The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III | Page 5

married to Lotte von
Lengefeld, with whom he lived most happily the rest of his days. His
letters of this period tell of a quiet joy such as he had not known before.
And then, suddenly, his fair prospects were clouded by the disastrous
breakdown of his health. An attack of pneumonia in the winter of
1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he recovered
from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse than the
first. He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went abroad that he
was dead. After a while he rallied, but never again to be strong and well.
From this time forth he must be thought of as a semi-invalid, doomed
to a very cautious mode of living and expectant of an early death. It
was to be a fourteen years' battle between a heroic soul and an ailing
body.
For a while, owing to the forced cessation of the literary work on which
his small income depended, he was in great distress for lack of money.
His wife, while of noble family, had brought nothing but herself to the
marriage partnership. And then, just as in the dark days at Mannheim in
1784, help seemed to come from the clouds. Two Danish noblemen,
ardent admirers quite unknown to him personally, heard of his painful
situation and offered him a pension of a thousand thalers a year for
three years. No conditions whatever were attached to the gift; he was
simply to follow his inclination, free from all anxiety about a livelihood.
Without hesitation he accepted the gift and thus found himself, for the

first time in his life, really free to do as he chose. What he chose was to
use his freedom for a grapple with Kant's philosophy. Today this seems
a strange choice for a sick poet, but let Schiller himself explain what
lay in his mind. He wrote to Körner:
"It is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to
philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And it
has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many
years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule.
Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the
play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is
conscious of being watched. But if I once reach the point where artistic
procedure becomes natural, like education for the well-nurtured man,
then my fancy will get back its old freedom and know no bounds but
those of its own making."
From these words we understand the nature of Schiller's enterprise--he
wished to fathom the laws of beauty. It seemed to him that beauty
could not be altogether a matter of changing taste, opinion, and fashion;
that somehow or other it must be grounded in eternal laws either of the
external world or of human nature. He felt, too, that a knowledge of
these laws, could it once become second nature, would be very helpful
to him as a dramatic poet. Whether he was right in so thinking is a
question too large to be discussed here, nor can we follow him in the
details of his esthetic speculation. The subject is too abstruse to be
dispatched in a few words. Suffice it to say that a number of minor
papers, the most important being _On Winsomeness and Dignity (Über
Anmut and Würde)_ and On the Sublime, prepared the way for a more
popular exposition of his views in the Letters on Esthetic Education
and in the memorable essay _On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry_, which
deserves to be called, next to Lessing's Laocoon, the weightiest critical
essay of the eighteenth century. The Letters contain a ripe and pleasing
statement of Schiller's philosophy in its relation to the culture-problems
of his epoch.
Along with these philosophic studies Schiller found time for much
work more closely related to his professorship of history. To say
nothing of his minor historical writings, he completed, in 1793, his
_History of the Thirty Years' War_. It appeared in successive numbers
of Göschen's _Ladies' Calendar_, a fact which in itself indicates that it

was not conceived and should not be judged as a monument of research.
The aim was to tell the story of the great war in a readable style. And in
this Schiller succeeded, especially in the parts relating to his hero, the
Swedish king Gustav Adolf. Over Schiller's merit as a historian there
has been much debate, and good critics have caviled at his sharp
contrasts and his lack of care in matters of detail. But the great fact
remains that the Defection of the Netherlands and the _Thirty Years'
War_ are