This is what Marx put forward when he criticized his own historical tragedy Zijin Root in his letter to La Salle. In this letter written by Marx in 1859, he said to Lassall: "In this way, you have to be more Shakespearean, and I think your greatest shortcoming is that Xi Schleswig successfully turned the individual into a simple mouthpiece of the spirit of the times." It can be clearly seen from Marx's original words that the so-called Xi Schleswig mainly means that his works lack the authenticity of real life and only pursue the abstract spirit of the times, so that the characters become the pure mouthpiece of this spirit. It not only reveals the shortcomings of Schiller's plays, but also criticizes Lhasa's vicious development of this shortcoming. Marx insisted on the artistic expression law of realism and opposed the idealistic tendency of conceptualization.
Schiller was a German romantic poet, playwright and famous aesthetician in the18th century. His plays have a great influence. Engels said that his play The Robber, "praising a chivalrous young man who declared war on the society openly" and "Conspiracy and Love" were "the first drama with political inclination in Germany", and they all gave positive comments. However, Schiller's plays also have obvious shortcomings, mainly because his plays are illogical to life, allowing characters to publicize the author's political ideals, lacking real personality and so on. This can be seen in the above two plays, especially Don Carlos. This creative achievement is the inevitable product of Schiller's aesthetic thought. In Simple Poems and Sentimental Poems, he believes that "in a civilized state, because the harmonious competition of human nature is only an idea, the poet's task must be to improve the reality to the ideal, or to show the ideal." Schiller's emphasis on expressing ideal ideas and writing in a subjective way enhances the expressive force and emotional effect of his works, but sometimes it also affects the authenticity of social history. Of course, "Xi Schleswig" does not refer to all the characteristics of Schiller's works, but only to a bias in creation. When contacting Schiller's works, Schiller still has a lot of experience to learn from if he doesn't particularly like this bias.
However, Lasalle, the author of Ji Jingen, who was criticized by Marx and Engels, was particularly fond of Schiller, flaunting the shortcoming of "the simple mouthpiece of the spirit of the times" in his plays as a successful artistic experience and becoming the guiding principle of his own script writing, so that Ji Jingen was finally written, more like Schiller than Schiller. Therefore, Marx pointed out that "Xi Schleswig" was not so much to reveal the shortcomings of Schiller's plays as to criticize wrathall's conceptual graphic method.
When Lasalle wrote Jijingen, he regarded Jijingen as the "incarnation" of the "universal spirit" and described this abstract concept, so he wrote the declining reactionary knight class, which was bound to perish, as a representative of the "spirit of the times", in an attempt to describe the failure of the knight uprising in the 1848- 1849 century and the failure of the revolution.
In La Salle's "Xi Schleswig" tendency, his "tragic concept" is the ideological basis of the example. La Salle thinks: "The power of revolution lies in the fanaticism of revolution and the direct trust in the power and infinity of the concept itself." According to his explanation, "fanaticism" means "ignoring limited means of implementation and complicated difficulties in reality", so the key issue is that "fanaticism" must go deep into complicated reality and be transformed into action with limited means. La Salle also believes that "fanaticism" is easily confused with "limited means" when it is transformed into action, and he is committed to this means. At this time, "fanaticism" will be "shattered". La Salle regards "cunning" as an extremely important factor in "limited means". He concluded: "Most failed revolutions-any real historical expert should agree with this-collapsed because of this cunning, or at least all revolutions that tried to rely solely on this cunning failed." In fact, La Salle's view of tragedy is a tragic model fabricated out of thin air by giving up his scientific analysis of historical movements, and its nature belongs to the guiding ideology of idealism. However, La Salle's fallacy lies not only in his wrong guiding ideology about writing, but also in his clinging to this concept when facing the revolutionary movement of historical reality, adapting history and reality to his tragic concept, and explaining his concept with distorted images at the expense of reality-in fact, in order to interpret his "first" tragic theme. Because of this, Marx affirmed the contradictions and conflicts in La Salle's plays, but denied the theme. Because, in the/kloc-6th century, the lower-class aristocratic uprising led by chivalry and the peasant war at that time, these two "national movements", the former opposed the church and vassals, and the latter opposed the feudal system in an all-round way, which formed a wide range of social contradictions with the feudal class. As Engels said, the results of these two struggles were: "Both uprisings failed, mainly due to the indecision of the most beneficial group, that is, the urban citizens." Although Marx affirmed the "tragic conflict" of the script, he thought that the "chosen theme" for the author was not suitable for expressing this conflict. That is to say, Lassard's description of the plot setting of the complicated feudal social contradictions and struggles in the16th century is understandable, but the problem is that the script does not extract the theme meaning of the situation from this realistic social contradiction, but takes his tragic concept of super-history and surreal logic as the leading thought, taking this as an example, which shows that "revolutionary fanaticism" is committed to "cunning wisdom". In Marx's view, "fanaticism is shattered" and "ideas" are not only the themes contained in the facts of social contradictions and conflicts in the16th century, but also the themes that can be excavated in the history of the failure of the German revolution from 1848 to 1849. This is entirely La Salle's "fantasy". Marx criticized La Salle's "theme" determined against historical logic, and pointed out that La Salle used the characters in the play to trigger the theme. He thought that if Bauhinia Root held a rebellion in the form of knight dispute, but raised the banner against imperial power and openly waged war against princes, he would surely win, which was an illusion that did not conform to the historical law. In fact, Schiller's ideal tendency is a more conceptual expression.