was not inspired by the meagre tradition of the Lesbian poetess, nor yet by anything more than the example of Goethe; he took only the outline of the story of Sappho and Phaon; his play is almost to be called a romantic love story, and the influence strongest upon him in the writing of it was that of Wieland.  The situation out of which the tragedy of Sappho develops is that of a young man who deceives himself into believing that admiration for a superior woman is love, and who is undeceived when a naive maiden awakens in him sentiments that really are those of love.  This situation occurs again and again in the voluminous works of Wieland—­most obviously perhaps in the novelette Menander and Glycerion (1803), but also in the novel Agathon (1766-1767), and in the epistolary novel Aristippus (1800-1802).  Moreover, it is the essential situation in Mme. de Stael’s Corinne (1807).  In the third place, this situation was Grillparzer’s own, and it is so constantly found in his dramas that it may be called the characteristic situation for the dramatist as well as for the man.  In this drama, finally, we have a demonstration of Grillparzer’s profound conviction that the artistic temperament is ill suited to the demands of practical life, and in the solitary sphere to which it is doomed must fail to find that contentment which only life can afford.  Sappho is not assailed by life on all sides as Tasso is; but she makes an egregious mistake in her search for the satisfactions of womanhood, thereby unfitting herself for the priesthood of poetry as well as forfeiting her life.

Sappho was as successful on the stage as The Ancestress had been, and the dramatist became the lion of the hour.  He was received in audience by Prince Metternich, was lauded in high social circles in Vienna, and was granted an annual pension of 1000 florins for five years, on condition that the Hofburgtheater should have the right to first production of his forthcoming plays.  It was, therefore, with great enthusiasm and confidence that he set to work upon his next subject, The Golden Fleece. The story of Jason and Medea had long been familiar to him, not only in the tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, but also in German dramas and operas of the eighteenth century which during his youth were frequently produced in Vienna.  The immediate impulse to treat this story came to him when, in the summer of 1818, he chanced upon the article Medea in a mythological lexicon.  His plan was soon formed and was made to embrace the whole history of the relations of Jason and Medea.  For so comprehensive a matter Grillparzer, like Schiller in Wallenstein, found the limits of a single drama too narrow; and as Schiller said of Wallenstein—­

  “His camp alone explains his fault and crime,”