The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Vi Part 20

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER AND KAETHI FRoHLICH IN 1823]

In 1810 he revolts from Schiller and swears allegiance to Goethe. In the ensuing years he learns English, Greek, and Spanish; Shakespeare supplants Goethe in his esteem, and he is attracted first to Calderon and then to Lope de Vega in whom, ere long, he discovers the dramatic spirit most closely akin to his.

We read of Grillparzer, as of Goethe, that as a child he was fond of improvising dramatic performances with his playmates. Occasionally he was privileged to attend an operetta or a spectacular play at one of the minor theatres. When he reached adolescence he experimented with a large number of historical and fantastic subjects, and he left plans and fragments that, unoriginal as most of them are, give earnest of a talent for scenic manipulation and for the representation of character. These juvenile pieces are full of reminiscences of Schiller and Shakespeare.

Grillparzer's first completed drama of any magnitude, _Blanca of Castile_ (1807-09), is almost to be called Schiller's _Don Carlos_ over again, both as to the plot and as to the literary style--though of course the young man's imitation seems like a caricature. The fragments _Spartacus_ (1810) and _Alfred the Great_ (1812), inspired by patriotic grief for Austria humiliated by Napoleon, are Shakespearean in many scenes, but are in their general disposition strongly influenced by Schiller's _Robbers and Maid of Orleans_. In all three of these pieces, the constant reference to inscrutable fate proves that Grillparzer is a disciple of Schiller and a son of his time.

There is, therefore, a double significance in the earliest play of Grillparzer's to be performed on the stage, _The Ancestress_ (1816)--first, in that, continuing in the direction foreshadowed by its predecessors, it takes its place beside the popular dramas of fate written by Werner and Mullner; and secondly, because at the same time the poet, now yielding more to the congenial impulse of Spanish influences, establishes his independence even in the treatment of a more or less conventional theme. Furthermore, _The Ancestress_ marks the beginning of Grillparzer's friends.h.i.+p with Schreyvogel. Grillparzer had translated some scenes of Calderon's _Life is a Dream_ which, published in 1816 by an enemy of Schreyvogel's who wished to discredit the adaptation which Schreyvogel had made for the _Burgtheater,_ served only to bring the two men together; for Schreyvogel was generous and Grillparzer innocent of any hostile intention. As early as 1813 Grillparzer had thought of _The Ancestress_. Schreyvogel encouraged him to complete the play, and his interest once again aroused and soon mounting to enthusiasm, he wrote in less than a month the torrent of Spanish short trochaic verses which sweeps through the four acts of this romantic drama. Schreyvogel was delighted; but he criticized the dramatic structure; and in a revised version in five acts Grillparzer so far adopted his suggestions as to knit up the plot more closely and thus to give greater prominence to the idea of fate and retribution. The play was performed on the thirty-first of January, 1817, and scored a tremendous success.

Critics, to be sure, were not slow to point out that the effectiveness of _The Ancestress_ was due less to poetical qualities than to theatrical--unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Mullner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all advent.i.tious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish a text for an opera. Grillparzer replied that the subject would perhaps yield a tragedy. The idea took hold of him; without delay or pause for investigation he made his plan; and in three weeks his second play was ready for the stage. Written in July, 1817, _Sappho_ was produced at the _Hofburgtheater_ on April 21, 1818. Grillparzer said that in creating _Sappho_ he had plowed pretty much with Goethe's steer.

In form his play resembles _Iphigenia_ and in substance it is not unlike _Ta.s.so;_ but upon closer examination _Sappho_ appears to be neither a cla.s.sical play of the serene, typical quality of _Iphigenia_ nor a _Kunstlerdrama_ in the sense in which _Ta.s.so_ is one. Grillparzer was not inspired by the meagre tradition of the Lesbian poetess, nor yet by anything more than the example of Goethe; he took only the outline of the story of Sappho and Phaon; his play is almost to be called a romantic love story, and the influence strongest upon him in the writing of it was that of Wieland. The situation out of which the tragedy of Sappho develops is that of a young man who deceives himself into believing that admiration for a superior woman is love, and who is undeceived when a _nave_ maiden awakens in him sentiments that really are those of love. This situation occurs again and again in the voluminous works of Wieland--most obviously perhaps in the novelette _Menander and Glycerion_ (1803), but also in the novel _Agathon_ (1766-1767), and in the epistolary novel _Aristippus_ (1800-1802).

Moreover, it is the essential situation in Mme. de Stael's _Corinne_ (1807). In the third place, this situation was Grillparzer's own, and it is so constantly found in his dramas that it may be called the characteristic situation for the dramatist as well as for the man. In this drama, finally, we have a demonstration of Grillparzer's profound conviction that the artistic temperament is ill suited to the demands of practical life, and in the solitary sphere to which it is doomed must fail to find that contentment which only life can afford. Sappho is not a.s.sailed by life on all sides as Ta.s.so is; but she makes an egregious mistake in her search for the satisfactions of womanhood, thereby unfitting herself for the priesthood of poetry as well as forfeiting her life.

_Sappho_ was as successful on the stage as _The Ancestress_ had been, and the dramatist became the lion of the hour. He was received in audience by Prince Metternich, was lauded in high social circles in Vienna, and was granted an annual pension of 1000 florins for five years, on condition that the _Hofburgtheater_ should have the right to first production of his forthcoming plays. It was, therefore, with great enthusiasm and confidence that he set to work upon his next subject, _The Golden Fleece._ The story of Jason and Medea had long been familiar to him, not only in the tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, but also in German dramas and operas of the eighteenth century which during his youth were frequently produced in Vienna. The immediate impulse to treat this story came to him when, in the summer of 1818, he chanced upon the article _Medea_ in a mythological lexicon. His plan was soon formed and was made to embrace the whole history of the relations of Jason and Medea. For so comprehensive a matter Grillparzer, like Schiller in _Wallenstein,_ found the limits of a single drama too narrow; and as Schiller said of _Wallenstein--_

"His camp alone explains his fault and crime,"

so Grillparzer rightly perceived that the explanation to modern minds of so incredible a crime as Medea's must be sought and presented in the untoward circ.u.mstances under which her relations with Jason began.

Accordingly, he showed in _The Guest Friend_ how Phryxus, obedient to what he believed to be the will of the G.o.ds, bore the Golden Fleece to Colchis, only to meet death at the hands of aeetes, the king of that land, who coveted the precious token. Medea, the king's daughter, vainly tries to prevent the crime, but sees herself included in the dying man's curse; for she shares her father's desire for the treasure and is appalled only by the sense of outraged hospitality, even to a haughty intruder. When, in _The Argonauts,_ Jason comes to recover the Fleece, Medea, still an Amazon and an enchantress, is determined with all her arts to aid her father in repulsing the invaders. But the sight of the handsome stranger soon touches her with an unwonted feeling. Against her will she saves the life and furthers the enterprise of Jason; they become partners in the theft of the Fleece; whereupon Jason, fascinated by the dark-eyed barbarian and gratified with the sense of subjugating an Amazon, a.s.sures her of his love and takes her and the Fleece in triumph away from Colchis.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRILLPARZER'S HOUSE IN THE SPIEGELGa.s.sE]

Four years elapse before the action of _Medea_ commences. Medea has borne two sons to Jason; as a husband and father he returns to Greece with the object of his quest. But he is now received rather as the husband of a sorceress than as the winner of the Fleece. Ostracism and banishment accentuate the humiliation of marriage to a barbarian. Medea has sacrificed all to serve him; without her aid his expedition would have been fruitless, but with her he cannot live in the civilized community where she has no place. She frantically endeavors to become a Greek, but to no purpose. Jason strives to overcome a growing repugnance and loyally makes common cause with her; but he cannot follow her in banishment from Corinth, nor appreciate the feelings of the wife who sees him about to marry Creusa, and of the mother who sees her children prefer Creusa to herself. Then the barbarian in Medea rea.s.serts herself and the pa.s.sion of a just revenge, stifling all other feeling, moves her to the destruction of all her enemies and a final divorce from her heartless husband. To Jason she can give no other words of comfort than that he may be stronger in suffering than he has been in acting.

Such an eminently personal tragedy Grillparzer constructed on the basis of a mythological story. The Fleece, like the h.o.a.rd of the Nibelungen, is the occasion, but the curse attached to it is not the cause, of crimes; this cause is the cupidity of human nature and the helplessness of the individual who allows the forces of evil to gain sway over him.

Jason, in overweening self-indulgence, attaches himself to a woman to whom he cannot be true. Medea, in too confident self-sufficiency, is not proof against the blandishments of an unscrupulous adventurer and progresses from crime to crime, doing from beginning to end what it is not her will to do. An unnatural and unholy bond cannot be severed even to make way for a natural and holy one. And the paths of glory lead not to the grave but to a living death in the consciousness of guilt and the remorse for misdeeds.

Grillparzer never again wrote with such tumultuous pa.s.sion as swayed him at the time of his work on the first half of _The Golden Fleece._ His illicit love of Charlotte Paumgarten gave him many a tone which thrills in the narrative of Jason and Medea; the death of his mother brought home to him the tragedy of violence and interrupted his work in the midst of _The Argonauts;_ his visit to Rome enabled him to regain composure and increase his sense of the local color of ancient civilization; so that when he completed _Medea,_ in the fall and early winter of 1819-20, he wrote with the mastery of one who had ventured, suffered, observed, and recovered. In his own person he had experienced the dangers of the _vita activa_ against which _The Golden Fleece_ is a warning.

Mention has already been made of Grillparzer's pride in the history of Austria. In 1809 he wrote in his diary, "I am going to write an historical drama on Frederick the Warlike, Duke of Austria." A few stanzas of a ballad on this hero were written, probably at this time; dramatic fragments have survived from 1818 and 1821. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century vigorous efforts were made, especially by Baron von Hormayr and his collaborators, to stir up Austrian poets to emulate their North-German colleagues in the treatment of Austrian subjects. With these efforts Grillparzer was in hearty sympathy. The Hanoverian A.W. Schlegel declared in a lecture delivered at Vienna in 1808 that the worthiest form of the romantic drama was the historical; and made special mention of the house of Habsburg. In 1817 Matthaus von Collin's play _Frederick the Warlike_ was published, as one of three (_Leopold the Glorious, Frederick the Warlike_, and _Ottocar_) planned as a cycle on the house of Babenberg. Collin's _Frederick_ interested Grillparzer; Ottocar, who married Frederick's sister and whose fate closely resembled Frederick's, appealed to him as a promising character for dramatic treatment; a performance of Kleist's _Prince Frederick of Homburg,_ which Grillparzer witnessed in 1821, may well have stimulated him to do for the first of the Habsburgs, Ottocar's successful rival, what Kleist had done for the greatest of the early Hohenzollerns; and particularly the likeness of Ottocar's career to that of Napoleon gave him the point of view for _King Ottocar's Fortune and Fall,_ composed in 1823.

_Ottocar_ is remarkable for the amount of matter included in the s.p.a.ce of a single drama, and it gives an impressive picture of the dawn of the Habsburg monarchy; but only in the first two acts can it be said to be dramatic. The middle and end, though spectacular, are rather epic than dramatic, and our interest centres more in Rudolf the triumphant than in Ottocar the defeated and penitent. The play is essentially the tragedy of a personality. Ottocar is a _parvenu,_ a strong man whom success makes too sure of the adequacy of his individual strength, ruthless when he should be politic, indulgent when stern measures are requisite, an egotist even when he acts for the public weal. Grillparzer treated his case with great fulness of sensuous detail, but without superabundance of antiquarian minutiae, in spite of careful study of historical sources of information. "Pride goeth before destruction," is the theme, but Grillparzer was far from wis.h.i.+ng either to demonstrate or ill.u.s.trate that truth. _Ottocar_ is the tragedy of an individual unequal to superhuman tasks; it does not represent an idea, but a man.

After having been retained by the censors for two years, lest Bohemian sensibilities should be offended, _Ottocar_ was finally freed by order of the emperor himself, and was performed amid great enthusiasm on February nineteenth, 1825. In September of that year the empress was to be crowned as queen of Hungary, and the imperial court suggested to Grillparzer that he write a play on a Hungarian subject in celebration of this event. He did not immediately find a suitable subject; but his attention was attracted to the story of the palatin Bancba.n.u.s, a national hero who had found his way to the dramatic workshop of Hans Sachs in Nuremberg, had been recommended to Schiller, and had recently been treated in Hungarian by Joseph Katona. Grillparzer knew neither of the plays of his predecessors. In connection with this subject he thought rather of Shakespeare's _King Lear_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_, of Byron's _Marino Faliero_--he had early experimented with this hero himself--and this was the time of his first thorough study of Lope de Vega. In November and December, 1826, he wrote _A Faithful Servant of His Master._ This is a drama of character triumphant in the severest test to which the sense of duty can be put. Bancba.n.u.s, appointed regent while his sovereign goes to war, promises to preserve peace in the kingdom, and keeps his promise even when his own relatives rise in arms against the queen's brother who has insulted Bancba.n.u.s' wife and, they think, has killed her. We have to do, however, not merely with a brilliant example of unselfish loyalty; we have a highly special case of individualized persons. Bancba.n.u.s is a little, pedantic old man, almost ridiculous in his personal appearance and in his over-conscientiousness.

Erny, his wife, is a childlike creature, not displeased by flattery, too innocent to be circ.u.mspect, but faithful unto death. And Otto von Meran, the princely profligate, is one of Grillparzer's boldest creations--not bad by nature, but utterly irresponsible; crafty, resourceful, proud as a peac.o.c.k and, like a monkey in the forest, wis.h.i.+ng always to be noticed. He cannot bear disregard; contempt makes him furious; and a sense of disgrace which would drive a moral being to insanity reduces him to a state of stupidity in which, doing good deeds for the first time and unconsciously, he gradually acquires consciousness of right and wrong. It is Bancba.n.u.s who brings about this transformation in the character of Otto, who holds rebellious n.o.bles and populace in check, who teaches his master how to be a servant of the State, and who, by saving the heir to the throne and praying that he may deserve the loyalty shown his father, points forward to the better day when feudalism shall give way to unselfish enlightened monarchy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRILLPARZER'S ROOM IN THE HOUSE OF THE SISTERS FRoHLICH]

This play, a glorification of patriotic devotion and, in spite of the self-repressive character of the hero, as full of stirring action as any German historical play whatever, was presented on the twenty-eighth of February, 1828, and was received with applause by high and low. The emperor caused a special word of appreciation to be conveyed to the poet. How great was Grillparzer's astonishment, therefore, when, on the following day, the president of police summoned him and informed him that the emperor was so well pleased with the play that he wished to have it all to himself; wherefore the dramatist would please hand over the ma.n.u.script, at his own price! Dynastic considerations probably moved the emperor to this preposterous demand. The very futility of it--since a number of copies of the ma.n.u.script had already been made, and one or the other was sure to escape seizure--is a good example of the trials to which the patience of Austrian poets was subjected during the old regime. Grillparzer was at this time depressed enough on his own account, as his poems _Tristia ex Ponto_ bear witness. This new attempt at interference almost made him despair of his fatherland. "An Austrian poet," he said, "ought to be esteemed above all others. The man who does not lose heart under such circ.u.mstances is really a kind of hero."

Grillparzer was not a real hero. But in the midst of public frictions, personal tribulations, apprehension that his powers of imagination were declining, and petulant surrenders to discouragement, he kept pottering along with compositions long since started, and by 1831 he had completed two more plays, _A Dream is Life_ and _Waves of the Sea and of Love_.

Like _The Ancestress_, _A Dream is Life_ is written in short trochaic verses of irregular length and with occasional rhyme. The idea was conceived early, the first act was written at the time of _The Ancestress,_ and the t.i.tle, though chosen late, being a reversal of Calderon's _Life is a Dream_, suggests the connection with that Spanish drama. Grillparzer's princ.i.p.al source for the plot, was, however, Voltaire's narrative ent.i.tled _White and Black_. In the psychology of dreams he had long been interested, and life in the dream state formed a large part of the opera text _Melusina_ which, in 1821-23, he wrote for Beethoven. A particular flavor was doubtless given to the plot by the death of Napoleon on May fifth, 1821, and the beginning of Grillparzer's friends.h.i.+p with Katharina Frohlich shortly before; for _A Dream is Life_ represents in the dream of a harmless but ambitious young man such a career of conquest as Napoleon was thought to have exemplified, and the hero, waking after a nightmare of deceits and crimes that were the stepping stones to success, is warned of the dangers that beset enterprise and taught to prefer the simple life in union with a rustic maiden. There are two actions, corresponding to the waking and sleeping states, the actors in the latter being those of real life fantastically transformed; but there is no magic or anything else super-natural, and the most fascinating quality in the drama is the skill with which the transformation is made in accordance with the irrational logic of dreams. Accompanied by the weird music of Gyrowetz and exquisitely staged, this is the most popular of Grillparzer's plays in Vienna. But it is by no means merely theatrical. There is profound truth in the theory upon which it is constructed: a dream is the awakening of the soul; dreams do not create wishes, they reveal them, and the actions of a dreamer are the potentialities of his character. Moreover, the quietistic note of renunciation for the sake of peace to the soul and integrity of personality is the final note of _The Golden Fleece_ no less than of this fantasmagoria. _Waves of the Sea and of Love_ is a far-fetched and sentimental t.i.tle for a dramatization of the story of Hero and Leander. Grillparzer chose the t.i.tle, he said, because he wished to suggest a romantic treatment that should humanize the matter.

The play really centres in the character of Hero and might much better be called by her name. In it Grillparzer's experiences with Charlotte von Paumgarten and Marie Daffinger are poetically fructified, and his capacity for tracing the incalculable course of feminine instincts attains to the utmost of refinement and delicacy. The theme is the conflict between duty to a solemn vow of sacerdotal chast.i.ty and the disposition to satisfy the natural desire for love. But Grillparzer has represented no such conflict in the breast of Hero. Her antagonist is not her own conscience but the representative of divine law in the temple of which she is priestess. The action of the play therefore takes the form of an intrigue on the part of this representative to thwart the intrigue of Hero and Leander. This external collision is, however, far from supplying the chief interest in a drama unquestionably dramatic, although its main action is internal. Hero is at the beginning a Greek counterpart to the barbarian Medea. She has the same pride of station and self-a.s.surance. Foreordained to asceticism, she is ready to embrace it because she thinks it superior to the worldliness of which she has no knowledge. When worldliness presents itself to her in the attractive form of Leander, she is first curious, then offended, apprehensive of danger to herself and to him, only soon to apprehend nothing but interruption of the new rapture to which she yields in oblivion of everything else in the world. Only a poet of the unprecedented _navete_ of Grillparzer could so completely obliterate the insurgency of moral scruples against this establishment of the absolute monarchy of love.

In spite of admirable dramatic qualities and the most exquisite poetry even in the less dramatic pa.s.sages, this play on Hero and Leander disappointed both audience and playwright when it was put upon the stage in April, 1831. Other disappointments were rife for Grillparzer at this time. But he put away his desires for the unattainable, and with the publication of _Tristia ex Ponto_ in 1835, took, as it were, formal leave of the past and its sorrow. Indeed, he seemed on the point of beginning a new epoch of ready production; for he now succeeded, for the first time since 1818, in the quick conception and uninterrupted composition of an eminently characteristic play, the most artistic of German comedies, _Woe to the Liar_. It was the more lamentable that when the play was enacted, on the sixth of March, 1838, the brutal behavior of an unappreciative audience so wounded the sensitive poet that he resolved never again to subject himself to such ignominy--and kept his word. In 1840 he published _Waves of the Sea and of Love, A Dream is Life_, and _Woe to the Liar_; but the plays which he wrote after that time he kept in his desk.

The year 1838, accordingly, sharply divides the life of Grillparzer into two parts--the first, productive and more or less in the public eye; the second, contemplative and in complete retirement from the stage. To be sure, the poet became conspicuous once more with his poem to Radetzky in 1848; in 1851 Heinrich Laube, recently appointed director of the _Hofburgtheater_, inst.i.tuted a kind of Grillparzer revival; and belated honors brought some solace to his old age. But he had become an historical figure long before he ceased to be seen on the streets of his beloved Vienna, and the three completed ma.n.u.scripts of plays that in 1872 he bequeathed to posterity had lain untouched for nearly twenty years.

Two of these posthumous pieces, _Brothers' Quarrels in the House of Habsburg_ and _Libussa_, undoubtedly reveal the advancing years of their author, in a good and in a bad sense. They lack the theatrical self-evidence of the earlier dramas. But on the other hand, they are rich in the ripest wisdom of their creator, and in significance of characterization as well as in profundity of idea they amply atone for absence of the more superficial qualities. Kaiser Rudolf II. in _Brothers' Quarrels_ is one of the most human of the men who in the face of inevitable calamity have pursued a Fabian policy. Even to personal predilections, like fondness for the dramas of Lope, he is a replica of the mature Grillparzer himself. _Libussa_ presents in Primislaus a somewhat colorless but nevertheless thoroughly masculine representative of practical cooperation and progress, and in Libussa, the heroine, a typical feminine martyr to duty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER In his Sixtieth Year]

The third of the posthumous pieces, however, _The Jewess of Toledo_, may perhaps be said to mark the climax of Grillparzer's productive activity.

It is an eminently modern drama of pa.s.sion in cla.s.sical dignity of form.

Grillparzer noted the subject as early as 1813. In 1824 he read Lope de Vega's play on it, and wrote in trochees two scenes of his own; in 1848-49--perhaps with Lola Montez and the king of Bavaria in mind--he worked further on it, and about 1855 brought the work to an end. The play is properly called _The Jewess of Toledo_; for Rachel, the Jewess, is at the centre of the action, and is a marvelous creation--"a mere woman, nothing but her s.e.x"; but the king, though relatively pa.s.sive, is the most important character. He is attracted to Rachel by a charm that he has never known in his coldly virtuous English consort, and, after an error forgivable because made comprehensible, is taught the duty of personal sacrifice to morality and to the state. In doctrine and in inner form this drama is comparable to Hebbel's _Agnes Bernauer_; it is a companion piece to _A Faithful Servant of his Master_, and the sensuality of Rachel contrasts instructively with the spirituality of Hero. The genuine dramatic collision of ant.i.thetical forces produces, furthermore, a new synthesis, the effect of which is to make us wish morality less austere and the sense of obligation stronger than they at first are in two persons good by nature but caused to err by circ.u.mstances. In the series of dramas thus pa.s.sed in review there is a great variety of setting and incident, and an abundance of dramatic _motifs_ that show Grillparzer to have been one of the most opulent of playwrights. The range of characters, too, each presented with due regard for _milieu_, is seen to be considerable, and upon closer examination would be seen to be more considerable still. The greatest richness is found in the characters of women. Grillparzer himself lacked the specifically masculine qualities of courageous enterprise and tenacity of purpose. His men are rather affected by the world than active creators of new conditions, and their contact with conditions as they are leaves them with the scars of battle instead of the joy of victory. No one, however, could attribute a feministic spirit to Grillparzer; or, if so, it must be said that the study of reaction is no less instructive than the study of action and that being is at least as high an ideal as doing. Being, existence in a definite place amid the tangible surroundings of personal life, Grillparzer gives us with extraordinary abundance of sensuous details. The drama was for him what Goethe said it should always be, a present reality; and for the greater impressiveness of this reality he is fond of the use of visible objects--whether they be symbols, like the Golden Fleece in _Medea_, the lyre in _Sappho_, the medallion in _The Jewess of Toledo_, or characteristic weapons, accoutrement, and apparel. Everything expressive is welcome to him, gesture or inarticulate sound reinforces the spoken word or replaces it. Unusually sensuous language and comparative fulness of sententious pa.s.sages go hand in hand with a laconic habit which indulges in many ellipses and is content to leave to the actor the task of making a single word convey the meaning of a sentence.

Grillparzer's plays were written for the stage. He abhorred what the Germans call a book drama, and had, on the other hand, the highest respect for the judgment of a popular audience as to the fact whether a play were fit for the stage or not. The popular audience was a jury from which there was no appeal on this question of fact. A pa.s.sage in _The Poor Musician_ gives eloquent expression to Grillparzer's regard for the sure esthetic instinct of the ma.s.ses and, indirectly, to his own poetic _navete._ But his plays are also poems; they are all in verse; and like the plays of his French prototype, Racine, they reveal their full merit only to connoisseurs. They are the work of a man who was better able than most men of his generation to prove all things, and who held fast to that which he found good. His art is not forward-looking, like that of Kleist, nor backward-looking, like that, say, of Theodor Korner. It is in the strictest sense complementary and co-ordinate to that of Goethe and Schiller, a cla.s.sicism modified by romantic tendencies toward individuation and localization. He did not aim at the typical. He felt, and rightly, that a work of art, being something individual, should be created with concentrated attention upon the attainment of its perfection as an individual; this perfection attained, the artist would attain to typical, symbolical connotation into the bargain. From anything like the grotesqueness of exaggerated characterization Grillparzer was saved by his sense of form. He had as fertile an imagination and as penetrating an intellect as Kleist, and he excelled Kleist in the reliability of his common sense. It was no play upon words, but the expression of conviction when he wrote, in 1836: "Poetry is incorporation of the spirit, spiritualization of the body, feeling of the understanding, and thought of the feeling." In its comprehensive appeal to all of these faculties a work of art commends itself and carries its meaning through its existence as an objective reality, like the phenomena of nature herself. A comprehensive sensitiveness to such an appeal, whether of art or of nature, was Grillparzer's ideal of individual nature and culture. He thought the North Germans had cultivated their understanding at the expense of their feeling, and had thereby impaired their esthetic sense. He thought the active life in general inevitably destroyed the harmony of the faculties and subst.i.tuted an extrinsic for an intrinsic good. In the mad rush of our own time after material wealth and power we may profitably contemplate the picture which Grillparzer drew of himself in the following characteristic verses:

THE ANGLER

Below lies the lake hushed and tranquil, And I sit here with idle hands, And gaze at the frolicking fishes Which glide to and fro o'er the sands.

They come, and they go, and they tarry; But if I now venture a cast, Of a sudden the playground is empty, As my basket remains to the last.

Mayhap if I stirred up the water, My angling might lure the shy prey.

But then I must also give over The sight of the fishes at play.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GRILLPARZER MONUMENT AT VIENNA.]

FRANZ GRILLPARZER

MEDEA

A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

CREON, _King of Corinth

CREUSA, _his daughter

JASON

MEDEA

GORA, _Medea's aged nurse_

_A herald of the Amphictyons_

_A peasant_

_Medea's children_