Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heiszt,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.—'Faust', lines 577-8.]
CHAPTER XII
Dark Days Within and Without
1791-1794
Zu einer Zeit, wo das Leben anfing, mir seinen ganzen Wert zu zeigen, wo ich nahe dabei war, zwischen Vernunft und Phantasie in mir ein zartes und ewiges Band zu knüpfen,… nahte sich mir der Tod.—Letter of 1791.
The year 1790 was the happiest of Schiller's life. For a little while, at last, fate became supremely kind to him. The reality of wedlock more than fulfilled his dreams, and it seemed as if all his vague malheur d'être poète were about to be buried in the deep bosom of connubial beatitude. 'We lead the blessedest life together', he wrote to Christophine Reinwald in May, 'and I no longer know my former self.' And a month later to Wilhelm von Wolzogen: 'My Lotte grows dearer to me every day; I can say that I am just beginning to prize my life, since domestic happiness beautifies it for me.' His income, indeed, was pitifully small, but his courage was great, his fame well grounded, and there were prospects here and there. From the first he had regarded the Jena professorship only as a makeshift. To bring variety into his academic routine he began, in the summer term of 1790, to lecture upon the theory of tragedy, developing the subject from his own brain and paying little attention to the authorities. In the autumn these lectures were resumed, and soon the aesthetic philosopher began to prevail over the historian.
And now came his great calamity. In reading the later writings of Schiller, whether philosophical or poetical, it is difficult to imagine them the work of an invalid, produced in the intervals of physical suffering such as would utterly have broken the courage of a less resolute man. But so it was. The early winter of 1791 brought with it a disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him away prematurely at the age of forty-five.
Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt. There were Karoline von Dacheröden and her lover, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was destined to become Schiller's intimate friend and also his faithful comrade in the field of aesthetic philosophizing. Then there was the influential Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a brother of the Mannheim intendant. This elder Dalberg, who some years later became dubiously prominent in connection with Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, was now residing at Erfurt as Coadjutor to the Elector of Mainz and expecting to become Elector himself on the death of his superior. He was an energetic, good-natured man, not free from ostentatious fussiness, and he enjoyed the rôle of Maecenas. In Schiller and Lotte he took a deep interest, promising to do something handsome for them when he should come to power at Mainz. While spending his vacation with these Erfurt friends, at the close of the year 1790, Schiller took a cold which brought on an attack of pneumonia. An Erfurt doctor treated the case lightly and unskillfully and sent him back half cured to Jena, where he resumed his lectures. Now came a second and sharper attack, with hemorrhage and other alarming symptoms. The doctors operated upon him as best they knew, with leeches and phlebotomy and purgatives and vomitives, and came very near killing him. For days he lay at the point of death, a few faithful students sharing the young wife's anxious vigil at his bedside. His convalescence was slow and in the end imperfect, leaving him with wasted strength, a pain in the right lung and a serious difficulty in breathing. Of course it was all up with his lecturing; but he easily obtained a release for the summer term from the sympathetic Duke of Weimar. In March he was well enough to take up the reading of Kant's then recently published 'Critique of the Judgment', and a little later to try his hand at translating from the Aeneid in stanzas and to write a rejoinder to the 'anticritique' of the aggrieved Bürger.
This unfortunate feud with Bürger grew out of a magisterial review published by Schiller in 1791; a review which, while dignified in tone and purporting to speak solely in the interest of the lyric art, amounted to a scathing condemnation of Bürger's character. After expatiating upon the high vocation of the poet, the necessity of his thinking and feeling nobly, and the importance of his giving only his idealized self, the anonymous critic proceeded to comment upon Bürger's frequent lapses from good taste, his crudities, indecencies and vulgar ding-dongs, and to refer these things with remorseless directness to personal defects. The criticism was just and had all the other merits save discretion and urbanity, Goethe was pleased with it before he knew who wrote it,[84] and eleven years later Schiller saw nothing in it to change. In writing it, as a matter of fact, he was only breaking the rod over his own early self; for in his Stuttgart 'Anthology' he had committed nearly every sin for which now, from the serene heights of a better artistic insight, he castigated his victim. To poor Bürger, whose life was just then bitter enough at the best, the review was a terrible blow. He at once published a reply, which is also very good reading in its way, but might have been made much more spicy had he known the name of his adversary. Schiller's final rejoinder added nothing of importance to the discussion.[85]
This short digression leads naturally to another. While still at Weimar Schiller received a visit from Bürger, and the two agreed to vie with each other in a translation from Vergil. Schiller chose for his experiment the eight-line stanza which he was proposing to use in an epic upon Frederick the Great. This 'Fredericiad' was much on his mind in the spring of 1789. His plan was to center his story about some ominous juncture in Frederick's career (say the battle of Kollin), and write a poem which should exhibit in lightly-flowing stanzas the 'finest flower' of eighteenth-century civilization.[86] Albeit intensely modern it was to have the indispensable epic 'machinery'. Nothing came of the project, but a year later he was still ruminating upon it and declared that he should not be truly happy until he was again making verses.