dressed as the master-bellfounder, was to shatter the pasteboard mould with a blow of his hammer, and there was to be disclosed, not a bell, but a bust of Schiller. The Kotzebue party, however, had reckoned without their host, that is to say, without Goethe. In all Weimar there was only one bust of Schiller, that which stood in the library. When, on the last day, a messenger was sent to borrow it, the unexpected answer was given, that never in the memory of man had a plaster cast lent for a fête been returned in the condition in which it had been sent, and that the loan must therefore be unwillingly refused. And one can imagine the astonishment and rage of the allies when they heard that the carpenters, arriving at the Town Hall with their boards, laths, and poles, had found the doors locked and had received an intimation from the Burgomaster and Council that, as the hall had been newly painted and decorated, they could not permit it to be used for such a "riotous" entertainment.
This is only a small piece of provincial town scandal. But what is really remarkable, what constitutes the kernel of the story, is the fact that the whole company of distinguished ladies who had hitherto upheld the fame of Goethe (Countess Henriette von Egloffstein; the beautiful lady of honour and poetess Amalie von Imhof, at a later period the object of Gentz's adoration, whose fifty gold guldens had been wasted, &c., &c.) took offence, and deserted his camp for that of Kotzebue. Even the Countess Einsiedel, whom Goethe had always specially distinguished, went over to the enemy. This shows how little real hold the higher culture had as yet taken even on the highest intellectual and social circles, and how powerful the man of letters still was who concerned himself with real life and sought his subjects in his surroundings.
There had, most undoubtedly, been a time when Goethe and Schiller themselves were realists. To both, in their first stage of restless ferment, reality had been a necessity. Both had given free play to nature and feeling in their early productions, Goethe in Götz and Werther, Schiller in Die Räuber. But after Götz had set the fashion of romances of chivalry and highway robbery, Werther of suicide, both in real life and in fiction, and Die Räuber of such productions as Abällino, der grosse Bandit, the great writers, finding the reading world unable to discriminate between originals and imitations, withdrew from the arena. Their interest in the subject was lost in their interest in the form. The study of the antique led them to lay ever-increasing weight upon artistic perfection. It was not their lot to find a public which understood them, much less a people that could present them with subjects, make demands of them—give them orders, so to speak. The German people were still too undeveloped. When Goethe, at Weimar, was doing what he could to help Schiller, he found that the latter, on account of his wild life at Mannheim, his notoriety as a political refugee, and especially his pennilessness, was regarded as a writer of most unfortunate antecedents. During the epigram war (Xenienkampf) of 1797, both Goethe and Schiller were uniformly treated as poets of doubtful talent. One of the pamphlets against them is dedicated to "die zwei Sudelköche in Weimar und Jena" (the bunglers of Weimar and Jena). It was Napoleon's recognition of Goethe, his wish to see and converse with him, his exclamation: "Voilà un homme!" which greatly helped to establish Goethe's reputation in Germany. A Prussian staff-officer, who was quartered about this time in the poet's house, had never heard his name. His publisher complained bitterly of the small demand for the collected edition of his works; there was a much better sale for those of his brother-in-law, Vulpius (author of Rinaldo Rinaldini). Tasso and Iphigenia could not compete with works of such European fame as Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue; Goethe himself tells us that they were only performed in Weimar once every three or four years. Clearly enough it was the stupidity of the public which turned the great poets from the popular path to glory; but it is equally clear that the new classicism, which they so greatly favoured, was an ever-increasing cause of their unpopularity. Only two of Goethe's works were distinct successes, Werther and Hermann und Dorothea.
What were the proceedings of the two great poets after they turned their backs upon their surroundings? Goethe made the story of his own strenuous intellectual development the subject of plastic poetic treatment. But finding it impossible, so long as he absorbed himself in modern humanity, to attain to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks, he began to purge his works of the personal; he composed symbolical poems and allegories, wrote Die Natürliche Tochter, in which the characters simply bear the names of their callings, King, Ecclesiastic, &c.; and the neo-classic studies, Achilleis, Pandora, Palæophron und Neoterpe, Epimenides, and the Second Part of Faust. He began to employ Greek mythology much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a universally understood metaphorical language. He no longer, as in the First Part of Faust, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were supposed to be individuals. His own Iphigenia was now too modern for him. Ever more marked became that addiction to allegory which led Thorvaldsen too away from life in his art. In his art criticism Goethe persistently maintained that it is not truth to nature, but truth to art which is all-important; he preferred ideal mannerism (such as is to be found in his own drawings preserved in his house in Frankfort) to ungainly but vigorous naturalism. As theatrical director he acted on these same principles; grandeur and dignity were everything to him. He upheld the conventional tragic style of Calderon and Alfieri, Racine and Voltaire. His actors were trained, in the manner of the ancients, to stand like living statues; they were forbidden to turn profile or back to the audience, or to speak up the stage; in some plays, in defiance of the customs of modern mimic art, they wore masks. In spite of public opposition, he put A. W. Schlegel's Ion on the stage—a professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides, suggested by Iphigenia. Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel's Alarkos, an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless schoolboy, and was certain to be laughed off the stage.[3] To such an extent as this did he gradually sacrifice everything to external artistic form.
It is easy, then, to see how Goethe's one-sidedness prepared the way for that of the Romanticists; it is not so easy to show that the same was the case with Schiller. Schiller's dramas seem like prophecies of actual events. The French Revolution ferments in Die Räuber (the play which procured for "Monsieur Gille" the title of honorary citizen of the French Republic), and, as Gottschall observes, "the eighteenth Brumaire is anticipated in Fiesko, the eloquence of the Girondists in Posa, the Cæsarian soldier-spirit in Wallenstein, and the Wars of Liberation in Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Wilhelm Tell." But in reality it is only in his first dramas that Schiller allows himself to be influenced, without second thought or ulterior purpose, by his theme. In all the later plays the competent critic at once feels how largely the choice of subject has been influenced by considerations of form. Henrik Ibsen once drew my attention to this in speaking of Die Jungfrau von Orleans; he maintained that there is no "experience" in that play, that it is not the result of powerful personal impressions, but is a composition. And Hettner has shown this to be the relation of the author to his work in all the later plays. From the year 1798 onwards, Schiller's admiration for Greek tragedy led him to be always on the search for subjects in which the Greek idea of destiny prevailed. Der Ring des Polykrates, Der Taucher, and Wallenstein are dominated by the idea of Nemesis. Maria Stuart is modelled upon the Œdipus Rex of Sophocles, and this particular historical episode is chosen with the object of having a theme in which the tragic end, the appointed doom, is foreknown, so that the drama merely gradually develops that which is inevitable from the beginning. The subject of the Jungfrau von Orleans, in appearance so romantic, is chosen because Schiller desired to deal with an episode in which, after the antique manner, a direct divine message reached the human soul—in which there is a direct material interposition of the divinity, and yet the human being who is the organ of the divinity can be ruined, in genuine Greek fashion, by her human weakness.
It was only in keeping with his general unrealistic tendency that Schiller, though he was not in the least musical, should extol the opera at the expense of the drama, and maintain the antique chorus to be far more awe-inspiring than modern tragic dialogue. In Die Braut von Messina he himself produced a "destiny" tragedy, which to all intents and purposes is a study in the manner
