Die schöne Seele: Wieland, Schiller, Goethe

Abstract

Chris toph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) expressly mentions the ideal of the beautiful soul in referring to his complex fictitious character Danae, who appears in the novel Geschichte des Agathon (1766-67).The narrator of this novel, in what were for the time innovative addresses to the reader, digresses from the plot at various junctures in order to discuss various topics that arise from episodes in the narrative.Among these topics the favourite is probably Schwarmerei, that rather perplexing excess of enthusiasm, but another diversion concerns the ins and outs of the thoroughly fashionable eighteenth-century concept of the "schône Seele".Danae is not the only personification of this concept to be found in the pages of Wieland's fictional works.Although Wieland does not directly claim this for her, the morally and intellectually balanced heroine of his narrative poem Musarion, who is instrumental in helping others overcome a one-sided extreme stoicism in order to achieve a similar balance, could be seen as another embodiment of the schône Seele, the quintessential Enlightenment figure.Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) arrives at a description of the schône Seele as a theoretical visible union of duty and inclination, grace and dignity in his essay Uber Anmut una Wiirde, a work in which he shakes himself free from Kant's influence and takes a different route.Having carefully delineated the circumstances and conditions necessary for that aesthetic and ethical phenomenon, grace, to be present in a person, Schiller turns his attention to analyzing the restraints required by dignity.Schiller's essential method for bringing the two spheres together involves the containment of extreme tendencies by means of balancing one against the other.For Schiller, the goal is reached when restraint and moderation have become second nature, a state he refers to as the beautiful soul.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) introduces yet another way of treating the topic of the beautiful soul when he uses the first-person narrative voice to recount the trials, doubts and temptations that consti-

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