Aesthetic Poetry | Page 9

its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially
through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you
with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions
with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in
Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and sublime forehead.
After this glance at the position and chief characteristics of Schiller, it
may be useful to offer a few remarks on those of the principal works in
this volume, his Aesthetical Letters and Essays. Schiller, in his
Aesthetical Essays, did not choose the pure abstract method of
deduction and conception like Kant, nor the historical like Herder, who

strove thus to account for the genesis of our ideas of beauty and art. He
struck out a middle path, which presents certain deficiencies to the
advocates of either of these two systems. He leans upon Kantian ideas,
but without scholastic constraint. Pure speculation, which seeks to set
free the form from all contents and matter, was remote from his
creative genius, to which the world of matter and sense was no
hinderance, but a necessary envelop for his forms.
His removal to Jena in 1791, and acquaintance with Reinhold,
familiarized him with the Kantian philosophy, but he only appreciated
it by halves. The bare and bald dealing with fundamental principles was
at this time equally repulsive to Goethe and Schiller, the man of the
world and the man of life. But Schiller did not find anywhere at that
time justice done to the dignity of art, or honor to the substantial value
of beauty.
The Aesthetical Essays in this volume appeared for the most part since
1792, in the "Thalia" and the "Hours" periodicals. The first "On the
Ground of our Pleasure in Tragic Subjects" (1792), applies Kantian
principles of the sublime to tragedy, and shows Schiller's lofty estimate
of this class of poetry. With Kant he shows that the source of all
pleasure is suitableness; the touching and sublime elicit this feeling,
implying the existence of unsuitableness. In this article he makes the
aim and source of art to consist in giving enjoyment, in pleasing. To
nature pleasure is a mediate object, to art its main object. The same
proposition appears in Schiller's paper on Tragic Art (1792), closely
connected with the former. This article contains views of the affection
of pity that seem to approximate the Aristotelian propositions about
tragedy.
His views on the sublime are expressed in two papers, "The Sublime"
and "The Pathetic," in which we trace considerable influence of
Lessing and Winckelmann. He is led especially to strong antagonism
against the French tragedy, and he indulges in a lengthy consideration
of the passage of Virgil on Laocoon, showing the necessity of suffering
and the pathetic in connection with moral adaptations to interest us
deeply.

All these essays bespeak the poet who has tried his hand at tragedy, but
in his next paper, "On Grace and Dignity," we trace more of the
moralist. Those passages where he takes up a medium position between
sense and reason, between Goethe and Kant, are specially attractive.
The theme of this paper is the conception of grace, or the expression of
a beautiful soul and dignity, or that of a lofty mind. The idea of grace
has been developed more deeply and truly by Schiller than by Wieland
or Winckelmann, but the special value of the paper is its constantly
pointing to the ideal of a higher humanity. In it he does full justice to
the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful
nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason
mere reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in
which grace and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty
(structure), the last supported by power.
The following year, 1795, appeared his most important contribution to
aesthetics, in his Aesthetical Letters.
In these letters he remarks that beauty is the work of free contemplation,
and we enter with it into the world of ideas, but without leaving the
world of sense. Beauty is to us an object, and yet at the same time a
state of our subjectivity, because the feeling of the conditional is under
that which we have of it. Beauty is a form because we consider it, and
life because we feel it; in a word, it is at once our state and our art. And
exactly because it is both it serves us as a triumphant proof that
suffering does not exclude activity, nor matter form, nor limitation the
infinite, for in the enjoyment of beauty both natures are united, and by
this is proved the capacity of the infinite to be