The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III | Page 7

his singable lyrics, such as _The Maiden's Lament_, is but small. As a poet of reflection he is at his best in _The Ideal and Life, The Walk, The Eleusinian Festival_, and the more popular Song of the Bell. The first-named of these four, at first called The Realm of Shades, is a masterpiece of high thinking, charged with warm emotion and bodied forth in gorgeous imagery. Its doctrine is that only by taking refuge in the realm of the Ideal can we escape from the tyranny of the flesh, the bondage of Nature's law, the misery of struggle and defeat. Yet it is not a doctrine of quietism that is here preached, as if inner peace were the supreme thing in life, but rather one of hopeful endeavor. The Walk, one of the finest elegies in the German language, is a pensive retrospect of the origins of civilization, loving contemplation of Nature giving rise to reflections on man and his estate. The Song of the Bell, probably the best known of all Schiller's poems, gives expression to his feeling for the dignity of labor and for the poetry of man's social life. Perhaps we may say that the heart of his message is found in this stanza of _The Words of Illusion_:
And so, noble soul, forget not the law, And to the true faith be leal; What ear never heard and eye never saw, The Beautiful, the True, they are real. Look not without, as the fool may do; It is in thee and ever created anew.
In 1797--Hermann and Dorothea was just then under way--Goethe and Schiller interchanged views by letter on the subject of epic poetry in general and the ballad in particular. As they had both written ballads in their youth, it was but natural that they should be led to fresh experiments with the species. So they both began to make ballads for next year's Musenalmanach. Schiller contributed five, among them the famous Diver and The Cranes of Ibycus. In after years he wrote several more, of which the best, perhaps, are The Pledge, a stirring version of the Damon and Pythias story, and The Battle with the Dragon, which, however, was called a romanza instead of a ballad. The interest of all these poems turns mainly, of course, on the story, but also, in no small degree, on the splendid art which the poet displays. They are quite unlike any earlier German ballads, owing nothing to the folk-song and making no use of the uncanny, the gruesome, or the supernatural. There is no mystery in them, no resort to verbal tricks such as B��rger had employed in Lenore. The subjects are not derived from German folk-lore, but from Greek legend or medieval romance. Their great merit is the strong and vivid, yet always noble, style with which the details are set forth.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH IN WHICH SCHILLER WAS MARRIED]
We come back now to the province of art in which Schiller himself felt that his strength lay, and to which he devoted nearly all his strength during his remaining years. The very successful performance of the complete Wallenstein in the spring of 1799 added greatly to his prestige, for discerning judges could see that something extraordinary had been achieved. Weimar had by this time become the acknowledged centre of German letters, and its modest little theatre now took on fresh glory. Schiller had made himself very useful as a translator and adapter, and Goethe was disposed to lean heavily on his friend's superior knowledge of stage-craft. In order to be nearer to the theatre and its director, Schiller moved over to Weimar in December, 1799, and took up his abode in what is now called the Schillerstrasse. He was already working at Mary Stuart, which was finished the following spring and first played on June 14, 1800.
In Mary Stuart, as in Wallenstein, Schiller focused his light on a famous personage who was the subject of passionate controversy. But of course he did not wish to make a Catholic play, or a Protestant play, or to have its effect dependent in any way on the spectator's pre-assumed attitude toward the purely political questions involved. So he decided to omit Mary's trial and to let the curtain rise on her as a prisoner waiting for the verdict of her judges. This meant, however, according to his conception of the tragic art, a pathetic rather than a tragic situation; for the queen's fate would be a foregone conclusion, and she could do nothing to avert it. To give her the semblance of a tragic guilt he resorted to three unhistorical inventions: First, an attempt to escape, with resulting complicity in the act of the murderous Catholic fanatic Mortimer; second, a putative love on the part of Mary for Leicester,