himself one' with his hero.[26] He felt himself one with certain phases
of Moor's thought and feeling; for the rest, however, the
robber-chieftain was to be abominated as well as admired. There has been
too much of the tendency to see in 'The Robbers' only a personal
document; only a youth's incoherent cry for liberty. The piece is a work
of art, duly calculated with reference to artistic effects.

Turning now from the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is
struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have
before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive
the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was
copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is
all a brain-spun creation, born of his dramatic reading and of his
studies in medicine and philosophy. In the first place we can observe
that Franz is studiously contrasted with his brother. Karl is an
idealist and a man of sentiment; Franz is a materialist to whom the
natural emotions of the heart are objects of cynical derision. For Karl,
who knows his Klopstock as well as his Plutarch, love is a
transcendental dream foretelling a spiritual union in a world without
end; for Franz it is carnal appetite. Karl wears his heart upon his
sleeve; Franz is wily and hypocritical. The one is handsome and
chivalrous, the other ill-favored and cruel.

The jealous cadet who plots criminally against his more fortunate
brother is common to both Leisewitz and Klinger, but in neither is he an
intriguing villain. In 'Julius of Tarentum' Guido is really the more
masterful man of the two. He despises his brother as a weakling and
asserts no other claim than that of the strongest. In Klinger's play, as
we have seen, everything is made to turn upon Guido's cankering doubt of
his brother's seniority. One gets the impression that if the doubt could