POEMS AND BALLADS OF SCHILLER.

No.  VII.

(The two following poems, “The Ideal,” and, “The Ideal and Life,” are essentially distinct in their mode of treatment.  The first is simple and tender, and expresses feelings in which all can sympathize.  As a recent and able critic, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, has observed, this poem, “still little known, contains a regret for the period of youthful faith,” and may take its place among the most charming and pathetic of all those numberless effusions of genius in which individual feeling is but the echo of the universal heart.  But the poem on “The Ideal and Life” is highly mystical and obscure;—­ “it is a specimen,” says the critic we have just quoted, “of those poems which were the immediate results of Schiller’s metaphysical studies.  Here the subject is purely supersensual, and does not descend to the earth at all.  The very tendency of the poem is to recommend a life not in the actual world, but in the world of appearances [5]—­that is, in the aesthetical world.”

It requires considerable concentration of mind to follow its meaning through the cloud of its dark and gigantic images.  Schiller desired his friend Humboldt to read it in perfect stillness, ’and put away from him all that was profane.’  Humboldt, of course, admired it prodigiously; and it is unquestionably full of thought expressed with the power of the highest genius.  But, on the other hand, its philosophy, even for a Poet or Idealist, is more than disputable, and it incurs the very worst fault which a Poet can commit, viz. obscurity of idea as well as expression.  When the Poet sets himself up for the teacher, he must not forget that the teacher’s duty is to be clear; and the higher the mystery he would expound, the more pains he should bestow on the simplicity of the elucidation.  For the true Poet does not address philosophical coteries, but an eternal and universal public.  Happily this fault is rare in Schiller, and more happily still, his great mind did not long remain a groper amidst the ‘Realm of Shadow.’  The true Ideal is quite as liable to be lost amidst the maze of metaphysics, as in the actual thoroughfares of work-day life.  A plunge into Kant may do more harm to a Poet than a walk through Fleet Street.  Goethe, than whom no man had ever more studied the elements of the diviner art, was right as an artist in his dislike to the over-cultivation of the aesthetical.  The domain of the Ideal is the heart, and through the heart it operates on the soul.  It grows feebler and dimmer in proportion as it seeks to rise above human emotion....  Longinus does not err, when he asserts that Passion (often erroneously translated Pathos) is the best part of the Sublime.)

[Footnote 5:  Rather, according to Aesthetical Philosophy, is the actual world to be called the world of appearances, and the Ideal the world of substance.]