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The public, which had expected something different, was disappointed; and when succeeding numbers brought further brain-racking profundities, there was a large ebullition of disgust. Cotta began to write of complaints and cancelled subscriptions; and ere long it looked as if the Horen would prove a big fiasco.
But another plan lay nearer to Schiller's heart, and before he left Suabia he had arranged with Cotta to edit a high-class literary magazine to be known as Die Horen. In May, 1794, he returned to Jena, glad to have escaped at last from his dear, distracting fatherland and to be once more at home. His health had not improved, and he had now become reconciled in a measure to the doom of the invalid.
In this characterization, truth to tell, there is a considerable element of pure moonshine, as any one may convince himself who will read through Schiller's letters, more especially those written during the lifetime of the Horen. He had in him quite enough of the fighter and of the schemer, and it came out in human ways.
He led a quiet, laborious life, battling often with disease and depression, but sustained by high resolution and finding joy enough in domestic affection and the friendship of Goethe. The Horen lasted three years and then died an easy death by the mutual consent of editor and publisher. Of the 'Almanac' five numbers appeared, beginning with 1796.
The poem was an object of ridicule to the Romanticists, and the elder Schlegel wrote a saucy parody of the first two strophes. The few poems that found a place in the 'Almanac' of 1797, along with the luxuriant crop of Xenia, are relatively unimportant. The difference between the sexes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed in the Horen, was expounded anew by Schiller in distichs.
'Because you have dared to annoy a lady, said Insarov, and suddenly he turned white, 'because you're drunk. 'Eh? me drunk? Hear what he says. Horen Sie das, Herr Provisor? I'm an officer, and he dares... Now I demand satisfaction. Einen Kuss will ich. 'If you come another step nearer began Insarov. 'Well? What then' 'I'll throw you in the water! 'In the water? Herr Je! Is that all?
Thus the two men were drawn closer together in mutual sympathy and appreciation, and found in each other more and more a bulwark against the whips and scorns of hostile criticism. Of such criticism there was no lack. The Horen was making enemies rapidly and had become, as Schiller put it, a veritable ecclesia militans. One Jakob in Halle made an assault upon Schiller's aesthetic writings.
"Py chiminy, nur horen Sie einmal! In my life day haf I never heard so brecious worts." "So I talked him out of the hack, Mr. Tracy, and he let up on that, and said put in a hearse, then because he's chief mate of a hearse but don't own it stands a watch for wages, you know. But I can't do a hearse any more than I can a hack; so here we are becalmed, you see. And it's the same with women and such.
Perhaps he may have been further influenced by A.W. Schlegel's sympathetic papers upon Dante, which had been published in the Horen and which revealed to him a new poetic genius of the highest order, yet not at all Homeric.
And then came the great project of the Horen, which was to unite all the best writers of Germany in a common effort for the advancement of letters and the elevation of the public taste. This was an opportunity not to be despised, for Goethe was at last beginning to be weary of his isolation at Weimar.
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