The Rudolf Steiner Archive

24. Schiller’s Influence in the 19th Century

[ 1 ] Today I would like to discuss the nature of Schiller’s influence on the 19th century, and then move on to Schiller’s significance for the present, and what Schiller might mean for the future yet to come. In the concluding lecture, I will then present an overall picture of Schiller. Anyone who wishes to describe Schiller’s relationship to the 19th century cannot possibly delve into details; therefore, we will not dwell on individual events unless they have particular symptomatic significance. The aim is to show the nature of the entire cultural life of the 19th century and the place Schiller occupies within it.

[ 2 ] It is generally difficult to say just how great Schiller’s influence was on individual periods; the channels through which it flowed cannot be traced in detail. Schiller’s influence can be compared in part to that exerted by Herder at the beginning of the century, of whom Goethe said to Eckermann: “Who still reads Herder’s philosophical works? Yet everywhere one encounters ideas that he sowed.” This is a more profound impact than that associated with his name. This is also the case with Schiller. His influence cannot be separated from the impact of the great classical era. One thing, however, stands out: this influence of Schiller’s—the recognition celebrated by the national festival on November 10, 1859—by no means came about so easily or without controversy. Schiller did not win acceptance so readily. Much had to happen to allow Schiller’s spirit to flow—in a completely intangible way—especially into the hearts of the youth. Thus, the “Song of the Bell” initially provoked the most vehement opposition in Romantic circles. Caroline von Schlegel, the wife of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, called it a petty-bourgeois, philistine poem.

[ 3 ] Not only in what we encounter in the Xenien, but more generally among those known as the Romantics, we find vigorous opposition to Schiller. The Romantics saw Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as their ideal and regarded Goethe—the loyal friend who had called out these words to Schiller:

Far behind him, in the insubstantial glow
Lay that which subdues us all, the commonality ... .

[ 4 ] held up as a banner at Schiller’s expense. Schiller’s tendency to elevate moral and ethical values so highly was something they found thoroughly unsympathetic. Harsh words were directed by the Romantics against Schiller, the petty-bourgeois ethicist. Those who have grown up today in the tradition of Schiller worship will find it difficult to understand words such as those Friedrich von Schlegel used to describe him in his discussions of Schiller and Goethe. He calls Schiller’s imagination “disrupted.” There is no trace of what drew everyone’s hearts to Schiller. Around the end of the 1820s, the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller was published—that monument which Goethe erected to his friend and to their friendship. There is an infinite amount to be learned from it, and its significance for the German appreciation of art is immeasurable. Yet even here, the Romantics took a thoroughly dismissive stance. They met it with scathing derision. Just how difficult it was for Schiller’s fame to gain a firm foothold is shown by the megalomania of the figures who opposed Schiller most vehemently. A. W. Schlegel, the distinguished translator of Shakespeare, composed a sonnet about himself in which he expressed how he viewed his own relationship to the German people; in it, he speaks with a sense of self-importance regarding his poetic significance that strikes us as strange today. It concludes:

What the future will call him
Is unknown, but this generation knew him
By the name August Wilhelm Schlegel.

[ 5 ] This man is not merely an isolated phenomenon; he embodies Romantic theory. He can only be understood if one grasps what the Romantic school sought to achieve. The Romantics sought a new art, a synthesis of all artistic expression. Their theory had actually grown out of what Schiller had presented in his aesthetic essays, but it was a caricatured interpretation. Schiller’s words—“Man is fully human only when he plays”—became a sort of motto for them. Thus arose Romantic irony, which turned everything into a game of genius. The prevailing view was that being a genius was subject to human whim. When Schiller called art a game, it was because he wanted to imbue the game with the fullest seriousness. “The secret of the master’s art lies in the triumph of form over substance,” says Schiller, whereas the Romantics neglected form and demanded that the substance itself produce an artistic effect. It was this very trend—which I do not wish to criticize but rather to characterize—that Schiller fundamentally opposed. The correspondence between Goethe and Schiller was therefore, as mentioned, viewed by them as something that disturbed them. They found the artistic rules discussed therein to be trite. A. W. von Schlegel wrote malicious epigrams under the influence of this correspondence. Among themselves, the Romantics regarded one another with the greatest admiration. All of this shows how, in the first decades of Schiller’s life, his body of work provoked the most vehement opposition. On the other hand, Schiller’s personality was so formidable that even these circles paid him recognition and admiration. Thus, Ludwig Tieck wrote about Schiller’s Wallenstein in an understanding and reverent manner.

[ 6 ] We see that Schiller is gradually gaining more and more influence, that he is taking root in the hearts of the nation. Thus, while Theodor Körner is certainly the most significant figure, he is not the only one who lives entirely in the spirit of Schiller—he, too, dies a heroic death, wholly imbued with the ideals that Schiller instilled in him. He seemed destined for this through the personal friendship that bound his family to Schiller. It was a warm friendship that bound Körner’s father and Schiller; Schiller was Theodor Körner’s godfather, and it was from him that Theodor Körner purchased the “lyre” that accompanied him everywhere. Schiller has slowly but surely found his way into the hearts of the youth.

[ 7 ] Anyone who traces the development of literary style among the rebellious Romantics will encounter Schiller’s influence even in the very forms of expression he coined. Through Schiller, what might be called “German culture” in the first half of the 19th century took shape: it was shaped, as if by imponderables, by what Schiller implanted in the mind. What originated with Herder and the other Classicists flowed into the nation through Schiller’s imagery and didactic turns of phrase. Even if some may resist at the height of aesthetic cultivation, Schiller has become increasingly established. Thus his influence continues to grow. And as Schiller’s centennial approaches, it is the best among us—the nation’s finest—who celebrate him. A book about Schiller collects the speeches that were delivered at that time. And it was eminent men who delivered those speeches: Jakob Grimm, Th. Vischer, the great aesthetician, Karl Gutzkow, Ernst Curtius, Moriz Carriere, and many others. The seed that Schiller had sown had taken root.

[ 8 ] And yet it must be said that the language spoken back then, in 1859, stood in stark contrast to what was emerging as something new at that time. The emphasis on the ideal in 1859 is strangely at odds with what else came to light that year. There are four significant developments in particular that I wish to highlight here: In 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. Then there was Fechner’s Introduction to Aesthetics. Fechner has exerted a major influence on a contemporary movement: he drew on Hegel, who himself had defended Schiller against the Romantics. Vischer, who came from the Goethe-Schiller era and advocated an idealist aesthetics, finds himself at odds with what he himself had previously known; he sees this school of thought supplanted by Fechner. This is an “aesthetics from below,” whereas previously an “aesthetics from above” had been advocated. Now, one sought to recognize the essence of beauty “from below,” through small symptoms. The third work, which dealt with spatial relationships, stands in a certain contrast to Schiller’s approach. After all, Schiller had addressed the astronomers in one of his epigrams as follows:

“Don’t go on and on to me about patches of fog and the sun.
Is nature great only because it gives you something to count?
Your subject is indeed the most sublime in space,
But, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.”

[ 9 ] This third work was the “spectral analysis” discovered by Kirchhoff and Bunsen. It made it possible to identify the Sun’s constituent elements and to analyze the most distant nebulae.

[ 10 ] The fourth work was Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. There was a striking contrast between what was being discussed at the Schiller celebration at the time and what that era actually brought about.

[ 11 ] Schiller—and our classical authors in general—took a peculiar stance toward world culture. One cannot conceive of Raphael or Michelangelo without the context of their time, the era from which they were born and in which they created. Thus, Homeric art is intimately connected to what lived within everyone. Homer need only give form to the feelings and thoughts that permeated his contemporaries. It was quite different with our classics. Homer—about whom did he write? He spoke of the Greeks to the Greeks. Thus, Dante, Michelangelo, and even Shakespeare were all deeply rooted in their own times. It was different with our classical writers. Lessing was inspired by Winckelmann; he formed his views on art from Winckelmann’s writings. Lessing also drew upon Aristotle. Schiller and Goethe studied Aristotle with Lessing in a spirit of devotion. This gave rise to such an isolated ideal of beauty, an art so detached from the life of the times, especially in the poets’ later years. For Schiller’s early plays, The Robbers and Intrigue and Love, are still connected to his own life. Goethe had developed particularly during his time in Italy. Art had become an end in itself, abstractly detached from real life. Goethe and Schiller had become indifferent to their subject matter. Thus we see that Schiller now seeks his subject matter everywhere in the world. He had distanced himself from the world around him and stood on his own two feet. Nothing characterizes Schiller’s influence more than the fact that Romanticism followed in his wake, assimilating everything foreign. Translations from all areas of world literature constitute one of the main achievements of the Romantic school. Schiller’s stance on art has a decisive impact on his relationship to the 19th century.