disgust: 'I am going to Andrea!'

Such a scheme, it is evident, does not provide for a 'republican
tragedy', except in a very loose sense. If we had a republican idealist
pitting his strength against a tyrant and going down in the battle,
either because of his adversary's superior strength or because of some
weakness in his own character, that would be a tragedy of republicanism.
In Schiller's play, however, the conflict is not of that character. At
heart Fiesco is never a republican, though he sometimes takes his mouth
full of fine republican phrases. His mainspring of action is not the
welfare of Genoa, but his own aggrandizement. Old Andrea, whose power he
plots to overthrow and whose magnanimity puts him to shame, is actually
a better man than he. If he has a measure of our sympathy in his feud
with the younger Doria, that is only because Gianettino is portrayed as
a vulgar brute deserving of nothing but the gallows. Politically there
is little to choose between the two, so long as we regard virtue as
consisting in an unselfish devotion to an ideal of republican liberty.

The character of Fiesco being what it is, his final catastrophe produces
no very clear impression. One does not see precisely what bearing it is
to have on the political fortunes of Genoa. At first blush the
conclusion seems to mean that the state has been saved from the clutches
of a tyrant who was about to subvert its liberties. But if we look at
the matter in that light we have a tragedy, not of republicanism, but of
the "vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself and falls on the other."
With the usurper Fiesco, and the brute Gianettino, out of the way, the
state returns to the good regimen of Andrea, who represents the only
republicanism then thinkable, democracy in the modern sense being
nowhere in question. But it is doubtful whether Schiller intends Fiesco
to be thus reprobated. The hot-blooded Italian has certain traits that