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 naivete. 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 Koerner.  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