Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
comprehensiveness; nothing is easier to grasp, and for that reason they
would have found favor with the Greeks. The French poets tried to obey
exactly the law of the three unities; but they violate the law of
comprehensiveness, as they do not expound dramatic subjects by dramas but
by recitals."
Poetical creation was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time
responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of
correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living
characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room
to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible lessons, is
now able to take place on the stage. The whole Thirty Years' War passes
before us in "Wallenstein." We hear the tumult of camps, the disorder of
a fanatical and undisciplined army, peasants, recruits, sutlers,
soldiers. The illusion is complete, and enthusiasm breaks out among the
spectators. Similar merits attach to many other of Schiller's plays.
This new drama, which seemed to give all to the natural sphere, concedes
still more to the ideal. An able critic has said the details which are
the truth of history are also its poetry. Here the German school
professes a principle of the highest learning, and one that seems to be
borrowed from its profoundest philosophers; it is that of the universal
beauty of life, of the identity of beauty and existence. "Our
aesthetics," says Goethe, "speak a great deal of poetical or antipoetical
subjects; fundamentally there is no subject that has not its poetry; it
is for the poet to find it there."
Schiller and Goethe divide the empire over modern German poetry, and
represent its two principal powers; the one, Schiller, impassioned and
lyrical, pours his soul over all the subjects he touches; in him every
composition, ode, or drama is always one of his noble ideas, borrowing
its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially
through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you
with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions
with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in
Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and sublime forehead.
After this glance at the position and chief characteristics of Schiller,
it may be useful to offer a few remarks on those of the principal works
in this volume, his Aesthetical Letters and Essays. Schiller, in his
Aesthetical Essays, did not choose the pure abstract method of deduction
and conception like Kant, nor the historical like Herder, who strove thus
to account for the genesis of our ideas of beauty and art. He struck out
a middle path, which presents certain deficiencies to the advocates of
either of these two systems. He leans upon Kantian ideas, but without
scholastic constraint. Pure speculation, which seeks to set free the
form from all contents and matter, was remote from his creative genius,
to which the world of matter and sense was no hinderance, but a necessary
envelop for his forms.
His removal to Jena in 1791, and acquaintance with Reinhold, familiarized
him with the Kantian philosophy, but he only appreciated it by halves.
The bare and bald dealing with fundamental principles was at this time
equally repulsive to Goethe and Schiller, the man of the world and the
man of life. But Schiller did not find anywhere at that time justice
done to the dignity of art, or honor to the substantial value of beauty.
The Aesthetical Essays in this volume appeared for the most part since
1792, in the "Thalia" and the "Hours" periodicals. The first "On the
Ground of our Pleasure in Tragic Subjects" (1792), applies Kantian
principles of the sublime to tragedy, and shows Schiller's lofty estimate
of this class of poetry. With Kant he shows that the source of all
pleasure is suitableness; the touching and sublime elicit this feeling,
implying the existence of unsuitableness. In this article he makes the
aim and source of art to consist in giving enjoyment, in pleasing. To
nature pleasure is a mediate object, to art its main object. The same
proposition appears in Schiller's paper on Tragic Art (1792), closely
connected with the former. This article contains views of the affection
of pity that seem to approximate the Aristotelian propositions about
tragedy.
His views on the sublime are expressed in two papers, "The Sublime" and
"The Pathetic," in which we trace considerable influence of Lessing and
Winckelmann. He is led especially to strong antagonism against the
French tragedy, and he indulges in a lengthy consideration of the passage
of Virgil on Laocoon, showing the necessity of suffering and the pathetic
in connection with moral adaptations to interest us deeply.
All these essays bespeak the poet who has tried his hand at tragedy, but
in his next paper, "On Grace and Dignity," we trace more of the moralist.
Those passages where he takes up a medium position between sense and
reason, between Goethe and Kant, are specially attractive. The theme of
this paper is the conception of grace, or the expression of a beautiful
soul and dignity, or that of a lofty mind. The idea of grace has been
developed more deeply and truly by Schiller than by Wieland or
Winckelmann, but the special value of the paper is its constantly
pointing to the ideal of a higher humanity. In it he does full justice
to the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful
nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason mere
reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in which grace
and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty (structure),
the last supported by power.
The following year, 1795, appeared his most important contribution to
aesthetics, in his Aesthetical Letters.
In these letters he remarks that beauty is the work of free
contemplation, and we enter with it into the world of ideas, but without
leaving the world of sense. Beauty is to us an object, and yet at the
same time a state of our subjectivity, because the feeling of the
conditional is under that which we have of it. Beauty is a form because
we consider it, and life because we feel it; in a word, it is at once our
state and our art. And exactly because it is both it serves us as a
triumphant proof that suffering does not exclude activity, nor matter
form, nor limitation the infinite, for in the enjoyment of beauty both
natures are united, and by this is proved the capacity of the infinite to
be developed in the finite, and accordingly the possibility of the
sublimest humanity.
The free play of the faculty of cognition which had been determined by
Kant is also developed by Schiller. His representation of this matter is
this: Man, as a spirit, is reason and will, self-active, determining,
form-giving; this is described by Schiller as the form-instinct; man, as
a sensuous being, is determinable, receptive, termed to matter; Schiller
describes this as the material instinct, "Stofftrieb." In the midst
between these two is situated the beautiful, in which reason and the
sensuous penetrate each other, and their enjoyable product is designated
by Schiller the play instinct. This expression is not happily chosen.
Schiller means to describe by it the free play of the forces, activity
according to nature, which is at once a joy and a happiness; he reminds
us of the life of Olympus, and adds: "Man is only quite a man when he
plays." Personality is that which lasts, the state of feeling is the
changeable in man; he is the fixed unity remaining eternally himself in
the floods of change. Man in contact with the world is to take it up in
himself, but to unite with it the highest freedom and independence, and,
instead of being lost in the world, to subject it to his reason. It is
only by his being independent that there is reality out of him; only by
being susceptible of feeling that there is reality in him. The object of
sensuous instinct is life; that of the purer instinct figure; living
figure or beauty is the object of the play instinct.
Only inasmuch as life is formed in the understanding and form in feeling
does life win a form and form win life, and only thus does beauty arise.
By beauty the sensuous man is led up to reason, the one-sided tension of
special force is strung to harmony, and man made a complete whole.
Schiller adds that beauty knits together thought and feeling; the fullest
unity of spirit and matter. Its freedom is not lack, but harmony, of
laws; its conditions are not exclusions, inclusion of all infinity
determined in itself. A true work of art generates lofty serenity and
freedom of mind. Thus the aesthetic disposition bestows on us the
highest of all gifts, that of a disposition to humanity, and we may call
beauty our second creator.
In these letters Schiller spoke out the mildest and highest sentiments on
art, and in his paper on Simple and Sentimental Poetry (1795) he
constructs the ideal of the perfect poet. This is by far the most
fruitful of Schiller's essays in its results. It has much that is
practically applicable, and contains a very able estimate of German
poetry. The writing is also very pointed and telling, because it is
based upon actual perceptions, and it is interesting because the contrast
drawn out throughout it between the simple and the sentimental has been
referred to his own contrast with Goethe. He also wished to vindicate
modern poetry, which Goethe seemed to wish to sacrifice to the antique.
The sentimental poetry is the fruit of quiet and retirement; simple
poetry the child of life. One is a favor of nature; the sentimental
depends on itself, the simple on the world of experience. The
sentimental is in danger of extending the limits of human nature too far,
of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the ideal
of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in human
nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in thought
from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also are
sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous
results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and
till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The
idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears
far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies in the proof of a
great capacity, but the perfect in the general attitude of the whole and
in the real facts.
On the whole it may be said, taking a survey of these labors, that if
Schiller had developed his ideas systematically and the unity of his
intuition of the world, which were present in his feelings, and if he had
based them scientifically, a new epoch in philosophy might have been
anticipated. For he had obtained a view of such a future field of
thought with the deep clairvoyance of his genius.
A few words may be desirable on Schiller's religious standpoint,
especially in connection with his philosophical letters.
Schiller came up ten years later than Goethe, and concluded the cyclus of
genius that Goethe had inaugurated. But as he was the last arrival of
that productive period of tempestuous agitation, he retained more of its
elements in his later life and poetry than any others who had passed
through earlier agitations, such as Goethe. For Goethe cast himself free
in a great measure from the early intoxication of his youthful
imagination, devoting himself partly to nobler matter and partly to purer
forms.
Schiller derived from the stormy times of his youth his direction to the
ideal, to the hostility against the narrow spirit of civil relations, and
to all given conditions of society in general. He derived from it his