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 FRIEDRICH
SCHILLER was born at Marbach, 10th November 1759. Whilst at the
Duke of Würtemberg's Military Academy at Stuttgart, he wrote
The Robbers (1781); a year afterwards it was performed
on the stage with the result that he, then a subaltern officer,
was placed by the Duke in arrest, and then received an order
thenceforth too abstain from literature. Rather than comply Schiller
fled by night across the border. This Hegira committed
him to a literary career as the only one open to him, and, working
with the general movement of the time, determined the spirit
and theme of his early productions--Freedom. For many years he
led the painful life of a penniless exile, and but for generous
benefactors (some of them strangers unknown to him in foreign
lands), he must have succombed. From poetry he turned to prose
for a livelihood, and, fresh from his drama of Don Carlos
(1787), he wrote his Revolt of the Netherlands. This procured
him a Chair of History with a nominal stipend at the University
of Jena, and there he composed his second historical work, The
Thirty Years' War. In the interval (1790), he had married
Charlotte von Lengefeld, and four years later he entered on his
friendship with Goethe--the
two events which helped to give him inward happiness and to stimulate
his spiritual activity in a period which otherwise, from poverty
and ill-health, was one of sore trial. At length his time came.
In 1799 he was established by the Duke of Weimar at his Court
on a modest pension. The closing years of his brief life he spent
at Weimar with no drawback but the constant one of shattered
health, in a happy home, amid public honour, side by side and
hand by hand with Goethe; the two labouring incessantly by production,
by criticism, by the conduct of the court stage, and every practical
endeavour to ennoble the drama and elevate their country by art.
Schiller's finest and most mature works are his Wallenstein
(1799), and his William Tell (1804). He also wrote many
beautiful ballads and minor poems (Song of the Bell, To Joy,
The Walk, etc...). He died at Weimar, May 1805, aged only
45.
Schiller was an idealist. Hence a tendency to unreality, to
a certain feverish exaltation both in language and sentiment,
to impassioned rhetoric as a substitute for poetry. But what
gifts, what virtues were his! A nobility of soul, proof against
poverty, dependence, ill-health, success: an enthusiasm for his
art, but ever with a view to the welfare of mankind, an abiding
sense of the "priest-like function" of the poet. If
indeed the poet's mission is to present pure and elevating ideals
of life, Schiller may take high rank. Freedom from oppression,
temporal and spiritual; freedom from sloth, ignorance, and vice:
love of the family, unity in the State, feeling for the race,
benevolence in the sovereign, loyalty in the statesman, the citizen,
and the friend; the courage of the warrior, the blessings of
peace and ordered life; the self-sacrificing aspirations of youth,
of lovers, and all ingenuous souls; the nobility of woman--these
are the themes which Schiller sang with glorious vehemence: ancient
ideas, intelligible, indeed familiar to all, but needing to be
revived for the depressed generation in which his lot was cast.
Schiller's dramas were a trumpet-call to what was best and noblest
around him: his verses stirred the spirit which, when the time
came, was to achieve the liberation of his country: and they
have justly found a lasting home in the German heart.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
