We see that as a balladist Schiller got his inspiration mainly from two sources: the traditions of Greek antiquity and the traditions of chivalrous romance. He dwelt habitually in the idealisms of the past, and his controlling purpose was to make these idealisms live again in stirring poetic pictures. The present time, with its fierce national conflicts, the larger meaning of which was not yet apparent, seemed to him barbarous and depressing. In the prologue to 'Wallenstein', it is true, he was able to survey the situation with a calm artistic eye and to see in the 'solemn close of the century' a period in which 'reality is becoming poetry'. But this is an isolated deliverance. His habitual mood was one of aversion, from which he sought relief by an escape into the kingdom of the mind. Thus, in some stanzas on the opening of the new century, he laments that the English-French war has overspread sea and land and left no place on earth for 'ten happy mortals'. Then he bids the friend to whom the verses are addressed take refuge in the holy temple of the heart, seeing that Freedom and Beauty dwell only in dreamland. A similar sentiment finds expression in 'The Words of Illusion', published in 1801, as a sort of pendant to the earlier 'Words of Faith'. The words of faith are Freedom, Virtue and God. Men are exhorted to cling steadfastly to these eternal verities, whereof only the heart gives knowledge. The other poem is directed against the superstition of believing in a golden age, or in any external realization of the right, the good and the true. The final stanza runs:
And so, noble soul, forget not the law, And to the true faith be leal; What ear never heard and eye never saw, The Beautiful, the True, they are real. Look not without, as the fool may do; It is in thee and ever created anew.
These last-named poems belong to a type which the Germans sometimes call the 'lyric of thought',--a name which is fairly appropriate to a goodly number of Schiller's shorter effusions. Other examples--to mention a few of the best--are 'Light and Warmth', 'Breadth and Depth' and 'Hope'. They might be called lyrics of culture, since they regard the perfection of the individual,--the equipoise of heart and head, steadfast seriousness as opposed to showy sciolism, the preservation of hope and faith,--as a noble object of emotion. They are not intellectual in the opprobrious sense of the word as applied to poetry; they are suffused with warm feeling and their language is simple and natural. On the other hand they _are_ argumentative: they state propositions and draw conclusions the value of which must in the end be gauged by the mind. For this reason one who has no sympathy with Schiller's idealism,--one who either never felt it or has lost it in the stress of life,--will not be touched by these poems, but will regard them as hollow. Yet they are no more hollow than the lyrics of Goethe or Heine or Shelley, though the illusion of sincerity is less perfect than in the work of these great lyrists.