At first the trio agreed to keep their momentous secret from chère mère. Schiller was poor and his prospects all uncertain. When he began, in the fall of 1789, to give lectures that were to be paid for, he found that his income from students' fees would be insignificant. Lotte had but a slender portion, and then there was that dreadful von in her name. To meet this difficulty Schiller procured the title of 'Hofrat' from the Duke of Meiningen. Then he laid the case before Karl August of Weimar, who was very sympathetic but also very poor. The best he could do was to promise shamefacedly a pittance of two hundred thalers by way of professorial salary. This, with love, was enough. In one of the noblest letters he ever wrote Schiller now addressed himself to chère mère who made no objections; and on the 22nd of February, 1790, the impecunious Hofrat Professor Schiller and his courageous, aristocratic sweetheart were married.
The work of Schiller in the historical field will be considered by itself in the next chapter. Before passing on to that subject, however, let us glance at the more important of the minor writings produced during the period just traversed.
In 'The Gods of Greece' he strikes with almost clangorous emphasis the note of pagan aestheticism. The poem sees the world under the aspect of the Beautiful and regards that as its most important aspect. The Greek religion, we hear, peopled earth and sky and sea with lovely forms that gave warmth and color to life and fed the imagination with sensuous poetry. Nature appeared living, spiritual. Rock and stream and tree had each its tale to tell, its tale of passionate personal history. The gods were near, intelligible, sympathetic; and divine gifts were more precious for being shared by the giver. And as the gods were more human, so man was more divine. In comparison our modern monotheism is cold, abstract, mechanical. Instead of a radiant Apollo, we have the law of gravitation. We have lost the many fair gods of old to enrich One who is remote, unfathomable, self-sufficient.
Where art thou, beauteous world of story?
Fair morning of a vanished day!
Alas! the magic of thine ancient glory
Lives only in the poet's lay.[75]
It was inevitable that such a frank eulogy of the old gods at the expense of the Christian Demiurgus should give offense. Count Leopold von Stolberg put himself at the head of a vociferous opposition by denouncing the poem in a Leipzig journal as blasphemous, and lamenting that the author of the noble 'Song to Joy' should have fallen so low. The modern reader finds it easy to acquit him on the religious arraignment, since he did not profess to present the claims of monotheism completely. We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks, Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the 'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks (gods and men) were not remarkably strong on the side of gentleness, holiness and fidelity.
In respect of poetic merit Schiller certainly had the right to his opinion that 'The Gods of Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or melody of phrasing,—Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of the ear,—but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas have a stately impressive swing. Goethe was pleased with the poem, but thought it too long,—a well-founded criticism, since many of the stanzas merely brought fresh illustrations of the same thought. In his revision Schiller reduced the twenty-five stanzas of the original version to sixteen, and at the same time omitted or toned down the lines that had given offense. In its revised form it is in every way a better poem.
In 'The Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the 'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as the 'ripest son of time, free through reason, strong through laws, great through gentleness'. Then the sublime creature is admonished not to forget the goddess who made him what he is:
In industry the bee may scorn thy merits,
In cleverness a worm thy teacher be;
Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits,
But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]
After this we hear that man entered the land of knowledge through the morning gate of the beautiful; it was his inchoate art-sense that developed his understanding. The heavenly goddess Urania, whom we know here as Beauty and shall one day known as Truth, accompanied him into the exile of mortality and became his loving nurse, teaching him to live by her law, free from wild passion and from the bondage of duty. To aid her in this work she chose a select body of priests, the artists, and taught them to imitate the fair forms of nature. In the contemplation of their work savage man was lifted to the heights of spiritual joy and forgot his gross appetites. He became acquainted with ideals and made gods and heroes for himself. Then he began to weigh and compare these ideals and thus arose philosophy and science, which aim in their slow and halting way to explain the full import of the primeval revelation. All truth was given in symbols at the beginning, and the artists still remain the conservators and prophets of the highest spiritual things.
In case of such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content, which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that have nothing to do with the goddess Urania, we have learned something of primitive man, and what we have learned is very much out of tune with Schiller's dream. He assigns to the aesthetic thrill a larger rôle than it has actually played in human history. This, however, is unimportant. What is more important is that by investing his subject with a nimbus of poetic mysticism he became one of the founders of the modern Religion of Art. For the theological revelation of truth he substitutes a secular revelation of beauty, which, however, was regarded by him as containing the germs of all truth and virtue. We see him moving toward a theory that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that Beauty is the one. To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial, have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very different thing from the later decorative aestheticism.