Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters

HENRY vm 103 revealing as are his dealings with Wolsey. We miss, too, a wealth of available detail from contemporary correspondence and the state papers: the acute observations of foreign ambassadors on the court, the love letters, and Cromwell's own correspondence. Henry may be ultimately elusive, but he is not as elusive as all that. Nevertheless, there is much of great value here, too. A careful analysis of the relation of the divorce to the reform issue, a fresh evaluation of the importance of the imperial claim, a judgement that Henry, not Cromwell, was the "effective author" of the new policy during the crucial months of 1530 and 1531 - all of these and many related issues command attention and fresh discussion. In the end, Mr. Scarisbrick concludes that Henry, far from being Pollard's author of national unity, brought deep division to the country through his divorce and reformation. Henry's royal supremacy was not really Marsilian, but something much closer to the thinking of the English humanists . At the same time, Mr. Scarisbrick clearly points to the ambiguity which lay at the heart of the royal supremacy: was it a personal attribute of the king, or was it founded upon the whole body politic and exercised by the king in Parliament? It was this ambiguity which confounded some of the most distinguished adherents to the doctrine in the next reign, when the supreme head was a child. This book is a valuable and stimulating contribution to Tudor studies. It leaves the impression that the author, still quite recently immersed in his extensive researches, is providing an interim report towards his final view of the reign. If that is so, his final verdict will be well worth waiting for. ( JAMES KELSEY MCCONICA) SCHILLER'S AESTHETIC LETTERS' The first version of Schiller's great treatise consisted of a series of private letters addressed by him in 1793 to his patron, the Duke of SchleswigHolstein -Augustenburg. A second, greatly expanded version was published in the periodical Die Horen in 1795, reprinted, with some changes, in 1801, and incorporated in Schiller's Collected Works of 1813. The present edition is based on the text of 1813 and is accompanied by an English translation on facing pages. Commenced within four years of the storming of the Bastille and rewritten when the Terror was at its height, the Aesthetic Letters take the course of the French Revolution as their starting point. Political liberty, Schiller suggests, does more harm than good unless those who achieve it have attained the maturity to usc it wisely: a change of political institutions could lead to a lasting improvement of the condition of man only if man's whole way of thinking and feeling had changed first. In Paris, a century of unprecedented intellectual advance had culminated· Friedricb Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letter-s. Edited and translated with an Introduction, Commentary and Glossary of Terms by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. WiUoughby, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1967. Pp. cxcvi, 372. $6.60. 104 HANS EICHNER in a blood bath; evidently, the cultivation of the intellect was not enough. What was needed was the development of the whole man, the bridging of the gulf between thinking and feeling, the mediation between the insights of reason and the will to act in their light; and such cultivation, Schiller argued, was only possible through the sphere of the aesthetic: "By means of beauty sensuous man is led to form and thought; by means of beauty spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense." No doubt Schiller's insistence that a change in methods of government must be preceded by a change in those governed will sound to some like opium for the masses, or at least like an excuse for political quietism; but if Schiller's present-day readers reaect on the fate of the Weimar Republic or on the more recent events in some of those countries that exchanged the yoke of colonialism for incomparably worse horrors, they will have to concede that he may have had a point. In any case, no brief comment on his impassioned...