for liberty was much too genuine to permit any trifling with the sacred
theme. There is no doubt that he began 'Fiesco' supposing that it would
prove a convenient setting for those inspiring ideas of liberty which he
had absorbed from the reading of ancient history and of modern
revolutionary literature. They were vague and tumultuous ideas, which
had very little relation to a definite theory of government, but he was
very much in earnest with them, especially after his rasping experience
with the Duke of Wuerttemberg. No one can mistake the autobiographic note
in the speech of Bourgognino which closes the first act: 'I have long
felt in my breast something that would not be satisfied. Now of a sudden
I know what it was. (Springing up heroically) I have a tyrant.' But the
young dramatist had not proceeded far before he discovered that his
ideal requirement was out of tune with the facts. To represent Fiesco as
a would-be liberator of his country was impossible without a violent
perversion of history for which he was not prepared. Out of deference to
history he was led to abase his hero into something like a Catilinarian
conspirator. But he could not give up the idea of a republican tragedy;
so he tried to save it by depicting his hero as a man who had it in him
to become a noble liberator, but is corrupted by the dazzling lures of
power and so led on to ruin.

There are those who regard Fiesco's inconsistency as an artistic
complexity of motive going to show that Schiller had progressed in the
knowledge of life and become aware that human heroism is apt to be more
or less mixed with base alloy. One writer[45] thinks it shows "how
intelligently he had studied the Italian Renaissance and how correctly
he had grasped its spirit." But this is to give him a credit that he
does not fully deserve. The simple truth is that 'Fiesco' was written
very hastily and that its author had spent precious little time in
studying the Italian Renaissance, though it must be admitted that he