rmed the greatest tragedian of
modern continental Europe. But in these vital particulars he was very
deficient. His position in society, character, and habits, precluded him
from acquiring it. The dissipated, heartless nobleman, who flew from one
devoted passion to another, without the slightest compunction as to
their effects on the objects of his adoration; who fought Lord Ligonier
in the Park, in pursuance of an intrigue with his lady; and stole from
the Pretender his queen, when age and dissipation had wellnigh brought
him to the grave; who traversed, post-haste, France and Italy with
fourteen blood-horses, which he wore out in his impetuous course, was
not likely either to feel the full force of the generous, or paint the
_real_ features of the selfish passion. He did not mingle with the
ordinary world on a footing of _equality_. This it is which ever makes
aristocratic and high-bred authors ignorant of the one thing needful in
history or the drama--a knowledge of human nature. No man ever learned
that, who had not been practically brought into collision with men in
all ranks, from the highest to the lowest. Hence his characters are
almost all overdrawn. Vice and virtue are exhibited in too undisguised
colours; the malignity of the wicked is laid too bare to the reader. He
makes the depraved _admit they are bad, but yet persevere in their
crimes_; a certain proof that he did not know the human heart. He knew
it better who said, "The heart _is deceitful above all things_, and
desperately wicked." Napoleon knew it better when he said to Talma,
after seeing his representation of Nero in _Britannicus_--"You are quite
wrong in your idea of Nero; you should _conceal the tyrant_. No man
admits he was guilty either to himself or others." Alfieri himself is a
proof of it: he recounts, in his life, many criminal acts he committed,
but never with the slightest allusion to their having been wrong. He
admitted, later in life, that he had been ignorant of human nature in
the great body of mankind; for he said, on recounting the horrors of the
10th August, which he had witnessed at Paris--"Je connais bien les
grands, _mais je ne connais pas les petits_."

It is hard to say whether Schiller belongs to the Greek or Romantic
school in the drama. His subjects are in great part chosen from the
latter class: he changes the scene, and did not hold himself bound by
the rules of Aristotle. But in his mode of treating these subjects, he
ap