The period now under consideration is, roughly speaking, the period from the beginning of acute political agitation, about 1830, to the realization of national unity in 1871. During the first part of this era academic philosophy was still largely under the influence of Hegel, but the reaction had set in and was destined to grow into a widespread distrust of all speculative philosophy. Not to explain and justify the existing world by the arachnean method of spinning a Weltanschauung out of one's own interior, but to make the world different,—was the new watchword. It was widely felt that Germans had speculated and theorized and dreamed too much; it was time to assert their strength in practical affairs. Men's minds began to be engaged with questions of political reform and social regeneration. It was no longer the ideal, the good, the beautiful and the true, that pressed for consideration, but constitutional government, the freedom of the press, popular representation and, above all, German unity. But chaos seemed to reign in the intellectual sphere. Young Germany, so called, began a noisy agitation which had no definite goal in view, but was characterized by a fierce hostility to existing forms in church and state,—to princes, aristocrats, priests, Christian marriage and conventional morality. And there were other agitations, doctrines, theories and tendencies innumerable. Germany had become, to revive a comparison then much in vogue, an irresolute Hamlet, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Talk, talk, everywhere, and nowhere the strong hand of constructive statesmanship. And so came the abortive revolution of 1848, with its ensuing disgusts, until finally the man of destiny appeared and conducted affairs, by way of Sadowa and Sedan, to the new German Empire.
Now in that era of the doctrinaires, of the philosophical break-up and of seething political passions, it was but natural that those who thought of Schiller at all thought not so much of the dramatic artist as of the prophet whose sentiments could be quoted for present edification or reproof. The men of the middle part of the century judged him generally from the partisan standpoint of their own political, philosophical and religious prejudices. This is true not only of the forgotten criticasters, but of the most famous, the most widely read and the most authoritative literary historians of the time, such as Gervinus and Vilmar. And in the domain of pure dramatic criticism, or what purported to be such, there was quite too much of that captious dogmatism which had come down from the Romanticists and which had its origin, as we have seen, in the habit of regarding Shakspere, not as the great dramatist of a nation and an epoch, but as the universal modern poet, whose methods and peculiarities must be canonical for everybody.[132] Instead of looking fairly and squarely at Schiller's plays and endeavoring to understand and interpret them as the expression of the life of a past epoch, and of an artistic individuality which had its own right to be and to grow in its own way, the dogmatic critics treated him, in many cases, de haut en bas, as if they knew everything better than he. Men who would have thought it a little absurd to assail Mont Blanc for not being Chimborazo did not scruple to gird at Schiller for not being something else than that which his nature made him. And so it was that the great dramatic poet of the nation, whose plays were daily proving their vitality in scores of theaters and were giving pleasure to millions of readers, was treated oftentimes with incredible severity by pompous Rhadamanthine critics who did not see that they were thereby making themselves and their critical pretensions slightly ridiculous.
Of course this line of remark is not meant to imply that the works of anybody should have been regarded as above criticism because they were popular and had become classical. What is intended is simply to characterize a past critical epoch which, in dealing with imaginative literature, cared a little too much for abstract dogmas and theoretical standpoints; which, instead of trying to enter humanly into the spirit of an author and to judge him according to the nature of his intentions and his success in carrying them out, preferred to lay him on a bed of Procrustes and hack at him with the axe of philosophy. Literature, like language, goes on its way with very little tenderness for theories and dogmas. That which meets the needs of human nature lives and after a while its 'faults' are forgotten; or mayhap they come to be regarded as merits, and the rules are extended to include the new case. Not to have seen this quite clearly enough was a weakness of the vigorous and rigorous German critics of half a century ago. And yet, some of them did see it dimly now and then. Reference was made a moment ago to Gervinus,—certainly one of the most learned, thoughtful and generally meritorious of German literary historians,—and it was implied that he too was affected by the bias of his age. It is thus a pleasure to quote a passage from him which shows him in a different light. It is from the fifth volume of his 'National-Litteratur der Deutschen', published in 1842:
If one insists on condemning 'Wallenstein' as a whole because one must reject the episode (of Max and Thekla), then one blinds oneself deliberately to great merits on account of small faults. The historical critic feels clearly here the disadvantage in which a living or recently deceased writer is placed, in comparison with an earlier one whose entire individuality has receded into the distance and is beyond the strife of the passions. Soon after Shakspere's death there was the same quarrel about him that we are having now about Schiller. To-day that which was imputed to him as vice is so interblended with his virtues that it is regarded as trivial to waste a serious word upon it. So it may be one day with our poets; and then people will look at the faults in Schiller's compositions from other points of view. We shall then manage to get along with what was done and accepted long ago, and content ourselves with explaining it; whereas now, at the beginning of its course, though we cannot unmake it, we think perhaps to prevent its acceptance and deprive it of immortality by rejecting it unexplained.
Here is certainly a highly interesting modern case of the fulfillment of prophecy.
Another phase of the Schiller-question which was much discussed in the middle portion of the nineteenth century was his aesthetic idealism. While his plays carry one into the rushing currents of life, and while his ballads are poems of action, it was possible to extract from his 'Letters on Aesthetic Education' and from some of his poems, notably 'The Ideal and Life', what seemed to be a message of aesthetic quietism; a message which appeared to say that the attainment of inward peace, freedom and harmony was the highest goal of human effort. Naturally enough the individualism and aestheticism of the Weimarian poets were not welcome doctrine to an excited generation that had caught a glimpse of an immense work to be done for the fatherland. The ever increasing pressure of social emotions made it seem a selfish and unmanly thing to be so concerned about one's own spiritual equipoise. This feeling finds frequent expression in the literature of the time; and so much was it harped on, and so feebly were the countervailing considerations presented, that many people, both in Germany and outside of it, got into their heads a radically wrong conception of the Weimarian Dioscuri; a conception which quite forgot that both of them, all their lives long, were very strenuous workers, strongly possessed by the social sentiment. And even those who were too wise to be thus completely misled as to the significance and the value of the Weimarian legacy could not help feeling that for the present, at least, it were better regarded as a dead issue. One can understand the sentiment with which Gervinus closed his great history of the national literature: 'The rival contest of the arts is finished. Now we should set before us the other mark, which no archer among us has yet hit, and see if peradventure Apollo will grant us here too the renown that he did not refuse us there.'
But while the critics and doctrinaires were contending thus variously about the merits of Schiller, his name endeared itself more and more to the many who were chafing under the régime of princely absolutism and were longing for a freer Germany. They idealized him as the poet of liberty,—chiefly, it would seem, on account of 'William Tell', or, among radical and boisterous youth, on account of 'The Robbers'; for the 'freedom' of his poems is a metaphysical rather than a political concept. In the year 1844 Freiligrath committed himself definitively to the cause of 'the people', as he understood it, which proved to be the cause of the Red Republicans. In announcing his conversion he wrote a poem called 'Good Morning', the last stanza of which, done into rough English rime, runs thus:
Good morning then! Behold a freeman here,
Walking henceforward in the people's ways;
For with the people is the poet's sphere,—
'Tis thus I read my Schiller nowadays.[133]
But he read him quite wrongly. For a much saner view of this question one should go back to honest Eckermann, who reports Goethe as saying to him in 1824: 'Schiller, who, between ourselves, was much more of an aristocrat than I, has the remarkable fortune to count as a particular friend of the people.' This is exactly right. Neither man had in him much of the stuff that tribunes of the people are made of, but Schiller had less of it than Goethe. His whole temper was that of an aristocrat. Had he lived in the forties of the nineteenth century, we may be very sure that he would have scented a return of the French Terror, and would have spoken, if at all, as an arch-conservative.
And really there is but cold comfort in 'William Tell' for those who, in the revolutionary epoch, were clamoring against princes as such. The play is in no sense anti-monarchical, nor is it either German or un-German, but simply human. As a curious illustration of the unreason that men could once be guilty of through their habit of regarding Schiller as a political poet, it is worth while to quote a passage from Vilmar, whose history of German literature enjoyed great popularity half a century ago. Speaking of 'William Tell', Vilmar has this to say: