[Footnote 31: Bulthaupt, I, 210, quotes from Pichler's history of the Mannheim theater the following account by an eye-witness; 'The theater was like a mad-house,—rolling eyes, clenched fists, stamping feet and hoarse shrieks from the spectators. Strangers fell sobbing into each other's arms, and women staggered to the door at the point of fainting. There was a general dissolution, as in chaos, from the mists of which a new creation bursts forth.' This description is perhaps the best possible antidote to Matthew Arnold's fastidious observation that 'The Robbers' is violent and tiresome.]
[Footnote 32: In a letter of Dec. 12, 1781, to Dalberg, he admits the cogency of the objection to his horde of robbers 'in our enlightened century' and virtually expresses regret that he had not himself, from the beginning, imagined an earlier date for the action. But he fears that to change the time, now that the piece is finished, will result in making it a monstrosity, a 'crow with peacock's feathers'.]
[Footnote 33:
"Love gilds not for thee all the world with its glow,
Never Bride in the clasp of thine arms shall repose;
Thou canst see not our tears, though in torrents they flow.
Those eyes in the calm of eternity close."
—Bulwer's Translation.]
[Footnote 34: As different poems undoubtedly Schiller's were variously signed, and as many of his youthful effusions were excluded by him from the collection of 1801, the sifting out of his share in the 'Anthology' and the ascription of the remaining poems to their proper authors are tasks of no small difficulty. The critical student should consult Weltrich, I, 501 ff.]
[Footnote 35: Schiller seems to have got his idea of Rousseau chiefly from H.P. Sturz's "Denkwürdigkeiten von Johann Jakob Rousseau" (1779). The famous 'Confessions' did not begin to appear until 1781. Curiously enough our poem refers to Rousseau as 'suckled on the banks of the Seine', and as having 'stood like a meteor on the banks of the Garonne'.]
[Footnote 36:
Geh, du Opfer dieses Trillingsdrachen,
Hüpfe freudig in den Todesnachen,
Grosser Dulder, frank und frei!
Geh, erzähl' dort in der Geister Kreise
Diesen Traum vom Krieg der Frösch' und Mäuse,
Dieses Lebens Jahrmarktsdudelei.]
[Footnote 37: Bulwer's translation, which is here particularly good.]
[Footnote 38: