essential part of Moor's character. It is this which, on German soil,
gave to 'The Robbers' tragic interest and insured its immortality. One
sees all along that Moor is a wanderer in the dark, and one can
sympathize with his purposes and his dreams while detesting his conduct.
This makes him a heroic figure. And when the clearing-up comes and he
discovers that he has been the victim not of society but of an
individual villain; that his attempt to right wrongs by committing new
wrongs, to enforce the laws by lawlessness, and to correct violence by
violence, was nothing but presumptuous and criminal folly,--when all
this becomes clear to him, we have a tragic situation of the most
pathetic character. This element of high tragic pathos was first given
to a German drama by Schiller. It had not been given by Goethe and
Lessing, nor was it in them to give it. This is why German tragedy in
the true sense may be said to have its beginning in 'The Robbers'.

That Schiller in a sense sympathized with his hero is undeniable. What
gives vitality to the character is here as always the fact that the
author looked into his own heart and then wrote. This, however, only
means that the moods of Moor are veritable moods of Schiller, raised to
a white heat and translated into action. The young student, dreaming the
dreams of youth and pining for freedom and action, had more than once
felt his gorge rise to the choking-point as he found himself forced to
plod on among the dull, oppressive, unheroic facts of life; and those
acts of official villainy against which Moor draws the sword he had
himself seen flourishing unavenged in his native Wuerttemberg. But, on
the other hand, he was never for a moment insensible to the moral
hideousness and the tragic folly of Moor's conduct. It was to be
sublime, but insane and calamitous nevertheless. One is justified in
thinking, therefore, that Goedeke goes too far, or does not express the
truth felicitously, when he says that the author of 'The Robbers' 'felt