7 - Aesthetic education

Summary

DIE HOREN AND FRIENDSHIP WITH GOETHE

Man hat wahrlich zu wenig bares Leben, um Zeit und Mühe daran zu wenden, Menschen zu entziffern, die schwer zu entziffern sind. Ist er ein so ganz liebenswürdiges Wesen, so werde ich das einmal in jener Welt erfahren, wo wir alle Engel sind.

(Life really is too precious to warrant spending time and effort trying to fathom people who are hard to fathom. If he is such a lovable being, no doubt I shall find that out in that world where we are all angels.)

This comment of Schiller to his future sister-in-law, Caroline von Beulwitz, in 1789 repeats the tone and content of several other statements of the year, in which he seems to lay finally to rest any hopes he entertained when settling in Weimar of forming a friendship with Goethe. Yet by 1794 the situation of both men had altered. For Schiller marriage, the duties of his Jena professorship, his serious illness of 1791, the struggle to meet financial commitments, also the growing awareness of the scope, limits and character of his own talents, pushed thoughts of rivalry with Goethe from his mind. For his part Goethe declares that although interested mutual friends tried to bring about a rapprochement, he himself was convinced that they were too far apart. Yet Goethe too was in need of stimulating and challenging literary companionship. His relationship with Christiane Vulpius, the woman he had taken into his house and whom he eventually married in 1806, was a source of offence to Weimar society and led to a certain isolation, intensifed by the lack of companions of adequate intellectual stature.