directed to a more specific class of objects. In his extreme attention to the philosophical aspects of the period, Schiller has neglected to take advantage of many interesting circumstances, which it offered under other points of view. The Thirty Years' War abounds with what may be called picturesqueness in its events, and still more in the condition of the people who carried it on. Harte's History of Gustavus, a wilderness which mere human patience seems unable to explore, is yet enlivened here and there with a cheerful spot, when he tells of some scalade or camisado, or an officer made bulletproof by art magic. His chaotic records have, in fact, afforded to our Novelist the materials of Dugald Dalgetty, a cavalier of the most singular equipment, of habits and manners well worth study and description. To much of this, though, as he afterwards proved, it was well known to him, Schiller paid comparatively small attention: his work has lost in liveliness by the omission, more than it has gained in dignity or in

structiveness.

Yet with all its imperfections, this is no ordinary history. The speculation, it is true, is not always of the kind we wish; it excludes more moving or enlivening topics, and sometimes savours of the inexperienced theorist who had passed his days remote from practical statesmen; the subject too has not sufficient unity; in spite of every effort, it breaks into fragments towards the conclusion: yet still there is an energy, a vigorous beauty in the work which far more than redeems its failings. Great thoughts at every turn arrest our attention, and make us pause to confirm or contradict them; happy metaphors, some vivid descriptions of events and men, remind us of the author of Fiesco and Don Carlos. The characters of Gustavus and Wallenstein are finely developed in the course of the narrative. Tilly's passage of the Lech, the battles of Leipzig and Lützen figure in our recollection, as if our eyes had witnessed them the death of Gustavus is de

scribed in terms, which might draw ❝iron tears" from the cheeks of veterans. If Schiller had inclined to dwell upon the mere visual or imaginative department of his subject, no man could have painted it more graphically, or better called forth our emotions, sympathetic or romantic. But this, we have seen, was not by any means his leading aim.

On the whole, the present work is still the best historical performance which Germany can boast of. Müller's histories are distinguished by merits of another sort; by condensing, in a given space, and frequently in lucid order, a quantity of information, copious and authentic beyond example: but as intellectual productions, they cannot rank with Schiller's. Woltmann of Berlin has added to the Thirty Years' War, another work of equal size, by way of continuation, entitled History of the Peace of Munster; with the first negociations of which treaty the former concludes. Woltmann is a person of ability; but we dare not say of him, what Wieland said of Schiller, that by his first historical attempt he "had discovered a decided capability of rising to a level with Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon." He will rather rise to a level with Belsham or Smollett.

This first complete specimen of Schiller's art in the historical department, though but a small fraction of what he meant to do, and could have done, proved in fact to be the last he ever undertook. At present very different cares awaited him: in 1791, a fit of sickness overtook him, he had to exchange the inspiring labours of literature, for the disgusts and disquietudes of physical disease. His disorder, which had its seat in the chest, was violent and threatening; and though nature overcame it in the present instance, the blessing of entire health never more returned to him. The cause of this severe affliction seemed to be the unceasing toil and anxiety of mind, in which his days had hitherto been passed: his frame, which though tall had never been robust, was too weak for the vehement

and sleepless soul that dwelt within it: and the habit of nocturnal study had, no doubt, aggravated all the other mischiefs. Ever since his residence at Dresden, his constitution had been weakened: but this rude shock at once shattered its remaining strength; for a time, the strictest precautions were required barely to preserve existence. A total cessation from every intellectual effort was one of the most peremptory orders. Schiller's habits and domestic circumstances equally rebelled against this measure; with a beloved wife depending on him for support, inaction itself could have procured him little rest. His case seemed hard; his prospects of innocent felicity had been too banefully obscured. Yet in this painful and difficult position, he did not yield to despondency; and at length assistance and partial deliverance reached him from a very unexpected quarter. Schiller had not long been sick, when the hereditary Prince, now reigning Duke of Holstein-Augustenburgh, jointly with the Count Von Schimmelmann, conferred on him a pension of a thousand crowns for three years.* No stipulation was added, but merely that he should be careful of his health, and use every attention to recover. This speedy and generous aid, moreover, was presented with a delicate politeness, which, as Schiller said, touched him more than even the gift itself. We should remember this Count and this Duke; they deserve some admiration and some envy.

This disorder introduced a melancholy change into Schiller's circumstances: he had now another enemy to strive with, a secret and fearful impediment to vanquish; in which much resolute effort must be sunk without producing any positive result. Pain is not entirely synonymous with evil; but bodily pain seems less redeemed by good than almost any other kind of it. From the loss of fortune, of fame, or even of friends, philosophy pretends to draw a certain compensating benefit; but in general the permanent loss of health will bid defiance to her alchymy. It is a universal diminution; the diminution equally of our resources and of our

capacity to guide them; a penalty unmitigated, save by love of friends, which then first becomes truly dear to us, or by comforts brought from beyond this earthly sphere, from that serene Fountain of peace and hope, to which our weak philosophy cannot raise her wing. For all men, in itself, disease is misery; but chiefly for men of finer feelings and endowments, to whom, in return for such superiorities, it seems to be sent most frequently and in its most distressing forms. It is a cruel fate for the poet to have the sunny land of his imagination, often the sole territory he is lord of, disfigured and darkened by the shades of pain; for one whose highest happiness is the exertion of his mental faculties, to have them chained and paralyzed in the imprisonment of a distempered frame. With external activity, with palpable pursuits, above all, with a suitable placidity of nature, much even in certain states of sickness may be performed and enjoyed. But for him, whose heart is already over keen, whose world is of the mind, ideal, internal,-when the mildew of lingering disease has struck that world, and begun to blacken and consume its beauty, nothing seems to remain but despondency and heaviness and desolate sorrow, felt and anticipated, to the end.

Woe to him if his will likewise falter, if his resolution fail, and his spirit bend its neck to the yoke of this new enemy! Idleness and a disturbed imagination will gain the mastery of him, and let loose their thousand fiends to harass him, to torment him into madness. Alas! the bondage of Algiers is freedom to this of the sick man of genius, whose heart has fainted and sunk beneath its load. His clay dwelling is changed into a gloomy prison; every nerve has become an avenue of disgust or anguish; and the soul sits within, in her melancholy loneliness, a prey to the spectres of despair, or stupified with excess of suffering, doomed as it were to a "life in death," to a consciousness of agonized existence, without the consciousness of power which should accompany it. Happily, death, or entire fatuity, at length

puts an end to such scenes of ignoble misery, which however we should view with pity more than with contempt.

Such are frequently the fruits of protracted sickness, in men otherwise of estimable qualities and gifts, but whose sensibility exceeds their strength of mind. In Schiller its worst effects were resisted by the only availing antidote, a strenuous determination to neglect them. His spirit was too vigorous and ardent to yield even in this emergency: he disdained to dwindle into a pining valetudinarian; in the midst of his infirmities he persevered with unabated zeal in the great business of his life. As he partially recovered, he returned as strenuously as ever to his intellectual occupations; and often in the glow of poetical conception he almost forgot his maladies. By such resolute and manly conduct, he disarmed sickness of its cruellest power to wound his frame might be in pain, but his soul retained its force, unextinguished, almost unimpeded; he did not lose his relish for the beautiful, the grand, or the good, in any of their shapes; he loved his friends as formerly, and wrote his finest and sublimest works when his health was gone. Perhaps no period of his life displayed more heroism than the pre

sent one.

:

After this severe attack, and the kind provision which he had received from Denmark, Schiller seems to have relaxed his connexion with the university of Jena: the weightiest duties of his class appear to have been discharged by proxy, and his historical studies to have been forsaken. Yet this was but a change not an abatement in the activity of his mind. Once partially free from pain, all his former diligence awoke; and being also free from the more pressing calls of duty and oeconomy, he was now allowed to turn his attention to objects which attracted it more. Among these one of the most alluring was the Philosophy of Kant.

The transcendental system of the Königsberg Professor had for the last ten years been spreading over Germany, which it had now filled with the most violent contentions.

The

powers and accomplishments of Kant were universally acknowledged; the high pretensions of his system, pretensions, it is true, such as had been a thousand times put forth, a thousand times found wanting, still excited notice, when so backed by ability and reputation. The air of mysticism was attractive to the German mind, with which the vague and the vast are always pleasing qualities; the dreadful array of first principles, a forest huge of terminology and definitions, where the panting intellect of weaker men wanders as in pathless thickets, and at length sinks powerless to the earth, oppressed with fatigue, and suffocated with scholastic miasma-seemed sublime rather than appalling to the Germans; men who shrink not at toil, and to whom a certain degree of darkness appears a native element, essential for giving play to that deep meditative enthusiasm which forms so important a feature in their character. Kant's philosophy accordingly found numerous disciples, and possessed them with a zeal unexampled since the days of Pythagoras. This, in fact, resembled fanaticism rather than a calm ardour in the cause of science; his warmest admirers seemed to regard him more in the light of a prophet than of a mere earthly sage. Such admiration was of course opposed by corresponding censure; the transcendental neophytes had to encounter sceptical gainsayers as determined as themselves. Of this latter class the most remarkable were Herder and Wieland. Herder, then a clergyman of Weimar, seems never to have comprehended what he fought against so keenly: he denounced and condemned the Kantean metaphysics, because he found them heterodox. The young divines came back from the university of Jena with their minds well nigh delirious; full of strange doctrines, which they explained to the examinators of the Weimar Consistorium, in phrases that excited no idea in the heads of these reverend persons, but much horror in their hearts.* Hence reprimands, and objurgations, and excessive bitterness between the applicants for ordination, and those

appointed to confer it: one young clergyman at Weimar shot himself on this account; several appeared inclined to imitate him. Hence Herder's vehement attacks on this " pernicious quackery;" this delusive and destructive" system of words.” * Wieland strove against it for another reason. He had, all his life, been labouring to give currency among his countrymen to a kind of diluted epicurism; to erect a certain smooth, and elegant, and very slender scheme of taste and morals, borrowed from our Shaftesbury and the French. All this feeble edifice the new doctrine was sweeping before it to utter ruin, with the violence of a tornado. It grieved Wieland to see the work of half a century destroyed: he fondly imagined that but for Kant's philosophy it might have been perennial. With scepticism quickened into action by such motives, Herder and he went forth as brother champions against the transcendental metaphysics: they were not long without a multitude of hot assailants. The uproar produced among thinking men by the conflict has scarcely been equalled in Germany since the days of Luther. Fields were fought, and victories lost and won; nearly all the minds of the nation were, in secret or openly, arrayed on this side or on that. Goethe alone seemed altogether to retain his wonted composure; he was clear for allowing the Kantean scheme to "have its day, as all things have." Goethe has already lived to see the wisdom of this sentiment, so characteristic of his genius and turn of thought.

In these controversies, soon pushed beyond the bounds of temperate or wholsome discussion, Schiller took no part: but the noise of their jarring afforded him a fresh inducement to investigate a set of doctrines so important in the general estimation. A system which promised, even with a very little plausibility, to accomplish all that Kant asserted his complete performance of; to explain the difference between matter and spirit, to unravel the perplexities of neces

sity and free-will; to show us the true grounds of our belief in God, and what hope nature gives us of the soul's immortality; and thus at length, after a thousand failures, to interpret the enigma of our beinghardly needed that additional inducement to make such a man as Schiller grasp at it with eager curiosity. His progress also was facilitated by his present circumstances: Jena had now become the chief well-spring of Kantean doctrine, a distinction or disgrace it has ever since continued to deserve. Reinhold, one of Kant's ablest followers, was at this time Schiller's fellow-teacher and daily companion: he did not fail to encourage and assist his friend in a path of study, which, as he believed, conducted to such glorious results. Under this tuition, Schiller was not long in discovering, that at least the "new philosophy was more poetical than that of Leibnitz, and had a grander character; persuasions, which of course, confirmed him in his resolution to examine it.

"

How far Schiller penetrated into the arcana of transcendentalism it is impossible to say. The moral and logical branches of it seem to have afforded him no solid satisfaction, or taken no firm hold of his thoughts; their influence is scarcely to be traced in any of his subsequent writings. The only department to which he attached himself with his ordinary zeal was that which relates to the principles of the imitative arts, and which in the Kantean nomenclature has been designated by the term Esthetics, or the doctrine of sentiments and emotions. On these subjects he already had amassed a multitude of thoughts; to see which expressed by new symbols, and arranged in systematic form, and held together by some common theory, would necessarily yield enjoyment to his intellect, and inspire him with fresh alacrity in prosecuting such researches. The new light which dawned, or seemed to dawn, upon him in the course of these researches, is reflected in various treatises, evinc

JULY, 1824.

ing, at least, the honest diligence with which he studied, and the fertility with which he could produce. Of these the largest and most elaborate are the essays on "Naive," and Sentimental Poetry; on Grace and Dignity; and the Letters on the Esthetic culture of Man: the other pieces are on Tragic Art; on the Cause of our delight in Tragic Objects; on Employing the low and common in

Art.

Being cast in the mould of Kantism, or, at least, clothed in its garments, these productions, to readers unacquainted with that system, are encumbered here and there with difficulties greater than belong intrinsically to the subject. In perusing them, the uninitiated student is mortified at seeing so much powerful thought distorted, as he thinks, into such fantastic forms: the principles of reasoning, on which they rest, are apparently not those of common logic; a dimness and doubt overhangs their conclusions; scarcely any thing is proved in a convincing manner. But this is no strange quality in such writings. To an exterior reader, the philosophy of Kant almost always appears to invert the common maxim: its end and aim seems not to be to make abstruse things simple, but to make simple things abstruse." Often a proposition of inscrutable and dread aspect, when resolutely grappled with, and torn from its shady den, and its bristling entrenchments of uncouth terminology, and dragged forth into the open light of day, to be seen by the natural eye and tried by merely human understanding,-proves to be a very harmless truth, familiar to us from of old, sometimes so familiar as to be a truism. Too frequently the anxious novice is reminded of Dryden in the Battle of the Books: there is a helmet of rusty iron, dark, grim, gigantic; and within it, at the farthest corner, is a head no bigger than, a walnut. These are the general errors of Kantean criticism: in the present works, they are by no means of the worst or most pervading kind; and there is a fundamental merit which does more than balance them. By the aid of study, the doctrine set before us can in general at length be comprehended; and Schiller's fine intellect, recognizable even in its mas

querade, is ever and anon peering forth in its native form, which all may understand, which all must relish, and presenting us with passages, that show like bright verdant islands in the misty sea of metaphysics.

That Schiller's genius profited by these ardent and laborious attempts to improve his taste, has frequently been doubted, and sometimes denied. That after such investigations the process of composition would become more difficult, might be inferred from the nature of the case. That also the principles of this critical theory were in part erroneous, in still greater part too far-fetched and fine-spun for application to the business of writing, we may farther venture to assert. But excellence, not ease of composition, is the thing to be desired; and in a mind like Schiller's, so full of energy, of images and thoughts and creative power, the more sedulous practice of selection was little likely to be detrimental. And though considerable errors might mingle with the rules by which he judged himself, the habit of judging early or not at all is far worse than that of sometimes judging wrong. Besides, once accustomed to attend strictly to the operations of his genius, and rigorously to try its products, such a man as Schiller could not fail in time to discover what was false in the principles by which he drew them, and consequently, in the end, to retain the benefits of this procedure without its evils. There is doubtless a purism in taste, a rigid fantastical demand of perfection, a horror at approaching the limits of impropriety, which obstructs the free impulse of the faculties, and if excessive would altogether deaden them. But the excess on the other side is much more frequent, and for high endowments, infinitely more pernicious. After the strongest efforts, there may be little realized; without strong efforts there must be little. That too much care does hurt in any of our tasks is a doctrine so flattering to indolence; that we ought to receive it with extreme caution. In works impressed with the stamp of true genius their quality, not their extent is what we value: a dull man may spend his life-time writing little; better so than writing much; but