by Will Durant
Körner met Schiller for the first time at Leipzig on July 1, and then returned to Dresden. “Heaven brought us together in a wonderful manner,” Schiller wrote to him, “and our friendship is a miracle.” But he added that he was again approaching bankruptcy.85 Körner sent him money, assurance, and advice:
Should you be in want of more, write to me, and by return post I will send you any amount … If I were ever so rich, and could … place you above ever wanting the necessaries of life, still I would not dare do it. I know that you are capable of earning wherewith to provide for all your wants as soon as you put your hand to the work. But allow me at least for one year to place you above the necessity of working. I can spare it without being worse off myself; and you can repay me, if you like, at your own convenience.86
Körner’s generosity was all the more remarkable since he was preparing for marriage. The wedding took place at Dresden on August 7, 1785. In September Schiller joined them, and he lived with them, or at their expense, till July 20, 1787. It was about this time—perhaps amid the happiness of the newlyweds—that he composed his most famous poem, An die Freude, the Ode to Joy that became the crown of the Ninth Symphony. Everyone knows Beethoven’s stirring melody, but few of us, outside of Germany, know Schiller’s words. They began with a call to universal love, and ended with a summons to revolution:
Freude, sch öner G ötterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng gesteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Br üder
Wo dein sanfter Fl ügel weilt.
Chorus: Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Br üder— überm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja—wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund,
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der steble
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund.
Chorus: Was den grossen Ring bewohnet,
Huldige der Sympathie!
Zu den Sternen leitet sie
Wo der Unbekannte thronet. . . .
Festen Mut in schweren Leiden
Hilfe wo die Unschuld weint.
Ewigkeit geschwornen Eiden,
Wahrheit gegen Freund und Feind,
M änerstolz vor K önigsthronen,
Br üder, g äit es Gut und Blut;
Dem Verdienste seine Kronen,
Untergang der Lügenbrut!
Chorus: Schliesst den heilgen Zirkel dichter,
Schw ört bei diesem goldnen Wein,
Dem Gel übde treu zu sein,
Schw ört es bei dem Sternenrichter!
Joy of flame celestial fashioned,
Daughter of Elysium,
By that holy fire impassioned
To thy sanctuary we come.
Thine the spells that reunited
Those estranged by custom dread;
Every man or brother plighted
Where thy gentle wings are spread.
Chorus: Millions in our arms we gather;
To the world our kiss is sent!
Past the starry firmament,
Brothers, dwells a loving Father.
Who that height of bliss has provèd
Once a friend of friends to be,
Who has won a maid beloved,
Join us in our jubilee.
Whoso holds a heart in keeping—
One in all the world his own—
Who has failed, let him with weeping
From our fellowship be gone.
Chorus: All the mighty globe contained!
Homage to Compassion pay!
To the stars she leads the way
Where the unknown Godhead reigneth. . . .
Hearts in direst need unquailing,
Aid to innocence in woe;
Troth eternally unfailing,
Loyalty to friend and foe!
Fronting kings, and manly spirit,
Though it cost us wealth and blood!
Crowns to naught save noblest merit,
Death to all the Liars’ brood!
Chorus: Close the holy circle. Ever
Swear it by the wine of gold!
Swear these sacred vows to hold,
Swear it by the stars’ Lawgiver!
For two years Körner supported Schiller, hoping that the poet would beat into presentable shape the drama that was to portray the conflict between Philip II and his son Carlos. But Schiller dallied so long with the play that he lost the mood in which he had begun it; perhaps more reading of history had altered his view of Philip; in any case, he changed the plot out of unity and sequence. Meanwhile (February, 1787) he fell in love with Henrietta von Arnim, and love letters consumed his ink, while Henrietta shopped for a richer suitor. Körner persuaded Schiller to isolate himself in a suburb until he had finished his play. At last it was complete (June, 1787), and the Hamburg theater offered to produce it. Schiller’s spirits and pride revived; perhaps now he might be judged worthy to join the galaxy of literary lights that shone around Duke Karl August. Körner, relieved, agreed that there was no future for the poet in Dresden. Besides, Charlotte von Kalb was in Weimar, husbandless and beckoning. On July 20, after many farewells, Schiller drove out from Dresden into a new life. On the morrow he was in Weimar, and the great circle was complete.
CHAPTER XXIII
Weimar in Flower
1775-1805
I. WIELAND SEQUEL: 1775—1813
MOZART, seeing Wieland at Mannheim in 1777, described his face as “frightfully ugly, covered with pockmarks, and he had a long nose; … aside from that he is … a most gifted fellow. … People stare at him as if he had dropped from heaven.”1 The stormy petrels of Sturm und Drang disliked him because he laughed at their rebel ecstasies, but Weimar liked him because he sweetened his satires with grace and a general absolution for mankind, and because he bore with good humor the repeated irruption of new stars in the literary sky where he could have claimed priority. Goethe’s autobiography commemorated him gratefully.2 Schiller at first encounter thought him vain and melancholy; but “the footing on which he at once placed himself toward me shows confidence, love, and esteem.”3 “We will shortly open our hearts to each other,” said the older to the younger poet; “we will assist each other in turn”;4 and he proved faithful to this promise. “Wieland and I draw daily closer together. … He never omits an occasion for saying a kind word.”5
Wieland competed successfully with the newcomers by issuing in 1780 a poetic romance, Oberon, about a knight who is rescued from a hundred fairies, and from the quagmire charms of an overheated queen, by the magic wand of the prince of fairies. When Goethe had to sit for a portrait, and wished to remain quiet for an hour, he asked Wieland to read parts of the epic to him. “Never,” Wieland reported, “have I seen anyone so happy over the work of another as Goethe was.”6 John Quincy Adams translated the poem while he was United States minister to Prussia in 1797-1801, and James Planché took from it the libretto for Weber’s opera (1826).
The March, 1798, number of Wieland’s Neue teutsche Merkur contained an article—presumably by Wieland—which remarkably presaged coming events. It noted the chaos into which France had fallen since 1789; it recommended the appointment of a dictator, as in the crises of republican Rome; and it nominated young Bonaparte, then having trouble in Egypt, as clearly fitted for the task. When Napoleon had in effect conquered Germany he met Wieland in Weimar and in Erfurt (1808), talked with him about Greek and Roman history and literature, and honored him, among German authors, as second only to Goethe.7
On January 25, 1813, Goethe wrote in his diary, “Wieland buried today,” and sent the news to a friend at Karlsbad: “O
ur good Wieland has left us. . . . On September 3 we still quite festively celebrated his eightieth birthday. There was a beautiful balance of tranquillity and activity in his life. With a remarkable deliberateness, without any impassioned striving or crying, he contributed an infinite amount to the intellectual culture of the nation.”8
II. HERDER AND HISTORY: 1777—1803
“I have just left Herder,” Schiller wrote in July, 1787. “. . . His conversation is brilliant, his language warm and powerful; but his feelings are swayed by love and hate.”9
Herder’s duties at Weimar were multifarious, and allowed him little time for writing. As chaplain to the Duke he performed the baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and funerals of the ducal family and the court. As General-superintendent of the duchy he supervised clerical conduct and appointments, attended consistory meetings, and preached sermons as orthodox as his private doubts would permit. The schools of the duchy were under his management, and became a model for all Germany. These responsibilities, added to his fistula and general ill-health, made him irritable, and gave his conversation, now and then, what Goethe called a “vicious bite.”10 For three years (1780-83) he and Goethe avoided each other; the Duke resented some of Herder’s sermons (“After such a sermon,” said Goethe, “there’s nothing left for a prince but to abdicate”11); and the amiable Wieland remarked, in 1777, “I’d like to have a dozen pyramids between Herder and me.”12 Weimar learned to make clinical allowances for its Dean Swift, and his pleasant wife Caroline counteracted some of his bite. On August 28, 1783, Goethe took advantage of this being the birthday of himself and Herder’s eldest son to invite the Herders to dinner; councilor and Generalsuperintendent were reconciled, and Goethe wrote that “the wretched clouds that so long separated us have been dispelled, and, I am convinced, forever.”13 A month later he added: “I know no one of a nobler heart or a more liberal spirit”;14 and Schiller noted in 1787, “Herder is a passionate admirer of Goethe—he almost idolizes him.”15 In time Wieland and Herder became understanding friends,16 and in the salon of Anna Amalie it was these two, rather than Goethe or Schiller, who led the conversation and won the Dowager Duchess’s heart.17
Amid his administrative chores Herder pursued primitive poetry, gathered specimens from a dozen nations, and from Orpheus to Ossian, and published them in an anthology, Volkslieder (1778), which became a fountain-head of the Romantic movement in Germany. While Goethe was preparing a return to classical ideals, forms, and styles, and to restraint of emotion by intellect, Herder counseled a reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism and seventeenth-century formalism to medieval faith, legends, lays, and ways.
In 1778 the Bavarian Academy offered a prize for the best essay “On the Effects of Poetry upon the Customs and Morals of the Nations.” Herder’s contribution was crowned, and was published by the Academy in 1781. It traced what the author considered the deterioration of poetry, among the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the North Europeans, from an early bardic expression of popular history, feelings, and ideas, in free and flowing rhythms, into a “refined” and scholastic exercise, counting syllables, wrenching rhymes, venerating rules, and losing the vitality of the people in the deadening artificialities of city life. The Renaissance, Herder held, had taken literature away from the people and imprisoned it in courts, and printing had replaced the living minstrel with the book. In another essay, “On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry” (1783), Herder, who had made himself a good Hebraist, proposed that the Book of Genesis should be read as poetry, not as science; and he suggested that such poetry could convey as much truth through symbolism as science does through “fact.”
His religious faith struggled to maintain itself despite his wide reading in science and history. In his first year at Weimar he was suspected of being an atheist, a freethinker, a Socinian, an “enthusiast” (mystic).18 He had read the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of Reimarus as published by Lessing, and was sufficiently impressed to doubt the divinity of Christ.19 He was not an atheist, but he accepted Spinoza’s pantheism. He told Jacobi in 1784, “I do not recognize an extramundane God.”20 He followed Lessing in studying and defending Spinoza; “I must confess that this philosophy makes me very happy.”21 He devoted to Spinoza the opening chapters of Gott, einige Gespräche (God, Some Conversations, 1787); in this treatise God lost personal form and became the energy and spirit of the universe, unknowable except in the order of the world and the spiritual consciousness of man.22 However, in tracts addressed to the clergy Herder accepted the supernatural quality of Christ’s miracles, and the immortality of the soul.23
He brought the scattered elements of his philosophy into a comparatively ordered whole in a massive masterpiece which he modestly entitled Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind), one of the epochal, seminal books of the eighteenth century. It appeared in four parts in 1784, 1785, 1787, and 1791. That so vast an undertaking should have neared completion amid Herder’s official responsibilities is evidence of a strong character and a good wife. So Herder wrote to Hamann, May 10, 1784: “In my whole life I have not written any work with so many troubles and exhaustions from within, and so many disturbances from without, as I have this one; so that if my wife, who is the real autor autoris [author of the author] of my writings—and Goethe, who accidentally got to see Book I—had not incessantly encouraged me and urged me on, everything would have remained in the Hades of the unborn.”24
Part I begins with a frankly secular story of “creation,” based on current astronomy and geology, and making no use of the Bible except as poetry. Life did not evolve from matter, for matter itself is alive. Body and mind are not separate and opposed substances, they are two forms of one force, and every cell in every organism contains, in some degree, both forms. There is no external design visible in nature, but there is an internal design—the mysterious and “perfect determination” of each seed to develop into a specific organism with all its own complex and characteristic parts. Herder does not derive man from lower animals, but he sees him as a member of the animal kingdom, fighting like other organisms for sustenance and survival. Man became man by taking erect stature, which developed in him a sensory system based upon sight and hearing rather than upon smell and taste; forefeet became hands, free for grasping, manipulation, comprehension, thought. The highest product of God or nature is the conscious mind acting with reason and freedom, and destined to immortality.
Part II of the Ideen starts with the assumption that man is by nature good; it renews the argument for the relative excellence and happiness of primitive societies, and deprecates the Kantian—later Hegelian—notion that the state is the goal of human development. Herder despised the state as he knew it. “In great states,” he wrote, “hundreds must go hungry so that one can strut and wallow in luxury; tens of thousands are oppressed and driven to death so that one crowned fool or wise man can carry out his fancy.”25
In Part III Herder praised Athens for its comparative democracy, which allowed culture to spread into many strata of the population. Rome, building its wealth on conquest and slavery, developed a narrow culture that left the people in poverty and ignorance. In all this history Herder saw no Providence; it was too evil to be divine. God, being one with nature, lets matters take their course according to natural law and human stupidity. Nevertheless, by the very struggle for existence, some progress emerges from the chaos; mutual aid, social order, morals, and law are developed as means of survival, and man moves slowly toward a humane humanity. Not that there is a continuous line of progress; this cannot be, for each national culture is a unique entity, with its own inherent character, its own language, religion, moral code, literature, and art; and, like any organism, each culture, barring accidents, tends to grow to its natural maximum, after which it declines and dies. There is no guarantee that later cultures will excel earlier ones, but the contributions of each culture are better transmitted to its successors, and so the human heritage grows.
&nb
sp; Part IV lauds Christianity as the mother of Western civilization. The medieval papacy served a good purpose in checking the despotism of rulers and the individualism of states; the Scholastic philosophers, though they wove meaningless webs with ponderous words, sharpened the terms and tools of reason; and the medieval universities gathered, preserved, and transmitted much of Greek and Roman culture, something even of Arabic and Persian science and philosophy. So the intellectual community grew too numerous and subtle for the custodians of power; the cake of custom was broken, and the modern mind declared itself free.
Between the third and fourth installments of the Ideen Herder realized his long-deferred hope of seeing Italy. Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg, Catholic privy councilor to the Archbishop-Elector of Trier, invited Herder to accompany him on a grand tour, all expenses paid. The Duke of SaxeWeimar—and Caroline—gave him leave of absence, and Herder left Weimar August 7, 1788. When he joined Dalberg in Augsburg he found that Dalberg’s mistress was an important member of the party. Her presence and her demands shared with ill-health in souring the trip for Herder. In October Anna Amalie arrived in Rome; Herder left Dalberg and joined her entourage. He liked Angelica Kauffmann too much for Caroline’s liking, and Caroline’s letters spoke too often and fondly of Goethe. Herder, having heard of Goethe’s life in Rome, resumed his bite: “My journey here,” he wrote, “has unfortunately made Goethe’s selfish existence, which is inwardly altogether unconcerned about others, clearer to me than I could desire. He can’t help it, so let him be.”26
He returned to Weimar July 9, 1789. Five days later the Bastille fell, and Herder changed his writing plans. He completed Part IV of the Ideen, then put the book aside, and, instead, wrote Briefe zur Beförderung der Humani-tät (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, 1793-97). He began with cautiously approving the French Revolution; he welcomed the collapse of French feudalism, and shed no tears over the secularization of the Catholic Church in France.27 When the Duke and Goethe went off to face the French at Valmy, and came back sore with defeat, Herder suppressed those early Briefe, and devoted the remainder to praise of geniuses safely dead.