[Illustration: MONUMENT TO SCHILLER (Berlin) Sculptor, Reinhold
Begas]
On the 22d of February, 1790, Schiller was married to Lotte von Lengefeld, with whom he lived most happily the rest of his days. His letters of this period tell of a quiet joy such as he had not known before. And then, suddenly, his fair prospects were clouded by the disastrous breakdown of his health. An attack of pneumonia in the winter of 1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he recovered from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse than the first. He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went abroad that he was dead. After a while he rallied, but never again to be strong and well. From this time forth he must be thought of as a semi-invalid, doomed to a very cautious mode of living and expectant of an early death. It was to be a fourteen years' battle between a heroic soul and an ailing body.
For a while, owing to the forced cessation of the literary work on which his small income depended, he was in great distress for lack of money. His wife, while of noble family, had brought nothing but herself to the marriage partnership. And then, just as in the dark days at Mannheim in 1784, help seemed to come from the clouds. Two Danish noblemen, ardent admirers quite unknown to him personally, heard of his painful situation and offered him a pension of a thousand thalers a year for three years. No conditions whatever were attached to the gift; he was simply to follow his inclination, free from all anxiety about a livelihood. Without hesitation he accepted the gift and thus found himself, for the first time in his life, really free to do as he chose. What he chose was to use his freedom for a grapple with Kant's philosophy. Today this seems a strange choice for a sick poet, but let Schiller himself explain what lay in his mind. He wrote to Körner:
"It is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And it has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule. Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is conscious of being watched. But if I once reach the point where artistic procedure becomes natural, like education for the well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old freedom and know no bounds but those of its own making."
From these words we understand the nature of Schiller's enterprise—he wished to fathom the laws of beauty. It seemed to him that beauty could not be altogether a matter of changing taste, opinion, and fashion; that somehow or other it must be grounded in eternal laws either of the external world or of human nature. He felt, too, that a knowledge of these laws, could it once become second nature, would be very helpful to him as a dramatic poet. Whether he was right in so thinking is a question too large to be discussed here, nor can we follow him in the details of his esthetic speculation. The subject is too abstruse to be dispatched in a few words. Suffice it to say that a number of minor papers, the most important being On Winsomeness and Dignity (Über Anmut and Würde) and On the Sublime, prepared the way for a more popular exposition of his views in the Letters on Esthetic Education and in the memorable essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, which deserves to be called, next to Lessing's Laocoon, the weightiest critical essay of the eighteenth century. The Letters contain a ripe and pleasing statement of Schiller's philosophy in its relation to the culture-problems of his epoch.
Along with these philosophic studies Schiller found time for much work more closely related to his professorship of history. To say nothing of his minor historical writings, he completed, in 1793, his History of the Thirty Years' War. It appeared in successive numbers of Göschen's Ladies' Calendar, a fact which in itself indicates that it was not conceived and should not be judged as a monument of research. The aim was to tell the story of the great war in a readable style. And in this Schiller succeeded, especially in the parts relating to his hero, the Swedish king Gustav Adolf. Over Schiller's merit as a historian there has been much debate, and good critics have caviled at his sharp contrasts and his lack of care in matters of detail. But the great fact remains that the Defection of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War are the earliest historical classics in the German language. Schiller was the first German to make literature out of history.
The year 1794 brought about a closer relation between Schiller and Goethe, an event of prime moment in the lives of both. On Goethe's return from Italy, in the summer of 1788, Schiller was introduced to him, but the meeting had no immediate consequences. In fact, Schiller had quietly made up his mind not to like the man whom, for a whole year, he had heard constantly lauded by the Weimar circle. He thought of Goethe as a proud, self-centred son of fortune, with whom friendship would be impossible. Goethe, on the other hand, was not drawn to the author of The Robbers. He looked on the popularity of the detestable play as a shocking evidence of depraved public taste and was not aware how its author had changed since writing it. So it came about that, for some six years, the two men lived as neighbors in space but strangers in the spirit. At last, however, an accidental meeting in Jena led to an interchange of views and prepared the way for the most memorable of literary friendships.
By this time Schiller had undertaken the editorship of a new literary magazine to be called Die Horen, which was to be financed by the enterprising publisher Cotta in Stuttgart. The plan was that it should eclipse all previous undertakings of its kind. But it was to eschew politics. Germany was just then agitated by the fierce passions of the revolutionary epoch, and this excitement was regarded by Schiller as ominous for the nation. There was need of esthetic education. So he proposed to keep the Horen clear of politics and try to divert the minds of men into the serener regions of letters and art. To Goethe, who also hated the Revolution, this was a highly acceptable program. So he readily undertook to write for the Horen, and thus he and Schiller soon became linked together in the public mind as allied champions of a cause. It is for this reason that the Germans are wont to call them the Dioscuri.
By way of signalizing their community of interest the Dioscuri presently began to write satirical distichs at the expense of men and tendencies that they did not like. For example:
Gentlemen, keep your seats! for the curs but covet your places,
Elegant places to hear all the other dogs bark.