The Life of Friedrich Schiller | Page 9

and
Nature, who employs his reasoning powers in creating new schemes
and devising new means, and conquers remorse by avoiding it,--by
fixing his hopes and fears on the more pressing emergencies of worldly
business. So reflective a miscreant as Franz could not exist: his
calculations would lead him to honesty, if merely because it was the
best policy.
Amelia, the only female in the piece, is a beautiful creation; but as
imaginary as her persecutor Franz. Still and exalted in her warm
enthusiasm, devoted in her love to Moor, she moves before us as the
inhabitant of a higher and simpler world than ours. "He sails on
troubled seas," she exclaims, with a confusion of metaphors, which it is
easy to pardon, "he sails on troubled seas, Amelia's love sails with him;
he wanders in pathless deserts, Amelia's love makes the burning sand
grow green beneath him, and the stunted shrubs to blossom; the south
scorches his bare head, his feet are pinched by the northern snow,
stormy hail beats round his temples--Amelia's love rocks him to sleep
in the storm. Seas, and hills, and horizons, are between us; but souls
escape from their clay prisons, and meet in the paradise of love!" She is
a fair vision, the beau idéal of a poet's first mistress; but has few mortal
lineaments.
Similar defects are visible in almost all the other characters. Moor, the
father, is a weak and fond old man, who could have arrived at gray
hairs in such a state of ignorance nowhere but in a work of fiction. The
inferior banditti are painted with greater vigour, yet still in rugged and
ill-shapen forms; their individuality is kept up by an extravagant
exaggeration of their several peculiarities. Schiller himself pronounced
a severe but not unfounded censure, when he said of this work, in a
maturer age, that his chief fault was in 'presuming to delineate men two
years before he had met one.'

His skill in the art of composition surpassed his knowledge of the world;
but that too was far from perfection. Schiller's style in the Robbers is
partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it represents;
strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but likewise
inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their rude emphasis,
come down like the club of Hercules; the stroke is often of a crushing
force, but its sweep is irregular and awkward. When Moor is involved
in the deepest intricacies of the old question, necessity and free will,
and has convinced himself that he is but an engine in the hands of some
dark and irresistible power, he cries out: "Why has my Perillus made of
me a brazen bull to roast men in my glowing belly?" The
stage-direction says, 'shaken with horror:' no wonder that he shook!
Schiller has admitted these faults, and explained their origin, in strong
and sincere language, in a passage of which we have already quoted the
conclusion. 'A singular miscalculation of nature,' he says, 'had
combined my poetical tendencies with the place of my birth. Any
disposition to poetry did violence to the laws of the institution where I
was educated, and contradicted the plan of its founder. For eight years
my enthusiasm struggled with military discipline; but the passion for
poetry is vehement and fiery as a first love. What discipline was meant
to extinguish, it blew into a flame. To escape from arrangements that
tortured me, my heart sought refuge in the world of ideas, when as yet I
was unacquainted with the world of realities, from which iron bars
excluded me. I was unacquainted with men; for the four hundred that
lived with me were but repetitions of the same creature, true casts of
one single mould, and of that very mould which plastic nature solemnly
disclaimed. * * * Thus circumstanced, a stranger to human characters
and human fortunes, to hit the medium line between angels and devils
was an enterprise in which I necessarily failed. In attempting it, my
pencil necessarily brought out a monster, for which by good fortune the
world had no original, and which I would not wish to be immortal,
except to perpetuate an example of the offspring which Genius in its
unnatural union with Thraldom may give to the world. I allude to the
Robbers.'[5]
[Footnote 5: Deutsches Museum v. Jahr 1784, cited by Doering.]

Yet with all these excrescences and defects, the unbounded popularity
of the Robbers is not difficult to account for. To every reader, the
excitement of emotion must be a chief consideration; to the mass of
readers it is the sole one: and the grand secret of moving others is, that
the poet be himself moved. We have seen how well Schiller's temper
and circumstances qualified him to fulfil this