Schiller and Goethe
We
come to-day to one of the most important chapters in German
cultural and intellectual history, the relationship between
Goethe and Schiller. The attitude of the two of them is unique
in the history of the world.
They
approached each other from different sides. Goethe came from
the side of Herder and all that could be associated with the
unity of spirit and nature, while Schiller came from the
Kantian philosophy and dualism. Besides that, Goethe's and
Schiller's natures were fundamentally different.
If we
take Goethe's Faust, we see how he tries to penetrate into
nature, finding himself unsatisfied when he grasps something
spiritual in abstractions and striving to create it immediately
out of nature. To Schiller nature was at first something low;
the ideal was something peculiar, born from the spirit and in
opposition to the real. Both men were deep in quality and could
only find themselves with difficulty. And thus, at the
beginning of their personal meetings these two great geniuses
were quite incapable of understanding each other. In fact, when
Schiller came to Weimar, he felt himself repelled by what he
heard about Goethe, and even a personal meeting could not alter
things.
In
1788 Schiller could still write an unfavourable criticism of
Egmont, that fruit of a mature artistic thought. He
could not understand how Goethe could represent Egmont,
not as a heroic enthusiast as Schiller himself would have done,
but as a weakling who could be guided by given
circumstances.
The
Iphigenie too was beyond Schiller's comprehension.
At one
point, Goethe and Schiller did almost touch. In an essay on
Bürger's poems Schiller had said that Bürger's lack
of idealism did not appeal to him; and Goethe was so much in
agreement with the essay that he remarked that he would like to
have written the essay himself. But there is still evidence how
different the two courses ran, in Schiller's essay on Charm
and Dignity. This essay shows us Schiller's whole striving
after freedom. In what is necessary he can find nothing of
charm; a work of nature cannot give any impression of charm. It
is only in the work of art which is a symbol, a concrete
picture of freedom, that we can speak of charm. And dignity is
a word which we can only apply to the higher spiritual realm.
Everywhere we see the old tendency to grasp the ideal as
something opposed to the natural.
Even
the professorship which Goethe got for Schiller at Jena is not
to be taken as a service of friendship. This step was of great
importance for Schiller. The study of historical
character gave him a deep insight into the evolution of the
spirit. Moreover, it made it possible for him to marry
Charlotte von Lengefeld and start a household. History was just
the subject which could help Schiller to reach maturity, as in
his inaugural lecture “How should we study history in a
universal sense?” In this way Schiller grew more and more
into reality.
From
1790 onwards, after a visit to Körner who acted as
intermediary between them, Goethe must have got a quite
different idea of Schiller. But their friendship was not to
mature by the ways in which average people come to feel
sympathy with each other. This joint relation was destined
never to come into being on the basis of personal interests.
Nor, considering the difference of their personalities would
their friendship have ever been of such a world-wide
importance, if it had been based on that.
It was
after a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in 1794
— probably in July — that Goethe and Schiller began
to discuss the lecture they had just heard, on the way home.
Schiller said that he had only a mass of isolated and unrelated
impressions; whereupon Goethe remarked that for himself
he could imagine another form of natural observation. He then
developed his views about the relation of all living things
— how the whole plant kingdom was to be regarded as in
continual development. With a few characteristic strokes Goethe
drew the archetypal plant, as it appeared to him, on a piece of
paper. “But that is not reality,” objected
Schiller, “that is only an idea.” “Well, if
that is an idea,” replied Goethe, “I see ideas with
my eyes.” In this meeting the nature of both their
thought can be seen. Goethe saw the spirit in nature.
For him that which the spirit grasps intuitively was as
real as what is sensible; for him nature embraces the
spirit.
Schiller's true greatness as a man shows itself in the way in
which he tried to discover the foundation on which Goethe's
spirit was based. He wished to find the right standpoint.
In unenvious recognition of all that thus came towards him,
Schiller began the friendship which was to unite the two. The
letter which Schiller wrote to Goethe after he had sunk himself
in Goethe's method of creation, the letter of 24th August 1794,
is one of the finest of human documents.
“For a long time I have, even though from a distance,
observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder
noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for
the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the harder path
from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature
as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality
of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the
individual.”
In
this way Schiller did Goethe honour, as soon as he had
recognised him. There is no deeper psychological
characterisation of Goethe. And so it remained till Schiller's
death. Their friendship was impregnable, though envy and
ill-will used the lowest means to separate them. They worked
together in such a way that the advice of the one always had a
fruitful influence on the other. Schiller, with a magnificence
which has not been surpassed by any other aesthetic writer, by
asking how this or that idea harmonises with Goethe's spirit,
came to a realisation of the various forms of artistic
creation, which he put down in his essay on “Naive and
sentimental art.” An artist who still stands in relation
to nature, who is himself still nature within nature, creates
naively. That is how the Greeks created. An artist who longs
for a return to nature, after being torn from her, creates
sentimentally. That is the quality of modern art. There
is something grand in the way in which these two conceived of
art. An old doctrine which still lives in eastern wisdom, of
the transitoriness of all appearance, of the veil of Maya,
finds expression here. Only he lives in reality who rises above
illusion to the region of the spirit. The highest reality is
not external.
In
every way these two men were forced to inner activity. Goethe,
it is true, made his Faust say that “in the beginning was
the deed.” But in Germany at that time things were not so
far advanced as in France where they could produce external
effects; there was only the longing for freedom. And so these
two sought their deeds in the sphere of the beautiful, of the
work of art. They aimed at a reflection of higher reality, of
nature within nature, in life by means of beautiful appearance.
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is of this type. Wilhelm
Meister is to take us beyond what is illusion in our
everyday life, to the fulfilment of personality. Thus it
becomes the finest novel of education, to which Schiller's
motto might be applied: “Only through the dawn of the
beautiful can you penetrate to the land of knowledge.”
The spirit out of which we act is the highest. In that period,
it was not possible to show that the world of the spirit is
born from within. Thus in Wilhelm Meister the liberation
of the world had still to be expressed in the form of artistic
beauty.
The
continual collaboration and advice of Schiller helped to
eradicate the personal element in Wilhelm Meister. On
the one side we see what must be regarded as the deeper
“cause” in man, what a newer spiritual science
calls the “causal body”; on the other side we have
the external influences. Nothing can be developed that is not
there in the seed; but it needs the influence from without.
This collaboration is seen also in Schiller's creative
activity. His ballads and his Wallenstein would have been
impossible but for Goethe's fertilising influence.
There
was a sort of modesty, but combined with a real
greatness, in the relation in which they stood to each other.
They only became a whole by the completion of their separate
natures, and as a result something of new greatness came
into being. The depth and strength of their friendship drove
all philistinism into opposition against them. They were
pursued with envy and hatred, for the small has never been able
to understand the great. It is hardly credible to-day what
attacks were launched by pettiness against them. The Annals of
Philosophy, for instance, spoke disparagingly of them, and
someone, called Manso, described them as the “sluts of
Weimar and Jena.”
They
had to defend themselves against all these attacks and the
“Xenien” of 1796 form a fine memorial to their
friendship. In the Distichs, which were a sort of historic
prosecution of all those who had offended against them or
against good taste, we cannot always distinguish those that are
by Goethe and those by Schiller. Their friendship was to make
them appear as one person. Schiller and Goethe provide us with
an example how greatness can defend itself against the
everyday, and show us what should be the true attitude
and bearing of a friendship which rests on the spiritual. And
both were searchers after truth; Schiller in the heart of men,
Goethe in the whole of nature.
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