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

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 manuscript, 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 manuscript 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 régime. 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 circumstances 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 title, though chosen late, being a reversal of Calderón's Life is a Dream, suggests the connection with that Spanish drama. Grillparzer's principal source for the plot, was, however, Voltaire's narrative entitled 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 friendship with Katharina Fröhlich 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 title for a dramatization of the story of Hero and Leander. Grillparzer chose the title, 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 Däffinger 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 chastity 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-assurance. 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 naïveté 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 passages, 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, instituted 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 manuscripts 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 coöperation and progress, and in Libussa, the heroine, a typical feminine martyr to duty.

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 passion in classical 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 sex"; but the king, though relatively passive, 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 antithetical 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 circumstances. In the series of dramas thus passed 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 passages 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 passage in The Poor Musician gives eloquent expression to Grillparzer's regard for the sure esthetic instinct of the masses and, indirectly, to his own poetic naïveté. 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 Körner. It is in the strictest sense complementary and co-ordinate to that of Goethe and Schiller, a classicism 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 substituted 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.

FRANZ GRILLPARZER

* * * * *MEDEAA 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

Slaves and slave-women, attendants of the King, etc.

MEDEA (1822)

TRANSLATED BY THEODORE A. MILLER, PH.D

ACT I

_Before the walls of Corinth. At the left, halfway up stage, a tent is pitched; in the background lies the sea, with a point of land jutting out into it, on which is built a part of the city. The time is early morning, before daybreak; it is still dark.

At the right in the foreground a slave is seen standing in a pit digging and throwing up shovelfuls of earth; on the opposite side of the pit stands MEDEA, before a black chest which is strangely decorated with gold; in this chest she keeps laying various utensils during the following dialogue.

MEDEA. Is it, then, done?

SLAVE. A moment yet, my mistress.

[GORA comes out of the tent and stands at a distance.]

MEDEA. Come! First the veil, and then the goddess' staff.             I shall not need them more; here let them rest.             Dark night, the time for magic, is gone by,             And what is yet to come, or good or ill,             Must happen in the beamy light of day.—             This casket next; dire, secret flames it hides             That will consume the wretch who, knowing not,             Shall dare unlock it. And this other here,             Full-filled with sudden death, with many an herb,             And many a stone of magic power obscure,             Unto that earth they sprang from I commit.

[She rises.]

             So! Rest ye here in peace for evermore.             Now for the last and mightiest thing of all!

[The slave, who has meanwhile climbed out of the pit and taken his stand behind the princess awaiting the conclusion of her enterprise, now turns to help her, and grasps at an object covered with a veil and hanging from a lance that has been resting against a tree behind MEDEA; the veil falls, revealing the banner, with the Golden Fleece glowing radiantly through the darkness.]

SLAVE (grasping the Fleece). 'Tis this?

MEDEA. Nay, hold thy hand! Unveil it not.

(Addressing the Fleece.)

             Once more let me behold thee, fatal gift             Of trusting guest-friend! Shine for one last time,             Thou witness of the downfall of my house,             Bespattered with my father's, brother's blood,             Sign of Medea's shame and hateful crime!

[She stamps upon the lance-haft and breaks it in two.]

             So do I rend thee now, so sink thee deep             In earth's dark bosom, whence, a bane to men,             Thou sprang'st.

[She lays the broken standard in the chest with the other objects and shuts down the cover.]

GORA (comes down).

What does my mistress here?

MEDEA. Thou seest.

GORA. Wilt thou, then, bury in the earth that Fleece,             The symbol of thy service to the gods,             That saved thee, and shall save thee yet again?MEDEA (scornfully).             That saved me? 'Tis because it saved me not,             That here I lay it. I am safe enough.

GORA (ironically).

Thanks to thy husband's love?

MEDEA (to the slave, ignoring Gora's taunt).

Is all prepared?

SLAVE. Yea, mistress.

MEDEA. Come!

[She grasps one handle of the chest, the slave the other, and together they carry it to the pit.]

GORA (observing them from a distance).             Oh, what a task is this             For a proud princess, daughter of a king!

MEDEA. Nay, if it seem so hard, why dost not help?

GORA. Lord Jason's handmaid am I—and not thine!             Nor is it meet one slave another serve.

MEDEA (to the slave).

Now lay it in, and heap the earth upon it.

[The slave lets the chest down into the pit and shovels in the earth upon it. MEDEA kneels at one side of the pit as he works.]

GORA (standing in the foreground).             Oh, let me die, ye gods of Colchis, now,             That I may look no more on such a sight!             Yet, first hurl down your lightning-stroke of wrath             Upon this traitor who hath wrought us woe.             Let me but see him die; then slay me too!MEDEA (to the slave).             'Tis finished. Stamp the earth about it close,             And go.—I charge thee, guard my secret well.             Thou art a Colchian, and I know thee true.

[The slave departs.]

GORA (calling after him with grim scorn).

If thou shalt tell thy master, woe to you both!

(To MEDEA.)

Hast finished?

MEDEA. Ay. At last I am at peace!

GORA. The Fleece, too, didst thou bury?

MEDEA. Even the Fleece.

GORA. Thou didst not leave it in Iolcos, with             Thine husband's uncle?

MEDEA. Nay, thou saw'st it here.

GORA. Thou hadst it still—and now hast buried it!             Gone, gone! And naught is left; all thy past life             Vanished, like wreaths of vapor in the breeze!             And naught's to come, and naught has been, and all             Thou seest is but this present fleeting hour!             There was no Colchis! All the gods are dead!             Thou hadst no father, never slew thy brother I             Thou think'st not of it; lo, it never happened!—             Think, then, thou art not wretched. Cheat thyself             To dream Lord Jason loves thee yet. Perchance             It may come true!

MEDEA (angrily).

Be silent, woman!

GORA.                              Nay!             Let her who knows her guilty lock her lips,             But I will speak. Forth from my peaceful home             There in far Colchis, thou hast lured me here,             To be thine haughty paramour's meek slave.             Freeborn am I, yet see! mine arms are chained!—             Through the long, troubled nights, upon my couch             I lie and weep; each morn, as the bright sun             Returns, I curse my gray hairs and my weight             Of years. All scorn me, flout me. All I had             Is gone, save heavy heart and scalding tears.—             Nay, I will speak, and thou shalt listen, too!

MEDEA. Say on.

GORA. All I foretold has come to pass.             'Tis scarce one moon since the revolted sea             Cast you ashore, seducer and seduced;             And yet e 'en now these folk flee from thy face,             And horror follows wheresoe'er thou goest.             The people shudder at the Colchian witch             With fearful whispers of her magic dark.             Where thou dost show thyself, there all shrink back             And curse thee. May the same curse smite them all!—             As for thy lord, the Colchian princess' spouse,             Him, too, they hate, for his sake, and for thine.             Did not his uncle drive him from his palace?             Was he not banished from his fatherland             What time that uncle perished, none knows how?             Home hath he none, nor resting-place, nor where             To lay his head. What canst thou hope from him?

MEDEA. I am his wife!

GORA. And hop'st—?

MEDEA. To follow him             In need and unto death.GORA. Ay, need and death!             Ætes' daughter in a beggar's hut!MEDEA. Let us pray Heaven for a simple heart;             So shall our humble lot be easier borne.

GORA. Ha!—And thy husband—?

MEDEA. Day breaks. Let us go.

GORA. Nay, thou shalt not escape my questioning!—One             comfort still is left me in my grief,             And only one: our wretched plight shows clear             That gods still rule in Heaven, and mete out             To guilty men requital, late or soon.             Weep for thy bitter lot; I'll comfort thee.             Only presume not rashly to deny             The gods are just, because thou dost deny             This punishment they send, and all this woe.—             To cure an evil, we must see it clear.             Thy husband—tell me—is he still the same?

MEDEA. What should he be?

GORA. O, toy not so with words!             Is he the same impetuous lover still             Who wooed thee once; who braved a hundred swords             To win thee; who, upon that weary voyage,             Laughed at thy fears and kissed away thy grief,             Poor maid, when thou wouldst neither eat nor drink,             But only pray to die? Ay, all too soon             He won thee with his passionate, stormy love.             Is he thy lover still?—I see thee tremble.             Ay, thou hast need; thou knowest he loves thee not,             But shudders at thee, dreads thee, flees thee, hates thee!             And as thou didst betray thy fatherland,             So shalt thou be betrayed—and by thy lover.             Deep in the earth the symbols of thy crime             Lie buried;—but the crime thou canst not hide.

MEDEA. Be silent!

GORA. Never!

MEDEA (grasping her fiercely by the arm ).             Silence, dame, I say!             What is this madness? Cease these frantic cries!             'Tis our part to await whate'er may come,             Not bid it hasten.—Thou didst say but now             There is no past, no future; when a deed             Is done, 'tis done for all time; we can know             Only this one brief present instant, Now.             Say, if this Now may cradle a dim future,             Why may it not entomb the misty past?             My past! Would God that I could change it—now!             And bitter tears I weep for it, bitterer far             Than thou dost dream of.—Yet, that is no cause             To seek destruction. Rather is there need             Clearly to know myself, face honestly             The thing I am. Here to these foreign shores             And stranger folk a god hath driven us;             And what seemed right in Colchis, here is named             Evil and wickedness; our wonted ways             Win hatred here in Corinth, and distrust.             So, it is meet we change our ways and speech;             If we may be no longer what we would,             Let us at least, then, be e'en what we can.—             The ties that bound me to my fatherland             Here in earth's bosom I have buried deep;             The magic rites my mother taught me, all             Back to the Night that bare them I have given.             Now, but a woman, weak, alone, defenseless,             I throw me in my husband's open arms!             He shuddered at the Colchian witch! But now             I am his true, dear wife; and surely he             Will take me to his loving, shelt'ring arms.—             Lo, the day breaks, fair sign of our new life             Together! The dark past has ceased to be,             The happy future beckons!—Thou, O Earth,             The kind and gentle mother of us all,             Guard well my trust, that in thy bosom lies.

[As she and GORA _approach the tent, it opens, and _JASON appears, talking with a Corinthian rustic, and followed by a slave.]