Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  So, after finishing Don Carlos, he gave his pen to a Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande (History of the Fall of the United Netherlands) . As Schiller could not read Dutch, he relied on secondary authorities, from whose narratives he put together a compilation of no lasting worth. Körner criticized Volume I (1788) with his usual honesty: “The present work, with all its talent, does not bear the stamp of that genius of which you are capable.”89 Schiller abandoned the Netherlands; no second volume came.

  On July 18, 1788, Goethe returned from Italy, and in September met Schiller in suburban Rudolstadt. Schiller reported to Körner: “The high idea I had conceived of him is not lessened in the slightest degree, … but I doubt if we shall ever draw very close to each other. … He is so far ahead of me … that we cannot meet on the road. His whole life from the very beginning has run in a direction contrary to mine. His world is not my world. On some points our notions are diametrically opposed.”90 And indeed the two poets seemed providentially designed to dislike each other. Goethe, thirty-nine, had arrived and matured; Schiller, twenty-nine, was climbing and experimenting; only in proud egotism did they agree. The younger man was of the people, poor, writing semirevolutionary lines; the other was rich, a man of rank and state, a privy councilor deprecating revolution. Schiller was just emerging from Sturm und Drang; he was the voice of feeling, sentiment, freedom, romance; Goethe, wooing Greece, was all for reason, restraint, order, and the classic style. In any case, it is not natural for authors to like one another; they are reaching for the same prize.

  When they returned to Weimar, Goethe and Schiller lived only a short walk from each other, but they did not communicate. Matters were worsened by the appearance of Schiller’s hostile review of Goethe’s Egmont. Goethe decided that “little Athens” was not large enough to contain both of them. In December, 1788, he recommended Schiller for a chair in history at Jena. Schiller gladly accepted, and called on Goethe to thank him, but in February, 1789, he wrote to Körner:

  It would make me unhappy to be a great deal in Goethe’s society. He never warms even toward his best friends; nothing attaches him. I verily believe he is an egotist of the first water. He possesses the talent of putting men under an obligation to him by small as well as great acts of courtesy, but he always manages to remain free himself.... I look upon him as the personification of a well-calculated system of unbounded selfishness. Men should not tolerate such a being near them. He is hateful to me for this reason, though I cannot do otherwise than admire his mind, and think nobly of him. He has aroused in me a curious mixture of hatred and love.91

  On May 11, 1789, Schiller took up his duties at Jena, and on May 26 he delivered his “inaugural address” on “What Is, and to What End Does One Study, Universal History?” Admission being free, the audience proved far too large for the room assigned, and the professor moved with his auditors in a gay stampede to a hall at the other end of town. This lecture was highly praised; “the students gave me a serenade that night, and three rounds of cheers”;92 but enrollment for the course—for which admission was charged—was small, and Schiller’s scholastic income was meager.

  He added to it by writing. In 1789-91 he brought out, in three installments, Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years’ War). Here he was at home at least with the language, though again he was too harassed to go to the primary sources, and his predilection for judging and philosophizing colored and halted the tale. Nevertheless Wieland hailed the work as indicating Schiller’s “capacity for rising to a level with Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon.”93 Seven thousand copies of Volume I were sold in its first year.

  Schiller now felt that he could indulge his longing for a home, and for a woman to give him love and care. He had had a brief glimpse of Charlotte and Caroline von Lengefeld at Mannheim in 1784. He saw them again at Rudolstadt in 1787; “Lotte” was living there with her mother, and Caroline, unhappily married, was living next door. “Both, without being pretty,” Schiller wrote to Körner,94 “are interesting, and please me exceedingly. They are well read in the literature of the day, and give proofs of a highly finished education. They are good performers on the piano.” Frau von Lengefeld frowned upon the idea of her daughter marrying an impecunious poet, but Karl August gave him a small pension of two hundred thalers, and the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen secured him a patent of nobility. He warned Lotte that he had many faults; she told him she had noticed them, but added: “Love is loving people as we find them, and, if they have weaknesses, accepting them with a loving heart.”95 They were married on February 22, 1790, and took a modest home in Jena. Lotte brought her own income of two hundred thalers a year, gave him four children, and proved, through all his tribulations, a patient and tender wife. “My heart swims in happiness,” he wrote, “and my mind draws fresh strength and vigor.”96

  He worked hard, preparing two lectures a week, writing articles, poems, and history. For months he labored fourteen hours a day.97 In January, 1791, he suffered two spells of “catarrhal fever,” involving gastric pains and expectoration of blood. For eight days he lay in bed, his stomach rejecting all food. Students helped Lotte to care for him, and “vied with one another as to who should sit up with me at night. … The Duke sent me half a dozen of old Madeira, which, with some Hungarian wine, has done me good service.”98 In May he was attacked by “a fearful spasm, with symptoms of suffocation, so that I could not but think that my last moment had come.... I took farewell of my loved ones, and thought to pass away any minute. … Strong doses of opium, camphor, and musk, and the application of blisters, relieved me most.”99

  A false report of his death alarmed his friends, and reached even to Copenhagen. There—on suggestions from Karl Reinhold and Jens Baggesen—two Danish noblemen, Duke Friedrich Christian of Holstein-Augustenburg and Count Ernst von Schimmelmann, offered Schiller an annual gift of a thousand thalers for three years. He received it gratefully. The university excused him from teaching, but he lectured to a small private circle. Part of his new leisure he gave, at Reinhold’s urging, to the study of Kant’s philosophy, which he accepted almost completely, to Goethe’s amusement and Herder’s disgust, and perhaps with some detriment to Schiller’s poetry.

  Now (1793) he sent forth his long essay On Grace and Dignity, which began the romantic cultivation of die schöne Seele. “A beautiful soul” he defined as one in which “reason and the senses, duty and inclination, are in harmony, and are outwardly expressed in grace.”100 The Copenhagen donors must have been alarmed to receive, as some return for their gift, a little volume entitled Briefe über dieästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, 1793-94). Starting with Kant’s conception of the sense of beauty as a disinterested contemplation of harmonious forms, Schiller argued (with Shaftesbury) that “the feeling developed by the beautiful refines manners,” and the aesthetic sense becomes one with morality.—It is a consolation to read, in this pronouncement from Weimar’s halcyon days, that Schiller (like Goethe) thought his generation decadent, sunk in “profound moral degradation.”101

  When he turned back from philosophy to poetry he found it difficult to recapture “that boldness and living fire I formerly possessed; … critical discussion has spoiled me.”102 But he insisted that “the poet is the only authentic human being; the best philosopher is a mere caricature compared with him”;103 and he exalted to the plane of celestial inspiration the function of the poet to teach and raise mankind. In a long ode, Die Künstler (The Artists, 1789), he described poets and artists as guiding mankind to the union of beauty with morality and truth. In another poem, Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece, 1788) he lauded the Greeks for their aesthetic sensibility and artistic creations, and argued, with cautious obscurity, that the world had become gloomy and ugly since the replacement of Hellenism by Christianity. He was already falling under Goethe’s spell, as Goethe had fallen under Winckelmann’s.

  Probably in both Schiller and Goethe the romantifica
tion of Hellas was an escape from Christianity. Despite some pious passages Schiller, as well as Goethe, belonged to the Aufklärung; he accepted the eighteenth-century faith in salvation by human reason rather than by divine grace. He retained a deistic belief in God—personal only in poetry—and a misty immortality. He rejected all churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. He could not bear sermons, even Herder’s. In an epigram entitled “Mein Glaube” (My Faith) he wrote two famous lines:

  Welche Religion ich bekenne? Keine von alien

  Die du mir nennst. Und warum keine? Aus Religion.

  —“Which religion do I acknowledge? None of all those that you name to me. And why none? Because of religion.”104 He wrote to Goethe, July 9, 1796: “A healthy and beautiful nature—as you yourself say—requires no moral code, no law for its nature, no political metaphysics. You might as well have added that it requires no godhead, no idea of immortality wherewith to support and maintain itself.” Nevertheless there were factors of imagination and tenderness in him that drew him back toward Christianity:

  I find that Christianity virtually contains the first elements of what is highest and noblest; and its various outward forms seem distasteful and repulsive to us only because they are misrepresentations of the highest. … No sufficient emphasis has been placed upon what this religion can be to a beautiful mind, or rather what a beautiful mind can make of it. … This explains why this religion is so successful with feminine natures, and why it is that only in women is it at all supportable.105

  Schiller was not, like Goethe, physically built for thorough paganism. His face was handsome but pale, his frame tall but thin and frail. He distrusted the diurnal vacillations of the weather, and preferred to sit in his room smoking and taking snuff. He contrasted himself with Goethe as idea versus nature, imagination versus intellect, sentiment versus objective thought.106 He was at once timid and proud, shrinking from hostility but always fighting back; occasionally irritable and impatient,107 perhaps because aware that his time was running out; often critical of others, sometimes envious.108 He had a tendency to moralize about everything, and to take a high idealistic tone. It is a relief to find him enjoying the eroticism of Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets.109 He analyzed his own talent well in an early letter to Goethe:

  The poetic mind generally got the better of me when I ought to have philosophized, and my philosophical mind when I wished to poetize. Even now it often happens that imagination intrudes upon my abstractions, and cold reason upon my poetical productions. If I could obtain such mastery over these two powers as to assign to each its limits [as Goethe did], I might yet look forward to a happy fate. But, alas, just when I have begun to know and to use my moral energies rightly, illness seizes me, and threatens to undermine my physical powers.110

  His ailment returned with fury in December, 1793; he recovered, but the sense that he could not be cured, and must expect recurrent seizures, darkened his mood. On December 10 he wrote to Körner: “I struggle against this with all the force of my mind, … but I am always driven back. … The uncertainty of my prospects; … doubts of my own genius, which is not sustained and encouraged by contact with others; the total absence of that intellectual conversation which has become a necessity to me”: these were the mental accompaniments of his physical trials. He looked with longing, from Jena to Weimar, to the enviably healthy Goethe, that mens sana in corpore sano; there, Schiller felt, was the man who could give him stimulus and support, if only the ice between them would melt, if only that fourteen-mile barrier would fall away!

  VII. SCHILLER AND GOETHE: 1794-1805

  It fell for a moment when, in June, 1794, both men attended in Jena a session of the Society for Natural History. Encountering Goethe as they left the hall, Schiller remarked that the biological specimens exhibited at the conference lacked life, and could offer no real help to understanding nature. Goethe emphatically agreed, and the conversation kept them together till they reached Schiller’s home. “The talk induced me to go in” with him, Goethe later recalled. “I expounded to him … The Metamorphosis of Plants”—a treatise in which Goethe had argued that all plants were variations of one primitive type, the Urpflanze, and that nearly all parts of a plant were variations or developments of the leaf. “He heard … all this with much interest and distinct apprehension; but when I had done he shook his head and said, ‘This is not experiment, it is an idea’ “; i.e., it was a theory not yet verified by observation or test. The comment nettled Goethe, but he saw that Schiller had a mind of his own, and his respect for him grew. Schiller’s wife, “whom I had loved and valued since her childhood, did her best to strengthen our reciprocal understanding.”111

  In May of 1794 Schiller, had signed a contract to edit a literary monthly to be called Die Horen. (The Horae, in Greek mythology, were the goddesses of the seasons.) He hoped to enlist as contributors Kant, Fichte, Klopstock, Herder, Jacobu, Baggesen, Körner, Reinhold, Wilhelm von Humboldt, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, and—best catch of all—Goethe. On June 3 he sent to Weimar a letter addressed to “Hochwohlgeborener Herr, Hochzuverehrender Herr Geheimer Rat” (High and Wellborn Sir, Highly Honored Sir Privy Councilor) a prospectus of the proposed magazine, and added: “The enclosed paper expresses the wish of a number of men, whose esteem for you is unbounded, that you would honor the periodical with contributions from your pen, in regard to the value of which there can be but one voice among us. We feel, your Excellency, that your consent to support this undertaking will be a guarantee of its success.”112 Goethe replied that he would gladly contribute, and was “certain that a closer connection with the sterling men who form your committee will arouse to new life much that is now stagnant within me.”113

  So began a correspondence that is among the treasures of literary history, and a friendship whose exchange of respect and aid, lasting for eleven years—till Schiller’s death—should enter into our estimate of mankind. Perhaps the most revealing of the 999 extant letters is the fourth (August 23, 1794), in which Schiller, after several meetings with Goethe, analyzed with both courtesy and candor, both modesty and pride, the differences between their minds:

  My recent conversations with you have put the whole store of my ideas in motion. … Many things about which I could not come to a right understanding with myself have received new and unexpected light from the contemplation I have had of your mind (for so I call the general impression of your ideas upon me). I needed the object, the body, to several of my speculative ideas, and you have put me on the track for finding it. Your calm and clear way of looking at things keeps you from getting lost in the side roads into which speculation, as well as arbitrary imagination … are so apt to lead me astray. Your correct intuition grasps all things, and that far more perfectly than what is laboriously sought for by analysis. … Minds like yours seldom know how far they have penetrated, and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy, which in fact can only learn from them. … Although I have done so at a distance, I have long watched the course which your mind has pursued. … You seek for the necessary in nature, but … you look at nature as a whole when seeking to get light thrown on her individual parts; you look for the explanation of the individual in the totality of all her various manifestations.114

  Goethe’s answer (August 27) cleverly avoided an analysis of Schiller’s mind:

  For my birthday, which occurred this week, I could have received no more agreeable gift than your letter, in which, with a friendly hand, you sum up my existence, and in which, by your sympathy, you encourage me to a more assiduous and active use of my powers.... It will be a pleasure to unfold to you at leisure what your conversation has been to me; how I too regard those days as an epoch in my life; for it seems to me that after so unexpected a meeting we cannot but wander on in life together.

  Goethe followed this up (September 4) with an invitation to Schiller to come and spend some days with him in Weimar. “You could take up any kind of work you like without being disturbed. We would converse together at con
venient hours, … and I think we would not part without some profit. You should live exactly as you like, and as much as possible as if you were in your own home.” Schiller readily accepted, but warned Goethe that “the asthmatic spasms from which I suffer oblige me to stay in bed all morning, since they leave me no peace at night.” So, from September 14 to 28, Schiller was Goethe’s guest, almost his patient. The older man took tender care of the ailing poet, guarded him against annoyance, gave him dietetic counsel, taught him to love fresh air. Back in Jena, Schiller wrote (September 29): “I find myself at home again, but my thoughts are still in Weimar. It will take me a long time to unravel all the ideas which you have awakened in me.” Then (October 8), with characteristic eagerness, he urged: “It seems to me necessary that we should come at once to some clear understanding about our ideas of the beautiful.”

  There followed three months of preparation for the first number of Die Horen. This appeared on January 24, 1795; the second, on March 1; the rest monthly for three years. Goethe reported from Weimar (March 18): “People are running after it, snatching the numbers from one another’s hands; we could not want more for a beginning.” On April 10 Schiller informed Goethe: “Kant has written me a very friendly letter, but begs for a delay in sending his contributions.... I am glad we have induced the old bird to join us.” Goethe asked that his own pieces be unsigned, for they included several of his Roman Elegies, and he knew that their lusty sensuality would seem unbecoming in a privy councilor.