the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the
badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason,
the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to
nature,--all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he does not content
himself with indignant rhetoric or sentimental repining. He takes arms
against the sea of troubles. Instead of an excellent youth pitifully
done to death by a jealous brother, we get a towering idealist who is
the moulder of his own fate. With sublime [Greek: hubris] he takes it
upon himself to wield the avenging bolts of Jove, but finds that Jove
rejects his assistance. He errs disastrously in his judgment, like any
short-sighted mortal, and his work goes all agley. But when the end
comes it is not depressing. We see no longer a revolting fratricide and
the painful sacrifice of virtue to the meanest of passions, but the
verdict of the gods upon human presumption.

In making his hero a defiant self-helper and sending him with sword in
hand against the minions of the established order, Schiller was
obviously influenced by the example of 'Goetz von Berlichingen'. Like
Goetz, Karl Moor regards himself as the champion of freedom against the
law, which is its enemy. Both are friends of the oppressed and haters of
pedantry and pettifoggery. Both fight like lions against tremendous
odds. Both assume the leadership of a band of outlaws whom they cannot
control, and thus become responsible for revolting crimes not foreseen
or intended. But along with these and other resemblances that might be
pointed out there is an important difference. In the fourth act of the
earlier play a Heilbronn Councillor says to Goetz: 'We owe no faith to a
robber.' Whereat Goetz exclaims: 'If you did not wear the emperor's
emblem, which I honor in the vilest counterfeit, you should take back
that word or choke upon it. Mine is an honorable feud.' That is, the
knight of the sixteenth century repudiates the name in which Karl Moor