om is there any interruption of the unity and simple directness of
his actions by sub-plots or episodes, and he scorned the easy
theatrical devices by which the successful playwrights of his day
gained their effects. Whether in drama or story, his action grows
naturally out of the characters and the situations. Hence the
marvelous fact that his dramas can be performed with hardly an
alteration, though the author, never having seen any of them on the
stage, lacked the practical experience by which most dramatists learn
the technique of their art.

Kleist evidently studied the models of classical art with care. His
unerring sense of form, his artistic restraint in a day when caprice
was the ruling fashion, and the conciseness of his expression, are
doubtless due to classical influence. But, at the same time, he was an
innovator, one of the first forerunners of modern realism. He
describes and characterizes with careful, often microscopic detail;
his psychological analysis is remarkably exact and incisive; and he
fearlessly uses the ugly or the trivial when either better serves his
purpose.

In all the varied volume of Kleist's works, there is very little that
is mediocre or negligible. The _Schroffenstein Family_, to be sure, is
prentice work, but it can bear comparison with the first plays of the
greatest dramatists. The fragment of _Robert Guiscard_ is masterly in
its rapid cumulative exposition, representing the hero, idolized by
his troops, as stricken with the plague when the crowning glory of his
military career seems to be within his grasp; while the discord
between Guiscard's son and nephew presages an irrepressible family
conflict. The style, as Wieland felt when he listened with rapture to
the author's recital, is a blend of classical and Elizabethan art. The
opening chorus of the people, the formal balanced speeches, the
analytical action, beginning on the verge of the catastrophe, are
traits borrowed from Greek tragedy. On the other hand, there is much
realistic characterization and a Shakespearian variety and freedom of
tone. _The Broken Jug_, too, is analytical in its conduct. Almost from
the first it is evident that Adam, the village judge, is himself the
culprit in the case at trial in his court, and the comic efforts of
the arch-rascal to squirm out of the inevitable discovery only serve
to make his guilt the surer. In this comedy the blank verse adapts
itself to all the turns of familiar humorous dialo