Schiller's Later Plays
We
have seen how Schiller tried, in each one of his later plays,
to solve the problem of the dramatic. There is something
sublime in observing how, after every success — and the
success was considerable (he was recognised by the best men of
his time, even though there was not a complete absence of
hostility) — he tried with each new play to climb to
greater heights. All the later plays, Tell, the Bride
of Messina, the Maid of Orleans, Demetrius, are
simply efforts to attain to the problem of the dramatic and the
tragic in a new form. He never rested satisfied in a belief
that he had exhausted psychology. In Maria Stuart we
have seen him treating the problem of destiny, creating a
situation complete in itself in which only the characters have
to unfold themselves. In the Maid of Orleans, he
dug still deeper into the human soul. He plunged into the
depths of human psychology and set out the problem, in the
sense that Hebbel meant, when he said that tragedy must have
some relation to the irrational. Thus, in the Maid of
Orleans we have the effects of dark soul forces: the Maid
is almost like a sleep-walker, under the influence of what we
may call the demonic and is carried forward by it. She is to
stand far above humanity, and only because she is a maid, has
she the right to pass through the ranks of her enemies, for her
country's sake, like a destroying angel.
In the
Bride of Messina, Schiller tries to get a still
higher conception of the drama and to reach back to the primal
drama — that drama, which came even before Aeschylus and
was not merely art but also an integral constituent of a truth
which included religion, science and art; that Dionysos-drama
which put the suffering, dying and resurgent god on the stage
as representative of all humanity. In such cases the action was
not what we should nowadays call poetry. It was the world-drama
that was set before man's eyes, the truth in beautiful and
artistic form; it was meant to elevate man and fortify him
religiously. Thus the Mystery drama contained, for the
spectators, what developed later, in separate form, as
religion, art and philosophy.
This
line of thought which Friedrich Nietzsche developed in his
Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he
regarded the primal drama as the higher form, was already alive
in Schiller. Schiller's idea of raising the beautiful to higher
levels by re-introducing the musical element, was taken up
again by Wagner and received monumental expression in his
musical dramas: Wagner harked back to the myth and chose music,
so as to express himself, not in everyday but in elevated
language. The direction which art followed in the Wagner circle
was indicated by Schiller. In his short introduction to
the Bride of Messina he gives it plastic and pregnant
expression. True art must give a freedom of the spirit in the
living play of all its forces. That shows what there was in
Schiller.
We
have seen how Schiller's spirit climbed upward by help of
Goethe. He himself called Goethe's mind intuitive, his
own symbolical; and this a significant saying.
Schiller always thought of men fundamentally as
representatives of a type; he thought of them in a sort of
symphony. We can see the drama growing out of a sort of musical
mood, and hence comes that symphony of human characters, acting
and suffering. So it became necessary to make single traits
into symbols of great human experience. Hence Schiller became
the poet of idealism: he used experience to bring the ideals to
earth and to clothe them in his characters. The problem of the
human I, the question how man works in his environment,
was, for him, the central point.
In the
Bride of Messina, he wanted to produce the Greek
tragedy of destiny in a new form. There must be something in
the human soul which makes men take their decisions not
reasonably — else they would act more intelligently
— there must be something dark in them, something
like the “daimon” of Socrates. That must be
working from the spiritual world. It is this something
which the reason cannot grasp, which Schiller allows to play
into his tragedy; and the way in which he does it shows him as
quite a modern. The action begins with two dreams: The Duke of
Messina dreams of a flame which destroys two laurel bushes. The
dream is interpreted by an Arabian astrologist as meaning that
the daughter, born to him, will bring destruction on his sons;
and he orders her death. But the Duchess has dreamed at the
same time of a child by whose side an eagle and a lion lie
nestled together; her dream also is interpreted; a
Christian monk tells her that her daughter will unite the two
disputing brothers in love for herself; and so she saves the
child.
In
this way the dark and undetermined enters at the very beginning
of the action. It is a fine point that the first dream should
be interpreted by an Arabian, the second by a Christian; but
Schiller does not take sides. If we take out all that is
mystical and dreamlike, there remains only the quarrel of
the brothers; and this rational action is still dramatic. The
stroke of genius and of special art is that each element is a
whole; even without the mystical the action is a unity. Thus
Schiller has put into this with skill and art something which
goes beyond human consciousness. — In this way he had
reached a still higher answer to his question.
He
uses the same human psychology in Tell. I am not going
to analyse the drama, only to show what Schiller was to the
Nineteenth Century and what he will still be to us. It is not
to no purpose that he sets Tell apart from the general
structure of the drama:
“Yet, what you do — leave me apart from your
councils. I cannot ponder long, or choose. But if you need my
too-determined deed, then summon Tell and he will not fail
you.” He acts, not like the others, under the impulse of
the idea of freedom, but from purely personal feeling, offended
paternal sense. Two lines run together, the one which concerns
Tell alone, the other felt by the whole Swiss people. Schiller
wanted to show how things do not run, in man, always along the
one line. We can see the same thing in Hebbel's Judith
where her country's needs fall together with her wounded
woman's feelings; the poet requires something which grows
immediately from out of the human heart.
Schiller has no use for the merely moral or the merely
material; the moral must descend and become a personal passion.
Man only becomes free when he controls his personal feeling in
such a way that it unites with the universal. He worked, step
by step, on the completion of his psychology, and his idealism
becomes more and more clarified. That is the magic which lives
in Schiller's plays. His deep aesthetic studies were not in
vain; not in vain his absorption in these problems.
Now
all the writings in the Nineteenth Century of men like Vischer,
Hartmann, Fechner, etc., important and true as they may be,
always put the beautiful outside man. But Schiller always
studied what went on within the human soul, how the beautiful
acts upon it. For that reason, we are moved so deeply and
intimately by what he says, and we can read his prose works
with delight again and again. It would be a worthy way of
celebrating the Schiller anniversary if these writings were
published and read far and wide; they would contribute much to
deepening the human spirit in an artistic and moral direction.
We might also make a selection for purposes of education from
his Aesthetic Letters; and a wholly new attitude would come
into our pedagogic system. If we are to understand Schiller's
plays, we must breathe the fine air of real education that lies
in his aesthetic works.
If we
want further insight into the way in which Schiller penetrated
deeper and deeper into the human heart, we can get in by a
study of the — unfortunately uncompleted —
Demetrius. This might have become a play than which even
Shakespeare could not have written anything more powerful and
affecting. Many attempts have been made to complete the work
but no one has proved equal to the task.
The
wholly tragic conflict — though there is plenty of
action, such as that for instance in the Polish Parliament
— is centred entirely in the ego; that is the significant
thing. We cannot say that our senses, perceptions and feelings
are our ego; we are what we are, because the thinking and
feeling of the world around us, press upon us. This Demetrius
has grown up without himself knowing what his ego is. During a
significant action for which he is to be executed, a certain
token is found on his person. It appears that the inheritance
of the throne of the Czars is his. Everything points in this
one direction, and he cannot but believe that he is the heir to
the Russian throne. He is thus driven to a definite
configuration of the ego; threads, spun without, drive him
onward. The movement is victorious; Demetrius develops the
character of a Czar. But then, when his ego is concordant with
the world around him, he learns that he has been mistaken; he
is not the true heir. He is no longer the person as which he
had found himself. He stands in the presence of his mother, who
honours him; but so strong is the voice of nature that she
cannot recognise him as son — while he has become that
which he had imagined to himself. He can no longer throw it
from himself; yet the preconditions of this ego fall from
him.
Here
is an infinitely tragic conflict. All is centred on a
personality which is drawn with infinite art, and which we may
believe “will not lord it over slaves.” The
external also was added with all the skill of which only
Schiller was capable. Thus Sapieha, Demetrius' opponent,
indicates prophetically the character of Demetrius. Here also
the symmetry is striven after which is achieved in the
Wallenstein. The drama was never finished; death intervened.
There is something tragic in Schiller's death; all the
hopes that were centred on him found expression in the letters
and words of his contemporaries. Deeply affected by the loss of
one from whom so much more was hoped, men like W. v. Humboldt,
for instance, allowed their feelings to find utterance:
“He was snatched from the world in the ripe maturity of
his spiritual powers; there is infinitely much more he might
have accomplished. For many years more he might have enjoyed
the bliss of poetic creation.”
That
is the tone which makes his death tragic — for in the
ordinary course of things death does not bear this irrational
quality. In such mood Goethe found for his dead friend the
following words in his Epilogue to Schiller's
Glocke:
Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.
Behind him lay in unessential feint
What holds us all in bondage, the common trivial.
This
mighty strain of idealism can be seen continuing through the
Nineteenth Century. Men began to realise that Schiller's spirit
was sublime enough to work as consolation and example to his
people in all their struggles.
This
continued activity of Schiller's idealism in the spiritual
quality of Germany was described effectively by C. Gutzkow in
his speech during the Schiller celebrations at Dresden on 10th
November 1859:
“Here lies the secret of our love for Schiller. He lifts
up our hearts; he gives us courage for action, a never-failing
help which the nation finds in every circumstance of its life.
Our memories of Schiller arouse in us courage and gladness.
Deep, rich, intimate and delightful Goethe may charm us all in
his creation which reminds us of home manners and custom, is
like ivy which welds itself to the past, sadly and dreamily.
But in Schiller everything lies in the future, the waving of
flags or crowning with the laurel. For this reason, it is that
we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his name, ringing and
echoing like a blow on a shield of bronze. All honour to the
poet of action, the bulwark of the German
fatherland.”
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