The motive of adverse circumstances driving a high-souled man to become a captain of robbers is most famous from Die Räuber (1781) of Schiller. In that drama Gustave Planche[81] finds the ‘idée mère’ of Bertram, though he prefers the latter play:—‘les mêmes idées, qui dans Schiller resemblent à une dissertation, prennent dans Maturin la forme vivante et animée d’une légende surnaturelle, et cette différence suffirait pour établir la supériorité de Bertram sur les Brigands.’ It is, however, difficult to see where, in Bertram, the ideas of The Robbers come in at all. The drama of Schiller is, despite its bombastic language, a typical 18:th century production with a social tendency. The hero and his followers are—as in the case of the theorizing ‘Arcadian’ robbers in Godwin’s Caleb Williams—revolting against the constituent principles of society, the perverseness of which alone has occasioned their desperate enterprise; but the enterprise is, after all, discovered to be an unjustifiable means of changing the existing state of things. In Bertram there is nothing of the 18:th century. The adventure presented to the spectator is of a quite individual character, the case being applicable to the hero and no one else. He does not want to reform society; he does not place himself at the head of a gang of robbers on any ideal grounds; he falls. Nor are his companions robbers of the chivalrous type who keep a court of honour among themselves and take from the rich to give to the poor. Bertram himself says to some of them:
—ye are slaves that for a ducat
Would rend the screaming infant from the breast
To plunge it in the flames.
The play thus aims at nothing but the poetical exhibition of a man blending sublimity in guilt. The catchword of Karl Moor expresses his determination to surrender himself to justice, that is, voluntarily to meet the ‘felon death’ which Bertram, in his last cry, rejoices at having escaped. In all this there would appear, in Bertram, not a formally different application, but a total absence, of the ideas of The Robbers, and any influence from Schiller seems uncertain.—In some detached passages of Bertram critics tried to detect loans from several obscure plays, from Shakespeare, and even from Scott; but excepting the fact that The Tempest necessarily is called to mind by any play opening with a shipwreck, these loans are unimportant. The treatment of the other principal motive, the marriage of Imogine to the enemy of her lover, shows less originality. Its model, as pointed out in the Irish Quarterly Review 1852, is to be found in a play called Percy (1778), by Miss Hannah More. This was one of the first English dramas where the action is placed in romantic surroundings, although it resolves round the favourite topics of the day.[82] Percy, Earl of Northumberland, is the lover and destined husband of Elwina, daughter of Earl Raby. For some offence Raby breaks off all relations with Percy, who subsequently joins a crusade. During his absence Raby compels his daughter to marry Earl Douglas, an inveterate foe of Percy, and shortly after that the hero returns to England. Elwina, on one occasion, relates the story of her misfortunes to her maid, which passage has a direct correspondence in Bertram. The most conspicuous resemblance, however, is afforded by the scene where Elwina meets Percy and discloses to him that she is the wife of Douglas. Percy, like Bertram, is seized with a violent fury, and his words:
And have I ’scap’d the Saracen’s fell sword,
Only to perish by Elwina’s guilt?
are distinctly echoed in Bertram’s:
And did I ’scape from war, and want, and famine