Tedious discourse on tigers, revisited

Truly it is a handsome man who reads Schiller.

As always, Bottom, you are sparkling and severe. But because I’ve spent more time burying my prospects in the unstable sand of 19th century letters than any sane being before me, I, like the Dude, am in a unique position to confirm or disconfirm your statements. I’m sorry to say you’ve bungled Schiller in precisely the same way people have bungled Jena romanticism for 180 years. By failing to reproduce the book in its entirety, I played my part in that misunderstanding, of course, but any balanced, careful reading of the letters shows that 1) Schiller's exposition is quite logical and 2) the marriage of form and content, as Schiller himself explains in the twenty-third letter, is an aesthetic illusion produced by the mastery of form over content: it is an effect of harmony, not its cause, and also, it's not even real.

But I won’t act apologist for Schiller, Coleridge, or any other Jenist. I already wrote over 200 bumbling pages of apology on that topic, and smart, sympathetic critics from Pater and Richards to McFarland and Barth have offered volumes of meticulous argument demonstrating the logical rigor, philosophical depth, and aesthetic courage of that generation of writers. I’m content to raise an abbreviated thesis complete with picture of toy tiger and let the audience decide. Besides, I’m tired of arguing this same point over and over again. I’ll just respond briefly and wrathfully before I curse God for letting Rafael Nadal lose in the 3rd round at Rome last week.

You always were a squishy one, Bottom, that's why we love you--for that, and for your stalwart refusal to compromise with old German pedants. Really, your life is measurably better for your decision not to pass days and nights with dense Teutonic tomes about how Hamlet resembles a wildflower.

And for the record, I didn't drag Schiller's pretentious diatribe into our backwater hack to make a point, much less to prove anything; I just thought it apt.