One may say that his art as a poet consists not so much in the direct expression of feeling in sensuous and passionate language, as in the transfiguration of thought by means of impassioned imagery. In his poems as elsewhere he is a good deal of a rhetorician, but he is never insincere. His verse came from the heart, only it was the expression of character and convictions rather than of moods and fancies. It seems intended to edify rather than to portray; to impress rather than to delight. Some of it, too, is occupied with ideal sentiments so abstract and sublimated as to possess but languid interest for normally constituted lovers of poetry. For a while, at least, after his return to poetry, he may fairly be said to have cared a little too much for the white radiance of eternity, and not quite enough for the colored reflection beneath the dome.[103]
This last observation has in view more particularly the poems he wrote in the year 1795, while still 'hugging the shore of philosophy'. Take for example 'The Veiled Image at Sais', which tells in rather prosaic pentameters of an ardent young truth-seeker who is escorted by an Egyptian hierophant to a veiled statue and told that whoso lifts the veil shall see the Truth. At the same time he is warned that the veil must not be lifted save by the consecrated hand of the priest himself. Moved by a curiosity which can hardly seem anything but laudable,—unless one is prepared to take the side of the sacerdotal humbug,—the young man returns in the night and raises the veil. In the morning he is found pale and unconscious at the foot of the statue. Soon afterwards he dies; leaving to mankind the message:
Woe unto him who seeks the Truth through Guilt.
This has an unctuous sound, and one gets a vague impression that the old story has been dressed up for the sake of some modern application. One is piqued to reflect upon it; but the more one reflects the more clearly one sees that there is no real instruction in it. But if there is no instruction, there is nothing at all; since the mysticism is of a kind that appeals solely to the intellect.
Far more interesting is the poem which was at first called 'The Realm of Shades' and later 'The Ideal and Life',—a difficult production, which resembles 'The Artists' in its suggestion of a voyage through the imponderable ether. We begin with the blessed gods in Olympus and end with the apotheosis of Hercules; and the intervening stretch is like the vasty realm of the Mothers in 'Faust'. The poem is intellectual, in the sense that its theme is a concept of the mind, and its structure logical throughout; yet every strophe is surcharged with feeling, and the diction presents a marvelous wealth of imagery. It must be conquered by study before it can yield any great pleasure; but the conquest once made, one finds a noble delight in the gorgeous coloring with which Schiller invests his idealistic rainbow in the clouds. Good critics, favorable to Schiller's genius, regard 'The Ideal and Life' as the greatest of his philosophic poems and the most characteristic expression of his nature. He himself felt a sort of reverence for it. 'When you receive this letter', he wrote to Humboldt, 'put away everything that is profane and read this poem in solemn quiet.' And Humboldt replied: 'How shall I thank you for the indescribable pleasure that your poem has given me? Since the day on which I received it, it has in the truest sense possessed me; I have read nothing else, have scarcely thought of anything else.'
The general drift of the wonderfully pregnant verses is that man attains peace only by renouncing the things of sense and living in the realm of shades, that is, among eternal ideals. Here he is free—like the gods.
The Weavers of the Web—the Fates—but sway
The matter and the things of clay;
Safe from each change that Time to Matter gives,
Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray
With Gods a god, amidst the fields of Day,
The FORM, the ARCHETYPE, serenely lives.
Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
Cast from thee Earth, the bitter and the real,
High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring
Into the Realm of the Ideal.[104]
Throughout the poem 'Beauty' is put for 'the Ideal'; and we get a reflex of the philosophic doctrine that only the aesthetic faculty can resolve the eternal conflict between the sensuous and the rational man. Life Is and must be struggle, that being its very essence; but by taking refuge in the Realm of the Ideal, man anticipates his apotheosis. There he escapes from the tyranny of the flesh and the bondage of nature's law. The misery of struggle and defeat no longer vexes him. The warring forces are reconciled and he sees their conflict under the aspect of eternal beauty. Thus, like the new-born god, Alcides, taking leave of the terrestrial battle-ground, he mounts into heaven, while the nightmare of the earthly life 'sinks and sinks and sinks'.
Behold him spring
Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,
And the dull matter that confined before
Sinks downward, downward, downward, as a dream!
Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,
And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,
Fills for a God the bowl.[105]
All this may seem, at first blush, to attach excessive importance to the attainment of inward peace and harmony,—as if one's private comfort were the greatest thing in life. It seems to recommend a quietistic, contemplative life; for how else shall one escape from the actual into the ideal? Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to read into the poem anything like a recommendation of quietism. The ultimate goal is described in terms which suggest now the mythology of Homer, now the Platonic realm of ideals, and again the Christian heaven; but however the blessed existence is imaged, it is always thought of as attainable only through a strenuous grapple with the realities of this life. Thus the essential spirit of the poem is the spirit of energetic, hopeful endeavor. Its doctrine is, to quote the words of Kuno Francke, that "only through work are we delivered from the slavery of the senses"; that "the very trials and sufferings of mankind bring out its divine nature and insure its ultimate transition to an existence of ideal harmony and beauty".[106]