History, like the Homeric Zeus, looks down with the same cheerful countenance upon the bloody works of war and upon the peaceful peoples that innocently nourish themselves upon the milk of their herds. However lawlessly the freedom of man may seem to operate upon the course of the world, she gazes calmly at the confused spectacle; for her far-reaching eye discovers even from a distance where this seemingly lawless freedom is led by the cord of necessity…. History saves us from an exaggerated admiration of antiquity and from a childish longing for the past. Reminded by her of our own possessions we cease to wish for a return of the lauded golden age of Alexander or of Caesar.
From this way of thinking it seems but a span to the modern scientific point of view; for that, however, neither Schiller nor Kant was ripe, since both thought it necessary to assume that human history began about six thousand years ago and began substantially as reported in Genesis, however the original authentic tradition might have been incrusted with spurious supernaturalism. The explanation of society thus resolved itself for them into the problem of a rational interpretation of the Bible. Kant believed, like Rousseau, in an original paradisaic condition, in which man had lived as a happy, peaceful animal. But while man's emergence from that state was regarded by Rousseau as a disaster, the selfish passions, with their resulting antagonisms, were conceived by Kant as the sine qua non of rational development. This thought, with its corollaries, was set forth by Kant in an essay of the year 1786, entitled 'Conjectural Beginning of Human History'. The Fall is there explained as a good thing, the story in Genesis being interpreted as a symbol of the emergence of man from the estate of a peaceful but instinct-governed animal to that of a quarrelsome but rational being. Kant's line of reasoning interested Schiller deeply, and in 1790 he published in the Thalia a paper upon the same general subject. It was entitled 'Something about the First Human Society on the Basis of the Mosaic Record'.
Portions of this essay, with its naïve license of affirmation, would make a modern anthropologist shudder. It begins with a description of the original paradise, from which the infant man was to be led forth into life by Providence, his watchful nurse. To quote a few words:
By means of hunger and thirst She showed him [let us keep the feminine providence of the German] the need of nourishment; what he required for the satisfaction of his needs She had placed around him in rich abundance; and by the senses of smell and taste She guided him in his choice. By means of a mild climate She had spared his nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind provision was made in the sexual impulse. As plant and animal man was complete…. If, now, we regard the voice of God which forbade the tree of knowledge as simply the voice of instinct warning man away from this tree, then the eating of the fruit becomes merely a defection from instinct, that is, the first manifestation of rational independence, the origin of moral being; and this defection from instinct, which brought moral evil into the world, but at the same time made moral good possible, was incontestably the happiest and greatest event in the history of mankind.
It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on Schiller's general attitude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain it like any rationalizing professor. The past interests him mainly for the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good opinion,—especially of the Goddess of Reason. He did not know what a terrible trial was preparing for this goddess and her self-complacent worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy of many. For the present, however, it was no inchoate Romanticism, but a publisher's enterprise, that led him into the study of the Middle Ages. He had undertaken to edit a great 'Collection of Historical Memoirs'. There were to be several volumes each year for an indefinite time; the volumes to consist of translations from various languages and to cover European history from the twelfth century down. Schiller was to supervise the undertaking and furnish the needful introductions. His plans were presently thwarted by illness and then by his increasing interest in philosophic studies; so that after the first few volumes had appeared he withdrew and left the continuation of the 'Memoirs' to other hands.
Of his various contributions to the initial volumes of the 'Historical Memoirs' a part are mere hack-work and therefore devoid of biographical interest. Somewhat different is the case with an elaborate account of the crusades, in which he attempts to show that that great medieval madness,—so it was regarded by the Age of Enlightenment,—was 'in its origin too natural to excite our surprise and in its consequences too beneficent to convert our displeasure into a very different feeling'. The general argument is that the ancient civilizations were dominated by the idea of the state; they produced excellent Greeks and Romans but not excellent men. The prestige of the despotic states was destroyed by the great migrations, but it was the crusades which first taught the nations to subordinate patriotism to a higher and broader sentiment. It was then that men learned to fight for an idea of the reason,—for the truth as they saw it. And thus the crusades prepared the way for the Reformation. The interest of the essay lies not in the vigor of its logic, which is lame here and there, but in the evidence it affords of Schiller's increasing respect for the Middle Ages. And he went further still. In a preface which he wrote in 1792, for a German translation of Vertot's work on the Knights of Malta, we find a passage which sounds very much like Inchoate Romanticism:
The contempt we feel for that period of superstition, fanaticism and mental slavery betrays not so much the laudable pride of conscious strength as the petty triumph of weakness avenging itself in unimportant mockery for the shame wrung from it by superior merit…. The advantage of clearer ideas, of vanquished prejudice, of more subdued passions, of freer ways of thinking (if we really can claim this credit), costs us the great sacrifice of active virtue, without which our better knowledge can hardly be counted as a gain. The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character…. Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,—if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.
We see that Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age of Enlightenment.
In comparison with these disconnected and more or less perfunctory studies, the 'History of the Thirty Years' War' seems like a large undertaking. But it was not so conceived at first. While 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the fragment of a great project, the 'Thirty Years' War' is the expansion of a small one. We first hear of it in a letter of December, 1789, wherein Schiller, just then casting about eagerly for possibilities of income, informs Körner that he is to have four hundred thalers from Göschen for an 'essay' upon the Thirty Years' War, to be published in the 'Historical Calendar for Ladies'. He felicitates himself that the labor will be light, since the material is so abundant and he is to write only for amateurs. The following spring he took up his task, which then grew upon his hands as he proceeded. Two books were printed in the 'Calendar' for 1791, a third in 1792, the fourth, and also a separate book-edition, in 1793. It met with great favor, the sales running up to seven thousand, and the author winning the name of Germany's greatest historian.
And, indeed, it does exhibit Schiller's historical style at its best, there being here, in comparison with his earlier work, somewhat less of heavy philosophical ballast. The narrative moves more lightly. There is this time not even a pretense of erudite scholarship. He does not quote authorities, rarely indulges in polemic, avoids tedious 'negotiations' and all political disquisitions which might be dull reading to the 'female fellow-citizens' for whom he writes. He endeavors merely to tell his complicated story in a lucid and interesting manner. The third book, which describes the career of Gustav Adolf from the great battle of Breitenfeld, in 1631, to his death at Lützen in the following year, is an admirable specimen of vivid historical writing. It may well be doubted whether any successors of Schiller have surpassed him in the art of narrating, though they may have been able to correct him here and there in matters of fact. What a telling description, for example, is that of the desperate charge at Lützen just after the death of the Swedish king!