is then made to suffer death at the hands of his own father.

In both these plays we have, as in 'The Robbers', an aged father whose
dynastic hopes center in an excellent son; this son the object of mad
jealousy on the part of a younger brother, and both brothers in love
with the same girl. The plays exhibit talent of a high order, but talent
that always falls short of genius. Psychical states are portrayed by
means of talk, and the talk is big enough; but very little actually
happens. The mighty passions have to be taken largely upon trust and the
conversation often drags. Dramatic possibilities are not fully grasped,
the situations are felt but not seen, and there is an obvious reluctance
to make unusual demands upon the stage. Even Klinger, whose play of
'Storm and Stress' gave a name to the whole contemporary movement in
German literature, reads tamely enough in comparison with 'The Robbers'.
But what is most noteworthy of all, Klinger and Leisewitz give us simply
dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a
single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life
with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the
larger tangle of human destiny.

This last is what the young Schiller did with masterly insight. He
converted the dynastic tragedy of his predecessors into a tragedy of the
social revolution; and his work has lived because we can hear in it the
preliminary roar of the storm which was soon to burst in the streets of
Paris.[22] He laid his scene not in far-off Italy nor in the remote
past, but in Germany and in the middle of the century which boasted of
its enlightened philosophy and its excellent police regulations. Of the
two brothers he took the sentimentalist for his hero, but made him at
the same time a man of action, a man of heroic mould and a self-helper.
The logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What