F ORTY-SIX years ago Germany celebrated with extra- ordinary enthusiasm Schiller's
hundredth birthday ; this year, the centenary of his death, she takes the opportunity to recall once more the memory of her Suabian poet. A Schiller festival has always something of the character of a family gathering. Wherever Goethe or Heine is com- memorated, we all have a right to be present ; they are an international possession, Germany's contribution to the poetical wealth of the world. But in Schiller—"our Schiller," as his countrymen fondly call him—the foreigner has no part; he is their very own, more to them even now on the whole than his great contemporary who was so much better a poet but not nearly so good a German.
Born in the village of Marbach, in Wiirtemberg, in 1759, younger by ten years than Goethe, Schiller was educated, much against his will, under the Duke's eye in the ducal Academy, and left it to join a regiment quartered at Stuttgart as surgeon. His first drama, The Robbers, was written while he Was still chafing under the rigid monotony of the College, and was played successfully at Mannheim in 1782. The young author fell into disgrace with his arbitrary Sovereign for having gone to see the "performance without leave, and was consequently forbidden to hold any communication with foreigners—that is, with any one outside the duchy—and to write on any but medical subjects. This tyrannical prohibi- tion drove him into exile, and he passed through some years of arduous struggle and anxiety before his "History of the Netherlands Revolt" interested Duke Carl August of Weimar, Goethe's patron, and brought him an Historical Professorship at Jena. In 1790 he married his admirable wife, Charlotte von Lengefeld, and not long after his health, never robust, began to fail. He died at Weimar, where he had gone to be near Goethe and the theatre, on May 9th, 1805.
"The story of my life," said Schiller, "is the story of the peojile. I have known " ; and seldom has a man of letters dis- played so true a genius for friendship. The tall, gaunt, some- what formidable young man—" as forbidding as a precipice," said an unwelcome visitor—whose attitude was invariably sublime, as Goethe declared, even at the tea-table, had a limitless craving for sympathy, and he was never without warm-hearted and loyal comrades who followed his affairs of the heart and his poetical projects with equal devotion. His friendship with Goethe in its serene harmony is perhaps unmatched in literary annals. The poets were extremely unsympathetic at first; the violence and bad taste of The Robbers disgusted Goethe, whose Olympian airs exasperated
the younger and less successful writer. "That man, that Goethe, is always in my way," he wrote, "for ever reminding me how hardly Fate has used me I believe he is an egoist to an extraordinary degree ; even with his dearest friends he never quite lets himself go." But intereet in the art they both loved drew them together in spite of radical differences of temperament, and for more than ten years no discord marred their constant intercourse. "When first I knew Schiller, my spring returned, my life broke out anew into blossom and leaf," said Goethe; and when his friend died they did not know how to tell him, and he read the news in their faces. "So he is dead P" was all he said ; and far into the night they heard him weeping his irreparable loss.
To suppose that the ardent homage which is paid to Schiller at the present moment through the length and breadth of Germany is paid to the poet would be to do a grave injustice to German taste. If every patriotic German has still somehow to come to terms with the author of William Tell, as a German writer declares, it is not mainly on account of his services to litera- ture. Much more popular in the first half of the century than Goethe, because more completely one with his age, Schiller has paid for that immediate triumph. He was not a lyric poet except in such rare moments as that which gave us that very moving lament for a lost joy, "I too was born in Arcady." Indeed, he openly disdained the lyrical gift, and deciding that the drama was the highest form of poetry, he had no difficulty in believing himself a dramatist. His four earlier plays, The Robbers, Cabal and Love, Piesco, and Don Carlos, were written in the seven years (1780-1787) before the French Revolution; and after an interval of historical and critical work (1787-1794) they were followed by The Maid of Orleans, Mary Stuart, Wallenstein, The Bride of Messina, and William Tell. But from the first he was a moralist, a preacher, before he was a poet. Into his earlier plays he crammed all his youthful discontent and impatience, his resentment of social injustice, of his own limitations. "I am sick," he cries, "of this inkstained century." But even in The Robbers be insists that his audience shall not only "admire the author, but respect the man," and hopes that in the career of his heroic brigand "the youth may view with horror the end of reckless vice and the man observe how Providence often uses the wicked as its instruments." His later plays are more serious, more sober, and not less deliberately didactic. "There are only two places for the preacher," he says towards the close of his life, "the pulpit and the stage." As a poet Schiller's day is over. The sonorous rhetoric to which an earlier generation responded so fervently thrills us no more ; we study him with respect rather than with interest; there is not a single scene, hardly a single passage, that seizes and possesses the reader. It is as a moral influence of the highest nature that be survives; as an eager and generous spirit, incapable of any selfish or sordid aim, a passionate lover of goodness and truth, nobly confident (on the eve of the battle of Jena ) of their ultimate triumph. In the lines which Goethe laid on his friend's grave, in speaking of the powerlessness of the every day, "the common master of us all," to check or chill his lofty aspira- tions, he reveals the secret of Schiller's vitality. In the words of his own Posa in Don Carlos, he was always "a citizen of centuries yet to come." "When I think," he wrote in one of his letters, "that perhaps a hundred years hence, when my dust has long been scattered, men will still bless my memory and think of me with admiration and regret, then, dearest, I rejoice in my poetic vocation, and am reconciled to God and my lot, which is often so very hard." His wish has been fulfilled, though not perhaps exactly as he would have chosen. It is as the eternal idealist that he lives to-day in the hearts of his countrymen.
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