Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
But the stage does even more than this. It is a great school of
practical wisdom, a guide for civil life, and a key to the mind in all
its sinuosities. It does not, of course, remove egoism and stubbornness
in evil ways; for a thousand vices hold up their heads in spite of the
stage, and a thousand virtues make no impression on cold-hearted
spectators. Thus, probably, Moliere's Harpagon never altered a
usurer's heart, nor did the suicide in Beverley save any one from the
gaming-table. Nor, again, is it likely that the high roads will be safer
through Karl Moor's untimely end. But, admitting this, and more than
this, still how great is the influence of the stage! It has shown us the
vices and virtues of men with whom we have to live. We are not surprised
at their weaknesses, we are prepared for them. The stage points them out
to us, and their remedy. It drags off the mask from the hypocrite, and
betrays the meshes of intrigue. Duplicity and cunning have been forced
by it to show their hideous features in the light of day. Perhaps the
dying Sarah may not deter a single debauchee, nor all the pictures of
avenged seduction stop the evil; yet unguarded innocence has been shown
the snares of the corrupter, and taught to distrust his oaths.
The stage also teaches men to bear the strokes of fortune. Chance and
design have equal sway over life. We have to bow to the former, but we
control the latter. It is a great advantage if inexorable facts do not
find us unprepared and unexercised, and if our breast has been steeled to
bear adversity. Much human woe is placed before us on the stage. It
gives us momentary pain in the tears we shed for strangers' troubles, but
as a compensation it fills us with a grand new stock of courage and
endurance. We are led by it, with the abandoned Ariadne, through the
Isle of Naxos, and we descend the Tower of Starvation in Ugolino; we
ascend the terrible scaffold, and we are present at the awful moment of
execution. Things remotely present in thought become palpable realities
now. We see the deceived favorite abandoned by the queen. When about to
die, the perfidious Moor is abandoned by his own sophistry. Eternity
reveals the secrets of the unknown through the dead, and the hateful
wretch loses all screen of guilt when the tomb opens to condemn him.
Then the stage teaches us to be more considerate to the unfortunate, and
to judge gently. We can only pronounce on a man when we know his whole
being and circumstances. Theft is a base crime, but tears mingle with
our condemnation, when we read what obliged Edward Ruhberg to do the
horrid deed. Suicide is shocking; but the condemnation of an enraged
father, her love, and the fear of a convent, lead Marianne to drink the
cup, and few would dare to condemn the victim of a dreadful tyranny.
Humanity and tolerance have begun to prevail in our time at courts of
princes and in courts of law. A large share of this may be due to the
influence of the stage in showing man and his secret motives.
The great of the world ought to be especially grateful to the stage, for
it is here alone that they hear the truth.
Not only man's mind, but also his intellectual culture, has been promoted
by the higher drama. The lofty mind and the ardent patriot have often
used the stage to spread enlightenment.
Considering nations and ages, the thinker sees the masses enchained by
opinion and cut off by adversity from happiness; truth only lights up a
few minds, who perhaps have to acquire it by the trials of a lifetime.
How can the wise ruler put these within the reach of his nation.
The thoughtful and the worthier section of the people diffuse the light
of wisdom over the masses through the stage. Purer and better principles
and motives issue from the stage and circulate through society: the night
of barbarism and superstition vanishes. I would mention two glorious
fruits of the higher class of dramas. Religious toleration has latterly
become universal. Before Nathan the Jew and Saladin the Saracen put us
to shame, and showed that resignation to God's will did not depend on a
fancied belief of His nature--even before Joseph II. contended with the
hatred of a narrow piety--the stage had sown seeds of humanity and
gentleness: pictures of fanaticism had taught a hatred of intolerance,
and Christianity, seeing itself in this awful mirror, washed off its
stains. It is to be hoped that the stage will equally combat mistaken
systems of education. This is a subject of the first political
importance, and yet none is so left to private whims and caprice. The
stage might give stirring examples of mistaken education, and lead
parents to juster, better views of the subject. Many teachers are led
astray by false views, and methods are often artificial and fatal.
Opinions about governments and classes might be reformed by the stage.
Legislation could thus justify itself by foreign symbols, and silence
doubtful aspersions without offence.
Now, if poets would be patriotic they could do much on the stage to
forward invention and industry. A standing theatre would be a material
advantage to a nation. It would have a great influence on the national
temper and mind by helping the nation to agree in opinions and
inclinations. The stage alone can do this, because it commands all human
knowledge, exhausts all positions, illumines all hearts, unites all
classes, and makes its way to the heart and understanding by the most
popular channels.
If one feature characterized all dramas; if the poets were allied in
aim--that is, if they selected well and from national topics--there
would be a national stage, and we should become a nation. It was this
that knit the Greeks so strongly together, and this gave to them the
all-absorbing interest in the republic and the advancement of humanity.
Another advantage belongs to the stage; one which seems to have become
acknowledged even by its censurers. Its influence on intellectual and
moral culture, which we have till now been advocating, may be doubted;
but its very enemies have admitted that it has gained the palm over all
other means of amusement. It has been of much higher service here than
people are often ready to allow.
Human nature cannot bear to be always on the rack of business, and the
charms of sense die out with their gratification. Man, oppressed by
appetites, weary of long exertion, thirsts for refined pleasure, or
rushes into dissipations that hasten his fall and ruin, and disturb
social order. Bacchanal joys, gambling, follies of all sorts to disturb
ennui, are unavoidable if the lawgiver produces nothing better. A man of
public business, who has made noble sacrifices to the state, is apt to
pay for them with melancholy, the scholar to become a pedant, and the
people brutish, without the stage. The stage is an institution combining
amusement with instruction, rest with exertion, where no faculty of the
mind is overstrained, no pleasure enjoyed at the cost of the whole. When
melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we
are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when
our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we
dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is
roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The
unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is
calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled,
savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, men of all
clanks, zones, and conditions, emancipated from the chains of
conventionality and fashion, fraternize here in a universal sympathy,
forget the world, and come nearer to their heavenly destination. The
individual shares in the general ecstacy, and his breast has now only
space for an emotion: he is a man.
ON THE TRAGIC ART.
The state of passion in itself, independently of the good or bad
influence of its object on our morality, has something in it that charms
us. We aspire to transport ourselves into that state, even if it costs
us some sacrifices. You will find this instinct at the bottom of all our
most habitual pleasures. As to the nature itself of the affection,
whether it be one of aversion or desire, agreeable or painful, this is
what we take little into consideration. Experience teaches us that
painful affections are those which have the most attraction for us, and
thus that the pleasure we take in an affection is precisely in an inverse
ratio to its nature. It is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad,
frightful things, even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible
seduction, and that in presence of a scene of desolation and of terror we
feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces. Suppose the
case be an assassination. Then every one crowds round the narrator and
shows a marked attention. Any ghost story, however embellished by
romantic circumstances, is greedily devoured by us, and the more readily
in proportion as the story is calculated to make our hair stand on end.
This disposition is developed in a more lively manner when the objects
themselves are placed before our eyes. A tempest that would swallow up
an entire fleet would be, seen from shore, a spectacle as attractive to
our imagination as it would be shocking to our heart. It would be
difficult to believe with Lucretius that this natural pleasure results
from a comparison between our own safety and the danger of which we are
witnesses. See what a crowd accompanies a criminal to the scene of his
punishment! This phenomenon cannot be explained either by the pleasure
of satisfying our love of justice, nor the ignoble joy of vengeance.
Perhaps the unhappy man may find excuses in the hearts of those present;
perhaps the sincerest pity takes an interest in his reprieve: this does
not prevent a lively curiosity in the spectators to watch his expressions
of pain with eye and ear. If an exception seems to exist here in the
case of a well-bred man, endowed with a delicate sense, this does not
imply that he is a complete stranger to this instinct; but in his case
the painful strength of compassion carries the day over this instinct, or
it is kept under by the laws of decency. The man of nature, who is not
chained down by any feeling of human delicacy, abandons himself without
any sense of shame to this powerful instinct. This attraction must,
therefore, have its spring of action in an original disposition, and it
must be explained by a psychological law common to the whole species.
But if it seems to us that these brutal instincts of nature are
incompatible with the dignity of man, and if we hesitate, for this
reason, to establish on this fact a law common to the whole species, yet
no experiences are required to prove, with the completest evidence, that
the pleasure we take in painful emotions is real, and that it is general.
The painful struggle of a heart drawn asunder between its inclinations or
contrary duties, a struggle which is a cause of misery to him who
experiences it, delights the person who is a mere spectator. We follow
with always heightening pleasure the progress of a passion to the abyss
into which it hurries its unhappy victim. The same delicate feeling that
makes us turn our eyes aside from the sight of physical suffering, or
even from the physical expression of a purely moral pain, makes us
experience a pleasure heightened in sweetness, in the sympathy for a
purely moral pain. The interest with which we stop to look at the
painting of these kinds of objects is a general phenomenon.
Of course this can only be understood of sympathetic affections, or those
felt as a secondary effect after their first impression; for commonly
direct and personal affections immediately call into life in us the