possessed a remarkable gift for visualizing the little that he had
read. Complexity of motive is all very well,--very human and very
Italian; but the difficulty is that in this case it is not properly
subordinated to a luminous dramatic idea. When a man's motives become
so complex and contradictory that one does not know how to take him, he
ceases to be available for the higher purposes of tragedy. That
'Fiesco' produces this bewildering effect is due to the fact that the
inner logic of the piece had not been fully and consistently thought
out when the writing began.

And this is not all. The author seems unable to control and guide the
unruly spirits whom he has conjured into life. There is no lucid
grouping of historical forces. France, Germany and the Pope stand dimly
in the background like mechanical puppets, and we never learn what they
severally represent in relation to Genoese politics, Gianettino pulls a
string and has a sanction for the wholesale murder of his countrymen.
Fiesco pulls another string and gets men and galleys ad libitum. We do
not see an intelligible clash of great political ideas, but a wild
melee, in the outcome of which we have no reason to be particularly
interested. It is all as little tragic as a back-country vendetta, or a
factional fight in the halls of a modern parliament.

How loosely the play is articulated, and how little of logical
compulsion there Is in the catastrophe, is shown with fatal clearness by
Schiller's procedure in revising his work for the Mannheim stage. By a
few strokes of the pen at the end he changed its entire character. In
the original draft his vacillating mind had leaned more and more
decisively towards the Catilinarian conception of his hero, and the
book-version of 1783 was accordingly supplied with a motto from
Sallust's 'Catiline.' The sentence runs: _Nam id facinus imprimis ego