ART. V.-SCHILLER.

[FROM THE REVUE CHRETIENNE.]

IN the history of literature we meet with both poets and prose writers who exhaust their originality in the first work they give the public. After this one grand effort, they seem to retain only vitality sufficient to compose variations on their favorite theme, or to exaggerate their distinctive qualities. But the true genius rarely manifests himself early. He has within a germ of strength that requires time for development, and its fruits need the sunshine of experience to ripen them. He is the oak made more vigorous by storm, the trunk and branches of which grow robust with years. Such was Schiller. He was born in Würtemberg, in 1759. At his first appearance he attracted interest though he was justly charged with many defects, the faults of his epoch, youth, and inexperience. Wieland frankly told him, that though not satisfied with his productions he found in them the promise of an eminent writer. He commended his firm outlines, vast compositions, and vivid coloring, but desired more correctness, purity, and taste; more delicacy and refinement. "His judgment coincides with yours," said Schiller, in writing to his friend Körner.

Schiller's spirit was eminently progressive. Far removed from that mediocrity which is happy in its small intellectual treasure, the poet was never satisfied with himself. His zeal for perfecting has even marred the perfectness of some of his works. Lacking the promptness of Goethe's poetic genius and the clearness of his intuition, Schiller yet astonished Goethe himself by his giant strides. The conscientiousness of the man and the artist, a predominating love of perfection, and the obstinate labor of meditation, took the place of facility with its dangerous allurements, and accelerated his progress by rendering it sure.

Genius or not, the man is influenced by his country and his time. If gifted with a high order of intelligence, he considers the tendency of the age and passes sentence upon it; where he associates himself with it it is of his own free will, not as a slave. Schiller was a pupil of the eighteenth century in

philosophy, politics, and religion. Rousseau was his early master. He called him "the great Rousseau," and in a youthful poem which he dedicated to his memory he extols him as a martyr for truth and humanity.

Strong minds, like common ones, receive their first education. from the external world; but the true genius is quite other than the product of his age, he is himself. As the soul, in the materialistic system of philosophy of Condillac, is only a blank sheet upon which the sensations imprint ideas till it at length gains the appearance of life and intelligence, so, in letters, most mediocre authors are enriched by external influence and a thousand various impressions; their surroundings are their support. The man of a higher order of mind, on the contrary, although connected with the world, has in himself a vital force, which directs his destiny and is the source of great thoughts. At times this lofty spirituality is allied to genius, then it shines, and we are astonished and carried away by it. Schiller is a noble exponent of this spiritualism, and has himself eloquently argued against the opposite system. Nemo unquam vir magnus fuit sine aliquo afflatu divino.

Schiller's mind was too vast for him to comprehend its powers immediately. His early aspirations were vague. A future of literary activity, of poetry, of devotion to the dignity and honor of humanity, seemed to him at times lit up with sunshine, at times obscured by clouds. Yet great thoughts constantly welled up from the deep fountains of his intellect.

A mingling of enthusiasm and speculation, of inspiration and analysis, was early apparent in our poet. When his genius soared he observed it closely; reflection accompanied it even in its raptures. Schiller studied himself incessantly, both as man and poet, in order to know himself and to attain perfection. Rectitude of conscience and the rule of reason were the same for him in the domain of talent as in that of ethics. This uprightness, and the necessity he felt of investigating everything, so as to walk with a sure step, led him to philosophy.

Schiller's philosophy is a key to the correct understanding of his poetical works. Though not a poet born of philosophy, it aided him to move freely in the highest regions of thought. The period of his most earnest occupation with philosophic

studies, preceded and accompanied his professorship at the University of Jena, to which he was called in 1789. From 1792 to 1796 he published his various works on the principles of the Beautiful. He was the first to make an extended application of the philosophy of Kant to esthetics. Outside of Königsburg, this philosophy was nowhere professed with more zeal than at Jena when our poet arrived there.

Having learned, before he knew the profound German thinker, to philosophize with J. J. Rousseau, philosophizing being to think for one's self, he acquired still greater independence of mind in bringing the two writers together. The influence of Rousseau was apparent in his social philosophy, that of Kant in his analysis of the intellectual faculties and of the laws of the will or moral science. He agreed with the great philosopher in the first of these sciences, and appeared to in the second. He, at first, like Kant, made virtue and morality consist in submission to duty without any view to interest, pleasure, or recompense. Kant in his imperatif catégorique, (moral obligation prescribed by reason and conscience,) subjects human life to the absolutism of reason without taking the sensibilities into account. Schiller soon carried the whole of man, his heart included, into the region of the abstract. Kant based ethics upon a law, and separated from that basis every inclination as a foreign, almost an impure motive. Schiller, agreeing in this with Rousseau, added to the law a sympathetic motive, the love of good. Thus the moral type that he extols in his poems, and which he has embodied in the "Marquis of Posa," had its origin.

Schiller's independent and progressive meditations were to extend the ideas and formulas of Kant still further.. No one in imitation of the master had more distinctly defined the domains of the good and the beautiful, nor shown more conclusively that moral science could not repose on an esthetic base, the notion of duty not being a matter of taste or sentiment. To each of the two domains he assigned its fundamental law. He did not eventually deny these principles, but he transformed them: he did this in the most original part of his philosophy, his Esthetics. His ideas expanded as he advanced in this, as in every other field of thought. He is one of those writers whose works should be studied in their chronological

order. His papers on Esthetics, published at first, for the most part, in the two literary journals which he created in succession, Thalia and Die Horen, are even more important than numerous. In spite of their diversity of aspect, a sustained attention will discover, underlying them all, less of variation of opinion than of amplified unity.

In Schiller, the speculations of the philosopher and the creations of the man of genius proceed from his personality; he was pre-eminently a man: as nature and human life in their collective activity filled him with enthusiasm, we might say that he was passionately a man. Hence the analysis in which he had followed Kant throughout, with all the exactness of his distinctions and definitions, resulted with the poet-philosopher in a magnificent synthesis. He embraced the life of nature and the senses, the life of the intellect and the heart, and the moral life, in one. He recognized in man the dualism of good and evil, the frequent opposition of desire and duty, and looked forward to find in the high regions of intellect the ideal of humanity. This tendency is the clew to his principal works.

Schiller had separated the good and the beautiful, not as opposed, but as resting on different principles. They may, then, unite at that point where philosophy and poetry mingle, in which philosophy is lyrical and enthusiasm philosophical; this is seen in his poem of the Artists, and several others, as Ideals, The Ideal and Life. Moral life being the supreme destiny of man, the moral ideal, represented under beautiful forms that awaken love, is the noblest aim of art. Schiller did not think it detracted from the principle of the beautiful that moral good should aid the inspirations of art. The theory of this 'conciliation is especially set forth in the treatise on Grace and Dignity. This was trying to unite Kant and Goethe. He incurred the blame of both: that of the absolute moralist for having accorded too much to nature; that of the mere artist for not having conceded enough. In the midst of this controversy, Schiller, by the grasp of his ideas, by his passionate love of the beautiful, by clearness of exposition and pleasing forms, fertilized the soil of esthetics more than any other writer of his country.

Schiller's poetry, thus enriched by the spoils of philosophy, appeared more powerful than ever: it was triumphant, radiant. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVI.-16

Poetry, like art in general, is connected by its purpose and means with the senses and sensibilities, the earth and the passions. To attain its aim, the worship of beauty, it disengages these from their gross elements and brings them forward under pure and beautiful forms. Beauty of form is a triumph of thought over matter. The mere contemplation of works of art habituates the mind to finding enjoyment in its own triumphs over the material world. It belongs to the artist and the poet to strengthen this bond of art and morality by the culture of the ideal, and to enrich the sentiment of the beautiful by all that is noble in the human heart. But the beauty of art in turn reacts beneficially upon nobleness of heart and thought. Accordingly Schiller has lovingly conceived the idea of the Esthetic Education of Man, and has developed it in a series of letters which are the most important of his philosophical writings.

If any man could justify the supremacy that Schiller the philosopher claims for art, whose empire alone, he thinks, should harmoniously develop all our powers, it is Schiller the poet. Possessing this love of the poetical and moral ideal, he unites a virgin delicacy of feeling and taste with the power of creating the most manly types. The Marquis of Posa, Max Piccolomini, Thecla, Joan of Arc, Mary Stuart, and William Tell, are emanations of this light. Its reflection irradiates characters less pure but still poetic, such as Philip II, The Queen, The Grand Inquisitor, the two brothers of the Bride of Messina and Wallenstein. The same fascination enriches the personages of the ballads Rudolph of Hapsburg and the Prophetess Cassandra, The Diver and the Knight of Soggenburgh. An ideal splendor illumines the sphere of the ideas, no less than the theater of action of the men and events.

His personified and deified Beauty seems herself to have descended from the skies, to place in the hands of Schiller the celestial cornucopia from which he scatters so many beautiful thoughts. These thoughts embrace in their vast circle all the aspects of life, the immensity of the human heart. They carry you easily from sublimity to purity, from strength to grace, as in the poem in which he sings the Worth of Woman. No one has spoken of woman with a deeper and more pleasing