There are those who regard Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how intelligently he had studied the Italian Renaissance and how correctly he had grasped its spirit." But this is to give him a credit that he does not fully deserve. The simple truth is that 'Fiesco' was written very hastily and that its author had spent precious little time in studying the Italian Renaissance, though it must be admitted that he possessed a remarkable gift for visualizing the little that he had read. Complexity of motive is all very well,--very human and very Italian; but the difficulty is that in this case it is not properly subordinated to a luminous dramatic idea. When a man's motives become so complex and contradictory that one does not know how to take him, he ceases to be available for the higher purposes of tragedy. That 'Fiesco' produces this bewildering effect is due to the fact that the inner logic of the piece had not been fully and consistently thought out when the writing began. And this is not all. The author seems unable to control and guide the unruly spirits whom he has conjured into life. There is no lucid grouping of historical forces. France, Germany and the Pope stand dimly in the background like mechanical puppets, and we never learn what they severally represent in relation to Genoese politics, Gianettino pulls a string and has a sanction for the wholesale murder of his countrymen. Fiesco pulls another string and gets men and galleys ad libitum. We do not see an intelligible clash of great political ideas, but a wild mêlée, in the outcome of which we have no reason to be particularly interested. It is all as little tragic as a back-country vendetta, or a factional fight in the halls of a modern parliament.