�What can a national scene really perform?�

�What can a national scene really perform?� was written to establish a national plan for what people should know about in a nation.

What can a theatre in good standing
really achieve?

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A lecture held in Mannheim during the public session of the Electorate Palatinate German Society on June 26th, 1784 by F. Schiller, member of this society and counsellor of the dukedom of Weimar.

When the natural pride � so I call the endorsed assessment of our particular value � should leave us without any relationship to the citizen�s life, hence, the first among these relationships is, probably, that we answer, beforehand, the question whether the occupation to which we devote, now; the best part of our spiritual force, is related to the dignity of our spirit, and fulfils the rightful pretence of the whole to our contribution.

The highest extension of the forces you should always prepare yourself for, only their most noble use can insure greatness. The more sublime is the goal toward which we are striving and the broader, the more encompassing the circle in which we are acting, then the greater increases our courage; the purer becomes our self confidence, and the more independent it is from the opinion of the world.

Then, only when we, first, have decided by ourselves, what we are, and what we are not, only then, are we removed from the danger, to suffer from foreign judgment � to become carried away by the admiration shown to us or disheartened by the misjudgement about ourselves.

Why is it then, however, - this remark has pressed me ever since I observed human beings � why is it that the pride that people take from an office, is so voluntarily in reverse relationship with the true service they contributed? That most office holders double their demands on society in the same degree as their influence on the same society decreases? � How modest seems not often the minister who manages the reins of the country tax income, and who sees through the great government system with gigantic power, beside the little joker who puts his prescriptions on paper � How modest seems not the great scholar who broadens the limits of the human thinking and keeps alight the torch of enlightenment toward many parts of the world, compared to the dull pedant who look after his in-quarto books?

- People condemn the young man who pressed by inner force, exits the narrow confinement of a scientific interest pursued only for subsistence, and follows the call of God who is in him? � Is that the rage of the small minds on the genius who refuses to magnify them? Maybe they really account the effect of rage so highly because it turned out so sour in themselves? � Dullness, industriousness and scholarly exertion will be appreciated, rewarded and admired under the honourable names of precision, earnestness and profoundness. Nothing is more known, and at the same time, nothing entitles the healthy reason more to shame than the irreconcilable hatred, the proud despise, with which university faculties look down upon free arts � and these relationships endure, until erudition and taste, truth and beauty, embrace one another like two reconciled daughters.


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