Schiller's Ideal Life

Friedrich von Schiller, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 8 pages

Eight pages carrying Schiller's Das Ideal und das Leben in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's translation from The Poems and Ballads of Schiller (Leipzig, 1844). Roughly half the file is the translator's own preface, which supplies a *stanza-by-stanza analysis* of a poem he expects the reader to find difficult.

Bulwer-Lytton is candid that the poem is hard. He calls it purely philosophical, quotes Hoffmeister's judgement that every object and every epithet in it has a metaphysical background, and records that Schiller himself was aware of its obscurity — asking that even Humboldt should read it in a kind of holy stillness, banishing all that was profane during the meditation it required. He also places it: Schiller had been at work on his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, and the poem is described as their crowning flower, so that readers who know the philosophical works see a familiar symbol where the general reader perplexes himself in a riddle. The analysis that follows is the practical heart of the file. The Fates can touch only the body and the things of time and matter, while the Platonic Archetype hovers safe in the realm of the Ideal; if we can ascend to that realm — the domain of Beauty — we reach a perfection in which the sensual and intellectual powers are united as they are in the gods. In the actual life we strive for a goal we cannot reach; in the ideal, the goal is attainable and effort is itself victory. From the fifth stanza on, the poem is described as a sustained antithesis balancing the conditions of the Actual against the privileges of the Ideal — with the warning that the Ideal is not meant to relax us but to brace us for the Actual, the eye fixed on Beauty aloft beholding the goal when we begin to flag. Strength and courage are the requisites of actual life and are doomed to eternal struggle; in the ideal there is no struggle, the stream far from its rocky sources smoothed to repose; and the artist must strive and labour so long as he contends with matter, since truth is only elicited by toil and the statue wakens from the block by the stroke of the chisel.

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