529 CHAPTER X. LITERATURE IN AUSTRIA; GRILLPARZER. IN the first half of the nineteenth century, conditions in Austrian Austria were unfavourable to the growth of a national litera- literature. ture. While in Weimar, Goethe and Schiller lived under an enlightened government which paid literature and art every respect, the writers of the Austrian capital could hardly rise above the platitudes of ordinary life, without coming into conflict with an autocratic censor. A freer literary development might have been possible had the Austrians, like the Russians of a later date, sought outside their own country the liberty denied them at home; but Austrian literature in the first half of the century was too exclusively Viennese to bear transplanting, and the Austrian poets preferred to suffer in silence. Only one art, that of music, had complete freedom to develop in Vienna at the beginning of the century; here Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), a native of Bonn, L. van found a congenial home and encouraging patrons; here he Beethoven, composed, between 1800 and 1812, his eight Symphonies, followed in 1823-24 by the ninth in D minor-works which laid the foundation of modern instrumental music. In Vienna, too, Franz Schubert (1797-1828), the first master of German song - writing, composed his countless Lieder. The strongest proof of the artistic instincts of Austria under Metternich's tyranny is, however, that the drama—the form of literature most exposed to the interference of a censorshould not only have lived, but flourished, and that Vienna should have produced in Franz Grillparzer, the greatest dramatic poet of the nineteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, as has been pointed. out in an earlier chapter, the Austrian drama lagged far 1770-1827) H. J. von Collin, 1771-1811. J. Schrey vogel, 1768-1832. Franz Grill parzer, 1791-1872. behind the drama in North Germany, and even as late as the 1 Sämmtliche Werke, 6 vols., Vienna, 1812-14. Cp. F. Laban, H. J. von Collin, Vienna, 1879, and A. Hauffen, Das Drama der klassischen Periode, 2, 2 (D.N.L., 139, 2 [1891], 261 ff. 2 Sämmtliche Werke, ed. A. Sauer, 5th ed., 20 vols., Stuttgart, 1892-94. Cp. E. Reich, Franz Grillparzers Dramen, Dresden, 1894; A. Ehrhard, Frans Grillparzer, Paris, 1900 (German edition by M. Necker, Munich, 1902). had been denied him. Grillparzer's temperament was not a heroic one; he endured or renounced where a man of a stronger personality would have asserted himself and rebelled; he was deficient in that moral strength with which a poet like Schiller was so richly endowed. Grillparzer's life, in fact, was torn asunder by that conflict of will and circumstance which, in his dramas, he depicts again and again. His disappointments lay heaviest upon him about middle life, and his diaries, published after his death, reveal to what depths of despair he sank in the decade between 1825 and 1835. But in the midst of his misery and suffering, he wrote his finest lyric poetry poetry which gives him a place beside Lenau among the modern lyric writers of Austria. The group of Lyric verse which bears the title Tristia ex Ponto (1835) con- poetry. tains the concentrated history of Grillparzer's life during this period; here is the cry for an inspiration that will not come, the bitterness of disappointed hopes, and the mockery of a love that brings no happiness : "O Trügerin von Anfang, du o Leben! Ein reiner Jüngling trat ich ein bei dir, Rein war mein Herz, und rein war all mein Streben, This is the burden of all the unhappy poet's verses; and "Eins ist, was altergraue Zeiten lehren Between 1807 and 1809, Grillparzer wrote Blanka von Kastilien, a long iambic tragedy in the style of Don Carlos, but Die Ahnfrau was the first of his plays to be performed; Die Ahnit was produced on January 31, 1817, and received by the frau, 1817, Viennese public with enthusiasm. Die Ahnfrau, in which the poet gave expression to his own "Sturm und Drang," is written in the trochaic metre of Müllner's Schuld, and is itself virtually a "fate tragedy"; but it must be said to Grill 1 Werke, 1, 227 (Jugenderinnerungen im Grünen) and 129 (Entsagung). 2 Cp. J. Minor, Die Ahnfrau und die Schicksalstragedie in Festgabe für R. Heinzel, Weimar, 1898, 387 ff.; also an article in the Grillparzer-Jahrbuch, 9 (1899), i ff. parzer's credit that the ghostly "Ahnfrau," who watches over the house of Borotin, is surrounded with more of the poetry of horror than is to be found in any other work of its class. The most noticeable feature of Die Ahnfrau, however, is the skill with which it is built up; certainly no other leading dramatist of the world has begun his career with so little to learn as Grillparzer in the art of dramatic construction. A few months after the production of Die Ahnfrau, he completed his second drama, Sappho (1818). Goethe's Iphigenie and Tasso were naturally the models for this play, while the subject would seem to have been suggested to the poet by Madame de Staël's Corinne and a forgotten tragedy by F. von Kleist.1 Here again, the mastery of Grillparzer's technique is remarkable, and as striking as the beauty of his verse; out of the simple theme of Sappho's renunciation of Phaon on learning that he loves her young slave, Melitta, Grillparzer has created an impressive tragedy, classic in its proportions, and inspired by an essentially modern ethical idea. The reception of Sappho, if not as warm as that of Die Ahnfrau, was not discouraging, and Grillparzer began his next work, Das goldene Vliess (1820), which was planned as a trilogy, with a light heart. But between the beginning and the close of this trilogy, life assumed a different aspect for him; in a fit of insanity, his mother put an end to her life. This was a terrible blow to the poet, who himself was only too prone to melancholy, and, for a time, the work was entirely neglected. While Der Gastfreund and Die Argonauten, the two first dramas of the trilogy, were written, for the most part, in 1818, the last, Medea, was not finished until the beginning of 1820. The idea of the Goldene Vliess was possibly suggested to Grillparzer by Gotter's melodrama, Medea (1787), which was played in Vienna in 1817, and by Cherubini's opera of the same name (1792); Grillparzer, however, differed from his predecessors in so far as he dramatised the whole story of Jason and Medea, and not merely the momentous scenes of Medea's life. Der Gastfreund is a brief prologue in which Phryxus, coming with the Golden Fleece to Colchis, meets his death by treachery, at the hands of Medea's father. Die Argonauten 1 Cp. J. Schwering, F. Grillparzers helienische Trauerspiele, Paderborn, 1891, 14 ff. barbarian wife; in Corinth describes Jason's quest of the stolen Fleece, and culminates in the tragic conflict between Medea's love for Jason and her duty towards her own land and kin. In Medea, Grillparzer's Medea. genius was first revealed in its true proportions. Wherever Jason turns, he is ridiculed for his he hopes to find a place of refuge. Medea buries the symbols of her magic power, and resolves to subordinate herself to her husband's will. But the curse uttered by the dying Phryxus rests upon the Fleece, and is no less fatal to the Argonauts than was the curse on the "Nibelungenhort" to the possessors of that treasure. The fundamental idea of the trilogy might be expressed in Schiller's words : : "Das eben ist der Fluch der bösen That, Dass sie fortzeugend Böses muss gebären."1 There is no rest for Jason and Medea even in Corinth. Jason spurns the wife he has learned to hate; even her children flee from her. The wild spirit of the barbarian at last breaks forth in Medea; she slays her children and sets the palace of the Corinthian king on fire. In the closing act of the tragedy, she bears the Fleece back, to Delphi, and takes eternal leave of Jason in a noble monologue, hardly inferior to the farewell in the Medea of Euripides : "Erkennst das Zeichen du, um das du rangst? Das dir ein Ruhm war und ein Glück dir schien? Was ist der Erde Ruhm ?-Ein Traum! Du Armer! Der von Schatten du geträumt ! Das goldene Vliess is the finest of all dramatic versions of the Greek saga; neither Euripides nor Seneca, neither Corneille nor Klinger, has brought out the poetic significance of Medea's life as clearly as Grillparzer. In many respects, too, Das goldene Vliess fulfils the conditions of a trilogy better than its forerunner, Wallenstein: for while the latter is, as we have seen, essentially one long drama, introduced by a prologue, the constituent plays of Grillparzer's trilogy are independent 1 Die Piccolomini, Act 5, sc. I. |