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.
[Illustration: GRILLPARZER'S ROOM IN THE HOUSE OF THE SISTERS FRÖHLICH]
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.