Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Schiller by Williams Witte (Blackwell, Oxford, 12/6)
Schiller by H.B. Garland (Harrap, 15/-)

By a curious accident, the Goethe Bicentenary evoked only one new English monograph on Goethe, Professor Barker Fairley's A study of Goethe (1948), but two on Schiller, the first for over forty years. Though both are the work of university teachers of German literature, they are addressed not only to their pupils but to the general public, all quotations for instance being given in German for the one group and in English for the other. Both aim at a revaluation of Schiller as an unduly neglected writer. 'Misunderstood by his countrymen, who have tried in defiance of the facts to make a consciously national poet of him,' says Professor Garland, 'and neglected by other countries because rhetoric translated so easily turns to bombast, Schiller has still to meet a just valuation. The originality of his aesthetic thought is a minor aspect of his genius. Before all else he is one of the great playwrights of the European tradition.' Dr. Witte does not dispute Schiller's greatness as a dramatist, though he too deplores his false admirers and is in general more critical than Professor Garland, but he lays special stress on the 'vital message for our own age' which he finds in Schiller's philosophical poems and aesthetic writings and draws attention to the human interest and the quality of the writing in his letters. It is interesting to note that a recent German monograph, by Melitta Gerhard, which appeared a year later than these English works, also points to the relevance for our own time of Schiller's idea of an aesthetic education and attempts a critical revaluation of the plays and ballads which made Schiller's name.

It is inevitable that writers on Schiller to-day should tend to be apologetic, we feel, when we remember how shockingly his writings have been abused by his countrymen for purposes of political propaganda, partly perhaps merely for the same reason which leads our advertisers to exploit nursery-rhymes, because they are familiar to all, but partly also because of the twists that could be given to that ambiguous word 'freedom' which he uses so lavishly. Before 1848 it was interpreted as freedom of the rising middle class to attain to what they felt to be their rightful position in politics, so that in many small states his plays came to be looked upon by the censor as dangerously democratic. After the submergence of the liberals it often meant rather freedom of the fatherland from foreign domination, as it had done earlier, during the Wars of Liberation. At the centenary celebrations in 1859 Schiller was extolled as a self-made man and a leader in Germany's civilising mission. For more intellectual circles he stood for that inner freedom which was all a cultured man cared about, no matter what demands the state might make. So the interpretation varied from age to age and from group to group, until in Nazi times, finally, the official line was to praise Schiller as one of the few political poets of the Germans, their foremost educator for the responsibilities of a world-power, in contrast to the cosmopolitan hedonist, Goethe.

If that is what Schiller has to live down in Germany, in England it is remembered against him—by those few who remember him at all—that for Carlyle he had been one of the pillars of that 'noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany' which Carlyle championed against France in 1870. In the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century the idealistic humanism of the German Classics found many admirers among English readers. Schiller was a supreme example of German plain living and high thinking. The reaction began even in the 'seventies, partly for political reasons, obvious enough in the age of Bismarck, partly because of the fact that the richer and more powerful it grew, Germany, though still pre-eminent in science and scholarship, steadily lost ground in literature and art to the heartless, sneering, God-forgetting French,' as Carlyle had called them, as well as to the newly discovered Russians and Scandinavians. Schiller continued to be read chiefly by the older generation, or in those schools and universities where German was taught, as one of the German Classics. School editions of his works abounded, but few even of the professed Germanists had the heart to write about him at any length, until the centenary of his death (1905) called forth Professor J. G. Robertson's rather perfunctory sketch, 'Schiller after a century.'

The boldness of these two new biographers is therefore much to be admired, for it is no easy task to 'sell' Schiller to the modern English reader. Even the student of German is apt to have had a plethora of Schiller at an age when he could see in him only a longwinded dead classic, whose archaic language was a museum of figures of speech and grammatical and stylistic curiosities with Greek names, important in examinations. Few had the good fortune to see him acted; so that his plays never acquired for them, as they did for German boys and girls, whatever their elders might be writing about him, the romantic charm that attaches itself to the first plays one is allowed to see. The enthusiasm of an adolescent German audience for The Robbers is (or used to be) something that has to be seen to be believed, the kind of excitement our children reserve for Peter Pan, and performances of Wilhelm Tell in Switzerland are equally memorable occasions of infectious enjoyment.

Yet it is a common experience with those who occupy themselves seriously with German literature to find that as they get to know Schiller better he somehow acquires a hold on them, however unsympathetic they may have been towards him at first. Though his work is strangely mixed, there is something impressive about it. It is seldom, however, for purely aesthetic reasons that we admire him. If we like him, we put it down to his personality, or his aesthetic philosophy, or his ideas about education through art. We find his plays striking but full of faults, of his poems only the philosophical ones and one or two ballads give unmixed pleasure, and even in his best creative writing of any kind we fear that he may at any minute lapse into rhetoric, not merely where it is dramatically, appropriate but because routine is triumphing, we feel, in a tired man, over artistic sensibility. He seldom astonishes us with unique felicities of expression such as abound in Goethe. Too often his language is abstract and colourless and his metaphors tired. It is a plain fact, as Schiller himself saw, that his poetic talent was on a lower level than Goethe's, yet it is a level which compares favourably with all but the highest in German literature, and Schiller left none of it unused.

If we find Schiller's work uneven, we must remember that he was more dependent on the public than Goethe, who could afford to snap his fingers at it. Schiller was usually either writing for literary periodicals, almanachs and the like for his daily bread, or he was providing plays to be acted immediately by a particular theatre, Mannheim at first, then Weimar or Berlin. He could not think, like Goethe's poet in the 'Prologue on the stage,' simply of posterity, but like the Merry Andrew there, he needed a full house. Except for a small elite, it was a thoroughly sentimental public, with the confused sense of values of half-educated people in an age of transition, sure only of the rights of the heart, the virtues of family life. The plays of Iffland and Kotzebue reflect it even more clearly, but what the general public seemed to like best in Schiller was what he had in common with Iffland, the stagy and sentimental features. It is clear from some of the papers which Schiller left, particularly his Perkin Warbeck fragments, that he consciously calculated the effect of each scene, and the astonishing continuity of his success in Berlin proves that he did so to good effect, but at the cost of some concessions.

The appeal of Schiller's plays, from the outstanding success of The Robbers onwards, went, however, far beyond the sentimental. In spite of their obvious immaturities they clearly have from the first the stuff of drama in them, for Schiller had one gift at least which Goethe lacked, he knew what made a situation effective on the stage. Professor Garland probably claims too much for him when he says that 'his creative imagination—though not his intellect—is of Shakespearian type. He discards his own identity and enters in spirit into the separate and divergent characters of his work.' Many of his young heroes strike us as being variants of a single type, with many traits of the author himself. His motivation seldom has Shakespeare's supreme naturalness. The main situations are striking, but the connecting links are far-fetched. As Coleridge put it :
'Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.' Yet Coleridge would have agreed with Hazlitt (quoted by Dr. Witte) on The Robbers: 'The first reading of that play is an event in one's life which is not to be forgotten,' as we see from his early sonnet to Schiller, Bard tremendous in sublimity,' and for those who read the play early enough, Hazlitt's remark is still true, so surely does it appeal to the boyish idealism which delights in a Robin Hood.

There is no doubt that Schiller's plays, those of his maturity as well as those of his youth, have dated, as Shakespeare's have not. They had an emotional and intellectual appeal for his time, and for a generation or so later, which they will never have again, though their dramatic qualities may still assure them of success where the acting tradition they have created is unbroken, as in Germany itself. Perhaps the chief reason for this partial loss of effectiveness is the very fact which German critics sometimes make their chief claim to fame, that they are philosophical tragedies, or at least dramas of ideas, 'not the intense drama of passion,' in Coleridge's judgment, 'but the diffused drama of history.' The drama of passion may move any age, but there is usually a time limit to the appeal of ideas and of philosophies of history.

Ideas were however themselves a passion with Schiller, and that is what saves his best poems, the philosophical ones, as Dr. Witte clearly brings out. We cannot share Schiller's enthusiasm for friendship and for human brotherhood now, more's the pity, as Beethoven could. Outside the Ninth Symphony The Song to Joy falls flat. But his passion for the intellectual life and for the creation and appreciation of beauty can communicate itself to us, and it makes poems like The Ideal and Life deeply moving. All his friends tell us that he lived so much for ideas that there was an atmosphere almost of saintliness about him, which lifted him as Goethe says in his lament, the Epilogue to Schiller's 'The Bell,' high above the mean and commonplace. Carlyle was quite right then in feeling that there was something ascetic and dedicated about Schiller. It reveals itself first, somewhat crudely, in the revolutionary fervour of his Robbers and Cabal and Love, indictments of a mean-spirited age and of the creaking institutions of the ancien régime. Rousseau had evoked here the idealistic enthusiasm of a young man, fresh from the university, for the emancipation of the middle class, so that the plays were recognised by the French, after the Revolution, as heralds of its spirit. They have lost much of this appeal now, but they have saving dramatic qualities in the theatre, showing as they do 'not merely characters reacting to events which happen to them and around them,' as Dr. Witte says, 'but character and interplay of characters creating events'; and for its realistic presentation of contemporary political and social problems the second of them remained unique in Germany until the time of the Naturalists.

In his 'classical' plays, from Wallenstein onwards, Schiller's primary aim was no doubt the purely aesthetic one of making the maximum use of the dramatic form. He was trying to create in one generation a truly German form of drama, worthy to stand beside that of Greece, France and England, and he conducted ceaseless experiments with features derived from these earlier classicisms, with little in the way of a German tradition to help him. But he had to hold his contemporary audience, with consequences pointed out above, and for his own satisfaction and that of his more intelligent listeners, he had to motivate the actions of his characters by an appeal to first principles, to a 'philosophy of life.' In those years, we must remember, the theatre was coming to be taken very seriously in Germany for its supposed influence on conduct, and the romantic notion was constantly gaining ground that any author worth his salt must invent his own religion or working philosophy. We can see now that this was asking for impossibilities. To provide a classicism that would last, Schiller needed the support of a tradition. Lacking it, his dramas, in spite of all the merits to which Professor Garland and Dr. Witte draw our attention—the latter's study of Wallenstein in particular is extremely thorough and persuasive—are magnificent improvisations in the world of what he called 'aesthetic semblance,' excellent theatre, triumphs of virtuosity, but not finally satisfying interpretations of life and character. Compared with Shakespeare's great characters, figures in the round, Mary Stuart and the Maid of Orleans are, as it were, in low relief, and Wallenstein is a kind of Janus. Compared with Oedipus Tyrannus, The Bride of Messina appears a synthetic product, full, as Dr. Witte says, of 'questionable artifices.'

Both the new studies of Schiller pay some attention to his prose writings. Professor Garland presents the life and all the principal works chronologically, without stressing problematical features, writing as he is for readers who will include sixth-form schoolboys. As a first introduction his book is admirable. Dr. Witte varies the perspective and introduces illuminating comparisons, ranging widely over European literature. His study culminates in a third section, devoted to the playwright. In the first section he makes good Goethe's claim, that Schiller's letters were amongst the very best of his writings, and he makes skilful use of them as an autobiography. In the second he discusses, along with the poems, as clearly as is possible in the short space at his disposal, the aesthetic views of Schiller, dwelling more on Shaftesbury's influence than on Kant's, and the Letters on education through art, the conclusions of which he compares with some ideas of A.N. Whitehead. Schiller's aesthetics are highly speculative, what Saints-bury calls 'metacritical.' He is one of the 'terrible simplifiers' who stimulate but do not win our lasting assent. His ideas on aesthetic education, though speculative too, are still worthy of close attention. Something similar to them may be found to-day in such different writers as Mr. Herbert Read and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Rooted as he was in the Enlightenment, Schiller rejected otherworldliness and the idea of original sin, and he believed in progress. The ideal civilisation would be attained in time, he thought, perhaps in a very long time, by the help of education, and it was what he called art that had been, and would continue to be, the chief humanising factor in man's long history. Such a view can only be maintained by stretching the meaning of the ambiguous term art—but Schiller's philosophy in general suffers from his inexact use of words—and it seems less plausible in an age which is not so sure of its inherited scheme of ethical values as Schiller's contemporaries still remained in Germany, without realising how much they owed to previous ages and to other influences than art.

In all his aesthetic writings, as in his plays and poems, Schiller is predominantly concerned with the idea of human freedom. In the last resort it is perhaps as a living example of the power of 'Geist,' of the mind over the body and over circumstances, that he chiefly impresses us. This is what Thomas Mann makes the key-note of his impressionistic Schiller-study, A Heavy Hour, and it is not so different from Carlyle's view as it might seem. It may be a poor recommendation of Schiller for a time when philosophers speak of mind as 'the ghost in the machine,' but theirs will be a poor philosophy if, in its study of human behaviour, it takes no account of lives such as his.