And so on for six mortal pages, octavo print. The modern cynic will smile at this ecstatic cultus of friendship, but let him at the same time recall the saying of Goethe that what makes the poet is a heart completely filled with one emotion.[11]
It is now time to glance at the really important phase of Schiller's youthful development—his reading. While his native Suabia, just then rather backward in literary matters, was still chewing the cud of pious conventionality, a prodigious ferment had begun in the outside world. What is called the 'Storm and Stress' was under way. The spirit of revolt, which in France was preparing a political upheaval, was abroad in Germany, where it found expression in stormy or sentimental plays and novels,—works composed on the principle that everything is permissible except the tame and the conventional. The productions of these young innovators differed widely from one another, but they had a common note in their vehement would-be naturalism. There were over-wrought pictures of daring sin and terrible punishment; novels and plays laying bare the misère of the social conflict; tragedies of insurgent passion at war with conventional ideas; of true love crossed and done to death by the prejudice of caste. And so forth.
How much of this literature fell into the hands of Schiller at the academy can not be told with perfect certainty, but it would seem that very little of it escaped him. He read and was deeply touched by Gerstenberg's 'Ugolino', with its horrific picture of the agonies of starvation. He read the early writings of Goethe, of Leisewitz and of Klinger, and was touched by the woes of Miller's Siegwart. In 'Emilia Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust, he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy forms of the Celtic bard, big with their indefinable woe, increased the turmoil of his soul. Probably he read Rousseau more or less, though direct evidence of the fact is lacking. At any rate the air was surcharged with Rousseauite feeling. Certainly he read Plutarch and Cervantes, and along with all these came Shakspere,[12] to whom he was introduced—in the Wieland translation—by his favorite teacher, Abel.
The effect of this reading upon the mind of Schiller was prodigious. It changed the native docility of his temper, weaned him completely from his seraphic proclivities and carried him with a rush into the mid-current of the literary revolution. There came a time when the young medical student, faithfully pursuing his routine and on festal occasions spouting fervid panegyrics of the noble Karl and the divine Franziska, was not altogether what he seemed to be. There was another Schiller, burning with literary ambition and privately engaged in forging a thunderbolt.
Two dramatic attempts preceded 'The Robbers'. The first had to do with Cosmo dei Medici; the second, called 'The Student of Nassau', was based upon a newspaper story of suicide. Both were destroyed by their disgusted author, in what stage of progress we do not know. Still he was not discouraged; the tragic drama was clearly his field and he might succeed better the next time. But where to find a subject? His perplexity became so great that, as he said later, he would have given his last shirt for a good theme. Finally, in the year 1777, his friend Hoven drew his attention to a story by Schubart that had lately been published in the Suabian Magazine,—a story of a father and his two dissimilar sons, one of them frank and noble-minded but wild, the other a plausible moralist but at heart a scoundrel. Schiller took the hint and began to write, his interest being no doubt increased by the miserable fate of Schubart, who was then languishing in the Hohenasperg as the helpless victim of Karl Eugen's pusillanimous tyranny.[13]
Just how much progress was made with 'The Robbers' in the year 1777 is not known; probably not much, for Schiller soon decided to drop his literary pursuits for the present and devote himself closely to his medical studies. Perhaps he may have hoped by hard work to finish his course in four years instead of the expected five. At any rate he now bent to his toil and allowed the play to lie dormant in his mind. In 1779 he submitted a thesis on 'The Philosophy of Physiology', but it was judged unfit for print. The professors condemned it variously as tedious, florid, obscure, and, worst of all, disrespectful toward recognized authorities such as Haller. In these judgments the duke concurred. He found that Elève Schiller had said many fine things and in particular had shown much 'fire'. But the fire was too strong; it needed to be 'subdued' by another year of study.
It has usually been assumed by Schiller's biographers that in his intense longing for liberty he was embittered by this disappointment, and that in his mood of wrath he now took up his neglected play and poured into it, hissing hot, the whole fury of his quarrel with the world. There is, however, no evidence that he really hoped to win his release from the academy in the year 1779, or that the thesis just spoken of was regarded as a graduation thesis.[14] Neither his own letters nor those of his friends indicate that he was angry at being kept in school another year. Probably the critics have made too much out of this factor of personal disgruntlement. Schiller was a poetic artist, and his first play is much more than the wild expression of a plucked student's resentment. Nevertheless it is only natural to suppose that his proud and ambitious spirit chafed more or less under the requirements of an academic routine that his manhood had outgrown. That he succeeded after all, at the end of the year 1779, in capturing a number of prizes and received them in the presence of Goethe and the Duke of Weimar, who happened just then to be visiting Stuttgart, could do but little to sweeten the bitter dose that had been prescribed for him.
He now set about the preparation of a new thesis, and in the intervals of his professional occupation he worked with feverish energy upon 'The Robbers'. To gain time for writing he would often feign illness, and when the duke or an inspector surprised him would hide his manuscript in a big medical treatise kept at hand for the purpose. A few comrades who were in the secret eagerly watched the progress of his work and vociferously applauded the scenes which he now and then read to them. One of these comrades has left it on record that in the excitement of composition Schiller would often stamp and snort and roar.—And thus it was, in the stolen hours of the night and driven by the demon that possessed him, that he bodied forth his titanic drama of revolt. It was virtually finished during the year 1780. In after-time Schiller reasoned himself into the conviction that art must be 'cheerful',[15] but very little of cheerfulness went to the composition of 'The Robbers'. It was the disburthening of an oppressed soul that suffered horribly at times from morbid melancholy—the chicken-pox of youthful genius. A letter of June, 1780, shows how he had battled with the specters of despair. Writing to Captain von Hoven, whose son had lately died, he says:
A thousand times I envied your son as he was wrestling with death, and would have given up my life as calmly as I go to bed. I am not yet twenty-one years old, but I can tell you frankly that the world has no further charm for me. I have no delight in thinking of the world, and the day of my departure from the academy, which a few years ago would have been a day of festal joy, will not be able to force one happy smile from me. With each step, as I grow older, I lose more and more of my contentedness; and the nearer I come to the age of maturity, the more I could wish that I had died in childhood.
This sounds gloomy enough, but the desperate mood did not last long, A number of medical reports written in the summer of 1780 indicate that Schiller was able to take the calm professional view of a case very similar to his own. A fellow-student named Grammont was afflicted with hypochondria, and Schiller was set to watch him. His analysis of the case is eminently sane. He finds it difficult to decide whether the young man's malady has its seat in the mind or in the bowels: whether too much brooding over hard problems has ruined his digestion and given him a headache, or whether a physical derangement has confused his ideas of duty and religion. He thinks there is a fair chance of curing the patient by means of medicine and good advice.—A youth who can talk thus of another's Weltschmerz is himself in no great danger from the malady.