A new life began for Schiller in our house. He had long been denied the delight of a free, friendly intercourse, and he always found us susceptible to the thoughts that filled his soul. He wished to influence us, to teach us what might serve our turn of poetry, art, and philosophy, and this effort gave to himself a gentle harmonious disposition…. When we saw him coming to our house in the shimmer of the sunset, a bright ideal life disclosed itself to our inner sense. Lofty seriousness and the light gracious winsomeness of a pure and open soul were always present in Schiller's conversation; in listening to him one walked as among the changeless stars of heaven and the flowers of the earth…. Schiller became calmer, clearer; his appearance and his character more winsome, his mind more averse to those fantastic views of life which he had hitherto not been able to banish. A new hope and joy dawned in the heart of my sister, and I returned, in the happiness of a new inspiring friendship, to a true enjoyment of life. Our whole social circle shared in the pleasure of this kindly magic.
The discourse of these amiable truth-seekers turned partly at least upon the Greeks. Up to this time Schiller had remained virtually ignorant of the Greek poets, thus missing the best of all sanative influences. He had absorbed indirectly something of the Hellenism that had been diffused through the air by Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder and Goethe, but his knowledge of the Greek language was very rudimentary, and good translations had not been easily procurable. Thus the glory that was Greece now came to him with the charm of a new discovery. The poem, 'The Gods of Greece,' contributed to the Merkur in March, 1788, marks the beginning of his Hellenizing. A little later Homer fascinated him. A letter written in August runs thus:
I now read almost nothing but Homer. I have got Voss' translation of the Odyssey, which is in truth excellent, aside from the hexameters, which I cannot endure…. For the next two years I have made up my mind to read no more modern authors…. Not one of them benefits me. They all lead me away from myself, and the ancients now give me true enjoyment. At the same time I need them most urgently to purify my own taste, which through subtlety, artificiality and smartness was beginning to depart from true simplicity. You will find that familiar intercourse with the ancients will benefit me exceedingly, perhaps give me classicity. I shall first study them in good translations and then, when I almost know them by heart, read the Greek originals. In this way I expect to play at the study of the Greek language.
On the 7th of September, 1788, an event occurred: Goethe, who had now returned from Italy, came to visit the Lengefelds, and Schiller was introduced to him. For a year he had heard Goethe idolized on every hand and felt his spirit brooding over the Weimar atmosphere. What he heard did not please him. The local Goethe-cult, so he wrote to Körner, was characterized by a proud, philosophic contempt of all speculation and investigation. This 'child-like simplicity of mind', this 'resigned surrender to the five senses', seemed to him a sort of affectation. Besides this he was irritated by Goethe's prosperity and lordly independence. At the same time he could not help admiring him as a poet. The new 'Iphigenie' gave him a 'happy day', though his pleasure was somewhat marred by the depressing thought that he himself would never be able to produce anything like it. And so he waited with eager expectation to see what a personal acquaintance would bring forth. It brought forth pleasure mixed with dubiety. After that first interview with the great man he wrote to Korner thus:
On the whole, my idea of him, which was in truth very great, has not suffered from this personal acquaintance; but I doubt whether we shall ever come very close to each other. Much that is still interesting to me has had its day with him. He is so far in advance of me,—not so much in years but in self-development and experience of life,—that we shall never come together. And then his whole being is differently organized from mine. His world is not mine; our ways of looking at things seem essentially different. Nevertheless one cannot draw a sure conclusion from such a meeting. Time will tell.
Upon Goethe the meeting made no impression at all. For him Schiller was the author of 'The Robbers', a work whose popularity annoyed him. He did not know, and he took no pains to find out, that Schiller was no longer in sympathy with the ideas that had found expression in the detested play. So he held himself aloof and six years passed ere the two men came together in a friendly intimacy. At the same time there was nothing like ill-will on Goethe's part. He recognized Schiller's talent, praised 'The Gods of Greece' and was half pleased with the review of 'Egmont', which might well have nettled a less Olympian temper. In the fall of 1788 'The Defection of the Netherlands' was published and favorably received. About the same time a vacancy occurred in the Jena faculty, and Schiller's friends proposed him for the position. Goethe took the matter up with the various governments concerned and met with no opposition. And so it came about, one day in December, that Schiller, who had meanwhile taken to translating Euripides and was planning a whole Greek theater in German, was interrupted by an official notice that he had been appointed professor of history at Jena and would be expected to enter upon his duties in the spring. It was only an 'extraordinary' professorship without salary, but its possibilities as a stepping-stone were alluring. He decided to accept.
Now came a short season of helpless and comical dismay. 'I would take a thrashing', he wrote to Körner, 'if I could have you here for four-and-twenty hours. Goethe quotes his docendo discitur, but these gentlemen do not seem to know how small my learning is.' To Lotte he declared that he should feel ridiculous in the new situation. 'Many a student will perhaps know more history than the professor. Nevertheless I think like Sancho Panza with respect to his governorship: To whom God gives an office, to him he gives understanding; and when I have my island I shall rule it like a nabob.' It was not pleasant to drop his fascinating studies of the Greek poets and bury himself in learned sawdust, but the thing was not to be helped. So the winter and spring were devoted mainly to historical reading. At the same time, however, 'The Ghostseer' was carried along in the now resuscitated Thalia, and the long poem, 'The Artists', was slowly and with infinite revision got ready for publication in the Merkur.
During this period he saw little or nothing of Goethe and steadily nursed a splenetic determination not to like the man. Passages in his letters are almost comical in their perversity of misjudgment. He was exasperated by Goethe's reticence, composure and self-sufficiency,—qualities which seemed to him to spring out of calculating egotism. Goethe, so the arraignment ran, was a man who went on his way serenely dispensing favors, winning love and admiration and putting people under obligation, but always like a god,—without ever giving his intimate self or surrendering his own freedom. For his part, he, Schiller, did not wish to live near such a man, much as he admired his intellect and valued his judgment. This attitude of his was a great trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic character. If he is really such a very lovable being, I shall find it out in the next world, when we shall all be angels.' In fine he was not yet ripe for an understanding of the Weimar sovereign. He did not see that Goethe's method was after all a giving of himself, and that the self thus given was not the worse but the better for having outgrown the effusive raptures of sentimentalism.
In May the lectures at Jena began with great éclat. On the first day students to the number of five or six hundred flocked to hear the author of 'The Robbers' expound the difference between the philosophic scholar and the bread-and-butter professor. It was an inspiring discourse, full of high idealism and well fitted to inspire the souls of ingenuous youth, even though they might not quite understand it. The students were enthusiastic and gave the new professor the unusual compliment of a serenade. Having decided to begin with a course of free public lectures upon universal history, he took his duties very seriously, and even after curiosity had abated he continued, during the first term, to address a large audience. He had hoped only for prestige, and the game was quickly won. He was the most popular professor in Jena. All this time, however, his heart was in Rudolstadt,—with the two sisters to whom, for a year and a half, he had been writing letters of impartial Platonic devotion. Late in July he received a hint from Karoline to the effect that her sister was very much in love with him and that an understanding might be desirable. Then at last the timorous, cunctatory worshiper of femininity in the abstract declared himself and prayed to know if the good news could be true. Lotte assured him that it was; if she could make him happy she was willing to devote herself to the enterprise during the remainder of her days.
Now the millennium began. Our celestial dreamer, who had thus been gently pushed over the threshold by a friendly hand, found himself in a human paradise much more grateful to the soul than the court of Venus Urania. He was very, very happy. The black phantoms that had beset his pathway hitherto,—the depressing sense of loneliness, of having missed the great prize, of being de trop at the banquet of life, the occasional promptings of pessimism and misanthropy, the baleful pull of illicit passion, the selfish hugging of an illusory freedom,—all these took their flight to return no more. He had found what he needed—salvation from self through a woman's love. But he did not behave like other sons of Adam. He continued to address his love-letters to both sisters impartially, as if the possession of Lotte were after all to be only a subordinate incident in the preservation of a triangular spiritual friendship. Sometimes it is 'my dearest, dearest Karoline', again 'my dearest, dearest Lotte', most frequently 'my dearest dears'.