The Life of Friedrich Schiller

Summary

Thomas Carlyle's Life of Friedrich Schiller first appeared in instalments in the London Magazine in 1823-24 and as a book in 1825, when Carlyle was a young Scottish tutor and translator not yet known as an author. Its full title calls it 'comprehending an examination of his works', and that is an exact description: the book is a biography of the German poet, dramatist and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) interleaved with long critical accounts, plot summaries and translated scenes from his plays. Goethe admired it enough to sponsor a German translation in 1830 and write an introduction for it, which later English editions print as an appendix. Carlyle divides the life into three parts. Part I (1759-1784) follows the son of an army surgeon from a boyhood meant for the Lutheran ministry into the Duke of Wuertemberg's military academy, where he was made to study law and then medicine, and into the regimental post at Stuttgart from which he published The Robbers. When the Duke forbade him to write anything but medicine, Schiller fled to Mannheim and then lived in hiding at Bauerbach before returning as theatre-poet. Part II (1784-1790) treats his wandering years in Mannheim, Leipzig, Dresden and Weimar, Don Carlos, his turn to history in the Revolt of the Netherlands, his first, cool meeting with Goethe, his professorship at Jena and his marriage to Charlotte von Lengefeld. Part III (1790-1805) covers the Thirty Years' War history, the chest illness of 1791 that never fully left him, a Danish pension that rescued him, his engagement with Kant, his friendship with Goethe, and the great late dramas Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina and William Tell, ending with his death at Weimar on 9 May 1805. The 1872 Library Edition adds a supplement, translated from Saupe, on Schiller's father, mother and sisters, and appendices on the imprisoned poet Schubart, letters to Dalberg, and the Goethe friendship. The book's governing idea is stated at the opening of Part II: knowing wisdom is not practising it, and the Man of Letters is no freer from vanity, poverty and idleness than other men. Carlyle praises Schiller because he did practise it, keeping an earnest devotion to his ideal through debt, exile and disease. The closing pages call him 'the poet of truth' and praise him for having no cant. Here are the seeds of Carlyle's later lecture on the Hero as Man of Letters. Carlyle himself, in a preface of 1845, called this 'somewhat insignificant Book' imperfect and said the reader must remember it 'was written Twenty years ago'. For students the Life is a way into German literature through an English classic, and a chance to watch Carlyle form the convictions about work, sincerity and heroism that dominate his later books. It also contains, in its account of Schiller's night labours and final illness, one of the period's frank portraits of an author's body breaking under work.

Top Lessons

• To know is not to do: the Man of Letters' temptations

  Part II opens with Carlyle's warning that fame does not bring dignity or peace and that a writer must contend with idleness, vanity and want like anyone else. He then shows Schiller resisting those temptations by steady work. Students should state Carlyle's argument before judging it.

• The Duke and the fugitive: authority and vocation

  Schiller was educated at a ruler's expense and then forbidden to write. Carlyle sympathizes with the young poet's flight but calls the Duke a man who meant well. The episode lets students weigh obligation to a benefactor against a calling, and consider how Schiller later wrote a conciliatory letter to the Duke.

• Reading a play through a life

  Carlyle reads The Robbers as 'an emblem' of its author's baffled spirit and Wallenstein as the work of a matured mind. This biographical method is illuminating and risky: it can explain a play by the author's circumstances while overlooking its art. Students can test it on one play summary in the book.

• Calmer and calmer: an author's death

  The chapter on Schiller's last illness records his delirium, his recovery of clarity, his farewell to family and his last words. Carlyle presents the death as the fit close of an earnest life while leaving open the 'questionings of futurity' he finds in Schiller's later poems. It is an occasion to discuss what makes a death good and what a biographer may claim about another's soul.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Schiller was trained as a physician. His father had been apprenticed to a barber-surgeon and served as an army surgeon; Schiller studied medicine at the Duke's academy from 1775 and served briefly as a regimental surgeon at Stuttgart, though Carlyle says he took the study up only as 'a galling servitude' and never practised after leaving. Carlyle attributes the chest illness of 1791 to overwork and nocturnal study, describes Schiller's reliance on coffee and wine to write through the night, and narrates the final illness of 1805 with its delirium and lucid end. A footnote quotes Doering's report of the post-mortem findings in the lungs, heart, liver and gall-bladder. Later writers have proposed tuberculosis or other diagnoses for Schiller's illness; the text does not name one, and any such label is a retrospective reading.

• Part I (the military academy, 1775)

  Schiller is made to give up law for the new medical course at the Stuttgart academy, which he accepts as a lesser servitude.

• Part I (The Robbers)

  Carlyle reports Schiller's preface claiming that ridicule, like hellebore, had failed and that sharper medicines were needed for the age.

• Part III (1791 illness)

  A violent disorder of the chest attributed to toil, anxiety and night study; total rest is prescribed and health never fully returns.

• Part III (mode of life at Jena)

  Night writing until three to five in the morning, with strong coffee, wine-chocolate, Rhenish or Champagne at hand, described from a contemporary account.

• Part III (death, May 1805) and footnote 41

  Final illness, delirium, lucid farewell and death; the footnote cites Doering on post-mortem findings in the lungs, heart and liver.

• Supplement of 1872 (Schiller's father)

  Johann Caspar Schiller's apprenticeship to a barber-surgeon and service as an army doctor in the Seven Years' War.