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 of Sophocles. Not even in Wilhelm Tell is his point of view a modern one; on the contrary, it is in every particular purely Hellenic. The subject is not conceived dramatically, but epically. The individual is marked by no special characteristic. It is merely an accident that raises Tell above the mass and makes him the leader of the movement. He is, as Goethe says, a "sort of Demos." Hence it is not the conflict between two great, irreconcilable historical ideas that is presented in this play; the men of Rütli have no sentimental attachment to liberty; it is neither the idea of liberty nor the idea of country that produces the insurrection. Private ideas and private interests, encroachments on family rights and rights of property, here provide the mainspring of action, or rather of event, which in the other dramas is provided by personal or dynastic ambition. It is explicitly signified to us that the peasants do not aim at acquiring new liberties, but at maintaining old inherited customs. On this point I may refer the reader to Lasalle, who develops the same view with his usual ingenuity in the interesting preface to his drama, Franz von Sickingen.
Thus, then, we see that even when Schiller, the most political and historical of the German poets, appears to be most interested in history and politics, he is dealing only to a limited extent with reality; and therefore it may be almost considered proved, that distaste for historical and present reality—in other words, subjectivism and idealism—were the characteristics of the whole literature of that day.
But the spirit of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller is only one of the motive powers of Romanticism. The other is the philosophy of Fichte. It was the Fichtean doctrine of the Ego which gave to the Romantic individuality its character and force. The axioms: All that is, is for us; What is for us can only be through us; Everything that is, both natural and supernatural, exists through the activity