The Life of Friedrich Schiller | Page 7

loved with the passionateness
of a first affection; but he could not live by it; he honoured it too highly
to wish to live by it. His prudence told him that he must yield to stern
necessity, must 'forsake the balmy climate of Pindus for the Greenland
of a barren and dreary science of terms;' and he did not hesitate to obey.
His professional studies were followed with a rigid though reluctant
fidelity; it was only in leisure gained by superior diligence that he could
yield himself to more favourite pursuits. Genius was to serve as the
ornament of his inferior qualities, not as an excuse for the want of
them.
But if, when such sacrifices were required, it was painful to comply
with the dictates of his own reason, it was still more so to endure the
harsh and superfluous restrictions of his teachers. He felt it hard enough
to be driven from the enchantments of poetry by the dull realities of
duty; but it was intolerable and degrading to be hemmed-in still farther
by the caprices of severe and formal pedagogues. Schiller brooded
gloomily over the constraints and hardships of his situation. Many
plans he formed for deliverance. Sometimes he would escape in secret
to catch a glimpse of the free and busy world to him forbidden:
sometimes he laid schemes for utterly abandoning a place which he
abhorred, and trusting to fortune for the rest. Often the sight of his
class-books and school-apparatus became irksome beyond endurance;
he would feign sickness, that he might be left in his own chamber to
write poetry and pursue his darling studies without hindrance. Such
artifices did not long avail him; the masters noticed the regularity of his
sickness, and sent him tasks to be done while it lasted. Even Schiller's

patience could not brook this; his natural timidity gave place to
indignation; he threw the paper of exercises at the feet of the messenger,
and said sternly that "here he would choose his own studies."
Under such corroding and continual vexations an ordinary spirit would
have sunk at length, would have gradually given up its loftier
aspirations, and sought refuge in vicious indulgence, or at best have
sullenly harnessed itself into the yoke, and plodded through existence,
weary, discontented, and broken, ever casting back a hankering look
upon the dreams of youth, and ever without power to realise them. But
Schiller was no ordinary character, and did not act like one. Beneath a
cold and simple exterior, dignified with no artificial attractions, and
marred in its native amiableness by the incessant obstruction, the
isolation and painful destitutions under which he lived, there was
concealed a burning energy of soul, which no obstruction could
extinguish. The hard circumstances of his fortune had prevented the
natural development of his mind; his faculties had been cramped and
misdirected; but they had gathered strength by opposition and the habit
of self-dependence which it encouraged. His thoughts, unguided by a
teacher, had sounded into the depths of his own nature and the
mysteries of his own fate; his feelings and passions, unshared by any
other heart, had been driven back upon his own, where, like the
volcanic fire that smoulders and fuses in secret, they accumulated till
their force grew irresistible.
Hitherto Schiller had passed for an unprofitable, a discontented and a
disobedient Boy: but the time was now come when the gyves of
school-discipline could no longer cripple and distort the giant might of
his nature: he stood forth as a Man, and wrenched asunder his fetters
with a force that was felt at the extremities of Europe. The publication
of the Robbers forms an era not only in Schiller's history, but in the
Literature of the World; and there seems no doubt that, but for so mean
a cause as the perverted discipline of the Stuttgard school, we had never
seen this tragedy. Schiller commenced it in his nineteenth year; and the
circumstances under which it was composed are to be traced in all its
parts. It is the production of a strong untutored spirit, consumed by an
activity for which there is no outlet, indignant at the barriers which

restrain it, and grappling darkly with the phantoms to which its own
energy thus painfully imprisoned gives being. A rude simplicity,
combined with a gloomy and overpowering force, are its chief
characteristics; they remind us of the defective cultivation, as well as of
the fervid and harassed feelings of its author. Above all, the latter
quality is visible; the tragic interest of the Robbers is deep throughout,
so deep that frequently it borders upon horror. A grim inexpiable Fate
is made the ruling principle: it envelops and overshadows the whole;
and under its louring influence, the fiercest efforts of human will
appear but like flashes