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PREDERICK SCHILLER.

troops and the English, in which the former were always victorious, and the red coats running in a most ignominious style. As a work of art I doubt whether these frescoes have a rival in the world; the trees were cabbages, the figures bodiless, and Tippoo himself was represented riding on an elephant which was barely half as large as the warrior himself.

Soon after leaving Mysore we entered the precinct of that terrible jungle, the Wynard. Here, as had been preconcerted, we all travelled together -heavy baggage, palanquins and all; and this so retarded our progress, that it occupied us nearly six days before we, emerged from that dense,

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majestic forest, many of whose trees were absolutely so lofty that their uppermost branches entwining with each other, were barely perceptible, and the grandeur of such a canopy for miles and miles, where the sun, perhaps, through half a century had never penetrated, is more than my feeble pen can adequately describe. It was here, however, that we first came upon a real stirring and perilous adventure, one that had well nigh proved fatal to, at least, one of our party; and as the anecdote is full of thrilling 'interest, from the almost miraculous escape of my brother-in-law, I shall endeavour in the succeeding chapter to do justice to the incident.

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THE last sixty or seventy years have witnessed a remarkable resurrection of the Teutonic intellect. Before that time Germany had produced three, and only three, men of pre-eminent greatness in their several spheres-Luther, Kepler and Leibnitz. During the greater part of the eighteenth century, German authorship was enthralled by French influence, and was productive only of dullness and inanity. In this long winter of literary sterility, the first harbinger of the coming spring was Jacob Bodmer. Among the mountains of Switzerland, this true-sighted poet had nurtured his spirit into a love of nature, and by the study of Shakespere and Milton, had expanded his sympathies, and enuobled his tastes. Bodmer conducted a crusade against the prevailing frigidity, and maintained, in opposition to the writers of the

so-called classical school, that the true object of poetry was not solely to concern itself with the form or the verbal niceties of expression, but to appeal to the heart and the imagination. After Bodmer came Klopstock, who, with more fervour and pious sincerity, rendered a greater service towards the emancipation of the German mind by the publication, in 1748, of the first three cantos of the "Messiah." Mawkish, tawdry and tedious as that poem is, it was yet a signal step in advance. The theme is elevated, and the execution hearty and enthusiastic, although, from defective capacity, it is marred by many imperfections. To Klopstock succeeded Wieland, Lessing and Herder, and, noble triad-Richter, Goethe and Schiller. Freed from the pedantic trammels of preceding writers, by their freshness, force, and originality,

THE ROBBERS.

these intellectual magnates have created for Germany a literature whose influence is deeply felt beyond the confines of the Fatherland.

There is hardly a department of thought or literary effort to which recent German authorship has not applied itself—and that, too, with a singularly decisive effect and success. In particular, in the departments of theology, philosophy, criticism, and the drama, Germany among her host of distinguished writers can boast names of undying renown. We have a high sense of the inherent nobility of the literary character. The man of letters, if he has attained to the right idea of his calling, is, as he has been well termed, an apostle of the beautiful and the true. It is his to blend truth with beauty in thought and expression, and, by his compositions or creations, not merely to seek to amuse and to solace, but to elevate and to purify. Genius has been too frequently narrowed and debased by paltry motives and low aims; too little alive to the intrinsic dignity of its nature and function. In Frederick Schiller we have a writer of the noblest type. Richly endowed, cultured, enthusiastic, devoted, aspiring ever after a higher excellence, and aiming at greater and still greater achievements, he consecrated himself with a martyr's zeal to literary labour, and by his hightoned sentiments and immortal creations has added largely to the world's intellectual wealth and made mankind his debtors.

It was Schiller's lot to come under the patronising care of the Grand Duke of Wurtemberg, and the discipline of his Stuttgard Academy. Irksome was the toil imposed by studies uncongenial to his poetic temperament, while his spirit revolted against the mechanical movements of a prescribed military routine. Every moment which he could stealthily seize was devoted to the German popular authors. The writings of Klopstock and Wieland, and the "Goetz von Berlichingen" of Goethe, which fell in his way, he eagerly devoured. Among his chief favourites were Plutarch and Shakespere. Five dreary years of disgust and irritation were passed in the Stuttgard School, and Schiller had reached his nineteenth year. At this age he began in secret to compose his celebrated play, the "Robbers." This drama is the embodied revolt of his nature against the formalities and restraints which fettered his impulses. Cribbed and thwarted, as he had so long been, he gathered up his yet untried powers for a grand crowning act of retaliatory self-assertion. Deprived of scope and freedom, his mind had gained strength in beating against the barriers of its prison-house, and at length, as with a voice of thunder, it hurled abroad the language of its pent up vehemence and defiance.

Schiller, a mere boy of nineteen, secluded as he had been, could know little of the actual world of mankind; and he himself confesses that his drama is a monster-and that his "chief fault was in presuming to delineate men two years before he had met with one. Yet, with all its crudity, the

energy of the "Robbers" is irresistible, and its perusual not easily to be forgotten. In Karl von Moor, the robber chief, we have a being endowed with a noble, generous spirit, but at war with the conventional forms and the petty meannesses of society. Proud and impatient, he is involved in perplexity, and hurried into crime. Francis is a miscreant, of the type of Iago or Richard the Third-a piece of undiluted, unrelieved villainy. Both characters however, being the conceptions of mental immaturity, are crude, overstrained, and improbable.

The soliloquy of Karl on the banks of the Danube, amid the the repose of evening, and as the sun is setting behind the hills, is a plaint which could proceed only from a noble and generous nature, lost through crime. Though deficient in taste and truthfulness, it it a terrible outburst of passion and remorse-it thrills by its intensity, and touches by its pathos. It is the language wrung from a spirit at the moment when it realises its ruin, and that return to virtue is no longer possible. The wailings of the robber recalls Milton's representation of the arch-fiend when stirred with emotion; tears stream from his burning baleful eyes. In Aird's "Devil's Dream" we have the same appalling spiritual state vividly pourtrayed :And Sin had drunk his brightness since his heavenly days went by ;

Shadows of care and sorrow dwelt in his proud immortal

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gleam,

And God was still against his soul to plague him with a dream.

Great was the sensation produced throughout Germany by the publication of the "Robbers." Even France and England were stirred. Conventional decorum was shocked-the Frenchified literary taste of the period was offended, and arbitrary power, in the person of the Grand Duke, frowned displeasure. The ideas of his Highness as to the literary proprieties had been formed according to the improved standard of the French school.

We may, therefore, conceive his astonishment and disgust at the extraordinary production which had emerged from his own model Academy. It is said that he ordered the young author into his presence, and reprimanded him, signifying to him the Ducal will that he should abandon poetry and stick to his medical studies.

The "Robbers" was represented in the Theatre of Manheim on the 12th of January 1782. Schiller was present, and in the signal success of the play he discovered his vocation, and realised his power. "If Germany," he writes to a friend cognise in me a dramatic poet, I must date the a few days afterwards, "shall one day reepoch from the last week." In the drama "Fiesco,” soon afterwards produced, he discovers a striking

DON CARLOS.

advance in his knowledge of human nature, and in the principles of dramatic composition. It is clearer, calmer, and more condensed than the "Robbers," and shorn of the passionate ravings, declamatory fury and exaggeration, which characterise that immature production. The action is rapid, and the characters well delineated. We are impressed by the noble-minded Doria, and affected by the constancy, womanly tenderness, and sad fate of Leonora. The ambition of her adored Fiesco projects its blighting shadow over the felicity of her love. "Ah! my Fiesco," she ardently pleads," in the stormy atmosphere that surrounds a throne, the tender plant of love must perish. The heart of man, e'en were that heart Fiesco's, is not vast enough for two all-powerful idols. Love has tears, and can sympathise with tears. Ambition has eyes of stone, from which no drop of tenderness can e'er distil. Love has but one favoured object, and is indifferent to all the world beside. Ambition, with insatiable hunger, rages amid the spoils of nature, and changes the immense world into a dark and horrid prisonhouse-Return, Fiesco! Conquer thyself! Renounce! Love shall indemnify thee." In the republican fanaticism of Verrina, we have the foreshadowing of the spirit and narrowness of the Madame Roland school of French revolutioniststhe worship of an idea, dazzling, but unattainable and delusive.

"Don Carlos" was completed and given to the world in 1786, and greatly enhanced the fame and repute of its author. Hitherto, he had received the plaudits of the multitude, now there was tendered to him the homage of the discriminating. "Carlos," from its great length, befits the closet rather than the stage. As a work of art it is superior to his former productions; while by its grandeur of conception and imagery, it elevates the mind into the solemn region of the sublime. Schiller reveals to us the Court of Philip II. of Spain, in its stately and lonely magnificence-and embodies to our view the aged and despotic monarch, "the lord of Christendom," consumed with jealousy, inexorable and suspicious. Alva, his blood-thirsty minion-Don Carlos, the heir to the throne, high spirited, blighted by misfortune, overmastered by passion, and crushed by a relentless fate-and the Marquis Posa-a noble type of manhood, with lofty thoughts and heroic aspirations in the cause of humanity. Posa is a relief and a contrast to the abject servility and fanaticism of courtiers and inquisitors. His heart bleeds for the suffering subjects of Spain in the Netherlands, and he embarks in the grand, yet hazardous enterprise of freeing Flanders from the yoke of despotic cruelty. A reformer fallen on an unprepared age, he becomes a victim to his zeal and enlightenment. After the publication of "Don Carlos," Schiller abandoned fictitious literature for a time. Strangely imaginative, he was not yet "of imagination all compact;" his intellect was equally keen and powerful, and

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required fit aliment of growth and expansion in the realities of history. The fragments entitled the "Revolt of the Netherlands" and the "History of the Thirty Years' War” were the scarcely adequate results.

From the publication of "Don Carlos" five years had elapsed, devoted to historical studies, to the Kantian philosophy, and to Esthetical enquiries. During this period were composed some of his finest poems and essays. It was a time of varied culture, and bore ripe fruits. Schiller emerged from his studious retirement with a mind enriched and expanded-stored with fresh facts, and master of new principles, and with a deeper and clearer insight into the nature and scope of creative art. He began to meditate fresh literary achievements, and projected an epic poem; but this, although he had fixed first on Gustavus Adolphus, and afterwards on Frederick the Great, as the hero, he did not attempt. It was to the drama that he returned-and the works subsequently produced bear the stamp of their author's increased mental resources and maturity. The Thirty Years' War" supplied a subject; he began his play of "Wallenstein." To this task he brought all the stores of his knowledge-all the ripeness of his powers. So great was the compass embraced-of time and events-that years were required to reduce the materials to order, and out of the chaos to evolve the completed structure. This play has been characterised as the greatest dramatic work of the eighteenth century -it may rather be said the greatest since Shakespere. Of all Schiller's writings it embodies the largest amount of intellect. It is the grandest, the most colossal.

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In the first part we are brought into contact with the unreflecting gaiety and the rude life of the soldiers of Wallenstein. In the second, entitled "The two Piccolomini," we are introduced to his generals--unscrupulous men of war-and come under the shadow of his own portentous character. In the third part, the daring and guilty designs of his mad ambition develop themselves, and we also witness the march of the retributive power until it overtakes and destroys the traitor in the acme of his treason. In all essentials there is a strict adherence to historic fact. Wallenstein is presented with his superstitious weaknesses and his childish faith in astrology. We see how a great strong spirit, having abandonod the guiding star of duty for the worship of self, becomes the prey of irresolution, and the spirit of inconsistency

and how through frequent dallyings with temptation, free will is enchained, and no power remains to stay the guilty progress to dishonour and ruin. As a relief to the monrnful and tragic character of the drama-like the glad sunshine of day gilding troubled waters-is the mutual love of the brave Max Piccolomini and Thekla, the daughter of Wallenstein.

In the tragedy of "Mary Stuart," one of the least successful of his pieces, Schiller enters upon

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the ground of English history. The subject is a sad and an exhausted one. All the interest concentrates around the imprisoned Queen. No attempt is made to palliate or deny Mary's guilt; but our sympathy is excited by her sufferings. There is much scope for the pathetic, which Schiller has fully improved-and the play abounds in many touching passages. The scene of the execution is replete with tenderness. We forgive Mary's crimes on witnessing her sorrows and her fate. She claims and obtains our pity, and even love-while we detest her haughty rival, Elizabeth, for her cruelty and dissimulation. The "Maid of Orleans" was the next dramatic undertaking. In Joan of Arc, Schiller lighted upon a congenial theme. From the foul aspirations of Voltaire, in his "Pucelle," he has triumphantly vindicated the shepherd maiden. In the pages of the German, she stands forth in her spotless purity, native grandeur, and heroic devotedness, at once a glorious creation, and one of the noblest historic characters. This drama is full of elevated poetry, and appeals to every true and tender feeling of the heart. William Tell" was Schiller's last complete work, and in it his poetic genius and artistic execution culminated. No where else is he so entirely lost in his subject-so fresh-so clear, and so true to nature. In its perusal we breathe an air of reality—we feel as if transplanted to the lakes, crags, and mountains of Switzerland, and at one with its free-soiled peasantry in their impatience of tyrant thrall, and in their struggles for their birth-right freedom.

Ideal and Actual Life," we have the poetic expression of the essence of his "Letters on Esthetic Culture." Indeed, it is only by the careful study of these letters, characterised as they are equally by depth of thought and elevation of sentiment, that we obtain an insight into the higher moods of Schiller's mind. The letters were addressed to the Duke of Holstein-Augustenberg, and were written during the period of the Reign of Terror in France, when, as a philosophic inquirer, he might have been expected rather to deal with the political problems which seemed not to be in a fair way of a satisfactory practical solution. He appears to have thought that this was required of him, for he justifies the choice of his subject by undertaking to show that, in order to solve the question of liberty in experience, nations, like individuals, must pass through the æsthetic, "since it is beauty which leads to freedom." The records of the past, however, show that as nations have become refined, as art has flourished, and beauty been expressed, they have declined in moral worth, and in political importance. Schiller does not attempt to meet this objection to his theory, by showing that art in itself is not, and cannot be, the cause of national decay, and that its influence, fairly exercised, is necessarily elevating and beneficial; but takes other and higher ground, boldly alleging that beauty, as he conceives it, is different from that which has been realised and embodied in the past. He accordingly tasks himself with the endeavour to deduce it from the reason, and to show that it is an ideal beauty, absolute and independent of all bygone and partial manifestations. We make no attempt to follow him as he advances in his "dim and perilous way" of metaphysical investigation. At the twenty-fourth letter he has reached a table land of clearer and more tangible thought, and ve would simply avail ourselves of the advantage which it presents to make a brief extract :—

There may be distinguished three different moments or epochs of development through which the single man, as well as the whole race, must pass necessarily, and in a prescribed order, if they would complete the whole circle of their destiny. It is true, the single periods can now be protracted, now abridged, through accidental causes, which lie either in the influence of external things, or in man's free caprice, but none can be entirely omitted; and the order, too, in which they follow each other, can neither be inverted by nature nor the will. Man in his physical condition, endures only the force of nature, he frees himself from this force in the aesthetical, and governs it in the moral condition.

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the translator of our author's poems and ballads into English, remarks that "Schiller's poetry is less in form than substance-less in subtile elegance of words than in robust healthfulness of thought, which, like man himself, will bear transplanting to every clime." And that the power and spirit of the original have not evaporated in the process of rendering, Sir Edward's faithful and spirited translation affords proof enough. These "Poems and Ballads" have been arranged into three divisions, as expressive of the intellectual epochs of their author's life. The poems of the first series partake of the free utterance and natural energy which mark the "Robbers," while some of the second betoken the doubts, internal struggles, and sceptical questionings through which Schiller passed, ere he reached the ultimate haven of intellectual repose. To the third period belong his more matured and finished pieces, such as the "Divers," the "Lay of the Bell," and the "Walk." In Schiller's poetry are imaged the stages and conditions of his mental and moral being. It is a varied transcript of himself, revealing at one time his internal perplexities, and at another embodying his noblest thoughtsalways, however, marked by earnest, elevated pur--and in the harmony of all three states-beauty pose. His poetry, to be fully appreciated, must be read in the light of his philosophy and ardent aspirations.

In "The Artists," and more fully in "The

Schiller's great aim is to show that the natural and necessary course of humanity is to rise from the physical or untutored state, through the æsthetical or contemplative, to the moral or free state. In the due subjection of the physical to the moral

is evolved and manifested. The term beauty is to be understood in a wide sense, and seems to mean the full and spontaneous expression or outcome of humanity, in its highest mode of existence. The

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realisation of this ideal beauty is the attainment | away from the sordid tastes, the keen and practica

of truth-the ultimate object of pursuit, and the
good of human destiny.

She, the Urania, with her wreath of rays,
The glory of Orion round her brow;
On whom pure spirits only dare to gaze,
As Heaven's bright habitants before her bow;
And round her splendour the stars wink and fade;
So awful, reigning on her sunlit throne-
When she diswreaths her of her fiery crown,
Gliding to Earth (Earth's gentle Venus) down,
Smiles on us but as Beauty; with the zone
Of the sweet graces girded, the meek youth
Of infancy she wears, that she may be
By infants comprehended, and what we
Here, but as Beauty gazed on and obeyed,
Will one day meet us in her name of Truth."

Whatever amount of sound philosophy may be at the basis of Schiller's speculations, we cannot but think that he greatly errs in evolving so lofty a superstructure of attainment out of the possible of merely human capability and endeavour, and in taking no account both of the fact and manner of the supernatural action of divine power, in moulding the character, and in exalting the aims and life of man.

instincts, the worldly spirit, and the distorted and inadequate culture of our modern days of trade, commerce, and varied pursuit ; and surveying the past, finds in ancient Greece a spontaneous and harmonious expression of the totality of humanity, which elicits his admiration, and awakens the power of song. There is in the "Gods of Greece" no intentional offence against Christianity -no designed or scoffing disrespect to its spirit. and claims; the poem is rather the embodied regret that God-like humanity, as the poet viewed it, has passed away from earth. Though, doubtless, it is offence and disrespect enough that Schiller evades or overlooks the One who is the only embodiment of a perfect humanity.

Cold, from the north, has gone

Over the flowers the blast that kill'd their May;
And to enrich the worship of the One,

A universe of gods must pass away!
Mourning, I search on yonder starry steeps,
But thee no more, Selene, there I see!
And through the woods I call, and o'er the deeps,
And-Echo answers me!

Home to the poet's land the gods are flown,
Light use in them that later world discerns,
Which, the divine leading-strings outgrown,
On its own axle turns.

Holding, as we firmly do, the doctrine of the radical depravity of our species, we believe that the capacity to discern beauty or truth, in its The poem entitled "The Artists," Sir Edward highest form, must spring from a moral rectifica- Lytton has justly termed, "a lofty hymn in honour tion wrought by an agency above and beyond of intellectual beauty." Art, according to Schiller, man; and, consequently, that the free or moral is man's peculiar possession-a possession shared state, in natural order, does not follow but pre- neither by angel nor brute, and is the grand incedes and produces the aesthetic. The eye of the strument of elevation, and of deliverance from soul cannot perceive the ideal and lofty beauty in- sordid utilitarianism. The true artist, be he poet, dicated by Schiller, until its faculty of vision is painter, sculptor, or whoever, by means of the purged. Truth and moral loveliness are appre-beautiful, addresses our emotional natures, is not hended and possessed in degree by him only whose sent into his age to delight it merely, but to dignify spirit has been renovated by an extrinsic super- and to purge it. human influence.

But

We have already said that Schiller, like many other earnest and susceptible minds, passed through the ordeal of doubt, and attained what but few perhaps really do, a haven of philosophic repose. The pure ethics of the Gospel fell with a ready acceptance into his heart, and produced a due effect on his sentiments and opinions. Schiller's religious system, so far as it took body and form, sprung out of the emotional and intellectual elements of his mind, and expressed itself in the glorifying of man as man-never in his humiliation and abasement. The escape from doubt, to the calmness and satisfaction which philosophy affords, may sooth the intellect, and even, in a way, exalt the moral nature, but it is by a mode vitally different from that through which the abasing processes of true Christianity peremptorily require the regenerate to pass.

Schiller's religious creed might be summed up in the one word-humanity. His faith took the simple form of a belief in man-in his culture, inherent nobility, and high destiny.

Dissatisfied with civilisation, as producing an inharmonious and partial developement-he turns

O, Sons of Art! unto your hands consigned
(O, heed the trust! O, heed it and revere !)
The liberal dignity of human kind,
With you to sink, with you to re-appear!
Rise, ye free sons of the free Mother, rise!
Still on the light of beauty sun your eyes!
Still to the heights that shine afar aspire,
Nor meaner meads than those she gives desire.
Ever the Perfect dwells in whatsoe'er
Fair souls conceive, and recognise as fair;
Borne on your daring pinions soar sublime
Above the shoal and eddy of the time;
Far-glimmering on your wizard mirror, see
The silent shadow of the Age to te!

As to the refining and elevating capacity of art, there is no room for doubt; for whether we view it in the grandeur of Gothic architecture, or in the elegance and symmetry of the Grecian temple— whether in the picture of the Transfiguration, in the Apollo Belvidere, or the "Paradise Lost"we yield to its elevating influence. Still, art being purely human, can neither itself rise, nor raise us, above the level of its human origin and source. As a potent auxiliary in the culture and development of man, we willingly accord it a place; but not as the chief or only means.

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