The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller

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Title: The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller
Author: Calvin Thomas
Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9403] [This file was first
posted on September 29, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE LIFE
AND WORKS OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER ***

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THE LIFE AND WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
By
Calvin Thomas
Professor in Columbia University

To
Eleanor Allen Thomas

Herzelibe frouwe min, Got gebe dir hiute und iemer guot! Kunde ich
bas gedenken din, Des haete ich willeclichen muot.

PREFACE
I have wished to give a trustworthy account of Schiller and his works
on a scale large enough to permit the doing of something like justice to
his great name, but not so large as in itself to kill all hope and chance of
readableness. By a trustworthy account I mean one that is accurate in
the matters of fact and sane in the matters of judgment. That there is
room for an English book thus conceived will be readily granted, I
imagine, by all those who know. At any rate Schiller is one of those
writers of whom a new appreciation, from time to time, will always be
in order.
I have thought it important that my work, while taking due note of
recent German scholarship, should rest throughout on fresh and
independent study. Accordingly, among all the many books that have
aided me more or less, I have had in hand most often, next to the works
of Schiller, the collection of his letters, as admirably edited by Jonas.
Among the German biographers I owe the most to Minor, Weltrich and
Brahm, for the period covered by their several works; for the later years,
to Wychgram and Harnack. Earlier biographers, notably Hoffmeister
and Palleske, have also been found helpful here and there.
Of course I have not flattered myself, in writing of a man whose
uneventful career has repeatedly been explored in every nook and
cranny, with any hope of adding materially to the tale of mere fact. One
who gleans after Minor and Weltrich and Wychgram will find little but
chaff, and I have tried to avoid the garnering of chaff. One of my chief
perplexities, accordingly, has been to decide what to omit. If there shall
be those who look for what they do not find, or find what they did not
expect, I can only say that the question of perspective, of the relative
importance of things, has all along received my careful attention.
Thoroughness is very alluring, but life is short and some things must be
taken for granted or treated as negligible. Otherwise one runs a risk, as

German experience proves, of beginning and never finishing.
My great concern has been with the works of Schiller--to interpret them
as the expression of an interesting individuality and an interesting
epoch. It is now some twenty years since I first came under the
Weimarian spell, and during that time my feeling for Schiller has
undergone vicissitudes not unlike those described by Brahm in a
passage quoted at the very end of this volume. At no time, indeed,
could I truthfully have called myself a "Schiller-hater", but there was a
time, certainly, when it seemed to me that he was very much
overestimated by his countrymen; when my mind was very hospitable
to demonstrations of his artistic shortcoming. Time has brought a
different temper, and this book is the child of what I deem the wiser
disposition.
For the poet who wins the heart of a great people and holds it for a
century is right; there is nothing more to