700 Chapter XXIX
Joy, written several years earlier, was a favorite with German republicans of the
1790’s:
Seid umschlungen, Millionen,
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!Sometimes the words were sung to the same tune as the Marseillaise.^35 Schiller,
however, whose early dramas had upheld a stormy idea of freedom, turned against
the violence of the French Revolution and what seemed to him to be the low level
of its aims as revealed in practice. By 1801 he found true liberty to be not of this
world:
Edler Freund: Wo öffnet sich dem Frieden,
Wo der Freiheit sich ein Zufluchtsort?Viewing the struggle between France and Britain as a detached observer, he
washed his hands of both. No liberty could be at stake in such a contest:
Freiheit ist nur in dem Reich der Träume
Und das Schöne blüht nur im Gesang.^36The temptation to flee to a dream- world of true liberty led on into the peculiarities
of German romanticism, and the idea that the beautiful could flower only in works
of art, im Gesang, contributed to the serenities of classical Weimar. Both repre-
sented a form of withdrawal or an aesthetic attitude for which the interest of
events lay in the kind of appeal they made to a spectator, who, while remaining
essentially unexcited and uninvolved, could enjoy a succession of somewhat liter-
ary emotions—admiration, inspiration, indignation, or disgust. They were part of
what Droz characterizes as the humanist reaction to the French Revolution, shared
by Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.^37 These men did not
explicitly oppose the Revolution; they entered into no noisy counter- revolutionary
polemics; but they were troubled by the violence and fanaticism that were engen-
dered, and feared that so much obsession with politics would have a bad effect on
higher civilization. Deeply non- political, preoccupied with the problems of an
elite, concerned for the cultivation of mind and taste, they were too much inter-
ested in making room for romantic genius on the one hand, or for classically
rounded personalities on the other, to care much about popular doctrines of liberty
and equality, by which so many irreplaceable human values and achievements
35 Venedey, Deutsche Republikaner, 3–4; Schiller, Werke (Leipzig, 1895), I, 61. The verses may be
translated: “Be embracèd, O ye Millions, Here’s a kiss for all the world!”
36 “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts” (1801), Ibid., 264–65. In translation; “Noble friend:
Where opens there for peace, Or where for freedom now a place of refuge?” And: “Freedom is only in
the realm of dreams, And the beautiful blooms only in song.”
37 Droz, Allemagne, 297–336. For the argument that the lack of an outlet for action, together with
certain social and career frustrations, led many into the “way of the dream,” or the expectation of a
“miracle” (i.e., solutions without effort or understanding), see the brilliant book by H. Brunschwig, La
crise de l ’ état prussien à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et la genèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris, 1947).