The contempt we feel for that period of superstition, fanaticism and mental slavery betrays not so much the laudable pride of conscious strength as the petty triumph of weakness avenging itself in unimportant mockery for the shame wrung from it by superior merit.... The advantage of clearer ideas, of vanquished prejudice, of more subdued passions, of freer ways of thinking (if we really can claim this credit), costs us the great sacrifice of active virtue, without which our better knowledge can hardly be counted as a gain. The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,--if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.
We see that Schiller, though he was in no danger of becoming a renegade on the main issue, had his moods of disgust, as Goethe and Herder had had before him, at the shallow self-complacency of the Age of Enlightenment.
In comparison with these disconnected and more or less perfunctory studies, the 'History of the Thirty Years' War' seems like a large undertaking. But it was not so conceived at first. While 'The Defection of the Netherlands' is the fragment of a great project, the 'Thirty Years' War' is the expansion of a small one. We first hear of it in a letter of December, 1789, wherein Schiller, just then casting about eagerly for possibilities of income, informs Körner that he is to have four hundred thalers from Göschen for an 'essay' upon the Thirty Years' War, to be published in the 'Historical Calendar for Ladies'. He felicitates himself that the labor will be light, since the material is so abundant and he is to write only for amateurs. The following spring he took up his task, which then grew upon his hands as he proceeded. Two books were printed in the 'Calendar' for 1791, a third in 1792, the fourth, and also a separate book-edition, in 1793. It met with great favor, the sales running up to seven thousand, and the author winning the name of Germany's greatest historian.