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, naivete, 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 Haendel, 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.