What are, then, the distinguishing features of the Austrians, and of Grillparzer as one of them? Grillparzer said these features are an open heart and a single mind, good sense and reliable intuition, frankness, naïveté, generosity, modest contentment with being while others are up and doing. The Austrians are of mixed blood, and partake of South European characteristics less prominent among the purer blooded Teutons of the north. They have life on easier terms, are less intellectual, are more sensuous, emotional, more fanciful, fonder of artistic enjoyment, more sensitive to color and to those effects called "color," by contrast to form, in other arts than that of painting. The art of music is most germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to the peculiarities of the Austrian disposition in the difference between Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss, on the one hand, and Händel, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner on the other. Moreover, the Austrians are in all respects conservative, in literary taste no less than in politics and religion. The pseudo-classicism of Gottsched maintained its authority in Austria not merely after the time of Lessing, but also after the time of Schiller. Wieland was a favorite long before Goethe began to be appreciated; and as to the romantic movement, only the gentle tendencies of such a congenial spirit as Eichendorff found a sympathetic echo on the shores of the Danube. Romance influences, however, more particularly Spanish, were manifest there even before the time when they became strong upon Grillparzer.
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.
[Illustration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER]
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.
[Illustration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER AND KAETHI FRÖHLICH IN 1823]