laughed off the stage.[3] To such an extent as this did he gradually sacrifice everything to external artistic form. It is easy, then, to see how Goethe's one-sidedness prepared the way for that of the Romanticists; it is not so easy to show that the same was the case with Schiller. Schiller's dramas seem like prophecies of actual events. The French Revolution ferments in _Die Räuber_ (the play which procured for "Monsieur Gille" the title of honorary citizen of the French Republic), and, as Gottschall observes, "the eighteenth Brumaire is anticipated in _Fiesko_, the eloquence of the Girondists in _Posa_, the Cæsarian soldier-spirit in _Wallenstein_, and the Wars of Liberation in _Die Jungfrau von Orleans_ and _Wilhelm Tell_." But in reality it is only in his first dramas that Schiller allows himself to be influenced, without second thought or ulterior purpose, by his theme. In all the later plays the competent critic at once feels how largely the choice of subject has been influenced by considerations of form. Henrik Ibsen once drew my attention to this in speaking of _Die Jungfrau von Orleans_; he maintained that there is no "experience" in that play, that it is not the result of powerful personal impressions, but is a composition. And Hettner has shown this to be the relation of the author to his work in all the later plays. From the year 1798 onwards, Schiller's admiration for Greek tragedy led him to be always on the search for subjects in which the Greek idea of destiny prevailed. _Der Ring des Polykrates, Der Taucher_, and _Wallenstein_ are dominated by the idea of Nemesis. Maria Stuart is modelled upon the _Œdipus Rex_ of Sophocles, and this particular historical episode is chosen with the object of having a theme in which the tragic end, the appointed doom, is foreknown, so that the drama merely gradually develops that which is inevitable from the beginning. The subject of the _Jungfrau von Orleans_, in appearance so romantic, is chosen because Schiller desired to deal with an episode in which, after the antique manner, a direct divine message reached the human soul--in which there is a direct material interposition of the divinity, and yet the human being who is the organ of the divinity can be ruined, in genuine Greek fashion, by her human weakness.