The godlike man stands continually before my eyes, I will make him life-like. Schiller must live in sculpture as a colossal form. I intend an apotheosis…. The king was lately in my studio, and when he saw Schiller so large he said: 'Zounds! But why so large?' I answered: 'Majesty, Schiller must be thus large; the Suabian must make a monument to the Suabian.' Said the king: 'You must have been a good friend of his.' I answered: 'Yes, Majesty, from my youth up. I occupy myself with him daily, working at the colossal bust. It costs trouble, but it gives me joy, because the colossal image will make an indescribable impression.'
But it was not only his friends who were thus affected by his personality. Madame de Staël said of him in her famous book on Germany, which was published in 1813:
Schiller was as admirable for his virtues as for his talents. Conscience was his muse…. He loved poetry, the dramatic art, history, literature, for their own sake. Had he been resolved not to publish his works, he would have bestowed the same care upon them…. In his youth he had been guilty of some vagaries of fancy, but with the strength of manhood he acquired that exalted purity which springs from great thoughts. He never had anything to do with the vulgar feelings. He lived, spoke and acted as if bad people did not exist; and when he portrayed them in his works, it was with more exaggeration and less depth than if he had known them. The bad presented themselves to his mind as an obstacle, as a physical scourge.
In this characterization, truth to tell, there is a considerable element of pure moonshine, as any one may convince himself who will read through Schiller's letters, more especially those written during the lifetime of the Horen. He had in him quite enough of the fighter and of the schemer, and it came out in human ways. Moreover he wrote constantly for immediate publication, under the goad of strong necessity; what he might have done if this necessity had not existed, no man, or woman, can tell. Still, Madame de Staël's portrait is highly interesting, as the first that went out to the world at large, and as evidence of the impression produced by Schiller in his later years even upon those who were under no peculiar temptation to idealize him.
Much more influential in shaping the sentiment of posterity was Goethe's magnificent 'Epilogue', dating from the year 1815. In this poem the essential lineaments of Schiller's character, as seen through the soothing but not yet obscuring vista of ten years by the wisest of those who knew him well, were fixed for all time. He was here described as one who had 'mounted to the highest heights, closely akin to all that we esteem'; and posterity was besought to give him that which life had denied. Henceforth it was possible only for purblind partisanship to think otherwise than nobly of a man concerning whom a Goethe could say such words as these:
Denn er war unser. Mag das stolze Wort
Den lauten Schmerz gewaltig übertönen.
Er mochte sich bei uns im sichern Port,
Nach wildem Sturm, zum Dauernden gewöhnen.
Indessen schritt sein Geist gewaltig fort
Ins Ewige des Guten, Wahren, Schönen;
Und hinter ihm, in wesenlosem Scheine,
Lag was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.[131]
Nevertheless the purblind partisanship was already beginning its campaign, though less against Schiller's character than against his art; and this campaign soon led to a terrific logomachy, which was destined to convulse the German empire of the air for something like two generations. The controversy related to the comparative merit of Goethe and Schiller as men and as poets. In general the Romantic school was hostile to Schiller, partly for private reasons that had very little to do with critical theories. In his famous 'Lectures on Dramatic Art', originally delivered at Vienna in 1808 and published a few years later, A.W. Schlegel dealt briefly with Schiller at the end of the course. What he said was not unmixed with just appreciation, but the lectures set a bad fashion in German criticism. Modern poetry was identified with Romantic poetry and Shakspere was held up as the Romantic poet. Not only his greatness, but his rubbish, his rodomontade, his quips and quibbles and buffoonery, were treated as if they belonged to a sacrosanct canon of dramatic art. From this the natural inference was that to be like Shakspere was to be great, and that no other kind of greatness was possible for the Romantic, or modern, poet. As for Schiller, he was treated by Schlegel with urbane condescension as a gifted playwright who had tried to imitate Shakspere and met with but limited success. The early plays were dismissed with a mere cry of pain, and the later ones were discussed very briefly and perfunctorily with respect to purely formal matters.
As already remarked, the lectures of Schlegel were sufficiently urbane in tone and gave no foretaste of that bitterness with which he subsequently attacked Schiller in some of his poems. What is here important to observe is that Schlegel, and the other Romanticists who took their cue from him, set the vogue of judging Goethe and Schiller according to their imagined resemblance to Shakspere. Certain catchwords and phrases, such as universality, objectivity, irony, and what not, were imported into the literature of discussion, and these concepts were used as absolute criteria by which to write Goethe up and Schiller down. This naturally provoked the many friends of Schiller, and they replied by assailing Goethe. His 'universality' was decried as a lamentable weakness: it meant lack of character, of principle, of patriotism. His pleasing form was only the seductive veil of immorality and pococurantism. And so the controversy raged, becoming at last, in some cases, mere blind fury. One who would like to get a vivid impression of the state of German criticism at this time, and of the extent to which partisanship could obfuscate the vision of an intelligent and well-meaning man, should read the third volume of Wolfgang Menzel's 'German Literature', published in 1828. Menzel's treatment of Goethe is one long diatribe of misrepresentation, becoming at times a mere ululation of malignant hatred. Schiller, on the other hand, is exalted to the skies as the peerless representative of all that is noble in human nature and in poetry.
This fierce old battle of pen and ink, which was really a disgrace to German civilization, is still capable of affording, for the passionate fury and wrong-headedness of it, a modicum of amusement to the retrospective scholar of to-day. And it amused Goethe, who as usual found the sane point of view. Said he to Eckermann, one day in the year 1825: 'These twenty years the public has been contending as to which is the greater, Schiller or I; they ought rather to be glad that they have a brace of such fellows to quarrel about.' In all his talks with Eckermann Goethe remained steadfastly faithful to the memory of his friend, giving no comfort to those who were using his own name as a bludgeon wherewith to batter the prestige of Schiller. 'Schiller', said he, 'could do nothing that did not turn out greater than the best work of these moderns. Yes, even when he cut his finger-nails he was greater than these gentlemen.' He freely criticized this and that in particular plays, observing that there was 'something violent' in Schiller's methods; he even committed himself to the dubious conjecture that certain weak passages might be due to physical exhaustion or to the unwholesome stimulation of flagging energies. But the ever recurring burden of his discourse was—Er war ein prächtiger Mensch.
The death of Goethe, in 1832, brought to an end conspicuously the epoch of the Weimarian poets. Indeed it had ended virtually long before, but it was not until Goethe too had become a memory that its significance was fully realized. The Germans now saw, and the rest of the world saw too, that they had a classical literature which really counted. They began to speak of 'our classics', and to compare and contrast them with the newest literary manifestations. Writers of every kind,—philosophers, literary critics and historians, poets, novelists, journalists, politicians and agitators,—had now to adjust themselves mentally to Goethe and Schiller and what they stood for, or were supposed to stand for. And so the river of literature, which in our day has become a great Amazon, commenced flowing in a small, but steady and ever widening stream. Hoffmeister's monumental biography of Schiller, in five volumes, appeared between 1838 and 1842, and in the ensuing years there came a procession of less thorough biographers, writing more for the unlearned public. The criticism of him as a poet and a dramatist was still subordinated, in a large degree, to the consideration of him as the prophet of ideas which were to be examined with reference to their ethical and moral value, or to the degree of their applicability to then existing conditions.