The character of Tell, as depicted by Schiller, has been the subject of much criticism, the strictures relating more particularly to his shooting the apple from his son's head, and then to his subsequent assassination of Gessler. There is an oft-quoted opinion of Bismarck, which may be quoted again, since it expresses so well a thought that has no doubt occurred, some time or other, to most readers and spectators of the play. Busch makes Bismarck say, under date of October 25, 1870: It would have been more natural and more noble, according to my ideas, if, instead of shooting at the boy, whom the best of archers might hit instead of the apple, he had killed the governor on the spot. That would have been righteous wrath at a cruel demand. I do not like his hiding and lurking; that does not befit a hero--not even a bushwhacker. Undoubtedly such conduct as is here suggested for Tell would be more 'heroic', in accordance with, our conventional ideas of heroism. And the thing would have been dramatically feasible. We can imagine Tell, for example, as making sham preparations to shoot at the apple and then suddenly sending his arrow through the heart of his enemy; and we can also imagine a further management of the scene such that Tell should escape with his boy. Thus everything would be accomplished on the public square at Altorf, in full face of the enemy, which is subsequently accomplished from the secure ambush by the 'hollow way' near Küssnacht. Such conduct would have been 'heroic', but the obvious objection to it is that it would have destroyed the very heart of the saga, which it was not for Schiller to make over but to render dramatically plausible. It may be urged, perhaps, that a poet who had made Joan of Arc die in glory on the battle-field need not have been so punctilious in following the exact line of Tschudi's story. But the cases are not exactly parallel. There the alternative was a scene of unmitigated and revolting horror, which would have destroyed the effect of the tragedy; here it was simply a question of _when_ Gessler should be killed with an arrow. To make Tell do just what the saga makes him do, and do it without forfeiting sympathy, was a delicate problem, which may well have fascinated Schiller, who is surely the last man in the world to be accused of holding tame views as to 'heroism'. At any rate he must have felt that a Tell who should not shoot at the apple and hit it would be simply no Tell at all.