The reader of the play, however, is not disturbed by any considerations of this kind. For him the choruses are simply poetry,--admirable poetry, for the most part, in Schiller's very best vein. What a wealth of imagery and what a splendor of varying rhythms! And how cunningly the gorgeous diction twines itself, like ivy about a bare wall, concealing the nakedness of commonplace and giving an effect of noble sententious wisdom! This is and must remain the great value of 'The Bride of Messina',--to delight the reader with the charm of its style. Schiller's plea for the chorus passed unheeded save by the philologists. His example was not imitated; indeed he himself probably had no serious hope that it would be. On the other hand, there did spring up in the next two decades a most luxuriant crop of so-called fate-tragedies, which, with their horrors, banalities and puerilities, soon brought the species into contempt and made it fair game for the telling satire of Platen. The fashion,--a thoroughly bad fashion in the main,--was undoubtedly set by 'The Bride of Messina'; but we cannot make Schiller answerable for the hair-raising and blood-curdling inventions of Werner, Houwald, Müllner, Grillparzer and Heine. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 127: Kuno Francke, "Social Forces in German Literature," page 394.] CHAPTER XX William Tell Der alte Urstand der Natur kehrt wieder, Wo Mensch dem Menschen gegenübersteht; Zum letzten Mittel, wenn kein andres mehr Verfangen will, ist ihm das Schwert gegeben. _'William Tell'_. Schiller's last play, like his first, was inspired by the Goddess of Freedom, but what a difference between the wild-eyed bacchante of the earlier day and the decorous muse of 'William Tell'! There the frenzied revolt of a young idealist against chimerical wrongs of the social order; here a handful of farmers, rising sanely in the might of union and appealing to the old order against intolerable oppression. There the tragedy of an individual madman; here the triumph of a laudable patriotism. 'Tell' is a fresh illustration of its author's versatility, for nothing more different from its immediate predecessors could easily be imagined. It is also the most thoroughly human among his plays, and the only one that does not end upon a tragic note. Finally it is the most popular, though the most loosely articulated,--a fact that shows how little the permanent interest and classical prestige of a dramatic production depend upon its satisfying the ideal demands of critical theory.