Schiller, who should have been inured by this time to the consequences of editorial misjudgment, was disgruntled, vexed. He began to feel that the German public was an indolent, long-eared beast that needed the education of the scourge rather than of aesthetic letters. He made some effort, it is true, to enliven his columns with more entertaining matter, but the abstruse, in prose and verse, continued to preponderate. By autumn he was minded to give up the whole undertaking, but was persuaded by Cotta to go on. Meanwhile he had begun to grow weary of theorizing and to feel the homesickness of the poet. 'Wilhelm Meister', as it began to issue from the press, excited his unbounded enthusiasm. 'I cannot tell you', he wrote to his new friend,
I cannot tell you how painful it is to me oftentimes to turn from a work of this character to philosophy. There everything is so bright, so living, so harmonious and humanly true; here everything is so strict, so rigid, so very unnatural.... This much is certain: the poet is the only true human being, and the best philosopher is only a caricature beside him.
So, in the summer of 1795, he began once more to poetize,--'not venturing out upon the high sea of invention', as he expressed it, 'but keeping close to the shore of philosophy'. In other words he wrote a number of philosophic poems, partly for the _Horen_ and partly for the new poetic 'Almanac' that he had undertaken to edit, in addition to the _Horen_. This return to poetry was a joy to him, notwithstanding the ill health which confined him to the house and cut him off from the exhilarations of the external world. It must never be forgotten that those philosophic poems are the effusions of a lonely thinker who was compelled to draw his inspiration from within, and was not entirely unaware of the fetters he had forged for himself by his long addiction to philosophy.
There was, however, one more subject, of literary as well as philosophic interest, which he was minded to treat before turning his back finally upon the arid wastes of theory;--the subject of realism versus idealism, or, as he decided to phrase it, of naïve and sentimental poetry. This essay, published in 1796, was briefly analyzed in the last chapter. It marks the end of Schiller's one-sided glorification of the Greeks. In more than one passage he comes to the rescue of the modern poet--the sentimentalist--as the poet of the infinite, of the ideal. His contention is that while the realist may be the more admirable in a limited sphere, the idealist has a larger sphere, and his perfection is a higher thing. This attempt of Schiller's to describe, in a scientific spirit, the different kinds of artistic endowment, and to do full justice to all, grew naturally out of his intercourse with Goethe. He admired Goethe more and more. The fifth book of 'Meister' produced in him a 'veritable intoxication'; yet its quality was strikingly unlike that of 'Werther' or 'Iphigenie', and totally different from anything that he himself had done or could possibly do. Perhaps he may have been further influenced by A.W. Schlegel's sympathetic papers upon Dante, which had been published in the _Horen_ and which revealed to him a new poetic genius of the highest order, yet not at all Homeric. So he wrote his famous disquisition,--next to Lessing's 'Laokoön' the most thoughtful and the most influential piece of criticism produced anywhere in the eighteenth century,--and endeavored to make it as readable as possible. Goethe, who read the manuscript in November, 1795, wrote of it thus: