to their moral qualities, this was not enough. There had to be sheep and
goats, classified according to their loyalty. On the one hand, closest
to the leader stand the devoted Roller, the sturdy Schweizer and the
romantic idealist, Kosinsky; on the other are the envious malcontent,
Spiegelberg, and the wretched Schufterle. The others, less distinctly
characterized, represent the mass.

It will now be in order to look at 'The Robbers' a moment from the point
of view of dramatic art.[29] In a suppressed preface to the first
edition Schiller expressed himself very contemptuously with regard to
the stage, declaring that he had essayed a dramatized story and not a
stage-play. He would not advise that his work be put upon the boards;
for the rabble of the theater would not understand him, would take him
for an apologist of vice, and so forth. There seems no good reason to
doubt the essential sincerity of these expressions, though their author
quickly changed his tune when the staging of 'The Robbers' became a
practical question. In the heat of authorship, however, he had aimed at
a literary rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were
literary dramas. 'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a
book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the
like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for
representation, and Shakspere's day had not yet come.

This being so, it is a fact of interest that 'The Robbers' first
captured the public as a stage-play, and that too in a very much
modified version, from which all references to contemporary society had
been expunged, the action having been dated back into the fifteenth
century. This indicates that the initial success of the work was not due
mainly to the social 'tendency' which we see in it, but to its dramatic
power. And the dramatic power is there. With but slender knowledge of