Schiller, JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH, German poet and dramatist, was the son of an army surgeon, a man of deep religious feeling and strict conscientiousness. His mother was a woman of gentle disposition, true humility and piety, and some poetic feeling. Fritz was born at Marbach on Neckar on 10th November 1759, and inherited the distinguishing traits of both his parents. He was brought up amid the vine-clad hills of Marbach, beneath the ancestral castle and monastery of the Hohenstaufens at Lorch, and at Ludwigsburg, the Versailles of the Dukes of Württemberg. Besides learning Latin and Greek at the grammar-school of Ludwigsburg, Schiller was carefully educated, especially in religious matters, by his father, whose ambition it was to make him a pastor. But destiny in the person of Duke Carl Eugen decreed otherwise. This Württembergian imitator of the 'Grand Monarch,' who set up to be the father of his people, established in 1773 a school at his castle of the Solitude, near Ludwigsburg, for the purpose of training army officers and servants for the public service. Captain Schiller, who was at that date superintendent of the ducal forests and gardens around the Solitude, was given to understand that the duke wished to enrol his clever son Fritz amongst the first pupils of his new institution. Accordingly the boy turned to law instead of to theology; and at the ducal school (moved to Stuttgart in 1775) was kept under a rigid discipline, partly military, partly monastic. About 1776 Schiller, tired of law, which he never liked, threw it up for medicine, which he liked very little better. It was not long after this that, principally through reading Klopstock's Messias, he became conscious of his own poetic powers. From the first he conceived a decided fancy for tragedy; and now, instead of studying medicine, he spent most of his time in reading and writing poetry and tragedies, although both occupations were strictly forbidden by the duke. In philosophy also he took a more than ordinary interest, and this taste remained with him to the end of his days. The duke was very proud of his clever protégé, and on 14th December 1779, in the presence of Goethe and Duke Carl August of Weimar, was delighted to bestow upon him three medals for excellence in his medical studies; for Schiller had at last worked hard to qualify himself for leaving the Carl's School, and so becoming master of himself.
Exactly one year after Goethe's visit Schiller left school, and was appointed surgeon to a Württemberg regiment. One month later (13th January 1782) his play Die Räuber, begun in 1777, was put on the stage at Mannheim. People took their seats at noon, five hours before the performance began, and the piece made a tremendous sensation—being full of the revolutionary sentiments with which the air was charged previous to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Young Schiller had breathed the spirit of such 'storm and stress' productions as Goethe's Götz, and the ideas of the eccentric C. F. D. Schubart; moreover, he had drunk deeply at the wells of Plutarch's hero-worship and Rousseau's overwrought sentimentalism. The play itself, however, in spite of the gravest faults—gross crudities, improbabilities, exaggerated and unreal sentiment, inflated and bombastic diction—literally throbbed with energy and passion, and contained many passages of remarkable tragic force. Schiller himself was present at the performance; but because he quitted Stuttgart a second time without his ducal leave Carl Eugen had the aspiring dramatist arrested, and on his release forbade him both to write plays and to leave Württemberg. This treatment Schiller's pride, as writer and as man, would not brook; so on the night of 22d September he fled from the capital in disguise, and under an assumed name (Dr Ritter). He lay concealed at Mannheim and at Oggersheim, and latterly on Frau von Wolzogen's estate of Bauerbach near Meinigen. In that quiet retreat he finished two more plays, Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua and Kabale und Liebe. The structural idea of the former, Schiller's first historical play, printed in 1783, is that of nearly all his historical works, a revolt against some constituted authority that has degenerated into tyranny and become an enemy of freedom. The latter (1783) is a protest, dramatically a more successful work than Fiesco, against the tyrannies of social convenience, involving an attack upon the court life of the typical German ruler of the epoch.
On 1st September Schiller was appointed dramatist to the Mannheim theatre, and thought he had reached his port. But at the end of the year the engagement was not renewed; neither intendant, nor dramatist, nor actors were satisfied one with another. Thus Schiller was again thrown on his own resources; and from the time he left Stuttgart until he settled in Weimar he was always in debt and always struggling with narrow means. One of his plans of self-support was the issue of a sort of theatrical journal, Die Rheinische Thalia, begun in November 1784, and written almost entirely by his own hand. In this journal were first printed most of his Don Carlos, many of his best poems (e.g. An die Freude), and the stories Verbrecher aus Verlorener Ehre and Der Geistesseher. In 1785 he resolved to depart from Mannheim, and to accept a warm invitation from a circle of admirers in Leipzig, which included, he found, Göschen the publisher (grandfather of the English statesman) and Körner, father of the poet.
Schiller had not been without his love affairs: he had known the pangs of jealousy in connection with Frau von Wolzogen's daughter, he had paid suit to Margareta Schwann, the publisher's daughter in Mannheim, and he had been half fascinated by Charlotte von Kalb, perhaps the most remarkable woman of her generation in Germany. At Dresden, where Körner was living, Schiller found the rest he so much needed, rest from emotional excitement and rest from pecuniary worries. And this rest, which he owed in great part to Körner's generosity, he turned to good account. He finished Don Carlos (1787), which may be called his first mature play, in that the enthusiasm is more chastened, the language more sober and disciplined, the plot better elaborated, and the knowledge much riper. Nevertheless it suffers artistically from its excessive length, from its inherent lack of unity, and more especially from the shifting of the interest from Carlos to the Marquis Posa. The play was written in blank verse, as being more appropriate to the dignity of the subject; and besides embodying Schiller's ideas of a perfect political society, it presents a most noble type of the true friend of man in Posa. From the day he first saw Körner he shared with him nearly all his thoughts, and continued to do so after he left Dresden and be- came intimate with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Goethe. Amongst the finest fruits of his discussions with Körner and his circle are the poems An die Freude and Die Künstler. Under the stimulus of the same society he went back to his old love philosophy, and at the same time began to study history in a serious and systematic way. After two years in Dresden something of the old restlessness took possession of him again, caused in part by another unhappy love affair (with Henriette von Arnim), and he thought to allay it by a visit to Weimar and elsewhere. But of Weimar and its court circles the truth-loving poet soon grew tired—Goethe and Duke Carl August were both absent at the time. Nevertheless he stayed on awhile, finding society in Charlotte von Kalb, in Herder, and certain of the professors at Jena near by. One of these, Reinhold (Wieland's son-in-law), brought Kant to his notice; and Schiller steeped himself in the thoughts of the Königsberg recluse with his usual ardour, though he greatly modified Kant's system ere he adapted it for his own use. About the same time he met his future wife, Charlotte von Lengefeld; and, getting some hints of a possible chair at Jena, he resolutely bent his mind to the writing of a work of more practical value, and began his history of the revolt of the Netherlands. In the end of 1788 he was appointed to a professorship at Jena, and, being further granted a small pension by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, he married Lotte von Lengefeld. In order to meet the responsibilities entailed by these changes Schiller worked terribly hard, so hard in fact that he eventually broke down his health. Besides lecturing, he wrote a number of minor papers and the greater work, the history of the Thirty Years' War. These productions are not of course the outcome of a prolonged or exhaustive course of special studies; but they rank high amongst German historical writings by virtue of their great merits of style, the warm human interest the writer has breathed into them, and the broad philosophic ideas that form their life and substance.
Towards the end of the year 1792 Schiller was agreeably surprised by the offer, brought about chiefly by his admirer, the Danish poet Baggesen, of a free gift of 3000 gulden from the Duke of Augustenburg and his friend Count Schimmelmann. The first use the now invalid poet made of his freedom was to finish the Thirty Years' War, and his next to pay a visit to his old father and mother, whom he had not seen for eleven years. In the year of this visit (1793) he began the Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, letters of noble and weighty import concerning the function of art as the supreme educative agent. At this period, in the irony of circumstances, it came into the heads of the French revolutionists to nominate Schiller (M. Gille) an honorary member of the republic, a distinction which, although himself a man of democratic sentiments, he spurned with horror on learning of the execution of the king. The diploma of citizenship took five years to reach him (1798).
The year 1794 is in some respects the most important in the whole course of Schiller's life: he made the acquaintance of Fichte, he formed an intimacy with Wilhelm von Humboldt, and began his wonderful friendship with Goethe. He was introduced to the great poet at his future mother-in-law's house in the summer of 1788; but for a while they were both distant and reserved, and it was only in the course of a chance conversation at Jena in the summer of 1794 that they discovered common ground of sympathy. The ice once broken, however, they soon drew together; the dreamer and idealist and the man of universal human interests had both worked their way from entirely opposite starting-points to pretty nearly the same conclusions. Both regarded art as the crowning-stone of human culture, as in fact the best practical religion, and both thought and wrote in the spirit of that conviction. The year 1794 is marked in Schiller's career by two other events: he composed the essay Ueber Naïve und Sentimentale Dichtung, in which the respective characters of ancient (classic) and modern poetry were for the first time clearly defined and discriminated; and he started the magazine Die Horen, which died after a precarious existence of three years. But it gave birth to the much more celebrated Xenien (1797), a collection of satirical epigrams, written by Schiller and Goethe conjointly, and aimed at all who, in their estimation, did not pay fit and proper reverence to Art, and its object Beauty. Schiller's intercourse with Goethe had reawakened his poetic instincts, and he once more began to write poems, at first pieces of a reflective and lyric character, principally for his annual Die Musenalmanach (another bread-winning project), such as Die Macht des Gesanges, Die Ideale, Würde der Frauen, Der Spaziergang, and so forth, and later, mostly in his garden-house at Jena during the years 1797 and 1798, the matchless ballads (Kraniche des Ibykus, Der Handschuh, Der Taucher, Ritter Togenburg, &c.) that in the estimation of many constitute his principal contribution to literature, and that certainly make him the favourite beyond all other poets of the German people. And, under the same stimulus, he went back to the drama, and spent many a long night on the finishing of Wallenstein (1798-99), in spite of the fact that every hour's writing cost him several hours' suffering. This play (embracing the trilogy Wallenstein's Lager, Die Piccolomini, and Wallenstein's Tod), which Carlyle declares to have been 'the greatest dramatic work of which the 18th century can boast,' is in every way a remarkable advance on Don Carlos. It is built on a wider and truer estimate of human nature, displays a juster conception of the limits and possibilities of dramatic composition, and attains a happier, loftier harmony of the poetic and dramatic ideals; and, especially on account of the magnitude and masterly arrangement of the action, the character of Wallenstein, and the pathetic love-story of Max Piccolomini and Thelkla, ranks as one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of all plays in German literature.
In 1799 Schiller settled in Weimar—he had never lectured since 1793—in order to be nearer the theatre and close to Goethe, whom he zealously supported in his efforts to elevate the German stage into an influential engine of culture. In quick succession he finished Maria Stuart (1800), Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), Die Braut von Messina (1803), and Wilhelm Tell (1804). The first named, whilst not exactly answering the expectations of the English reader, is nevertheless an admirable drama. Mary, the heroine, is represented as an erring, but repentant and lovable woman, whose character shines out all the more beautiful from contrast with her cold and selfish cousin, Elizabeth; and the play contains several fine passages, descriptive and dramatic. Die Jungfrau is artistically one of Schiller's most successful performances; Joan of Arc, the principal character, is drawn as a lovely and innocent maiden inspired with the spirit of the prophetess—a deeply religious and ideally beautiful conception well carried out. Die Braut von Messina was confessedly an experiment, and, it is universally admitted, an unsuccessful experiment, at combining the ancient and the modern ideals of dramatic excellence, more especially by the introduction of the chorus as the principal supporter of the action.
Tell, however, is a noble piece of work, in spite of some technical defects (principally the lack of a central character and of a progressive concentration of the dramatic interest). All the dramatis personæ are thoroughly human and are cleverly put before us, and there are many fine descriptions of Swiss landscapes; but the finest thing of all is the unquenchable spirit of freedom that pulses in every line. This was the last drama Schiller lived to finish, though he left others in various stages of completion, Warbeck and Demetrius being the most advanced. His health, long enfeebled, finally and suddenly broke down; he died on the 9th May 1805, still a comparatively young man, in the prime of his intellectual activity.
Schiller's life was one long struggle against pecuniary difficulties, greatly aggravated at times by the most uncongenial surroundings, and latterly by ill-health. Yet through all he remained true to himself and to his high calling. He pressed ever strenuously forward along the path of knowledge and self-culture, and his literary career is an advance from crude elemental strength to finished and matured art. Personally, in spite of the drawbacks and hindrances of his outward situation, his character and conduct were of the noblest: he made it his constant end, deliberately chosen, to try and carry out in his own daily life the loftiest ideals he believed in, and strove to 'live like a man whom the world would be sorry to lose.' The key to his speculative ideas, especially with respect to art, is contained in the high and reverential regard he paid to moral beauty. That is the chief cornerstone of his æsthetic creed and of his principles of action. He had an enthusiastic admiration for what is noble and grand and magnificent, and this passion enters into the structure and substance of nearly all his writings. Two other great qualities ring through his works, an incorruptible love of truth and a lofty spirit of freedom. His poetic strength lay in a peculiar blending of moral and intellectual force. As a lyric poet he can hardly be accounted as of the first rank: he lacked not only the spontaneity but also the immediate insight and sympathy with the actual world, and the living men and women in it, that in so eminent a degree distinguished his greater friend and contemporary Goethe. As a dramatist, however, he undoubtedly stands first of the Germans, and must justly take a high rank amongst the dramatic writers of the world.
The standard editions of his works are those by Gödeke (17 vols. Stutt. 1868-76), Kurz (9 vols. Hildburghausen, 1868-69), and Boxberger (8 vols. Berlin, 1882). All preceding lives of Schiller have been superseded by Minor's (4 vols. Berlin, 1890 et seq.). See also the longer works of Weltrich (Stutt. 1885 et seq.) and O. Braham (Berlin, 1888 et seq.). Of the earlier biographies the best were those by Hoffmeister and Viehoff (5 vols. Stutt. 1875), Paleske (2 vols. 12th ed. Stutt. 1886), Düntzer (Leip. 1881), Scherr (4th ed. Leip. 1865), Caroline von Wolzogen (5th ed. Stutt. 1876), Schwab (3d ed. Stutt. 1859), and Hepp (Leip. 1885). Schiller's Briefe (2 vols. 1846) and his Correspondence with Goethe (2 vols. 4th ed. 1881), Körner (4 vols. 2d ed. 1874), W. von Humboldt (2d ed. 1876), Lotte (his wife) and her sister (3d ed. 1879), and others contain abundance of biographical matter. There are biographies in English by Carlyle (Lond. 1825), Bulwer-Lytton (Edin. 1844), J. Sime (Edin. 1882, 'Foreign Classics for English Readers'), and H. W. Nevinson (Lond. 1889, 'Great Writers' series), and English translations of Paleske (Lond. 1860) and Düntzer (Lond. 1883). Various English writers have published translations of Schiller's works in whole or in part; the versions of poems by Bulwer-Lytton (1844), Merivale (1844), Bowring (1851), and Lord Lytton (Lond. 1887), and of the dramas Coleridge's Piccolomini and Wallenstein's Death deserve special mention. The Schiller museum was united with the Goethe museum (Archiv) at Weimar in June 1889.