weak surrender for a man of his heroic stamp. In any case the wrong that
has been done him is a private wrong that has nothing to do with the
constitution of society. One does not see how it is to be righted or how
the world is to be purged of such baseness by killing and plundering
people in the Bohemian Forest.

The only reply which our drama makes to this objection is to be found in
Moor's crazy ambition for distinction. He has the 'great-man-mania'.
What attracts him in the career of crime is not the wickedness but the
bigness of it; the opportunity of lifting himself above the common herd
and sending his name down to posterity as that of a very extraordinary
person. 'I loathe this ink-spattering century', he says, 'when I read in
my Plutarch of great men.... I am to squeeze my body into a corset and
lace up my will in laws.... Law has never made a great man, but freedom
hatches out colossi and extremes, O that the spirit of Hermann were
still glowing in the ashes! Place me at the head of an army of fellows
like myself, and Germany shall become a republic in comparison with
which Rome and Sparta were nunneries.' Such, monstrous egotism needs no
motive, but only an occasion, for breaking with the order of
civilization. An occasion is furnished by the letter.

But that which marks Karl Moor as a genuine child of Schiller's
imagination and of the sentimental age is his combination of virile
energy with soft-heartedness and true nobility of feeling. In all his
robbings and burnings he does not become vulgarized like his comrades.
He imagines that he is engaged in a righteous work and has God on his
side. For this reason he has a right to his melting moods, as, for
example, in the famous and oft-praised scene on the Danube. This
delicacy of feeling, which to an American or Englishman is apt to seem
absurd in a bandit-chief who is engaged in wholesale crime, is an