gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

482 / FRIEDRICH vON SCHILLER
twentieth- century writers. They may disagree on the timing, but all emphasize that
this shift in consciousness— a dissociation of sensibility— manifests itself in the
operations of individual thought and feeling and in the style and structure of poetry.
In the selection below from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller touches
on the sense of acute cultural crisis that impels his arguments about the priority of
the aesthetic. He summons up an optimistic vision of the artist preparing “the shape
of things to come,” even as he testifies to the ordeal of being an artist in a hostile
environment. Defy the world’s opinion: this is Schiller’s advice to those wondering
whether they can endure in the midst of an unsympathetic and corrupt age. The
artist should be true to the heart’s “noble impulses”: “Impart to the world you would
influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to
fulfilment.” Through our inner potential, we revitalize ourselves and reinvigorate
(and sometimes disturb and unsettle) others.
The weakness of this position is that Schiller separates “the rhythm of time”
(which he trusts) from the very different rhythm of the world of Utility that, he
concedes, now rules but that he believes can be transcended. Others grappled more
directly with the comprehensive changes driven by the accelerating power of capitalism,
described by the Scottish- born historian (and biographer of Schiller) Thomas
Carlyle in “Signs of the Times” (1829): “Not the external and the physical alone is
now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. . . . Men are grown
mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Not just karl marx and
friedrich engels but the Victorian critics and social reformers John Ruskin and
William Morris responded to this alienation in ways that Schiller— whose aesthetic
works are grounded less in historical reference and analysis than in idealization of
the harmonious wholeness of the ancient Greeks— could not.
Yet Schiller, a prophet of the alienation that would pain many later authors,
believed that this alienation could be overcome through the civilizing power of literature,
enabling a higher Ideal to triumph over the degraded principles and practices
to which persons were currently (and mistakenly) loyal. A passionate advocate
for individual and po liti cal freedom, Schiller gave everything to his art; “the Muses
drained me dry,” he wrote to Goethe (1795), and, after a long period of poor health,
he died in his mid- forties.
bibliography
German editions of Schiller’s writings include the Säkular- Ausgabe, edited by Eduard
von der Hellen (16 vols., 1904– 05), and the Horenausgabe, edited by C. Schüddekopf
and C. Hofer (22 vols., 1910– 26), which includes many of his letters. German
scholars have noted that many En glish translations of Schiller’s texts are unreliable.
Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein (1800) is important. The translation and edition
of On the Aesthetic Education of Man by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby
(1967) is outstanding. A single- volume edition is Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology
for Our Times (trans. Jane Bannard Greene et al., 1959). For a selection of Schiller’s
writings on criticism and aesthetics, see Essays, edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel
O. Dahlstrom (1993).
A good biographical point of departure is William Witte, Schiller (1949). See also
John Simon, Friedrich Schiller (1981), and T. J. Reed, Schiller (1991). For critical
analysis, consult S. S. Kerry, Schiller’s Writings on Aesthetics (1961); Charles E. Passage,
Friedrich Schiller (1975); Juliet Sychrava, Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics
(1989); and Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics
(1991), a well- contextualized treatment of Schiller’s work as a dramatist, poet, and
literary theorist. Patrick T. Murray, The Development of German Aesthetic Theory
from Kant to Schiller: A Philosophical Commentary on Schiller’s “Aesthetic Education
of Man,” 1795 (1994), places Schiller’s aesthetics in their literary and national
contexts. See also Linda Marie Brooks, The Menace of the Sublime to the Individual