The Correspondence with Goethe.
Most fortunately, however, we are not left either in the cold with the Æsthetic treatises, or in hot water with the Bürger review and the Xenien. The Letters of Schiller and Goethe[[749]] are a twice-blest book. Nowhere does one like Goethe so much as in them: nowhere is it possible to understand, and therefore to like, Schiller better than in parts of them. It is true that the sense of his being fundamentally a prig of genius remains—that even the sense of his having something of that “bad blood,” of which Milton, Racine, and perhaps Wordsworth, are the chief other examples among persons of genius of the Upper House, remains likewise. But Goethe meets him with such an amiable camaraderie, he softens his asperities with such a never offensive but always effective blend of cordiality and irony, that, after the first few letters, Schiller begins to talk almost like a man of this world, and yet neither loses his predominant interest in literature. It is true that when we come to the Xenien the offence returns. It is not pleasant to find two men of genius calmly plotting how to put, into the smallest space and the neatest form, most envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness towards the greatest number of persons obnoxious to them. And Schiller’s remarks on the necessity of “giving it hot” to a certain unlucky Reichardt, who had had the impudence not merely to praise the Horen lukewarmly, but to praise the wrong things in them, can only be matched with Macaulay in reference to Croker, while there is much more deliberate malice in them. It is no excuse to say that severe criticisms are sometimes necessary. The reviewer is a policeman who may sometimes have to use his staff: the Xenien-writer is a bravo who chooses the stiletto. But enough of that matter.
And, as has been said, the book as a whole is very interesting to us. Schiller’s criticisms on Meister never reach the concentrated justice of Novalis (v. inf.) But they are by no means without parrhesia: and the picture they give us of the successive results of the instalments, on an eagerly receptive and extraordinarily sensitive literary wit-gauge, is not readily to be paralleled, except by the companion remarks of Goethe on Wallenstein later. And Goethe’s practised Weltweisheit deprives his observations of the naïve character which Schiller always, for good or for bad, retains. The latter, however, always retains likewise his porcupine attitude towards contemporary men of letters who are not quite of “ours.” From Richter to Bouterwek he cannot away with them in one sense, and would like to away with them very much in the other. Where this disturbing element does not come in, he is better; but seldom quite satisfactory. He was right not to think much of Darwin, and not wrong to think something of Restif’s Monsieur Nicolas: but this last, at least, has little to do with literature. His Shakespeare criticisms are always informing from the ethical-æsthetic side; they hardly even attempt the literary. But the elaborate character of the Index to these letters, which exhibits all the literary judgments of both the poets under separate reasoned catalogues, makes it almost unnecessary to pursue our usual process of sampling, the task being done to hand.
The Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.
Of the definite critical treatises, by far the most important for our purpose (the “Æsthetic Education” being omitted, on the showing of its chief admirers, as of a more general bearing) is the tract on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” It has even been claimed for this, that here, for the first time, is a distinction made out between ancient and modern poets, on the score of their objective and subjective character respectively. The distinction is not quite real, and it is not critically made out. In support of the first demurrer (which is something too wide for us here), let me request anybody who really knows the Greek choruses, and especially those of Æschylus, to say whether, on his soul and conscience, he can deny them “sentimentality” in the good sense, subjectivity in any. Goethe and Browning will be hard put to it to fight this prize against the choruses of the Agamemnon alone. The other point is more relevant. At the time[[750]] when Schiller wrote this essay we know, from a subsequent letter of his[[751]] to Goethe, that he had not read the Poetics; this is dangerous, but it is not fatal. What is, as it seems to me, fatal is that nearly all his literary citations are of a general and second-hand character. I can see nowhere any direct evidence of “contact” with the texts. He knows Kant at first hand certainly; he probably knows Lessing and Herder; he of course knows Kleist and Wieland. But did he know, at first hand and in the originals, besides the ancients, Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Ariosto, Rabelais and Molière? I cannot see much evidence of it.
In fact, though I know well to what danger I am, once more, exposing myself, I must once more say that Schiller does not seem to me a great critic, or even a good one. He was a man of letters who, as such, possessed genius, and a philosopher who at least had a very great talent for philosophy; and so much of a critic as can be made by these two qualifications he was. To put it in other ways, and perhaps to go even a little further, he was, as a merely a priori critic, or a critic furnished with such a posteriori knowledge as can be supplied at second-hand, very clever indeed. He could spin out of his interior more criticism, and of a better quality, than most men could. But he was excessively deficient in Love—that first and greatest fulfilling of the law of the true critic: and, partly without his own fault (for, as is well known, his life was short and not altogether favoured by fortune), partly by it, he did not give himself, or was not given, sufficient opportunity to warm his hands before that immortal fire of literature which each generation keeps burning, to soften what is harsh, feed what is starved, anoint and cheer and clean what is stiffened and saddened and soiled in the nature of man. The best of life might yet have been for him in criticism, as in other things: the Versöhnung, the time of the “calmed and calming mens adepta,” might have come. But it did not so please the Gods; and the most illogical form of playing Providence perhaps, though not the most mischievous and impertinent, is to refuse to accept the fact of what the Gods did not choose to do.
Others: Bürger.