That Schiller in a sense sympathized with his hero is undeniable. What gives vitality to the character is here as always the fact that the author looked into his own heart and then wrote. This, however, only means that the moods of Moor are veritable moods of Schiller, raised to a white heat and translated into action. The young student, dreaming the dreams of youth and pining for freedom and action, had more than once felt his gorge rise to the choking-point as he found himself forced to plod on among the dull, oppressive, unheroic facts of life; and those acts of official villainy against which Moor draws the sword he had himself seen flourishing unavenged in his native Württemberg. But, on the other hand, he was never for a moment insensible to the moral hideousness and the tragic folly of Moor's conduct. It was to be sublime, but insane and calamitous nevertheless. One is justified in thinking, therefore, that Goedeke goes too far, or does not express the truth felicitously, when he says that the author of 'The Robbers' 'felt himself one' with his hero.[26] He felt himself one with certain phases of Moor's thought and feeling; for the rest, however, the robber-chieftain was to be abominated as well as admired. There has been too much of the tendency to see in 'The Robbers' only a personal document; only a youth's incoherent cry for liberty. The piece is a work of art, duly calculated with reference to artistic effects. Turning now from the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his studies in medicine and philosophy. In the first place we can observe that Franz is studiously contrasted with his brother. Karl is an idealist and a man of sentiment; Franz is a materialist to whom the natural emotions of the heart are objects of cynical derision. For Karl, who knows his Klopstock as well as his Plutarch, love is a transcendental dream foretelling a spiritual union in a world without end; for Franz it is carnal appetite. Karl wears his heart upon his sleeve; Franz is wily and hypocritical. The one is handsome and chivalrous, the other ill-favored and cruel.