I shall always be a poor authority for any future investigator who has the misfortune to consult me. But perhaps at the expense of historic truth I shall find readers, and here and there I may hit upon that other kind of truth which is philosophic. History is in general only a magazine for my fancy, and the objects must content themselves with the form, they take under my hands.
The animating Idea of 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the same that Goethe found running through all the writings of Schiller—the idea of freedom. From the days of his youth 'freedom', however unphilosophically he might think about it, had connoted for his imagination the highest and holiest interest of mankind; and when he began his first historical work his enthusiasm had not yet been sicklied o'er by the events of the Paris Terror. He saw in the Dutch revolt a glorious battle for liberty; the struggle of a small trading population against the proudest, richest and most powerful monarch of the century; a cause seemingly hopeless at first, but growing stronger through pluck, union, tenacity and wise leadership, until the Spanish Goliath was completely beaten. It was magnificent and Schiller desired that his countrymen should feel its magnificence and take to heart its lesson. So he adorned his title-page with an emblem of freedom,—a broad-brimmed hat and a feather upon a pole,—and began his treatise with a bugle-blast that left no doubt of his purpose: 'I have thought it worth while to set up before the world this fair monument of civic strength, in order to waken in the breast of my people a joyous self-consciousness, and to give a fresh and pertinent example of what men may venture for a good cause and may accomplish by united action.'
A remarkable passage of the introduction runs as follows:
Let no one expect to read here of towering, colossal men, or of amazing deeds such as the history of earlier times offers in such abundance. Those times are past, those men are no more. In the soft lap of refinement we have allowed the powers to languish which those ages exercised and made necessary. With humble admiration we gaze now at those gigantic forms, as a nerveless old man at the manly sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit which gives sublimity to even the most paltry action. The pressure of circumstances surprised this people into a knowledge of their own strength, forcing upon them a transitory greatness which did not belong to them and which they perhaps will never again exhibit. So then the strength they manifested has not vanished from among us, and the success which crowned their desperate adventure will not be denied to us if, in the lapse of time, similar occasions call us to similar deeds.
One sees from this that Schiller is, halting between the poetic and the scientific view of the past, uncertain which way to set his face. The poet in him is inclined to idealize the brave days of old and to mourn that the ancient giants are no more. At the same time he finds that the struggle of the Low Countries, while not 'heroic', was very remarkable, very instructive and very inspiring. From this observation it is but a step to the recognition of the truth that it is his own conventional notion of 'heroism' that needs revising; that the giants of yore were no taller than those of to-day and that the world's supply of courage and devotion is not running low. It is an interesting fact that the sentence beginning, 'So then the strength they manifested,' was omitted by Schiller from the edition of 1801, possibly because the horrors of the Revolution had put him out of humor with fighting. But he might well have allowed the words to stand. Their truth was soon to be memorably proved by the German uprising against Napoleon.
A German writer[82] remarks correctly that Schiller occupies with Kant a middle stage between the older pragmatic historians, upon whom Faust[83] pours his scathing ridicule, and the later school of Ranke, whose principle was to extinguish self and simply tell what happened and how. He does not moralize like his predecessors, nor is he guilty of treating the distant past with patronizing condescension. At the same time he wishes to instruct and does not hesitate to point out where the instruction is to be found. He aims to be impartial to the extent of giving both sides a hearing, but he imputes motives freely and does not pretend to extinguish self. Probably the effort to do so would have seemed to him absurd. His sympathy is of course with the Netherlanders, but he writes as a philosophic champion of freedom rather than as a partisan of Protestantism. His concern is not to excite indignation at the colossal wickedness of Philip and Alva, but to show up their colossal folly. As we should expect he devotes his best powers to his portraits, some of which,—as those of Margaret, Granvella, Egmont and Orange,—are deservedly famous. At the same time they are subject to correction from the documents. Thus the crafty politician, William the Silent, in whom there was very little of the strenuous idealist, is presented as a 'second Brutus, who, far above timid selfishness, magnanimously renounces his princely station, descends to voluntary poverty, becomes a citizen of the world and consecrates himself to the cause of freedom'.
From what has been said it is clear that Schiller regarded the writing of history as essentially an exercise of the creative imagination. And such in a sense it really is and always must be, since no historian can divest himself of his own personality. He will inevitably see the events with his own eyes and put his own construction upon them. His very arrangement of his materials, his distribution of lights and shades, his selection of the matters to be recorded and commented upon, will involve a subjective coloring of his narrative. This being so, one cannot reasonably criticize Schiller for having his point of view, but only for taking too little trouble in the gathering and verification of his facts. He did not think it important to study his subject from first-hand sources of information. He quotes more than a score of authorities in Latin, French and German, but he uses them quite uncritically, and chiefly, it would seem, to give his work a semblance of learning. The facts were for him nothing but the raw material of history; the important thing was their philosophic truth, that is, the intellectual formula that should explain them. In our day we have grown distrustful of the 'philosophy of history', especially of any philosophy that does not rest upon a basis of long and thorough investigation.
'The Defection of the Netherlands' was very favorably received by the German public. Its merits lay on the surface, while its defects were not patent to the casual reader. Every one felt that Schiller had set a new pattern for historical composition. In his hands history had become literature. With such an achievement to his credit it was natural that his début in Jena should be looked forward to in academic circles as a great occasion. Feeling that much would be expected of him he prepared with great care his inaugural discourse upon the study of universal history. The address, which was subsequently published in the Merkur, begins with a vigorous elucidation of the difference between the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophic thinker. The former is depicted in caustic terms as a narrow, selfish, timorous time-server. He is the enemy of reform and discovery, because he is forever dreading that the enlargement of the human outlook may disturb his little private routine. He cares for truth only so far as it can be turned to his personal gain in the form of money, praise or princely favor. The philosophic thinker, on the other hand, is a joyous lover of his kind. Feeling the essential solidarity of all knowledge he seeks ever for the unifying principle. He loves truth for its own sake. Every advance of knowledge is welcome to him, and he willingly sees his private edifice go to ruin for the joy of building a new and better one. Then the lecture proceeds to describe the splendid progress of the human race. The task of universal history is declared to be the explanation of this evolutionary process. It must show how all things hang together, and, selecting for description those portions of the record which have a more obvious bearing upon the present form of the world, it must seek to bring home to the modern man the full import of his heirship.
In this address we begin to trace the influence of Kant, whose 'Idea of a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Spirit', published in 1784, was read by Schiller with great interest. The leading thoughts of this memorable paper, new then but very familiar now, are that the race and not the individual is nature's concern in her scheme of man's perfectibility; that the only perfection and happiness possible to him are those which he creates for himself by the progressive triumph of reason over instinct; that the fighting-spirit, antagonisms, wars, the madness and the calamity of the individual, are the necessary condition of race-progress; that the goal is a just civil society, which in turn, since man is an animal that needs a master, is inseparable from the idea of a law-governed state. Thus, while Herder's formula for the great evolutionary process was the upbuilding of the individual man to humanity, that of Kant was the preparation of man for a free citizenship which should ultimately embrace the world.
By the general bent of his mind Schiller was nearer to the humane idealism of Herder than to the law-governed collectivism of Kant. At the same time we can see from many a sentence in his inaugural address that the far more rigorous logic of the Königsberg philosopher had had its effect upon him. In particular he was captivated by the idea that the individual exists for the sake of the race, and that the gruesome antagonisms of history are therefore to be regarded with composure as the birth-pains of the modern man. A striking passage of the lecture runs thus: