, and to
live in the sunshine of friendship and domestic love.
This he had always longed for; this he at last enjoyed.
And though sickness and many vexations annoyed
him, the intrinsic excellence of his nature chequered
the darkest portions of their gloom with an effulgence
derived from himself. The ardour of his feelings,
tempered by benevolence, was equable and placid:
his temper, though overflowing with generous warmth,
seems almost never to have shown any hastiness or
anger. To all men he was humane and sympathising;
among his friends, open-hearted, generous, helpful;
in the circle of his family, kind, tender, sportive.
And what gave an especial charm to all this was, the
unobtrusiveness with which it was attended: there
was no parade, no display, no particle of affectation;
rating and conducting himself simply as an honest
man and citizen, he became greater by forgetting that
he was great.
Such were the prevailing habits of
Schiller. That in the mild and beautiful brilliancy
of their aspect there must have been some specks and
imperfections, the common lot of poor humanity, who
knows not? That these were small and transient,
we judge from the circumstance that scarcely any hint
of them has reached us: nor are we anxious to
obtain a full description of them. For practical
uses, we can sufficiently conjecture what they were;
and the heart desires not to dwell upon them.
This man is passed away from our dim and tarnished
world: let him have the benefit of departed friends;
let him be transfigured in our thoughts, and shine
there without the little blemishes that clung to him
in life.
Schiller gives a fine example of the
German character: he has all its good qualities
in a high degree, with very few of its defects.
We trace in him all that downrightness and simplicity,
that sincerity of heart and mind, for which the Germans
are remarked; their enthusiasm, their patient, long-continuing,
earnest devotedness; their imagination, delighting
in the lofty and magnificent; their intellect, rising
into refined abstractions, stretching itself into comprehensive
generalisations. But the excesses to which such
a character is liable are, in him, prevented by a
firm and watchful sense of propriety. His simplicity
never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his
enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers
his love of the vast to betray him into toleration
of the vague. The boy Schiller was extravagant;
but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation
in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of
truth; our understandings and consciences are satisfied,
while our hearts and imaginations are moved.
His fictions are emphatically nature copied and embellished;
his sentiments are refined and touchingly beautiful,
but they are likewise manly and correct; they exalt
and inspire, but they do not mislead. Above all,
he has no cant; in any of its thousand branches, ridiculous
or hateful, none. He does not distort his character
or genius into shapes, which he thinks more becoming
than their natural one: he does not hang out
principles which are not his, or harbour beloved persuasions
which he half or wholly knows to be false. He
did not often speak of wholesome prejudices; he did
not ’embrace the Roman Catholic religion because
it was the grandest and most comfortable.’
Truth with Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensable
requisite: if he but suspected an opinion to be
false, however dear it may have been, he seems to
have examined it with rigid scrutiny, and if he found
it guilty, to have plucked it out, and resolutely
cast it forth. The sacrifice might cause him pain,
permanent pain; real damage, he imagined, it could
hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous
to travel in the dark; but better so, than with an
Ignis-fatuus to guide us. Considering the
warmth of his sensibilities, Schiller’s merit
on this point is greater than we might at first suppose.
For a man with whom intellect is the ruling or exclusive
faculty, whose sympathies, loves, hatreds, are comparatively
coarse and dull, it may be easy to avoid this half-wilful
entertainment of error, and this cant which is the
consequence and sign of it. But for a man of
keen tastes, a large fund of innate probity is necessary
to prevent his aping the excellence which he loves
so much, yet is unable to attain. Among persons
of the latter sort, it is extremely rare to meet with
one completely unaffected. Schiller’s other
noble qualities would not have justice, did we neglect
to notice this, the truest proof of their nobility.
Honest, unpretending, manly simplicity pervades all
parts of his character and genius and habits of life.
We not only admire him, we trust him and love him.
‘The character of child-like
simplicity,’ he has himself observed, ’which
genius impresses on its works, it shows also in its
private life and manners. It is bashful, for
nature is ever so; but it is not prudish, for only
corruption is prudish. It is clear-sighted, for
nature can never be the contrary; but it is not cunning,
for this only art can be. It is faithful to its
character and inclinations; but not so much because
it is directed by principles, as because after all
vibrations nature constantly reverts to her original
position, constantly renews her primitive demand.
It is modest, nay timid, for genius is always a secret
to itself; but it is not anxious, for it knows not
the dangers of the way which it travels. Of the
private habits of the persons who have been peculiarly
distinguished by their genius, our information is
small; but the little that has been recorded for us
of the chief of them, of Sophocles, Archimedes,
Hippocrates; and in modern times, of Dante and Tasso,
of Rafaelle, Albrecht Duerer, Cervantes, Shakspeare,
Fielding, and others, confirms this observation.’
Schiller himself confirms it; perhaps more strongly
than most of the examples here adduced. No man
ever wore his faculties more meekly, or performed
great works with less consciousness of their greatness.
Abstracted from the contemplation of himself, his eye
was turned upon the objects of his labour, and he
pursued them with the eagerness, the entireness, the
spontaneous sincerity, of a boy pursuing sport.
Hence this ‘child-like simplicity,’ the
last perfection of his other excellencies. His
was a mighty spirit unheedful of its might. He
walked the earth in calm power: ’the staff
of his spear was like a weaver’s beam;’
but he wielded it like a wand.
Such, so far as we can represent it,
is the form in which Schiller’s life and works
have gradually painted their character in the mind
of a secluded individual, whose solitude he has often
charmed, whom he has instructed, and cheered, and
moved. The original impression, we know, was
faint and inadequate, the present copy of it is still
more so; yet we have sketched it as we could:
the figure of Schiller, and of the figures he conceived
and drew are there; himself, ’and in his hand
a glass which shows us many more.’ To those
who look on him as we have wished to make them, Schiller
will not need a farther panegyric. For the sake
of Literature, it may still be remarked, that his merit
was peculiarly due to her. Literature was his
creed, the dictate of his conscience; he was an Apostle
of the Sublime and Beautiful, and this his calling
made a hero of him. For it was in the spirit of
a true man that he viewed it, and undertook to cultivate
it; and its inspirations constantly maintained the
noblest temper in his soul. The end of Literature
was not, in Schiller’s judgment, to amuse the
idle, or to recreate the busy, by showy spectacles
for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic
disquisitions for the understanding: least of
all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness
of its professors, to minister to their malignity,
their love of money, or even of fame. For persons
who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt
of which his kindly nature could admit was at all times
in store. ‘Unhappy mortal!’ says
he to the literary tradesman, the man who writes for
gain, ’Unhappy mortal, who with science and art,
the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest
nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest;
who, in the domain of perfect Freedom, bearest about
in thee the spirit of Slave!’ As Schiller viewed
it, genuine Literature includes the essence of philosophy,
religion, art; whatever speaks to the immortal part
of man. The daughter, she is likewise the nurse
of all that is spiritual and exalted in our character.
The boon she bestows is truth; truth not merely physical,
political, economical, such as the sensual man in us
is perpetually demanding, ever ready to reward, and
likely in general to find; but truth of moral feeling,
truth of taste, that inward truth in its thousand
modifications, which only the most ethereal portion
of our nature can discern, but without which that
portion of it languishes and dies, and we are left
divested of our birthright, thenceforward ‘of
the earth earthy,’ machines for earning and
enjoying, no longer worthy to be called the Sons of
Heaven. The treasures of Literature are thus
celestial, imperishable, beyond all price: with
her is the shrine of our best hopes, the palladium
of pure manhood; to be among the guardians and servants
of this is the noblest function that can be intrusted
to a mortal. Genius, even in its faintest scintillations,
is ‘the inspired gift of God;’ a solemn
mandate to its owner to go forth and labour in his
sphere, to keep alive ‘the sacred fire’
among his brethren, which the heavy and polluted atmosphere
of this world is forever threatening to extinguish.
Woe to him if he neglect this mandate, if he hear not
its small still voice! Woe to him if he turn
this inspired gift into the servant of his evil or
ignoble passions; if he offer it on the altar of vanity,
if he sell it for a piece of money!
‘The Artist, it is true,’
says Schiller, ’is the son of his age; but pity
for him if he is its pupil, or even its favourite!
Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling
from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with
the milk of a better time; that he may ripen to his
full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And
having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign
shape, into his century; not, however, to delight
it by his presence; but terrible, like the Son of
Agamemnon, to purify it. The Matter of his works
he will take from the present; but their Form he will
derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time,
from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature.
Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence,
flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated
by the pollutions of ages and generations, which
roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath
it. His Matter caprice can dishonour as she has
ennobled it; but the chaste Form is withdrawn from
her mutations. The Roman of the first century
had long bent the knee before his Caesars, when the
statues of Rome were still standing erect; the temples
continued holy to the eye, when their gods had long
been a laughing-stock; and the abominations of a Nero
and a Commodus were silently rebuked by the style of
the edifice which lent them its concealment.
Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and
preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth
still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original
will be restored.
’But how is the Artist to guard
himself from the corruptions of his time, which
on every side assail him? By despising its decisions.
Let him look upwards to his dignity and his mission,
not downwards to his happiness and his wants.
Free alike from the vain activity, that longs to impress
its traces on the fleeting instant; and from the discontented
spirit of enthusiasm, that measures by the scale of
perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave
to common sense, which is here at home, the
province of the actual; while he strives from
the union of the possible with the necessary to bring
out the ideal. This let him imprint and express
in fiction and truth, imprint it in the sport of his
imagination and the earnest of his actions, imprint
it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it
silently into everlasting Time.’
Nor were these sentiments, be it remembered,
the mere boasting manifesto of a hot-brained inexperienced
youth, entering on literature with feelings of heroic
ardour, which its difficulties and temptations would
soon deaden or pervert: they are the calm principles
of a man, expressed with honest manfulness, at a period
when the world could compare them with a long course
of conduct. In this just and lofty spirit, Schiller
undertook the business of literature; in the same
spirit he pursued it with unflinching energy all the
days of his life. The common, and some uncommon,
difficulties of a fluctuating and dependent existence
could not quench or abate his zeal: sickness
itself seemed hardly to affect him. During his
last fifteen years, he wrote his noblest works; yet,
as it has been proved too well, no day of that period
could have passed without its load of pain. Pain
could not turn him from his purpose, or shake his equanimity:
in death itself he was calmer and calmer.
Nor has he gone without his recompense. To the
credit of the world it can be recorded, that their
suffrages, which he never courted, were liberally
bestowed on him: happier than the mighty Milton,
he found ‘fit hearers,’ even in his lifetime,
and they were not ‘few.’ His effect
on the mind of his own country has been deep and universal,
and bids fair to be abiding: his effect on other
countries must in time be equally decided; for such
nobleness of heart and soul shadowed forth in beautiful
imperishable emblems, is a treasure which belongs
not to one nation, but to all. In another age,
this Schiller will stand forth in the foremost rank
among the master-spirits of his century; and be admitted
to a place among the chosen of all centuries.
His works, the memory of what he did and was, will
rise afar off like a towering landmark in the solitude
of the Past, when distance shall have dwarfed into
invisibility the lesser people that encompassed him,
and hid him from the near beholder.
On the whole, we may pronounce him
happy. His days passed in the contemplation of
ideal grandeurs, he lived among the glories and
solemnities of universal Nature; his thoughts were
of sages and heroes, and scenes of elysian beauty.
It is true, he had no rest, no peace; but he enjoyed
the fiery consciousness of his own activity, which
stands in place of it for men like him. It is
true, he was long sickly; but did he not even then
conceive and body-forth Max Piccolomini, and Thekla,
and the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of Wilhelm
Tell? It is true, he died early; but the student
will exclaim with Charles XII. in another case, “Was
it not enough of life when he had conquered kingdoms?”
These kingdoms which Schiller conquered were not for
one nation at the expense of suffering to another;
they were soiled by no patriot’s blood, no widow’s,
no orphan’s tear: they are kingdoms conquered
from the barren realms of Darkness, to increase the
happiness, and dignity, and power, of all men; new
forms of Truth, new maxims of Wisdom, new images and
scenes of Beauty, won from the ‘void and formless
Infinite;’ a [Greek: ktema es aiei],
‘a possession forever,’ to all the generations
of the Earth.
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