To understand the furore created by 'The Robbers' one should read two other storm-and-stress plays, by writers of no mean dramatic talent, which present the same fundamental situation,[21]—'The Twins', by Klinger, and 'Julius of Tarentum', by Leisewitz. Both these plays came out in the year 1776 and were evidently studied with care by Schiller. Both follow the timid example which had been set by Lessing of laying the scene in a foreign land, Klinger gives us two brothers, Guelfo and Ferdinando, of whom neither the mother nor her physician can tell which was born first. But Ferdinando has always been treated as the elder, has enjoyed the favor of his father, risen to power and distinction and won the prize in love. He is of a noble and forgiving temper and plays only a subordinate part. The hero is Guelfo, who, like Schiller's Karl Moor, has read Plutarch and would fain do something great, like Brutus or Cassius. But he remains after all only a poor knight. His hand is unnerved and his heroic spirit paralyzed by the suspicion that he has been the life-long victim of a conspiracy; that he and not Ferdinando is the elder brother. The whole interest of the play turns upon the portraiture of his morbid, insensate jealousy. In the fourth act he takes a morning ride with his brother and murders him. Then he defiantly reports the deed at home and is himself slain by his father.
In 'Julius of Tarentum' the younger brother, Guido, is, again, the man of action; a miles gloriosus who boasts of his strong arm and dreams of glory. He looks with contempt and hatred upon his gentle, sentimental brother Julius, who, though heir to the throne, prepares to renounce his career because he is thwarted in love. The girl Blanca, upon whom he has fixed his affections, is not deemed a suitable bride for him by his father and has been shut up in a convent. He determines to abduct her by night and flee with her to some romantic spot in the far north. In the execution of this purpose he is killed by his jealous brother Guido, who is then made to suffer death at the hands of his own father.
In both these plays we have, as in 'The Robbers', an aged father whose dynastic hopes center in an excellent son; this son the object of mad jealousy on the part of a younger brother, and both brothers in love with the same girl. The plays exhibit talent of a high order, but talent that always falls short of genius. Psychical states are portrayed by means of talk, and the talk is big enough; but very little actually happens. The mighty passions have to be taken largely upon trust and the conversation often drags. Dramatic possibilities are not fully grasped, the situations are felt but not seen, and there is an obvious reluctance to make unusual demands upon the stage. Even Klinger, whose play of 'Storm and Stress' gave a name to the whole contemporary movement in German literature, reads tamely enough in comparison with 'The Robbers'. But what is most noteworthy of all, Klinger and Leisewitz give us simply dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the larger tangle of human destiny.
This last is what the young Schiller did with masterly insight. He converted the dynastic tragedy of his predecessors into a tragedy of the social revolution; and his work has lived because we can hear in it the preliminary roar of the storm which was soon to burst in the streets of Paris.[22] He laid his scene not in far-off Italy nor in the remote past, but in Germany and in the middle of the century which boasted of its enlightened philosophy and its excellent police regulations. Of the two brothers he took the sentimentalist for his hero, but made him at the same time a man of action, a man of heroic mould and a self-helper. The logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason, the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to nature,—all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he does not content himself with indignant rhetoric or sentimental repining. He takes arms against the sea of troubles. Instead of an excellent youth pitifully done to death by a jealous brother, we get a towering idealist who is the moulder of his own fate. With sublime [Greek: hubris] he takes it upon himself to wield the avenging bolts of Jove, but finds that Jove rejects his assistance. He errs disastrously in his judgment, like any short-sighted mortal, and his work goes all agley. But when the end comes it is not depressing. We see no longer a revolting fratricide and the painful sacrifice of virtue to the meanest of passions, but the verdict of the gods upon human presumption.
In making his hero a defiant self-helper and sending him with sword in hand against the minions of the established order, Schiller was obviously influenced by the example of 'Götz von Berlichingen'. Like Götz, Karl Moor regards himself as the champion of freedom against the law, which is its enemy. Both are friends of the oppressed and haters of pedantry and pettifoggery. Both fight like lions against tremendous odds. Both assume the leadership of a band of outlaws whom they cannot control, and thus become responsible for revolting crimes not foreseen or intended. But along with these and other resemblances that might be pointed out there is an important difference. In the fourth act of the earlier play a Heilbronn Councillor says to Götz: 'We owe no faith to a robber.' Whereat Götz exclaims: 'If you did not wear the emperor's emblem, which I honor in the vilest counterfeit, you should take back that word or choke upon it. Mine is an honorable feud.' That is, the knight of the sixteenth century repudiates the name in which Karl Moor glories. Says Schiller's Pater in the second act: 'And you, pretty captain! Duke of cutpurses! King of scoundrels! Great Mogul of all rogues under the sun!' To which Moor replies: 'Very true. Very true. Just proceed.' In comparison with such a daredevil Goethe's hero seems to roar like a sucking dove. In his own mind Götz never really burns the bridge behind him. He is at heart a loyalist who recognizes the emperor's claim to his allegiance. As a free imperial knight he feels himself within his right under the feudal system. In resisting his enemies he does not set himself in opposition to governmental authority per se, but only to the abuse of authority by subordinates who disgrace their master and his. And in assuming the leadership of the insurgent rabble he thinks to restrain their ferocity and thus earn the thanks of the supreme authority.—It remained for Schiller to convert this rude self-helper in the age of expiring feudalism into a savage anarchist in the boastful age of enlightenment.
It was a bold idea to be conceived by a youth in a school where every third word was of virtue and philanthropy. Not that there was anything particularly audacious in a strong presentation of the spirit of revolt. For some time past this spirit had been nourished by the writings of Rousseau and those who followed in his wake, until attacks upon the social order, in some phase of it, had come to be almost the staple of literature. But the attacks had not been very dangerous. Either they were veiled by a distant setting of the scene, or the indictment of the age was presented incidentally in connection with some lacrimose tragedy of the individual. People had learned to sigh and weep that things should be so, but there the matter ended. The German princeling could look on with equanimity, assured that the rhetoric and the tears did not mean him, or that if they did it did not matter. In real life those who felt themselves oppressed by the civilization of Europe could emigrate, and they did emigrate in large numbers. This was one form of the return to nature. In literature, however, the usual expedient was to let the hero chafe himself to death and go down, without striking a blow, before the irresistible tyranny of the established order. Schiller's hero is of another ilk. Romantic flight with his lady-love does not occur to him. Surrender to the wrong is out of the question. He finds another form for the return to nature and puts into practice the maxim, Here or nowhere is America. He stays and fights at the head of a troop of bandits. Thus the play which was originally to have been called 'The Lost Son' became 'The Robbers'.
In their way, then, Schiller's outlaws stand for the state of nature. They represent natural man rising in brute strength against the oppressions of a depraved society. Such at least is Karl Moor's construction of the matter when he says to the Pater: 'Tell them that my business is retribution, that my trade is vengeance.' Under our modern development of the social sentiment we can hardly imagine a really high-minded youth setting out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar in literature. The Thirty Years' War had familiarized Germany with marauding bands who recognized no authority save that of their leader. Even in the eighteenth century the brigandage which was common in the Mediterranean countries continued to flourish in Southern Germany. As late as 1781, the very year in which 'The Robbers' appeared, we hear of the capture in Bavaria of a band of outlaws numbering nearly a thousand men. The year 1771 witnessed the execution of the robber-chieftain Klostermayer, who, under the name of the Bavarian Hiesel, became the subject of an idealizing saga in which we recognize the essential features of Karl Moor.[23]
Schiller's main fiction was thus, in a sense, warranted by the facts; and it gains further in artistic plausibility when we consider that the idealized bandit was already a familiar type in literature. The author of 'The Robbers' was acquainted with Robin Hood, and he had probably read 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona', in which the banished Valentine becomes the captain of a band of outlaws on condition that they "do no outrages on silly women or poor passengers", and the outlaws reply that they "detest such vile, base practices."[24] He had also read, in 'Don Quixote', of the high-toned robber, Roque Guinart, who had more of compassion, in his nature than cruelty. Cervantes makes Roque comment thus upon his mode of life: "Injuries which I could not brook and thirst for revenge first led me into it contrary to my nature; for the savage asperity of my present behavior is a disgrace to my heart, which is gentle and humane." At the end of the episode Roque sends his captives away "admiring his generosity, his gallantry, and his extraordinary conduct, and looking upon him rather as an Alexander the Great than as a notorious robber."[25] Here was a sufficient hint for a criminal in the grand style, who should imagine himself the spiritual congener of Plutarch's heroes.
'A singular Don Quixote whom we abominate and love, admire and pity',—such was Schiller's own formula for his first dramatic hero. From the standpoint of ordinary logic it must be admitted that Moor's motive for becoming a robber (the lying letter that he receives from Franz) is quite insufficient. He is duped too easily and should have known his brother better. He is too ready to give up everything dear to him, including the dear Amalia. 'I have no sweetheart any more', is a weak surrender for a man of his heroic stamp. In any case the wrong that has been done him is a private wrong that has nothing to do with the constitution of society. One does not see how it is to be righted or how the world is to be purged of such baseness by killing and plundering people in the Bohemian Forest.
The only reply which our drama makes to this objection is to be found in Moor's crazy ambition for distinction. He has the 'great-man-mania'. What attracts him in the career of crime is not the wickedness but the bigness of it; the opportunity of lifting himself above the common herd and sending his name down to posterity as that of a very extraordinary person. 'I loathe this ink-spattering century', he says, 'when I read in my Plutarch of great men…. I am to squeeze my body into a corset and lace up my will in laws…. Law has never made a great man, but freedom hatches out colossi and extremes, O that the spirit of Hermann were still glowing in the ashes! Place me at the head of an army of fellows like myself, and Germany shall become a republic in comparison with which Rome and Sparta were nunneries.' Such, monstrous egotism needs no motive, but only an occasion, for breaking with the order of civilization. An occasion is furnished by the letter.