Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), June 28, 1845, vol. 1, no. 26, p. ??

[page 408:]

REVIEWS.

THE ÆSTHETIC LETTERS, ESSAYS, AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS or SCHILLER: Translated, with an Introduction, by J. Weiss. Boston, Charles C. Little, and James Brown; 1845, pp. 33 and 379.

Among the many flattering titles which the American people has, at due intervals, seen fit to bestow upon itself, that of a “reading people” is, perhaps, the one which has been most insisted upon and most tenaciously clung to. From certain unsightly pieces of rottenness in our social fabric, our claim to be the “freest and most enlightened nation on the face of the earth,” though rigorously asserted by fourth of July orators, and swallowed unsuspiciously by fourth of July audiences, has come to be generally doubted by the thoughtful; in spite of, now and then, a Philadelphia symphony or opera, which are, indeed, reservoirs of noise vast enough, if conveyed by proper streporiducts, to supply all the musical composers of the world, we are hardly yet on a level with Germany in taste or enthusiasm for music; our poetry is said to be conveyed, in surreptitious phialsfull, from the English Helicon; in painting and sculpture, we have no recognised standard of authoritative judgment, and bestow sums upon figurehead cutters and sign-painters which might have saved from starving worthy rivals of Phidias and Titian. But who can deny to us the glory of being a “reading people?” Who can penetrate into our kitchens, and confute the theory we have established, that our cooks first read, ere they singe their fowls with the sybilline leaves of neglected epics and tragedies, which sputter, as they burn, with a Byronic exultation of scorn for the unappreciating world which shall, too late, lament their incremation? Who shall deny that our chambermaids draw a refining influence from the fugitive verses which, with an Orphean potency, have taught the savage locks of their mistresses to wander into hyacinthine curls? Who but a Pyrrhonist would doubt the existence of those hordes of Nomadic bipliopoles who haunt our railway stations and steamboat-wharves, arrayed, with emblematic propriety, in that last stage of cloth, ere it is transmuted into material for the author and the printer?

No, we are emphatically a reading people; but, before making a boast of it, we should do well to consider what we read. Flocks of pamphlets on green, and blue, and yellow wings, hover over the land — obscene volucres — to snatch at and be-slime, like harpies, whatever is pure and healthfully-nourishing for the soul. Under the very eaves of our churches and colleges, these filthy creatures hang their nests, prolific of infamy and vice; they perch upon the roofs of our lyceums and lecture-rooms; they disturb the hitherto peaceful recesses of our hamlets and villages with hoarse screams for their prey of garbage and ordure. Literature, in the true sense of the word, is dead; and the only creatures who can be said to live by it are the vermin who riot and feast upon its decay. That this state of things is mainly attributable to the want of an international copyright law, we have never had a doubt. It is of the literature which is supplied to the mass of the people that we speak — for this the most important. Bad food will produce disease as well in the spiritual as the material world. What a fascinating sound has these two words, “cheap literature!” We fondly imagine the ploughman drinking inspiration from his fourpenny Burns, and the cobbler hanging entranced over Bunyan's prose translation of Dante. The blacksmith, we think, will swing his sledge to the cadence of a shilling Milton, and Miss Barrett will become the solace of the factory girl for sixpence! Grogahops will be displaced by bookstalls, and, instead of “best liquors at three cents a glass,” we shall see “Bacon for six cents,” “Spenser at a shilling,” “Don Quixotte ten cents;” or, if the vender be poetical, he will give us “a slice [column 2:] of Bacon for fourpence,” “breast of Lamb for sixpence,” “glass of Shakspeare at three cents.” To think of Apollo visiting our floor-hearths for eighteen and three-quarter cents, ‘ or “the muses to be seen here; admittance quarter of a dollar!” But alas! this is but an auctioneer's picture of the beauty of the system. The cabalistic fingers of a George Robbins may be detected pulling the wires of this magnificent fairy-scene. The literature which really circulates among the masses, and steals through the gateway of our national morals for so cheap a toll, is the literature of the pickpocket, the burglar, and the bawd; or, if not this, it is the last pitiful drivellings of sentimentalism in its dotage. ‘We wish that our legislators — whose sinful apathy to the true interests of our literature, and, therefore, of our morals, has created this brazen monster — could be forced to try the involuntary philosophical experiment of Perillus. We wish that they might be made the first tests of the efficiency of this system for the education of the people, by being cuittpullod to read all the books which issue from our so-called cheap presses.

The book before us is of a very different kind: it is the production of a refined and thoughtful scholar. The translator is a clergyman in the neighborhood of Boston, who preaches to a rustic audience sermons worthy of the English pulpit when, its poetry was supplied by Taylor, and its wit by South. A residence in Germany has given him familiarity with the language of his original, and a hearty love of Schiller makes him a worthy translator of its spirit.

These letters of Schiller are by no means “familiar” ones: they are addressed to one of those Princes (Christian Frederick, Duke of Holstein Augustenburg) who took a dilletante interest in the rights of man at the beginning of the French Revolution. Schiller had received noble and unexpected aid from him during a period of great distress; and though he was a man who could look through the star on the breast to the heart underneath it, yet it is clear that lie had only acquired the faculty (so hard to gain in aristocratical communities) of looking on his benefactor as merely man, and had not yet reached the more unconscious point of regarding him as friend. The letters, therefore, are not written with the abandon of private friendship, if, indeed, their subject would have allowed it.

The translator has prefixed an excellent introduction, written with judgment and eloquence, in which the reader will find a far better analysis of the book than we are prepared to give. The following extract from it contains a view of the relation of Goethe and Schiller to each other, which is new to us, and which we deem worthy of attention — as well from its novelty as the exactness and pertinence with which it is stated:

“We have lately fallen into the error (for which we are indebted to Germany herself) of forcing an unnatural contrast between Goethe and Schiller, her too greatest men. Scholars spend their ingenuity in drawing parallels and exposing differences, when the true process would be, to construct an equation, and indicate the points of contact. The error has become almost irremediable; and it seems to be generally understood, that the two men would have never lived together in Weimar if Providence had not designed to puzzle posterity with the contrast, and to occupy its leisure moments with the debate as to which is the greater. They have unfortunately passed into history with the legal versus between their names, which never kept asunder the Doe and Roe of fiction with a more abiding pertinacity.

“This is a great injury which we inflict upon ourselves. Undoubtedly, the delightful period of their common activity at Weimar affords the most natural opportunity for instituting a comparison between them, which is not without its interest and advantage. Their mutual tendencies differed too distinctly to escape observation. Perhaps they challenge it; and perhaps the two poets are not worthy as successful exponents of the two great elements of humanity — the real and the ideal; for neither was Goethe the whole man, nor was Schiller the loss [page 409:] complete one he has been represented. But it is in this very distinctness with which they developed, respectively, those two great elements, that we ought to discern, not only the special mission of each, but the still higher mission of both united. It is striking to observe how their diversity produces a unity. It would be instructive to analyze their characters, in order to perceive their capacity for creating a third character, which is the idea of humanity — the result of the two tendencies which make a man. It seems, then, as if that period of their artistic union was a lucky manoeuvre of nature to bring together her two elements most favorably developed, that she might give the world assurance of a man.’ Where Goethe was deficient, Schiller abounded; where the latter yearned to express that which is absolute, the former fulfilled definite and ascertained limits. Both were earnest seekers after truth: it was, for both, the very condition of their existence — a demand of their consciousness which they never once evaded. But we attain a steadfast form of truth and a harmonious development of human faculties, only by combining the results of both; or, rather, a true man, made after the Divine image, is the union of both their tendencies. There will be a residue if we attempt to unite the two men as they were; but, that excepted, the product is the type of that which is possible within us, and, as such, it should be prized, studied, and never rudely violated. When German scholars have asked, Which is greater — Goethe? — Schiller?’ — others have sought to deprecate such a distinction, and have taken refuge in the simile of the Dios-curi; but even that will not serve our turn, for an alternate immortality does not become those who are really immortal and available only when made into one.” Pp. 7, 8, 9.

Elsewhere, Mr. Weiss says, beautifully: —

“The undeniable characters of a good life cannot be denied to Schiller; he is known by his works in every sense. Pure, highminded, truthloving, enamored of virtue for her own sweet sake, he presents to us the lofty spectacle of a man pursuing the ideal of his race through every opposition, disappointment, loss. He would realize Christianity, which is the moral law transfigured by love. In his own person he represents the struggles of humanity; his life was an unfinished prophecy. It is inspiring because his deeds were vast, and rang like the sound of a trumpet; it is pathetic and purifying because it contained the divine element of sorrow, and we are given to see a spirit, not only battling with the world and with necessities, but wellnigh overinastered with its own yearning. He was the direct ambassador of the ideal; he had an indefeasible right to dictate to humanity the terms of its culture, because he evolved it from the regenerative idea of duty as love. And what he preached, he practised. * * * * * His maturer writings present to us his genuine creed and philosophy, and show us his heart still honest arid pure, still unstormed, though kTitanic intellect had often encamped before it.” Pp. 30, 31.

But Schiller was no apostle of the ideal in the sense which those understand it who would make it an excuse for a weak dereliction from fidelity to the truth of absolute nature. By “ideal,” he meant that highest perfection of nature which only the inspired eye of the true artist can discern. His ideal was not out of the world, but in it. He was not one of those who, not strong enough nor wise enough to follow nature, are interested to make us believe that the region of art is some cloudy, realm, the product of their own fancy, and that the beautiful is some misty, undefined shape, which they are pleased to call “classical,” as if God must give over creating, and go to school to their abecedarian profundity.

Referring the reader again to Mr. Weiss's excellent introduction for an analysis of the book, we proceed to make a few short extracts — such as our space will allow — taken almost at, random. We will preface them with the following fit text’ from the first letter.

“My ideas, drawn rather from a uniform converse with myself than from a rich experience, or from reading, will not deny their origin; they will sooner be guilty of any error than of sectarism, and will rather fall from their own weakness than maintain themselves by authority and foreign strength.” P. 2.

In the following passage, Schiller beautifully describes the aspect under which ancient Greece presented itself to his mind: [column 2:]

“The Greeks shame us, not only by a simplicity to which our age is a stranger, hut they are, at the same time, our rivals — nay, after our model — in that very pre-eminence with which we are wont to console ourselves for the native perverceness of our manners. At once objective and subjective — at once philosophic and creative, tender and energetic — we behold the youth of fancy united in a noble humanity to the manliness of reason.

In the beautiful awakening of the spiritual powers at that period, sense and spirit had no strongly-marked peculiarity.* No dispute had yet constrained them to withdraw, in a hostile manner, from each other, and define their boundaries. Poesy had not yet contended with wit, and speculation had nut disgraced itself by craft. In case of need, both could exchange their functions; since each revered truth after its own fashion. However high reason soared, it ever lovingly lifted the outward after it, and however finely and sharply it discriminated, still it never lacerated. It is true it analyzed human nature and threw its amplified elements into the majestic circle of divinities; but not thereby tearing it in pieces, only mingling it diversely, since a complete humanity was wanting to no single god. How entirely different with us moderns! With us too, the type of the race is thrown, in parts that are amplified, into individuals; but in fragments, not in different combinations; so that one must enquire from individual to individual in order to read collectively the totality of the race. With us, one is almost tempted to affirm, the powers of the mind display themselves in experience detached, as they are represented by the psychologist, and we see, not only single subjects, but whole classes of men developing only one part of their dispositions, while the remainder, like stunted plants, preserve vestiges of their nature almost too feeble to be recognised.” Pp. 19-20, Letter 6.

In the ninth letter, the exuberant stream of Schiller's eloquence, which has been working its way through the tangled 1roots and cloven rocks of definitions and argumentative premises, with here and there a glassy spot reflecting the sky and leaves, or a singing cascade, burst forth free and majestic, and flows on in rushing gladness, singing the triumph of its release. We would gladly copy whole of it, had we room. Even if the translator had not informed its of it in his preface, we should have felt sure that this letter was a favorite with him, for it is turned into English with admirable fidelity to the meaning, and lucky sympathy with the rhythmic enthusiasm of the original. Throughout the whole book, but particularly in this letter, we feel that translation has been a labor of love and no drudge-work with Mr. Weiss. Though our extracts have already been long, we must give our readers one or two passages from this letter.

“It is true the Artist is the son of his time, but alas for him if he be likewise its pupil, or even its favorite. Let a kind Divinity snatch the suckling betimes from his mother's breast, nourish him with the milk of a bitter age, and let him come to maturity beneath a distant Grecian sky. Then, when he has become a man, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not to delight it with his appearance, but terrible, like Agamemnon's son, to purify it. Ile will take his material, indeed, from the present, but borrow his form from a nobler time, nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute, unchangeable unity of his being. Here, from the pure ether of his Divine nature, runs down the fountain of beauty, undefiled by the corruption of races and times which fret far beneath him in troubled whirlpools.

* * * * * “But how can the Artist protect himself from the corruptions of his age which on all sides surround him! By despising its judgment. Let him look upward to his dignity and the law, not downward to his prosperity and his wants. Alike free from the vain activity that would fain leave its traces on the fleeting moment, and from the impatient enthusiasm that applies the scale of the absolute to the paltry product of time, let him leave to the understanding, which is here at home, the sphere of the actual; but let him strive to evolve the ideal from the union of the possible with the necessary. This let him express in fiction and truth, in the [page 411:] play of his fancy and the gravity of his deeds, in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into infinite time.” Pp. 36, 37.

From the essay on Pathos we make one extract containing a criticism which has a wider application than to its immediate object, and which fits many modern productions as closely as the old French Drama.

“The latter is the case with the old French Tragedy, in which we are very seldom or never shown a suffering nature, but generally see only cold, declamatory poets, or comedians upon stilts. The frosty tone of declamation extinguishes all the nature, and their adorable scenery makes it completely impossible for French tragic poets to portray humanity in its truth. Decency falsifies, even in its own proper place, the expression of nature, and yet the art demands the latter imperatively. We can hardly believe it in a French tragic hero that he suffers, for he delivers himself concerning his state of mind like the calmest of men, and his incessant regard to the impression which he makes upon others never allows him to leave to his own nature its freedom. The kings, princesses and heroes of a Corneille and a Voltaire never forget their rank in the most vehement passion, and they put off their humanity far sooner than their dignity. They are like the kings and emperors in the old picture books, who go to bed with their crowns on.” Pp. 202, 203.

We must here reluctantly leave a book for which the Translator deserves our warmest thanks. It is full to overflowing with deep philosophy, as well of life as of morals, with profound criticisms and apothegms upon art, with true poetry, the whole all aglow with the warm sunlight of a noble and aspiring nature. It is a book, too, which demands study, and which exercises while it instructs. We sincerely hope that Mr. Weiss may be encouraged to persevere in a labor for which he has shown such eminent qualifications, and that he will give to the world the other volume of translations from Schiller at which he hints in his introduction.

Besides the Æsthetic letters, the present volume contains essays upon “The necessary limits in the use of beautiful forms,” “The moral use of Æsthetic manners,” “The pathetic,” “The sublime,” “The use of the common and low in Art,” “Disconnected observations upon various Æsthetic subjects,” “Upon the tragic art,” and “The philosophical letters.” We learn that it has already been re-published in England.

[the following footnote appears at the bottom of page 409, column 2:]

* We think (with deference to Mr. Weiss's more thorough knowledge of German) that individuality would better express the meaning here. Eigenthum is the word in the original.