Whatever may have been Kleist's personal peculiarities, his works give evidence of the finest artistic sanity and conscience. His acute sense of literary form sets him off from the whole generation of Romanticists, who held the author's personal caprice to be the supreme law of poetry, and most of whose important works were either medleys or fragments. He was his own severest critic, and labored over his productions, as he did over his own education, with untiring energy and intense concentration. A less scrupulous author would not have destroyed the manuscript of _Robert Guiscard_ because he could not keep throughout its action the splendid promise of the first act. His works are usually marked by rare logical and artistic consistency. Seldom is there any interruption of the unity and simple directness of his actions by sub-plots or episodes, and he scorned the easy theatrical devices by which the successful playwrights of his day gained their effects. Whether in drama or story, his action grows naturally out of the characters and the situations. Hence the marvelous fact that his dramas can be performed with hardly an alteration, though the author, never having seen any of them on the stage, lacked the practical experience by which most dramatists learn the technique of their art. Kleist evidently studied the models of classical art with care. His unerring sense of form, his artistic restraint in a day when caprice was the ruling fashion, and the conciseness of his expression, are doubtless due to classical influence. But, at the same time, he was an innovator, one of the first forerunners of modern realism. He describes and characterizes with careful, often microscopic detail; his psychological analysis is remarkably exact and incisive; and he fearlessly uses the ugly or the trivial when either better serves his purpose.