This being so, it is a fact of interest that 'The Robbers' first captured the public as a stage-play, and that too in a very much modified version, from which all references to contemporary society had been expunged, the action having been dated back into the fifteenth century. This indicates that the initial success of the work was not due mainly to the social 'tendency' which we see in it, but to its dramatic power. And the dramatic power is there. With but slender knowledge of the rules and the conventions, without ever having seen a moderately good play in his life, with little help save from the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, the young student had shown himself at a stroke the coming dramatist of his nation. Let us freely admit that he had not shown himself a master of dramatic craftsmanship. Faulty the piece no doubt is in several particulars. The soliloquies of Franz are too long-winded, and the same may be said of some of the robber-scenes. Spiegelberg's vulgar tongue is allowed to wag too freely. Contempt of quotidian probability is now and then carried so far as to produce an unintended effect of burlesque: as when the robbers, who are merely dissolute students from Leipzig, fight with twenty times their number of soldiers, lose one man and slay three hundred. Again, one does not quite see the moral necessity of honest Schweizer's killing himself, when he has the misfortune to find Franz dead. He has indeed promised to capture him or die in the attempt, but his promise was never meant to cover the case of the villain's suicide. Under the circumstances his shooting himself is mere exuberance of dramatic bloodshed. But how absurd it would be to dwell upon these things as if they were serious defects! Young Schiller undertook to Shaksperize. His parole was not to be the natural and the probable, but the extraordinary, the tremendous. Why then should he have been more timid than the author of 'Lear' and 'Macbeth'? One who is borne along by a whirlwind may be pardoned for ignoring the rules and the proprieties. Of course it is not intended to compare 'The Robbers' with the riper works of Shakspere. That would be absurd, and yet no more absurd than to gird at Schiller for doing what we pardon or even admire in Shakspere. Like every great dramatist Schiller has an indefeasible right to demand that we take his point of view, make his assumptions and enter into the spirit of his creation. And when we do this, how magnificently he carries us along! What animation in the dialogue everywhere, and what fire in the robber-scenes! From first to last the play fairly throbs with passion, and always with passion made visible. It is all action, all meant to be done and seen. Extravagant it is, no doubt; but while there are always hundreds of critics in the world who can see that and say it more or less cleverly, there is but one man in a century who can write such scenes. FOOTNOTES: