In its metrical form the poem attempts to express the lovableness of the 'eternal-womanly' by means of a lightly flowing dactylic measure, while a heavier trochaic cadence is employed to denote the nature of man:
Ehret die Frauen! Sie flechten und weben
Himmlische Rosen ins irdische Leben,
Flechten der Liebe beglückendes Band….
Ewig aus der Wahrheit Schranken
Schweift des Mannes wilde Kraft,
Und die irren Tritte wanken
Auf dem Meer der Leidenschaft.[108]
Such a scheme, in the hands of a Schiller, leads inevitably to a crescendo of rhetorical contrasts, which in the end sound somewhat flighty and forced. The poem was an object of ridicule to the Romanticists, and the elder Schlegel wrote a saucy parody of the first two strophes.[109]
The few poems that found a place in the 'Almanac' of 1797, along with the luxuriant crop of Xenia, are relatively unimportant. The difference between the sexes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed in the Horen, was expounded anew by Schiller in distichs. It is very much the same story as the 'Dignity of Women', the distich form lending itself beautifully to those antitheses which were Schiller's delight. Then there was a poetic riddle, called 'The Maiden from Afar',—a slight affair, but pretty in its way; a 'Lament of Ceres', in trochaic tetrameters, and a 'Dithyramb', wherein a poet is visited by all the Olympian gods and cheered with a draught of Hebe's joy-giving nectar. These classicizing poems, which purport to express modern feeling in the terms of Greek mythology, sound now a little hollow and conventional. The vein had been worked to excess even in Schiller's day, and it is no wonder that the Romanticists pined for something new. The best of them all is 'The Eleusinian Festival', called originally 'Song of the Citizen', in which Schiller returns to his favorite theme—the origin and progress of civilized society. The climactic thought of the twenty-seven sonorous stanzas is contained in the Kantian oracle of Ceres:
Freiheit liebt das Tier der Wüste,
Frei im Äther herrscht der Gott,
Ihrer Brust gewalt'ge Lüste
Zähmet das Naturgebot;
Doch der Mensch, in ihrer Mitte,
Soll sich an den Menschen reihn,
Und allein durch seine Sitte
Kann er frei und mächtig sein.[110]
In the spring of the year 1797, as 'Hermann and Dorothea' was approaching completion, Goethe and Schiller were led to an interchange of views concerning the distinctive qualities of epic poetry. Their discussion begot an interest in the kindred type of the ballad, which may be regarded as a miniature epic in a lyrical form. The result was that both poets began to make ballads for the next year's 'Almanac'. Schiller contributed five: 'The Diver', 'The Ring of Polycrates', 'The Cranes of Ibycus', 'The Errand at the Furnace' and 'The Knight of Toggenburg'. In subsequent years he wrote three others: 'The Pledge', 'Hero and Leander' and 'The Count of Hapsburg'. To these may be added 'The Glove ', which was not called a ballad because not written in uniform stanzas, and 'The Fight with the Dragon ', which was called a 'romanza'.
These poems, taken as a whole, owe nothing whatever to the folk-song. The popular ballad, which had once fascinated Goethe and Herder and Bürger, and the Göttingen poets generally, seems never to have appealed to Schiller in any notable degree. If we except 'The Count of Hapsburg', his ballad themes are all exotic, that is, they do not deal with German legend or history or superstition. The suggestions came generally from out-of-the-way reading, and in one or two cases his exact source has not been certainly identified. The tales have no odor of the soil, no local color. They make no use of the supernatural, the gruesome or the uncanny. They are not wild roses, but jaqueminots cultivated with an aesthetic end in view. Their aroma is distinctly literary, and they are all eminently serious. Not a smile is provided for in the whole list. There is no element of mystery about them. The passions and sentiments illustrated are of the universal kind. And just as vague, uncanny and bizarre feelings play no part, so there is no resort to verbal tricks, such as meaningless repetitions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language is dignified and classical. Their great merit is the vivid and strong imaginative coloring with which situations and actions are portrayed. While in no sense folk-songs, they have always been great favorites with the German people.
In 'The Diver' the stress falls upon the portraiture of the raging deep and its awful horrors. It is a rhetorical Prachtstück, which has done good service to many an elocutionist and declaiming schoolboy. Schiller himself had never seen the sea, nor any body of water remotely resembling the Charybdis of the poem. Observation, as he humbly confessed, had given him nothing more awesome than a mill-dam,—the rest was Homeric and imaginative; wherefore it no doubt gratified him when Goethe reported from Schaffhausen, after a visit to the cataract, that the line
Und es wallet, und siedet, und brauset, und zischt,
was scientifically correct. 'The Glove' merely versifies a simple incident of a brave knight whose courage is put to an inhuman test by his lady-love; he brings her glove from among the 'horrible cats', and then contemptuously cuts her acquaintance. In these two, the earliest of the ballads, description of the situation preponderates over the epic element, and there is no 'idea' except to narrate an extraordinarily brave action. In 'The Ring of Polycrates' one can discern progress in the mastery of the ballad form, though the subject was none of the best. Based upon a story in Herodotus, it is a poetic setting of the ancient idea that excessive good fortune provokes the anger of the gods and portends disaster. Strangely enough Schiller's poem breaks off with the recovery of the ring from the fish's belly, and the consequent warning and departure of the Egyptian guest. One would expect an additional stanza or two, showing how the forebodings of Amasis were presently realized.