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is expressed in the wonderful philosophic lyrics of his Jena period, implies a mind less in sympathy with the Greek poets than with the rationalistic thinkers of the eighteenth century.

At every stage of his career Goethe impresses us with the independence and universality of his genius; he belongs to no one epoch, he cpmmits himself to no single tendency of thought. In every movement in which he takes part he has the art of rising above the strife of the moment, and sifting out and utilising those elements which are of universal application and abiding worth. No poet ever belonged in the same full sense as Goethe to two centuries. Schiller, on the other hand, was essentially a poet and thinker of the age of " Enlightenment." The philosophy of rationalism had formed his chief mental training as a schoolboy, and he erected his own ethics and aesthetics on a basis, part of which he owed to Kant, part to Shaftesbury. He carried German aesthetics a stage further than Kant, but he did not, like Herder, attempt to revise the problem of the relations of the individual mind to the manifestations of beauty. Rationalistic, too, was his conception of history; and he wrote his own works Der Abfall der vereinigten Niederlande (1788) and Der dreissiyjahrige Krieg (1791-3) in the rhetorical style of the masters of the eighteenth century; he had little understanding for the new ideals of social evolution and the precise scientific methods which were adopted by the historians in the following age. In the same way, the optimistic ground-tone of his poetry harmonised with the best elements in eighteenth century classicism; he retained to the last that widehearted humanism and cosmopolitanism which were characteristic of the best thought in Europe before the French Revolution.

And yet, mutally antithetic as the standpoints of Goethe and Schiller were, time gradually brought about an understanding between the poets. The dissatisfaction which the older poet felt with the condition of German literature on his return from Italy led to the conviction that the only hope for its future lay in the complete abnegation of all that savoured of Sturm und Drang, of uncouth nationalism. Schiller, too, soon left behind him the crude utilitarianism of the Aufklarung; and a truer classicism began to take the place of the methods he had followed in Don Carlos. The real obstacle to an understanding lay, not in matters of literature, but in the attitude of each poet towards philosophy; Schiller, the idealist, bad become a confirmed disciple of Kant and a champion of the new transcendentalism, while Goethe, the realist, whose starting-point had been Spinoza, looked with distrust on metaphysics as a useless key to the riddle of the universe. Irreconcilable as these standpoints were, the difficulty was surmounted by the discovery, which both poets made in 1791, that they were really at one as to the ultimate object of their striving. They were in essential agreement concerning the aims of a national art and literature, and were

392 The friendship of Goethe and Schiller [1794-1805

both filled with the same lofty ideal of "perfect humanity" ; only they had reached their conclusions by different processes. Schiller had solved the problem deductively, that is to say, he had set out from the " idea," while Goethe had proceeded inductively, basing his standpoint on nature and the actual facts of experience.

Apart from the correspondence of the two poets in these years, the work which gives us most insight into the nature of their relationship is Schiller's treatise, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, which appeared in 1795. On the basis of that dualism, which the transcendental philosophy had introduced into every province of the intellectual life, Schiller conceived of literature as grouping itself round one or other of the two poles, the "naive" and the "sentimental." Naive was, according to him — and in this he was only following the views of his century, on the subject — the poetry of the ancients; naive, too, were poets of the modern world like Shakespeare and Goethe, whose attitude towards poetry was intuitive, immediate, unreflective. This dogma once accepted, the logical antithesis to the nai've was clearly the type of mind which reasons and reflects, the "sentimental" mind; and, according to Schiller, this type predominated in modern poetry. Such was the central idea round which the poet's philosophic theory of literature turned, and it may be regarded as fundamental for the whole classical ars poetica. Even more interesting and suggestive, however, are the subjective aspects of the treatise ; Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung is the key to the friendship of the two poets. It is Schiller's justification of a type of poet directly antithetic to that represented by the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Goethe — a sentimental or modern type of which he regarded himself, and rightly, as a characteristic example.

The friendship of Goethe and Schiller was thus based, not so much on mutual concessions, as on a common agreement that there were several ways of attaining the end both poets had in view; that it was possible to look at life and literature differently and yet be at one on the essential issue. It was hardly in the nature of things, however, that two men should live in such close intellectual companionship for eleven years and not each take on to some extent the colour of the other; this is to be seen most clearly in the gradual approximation of their views with regard to what is " classic " in poetry. If Goethe's second period of classicism differed so profoundly from that of Iphigenie, if he demanded still more emphatically the expression of the type, the perfect form and the impersonal note in literature — if he abandoned the more or less subjective warmth of Fasso, with its slightly veiled portraits, for the complete and almost repellent objectivity of Die natiirliche Tochter and Pandora — if the typical figures of Hermann und Dorothea take the place of the individualised characters of Wilhelm Meister, and if the generalising methods with which Faust was continued form so abrupt a contrast to the personal note of the earlier fragments — all this was due, in some

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measure at least, to the influence of his friend. On the other hand, the influence of Goethe on Schiller is even more marked. It was clearly Goethe who removed the metaphysical hindrances which in 1794 still separated Schiller from poetry; it was he who facilitated a return to the drama and taught Schiller to write ballads that have won a warm place in the nation's heart. It was, above all things, Goethe's naive, plastic, unmetaphysical outlook upon life that fevealed to Schiller the worth of reality and broadened his whole conception of humanity.

The friendship of Goethe and Schiller, that is to say the eleven years from 1794 to Schiller's death in 1805, represents the summit of German literary achievement, the culminating result in the long process of eighteenth century development towards classicism. As in all classical epochs, the dominant note of the time was one of conscious achievement; the men of the age were proud of having brought humanity and art " so herrlich weit" and they doubted — with the horrors of the French Revolution fresh in their memories — the possibility of the younger generation advancing beyond them. What was written by the great German poets in these years was a ripe, not a ripening, literature ; the nation was no longer in the position of Goethe's Iphigenia in that unforgettable line,

Das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend;

the land of the Greeks was found; Hellas was in Weimar. This selfsatisfied, conclusive character of the age is exemplified by its leading personalities — Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt; and it is to be read out of all the great books that were written at that time. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for example, is the climax to which the fiction of the eighteenth century, since its first awakening to life under Richardson's stimulus, had steadily advanced; it is the most national of all German novels, and it became the model of the representative German fiction of the earlier nineteenth century. Hermann und Dorothea (1797), again, is perfect of its kind, harmonious, irreproachable; it is a classic poem, although its classicism is clearly different from that of Goethe's Iphigenie. In the earlier drama the poet had created complicated, individualised personages conceived by an essentially Germanic imagination without too careful a consideration for the classic canon ; whereas in Hermann und Dorothea he has openly accepted the doctrine that perfect literature deals not with individuals, but with more or less abstractly constructed types. It is this generalisation — making the personages of the poem true not so much to themselves as to a whole class, selecting for treatment not peculiar or exceptional incidents, but events of universally human significance — that renders Hermann und Dorothea a classical poem, in comparison with which Iphigenie and Tasso still belong to a comparatively unclassic art. Indeed, we might even claim for Goethe's idyll the honour of

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being the most perfect manifestation of German classicism. Final, too, although not in any exclusive sense classic, is Faust, which was revised and continued under Schiller's stimulus. The completed "First Part" was not published until 1808, three years after Schiller's death, the second part not until 1833.

When we return to Schiller's writings, we find in them similar "final" qualities. His treatise On naive and sentimental poctry is virtually the last word on the subject of classical literary theory; his Wallenstein (1798-9) is the finest historical drama of the eighteenth century; and there is the same mellow quality in the classic ballads of 1798. None, it is true, of Schiller's later dramas touches quite so high a level as Hermann und Dorothea or Faust; but the reason is to be sought in the genius and temperament of the younger poet. On the one hand, the schism in Schiller's nature between what might be called the national needs and the cosmopolitan ideals of the century was more marked; and, on the other, Schiller's knowledge of Greek literature was wanting in that depth and sympathy which is characteristic of Goethe's. It was manifestly harder for him to discover his " form " than it was for Goethe; and there is in consequence something tentative and experimental about all the dramas of his last years. Not until 1804, the year of Wilhelm Tell, did he create a national historical drama which occupies a position in the poetry of the period analogous to that held by Hermann und Dorothea.

There is, however, another side to this picture of German classicism which is apt to be overlooked. We allow ourselves too readily to be dazzled by the achievements of Weimar, and forget that the general body of German literature at the turn of the century stood far below these models of classic excellence. Works like Hermann und Dorothea, Wilhelm Meister, and Wilhelm Tell were not, after all, representative of the German epic, novel, and drama at this epoch; and the masterly ballads of Goethe and Schiller found no capable imitators among their contemporaries. The average literary production of the time is approximately represented by poems like Kosegarten's Jueunde (1808) and Tiedge's didactic epic Urania (1801) ; the drama of the period, in spite of Schiller, lay mainly in the hands of belated representatives of the Sturm und Drang, of effective masters of stage-craft like August Wilhelm Iffland (1759-1811) or of playwrights who showed little respect for the dignity of poetry, like August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) and the rationalists of Berlin; lastly, the most popular German fiction of the classical age was not Wilhelm Meister but the voluminous writings of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), who had more Sturm und Drang in his veins than Weimarian classicism. The floundering, confused, and formless novels which Richter wrote are more characteristic of a literature of decay and disintegration than of one of achievement. Not that he was deficient in genius of a higher sort—to find so kindly

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and genial a humorist we have to go back to Sterne —but his gifts only threw into more glaring contrast the clumsiness of the vehicle by means of which he expressed himself. It would thus seem as if the class distinctions of the social life of the eighteenth century were also characteristic of its literature; there is the same wide gulf between the leaders of poetry and their followers as there was between the absolute rulers of the petty German States of the time and the subjects over whom they ruled. When we look into the actual facts of literary history more closely, we are forced to the conclusion that the general condition of German poetry at the zenith of the classical period was, if anything, less promising than in that age of Sturm und Drang, when an optimistic enthusiasm had inspired all forms of German literature.

This consideration is of importance, if we are to understand and justify the extraordinary outburst of Romanticism which at the very close of the eighteenth century disturbed the equanimity of German classicism. To realise what the Romantic revolt meant we must look beyond Goethe and Schiller, and study the lower manifestations of German poetry at this time; beneath the noble classicism associated with Weimar there lay appalling depths of cynical rationalism, which the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller (1796) — effective enough in their gibes against the coming men of the new movement — were powerless to destroy. Clearly the " time-spirit" looked at German classicism with other eyes than its great poets; and the future lay not here, but in a reversion to those subjective ideals, in which at all times the German spirit has sought healing and recovery from its wanderings into the alien world of Latin classicism. The new century belonged in the first instance, not to Schiller and not to the classic Goethe, but to the Romanticists.

The period of Romanticism stands in a relation to that of Sturm und Drang analogous to that in which Goethe's and Schiller's classicism stands to Lessing's; just as, owing to the intervening outburst of Sturm und Drang, the literature which centred in Wallenstein and Hermann und Dorothea was a fuller expression of the national life of the German people than Minna von Barnhelm and the poetry of the Frederician age, so now the Romantic movement showed how enormously the national spirit had benefited by the discipline of Weimar. German critics of the earlier half of the nineteenth century, and especially those who had come through the Hegelian school, found a difficulty in discriminating between the epoch known as Sturm und Drang and that of Romanticism. And it must be admitted that the points of similarity between the periods are more striking than the points of difference. Both movements stand out in sharp contrast to those which they superseded by virtue of their pronounced individualism; both claim the rights of poetry to adopt a purely subjective standpoint. They are at one in their contempt for rules and for regularity of form ; they are determined opponents of