“Every human being has his own history to work out, and that this should be thoroughly done does not depend upon the amount of talent he has, but upon the will which few bring to it unconditionally and in a cheerful spirit.”
Stolberg was of a healthier school and generation; he did not see the beauty and sentiment and romance of passion running riot, misunderstood natures, morbid hearts, vain strivings, and all the paraphernalia of a moral sick-bed. For instance, the baneful and unreal excitements of the theatre were very dangerous in his eyes, and the evil custom which even good and well-meaning people fell into of countenancing private theatricals, and letting even their young children take part in them, was a great sorrow to him. One of the evils he deprecated was the rousing of a false sympathy with imaginary woes, which ended by undermining true sympathy with our neighbor’s actual troubles; another, the vanity which play-acting fostered in young people, and the excitement which rendered them unfit for serious study and work. It also destroys the simplicity of the soul and that modesty which is the chief adornment of young souls, especially of a girl’s soul.
“Young girls,” he says, “when they have once overcome their shyness, long after the same excitement, and are always wishing to be playing a part. The truthfulness of their nature is soon lost; seeming overcomes being, every acted feeling destroys real feeling; the heart becomes cold for reality, and is only to be aroused by supposed passion.”
Public theatricals he looked upon as equally dangerous, and even wrote against them, praising Geneva for having, until it became French, refused to allow the erection of a theatre within the limits of its territory. “The special charm of the stage,” he says, “lies in its flattery of our lusts, our vanity, and our laziness.” We have often heard fine theories advanced as to the mission and morality of the drama, but as long as practice belies these theories it is impossible to look upon them otherwise than as a well-meaning Utopia. Stolberg saw the real harm done, and not the imaginary good which some high-minded and exceptional artists would fain do.
The atheistical and deist philosophy of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth were naturally repugnant to such an upright mind as Stolberg. He hated the wilful groping in the dark after a truth which the “philosophers” might have found in the Gospels, had they had the fairness to admit these on an equality, at least, with other so-called “proofs.” He called Steffen and Schleiermacher at Halle the “new Gnostics,” and compared their systems to the vain effort of the fabled Danaides to pour the ocean through a sieve.
“The name of Gnostics sounds ominous,” he says, “and brings to mind the Gnostics of the first centuries, with many of whose beliefs, indeed, the wisdom of our newest sages astonishingly coincides. Under their treatment even realities dissolve themselves in shadow, while they give to shadows the form and appearance of realities.”
Jacobi was at that time a very prominent leader of philosophy in Germany, and Stolberg mentions him many times in his correspondence with various persons, evidently as a representative man. At one time this teacher, the friend of Goethe, a sort of Medici among his disciples near Düsseldorf, where he had a beautiful house, and still more beautiful garden—now the property of the town and the appropriate scene of artists’ banquets and popular fêtes—confessed himself, in the midst of his philosophy, “a very beggar” in the true learning of the Spirit. Stolberg often alluded to this, and, when the master’s pride had long distanced the frame of mind in which this acknowledgment had been made, wrote of him: “Poor Jacobi! he was richer indeed when he called himself poor as 'a beggar.’” In 1812 he writes:
“I have just read Jacobi’s last pamphlet. The one before the last On a Wise Saying of Lichtenberg, seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. That on The Recension (Jacobi cannot help putting odd and often trivial titles to his works) has also excellent points, but the whole seems to me loose, and a windy toying with views which he borrows from Christianity, the whole system of which, however, he, as far as in him, the puny mortal, lies, seeks to weaken and annihilate. While he praises the god-like Plato, he seems to forget that this philosopher, or rather Socrates in his platonic Phædrus, evidently longs, as a hart after the fountains of waters, for a god-given revelation whose very possibility itself Jacobi, on the contrary, strives to reason away.”
Schelling’s answer to Jacobi, however, equally displeased Stolberg, and he accuses him of making Jacobi appear, “through certain wiles of speech, now an atheist, now a fanatical dreamer,” and of taking credit to himself for
“Having been the first clearly to prove the existence of God. His God has been from all eternity the greatest Force, which contained within itself, in potentia, but not in actu, that goodness and wisdom which it developed in later ages. He falls thus into Count Schmettau’s error, of a god who has raised himself from a lower state to the highest, which theory one might compare with the career of a field-marshal who has risen by degrees from the ranks.... Evidently Schelling is a man of much mind, but of overweening vanity. He speaks of Christianity with respect, and probably believes in the divine mission of Christ, whose system, however, it was reserved for him—Schelling—fully to explain. He sent this paper of his to Perthes (Stolberg’s publisher), and told him he wished me to read it, and that I should then have quite another idea of what his philosophy was, and discover that he did not hold the views I attributed to him.”