Schiller, the Greek Drama and Nietzsche
The
period at which Schiller wrote his Wallenstein, was for him a
period of transition, a refining period in which he was trying
to rise above his earlier “Weltanschauung” to the
grasp of what he called the purely artistic. We have seen how
Schiller found in the beautiful and artistic something which
could raise man's forces of soul, bring them into a harmony
— so that it is artistic creation which gives man
freedom. Thus for him, as he wrote to Goethe à propos of
his Wilhelm Meister, the artist was the only true man
and the philosopher, compared to him, only a caricature. Here
was a vital turning-point which reflected what Schiller had
then experienced.
In
Fiesco, in Kabale and Liebe, in
Don Carlos some of the characters are sympathetic to
him, others antipathetic. But at the height of his art he
wished to get rid of such moral judgment and valuation; he
wished to treat a wrong-doer with the same loving care as he
did the hero; his work was no longer to be associated with what
he himself felt as sympathy or antipathy. When the objection
was made to Wilhelm Meister, that many of the figures
offended against moral feeling, he wrote more or less like this
to Goethe: “If one could show you that the non-moral
originated in you and not in the characters, one might have
some ground for objection.” For Schiller Wilhelm
Meister is an education in aesthetic.
Schiller, having had a vision of human personality in its true
autonomy, tried to raise himself to the sunlit heights of pure
art. Hence comes a new form of participation of the artist in
his art; we can see it already in Wallenstein. He was not going
to have a personal part any more, nor judge and value morally;
he was simply to be an artist.
This
conception reminds us of a conversation of his with
Goethe in which they were discussing architecture, and in which
Goethe made a remark of deep significance, though it might
sound at first somewhat of a paradox. Goethe demanded of a
beautiful building that it should make an impression of harmony
not only on the eye but on a man who might be led through it
with bandaged eyes. When everything sensible has been
abstracted, it is still possible to put oneself into it by the
spirit. It is not fitness for a purpose that he demanded, but
the ideal quality of the spirit. At first sight it may seem
paradoxical: it was created out of the lofty view of art which
Goethe and Schiller held. Round them there grew up a circle of
artists whose judgments were similar: e.g., Wilhelm v.
Humboldt, a fine connoisseur, whose aesthetic essays are
important for the contemporary intellectual atmosphere. In this
way Schiller was led into opposition to his earlier artistic
views and to Kantianism, which practically only admits the
supersensible where the moral is concerned. No artist could see
like that; and in his return to the artistic Schiller found
Kant inadequate.
Schiller's conception of the tragic conflict was that later
formulated by Hebbel when he said that only that is tragic
which is inevitable. That was Schiller's feeling, and that was
what he tried to carry out in his Wallenstein; that was the way
in which he wanted to depict the tragic. In Shakespeare's
Richard III he saw fate breaking in with such inevitability;
but before then he had had an earlier love for the Greek drama.
In the Shakespearean drama the person of the hero takes the
central place, and it is from his character that the inevitable
development arises. Greek drama is quite different: there
everything is predestined, and complete. Man is set in a higher
spiritual order, but simultaneously, because he is a material
sense-being, he is shattered by it. The decisive element is not
the character or personality of the hero but the superhuman
destiny and fate.
The
Erinyes of Greek tragedy are not originally avenging Furies but
represent the vague foreboding something which is not wholly
soluble and shines dimly into human destiny. In his return to
the artistic Schiller reached this conception of the tragic. If
we are to feel tragedy in this sense, we must eliminate the
personal and separate it from the merely human. Only then can
we really understand Wallenstein.
There
is something super-personal that has grown beyond the personal
which hovers over Wallenstein. Man belongs to a higher order, a
higher spiritual world — that is for Schiller the meaning
of the stars which guide man's destiny. It is in the stars that
Wallenstein is to read his destiny. Carlyle indicates this
super-personal, when he points to the parallelism in the
character of the separate personalities in Wallenstein's camp,
which hints at the personalities of the leaders. Thus the Irish
Dragoon, who puts his trust in the luck of war, points to his
chief, Buttler; the first Cuirassier who reflects the finer
side of life in war, to Max Piccolomini; the Trumpeter in his
complete devotion, to Terczky; while the Sergeant Major, who
quotes the sayings of his general, appears as a caricature of
Wallenstein.
We
have here then a great law which goes beyond the merely
personal. The whole composition of the poem shows us the
standpoint which Schiller believed he had achieved. We
have first, the camp where Wallenstein does not appear at all;
second, the Piccolomini scenes where Wallenstein
practically does not enter but learns what has happened from
Max Piccolomini
and hears from his wife what is happening in the Viennese
court. He allows events to take their course so that his
generals unite and sign the famous document. The action takes
place round about him. In the same way the idea of treachery is
only grasped lightly, and then takes possession of his soul.
Thirdly, Wallenstein's death; here he is driven into events by
his own thoughts which have taken on an objective life, he is
forced into a super-personal destiny. A monumental
language marks the situation. He is set within an iron
necessity; the personal — which has nothing particular to
do with the great lines — is thrust into a corner. It
does, no doubt, express itself in stirring tones, as, for
instance, in the conversation with Max Piccolomini: —
Wallenstein (with eyes silently fixed on him and approaching
him): Max, stay with me; leave me not, Max. When they brought
you to me in my winter camp at Prague, into my tent, a delicate
boy, unused to German winters, your hand was frozen to the
heavy standard which, like a man, you would not let go. Then I
took you in, covered you with my cloak; myself was your nurse,
nor was ashamed, of the smallest service; I tended you with a
woman's careful thoughtfulness, till you, warmed by me, felt
the young life again pouring through you. When, since then,
have I changed? Thousands I have made rich, given them lands
and honours — you, I have loved. I gave you my heart,
myself. They were all strangers, you the child of my house.
Max, you cannot leave me. It cannot be, I will not, cannot
believe my Max can leave me.
But it
does not specially fit into the plot. Schiller's great
achievement in this drama was that he kept the tragic and the
personal apart, that he has shown how Wallenstein, after
letting the thoughts play freely about him, simply cannot but
stride onwards to the deed. He shows us how out of freedom
there grows a kind of necessity; and this whole style of
thought contains ideas of the moment which have only to be
fanned to life in order to become fruitful.
The
next play, Maria Stuart, is conceived in the same vein.
Practically everything has already happened at the beginning,
and nothing occurs but what has been long prepared. It is only
the character, the inner life, which unfolds itself before us,
and this inner life again acts as a necessity. In his later
plays Schiller tried more and more to give form to the idea of
destiny. Thus in the Maid of Orleans something
super-personal is expressed in the visions in which her
demon-spirit appears, calls her to her mission and opposes her
when she is untrue to the command, until by repentance she
redeems it. In the Bride of Messina especially he almost
tries to give the Greek drama once more a place in modern life.
There he expresses the super-personal by introducing the
chorus.
What
did he want with the chorus? Schiller was looking to the origin
of tragedy, which arose from religion. In the primitive drama
it was shown how Dionysos, the suffering God, finds redemption
in humanity. (More recent research has revealed the truth of
this.) When the Greek Mystery drama was secularised, there
arose the first beginnings of dramatic art. Thus in
Aeschylus we still have the echo of that out of which art had
arisen, of the Mystery cults within which the world-drama of
world-redemption was depicted. Edouard Schuré has
described these Eleusinian Mysteries in his Sanctuaires
d'Orient, a first example of the religious and
artistic solution of the world-riddle. The world-embracing
action of this original drama could not find in speech its
proper instrument; for speech is too much the expression of
personal relations. When drama began to use the word, it dealt
with more personal relations, as in Sophocles and Euripides.
There was a passage from the representation of the typical to
the personal. Hence the old drama used a super-personal speech
which was akin to music, and given by the chorus which
accompanied the action represented in mimicry. Thus the musical
drama developed into the later speech drama. Nietzsche has
developed these ideas further in his Birth of Tragedy from
the Spirit of Music.
For
him the word drama is a sort of decadence; and hence comes his
reverence for Wagner who wanted to create a new religious art,
born out of the world of myth. Wagner was keen, not on the
personal, but the super-personal; and so he took for the
foundation of his dramas not historical, but mythical action;
and where he has to represent the super-personal he does not
employ the usual language but a language sublimated by
music.
Schiller felt what was only discovered by research after his
time, and developed Greek tragedy along those lines. He wanted
to introduce a lyric element, so that, as he says in the
preface, he might raise art to a higher level by means of the
mood. Thus there already lies in Schiller what was worked out
more radically in the Nietzsche-Wagner circle — except
that those men did not deal with it so clearly as Schiller had
done.
In
Schiller we have already the great conception of leading
mankind back to the source from which the spiritual sprang, of
leading art back to the original basis from which religion, art
and science all grew up. To him beauty was the dawn of truth.
Even to-day we can find in Schiller what may guide us to the
best we may hope, for the present and the future. And so he may
be a prophet for us of a better future.
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