the rules and the conventions, without ever having seen a moderately
good play in his life, with little help save from the poet's eye in a
fine frenzy rolling, the young student had shown himself at a stroke the
coming dramatist of his nation.

Let us freely admit that he had not shown himself a master of dramatic
craftsmanship. Faulty the piece no doubt is in several particulars. The
soliloquies of Franz are too long-winded, and the same may be said of
some of the robber-scenes. Spiegelberg's vulgar tongue is allowed to wag
too freely. Contempt of quotidian probability is now and then carried so
far as to produce an unintended effect of burlesque: as when the
robbers, who are merely dissolute students from Leipzig, fight with
twenty times their number of soldiers, lose one man and slay three
hundred. Again, one does not quite see the moral necessity of honest
Schweizer's killing himself, when he has the misfortune to find Franz
dead. He has indeed promised to capture him or die in the attempt, but
his promise was never meant to cover the case of the villain's suicide.
Under the circumstances his shooting himself is mere exuberance of
dramatic bloodshed.

But how absurd it would be to dwell upon these things as if they were
serious defects! Young Schiller undertook to Shaksperize. His parole
was not to be the natural and the probable, but the extraordinary, the
tremendous. Why then should he have been more timid than the author of
'Lear' and 'Macbeth'? One who is borne along by a whirlwind may be
pardoned for ignoring the rules and the proprieties. Of course it is
not intended to compare 'The Robbers' with the riper works of
Shakspere. That would be absurd, and yet no more absurd than to gird at
Schiller for doing what we pardon or even admire in Shakspere. Like
every great dramatist Schiller has an indefeasible right to demand that