passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become
vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the
very field for a mad Ajax who should make havoc among the cowards and
the pigmies. In Schubart's tragi-comedy there are no heroic passions
whatever. Nothing is conceived in a large and bold way. The characters
live and move throughout in the little world of their own selfish
interests. Such a piece, in which the penitent hero bends his back to
the plow and weakly pardons an abominable crime, did not comport with
Schiller's mood of fierce indignation. So he converted the story into a
tragedy and turned Schubart's meek and forgiving prodigal into a
terrible avenger of mankind.

In the contrasted brothers we see what Minor[20] well enough calls the
hot and cold passions. Karl is a hotspur whose emotions are always keyed
up to the highest pitch; he is never calm and is incapable of sober
reasoning. His boiling blood and his insensate ambition are his only
oracles. We may say that his motives are lofty, but in trying to set the
world right and make it conform to his perfervid dreams of justice and
freedom, he becomes a madman and a criminal. Franz, on the other hand,
represents the scheming intellect sundered from conscience and natural
feeling. He is a monster of cool, calculating, hypocritical villainy. At
the end he cowers in abject terror before the phantom conscience that he
has reasoned out of existence in the first act. The portrait of the two
brothers, as thus conceived, is crudely simple. There are no delicacies
of shading, no subtleties of psychological analysis. In short, Robber
Moor and his brother give the impression of having been made to a scheme
rather than copied from nature. Nevertheless the scheme is conceived
with superb audacity and executed with a dramatic power and insight that
had never been surpassed in Germany.