injustice. She gave us wit when she placed us naked and miserable on
the shore of this great ocean-world. Swim who can, and whoso is too
clumsy let him sink. The right is with him that prevails. Family
honor? A valuable capital for him that knows how to profit by
it.--Conscience? An excellent scarecrow with which to frighten
sparrows from cherry-trees.--Filial love? Where is the obligation?
Did my father beget me because he loved me? Did he think of me at
all? Is there anything holy in his gratification of carnal appetite?
Or shall I love him because he loves me? That is mere vanity, the
usual predilection of the artist for his own work.

Such is the ethical attitude of Franz Moor, as we gather it from his
first soliloquy. One sees that Schiller was concerned to portray a
scoundrel who had read deeply and come to the conclusion that in a world
like this there is no valid reason why a man should be virtuous.
Evidently the author had himself breathed the mephitic air of
eighteenth-century skepticism. His natural goodness of heart safeguarded
him from corruption, but it pleased him as artist to dip his pen in the
blackest ink and draw the picture of the devil with whom he had wrestled
in moments of solitary musing.

In spite of his intellectual subtlety, however, Franz is a rather dull
villain. His philosophical and physiological pedantry--for Schiller
endows him lavishly with the special lore of the medical man--obfuscates
his vision for the ordinary facts of human nature. He has upon the whole
a more intelligible motive for his rascality than Iago, but he is much
less interesting, much less picturesque, for simple lack of mother-wit.
What a woeful blunder, for example, is his attempt to win Amalia by
depicting her absent lover, at great length and with all manner of
revolting details, as the victim of the most loathsome of diseases! And