The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 06

Franz Grillparzer was born in Vienna on the fifteenth of January, 1791. His father, Wenzel Grillparzer, a self-made man, was a lawyer of the strictest probity, who occupied a respectable position in his profession; but, too scrupulous to seize the opportunities for profit that lawyers easily come upon, he lived a comparatively poor man and in 1809 died in straitened circumstances. At home he was stern and repressive.

Both his legal habit of mind and also his true discipleship of the age of enlightenment in which he grew up disposed him to intellectual tyranny over everything that looked like sentimentality or foolish fantasy in wife or children. His own hobbies, however, such as long walks in the country and the cultivation of flowers or—strangely enough—the reading of highly romantic novels, he indulged in as matters of course. It is with some surprise that we find him married to a woman of abnormal nervousness, who was given to mysticism and was feverishly devoted to music. Marianne Grillparzer, born Sonnleithner, belonged to a substantial middle-class family. Her father was a friend of Haydn and Mozart and was himself a composer of music; her brothers became men of note in the history of the Viennese operatic stage; and she herself shared in the artistic temperament of the family, but with ominously pathological over-development in one direction. She took her own life in 1819 and transmitted to her sons a tendency to moodiness and melancholy which led to the suicide of one and the haunting fear of insanity in that other who is the subject of this sketch.

That Franz Grillparzer was destined to no happy childhood is obvious, and it is equally clear that he needed a strong will to overcome not merely material obstacles to progress but also inherited dispositions of such antithetical sort. The father and the mother were at war in his breast. Like the mother in sensitiveness and imaginativeness, he was the son of his father in a stern censoriousness that was quick to ridicule what appeared to be nonsense in others and in himself; but he was the son of his father also in clearness of understanding and devotion to duty as he saw it.

Grillparzer once said that his works were detached fragments of his life; and though many of their themes seem remote from him in time and place, character and incident in them are unmistakably enriched by being often conceived in the light of personal experience. Outwardly, however, his life was comparatively uneventful. After irregular studies with private tutors and at school, Grillparzer studied law from 1807 to 1811 at the University of Vienna, gave instruction from 1810 to 1813 to the sons of various noblemen, and in 1813 began in the Austrian civil service the humdrum career which, full of disappointments and undeserved setbacks, culminated in his appointment in 1832 to the directorship of the Hofkammerarchiv, and lasted until his honorable retirement in 1856. He was a conscientious official; but throughout this time he was regarded, and regarded himself, primarily as Grillparzer the poet; and in spite of loyalty to the monarchy, he was entirely out of sympathy with the antediluvian administration of Metternich and his successors. Little things, magnified by pusillanimous apprehension, stood in his way. In 1819 he expressed in a poem The Ruins of Campo Vaccino esthetic abhorrence of the cross most inappropriately placed over the portal of the Coliseum in Rome, and was thereafter never free of the suspicion of heresy. In 1825 membership in a social club raided by the police subjected him to the absurd suspicion of plotting treason. Only once do we find him, during the first half of the century, persona gratissima with the powers that be. Grillparzer firmly disapproved the disintegrating tendencies of the revolution of 1848, and uttered his sense of the duty of loyal coöperation under the Habsburgs in a spirited poem, To Field-Marshal Count Radetzky. For the moment he became a national hero, especially in the army. His latter years were indeed years of honor; but the honor came too late. He was given the cross of the order of Leopold in 1849, was made Hofrat and a member of the House of Lords in 1856, and received the grand cross of the order of Franz Josef upon the celebration of his eightieth birthday in 1871. He died on the twenty-first of January, 1872.

Grillparzer led for the most part a solitary life—for the last third of his life he was almost a hermit—and he was rather an observer than an actor in the affairs of men; but nevertheless he saw more of the world than a mere dreamer would have cared to see, and the circle of his friends was not inconsiderable. Besides making the trip to Italy, already alluded to, in 1819, he journeyed in 1826 to North Germany, seeing Goethe in Weimar, in 1836 to Paris, in 1837 to London, in 1843 down the Danube to Athens, and in 1847 again to Berlin and to Hamburg. No one of these trips gave him any particular poetic impetus, except perhaps the first, on which he found in the classical atmosphere of Rome a refreshing antidote to the romantic miasma which he hated. Nor did he derive much profit from the men of letters whom he visited in various places, such as Fouqué, Chamisso, and Heine. He dined with Goethe, but was too bashful to accept an indirect invitation to spend an evening with Goethe alone. He paid his respects to Uhland, whom he esteemed as the greatest German poet of that time (1837); but Uhland was then no longer productive and was never a magnetic personality. Indeed, there was hardly more than one man, even in Vienna, who exerted a strong personal influence upon Grillparzer, and this was Josef Schreyvogel, journalist, critic, playwright, from 1814 to 1831 secretary of the Burgtheater. A happy chance gained for Grillparzer in 1816 the friendship of this practical theatre manager, and under Schreyvogel's auspices he prepared his first drama for the stage.

On another side, Grillparzer's character is illumined for us by the strange story of his relations with four Viennese women. He was not a handsome man, but tall, with an abundance of blond hair, and bewitching blue eyes that made him very attractive to the other sex. He, too, was exceedingly sensitive to sexual attraction and in early youth suffered torments from the pangs of unsatisfied longing. From the days when he knew that he was in love, but did not yet know with whom, to the time of final renunciation we find him irresolute, ardent, but apparently selfish in the inability to hazard the discovery that the real might prove inferior to his ideal. Thus his critical disposition invaded even the realm of his affections and embroiled him not merely with the object of them, but also with himself. Charlotte von Paumgarten, the wife of a cousin of Grillparzer's, Marie Däffinger, the wife of a painter, loved him not wisely, but too well; and a young Prussian girl, Marie Piquot, confessed in her last will and testament to such a devotion to him as she was sure no other woman could ever attain, wherefore she commended "her Tasso" to the fostering care of her mother. Grillparzer had experienced only a fleeting interest in Marie Piquot; so much the more lasting was the attachment which bound him to her successful rival, Katharina Fröhlich. Katharina, one of four daughters of a Viennese manufacturer who had seen better days, and, like her sisters, endowed with great artistic talent and practical energy, might have proved the salvation of Grillparzer's existence as a man if he had been more capable of manly resolution, and she had been less like him in impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Fröhlich sisters and, finally, makes Katharina his sole heir.

Grillparzer's development as a poet and dramatist follows the bent of his Austrian genius. One of the first books that he ever read was the text to Mozart's Magic Flute. Music, opera, operetta, and fairy drama gave the earliest impulse to his juvenile imagination. Even as a boy he began the voluminous reading which, continued throughout his life, made him one of the best informed men of his time in European literature. History, natural history, and books of travel are followed by the plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, while Gesner's idyls charm him, and he absorbs the stories and romances of Wieland. In 1808 he reads the early works of Schiller and admires the ideal enthusiasm of Don Carlos.

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 Calderón 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 Müllner; 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 friendship 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 Müllner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious 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 Tasso; but upon closer examination Sappho appears to be neither a classical play of the serene, typical quality of Iphigenia nor a Künstlerdrama in the sense in which Tasso 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 naïve 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 Staël'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 assailed by life on all sides as Tasso 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 circumstances 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 gods, bore the Golden Fleece to Colchis, only to meet death at the hands of Æëtes, 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, assures her of his love and takes her and the Fleece in triumph away from Colchis.

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 reasserts herself and the passion 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 hoard 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 passion 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 Matthäus 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 space 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 minutiæ, in spite of careful study of historical sources of information. "Pride goeth before destruction," is the theme, but Grillparzer was far from wishing either to demonstrate or illustrate 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 Bancbanus, 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 Othello, 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. Bancbanus, 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 Bancbanus' 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. Bancbanus 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 circumspect, 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 peacock and, like a monkey in the forest, wishing 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 Bancbanus who brings about this transformation in the character of Otto, who holds rebellious nobles 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.