And yet such a conclusion would not be perfectly just to Schiller. It is
true that he was all for tragedy and that a happy moral ending, in the
vein of Diderot, would not have been to his taste. But this does not
tell the whole story. The romantic lovers are sacrificed in order that
the guilty president and his vile accomplices may be brought to book and
punished for their sins. The heart of the matter for Schiller was to
free his mind with respect to the infamies of high life. It was this
that tipped his pen with fire.

Of course there are German critics who find Louise's conduct in this
last scene quite 'inevitable' and full of a high tragic pathos. Thus
Palleske says of her:

Her anxious piety, her touching and indeed so intelligible devotion
to her father, her lack of freedom, bring on her fate. A veil of
mourning rests upon all she says. Heroic liberty of action, such as
befits a Juliet, is made impossible to this girl by her birth in the
bourgeoisie; she has only the liberty to perish, not the courage to
be happy. Of guilt there can be no question in this case: her
anxiety, her filial devotion, are her whole guilt; her virtue, her
love for her father, become her ruin. Whoever thoroughly knows the
bourgeoisie, which had yet to recover from these wounds,[54] will
admit that this character is drawn with terrible truthfulness.

This, however, is putting too fine a point upon it; it implies, when
closely analyzed, that Schiller deliberately made his heroine a little
stupid,--a view of her that hardly comports with the rest of the play.
To say that she _must_ die because she belongs to the bourgeoisie is
mere moonshine, for common sense can readily find a number of escapes.
She may cleave to her father and send her lover packing, after proper