The Life and Works of Friedrich SchillerThomas, Calvin
General
The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller
Thomas, Calvin
Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805
Of far greater poetic interest are the verses entitled 'Rousseau', whose
neglected grave (he died in 1778) is made the point of departure for a
vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to
place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time
when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There
is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or
pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a
martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,--'he who
makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is
apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into
Charon's boat and go tell the spirits about this 'dream of the war of
frogs and mice, the hand-organ doodle-doodle of this life'.[36]
In this poem there is certainly no lack of that 'fire' which Duke Karl
found in Schiller's dissertation. Indeed fire abounds everywhere in his
youthful versifying. He never contemplates, never dwells upon a
temperate emotion. The poetry of common things and of the gentler
feelings seems to have been nonexistent for him. His imagination likes
to occupy itself with the supernal, the stupendous, or else with the
awful and the revolting. This is seen in the two poems 'Elysium' and 'A
Group from Tartarus'; the one aiming to portray a land of ineffable
happiness, where sorrow has no name and the only pain is a gentle
ecstasy, the other depicting the infinite misery of the inferno. In both
there is a free blending of Christian with pagan conceptions, 'Elysium'
being put for heaven and 'Tartarus' for hell. A similar blending is
noticeable in many of the other poems, ancient mythology being made to
furnish forth the setting and the symbols of modern passion. So it is,
for example, in the lyric operetta 'Semele', the longest and most
pretentious of the 'Anthology' poems. It consists of two scenes in
irregular verses, dealing with Jupiter's love for the mortal Semele' and
Juno's jealousy. Artistically it is much in need of the file, and Its
sustained note of passionate pathos hardly comports, perhaps, with the
type of the operetta. Nevertheless it contains powerful passages and
telling stage effects. One can see that the young student--'Semele'
appears to have been written at the academy--had learned, through, his
occasional visits to the opera, how to manage a conventional theme and
conventional machinery in such a way as to startle and thrill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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