But how absurd it would be to dwell upon these things as if they were serious defects! Young Schiller undertook to Shaksperize. His parole was not to be the natural and the probable, but the extraordinary, the tremendous. Why then should he have been more timid than the author of 'Lear' and 'Macbeth'? One who is borne along by a whirlwind may be pardoned for ignoring the rules and the proprieties. Of course it is not intended to compare 'The Robbers' with the riper works of Shakspere. That would be absurd, and yet no more absurd than to gird at Schiller for doing what we pardon or even admire in Shakspere. Like every great dramatist Schiller has an indefeasible right to demand that we take his point of view, make his assumptions and enter into the spirit of his creation. And when we do this, how magnificently he carries us along! What animation in the dialogue everywhere, and what fire in the robber-scenes! From first to last the play fairly throbs with passion, and always with passion made visible. It is all action, all meant to be done and seen. Extravagant it is, no doubt; but while there are always hundreds of critics in the world who can see that and say it more or less cleverly, there is but one man in a century who can write such scenes.
[Footnote 18: The Schubart story is reprinted by Weltrich, I, p. 183 ff., who attempts to trace its provenience. It was not entirely fiction. Cf. Minor, I, 298, to whom this chapter is indebted in many places.]
[Footnote 19: Eckermann's "Gespräche mit Goethe", under date of Jan. 17, 1827.]
[Footnote 20: "Schiller, sein Leben und seine Werke," I, 299.]
[Footnote 21: Bitter family fends, and particularly the fiction of the hostile brothers,--with motives of rivalry, jealousy and hatred, with paternal curses and parricide and fratricide and filicide,--were just then a literary fashion. It is worth noting in this connection that J.M.R. Lenz published in 1776 a story entitled "Die beiden Alten", in which a son shuts up his father in a cellar and sends a man to kill him. But the man's heart fails him and the prisoner escapes,--to reappear like a ghost among his kin. That Schiller read this story is at any rate thinkable, though there is no direct evidence of the fact.]