On page twenty-one we read:  “Do you know what it is that I love in Uhland’s imperfect dramas?  It is the pure, vital, German-dramatic poetry, which, piercing the tawdry veneer of culture and the prevailingly wretched appearances of our life, strikes fire from the bed-rock of spiritual life itself, and with its divining rod points to the golden veins in the foundations of the national character.  German-dramatic! that is the right word! and this is saying a great deal, for German and dramatic are contradictory terms.  Just because Uhland is so German-dramatic he might give our theatre the national consecration which it lacks, and which alone can assure it intrinsic worth and dignity, efficacy and stability.  Goethe’s Goetz is not adapted to the stage, and it will be difficult for the scissors to make it so.  Schiller’s Wallenstein, in spite of its extensiveness, is only a character picture; the Thirty Years’ War merely peeps through shyly now and again when the Duke’s eloquence fails him, and when Max and Thekla take a rest from their love-making.  With all due respect for the great dead, from whose laurel tree I do not intend to pluck a single leaf, be it said that the piece has something ridiculous about it when it is played; it is a thunderstorm during which two turtle-doves are billing and cooing.  There is some difference in William Tell, Bertha and Rudenz are more modest and more sparing with their sighs, tears, and premonitions.  But the depicted situation is accidental, and under similar circumstances is repeated everywhere, therefore one cannot judge the Germanic nature by it—­even if we include Switzerland as a representative of this nature—­any more than one can judge of a man by the portrait which has been made of him during his illness.  Neither am I able to find the spectacle of the strength that breaks external fetters so edifying as many others do:  Why did it allow itself to be enchained?  Kleist’s Hermann’s Battle and his Prince of Homburg carry us, the one too far back and the other too far forward.  Uhland chose historic events better than Kleist, he treated them more worthily and more nobly than Schiller.  For this reason, if for no other, he stands in the foreground of this discussion.”

In the same place the question is raised:  What is the conception of religion or fate from which our tragic drama has emanated?  Wienbarg skips over the question, or at least takes the answers to it too lightly.  Nevertheless here is the root of the whole tree.  Human nature and human destiny, these are the two riddles that the drama strives to solve.  The difference between the drama of the ancients and the drama of the moderns lies in this:  the ancients sought to illumine the labyrinths of fate by means of the torch of poetry; we moderns try to refer human nature, in whatever form or contortion it presents itself before us, to certain eternal and changeless principles, as to an immovable foundation.  What to us is the means, was to them the end, and vice versa.