Professor Thomas's Life of Schiller

“THESE twenty years the public has been contending as to which is the greater, Schiller or I ; they ought rather to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about. ” These words, addressed by Goethe to Eckermann in 1825, refer to a deplorable direction of public opinion that originated with the extremely partisan Romanticists. Unfortunately, this puerile and profitless bickering as to the relative merits of Goethe and Schiller became acute with Menzel and the Young Germans, and has latterly been given a pseudo-scientific twist by the attitude of prominent Goethe scholars. Eminent leaders among the historians of German literature, like Hermann Grimm, Wilhelm Scherer, and Erich Schmidt, have set the pace for the exertions of a throng of young Goethe philologists. Honest absorption in important and trivial questions of date, inception, development, completion, transmission, final form, and intention of the poet’s works has often led to a somewhat exclusive and one-sided admiration of his personality and contribution to modern thought. Some have even gone so far afield as to find no adequate expression for their allegiance to the child of Frankfurt short of ill-concealed or outspoken contempt for the alleged narrowness and provincial tone of the mind of Schiller. The undeniable popularity of the latter is, in the eyes of such scholars, a distinct condemnation of him as an unripe interpreter of life and art, whom the people love and admire because they understand the burden of his mediocre song.

In view of this state of things, competent attempts, like those of Minor, Weltrich, and Wychgram, to reinterpret for modern readers the personality and art of Schiller are welcome signs of a return of the judicial temper to the service of German scholarship. Professor Thomas, though never a “Schiller hater, ” regarded the poet, at one time, as “very much overestimated by his countrymen, ” and listened with complacency to “demonstrations of his artistic shortcomings. ” He has since then been brought to a different temper, and has embodied his conversion and present views in a book ¹ that will compare favorably, in point of readableness and impartiality, with the best that has ever been written upon the subject.

Professor Thomas comes to the task in the spirit of the inquirer, desirous of securing, by direct study of the poet’s works, especially of his letters, a fair and independent evaluation of the man and artist, Schiller. With due regard to the major and minor investigations of his predecessors, the author maintains throughout that judicial independence of temper characteristic of the best of his previous work as a student of Goethe. Schiller’s marvelous development as an artist is so utterly out of proportion to the scanty items of his contact with the world of men and affairs as to render of prime importance a study of his works, as a reflection of his inner life. This consideration has dictated the relatively large space devoted by Thomas to genetic and expository criticism of the successive products of the poet’s pen. With wise silence about matters of slight importance, our author traces in detail, through a sequence of twenty-two chapters, the persistence and unity of purpose that dominate the career of Schiller. The mass of detail is never so great as to obscure for the general reader the essential features of the picture. He expressly disclaims all “care to be either systematic or exhaustive. ” Only essentials are selected for discussion, and space is thus secured for a suggestive introduction to the study of each of the dramas of the poet’s earlier and later period. On the whole, the scholar will approve the author’s distribution of emphasis, and the general reader will be stimulated, by the exposition and criticism offered, to a personal examination of Schiller’s dramatic works. A glance at Professor Thomas’s treatment of the poet’s youth will reveal in general how the critic conceives his task.

He emphasizes the visible passion with which Schiller’s first drama, The Robbers, fairly throbs, and also the impetuous rush of its dialogue, as the main causes of its deep hold upon the reading and theatre-going public, from the date of its appearance, 1781, to the present. These elements vitalize it, in spite of the handicap of turgid rhetoric, a dull villain, an insipid heroine, and a nerveless “dummy in a rocking-chair,” father of the visionary revolutionist, Karl Moor, and of his Satanic brother, Franz. Professor Thomas points out the defects of Schiller’s youthful dramatic craftsmanship. He condemns the long monologues, the disregard of everyday probability, in the plot as a whole and in several of its parts, and the loose motivation of the death of Spiegelberg. But he mentions these flaws in passing, without making them unduly prominent, in face of the wonderful capacity already shown by the poet for transmuting the details of an abstract plot into action. He might well have added a word of praise for the rare economy and effectiveness of the exposition in this first dramatic experiment. Of the whole he says, “Extravagant it is, no doubt ; but while there are always hundreds of critics in the world who can see that and say it more or less cleverly, there is but one man in a century who can write such scenes.”

With similar good taste and sureness of touch Fiesco and Cabal and Love are passed in review. Professor Thomas recognizes in the former a slight improvement in the poet’s delineation of feminine character, but regards the play as equally open to adverse criticism on the score of lurid rhetoric, unredeemed by the unity of heroic personality and the dramatic verve, characteristic of The Robbers. He mentions the indebtedness of Schiller to sundry predecessors, notably Rousseau, Diderot, and Lessing, for features of his next drama, Cabal and Love. He then shows how thoroughly the poet digested this raw material, and converted it by his extraordinary gift of dramatic visualization into a strong, consistent action. Schiller is blamed for allowing the tragic element of the situation to hinge upon the silence of the heroine in face of the jealousy of her lover, since an explanatory word from her would remove the fatal tension, without even a breach of the oath extorted from her by threats against her father’s life. This verdict of common sense seems valid, and applicable not only to Cabal and Love, but also to a similar unnatural silence of the mother in The Bride of Messina. The discrepancy between Louise’s childlike simplicity under ordinary circumstances and her precocious philosophizing in the presence of Lady Milford is further evidence of Schiller’s youthful ignorance of female character. Contemporary political life in Württemberg abounded in prototypes of the ogre-like features of the President von Walther. Ferdinand, the hero of the play, is, however, a sentimental idealist, who shows such a genuine disdain for his father’s brutality as to suggest a world in which thorns bear grapes, and thistles figs. Professor Thomas fails to note this freak of heredity. He is right in regarding this tragedy of the middle class as having a dramatic power superior to that of its predecessors, due to its convincing portrayal, not of abstract conditions, but of real infamies of the old aristocracy of Württemberg. Schiller assumes no Italian mask, as did Lessing in his Emilia, while holding “the mirror up to nature ” for the instruction of his fellow countrymen. It would have been worth while to call attention to the fact that both Lessing and Schiller assign a tragic import to the silence of the heroines of their respective plays.

Professor Thomas gives in the opening chapters of his book a clear-cut and in the main correct impression of the tremendous energy, the strong dramatic instinct, the ignorance of human nature, and the love of titanic phraseology characteristic of Schiller’s youth. By means of a suitable selection of salient phases of the poet’s intellectual activity, he acquaints us with the life, taste, and growth of Schiller, from his dark days at the academy to his friendship with Körner, dating from 1785. The impassioned though somewhat chaotic Ode to Rousseau (born, as Schiller then supposed, in Paris, and toiling for thankless humanity in southern France), the high-keyed, empty songs to Laura, Schiller’s own remarkable analysis and searching criticism of The Robbers, his ill health, his financial straits, the heartlessness of the Mannheim intendant, Dalberg, — these and other elements of the poet’s experience and occupation are given proper place and perspective in the general narrative.

The limits of the present review render impossible any adequate indication of the wealth of suggestive discussion offered by Professor Thomas in connection with his treatment of the genesis and texture of Schiller’s later dramas, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Maid of Orleans, Bride of Messina, and William Tell, and also in dealing with the dramatic fragments. The chief charm and value of these chapters are their suggestiveness, and the absence from them of the dogmatic spirit that imagines itself each moment as saying the final word and effectively closing the debate. The author’s catholicity of mind and fairness of argument are likely to make his book a starting point in America for a fruitful investigation of mooted questions of genesis and interpretation.

Schiller’s friendship with Körner, the timely assistance of the Danish admirers, the calming and steadying influence of Schiller’s love for Lotte, and the enriching and quickening influence of the poet’s detailed study of Kant and the Greeks are touched upon, together with a large number of other items of importance in any adequate picture of the development of Schiller’s knowledge, taste, and artistic power. Thomas considers also Schiller’s professorship at Jena, his studies in Netherlands history and in the details of the Thirty Years’ War, his graphic historical style, and his tendency to subordinate the facts of history to the features of his own philosophic preconception. He might have shown more clearly than he has done that such hyper-subjective treatment of history not only was quite natural in the premises, but actually affords a gauge of the strength of the artistic impulse of Schiller’s genius. His power and his weakness as an historian are both the result of his marvelous capacity for dramatic visualization.

The chapter on Schiller’s æsthetic writings would be much improved by a comparison of Schiller’s views under the influence of Kant with those of Lessing under the influence of Aristotle.

One of the most important and interesting chapters in the book is that dealing with the friendship of Goethe and Schiller. For to the inspiration of this intercourse with the older poet is ascribable in large measure the admirable variety and quality of Schiller’s dramatic productions, that crowned the closing eighteenth and so brilliantly inaugurated the nineteenth century. It was certainly well for the cause of German drama that natural affinity finally triumphed over distrust and prejudice, and brought together these men whose united service so far exceeded the arithmetical sum of their individual efforts. Thomas tells the story of this partnership sympathetically and effectively. He fails, however, to mention what ought never to be passed over in silence in such an account, — the important service rendered Goethe and the world by Schiller through a long series of pleadings and urgent requests for the continuation and completion of the Faust fragment, coupled with many helpful suggestions as to the general plan. It is very doubtful whether Goethe, in the absence of this stimulation from his younger colleague, would ever have felt impelled to resume work upon what had become repugnant to his views of art. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that we are indebted to Schiller for the completed first part of the poem, and also, indirectly, for the second part, since Eckermann’s suggestions would certainly have fallen upon deaf ears, had Goethe made no progress beyond the fragment of 1790. This was of vastly greater importance than the “Xeniafusillade ” or the coöperation of the friends in the production of the Horen.

The final chapter of the book, entitled The Verdict of Posterity, contains a terse summary of the estimate placed upon Schiller by the German people at large, by the sculptor Dannecker, by Madame de Staël, by Goethe, by the Romanticists, the Young Germans, and other doctrinaires, by the modern Realists since 1871, and by the author himself. While denying to Schiller “the supreme qualities that go to the making up of a great world poet, ” Professor Thomas sees in him, in spite of his cosmopolitanism, “ a German of the Germans. Think of a sentiment that Germans love, and you shall find it, if you search, expressed in sonorous verse in some poem or play of Schiller. . . . The intellectual classes . . . are coming to dwell less on the great qualities that he lacked than upon the great qualities that he possessed.”

Starr Willard Cutting.