O big, amazingly big thing!
My head swims when I look;
I shudder and start back afraid
And fall—upon my knees.
These verses—the translation may hold up its head quite unabashed beside the original—hardly rise above the plane of doggerel; they signify nothing except that their author has had his little quarrel with this best of all possible worlds and is not unwilling to shock people.
Of far greater poetic interest are the verses entitled 'Rousseau', whose neglected grave (he died in 1778) is made the point of departure for a vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's boat and go tell the spirits about this 'dream of the war of frogs and mice, the hand-organ doodle-doodle of this life'.[36]
In this poem there is certainly no lack of that 'fire' which Duke Karl found in Schiller's dissertation. Indeed fire abounds everywhere in his youthful versifying. He never contemplates, never dwells upon a temperate emotion. The poetry of common things and of the gentler feelings seems to have been nonexistent for him. His imagination likes to occupy itself with the supernal, the stupendous, or else with the awful and the revolting. This is seen in the two poems 'Elysium' and 'A Group from Tartarus'; the one aiming to portray a land of ineffable happiness, where sorrow has no name and the only pain is a gentle ecstasy, the other depicting the infinite misery of the inferno. In both there is a free blending of Christian with pagan conceptions, 'Elysium' being put for heaven and 'Tartarus' for hell. A similar blending is noticeable in many of the other poems, ancient mythology being made to furnish forth the setting and the symbols of modern passion. So it is, for example, in the lyric operetta 'Semele', the longest and most pretentious of the 'Anthology' poems. It consists of two scenes in irregular verses, dealing with Jupiter's love for the mortal Semele' and Juno's jealousy. Artistically it is much in need of the file, and Its sustained note of passionate pathos hardly comports, perhaps, with the type of the operetta. Nevertheless it contains powerful passages and telling stage effects. One can see that the young student—'Semele' appears to have been written at the academy—had learned, through, his occasional visits to the opera, how to manage a conventional theme and conventional machinery in such a way as to startle and thrill.
More noteworthy, for the characterization of the youthful Schiller, is the ode entitled 'Friendship', which purports to be taken 'from the letters of Julius to Raphael, an unpublished novel'. In this poem we have not so much the expression of a real human affection as a philosophy of friendship; just as in the Laura poems we have a philosophy of love. The verses remind one immediately of Rousseau's saying that he was 'intoxicated with love without an object'. Friendship is described as a mystic attraction of souls, identical with the attraction of gravitation. This it is which makes the beauty and the glory of the spiritual world. 'We are dead groups when we hate, gods when we love.'
If in creation's All I stood alone,
Souls would I dream into the senseless stone
And kiss them in a fond embrace.
Then we hear of a hierarchy of spirits, ascending 'from the Mongol to the Greek seer, who precedes the last of the seraphs'; and in this harmonious ring-dance of souls Raphael and Julius 'sweep onward to where time and space are submerged in the sea of eternal glory'.
Other poems which rise above the general level are 'The Bad Monarchs', a poetic castigation (without mention of names) of the type of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Württemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than any of these, however, from a poetic point of view, is the 'Funeral Fantasy', which was occasioned by the death of young Von Hoven in 1780. One may perhaps doubt the genuineness of the grief that could find expression in such a pomp of words, but there is no doubting the poetic power of pictures like this:
Pale, at its ghastly noon,
Pauses above the death-still wood the moon;
The night-sprite sighing, through the dim air stirs;
The clouds descend in rain;
Mourning, the wan stars wane,
Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres!
Haggard as spectres, vision-like and dumb,
Dark with the pomp of Death, and moving slow,
Towards that sad lair the pale Procession come
Where the Grave closes on the Night below.[37]