by Will Durant
Herder anticipated the Werther fashion by falling hopelessly in love with a married woman; he suffered so severe a physical and mental depression that he was given a leave of absence with promise of re-employment at a better salary on his return. He borrowed money, left Riga (May 23, 1769), and never saw it again. He went by ship to Nantes, stayed there four months, and passed to Paris. He met Diderot and d’Alembert, but he was never won to the French Enlightenment.
His bent was aesthetic rather than intellectual. In Paris he began to collect primitive poetry, and found in it more delight than in the classic literature of France. He read Macpherson’s “Ossian” in a German translation, and pronounced these skillful imitations superior to most modern English verse after Shakespeare. He began in 1769 those essays in artistic and literary criticism which he called Wäldchen (groves); three volumes of these he published in his lifetime as Kritische Wälder (Critical Woods). In February, 1770, he spent fourteen days in fruitful contact with Lessing at Hamburg. Then he joined the Prince of Holstein-Gottorp as tuter and companion, and traveled with him through western Germany. In Cassel he met Rudolph Raspe, professor of archaeology and soon to be author of Baron Münchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785). Raspe had called the attention of Germany to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in the year of its appearance (1765). Herder was strengthened in his belief that poets should abandon the Win-ckelmann-Lessing call for imitation of Greek classics, and should rather cling to the popular sources of their nation’s traditions in folk poetry and ballad history.
Passing with the Prince to Darmstadt, Herder met its “Circle of Sensitives,” took kindly to their exaltation of sentiment, and especially appreciated the sentiments of Caroline Flachsland, the orphaned sister-in-law of Privy Councilor Andreas von Hesse. He was invited to preach in a local church. She heard him and was moved; they walked in the woods; they touched hands and he was moved. He proposed. She warned him that she lived on the charity of her sister, and could bring him no dowry; he replied that he was heavily in debt, had only the dimmest prospects, and was committed to accompany the Prince. They pledged each other no formal troth, but agreed to love each other by mail. On April 27, 1770, his party left for Mannheim.
When it reached Strasbourg Herder, though he longed to see Italy, left the Prince. The fistula in his lachrymal gland blocked the tear duct to the nostril, causing constant pain. Dr. Lobstein, professor of gynecology at the university, promised that an operation would clear up the matter in three weeks. Herder submitted, without anesthetics, to repeated drilling of a channel through the bone to the nasal passage. Infection set in, and for almost six months Herder was confined to his hotel room, discouraged by the failure of the operation, and gloomy with doubts of his future. It was in this mood of suffering and pessimism that he met Goethe (September 4, 1770). “I was able to be present at the operation,” Goethe recalled, “and to be serviceable in many ways.”64 He was inspired by Herder’s view that poetry arose instinctively among the people, not from “a few refined and cultivated men.”65 When Herder left, his funds quite exhausted, Goethe “borrowed a sum of money for him,” which Herder later repaid.
Reluctantly he accepted an invitation from Count Wilhelm zu Lippe, ruler of the little principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, in northwest Germany, to serve him as court preacher and consistory president in his modest capital, Bückeburg. In April, 1771, Herder left Strasbourg, visited Caroline at Darmstadt and Goethe at Frankfurt, and reached Bückeburg on the twenty-eighth. He found the Count an “enlightened despot” of a rigid disciplinarian cast. The town was provincial in everything but music, which was well supplied by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Herder resigned himself to isola tion from the mainstream of German thought; but the books that he issued from his foot of earth powerfully affected that stream, and shared in forming the literary ideas of Sturm und Drang. He assured German authors that if they were to seek their inspiration in the roots of the nation and the life of the people they would in time outshine all that the French had done. In philosophy and science this prediction was verified.
His Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1772) won the prize that had been offered by the Berlin Academy in 1770. While sincerely professing piety, Herder rejected the notion that language was a special creation of God; it was a human creation, naturally resulting from the processes of sensation and thought. Originally, he suggested, language and poetry were one as expressions of emotion, and verbs, expressing action, were the first “part of speech.”—Another volume, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (One More Philosophy of History, 1774), presented history as “the natural philosophy of successive events.” Each civilization was a biological entity, a plant with its own birth, youth, maturity, decline, and death; it should be studied from the standpoint of its own time, without moral prepossessions based on another environment and age. Like the Romantics in general, Herder admired the Middle Ages as the age of imagination and feeling, of popular poetry and art, of rural simplicity and peace; by contrast, post-Reformation Europe was the worship of the state, of money, urban luxury, artificiality, and vice. He criticized the Enlightenment as the idolatry of reason, and compared it unfavorably with the classic cultures of Greece and Rome. In all the historic process Herder, like Bossuet, saw the hand of God, but sometimes the eloquent pastor forgot his theology, and thought that “the general change of the world was guided far less by man than by a blind fate.”66
His loneliness moved him, despite his meager income, to ask Caroline and her brother-in-law might he come and make her his wife. They consented, and the lovers were married at Darmstadt on May 2, 1773. They returned to Bückeburg, and Herder borrowed money to make his rectory a pleasant home for his mate. She gave him a lifelong service and devotion. Through her a coolness that had developed between Herder and Goethe was ended, and when Goethe found himself in a position to recommend the pastor to a more remunerative post, he was happy to do it. On October 1, 1776, Herder and Caroline arrived in Weimar, and moved into the house that Goethe had prepared for them. Now only one member had yet to come of the quadrum-virate that was to make Weimar’s fame.
V. SCHILLER’S WANDER]AHRE: 1759-87
Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller was born on November 10, 1759, at Marbach in Württemberg. His mother was the daughter of the landlord of the Lion Inn. The father was a surgeon—later a captain—in the army of Duke Karl Eugen; he moved about with his regiment, but his wife stayed mostly in Lorch or Ludwigsburg. In those towns Friedrich received his education. His parents intended him for the ministry, but were persuaded by the Duke to send him, aged fourteen, to the Karlsschule at Ludwigsburg (later at Stuttgart), where the sons of officers were prepared for law, medicine, or an army career. The discipline was rigorously military; the studies were uncongenial to a lad almost femininely sensitive. Schiller reacted by imbibing all the rebel ideas that he could find, and pouring them (1779-80) into Die Räuber (The Robbers), a drama that surpassed Götz von Berlichingen as an expression of Sturm und Drang.
In 1780 Schiller was graduated in medicine, and became surgeon to a regiment at Stuttgart. His salary was slight; he lived in one room with Lieutenant Kapf; they prepared their own meals, chiefly of sausage, potatoes, and lettuce, and, on gala occasions, wine. He tried hard to be a man in the soldier’s sense of battle, beer, and bordellos; he visited the prostitutes who attended the camp;67 but he had no taste for vulgarity, for he idealized women as sacred mysteries to be approached with trembling reverence. His landlady, Luise Vischer, was a thirty-year-old widow, but when she played the harpsichord “my spirit left its mortal clay,”68 and he wished he could be “fixed forever to thy lips, … thy breath to drink,”69—a novel way of suicide.
He tried in vain to find a publisher for The Robbers; failing, he saved and borrowed, and paid for its printing himself (1781). Its success astonished even the twenty-two-year-old author. Carlyle thought it marked “an era i
n the Literature of the World;”70 but respectable Germany was shocked to find that the play left hardly any aspect of current civilization undamned. Schiller’s preface pointed out that the denouement showed the grandeur of conscience and the wickedness of revolt.
Karl Moor, elder son of the aging Count Maximilian von Moor, is especially beloved by his father for his idealism and generosity, and is therefore envied and hated by his brother Franz. Karl goes off to the University of Leipzig, and imbibes the rebellious sentiments that were seething in the youth of Western Europe. Dunned for his debts, he denounces the heartless money-grubbers who “damn the Sadducee who fails to come to church regularly, although their own devotion consists in reckoning up their usurious gains at the very altar.”71 He loses all faith in the existing social order, joins a robber band, becomes its captain, pledges to be loyal to it till death, and comforts his conscience by playing Robin Hood. One of the band describes him:
He does not commit murder, as we do, for the sake of plunder, and as to money … he seems not to care a straw for it; his third of the booty, which belongs to him of right, he gives to orphans, or to support promising youths at college. But should he happen to get into his clutches a country squire who grinds his peasants like cattle, or some gold-laced villain who warps the law to his own purposes, … or any other chap of that kidney—then, my boy, he is in his element, and rages like a very devil.72
Karl denounces the clergy as sycophants of power and secret worshipers of Mammon; “the best of them would betray the whole Trinity for ten shekels.”73
Meanwhile Franz arranges that a false message should announce to the Count that Karl is dead. Franz becomes heir to the estate, and offers marriage to Amelia, who loves Karl alive or dead. Franz poisons his father, and quiets his qualms with atheism: “It has not yet been proved that there is an eye above this earth to take account of what passes on it. … There is no God.”74 Karl hears of his brother’s crimes, leads his band to the paternal castle, besieges Franz, who prays desperately to God for help, and, none coming, kills himself. Amelia offers herself to Karl if he will leave his life of robbery; he longs to do so, but his followers remind him of his pledge to remain with them till death. He respects his pledge and turns away from Amelia; she begs him to kill her; he accommodates her; then, having arranged that a poor workingman should receive the reward for capturing him, he gives himself up to the law and the gallows.
All this, of course, is nonsense. The characters and events are incredible, the style is bombastic, the speeches unbearable, the conception of woman romantically ideal. But it is powerful nonsense. There is in nearly all of us a secret sympathy with those who defy the law; we too sometimes feel ourselves “squeezed into stays” by the thousands of laws and ordinances that bind or mulct us; we are so accustomed to the benefits of law that we take them for granted; we have no natural sympathy with the police until lawlessness makes us its victim. So the printed play found fervent readers and applause, and the complaints of preachers and lawmakers that Schiller had idealized crime did not deter a reviewer from hailing Schiller as promising to be a German Shakespeare,75 nor producers from proposing to stage the play.
Baron Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg offered to present it in the Na-tionaltheater at Mannheim if Schiller would provide a happier ending. He did: Moor marries Amelia instead of killing her. Without asking permission of Duke Karl Eugen, his military commander, Schiller slipped away from Stuttgart to attend the première on January 13, 1782. People came from Worms, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and elsewhere to see the performance; August Iffland, one of the finest actors of that generation, played Karl; the audience shouted and sobbed its approval; no other German drama had ever received such an ovation;76 it was a high-water mark in Sturm und Drang. After the play Schiller was feted by the actors and courted by a Mannheim publisher; he found it hard to return to Stuttgart and resume his life as regimental surgeon. In May he escaped again to Mannheim to see another performance of The Robbers, and to discuss with Dalberg plans for a second drama. Back again with his regiment, he received a reproof from the Duke, and was forbidden to write any more plays.
He could not accept such a prohibition. On September 22, 1782, accompanied by a friend, Andreas Streicher, he fled to Mannheim. He offered Dalberg a new play—Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (The Conspiracy of Fiesko at Genoa). He read it to the actors; they pronounced it a sad decline from The Robbers; Dalberg thought he might produce the play if Schiller revised it; Schiller spent weeks on this task; Dalberg rejected the result. Schiller found himself penniless. Streicher spent, in supporting him, the money he had saved to study music in Hamburg. When this ran out, Schiller welcomed an invitation to stay in Bauerbach in a cottage owned by Frau Henrietta von Wolzogen. There he wrote a third play, Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), and fell in love with Fräulein Lotte von Wolzogen, aged sixteen. She preferred a rival. Meanwhile Fiesko, published, had a good sale. Dalberg repented, and sent Schiller an invitation to be resident playwright for the Mannheim theater at three hundred florins per year. He agreed (July, 1783).
Despite many unpaid debts, and one serious illness, Schiller, modestly lodged in Mannheim, had a year of precarious bliss. Fiesko received its première January 11, 1784; the incredibly happy ending which Dalberg had insisted upon spoiled it, and the play aroused no enthusiasm. But Kabale und Liebe was better constructed, had fewer orations, and showed a growing sense of the theater; some have pronounced it, from the theatrical point of view, the best of all German tragedies.77 After the initial performance (April 15, 1784) the audience gave it such tumultuous applause that Schiller rose from his seat in a box and bowed.
His happiness was extreme and brief. He was not temperamentally fit to deal with actors, who were almost as high-strung as himself; he judged their acting strictly, and reproved them for not accurately memorizing their lines.78 He was unable to finish a third play, Don Carlos, by the stipulated time. When his contract as Theaterdichter neared expiration in September, 1784, Dalberg refused to renew it. Schiller had saved nothing, and was again faced with destitution and impatient creditors.
About this time he published some letters, Philosophische Briefe, which indicate that religious doubts were added to his economic embarrassments. He could not accept the old theology, and yet his poetic spirit was revolted by such materialistic atheism as d’Holbach had expressed in Système de la nature (1770). He could no longer pray, but he envied those who could, and he described with a sense of great loss the comfort that religion was bringing to thousands of souls in suffering, grief, and the nearness of death.79 He kept his faith in free will, immortality, and an unknowable God, basing all, like Kant, on the moral consciousness. And he expressed memorably the ethic of Christ: “When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. To pardon is to receive a property that has been lost. Misanthropy is a protracted suicide.”80
Amid these complications Christian Gottfried Körner brought into Schiller’s life one of the finest friendships in literary history. In June, 1784, he sent to Schiller from Leipzig a letter of warm admiration, accompanied by portraits of himself, his fiancée Minna Stock, her sister Dora, and Dora’s fiancé Ludwig Huber, and a wallet that Minna had embroidered. Körner had been born in 1756 (three years before Schiller) to the pastor of that same Thomaskirche where Bach a generation earlier had conducted so much enduring music. The youth became a licentiate in law at the age of twenty-one, and was now counselor to the Upper Consistory in Dresden. Schiller, pressed with troubles, delayed reply till December 7. Kórner answered: “We offer you our friendship without reserve. Come to us as soon as possible.”81
Schiller hesitated. He had made friendships in Mannheim, and had had several amours, especially (1784) with Charlotte von Kalb, who had been married only a year before. At Darmstadt, in December, 1784, he met Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, read to him the first act of Don Carlos, and received the title of Rat, or honorary councilor; but no offer came of a place in th
e Weimar firmament. He decided to accept Körner’s invitation to Leipzig. On February 10, 1785, he sent to his unknown admirer an emotional appeal that shows him near the breaking point:
While half of Mannheim is rushing to the theater … I fly to you, dearest friends. … Since your last letter the thought has never left me that we were meant for each other. Do not misjudge my friendship because it may seem somewhat hasty. Nature waives ceremony in favor of certain beings. Noble souls are held together by a delicate thread which often proves lasting. . . .
If you will make allowances for a man who cherishes great ideas and has performed only small acts; who as yet can only surmise from his follies that Nature has destined him for something; who demands unbounded love and yet knows not what he can offer in return; but who can love something beyond himself, and has no greater torment than the thought that he is very far from being what he desires to be; if a man of this stamp may aspire to your friendship ours will be eternal, for I am that man. Perhaps you will love Schiller; even should your esteem for the poet have declined.
This letter was interrupted, but was resumed on February 22.
I cannot remain any longer in Mannheim.... I must visit Leipzig, and make your acquaintance. My soul thirsts for new food—for better men—for friendship, affection, and love. I must be near you, and, by your conversation and company, freshness will be breathed into my wounded spirit. … You must give me new life, and I shall become more than I ever was before. I shall be happy—I never yet was happy. … Will you welcome me?82
Körner answered on March 3, “We will welcome you with open arms”; and he paid G. J. Göschen, a Leipzig publisher, to send Schiller an advance payment for future essays.83 When the poet reached Leipzig (March 17, 1785) Körner was absent in Dresden, but his fiancée, her sister, and Huber revived Schiller with food and solicitous hospitality. Göschen took to him at once. “I cannot describe to you,” he wrote, “how grateful and accommodating Schiller is when given critical advice, and how much he labors at his own moral development.”84