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Revolution
and the Romantic Theater
by
Brian Johnston
Friedrich Schiller: The Concept of a Modern Theater
IV. Friedrich Schiller: The Concept of a Modern Theater
The consciousness of this conflict gave dramatists not only a new idea of the function of the theater in society (explicitly avowed by Schiller and Wagner) but also of their theater's subject matter, with its attendant rhetoric, mythology and imagery. And, of course, the dramatists inhabited a period in which such a supertext was sustained and extended by other cultural forces: by historical, social and scientific developments; by philosophy, poetry, the visual arts, music and the novel. Theater stood at the center - often a storm center - of this universe of discourse, reflecting its conflicts with particular vividness.
In the quarrel between Burke and Paine, therefore, we see the origins of a much wider and more involved dialectic. The function of theater which Burke espoused, of fortifying emotional support for the conventional values under attack from critical reason, was to continue and to flourish up to the popular theater and entertainment of today. In England, the Examiner (Censor) of plays soon made sure that revolutionary or 'inflammatory' plays were denied the stage. Under the Bourbon government of France, the censorship that discouraged the emergence of a serious drama encouraged the well-made-play, with its insistence that trivial chance, not ideology or critical reason determined historical events. Self-censoring Hollywood and Broadway today as effectively banish any serious (truly critical) presentation of reality. This is popular and fashionable entertainment's primary political function. On the other (left) hand Paine, following Rousseau, seemed to see no worthwhile function for the theater at all in the new society that the revolution augured. Even where the left has accepted a cultural function for drama, as in many socialist countries, it often has severely limited the theater's freedom of expression: which is only another form of the anti-theatrical prejudice. But in Germany writers following Schiller, who acknowledged Rousseau as a mentor, set about recreating an alternative, and liberating, theater of which even Rousseau and Paine might have approved. And, until Ibsen, it is only these German dramatists who allow us to see the potential in Romanticism for a major modern dramatic art.
The radical redefinition of the function of art is set out in Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. (1795) Sharing in the project of the French Revolution - the first revolution, according to Hegel, that had as its aim the re-creation of humanity - Schiller claims for art a central role in that process of re-creation. The aesthetic sense, or sense of beauty, proceeds from reason, yet, unlike analytical reason, does not sacrifice the sensuous. From his reason, aesthetic man understands the extent of his social and historical alienation. Man "comes to himself out of his sensuous slumber, recognizes himself as Man, looks around and finds himself - in the State. An unavoidable exigency had thrown him there before he could freely choose his station; need ordained it through mere natural laws before he could do so by the laws of reason."
Awakened by reason (e.g. Kantian philosophy) such an individual could not accept Burke's bland injunction to consider the consolations of eternal justice a sufficient compensation for the loss of earthly justice. But neither could such a citizen consider the whole existing fabric of traditional society as merely a handful of mouldy parchments shackling freedom of action within the present. Rational justice, such as Paine's, was too prone to offer a simplified account of our humanity, an abstract 'natural man' which idealistically ignores much of our human nature. "It will therefore always argue a still defective education if the moral character can assert itself only through the sacrifice of what is natural; and a political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to produce unity only by suppressing variety." In this manner, the disciple of Rousseau implicitly reproaches his master. Rousseau, like another enemy of the theater, Plato, had adulated Sparta. In his fine political essay, The Legislation of Lykurgus and Solon, Schiller held up Athens, with its social and intellectual freedoms, as representing a superior model of a human community. And Athens, above all, had emphasized the primacy of an aesthetic education in which the theater held the most honored place. It was this idea of the theater that the Romantic dramatists sought to recreate in modern terms, as a means for recreating, also, human society.
To vastly simplify Schiller's subtle and closely argued program in The Aesthetic Education, extending over twenty seven 'letters', we find that art can perceive in the mode of 'beauty' and 'play' the nature of our true freedom, while retaining the full range of our sensuous nature and its conflicts. At the same time keeping its activity free of utilitarian ends, art is able, even in an unfree world, to maintain the idea of human freedom that must be attained in time. Art learns philosophy (Schiller was deep in the study of Kant while writing the Letters) and mediates between, on one side, the abstract ideas of truth and freedom which philosophy rigorously formulates and, on the other, the 'sensuous' world of men and women who can comprehend and enjoy the liberation offered by an aesthetic (pleasurable) expression of these ideas. Drama, above all, would be best placed for this function and Schiller consciously set about creating just such a new kind of drama, one which would lead audiences through palpable (sensuous) theatrical metaphors to a perception of the conflict or play of universal ideas (the ideological argument) that lay behind them. In such a concept of the new drama, the adequate modern playwright would necessarily, in Eric Bentley's formulation, be a thinker.
The Romantic artist's journey of self-exploration (the 'self' as a problematic potentiality, only: a call to 'self-determination') would simultaneously be an exploration of the 'world' which Romanticism saw as also awaiting its fulfillment. It was a conviction of Romanticism that the subjective conflict within the individual can find its extension in the objective worlds both of society and of 'nature', making modern drama, from Schiller to Strindberg at the same time deeply intensive and ambitiously extensive. It is for this reason, and not for any predilection for the 'picturesque', that symbolic scenes and landscapes are so important to Romantic and realist drama.
This extension of the individual's inward drama into the cosmos is far more than the 'pathetic fallacy' that attributes to natural phenomena human emotions and volitions. In his essay On the Sublime Schiller argues that it is only from a contemplation of the sublime and terrifying aspects of Nature that an individual comes to suspect the 'demonic freedom' within him-or-herself:
...no sooner has free contemplation set him at a distance from the blind assault of natural forces - no sooner does he discover in the flood of appearances something abiding in his own being - then the savage bulk of nature about him begins to speak quite another language to his heart: and the relative grandeur outside him is the mirror in which he perceives the absolute grandeur within himself. Fearlessly and with a terrible delight he now approaches these ghastly visions of his imagination and deliberately deploys the whole force of this faculty in order to represent the sensuously infinite, so that even if it should fail in this attempt he will experience all the more vividly the superiority of his ideas over the highest of which sensuousness is capable. The sight of unlimited distances, and heights lost to view, the vaster ocean above him, pluck his spirit out of the narrow sphere of the actual and out of the oppressive bondage of physical life. A mightier measure of esteem is exemplified for him by the simple majesty of nature, and surrounded by her massive forms he can no longer tolerate pettiness in his mode of thought.
One thinks of the intense disorder of an Ellida Wangel set within the huge landscape, in The Lady from the Sea; the inner disorder finding its only adequate expression through the drama's extensions into sea depths and mountain heights. Romantic disorder is the necessary disquietude that impels consciousness through alienation towards more adequate concepts of liberation. This creative interplay between concept and metaphor, in which natural objects became the only adequate symbols, and to which each artist and thinker contributed, made Romantic drama's supertext one of the richest there has been. The dynamism of the Romantic supertext would encourage the development of a major dramatic tradition.
After Schiller, the concept of liberation was to undergo many modifications: but every avant-garde dramatist (or movement) has felt his or her idea of the theater to be a form of aesthetic liberation from forms of false consciousness: a form of secular salvation. For the disciples of Richard Wagner, devotional journeys to Bayreuth became the equivalent of medieval pilgrimages to a holy shrine, the aesthetically sanctified ground where only the work of the Master would be performed. Bernard Shaw proclaimed that the modern theater had taken the place once held by the Church in society, and that the line of modern dramatists resembled the line of prophets of the new revelation. Shaw, pleading for an Ibsen theater that would perform only the Master's works "like Wagner's ring, in cycles..." added, "I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible." There has been no more ambitious idea of the theater since the drama of Athens. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine would have been staggered by the claim.
