What
can the present learn from Schiller
We
must not overlook the fact that the relationship of the general
public to Schiller was bound to become something quite
different in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from
what it had been in the first: if only because of those facts
which I have mentioned. Schiller's feeling towards Truth was
expressed by his saying that “through the dawn of the
beautiful you may pass into the land of knowledge.” To
him truth was the beautiful; a work of art was to give form to
the idea, the idea by which the world as a whole is to be
imagined as being permeated. It was an idealist view of the
world, a fine and subtle view which can only be grasped by a
man who can rise to subtle spiritual heights. To understand
Schiller requires very definite conditions.
For
this reason, there is something less intense in the second half
of the century, in the honour done to Schiller; the growing
natural science produced a cooler attitude in men. Truth was
now seen only in what was tangible: which is what Schiller
never did. His ideal was always truth, but truth on a spiritual
basis. We can no longer grasp as true reality what lived at the
time in men's feelings. Schiller had grown up out of the
greatness and breadth of his spiritual horizons: the world of
Goethe, Lessing, Herder and Winckelmann. When external reality
thrust forward its harsh demands, there was no real
relationship left between the true and the beautiful.
A man
like Ludwig Büchner has been able to build up a purely
materialistic philosophy on the basis of natural science; but
Schiller is not for a materialistic age, and if we appeal to
his views in such an age, we are only playing with words. Thus
Schiller dropped into the background. Goethe could still mean
something to the second half of the century because in him the
artistic can be separated from a world conception
(Weltanschauung): even Herman Grimm concentrates his eulogy on
Goethe as the artist. True, if we are dealing exactly with
Goethe, we shall see that in his case also it will not do to
separate the Weltanschauung from the man; still a purely
aesthetic view is possible with him, whereas with Schiller it
is not. Nowadays art is regarded as something that deals with
the realm of phantasy. That, in itself, is a rejection of the
world-conception, Weltanschauung.
A gulf
has grown up between the spirit of the age in which Schiller
lived and that of our own age: — indeed a recent
biographer of Schiller, Otto Brahm, could begin his book with
the words: “In my youth I hated Schiller.” He only
fought his way to an understanding of Schiller by his learning
and the increase of knowledge. Schiller has had many learned
biographers, but the feeling of the age has become a stranger
to the truly Schillerian problems; nor can it understand how
what we nowadays call knowledge can be brought into harmony
with what Schiller stands for. As I said, the artists of an
earlier age, a Raphael or Michelangelo, grew up out of the life
of their time. That was no longer the case after Goethe's
death. An artist, for instance, like Peter Cornelius, creates
wholly out of his thoughts, being no longer in any relation to
the spiritual content of his time. He felt himself especially a
stranger in Berlin; attracted towards Catholicism in which he
believed that he saw the basis for his artistic ideal, he stood
face to face with the life of his time, unable to take any part
in it.
The
gulf between life and art becomes ever greater. And so Schiller
becomes more and more a stranger to the life of the Nineteenth
Century. Men like Jacob Minor may write large tomes about his
youth, but everything shows really how Schiller's views have
become out of touch with our times.
What
we recognise as true nowadays, has grown up out of the attitude
of natural science. Aesthetics also have passed from an
idealist to a realist attitude. Indeed, this revolution was so
violent that Vischer could not make up his mind to publish a
second edition of his Aesthetics which he had written from an
idealist standpoint: — the very views he had formerly
supported had become unintelligible to him. The ideas of the
first half of the century had become so foreign to the leading
thinkers of the second half that we find men criticising
themselves like that.
After
such a development we shall understand how Schiller stands in
the present. E. du Bois Reymond, for instance, who after all
derived his diction wholly from Schiller, was able to say in a
speech about Goethe's “Faust,” that it was really a
failure, and that really Faust ought to have married Gretchen,
made some valuable discoveries and led a useful existence. The
real significance of “Faust” was thus
unintelligible to an important thinker of the Nineteenth
Century.
This
attitude was the dominant one, and no one dared to oppose it or
to emphasise the rights of the ideal. Even art called itself
realist. Any idealist tinge failed to find approval with the
public. It was only honest for men to admit that they felt no
liking for Schiller. It was no longer admitted that the
beautiful was an expression of the true; for the truth was
regarded as that which can be seen by the eye or touched by the
hand. Schiller had never believed that; he had always found the
truth in great ideal laws. Art was for him the representation
of the spiritual hidden in the actual, not of the everyday
things. The true which Schiller sought is recognised nowadays
neither by science nor by art; no one understands nowadays what
Schiller understood by the true. Hence comes that opposition;
for we understand by the true what Schiller called the
indigence of the sense-world. It was in the harmony between the
spiritual and the poverty of the sense-world that Schiller
looked for the ideal of Freedom. What we call
“artistic” nowadays can never be called so in the
sense in which Schiller talked of it.
There
is a further gulf between present-day views and those of
Schiller. Our age has lost the intense passion to penetrate
into the world's inner core. This deep seriousness which broods
over all Schiller's views no longer exists. Hence in our times
we try to compare, quite superficially, two so fundamentally
different men as Tolstoi and Nietzsche.
Materialism has become a world philosophy, a gospel, an
integral element of our times. Particularly, it is the great
masses of people who think like that and admit no other
philosophy; they will only admit as true what natural science
allows them to call so. Let me tell you a little story to
illustrate what that leads to: It was the last time when a
philosophy appeared, which though pessimistic, had an ideal
colouring; Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the
Unconscious. The book was attacked a good deal; and there
was one particularly effective criticism under the title of
The Unconscious from the point of view of the theory of
descent and of Darwinism. This book was anonymously
published. The scientists welcomed it as the best refutation of
Hartmann's work. In the second edition the author's name was
given: it was Eduard v. Hartmann. He wanted to show that it is
easy to drag oneself down to the materialistic view when
one has reached a higher view. Men at a higher level can
understand a lower level, but not vice versa. You will
always find that men whose standpoint is that of idealism are
ready to admit the materialistic view to a considerable extent.
A man whose standpoint is that of Schiller can judge modern art
in its materialist view, but the materialist cannot,
contrariwise, understand the idealist.
Schiller was a believer in the ideal. There is a deep saying of
his: “What religion do I subscribe to? None of all those
that you name. And why none of them? Because of
religion.” That is the greatness in the man, that his
aesthetic creed is also his religious and that his artistic
creation was his form of religious worship. The fact that his
ideal lived in this way within him is part of his greatness. We
should not ask if Schiller can mean anything to us nowadays; on
the contrary he must come to mean something for us
again, because we have forgotten how to understand what goes
beyond the purely material. Then we again shall be able to
understand an art which seeks to unveil the secrets of
existence.
But
there is a new ideal of freedom we can learn to understand
through him. We hear a good deal of talk just now about
freedom, and we all want to be free from political and economic
bonds. Schiller looked at freedom in a different way. How can
man become free in himself? How is he to become free from his
lower desires, free from the necessities of logic and reason?
Schiller — who wrote about the State and life in society
— found a new aim and a hint of new ideals, which still
he in the future. If we want to claim with justice, at the
present time, that the individual should develop freely, we
must understand harmony in Schiller's sense, het us measure the
demands of to-day with Schiller's; let us compare what we
expect nowadays with what Schiller demanded; take two
instances, Max Stirner and Schiller. What could be more unlike,
more diametrically opposed than Stirner's The Individual and
his Property and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: When
Schiller's influence was declining, Stirner's was increasing.
Stirner had remained neglected all the time until he was
re-discovered in the 1890's and his work became the foundation
of what buzzes about as individualism. There is a good deal of
justification in this attitude of to-day, but the particular
form which it takes must strike us as immoderate. In Schiller's
Aesthetic Letters the demand for the liberation of human
personality is put forward still more radically. Schiller's
ideal was much less provincial than Stirner's. The ideal of men
working together who have become inwardly free, appears to
others as an exhortation. When men live in such freedom there
are no laws and commandments.
Nowadays we seem to think that chaos must result where men are
not hemmed in by police regulations; yet we must remember that
an enormous proportion of things goes on without laws. Every
day you can see how men make way for each other in the most
crowded streets without our having to have a law about it.
Ninety-eight per cent, of our life goes on without laws; and
someday it will be possible to get on completely without law
and force. But for that man must be inwardly free. The ideal
which Schiller puts before us is one of infinite sublimity. Art
is to lead man to freedom. Art, growing out of the substance of
our culture, is to become the great educator of the world.
Artists are not to provide us with photographs of the external
world, but to be the heralds of a higher spiritual reality.
Then artists will once more create, as they did formerly, from,
out of the ideal. Schiller wanted to lead men through art to a
new comprehension of reality; and he meant it very
seriously.
If
this age of ours is to understand Schiller properly, it must
unite all that it has won of knowledge, into a higher idealism
which shall in time raise that knowledge to spiritual reality.
Then there will be men who can speak in the spirit of Schiller
from the depths of their hearts. It is of little use to open
the theatres in Schiller's honour if the people who sit in them
have no understanding for him. Only when we have attained to
such an understanding of Schiller will there be men, who, like
Herman Grimm about Goethe, will be able to speak about
Schiller from the depth of the heart.
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