SOURCE: “The Greek Tragedies,” in The Plays of Grillparzer, Pergamon Press, 1969, pp. 33-82.

[In the following excerpt, Wells discusses Grillparzer's three Greek tragedies—Sappho, Das goldene Vliess, and Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen—noting that they all share the theme of love and that in each Grillparzer concentrated on preserving unity of time, place, and action.]

1. SAPPHO (1818)

In the draft of a letter to Müllner of 1818, Grillparzer confessed to being somewhat ashamed of what he called the “tolles Treiben” in Die Ahnfrau, and was anxious to show that he could write a play without bangs and ghosts. He added that when he came across the story of Sappho, he realized at once that he had found the material he needed for a calm play with a simple plot (III, 1. 97).

The simplicity of the material enabled him to keep the three unities. This is in fact the only play of his which keeps the unity of place; as a result, direct action is curtailed and messengers are brought on to narrate what has happened. Thus, in the first scene, Rhamnes tells the slave-girls what Sappho has achieved during her absence. The way Sappho and Phaon became acquainted is conveyed entirely by Phaon's narrative (I, 3); Eucharis narrates what happened at the banquet (between Acts I and II) at which Melitta and Phaon first become conscious of each other and which serves, as Grillparzer said, “sie in jenen Zustand des Berührtseyns zu bringen, das der Liebe den Weg bereitet” (ibid., p. 101). Eucharis also narrates Melitta's ablutions (II, 3), the return of Melitta and Phaon as captives (V, 1) and—most important of all—Sappho's august behaviour (V, 5) before her final entry. Since Grillparzer prefers direct action to narrative, he does not, in his later plays, keep the unity of place, which has messengers' reports as a natural concomitant. Even in Sappho a great deal is directly enacted: e.g. the scene culminating in Phaon kissing Melitta, which is witnessed by Sappho, who tries to convince herself that nevertheless all is well; also the scenes where Phaon speaks Melitta's name in his dream, and Sappho, although she still resists the obvious inference, decides to question the girl; when she does so, her anger is thoroughly aroused, and she draws her knife. All these scenes bring direct and swift action.

Grillparzer did not find it easy to make his material into a convincing tragedy. In antiquity Sappho's story had been the theme of comedies. It was the comic poets who linked her with Phaon, who is not mentioned in any of her extant poems. In these comedies he is an ugly old ferryman, rejuvenated by magic ointment, supplied by Aphrodite, and then in consequence pestered by women, of whom Sappho is one. Because of her age her advances evoke no response, so she throws herself from the rock at the end of the isle of Leucas. Tradition prescribed such behaviour to cure the pangs of unrequited love; the victim jumped in, was taken from the water, and could go on repeating the jump until well and truly “cooled off” in every respect.

Grillparzer had to avoid what Carlyle called “the ridicule that lies within a single step of Sappho's tragic situation” ([Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,] p. 332). An oldish woman pursuing a young man could well be represented as ridiculous. Grillparzer himself seems to have felt that such material is repulsive rather than comic:

Sappho ist in der Katastrophe [viz. Act IV] ein verliebtes, eifersüchtiges, in der Leidenschaft sich vergessendes Weib; ein Weib, das einen jüngern Mann liebt. In der gewöhnlichen Welt ist ein solches Weib ein ekelhafter Gegenstand.

(III, 1, 99)

Scherer asserts that the comic element shows through the action of Grillparzer's play, and also that “die Gestalt der Sappho im Ganzen hat etwas unwillkürlich zur Parodie Herausforderndes” ([Scherer, Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Gesch. des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich,] p. 234). He is thinking in particular of her suicidal leap from the rock, and says we do not feel that her passion was so great that she cannot go on living. But we must ask whether it is her passion for Phaon that in fact motivates her suicide, or whether the text gives other reasons for her behaviour. As Rippman notes, most critics have found the final tragic outcome unconvincing. He himself asserts that we “cannot but feel that death is the true ending” ([Rippmann, Sappho,] p. xii). But the question is: what is the basis for this feeling, if in fact we have it?

From what we are told in Act I it seems that Sappho felt desperately in need of a partner. Her relationship with Phaon was begun at the Olympic festival entirely on her initiative. He was standing “schamentgeistert” in her presence, and she bade him follow her (l. 253). He is still bewildered when they arrive in Lesbos at the beginning of the play (ll. 317-18). Her view of him then is naïvely ideal—she even recommends him to her people as an accomplished poet (l. 77)! From the first she is unsure of his affection. She warns him that she will be capable of any unreasonable behaviour if he becomes indifferent to her (ll. 123-7). And when he expresses his ecstatic feelings, she replies that he may one day view her more realistically and therefore less favourably (ll. 202-3). The basis for her fears is that she has become embittered by painful disappointments in friendship and love, and also by the early death of her family (ll. 113-22), whereas Phaon is young and a complete stranger to the cynicism born of disappointment. It is surely because of her loneliness and unhappiness that she was drawn to him in the first place, and thus deludes herself into thinking that his admiration of her is love. She expressly contrasts her own bitterness with his “Lebenslust” and “Lust an dem, was ist” (ll. 265, 267), and a little later she elaborates this contrast (ll. 370-92) and designates it as the “gulf” which divides them (l. 394). She begs the gods to give her back the outlook of her youth (ll. 380-7) and so bring her into harmony with him. But it is obviously impossible for her to become young again, “mit runden Kinderwangen”, as she charmingly puts it, and the relationship is soon terminated. But this hardly gives her a motive for suicide. It would be unconvincing if she were finally to think that she cannot live without this callow youth who lacks intellectual interests and never loved her anyway. It is quite plausible that, in her state of lonely unhappiness, she should have fallen in love with him; but by the end of the play she has realized that he could never have understood her (l. 1962) and that they had better part. Nor is she represented as killing herself because, in the grief of her recent disappointment, she despairs of finding any suitable partner, yet feels she cannot live without one.

We must look for other clues. After she has spoken of the difference in age and outlook between herself and Phaon and called it the “gulf” which lies between them, she immediately goes on to describe this gulf in very different terms, and it is not easy to see the connection between her two interpretations of it. The second of these is that in pursuing her literary ambitions she has become cut off from normal warm human contacts:

Weh Dem, den aus der Seinen stillem Kreise
Des Ruhms, der Ehrsucht eitler Schatten lockt.

(ll. 398-9)

She goes on to liken such a person to a mariner sailing through rough seas in a light boat. He has no green fields nor flowers, nor any living thing around him, but only the grey limitless expanses of the sea. The coast which harbours his loved ones he only sees afar off, and their cries are drowned by the roar of the waves. When he does finally return, the flowers are dead, and all life and warmth has gone. Although this whole extended simile expresses the lot of anyone who neglects those closest to him in his pursuit of his ambition, Sappho is, of course, thinking primarily of literary ambition and fame. She has just won a laurel wreath at the Olympic competition, but this success seems to her as barren as the laurel leaves. In an earlier scene she had made similar remarks:

Umsonst nicht hat zum Schmuck der Musen Chor
Den unfruchtbaren Lorbeer sich erwählt,
Kalt, frucht- und duftlos drücket er das Haupt
Dem er Ersatz versprach für manches Opfer.

(ll. 271-4)

It is not that she has been unhappy all her life; her single-minded devotion to literary composition has brought her “des Vollbringens Wahnsinnglühende Lust” (l. 50). But she wants the warmth of family life instead, and fears that, like the mariner in her image, she will find only desolation on returning to land. In sum, then, the gulf between herself and Phaon exists (1) because of her maturity and bitterness of outlook and (2) because she has pursued her (literary) ambition instead of cultivating human relationships. She feels strongly that to devote herself further to literature would be incompatible with marriage, and so she proposes now to live a simple unpretentious life with Phaon and renounce all her ambition. She says to her people:

An seiner Seite werd' ich unter euch
Ein einfach stilles Hirtenleben führen.

(ll. 93-4)

She will not give up her art altogether, but will

Zum Preise nur von häuslich stillen Freuden
Die Töne wecken dieses Saitenspiels.

So at this stage she believes that she can reconcile art and life (cf. ll. 280-3), although only by restricting her art drastically.

The view of poetry which she takes in Act I (clear from the passage where she specifies the dire consequences of ambition) is due partly to the fact that she is full of her love and of the married happiness that she thinks awaits her. When her relationship with Phaon has gone badly wrong, she exaggerates in the opposite direction. Instead of the argument of Act I (that devotion to literary ambition has brought her barren recompense) she says in Act IV that she was happy enough in the “meadows of poetry” until Phaon destroyed her composure. Here, it is poetry that is associated with flowers and fields, and the laurel wreath is designated not “dürr”, but “heiter” (ll. 1272 ff.).

Grillparzer's comments on the play give some guidance as to how Sappho's position as an artist is related to her personal tragedy, although they do not appear completely consistent. Sometimes he suggests that her tragedy is due to her personal character, while on other occasions he derives it from the fact that she is an artist. The former view is stated in his autobiography, where he says it was not his intention to stress the poetess in Sappho:

Ich war nämlich immer ein Feind der Künstlerdramen. Künstler sind gewohnt, die Leidenschaft als einen Stoff zu behandeln. Dadurch wird auch die wirkliche Liebe für sie mehr eine Sache der Imagination als der tiefen Empfindung. Ich wollte aber Sappho einer wahren Leidenschaft, und nicht einer Verirrung der Phantasie zum Opfer werden lassen.

(I, 16, 130-1)

He specifies how the tragedy is derived from Sappho's character in the draft of the letter to Müllner, saying that she is:

ein Charakter, der Sammelplatz glühender Leidenschaften, über die aber eine erworbene Ruhe, die schöne Frucht höherer Geistesbildung, den Szepter führt, bis die angeschmiedeten Sklaven [viz. her passions] die Ketten brechen und dastehen und Wuth schnauben.

(III, 1, 97)

The text certainly confirms this view of Sappho's character. She warns Phaon in Act I:

Du kennst noch nicht die Unermeβlichkeit,
Die auf und nieder wogt in dieser Brust.

(ll. 126-7)

In conversation with Melitta a little later she confesses to such unpleasant traits as “der Stolz, die Ehrbegier, des Zornes Stachel” (l. 350), and it is clear that she has been quick-tempered and hurtful to the girl on occasions (ll. 359-60). Melitta herself concedes that her mistress is “heftig manchmal, rasch und bitter” (l. 671). And in Act IV, when Phaon and Melitta have aroused Sappho's rage, she begs the gods to protect her from the violence of her own passions:

Beschützt mich, Götter, schützt mich vor mir selber!
Des Innern düstre Geister wachen auf
Und rütteln an des Kerkers Eisenstäben!

(ll. 1219-22)

This image is exactly how Grillparzer expresses himself in the letter to Müllner, where he speaks of her “enchained” passions bursting their bonds. Sappho, then, reaches a tragic situation because she is an unbalanced woman, easily led astray by rage and jealousy.

However, Grillparzer added to the words last quoted from the letter to Müllner:

Dazu [viz. in addition to Sappho's character] gesellte sich, sobald das Wort: Dichterin einmal ausgesprochen war, natürlich auf der Stelle der Kontrast zwischen Kunst und Leben (wenn die Ahnfrau unwillkürlich gewissermaβen eine Paraphrase des berüchtigten d'Alembert'schen malheur d'être geworden ist, so dürfte wohl die Sappho ein in eben dem Sinne wahres malheur d'être poète in sich fassen).

He goes on to say that Phaon and Melitta represent life (“haben die Parthie des Lebens”), and that he was trying to depict “nicht die Miβgunst, das Ankämpfen des Lebens gegen die Kunst, … wie in Corregio oder Tasso, sondern die natürliche Scheidewand, die zwischen beiden befestigt ist”. We have seen that one reason given in the text to explain the existence of this “natural barrier” is that devotion to art cuts the poet off from family life. But Sappho is prepared to abandon (or at any rate drastically restrict) her art in order to devote herself to her husband, and there is nothing in the text to suggest that she would have been incapable of finding happiness in this way if she had been given the chance. It seems that we must look for another reason for the poet's unhappiness—one that also links up with Sappho's character as an unbalanced woman.

Douglas Yates has made some helpful suggestions on this head ([Yates, Grillparzer: A Critical Biography,] pp. 35–6). He shows it was Grillparzer's opinion that the artist has violent passions of which he easily loses control. Thus Grillparzer once observed that he himself had strong passions, and that the dramatist must have them (and try to control them in his life) in order to depict them in his plays. Yates also points to a passage in the letter to Müllner that supports this interpretation. Grillparzer there says that Sappho has a “Kraft” (as a poetess) “die mit unter die erregenden Kräfte des Sturms [der Leidenschaft] selber gehört”. This clearly implies that her nature as a poetess is partly responsible for her passionate outburst in Act IV, where her “erworbene Ruhe” vanishes and gives way to “Wut”.

Yates' theory enables us to understand the basis of Sappho's behaviour up to the beginning of Act V. But at the end of this final Act, she adopts a new and unexpected attitude, claiming to have “found herself” (l. 1960). What exactly does this mean? Yates thinks that the idea is that the artist is something priestly, even divine, not to be sullied by contact with what is merely human; and that she is now conscious of having betrayed her art by wanting to marry and enjoy life. As Yates himself is aware, this is very different from the theory that the artist is an uncontrolled person who cannot cope with life because of his passions.

Now is it in fact the case that Sappho thinks, in Act V or elsewhere, that she has betrayed her art? She does seem to express this idea in Act III, when her relationship with Phaon has begun to deteriorate radically. In this Act she has (like the priest in Act IV of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen) a number of monologues in which she resists believing something that she knows at heart to be true. When finally she can no longer resist the conviction that Phaon has betrayed her, she denounces herself for renouncing her art and seeking happiness with a mere mortal:

O Törin! Warum stieg ich von den Höhn,
Die Lorbeer krönt, wo Aganippe rauscht,
Mit Sternenklang sich Musenchöre gatten,
Hernieder in das engbegrenzte Tal,
Wo Armut herrscht und Treubruch und Verbrechen?
Dort oben war mein Platz, dort an den Wolken,
Hier ist kein Ort für mich, als nur das Grab.
Wen Götter sich zum Eigentum erlesen,
Geselle sich zu Erdenbürgern nicht,
Der Menschen und der Überird's chen Los
Es mischt sich nimmer in demselben Becher.

(ll. 942-52)

In what follows she certainly does not act on this conviction that she has kinship with the gods and not with man; for instead of transcending her own all-too-human nature, she goes on to reveal jealousy and vindictiveness in her resolve to summon Melitta in order to see why such an empty-headed girl could have impressed Phaon (ll. 963 ff.). When the girl comes, Sappho even draws a dagger on her. Then in Act IV she reaches her lowest moral level. In her opening monologue she convinces herself that ingratitude is a worse crime than murder. The implication is that Phaon (guilty of ingratitude to her) is worse than she (a potential murderess in her behaviour towards Melitta). She decides to take vengeance on Melitta by banishing her to Chios where she will suffer the pangs of unrequited love (ll. 1239-41). In scene 2 she continues to vent her fury at Phaon's ingratitude and orders Rhamnes to remove Melitta by trickery or by actual violence if necessary (l. 1322). When Phaon foils this scheme and himself takes flight with the girl, Sappho breathes “nur Wut und Rache!” (l. 1531), and is so utterly exhausted by the emotional turmoil into which she has been thrown that she sinks into Eucharis' arms at the end of Act IV. However, when the two fugitives are brought back and she is confronted with them, she is unable to take a firm attitude—not only because of her exhaustion, but also because by now she has begun to be conscious of having behaved wrongly to Phaon. It is surely for this reason that she cries (when the couple are announced) “Wer rettet mich vor seinem Anblick?” (l. 1592) and averts her eyes (l. 1703) when he tells her she is unworthy of her art. Admittedly, she never expressly says she has done wrong to Phaon; but it is difficult to explain these words and gestures without assuming consciousness of guilt as their basis.

As for Phaon, his attitude to her here, in the first half of Act V, scene 3, is as negative as it was at the end of Act III (the dagger scene). There he said:

Und wenn mir je ein Bild verflossner Tage
In süβer Wehmut vor die Seele tritt,
Soll schnell ein Blick auf diesen Stahl mich heilen!

And here:

Wie anders malt' ich mir, ich blöder Tor
Einst Sapphon aus, in frühern, schönern Tagen!

(ll. 1695-6)

His attitude is intelligible enough. As Grillparzer himself said, Sappho's jealous behaviour “macht ihn durch die bei Menschen so gewöhnliche Verwechslung glauben, weil er Sapphon Unrecht thun sieht, sie sey von jeher gegen ihn im Unrecht gewesen” (III, 1, 100). Yet immediately after this, he appeals to her better nature, saying that as an artist she is only soiling herself by contact with mere humans:

Mit Höhern, Sappho, halte du Gemeinschaft,
Man steigt nicht ungestraft vom Göttermahle
Herunter in den Kreis der Sterblichen.
Der Arm, in dem die goldne Leier ruhte,
Er ist geweiht, er fasse Niedres nicht!

(ll. 1726-30)

O. E. Lessing has found this a very ill-motivated change of attitude and has said that “das ganze Intrigenspiel war offenbar nicht geeignet, jene Erkenntnis [that Sappho is semi-divine] in Phaon wachzurufen” ([Lessing, Grillparzer und das Neue Drama,] pp. 19–20). But this verdict seems unnecessarily harsh. Phaon has repeatedly regarded Sappho as great and god-like. This is how he thought of her before they ever met (ll. 162-201), and this was still his attitude at the beginning of the play, where his own feeling of insignificance is brought out not only by his words of deference, but also (in Grillparzer's usual way) by the visible contrast between “Sappho, köstlich gekleidet” and Phaon, “ihr zur Seite in einfacher Kleidung” (directions for their entry in I, 2). In the present context he is replying to Sappho's charge that his love for her was a sham (l. 1723). He explains that he loved her genuinely, but as something divine, and that only when he met Melitta did he learn to distinguish these feelings from warm human love. As he himself says, these reflections have brought him to his senses (ll. 1740-1), and so instead of continuing to abuse Sappho as a “gifterfüllte Schlange” who ought to destroy her lyre because she is unworthy of it (ll. 1685-7), he begs her not to desecrate the sacred arm in which she holds the instrument, as she would do if she turned to earthly love.

Although, as we saw, she had herself, on a previous occasion, argued that she has kinship with the gods rather than with men, here she expressly rejects Phaon's argument, saying in an aside that to renounce love is too high a price to pay for greatness as an artist (ll. 1731-2). However, Phaon reiterates his point at the end of this scene (V, 3):

Den Menschen Liebe und den Göttern Ehrfurcht,
Gib uns, was unser, und nimm hin, was dein!
Bedenke, was du tust, und wer du bist!

All these words bring home to her that her violent and unreasonable behaviour is not what one is entitled to expect of someone of her exalted calling. We saw already that her inability to look Phaon in the face, and also the way she listens silently to his long indictment of her, imply that she is conscious of having done wrong. And after these final words of Phaon, the stage directions indicate that she retires in confusion. When she returns she appears to have taken these words to heart and to agree that her place is among the gods, not with man.

During her absence from the stage, Rhamnes lauds her character. In Act IV she has behaved in a thoroughly unworthy manner, and Grillparzer realized that it would be necessary to restore the audience's sympathy for her. So he makes Rhamnes bring out her sterling qualities in nearly a hundred lines of verse (ll. 1812-92). We can see now one of the reasons why Grillparzer did not take Müllner's advice and delete the first Act of the play, in which (as Müllner complained) there is little action. Grillparzer replied that it was “durchaus notwending, sie noch vor dem Sturm der Leidenschaften so zu zeigen, wie sie in ihrem gewöhnlichen Zustande war, damit der Zuschauer die Arme bemitleide, statt sie zu verabscheuen”. If Act I were cut, we should see little but the unpleasant side of her character, and Rhamnes' account of her exalted nature would then strike us as very unconvincing. Even as it now stands, some critics have found it not altogether easy to accept, particularly as it is made to throw Phaon and Melitta into such confusion. O. E. Lessing, for instance, notes that Phaon does not deserve the curses that Rhamnes pours upon him; that if he has behaved badly to Sappho, so has she to him, and that one would expect him to answer Rhamnes by pointing this out. Lessing believes that it is only because Grillparzer's purpose is to elevate her into an august figure that Phaon (implausibly) makes no effective reply and is made to regard himself as small beside the great Sappho. But we have already seen that, a little earlier, he had reverted to his initial elevated view of her, and it is really not at all implausible that he should accept this view now, when Rhamnes presses it upon him so forcibly.

Eucharis next reports that Sappho has assumed a statuesque appearance—“im Kreis von Marmorbildern, fast als ihresgleichen” (l. 1907); that she has taken up her lyre, donned her laurel wreath and purple robe, and looks completely transfigured:

Wer sie jetzt sah, zum erstenmale sah, …
Als Überird'sche hätt' er sie begrüβt.

There is a close correspondence between this description and the one that Phaon gives of her in Act I, when he tells how sublime she appeared when he first saw her (ll. 222-35). The earlier description prepares us for the later, and this also helps us to understand why Grillparzer declined to cut the first Act.

After Eucharis' long description, Sappho herself appears in this full regalia and announces that she has discovered her true being. In the ensuing monologue she thanks the gods for their many gifts to her. They have given her poetic capacity, fame, and even a taste of the joys of life. She argues that she has completed the task assigned to her in this world (written poetry which will bring her immortal fame), and asks them on that account not to refuse her “den letzten Lohn”, that is, to remove her from this life. There is no suggestion that she feels any guilt. She does not, for instance, argue that she has sinned against the gods by wishing to renounce her art in favour of married life, and should therefore be punished by them with death.¹ She is asking them not for punishment but for further “Lohn” in addition to blessings already bestowed. This reward is to consist in allowing her to die before she becomes old and is mocked by fools who deem themselves wise, and by the enemies of the gods. She certainly stresses that she belongs to the gods (l. 2004), and that it would be inappropriate for anything divine to suffer weakness and sickness. When she cries to them:

Erspart mir dieses Ringens blut'ge Qual.
Zu schwach fühl' ich mich, länger noch zu kämpfen

she does not expressly say against whom this struggle would have to be fought, were her life to continue. The idea seems to be that she would have to fight it against her own passionate nature; for immediately afterwards she repeats (l. 2025) what Phaon had said to her “Den Menschen Liebe und den Göttern Ehrfurcht!” and she must surely have in mind the context in which this was said, namely Phaon's rebuke of her uncontrolled behaviour—a rebuke which included the injunction: “Bedenke, was du tust und wer du bist!”

In her final monologue she never once expresses her feelings of guilt towards Phaon and Melitta. It is clear enough from her behaviour earlier in Act V that she has such feelings, and I think Grillparzer's reason for not making her allude to them here in the monologue which motivates her suicide was that he wished to avoid any suggestion that she dies in order to atone for her behaviour towards the couple. They are too insignificant to be the cause of her death, and so she is made to tell Phaon that he could never understand her and that they must go their separate ways (l. 1962). Phaon and Melitta are not the real causes of her death, but through them she has become aware that she can no longer be certain that she will always be able to control her passionate nature, and that she would be a very unworthy ambassador of the gods if she went on living. Her recent experiences, which we have witnessed in the play, are certainly such as to provide a genuine basis for such fears. This interpretation of her final state of mind seems to me to be more in harmony with her last words than the view that she regards her death as a punishment for betraying her art, or as a relief from unrequited love.²

Sappho is the first of Grillparzer's plays with a final Act in which the principal character adopts a new, unexpectedly calm attitude. In Sappho's case this is not exactly the dispassionate review of previous aberrations that it is with Medea, with Ottokar, and with the king in Die Jüdin (see below, pp. 158-9). Sappho's final criticism of her own behaviour is implicit, not directly stated; and she is really more concerned with the transgressions she would commit in the future, if she were to live on, than with her past.

As Grillparzer's second published play, Sappho, is a notable improvement on Die Ahnfrau in that it has none of the artificial motivation that disfigures the earlier work. But it still has many repetitions, neat antitheses and other features which O. E. Lessing has said are “im Ton der Übertreibungen jugendlicher Schillerepigonen” ([Grillparzer und das Neue Drama,] p. 12). As an example he refers to the following passage, where Sappho can no longer doubt that Phaon is in love with Melitta:

Sie schwebt vor seiner schamentblöβten Stirn,
In ihre Hülle kleiden sich die Träume,
Die schmeichelnd sich des Falschen Lager nahn.
Sappho verschmäht, um ihrer Sklavin willen?
Verschmähet! Wer? Beim Himmel! und von wem?
Bin ich dieselbe Sappho denn nicht mehr,
Die Könige zu ihren Füβen sah
Und, spielend mit der dargebotnen Krone,
Die Stolzen sah und hörte, und—entlieβ;
Dieselbe Sappho, die ganz Griechenland
Mit lautem Jubel als sein Kleinod grüβte?

This outburst is, however, not just empty rhetoric. Sappho is not only jealous of Melitta but is also beginning to realize that Phaon is something of a nonentity. This is clearly conveyed by her question “Verschmähet! Wer? Beim Himmel! und von wem?” and by the contrast with the royal suitors that follows. I can only endorse the judgement of Scherer that “Leere Rhetorik, welche aus dem Rahmen der Situation heraustritt, um einem lyrischen Gelüste des Dichters zu fröhnen, überhaupt jene beliebten Kraftstellen, in denen ein Poet seine Figuren als Sprachrohr für seine eigenen Angelegenheiten miβbraucht, werden sich bei Grillparzer kaum finden” ([Vorträge und Afsätze zur Gesch. des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich,] p. 218)

2. DAS GOLDENE VLIEβ (1821)

A trilogy is not what one would have expected from Grillparzer, who disliked plays where understanding what is happening at one point presupposes memory of many previous details. This approach, he thought, was epic and suited to a reader who can pause to correlate passages, rather than dramatic, which means suited to the stage. Thus in his autobiography he was critical of his decision to write Das goldene Vlieβ as a trilogy:

Das Drama ist eine Gegenwart, es muβ alles was zur Handlung gehört in sich enthalten. Die Beziehung eines Teils auf den andern gibt dem Ganzen etwas Episches, wodurch es vielleicht an Groβartigkeit gewinnt, aber an Wirklichkeit und Prägnanz verliert.

(I, 16, 135)

The only acceptable type of trilogy, he adds, is Aeschylus' three independent plays linked only by their common theme, where “der durchgehende Faden verknüpft, ohne zu bedingen”—in contrast to Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy, which is completely epic: “Das Lager ist völlig überflüssig, und die Piccolomini sind nur etwas, weil Wallensteins Tod darauf folgt.” Grillparzer's trilogy lies between these two extremes. The action of each of the first two plays is complete in itself and not merely an exposition to the third. But the third is by far the most effective, for the same reason that, in Goethe's judgement, Wallensteins Tod is superior to die Piccolomini, namely (as he wrote to Schiller, 9 March 1799): “Die Welt ist gegeben in der das alles geschieht, die Gesetze sind aufgestellt nach denen man urteilt, der Strom des Interesses, der Leidenschaft, findet sein Bette schon gegraben, in dem er hinabrollen kann.”

The final play is not completely independent of the others but most of the preceding action is summarized in it (e.g. Jason's long account in Act I of how he came to woo Medea). It is independent enough to be played separately, and is the only part of the trilogy still regularly performed. Its portrayal of how bright hopes can end in disillusion is (particularly in the two opening Acts) among Grillparzer's most powerful and moving essays in pessimism. By the time its action commences, all joy has long since vanished from the lives of Medea, Gora and Jason. And by the end Kreusa, the one adult character with no trace of ruthlessness, is brutally murdered, leaving her father, the king, heartbroken.

Many of the events presupposed in Euripides' Medea are enacted in the first two plays of Grillparzer's trilogy. This is partly because the modern dramatist could not assume that his audience was acquainted with the details of the legend. But it is partly, as Scherer noted, “dem Geiste des modernen Dramas gemäβ” ([Vorträge und Afsätze zur Gesch. des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich,] p. 236). Whereas a Greek tragedy concentrates on the final catastrophe of a series, modern tragedies begin at the beginning, with no trace of gloom in Act I, although there are of course exceptions. Schiller said (in a letter to Goethe of 26 April 1799) that the historical material for his Maria Stuart lent itself to what he called “the Euripidean method” of starting after a catastrophe. And in Schiller's play, Maria has in fact been imprisoned, tried and condemned before the curtain rises. However, it is usual in modern drama to begin before gloom and disaster, and to achieve this with the Medea legend Grillparzer had to write a trilogy.

There is a third reason why he enacts the whole story and not just the end. In barbarian Colchis, Jason found Medea radiant and beautiful “Im Abstich ihrer nächtlichen Umgebung” (Medea, l. 457). But against a Greek background she seems sombre, even sinister. Grillparzer wished to show not merely this common source of human unhappiness—that the girl who thrills the youth is repulsive to the man, so that the end of the romance is anything but romantic—but something even more general; namely that the ambition which drives on the young brings disillusionment when it is fulfilled. And so he wrote of his trilogy: “Das ganze ist die groβe Tragödie des Lebens, daβ der Mensch in seiner Jugend sucht, was er im Alter nicht brauchen kann.”³ And he made Jason come to realize the truth of this, saying:

Ein Jüngling war ich, ein verwegner Tor:
Der Mann verwirft was Knaben wohlgefällt.

(Medea, ll. 1471-2)

All this can only be brought home if we actually see Jason and Medea full of confidence and vigour, and witness their gradual disillusionment, and this cannot be put before our eyes in a single play.

As the curtain rises on the first play, the one-act tragedy Der Gastfreund, the setting leaves no doubt that the scene is barbarian territory. The stage directions read:

Kolchis. Wilde Gegend mit Felsen und Bäumen, im Hintergrunde das Meer. Am Gestade desselben ein Altar, von unbehauenen Steinen zusammengefügt, auf dem die kolossale Bildsäule eines nackten bärtigen Mannes steht, der in seiner Rechten eine Keule, um die Schultern ein Widderfell trägt.

The barbarism suggested by the unhewn stones, the colossal size of the statue, and the wild landscape is reinforced by the sight of Medea, bow in hand, having just shot an arrow. Later this gesture is contrasted with one which represents civilization, namely playing the lyre. When at the beginning of Act II of Medea she tries to learn Greek manners, she handles the instrument clumsily and complains:

Nur an den Wurfspieβ ist die Hand gewöhnt
Und an des Weidwerks ernstlich rauh Geschäft.

Grillparzer makes the whole tragedy depend on the incompatibility between barbarism and civilization. The way the Greeks mistrust all barbarians is repeatedly stressed. To Milo Medea is “eine Barbarin, und eine Zauberin dazu”, and “ein furchtbar Weib mit ihren dunkeln Augen!” (Die Argonauten, ll. 1101-3). Even the kind and gentle Kreusa is at first ready to believe, merely on hearsay, that she is “Ein gräβlich Weib, giftmischend, vatermōrd'risch” (Medea, l. 330). And neither Medea nor Jason will ever forget the scorn with which she was treated on her arrival in Greece (Medea, ll. 251-5). But in fact Medea has none of the repulsive qualities associated with the word “barbarian”. She has none of her father's covetousness and treacherousness. She is pathetically moved when Kreusa, realizing the wrong she has done her, begs her forgiveness: kindness and consideration are qualities that Medea has hardly experienced before, and the way she values them brings out her basic nobility of character (Medea, ll. 370-6). But she can never acquire the appearance or accomplishments of a Greek, however hard she tries, and so Jason cannot rid himself of the horror he has come to feel for this alien woman. Back in Greece, her dark eyes, which Milo had found so horrible from the first, constantly put him in mind of the serpent which guarded the fleece in Colchis, and he confesses to the king: “Und nur mit Schaudern nenn' ich sie mein Weib” (Medea, l. 475). We can see, then, why Grillparzer maintained that his purpose was to make the first two plays of the trilogy “so barbarisch und romantisch … als möglich, gerade um den Unterschied zwischen Kolchis und Griechenland herauszuheben, auf den alles ankam.” And again: “Ich hatte bei der … Vermengung des Romantischen mit dem Klassichen nicht eine läppische Nachäfferei Shakespeares … im Sinne, sondern die möglichste Unterscheidung von Kolchis und Griechenland, welcher Unterschied die Grundlage der Tragik in diesem Stück ausmacht” (I, 16, 136; 159). He adds that one method he adopted to bring out the contrast was the use of free verse when the action takes place in Colchis and iambics when it is in Greece, “gleichsam als verschiedene Sprachen, hier und dort”.

A good example of what he means by “das Romantische” is the stage-setting of the final Act of Die Argonauten. Jason and Medea stand in a cave which has “in der Felsenwand des Hintergrundes ein groβes verschlossenes Tor”. When Jason strikes this with his sword, “die Pforten springen auf und zeigen eine innere schmälere Höhle, seltsam beleuchtet. Im Hintergrunde ein Baum, an ihm hängt hellglänzend das goldene Vlieβ. Um Baum und Vlieβ windet sich eine ungeheure Schlange, die beim Aufspringen der Pforte ihr in dem Laub verborgenes Haupt hervorstreckt und züngelnd vor sich hin blickt.” The whole incident, culminating in Jason's capture of the fleece, is not only important for the action, but brings out the horror that all the Greeks feel for barbarian magic. And the serpent's eyes, as we saw, leave an indelible impression on Jason's mind, and forever remind him that his dark-eyed wife is a barbarian.

The principal function of the first play is to establish the fleece as a symbol. Grillparzer said he intended it to be “ein sinnliches Zeichen des ungerechten Gutes, eine Art Nibelungenhort” (I, 16, 134). It seems to confer power and victory, but there is a curse on it. Phryxus steals it, Aietes murders him for it, Jason then Pelias and Medea acquire it, Kreon seeks it—and they are all ruined. Not that it has any supernatural power. As with the picture of Rahel in Die Jüdin, there is no magical hocus-pocus: the fleece is simply an outward and visible sign of ill-gotten gain, and shows the evil consequences of wealth so acquired. To illustrate this, Grillparzer quoted the words Octavio speaks at the end of Die Piccolomini:

Das eben ist der Fluch der bösen Tat,
Daβ sie fortzeugend Böses muβ gebären.(4)

An evil deed, then, brings misfortune, and this in turn motivates further crimes.

In the second play, Die Argonauten, Jason comes to Colchis to avenge Phryxus and regain the fleece—but not for the sake of justice. Like Phryxus, he is persecuted by his family, and leaves Greece because this is the only way he can achieve fame and power, for which he is glad to risk his life:

Ruhmvoller Tod für ruhmentblöβtes Leben,
Mag's tadeln wer da will, mich lockt der Tausch!

(ll. 303-4)

When he left, he was indifferent to all else. As he tells Kreusa on his return:

Ich hatte da kein Aug für deine Tränen
Denn nur nach Taten dürstete mein Herz.

(Medea, ll. 867-8)

At his first meeting with Medea, he expresses in long speeches his amazement at finding such beauty in barbarian Colchis, while the turmoil she feels prevents her from uttering anything but interjections. When armed Colchians enter, led by her brother Absyrtus, she restrains them with a gesture of her arm, thus allowing Jason to escape. At the beginning of Act II, the change that has come upon her as a result of meeting him is indicated by her friendliness and warmth to Peritta, whom she had previously scornfully repudiated as a slave of passion. (This is similar to the way Grillparzer brings out the effect on Hero of the meeting with Leander by her change of attitude to Ianthe.) At their second meeting she again saves his life by warning him not to drink the poisoned cup, and then in Act III he urges her to betray her own people and follow him. For nearly 200 lines he has all the coherent speeches, and she replies with interjections, silence or tears. It is not that he is deeply in love, but he wants to enjoy the consciousness of his power by compelling her to admit her feelings. When he fails, he turns away enraged, but she then turns her face to him, stretches out her arm, and cries the one word “Jason” (l. 1327). It is enough to show that she loves him. When in the final play he recalls this incident, he says: “Und nur ihr Tun, ihr Wort verriet mir nichts” (l. 463). Here, then, the strongest emotion is expressed not with declamation but, as in real life, with broken phrases, and we find the same in most of Grillparzer's plays. Ottokar, for instance, is usually voluble enough, but when he learns that Rudolf has been elected emperor, the great shock he feels is conveyed by making him falter in the instructions he had been giving with his habitual confidence. Rudolf II of Ein Bruderzwist says practically nothing when he is really angry in Acts I and IV, but bangs on the floor with his stick or makes some other gesture.

Jason's emotion is not nearly as strong as Medea's and, so he can speak at length while she is silent. He sees that she loves him, and the very fact that she will not admit it in so many words angers him, and (as he concedes in retrospect, Medea, ll. 465-7) increases his determination to press her to a declaration. His relentlessness is brought out when he cries: “Du weinst! Umsonst; ich kenne Mitleid nicht” (l. 1264). Another motive for the ruthless pressure he brings to bear on her is revealed when he says to his companions:

Sie kennt das Vlieβ, den Ort, der es verbirgt
Mit ihr vollbringen wir's und dann zu Schiff.

(ll. 1393-4)

Having claimed her as his bride, he immediately says he cares for nothing but the fleece (l. 1429). In the next Act, she threatens to kill herself if he continues his quest for it, but he merely retorts: “Beweinen kann ich dich, rückkehren nicht” (l. 1503). Her unwillingness to help him is due partly to her conviction that she can only atone for her family's treacherous acquisition of the fleece by leaving it alone; and partly to her consciousness of how much unhappiness its possession has caused. But he is set solely on fame and glory—an attitude not infrequently taken by Grillparzer's heroes. His Sappho says despairingly of the male in general:

Nach auβen geht sein rastlos wildes Streben
Und findet er die Lieb', bückt er sich wohl,
Das holde Blümchen von dem Grund zu lesen,
Besieht es, freut sich sein und steckt's dann kalt
Zu andern Siegeszeichen auf den Helm.

(ll. 820-4)

This is exactly what Jason does. In retrospect he says:

Auf Kampf gestellt rang ich mit ihr, und wie
Ein Abenteuer trieb ich meine Liebe.

(Medea, ll. 466-7)

The third play begins a month after Jason and Medea's arrival in Greece, following four years at sea, during which two sons have been born to them. All that has happened in this interval is communicated by two sets of narratives—Gora's at the beginning of the first Act and Jason's at the end, which acquaints us with details omitted in Gora's briefer sketch. Both speak not simply to inform the audience, but for purposes of their own. Jason is concerned to convince the king (who interrogates him curtly and with hostile aloofness) that he is innocent, and his long speeches are punctuated only by short comments or questions from Kreon. Gora tells us less because she is addressing Medea to whom the facts are already known. While Medea is anxious to bury her past for Jason's sake, Gora reminds her of what she considers to be her guilt in deserting her country and causing, even if unwittingly, the deaths of her brother and father. Gora speaks partly from resentment—she accuses Medea of having enticed her away from her native land into slavery in Greece—and partly from motives of religious hope: to her, the change for the worse in Medea's fortunes is proof “Daβ Götter sind, und daβ Vergeltung ist”. And this means that Jason, the chief criminal, will in turn be punished (ll. 36-7). It also means that Medea must on no account attempt to put her own actions, which have had such dire consequences, out of her mind, for this would be tantamount to denying the justice of the gods. And so Gora keeps referring to what Medea is trying to put aside. Gora's preoccupation with the gods here is not a pretext for enabling her to tell us what we need to know, but is an attitude she constantly takes, and underlies the different advice she gives Medea throughout this final play.

Another important matter to which Gora alludes is that Pelias died in mysterious circumstances, “man weiβ nicht wie” (l. 80). In Grillparzer's trilogy there is no proof that Medea murdered him or committed any atrocity prior to her killing of her own children; whereas Euripides' Medea murders both her brother and Pelias, and is held in dread even by her nurse. The reason why Grillparzer mitigates her guilt is obvious enough; to keep her as the half-demented barbarian of the legend would indeed have made it easy to motivate her child-murder, but she would then have forfeited the sympathy of a modern audience.

Jason is loathed and shunned on his return to Greece because of his barbarian wife, because the Greeks could believe only the worst of a barbarian and of the man who could marry her. Gora tells her:

Ein Greuel ist die Kolcherin dem Volke.
Ein Schrecken die Vertraute dunkler Mächte. …
Sie hassen ihn um dein, um seinetwillen.

So we can see why Medea, in the opening scene, tries quite literally to bury her past by placing her magic tools in a box and interring it, saying:

Die Zeit der Nacht, der Zauber ist vorbei
Und was geschieht, ob Schlimmes oder Gutes,
Es muβ geschehen am offnen Strahl des Lichts.

Her magic things are associated with night because they are instruments of death which must be banished “aus des heitern Lebens Nähe” to which she now turns (ll. 9-10). She buries them “vor Tagesanbruch” and cries: “Der Tag bricht an—mit ihm ein neues Leben!” (l. 137). As at the beginning of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, where Hero's happiness and confidence are brought out by the brightness of the morning sunlight, the emotions of the heroine are made clear not only by her words but by the whole situation in which we see her.

Medea buries the fleece together with her magic tools, and her address to it tells us what it has come to stand for in her mind:

Du Zeuge von der Meinen Untergang,
Bespritzt mit meines Vaters, Bruders Blut,
Du Denkmal von Medeens Schmach und Schuld!

It is for Jason's sake that she is putting away her past, not, as Gora supposes, in order to wipe out this consciousness of guilt. When Gora tells her to face the facts instead of burying them she counters with:

Geschehen ist, was nie geschehen sollte,
Und ich bewein's und bittrer, als du denkst,
Doch soll ich drum, ich selbst, mich selbst
          vernichten?
Klar sei der Mensch und einig mit der Welt!

(ll. 117-20)

“Welt” here means “environment”, and to be at one with her Greek surroundings she must bury her Colchian past.

This reply to Gora also makes it clear that, although she regrets what has happened, she does not regard herself as morally guilty in Gora's sense. Gora's reiterated statements of Medea's guilt serve to remind us of how much she has sacrificed to Jason, how much grief her love for him has brought to herself and others. This needs to be emphasized so that we see the powerful motive for vengeance she will have when he deserts her. Some commentators, however, have accepted Gora's statements as the view which the dramatist is urging us to take. They are anxious to stamp some of Medea's early actions as sinful, feeling that they can thereby make her final tragedy acceptable as a just punishment.⁵ But as she herself says, she did not kill her father, nor did her brother fall “durch mich” (ll. 333-4). The crucial action from which these and other catastrophes stem is that she loved and followed Jason; and Grillparzer impresses upon us that she was driven to this by overpowering emotions, which bewildered her as much as her family, which were not under the jurisdiction of her will and therefore are not open to moral censure—quite apart from the fact that following the man one loves is not, in normal circumstances, a crime. Even Jason, ruthless opportunist that he is, can be convicted of little outright villainy. He himself gives the best statement of the nature of his guilt:

Ich habe nichts getan was schlimm an sich,
Doch viel gewollt, gemöcht, gewünscht, getrachtet;
Still zugesehen, wenn es andre taten;
Hier Übles nicht gewollt, doch zugegriffen.

(ll. 765-8)

If Medea's situation in the final play were something for which we could blame her, Grillparzer would not be prompting us to pessimistic reflections, showing in accordance with his theory how the finest characters must come to grief and tragedy; he would merely be demonstrating that certain moral shortcomings are apt to have painful consequences, and this, however adequate to a Gottsched, is much too trite for a Grillparzer.

Medea's nobility of character is at its clearest in this opening Act. Her calm acceptance of all the misfortune that has befallen herself and Jason is expressed by her line: “Laβ uns die Götter bitten um ein einfach Herz” (l. 86). To this, Gora replies: “Ha! Und dein Gemahl?”—knowing that, whatever Medea may do, Jason is incapable of such humility. Later, when Kreusa bids him bear his lot with “Ein einfach Herz und einen stillen Sinn” (l. 829), he can only helplessly contrast the promise of his youth with the bleak grimness of his present. Such contrasts repeatedly occur in order to bring out the tragedy of lives which had begun so auspiciously. A fine example is the short monologue which Jason begins by flinging himself despairing on a bench and crying, as he beats his breast: “Zerspreng' dein Haus und mach' dir brechend Luft!” He does not lecture on despair in the abstract, but expresses his feelings by addressing the walls of Corinth, visible in the background. This town, which harboured him as a youth, seems now so inaccessible:

Da liegen sie, die Türme von Korinth,
Am Meeresufer üppig hingelagert,
Die Wiege meiner goldnen Jugendzeit!
Dieselben, von derselben Sonn' erleuchtet,
Nur ich ein andrer, ich in mir verwandelt.
Ihr Götter! warum war so schön mein Morgen,
Wenn Ihr den Abend mir so schwarz bestimmt—
O wär'es Nacht!

(ll. 203-11)

Again, ideas and emotions are expressed vividly and with immediacy by being linked with something we can actually see on the stage.

Soon after this we see Jason and Medea alone for the first time in this final play, and their conversation tells us what their relationship has become. We have seen how much Medea is prepared to do for his sake. For instance, when he had complained that her red veil is Colchian rather than Greek dress, she expressed her complaisance to his will by silently handing it to Gora. (The magic veil, which, for him, represented barbarism and which he had taken from her in Colchis when he claimed her as Greek, she had already buried, earlier in the scene.) But the conversation she now has with Jason shows that she fears he will repudiate her; and the slightest thing makes her suspicious and resentful. This resentment gradually gains the upper hand, and in Act II we see that she knows at heart that Gora is right, that Jason has not the strength of character to accept misfortune with quiet resignation. She indicts his ruthless egoism, saying:

Nur Er ist da, Er in der weiten Welt
Und alles Andre nichts als Stoff zu Taten. …
Lockt's ihn nach Ruhm, so schlägt er einen tot,
Will er ein Weib, so holt er eine sich,
Was auch darüber bricht, was kümmert's ihn!

(ll. 630-6)

The speech culminates in the terrible line “Ich könnt' ihn sterben sehn und lachen drob.” Aietes had foretold that Jason would despise her “wenn gestillt die Begier” (Die Argonauten, ll. 1372-4). At the beginning of the third play he is still determined to stand by her, although she is nothing but a burden to him (ll. 552-4). She for her part tries desperately to suppress her fierce resentment and to do everything to please him. In Act I he had complained of her barbarian dress. At the beginning of Act II she appears “griechisch gekleidet” and learning the lyre. But then Kreusa tells her the words of the prayer that, as a boy, he used to sing to the gods:

Wölbt meine Brust
Daβ den Männern
Ich obsiege
Und den zierlichen
Mädchen auch.

Medea is naturally put in mind of his selfishness, and although she makes a tremendous effort to forget the wrongs he has done her, she fails and cries “Doch das vergiβt sich nicht” (l. 699).

Grillparzer has produced nothing so overpoweringly pessimistic as these first two Acts of Medea. The spouses have come to hate each other, although they feel they must stay together. Kreusa, horrified at their mutual hatred, asks: “Wer sagte mir denn, Gatten liebten sich?” (l. 721). Jason points the pessimistic moral when he observes, not merely that their relationship has failed to stand the test of misfortune, but the more general truth that man is worsened, not purified, by hardship and deprivation:

Es ist des Unglücks eigentlichstes Unglück,
Daβ selten drin der Mensch sich rein bewahrt.

(ll. 757-8)

We are reminded of Octavio's words about “der Fluch der bösen Tat” (see above, p. 51).

Jason goes on to exchange reminiscences with Kreusa about their happy youth. When Medea enters, she tries to attract his attention to tell him that she has learned a Greek song—a good example of her determination to assume Greek manners for his sake. What follows is a fine illustration of how Grillparzer conveys the most powerful emotions by gesture rather than by word. Jason is so absorbed in his conversation with Kreusa that Medea has to say three times “Jason, ich weiβ ein Lied” before she is even heard. And then it is Kreusa who notices her and brings him to let her perform the song. He is cruelly contemptuous, and says she would do better at throwing a spear or hissing at a snake. Naturally, her confidence sinks, and so she bungles the complicated and difficult task which she had only just begun to master. Then she drops the lyre and covers her eyes with her hands to express her shame and despair. Jason tells Kreusa, a decent civilized Greek, to sing the song. But when Kreusa makes to pick up the lyre, Medea fends her off with one hand and takes it herself with the other. When Jason advances on her to retrieve it, she breaks it, shows him the broken pieces, and then throws them at Kreusa's feet. Kreusa recoils in horror at this barbarous action and cries “tot”, referring of course to the lyre. Medea looks round quickly and says “Wer?—Ich lebe—lebe.” And the stage directions indicate an attitude of pride and defiance. “Sie steht da hoch emporgehoben vor sich hinstarrend.” The incident is closed, for there follows “von auβen ein Trompetenstoβ”, distracting attention and preparing the arrival of the herald with his sentence of banishment. Both Medea and Kreusa have said little, but their powerful emotions have been very clearly conveyed.

By this time Jason has lost all initiative. Whereas he had earlier told the king he would stand by Medea, he now acquiesces in the king's plan that she should be banished and he wed Kreusa. Kreon is acting justly, according to his lights.⁶ The herald's evidence (ll. 960-1005) can only confirm his opinion that Jason is innocent of Pelias' murder, while giving him good grounds for thinking that the real culprit was Medea. Thus to repudiate her will not be an injustice, while to make Jason his son and heir will protect him from the sentence of banishment which has been decreed against both Jason and Medea. Medea pleads to remain, yet cannot suppress her resentment, and she expresses these conflicting emotions when she says to Jason: “Verhaβter komm! Komm mein Gemahl!” (l. 1110). It is the same alternation between hatred and dependence that Bancbanus shows towards Otto at the end of Ein treuer Diener, and is expressed in the same way. We shall again meet this way of expressing an alternation between contrary emotions in Act III of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, where Hero fiercely accuses Leander of selfishly taking risks that will jeopardize her life as well as his, and then changes her tone as her love for him begins to outweigh this resentment:

                    Entsetzlicher! Verruchter!
Was kommst du her? nichts denkend als dich selbst
          …
Und du—Entsetzlich Bild—Leander, O!

By the end of the second Act Medea's hatred has obliterated the contrary emotion that had held it in check. She tears the Greek coat that Kreusa had given her, and says to Jason:

Sieh! Wie ich diesen Mantel durch hier reiβe
Und einen Teil an meinen Busen drücke,
Den andern hin dir werfe vor die Füβe,
Also zerreiβ' ich meine Liebe, unsern Bund.

(ll. 1125-8)

Such an explanation of what a gesture represents is not infrequent. In the second play, when Jason claims Medea as his bride, he gives visible expression to this by taking her magic veil from her, stripping her of this barbaric accessory in order to make her a Greek. He says:

Und wie ich diesen Schleier von dir reiβe,
Durchwoben mit der Unterird's chen Zeichen,
So reiβ' ich dich von allen Banden los,
Die dich geknüpft an dieses Landes Frevel.

(ll. 1402-5)

The Act finishes with Kreon's refusal of her plea at least to be allowed to take her children into banishment. Again, it is Kreon who decides what is to happen, and Jason simply follows his initiative. Only Kreusa feels misgiving at this treatment of Medea, and asks: “Ich sinne nur, ob recht ist, was wir tun.”

At the beginning of Act III Gora urges her mistress to avenge herself on Jason, and reminds her that her betrayal of her family and country for this hated Greek brought her father to his grave:

Du hast wohl gehört, dir ward wohl Kunde …
Daβ er den Schmerz anfassend wie ein Schwert,
Gen sich selber wütend, den Tod sich gab.

But Medea is more concerned with keeping her children than with thoughts of revenge. Jason, we saw, weakly accepted the king's ruling that the children must stay in Corinth. But she contrives to speak to him in the absence of the king and he gives in to her to the extent of agreeing that one of the children shall be allowed to go with her. Nowhere is Jason's injustice clearer than at this interview. He cannot deny that he urged her to murder his uncle (ll. 1082-1105, 1434-41), but there is no proof that she actually did so. Yet he acquiesces in her sentence of banishment for this crime in order to be rid of her. And this is the man for whom she has given up everything! Jason is by now completely broken. He shows no joy at the prospect of marriage with Kreusa—not only when he speaks of his future to Medea, to whom he might be expected to minimize his happiness with her rival, but even in conversation with Kreon, her father (ll. 1324-42). He can only grieve at his loss of fame and power:

Ich bin nicht der ich war, die Kraft ist mir gebrochen,
Und in der Brust erstorben mir der Mut.

(ll. 1523-4)

His feeling of impotence and inability to take effective action is brought out by his declaration, repeated at every new development, that all has been willed by the gods.

Prior to their death in Act IV the children make three appearances. In Act I they bring out the mutual hatred of Greeks and barbarians. One of the boys asks his father whether he is a Greek, saying that, according to Gora, these are “betrügerische Leut' und feig” (l. 217). Later in Act I, Jason stands with them to plead for asylum in Corinth, and they immediately win both Kreon's and Kreusa's affection. Hence Kreon's later insistence that they should remain in Corinth and not accompany their barbarian mother into banishment. He has not merely taken a fancy to the children, but feels he must not entrust them to someone who, he believes, has committed a foul murder. They are at once drawn to the gentle Kreusa and cling to her when Medea calls them (ll. 353-6). Medea truly loves them, and is not a harsh mother—she was tactful and conciliatory to them when they taunted Jason for being a Greek (ll. 218-22). But she has none of Kreusa's sweetness, and gentleness, and this has fatal consequences. From the end of Act II, where Kreon banishes her, she repeatedly says she will go if she may take her children with her. After Jason has conceded that one of the two shall accompany her, they are brought on to the stage for the third time to see which of them will choose to follow their mother. Medea's desperation leads her to speak roughly to them, and this makes them flee to Kreusa. They do not really positively reject Medea, but are frightened—both of her manner and (as they reveal in the following Act, ll. 2042-3) of another long voyage in a ship “wo es schwindlicht ist und schwül”, which they know awaits them if they accompany her (l. 1653). But here in Act III they are silent, and their behaviour naturally makes Medea think that her own—all that she has left—has turned against her. This provokes her cry:

Wer gibt mir einen Dolch?
Einen Dolch für mich und sie!

(ll. 1697-8)

The rest of the play is not so powerfully effective. Act IV is concerned mainly with the further motivation of Medea's murder of the children, and Act V with exonerating her and ensuring that we continue to sympathize with her. As Grillparzer himself noted, this murder is the one thing that modern audiences know of Medea, and so it must form the culmination of the play. The deed is done at the end of the only long monologue of the final play (in contrast to Sappho, the fleece-trilogy already shows the tendency of the mature Grillparzer to restrict the length and number of the monologues). This one not only makes Medea's motives clear but also creates a sense of suspense. The catastrophe of a play entitled Medea cannot come as a surprise, so while we are looking onwards, to the murder, she keeps us in suspense by reviewing her past.

The weakness of Act IV is that Grillparzer does not succeed in motivating the murder very convincingly, although the effect of this failure is not as serious as one might think; for whether the children die or not makes no difference to the tragedies of the lives of Medea and Jason. Both were so full of hope and strength, but both are now so completely broken in will and embittered that any future happiness is out of the question for either of them. If we recall Grillparzer's statement that the whole trilogy shows “die groβe Tragödie des Lebens”, then we can understand that the killing of the children is not really essential to the tragic effect.

Medea is not set on murder at the beginning of Act III. All she knows at this stage is that she will not accept banishment (ll. 1281-2). She does think of murdering them as a means of avenging herself on Jason, but Gora dismisses this suggestion, saying: “Dich selber trifft deine Rache, nicht ihn” (l. 1235). Then Gora tells how the Greek heroes who accompanied Jason to Colchis have all met an untimely death—evidence, for her, of divine retribution. She mentions Hercules' death when he donned a poisoned coat prepared by his wife, and Medea's interest is visibly aroused. It is clear that she is now thinking of murdering Jason (as she later does Kreusa, by sending a poisoned garment), not the children. But by the end of Act III the children have, she thinks, repudiated her, and this makes her think of revenge on them. She now begins to talk of hating them, as she hates their father whom they so strongly resemble (ll. 1776-83). This hatred for them is just a moment of desperate rage; her love is far stronger, but that too impels her to kill them. She knows that if she leaves them, as she must, they will be taunted as barbarians by the children of Jason and Kreusa:

Oder der Ingrimm, am Herzen nagend,
Macht sie arg, sich selbst ein Greuel.

(ll. 1794-5)

She knows what it is to become “sich selbst ein Greuel”, and cries:

Ich wollt' mein Vater hätte mich getötet,
Da ich noch klein war,
Noch nichts, wie jetzt, geduldet,
Noch nichts gedacht—wie jetzt.

And again:

Man hat mich bös genannt, ich war es nicht:
Allein ich fühle, daβ man's werden kann.

(ll. 1849-50)

These lines reiterate the truth already stated by Jason that man is worsened, not purified, by oppression and misfortune. The desire to spare her children this fate alternates with the rage and resentment that her own misfortunes have made so strong in her, and which lead her to think once more of killing her children in order to take revenge on Jason who loves them (ll. 1809-14). It is already clear that she will not kill them for one single clearly stated reason, but will be impelled by a number of motives, as is so with many acts in real life.⁷ Even the motives already discussed do not give her the strength to do the deed. “Dem alten Wollen fehlt die alte Kraft” (l. 1860). She means that without her magic implements, which she buried in Act I, she is powerless (ll. 1869-76). But she can easily recover the box in which she interred them: “Zwei Handvoll Erde weg—und es ist mein!” And that she fails to take the necessary action means that she lacks the will-power, not just the means, to kill. It is her horror of the fleece that deters her from excavating the box. Just as the dying Pelias could not look at it without seeing the man he had murdered, so Medea fears that the sight of it will torment her with her memories of how her brother and her father died as a result of her allegiance to Jason. In the upshot, she acquires the box, and with it the strength to kill, as a result of a series of coincidences and implausible acts by others. First, the king has found the buried box, and she admits it contains the fleece which he covets—not from personal greed, but as the token of Jason's greatness. He thinks (ll. 1366-8) that if Jason has this fleece which symbolizes and proves the success of his adventure, then he will necessarily recover his power and popularity. Once again, Kreon's behaviour is not rank injustice, but must look like this to Medea and further provoke her. When the box is brought, he orders her to open it, for she alone can break the magic spell that closes it. She bids him wait, and he complies, saying that she should send the fleece to Kreusa when she does eventually open the box. What basis he has for this suggestion is not clear, but it gives Medea the idea of murdering Kreusa with the lethal instruments in the box. Next, he announces that, since Medea seems calm and co-operative, he is ready to comply with Kreusa's request that she be allowed to spend an hour with her children before she departs into banishment. It is, of course, important for the plot that they should be brought into her presence, but the king's readiness to send them is hardly convincing. He has repeatedly said that he regards her as a treacherous barbarian who will stick at nothing. And he was present when she cried out for a dagger to kill them, and herself too, when they repudiated her.

But we have yet to see how she acquires the will to kill them. The king leaves in order to send them to her. She opens the box and gives Gora a vessel from it, to be handed to Kreusa as a gift. In spite of her later disclaimer (l. 2172) Gora must realize that this vessel is in fact lethal, for when she accidentally raises its lid, a flame spurts out, and she cries: “Mir ahnet Entsetzliches!” (l. 2009). Medea then covers the vessel with the fleece, and both with a coat. We think at once of the poisoned coat which killed Hercules, and in which she had earlier shown so much interest. After some hesitation, Gora does Medea's will and takes all these things to Kreusa. This is virtually an act of suicide, for she can reasonably anticipate that her part in Kreusa's murder will be punished by death. It is, however, not in itself implausible that she should give up her life. She has repeatedly said that it is meaningless; she has long since ceased to love Medea, and the two children to whom she had clung are now to be cut off from her. It is for a quite different reason that her meek compliance with Medea's will is difficult to accept. At this stage of the play she is represented as trying to restrain her mistress, and we must see how she comes to take this attitude.

At the beginning of the final play she was openly defiant and justified her refusal to help bury the magic implements by saying that she is Jason's slave, not Medea's (l. 31). She had repeatedly urged Medea to return to Colchis, and only when the Greeks banish her from Corinth does she change her counsel and urge her mistress to stay, thinking that it would be shameful to return, now that the initiative for departure has come from the Greeks. Then, at the beginning of Act IV, she again changes her advice and suggests flight. The change strikes Medea as remarkable:

Und was hat dich denn so weich gemacht?
Schnaubtest erst Grimm, und nun so zagend?

(ll. 1754-5)

Gora has become “weich” because the children have repudiated their mother, and because in this she sees divine vengeance, punishing Medea for abandoning her country and family. For the rest of Act IV she tries to dissuade Medea from active revenge. Yet finally she allows herself to be bullied into bringing about Kreusa's death. All this is only intelligible if we consider that Kreusa's murder is essential to the action, in that it makes Medea feel that she must kill her children (to save them from a worse fate) and so gives her the strength she hitherto lacked. She knows that the king will avenge Kreusa by torturing and killing the children as well as herself, and this forces her hand:

Ist's nicht schon zu spät?
Zu spät zum verzeihn?
Hat sie nicht schon, Kreusa, das Kleid,
Und den Becher, den flammenden Becher? …
Sie kommen, sie töten mich!
Schonen auch der Kleinen nicht.

(ll. 2141-8)

It is doubtless because the fleece-trilogy is an early work (Grillparzer's third published play) that it shows some artificiality of motivation. But the effect of making Medea's action dependent on factors external to her (on contingencies and on badly motivated acts by others) is not entirely negative. It does impair the inevitability of the death of the children, but it also mitigates her guilt. In Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen the tragedy is caused almost exclusively by the characters. Once Hero and Leander have fallen in love, it does not need any chance happenings to kill them: their passion leads them straight to their deaths. But there the passion is love and, in the case of the priest (whose action in extinguishing the lamp is so decisive), duty. With Medea the passion is of a much uglier nature, and it would be intolerable if Grillparzer showed her murder of the children determined entirely or even principally by her lust for revenge. That outer circumstances have to be invoked to play a large part in the motivation of her deed helps to reconcile us with her.⁸ This too is the function of the second scene of the fifth Act of Medea. Both Jason and Medea feel annihilated, all that remains for them is (as Medea urges him) “Trage … dulde … büβe”, and she appears as the more resolute of the two in this determination to atone.

In the first scene of Act V Gora is made to pass judgement on Kreusa, Jason and the king, and the stress thus placed on their guilt also has the effect of diminishing Medea's. Gora is even made to exaggerate the guilt of Kreusa and the king. The latter deprived Medea of her husband and children only because the evidence against her seemed so damning, and Kreusa had acquiesced for the same reason, but even then with misgivings. It is without justification when Gora asks of her: “Warum griff sie nach des Unglücks letzter Habe?” But what really matters at this stage is not whether what they had done is just but that we should be conscious of the undeniable fact that the natural effect of their deeds was to goad Medea to desperation, as if she were a hunted beast. Gora says to the two men:

Habt ihr es nicht umstellt mit Jägernetzen
Des schändlichen Verrats, das edle Wild,
Bis ohne Ausweg, in Verzweiflungswut,
Es, überspringend euer Garn, die Krone,
Des hohen Hauptes königlichen Schmuck,
Miβbraucht zum Werkzeug ungewohnten Mords.

(ll. 2245-50)

It is obvious that the effect is to exonerate Medea. And the final scene of the play elevates her further. It has something of the transfiguration of the heroine at the end of Euripides' play, where she appears on a chariot drawn by winged dragons, which finally rises into the air. Grillparzer gives her more than natural knowledge when he makes her tell Jason that she is not destined to fall by his hand, and that they will never again confront each other. Furthermore, her meeting with Jason here is not motivated in the ordinary sense. She seems to know where to find him.⁹

Grillparzer's trilogy ends with an allusion to the symbolism of the fleece. Medea is on her way to return it to the temple at Delphi. She shows it to Jason, saying:

Erkennst das Zeichen du, um das du rangst?
Das dir ein Ruhm war und ein Glück dir schien?
Was ist der Erde Glück?—ein Schatten!
Was ist der Erde Ruhm?—ein Traum!
Du Armer! Der von Schatten du geträumt!
Der Traum ist aus, allein die Nacht noch nicht.

The parallel with what Rustan says when he awakens at the end of Der Traum ein Leben … is striking. As Professor Yuill has said (56, p. xxiii)) Rustan gives the same message of resignation, but in a less sombre light, since his terrifying dream prevents him from embarking on the course that has led Medea and Jason to ruin.

3. DES MEERES UND DER LIEBE WELLEN (1831)

Modern writers who treat themes from classical antiquity often do so in order to write about love, and Grillparzer's plays on Greek material all depict love's first awakening in young people, although only Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen is restricted to this theme. As in his two other Greek plays, the story is not about the real historical world of Athens or Sparta, but is taken from myth and legend. Free from the limitations which go with a historical setting, these plays show human emotions and problems common to all ages and special to none.

Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen is essentially a study in a girl's growth to womanhood. All the other characters, even her partner, are less important than she. Her opening monologue, spoken on the morning of the day she is to be consecrated priestess, is a splendid piece of character-drawing. Almost her first words bring out her pride at the thought of the career which is to be initiated at the ceremony:

Und ich bin dieses Festes Gegenstand.
Mir wird vergönnt, die unbemerkten Tage,
Die fernhin rollen ohne Richt und Ziel,
Dem Dienst der hohen Himmlischen zu weihn;
Die einzelnen, die Wiesenblümchen gleich,
Der Fuβ des Wanderers zertritt und knickt,
Zum Kranz gewunden um der Göttin Haupt,
Zu weihen und verklären. Sie und mich.

Like her uncle, she is proud of her descent from a family of priests (ll. 20-3) and very conscious of her superiority to “der Schwarm”—the common herd, who leave undone those things which they ought to have done (ll. 52-3), while she rectifies their omissions with complacency. Her playful mockery of Hymen, god of marriage (ll. 33-7), and of Amor, shows that she is glad to enter upon the celibate life of a priestess and does not regard it as a sacrifice. When Ianthe suggests that Hero, like any other girl, would have stolen a glance through the gate at the youths waiting to be admitted to the festival, she is visibly angered and tells Ianthe, not once but repeatedly, to silence her wanton tongue:

Sprich nicht und reg dich nicht'

(l. 85) …

Du sollst nicht reden, sag' ich, nicht ein Wort!

(l. 90)

And her uncle's suggestion that her mother will arrive “mit dem Bräut'gam an der Hand” (l. 216) provokes likewise a strong reaction. She accuses him of tactless and hurtful joking (l. 217) and turns her back on him—the strongest gesture she can make to one who (unlike the servant girls) is her superior.

Grillparzer makes her lack of interest in young men understandable enough. Those she has met have all been like her brother:

Vom gleichem Sinn und störrisch wildem Wesen.
Das ehrne Band der Roheit um die Stirn,
Je minder denkend, um so heft'ger wollend.

(ll. 308-10)

The temple, where she has spent the last eight years, has been in every respect a place of peace and refuge for her. She came to it from the rancour and discord of an unhappy home (ll. 201-4) in a society where women had duties but no rights—whereas “Im Tempel hier hat auch die Frau ein Recht” (l. 279). So for her the temple represents calm and happiness, and she is not conscious of making any sacrifice in renouncing normal life: “Hier ist kein Krieg, hier schlägt man keine Wunden” (l. 389). The sequel shows that it is otherwise.

Papst, who is well aware that Hero's experience of men and of normal life have been distasteful to her, nevertheless supposes that her readiness to renounce them is due to suppression of subconscious desire for erotic experience; that her renunciation is so emphatic as to suggest resolution of an “inner conflict” of this kind. My view is that the motives of which Grillparzer shows her conscious are adequate to explain her attitude. Papst also interprets the sharpness of her replies to Ianthe's suggestions as evidence of “subconscious fear of admitting to herself even the possibility of their partial truth”, while I think that Hero's sharp manner testifies to her consciousness of her superiority over ordinary girls. He also mentions her father's reference (l. 250) to “kleinlich dunkle Zweifel”, and interprets these as Hero's doubts as to her suitability for the priesthood, these being in turn interpreted as caused by subconscious desire for love that is incompatible with office. But the “Zweifel” are clearly not Hero's at all, but her mother's. The subconscious has become an unfortunate adjunct of recent literary criticism, and Papst goes so far as to distinguish, as a specifically Austrian element in Grillparzer's heritage, a “highly developed sensitivity to twilight mental states on the borderland between the conscious and the subconscious” ([Pabst, “Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen,”] pp. 17, 29–30, 50). I do not wish to deny that much in human thought and behaviour is unconscious, nor that dramatists sometimes represent characters as impelled by motives of which they are not conscious. But it seems to me that the subconscious motives that critics sometimes discern contribute more to their own reputation for subtlety than to the elucidation of the play. I would remind the reader of Grillparzer's words quoted as the motto of this book.

Although, to my mind, Hero is not repressing any desires, she certainly does not know her potentialities. Already in this first Act Grillparzer shows that she is not really a dedicated priestess. She is represented as finding peace and calm in the practical duties of her office. We first see her as she decorates the temple with flowers, and she envisages her future days:

Einförmig still, den Wasserkrug zur Hand,
Beschäftigt, wie bisher, an den Altären;
Und fort so Tag um Tag.

(ll. 396-8)

She does not even understand her uncle's suggestion that she should become a seer and commune with the goddess by night. “Du hast mich nicht gefaβt”, he says (l. 136), showing how much more her mind is on this world than is his, even though she is less worldly than the servant girls whom she had in turn professed, with haughty disdain, not to understand (l. 65). When he explains what he meant, she immediately rejects his suggestion:

Verschiednes geben Götter an Verschiedne;
Mich haben sie zur Seh'rin nicht bestimmt.
Auch ist die Nacht zu ruhn; der Tag, zu wirken,
Ich kann mich freuen nur am Strahl des Lichts.

(ll. 184-7)

How much irony there is here! She is to find in Act III that the night is not for rest, in Act IV that in her exhaustion she cannot “wirken” throughout the day, and that instead of rejoicing in it she longs for night.

In these opening incidents of Act I her character is also brought out by contrast with her parents. Her father's pride is not, like Hero's and the priest's, centred on higher things, but is that of the pompous petit-bourgeois, as is clear when he goes out of his way to mention how he is envied because of

… das Amt, mit dem seit manchem Jahr
Bekleidet das Vertraun mich unsrer Stadt.

(ll. 238-9)

Only with reluctance does he leave his wife and daughter to speak alone, since he knows that his wife would gladly persuade Hero to return home instead of becoming a priestess and filling his heart with pride. The mother is too upset to say much, and while Hero talks to her in the front of the stage, a dove which had made its nest in a bush at the back is removed by the Tempelhüter, with Hero's uncle and father watching. This brings some action into a scene which is otherwise limited to character-drawing, and this action is in turn made to effect a further portrayal of character, for the mother sees her own fate reflected in the treatment of the dove:

Unschuldig fromme Vögel stören sie
Und nehmen aus ihr Nest. So reiβen sie
Das Kind auch von der Mutter, Herz vom Herzen.

(ll. 338-40)

Furthermore, just before this, Hero has said that she proposes

Hier an der Göttin Altar, meiner Frau,
Das Rechte tun, nicht weil man mirs befahl,
Nein, weil es recht, weil ich es so erkannt.

(ll. 333-5)

There could be no clearer illustration of her independence than the way she goes on to ignore the temple rule that “All was sich paart bleibt ferne diesem Hause” (l. 357), and to caress the dove which the others had been trying to remove. Scherer rightly stresses her independence as an important factor in motivating her death. “Sie hält von ihrem Wesen jegliche Störung fern. Sie will den eigenen Sinn bewahren, ablehnend alles Übrige. … Solche Unabhängigkeit kann sich nicht leidend fügen und nach thränenreichen Klagen ins Unvermeidliche schicken. Wenn sie das Unglück trifft, zerbricht sie” ([Vorträge und Afsätze zur Gesch. des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich,], pp. 258–9).

When Hero leaves the stage to dress for the ceremony, the crowd of spectators gathers. It includes Naukleros, who is talkative and cheeky, and Leander, who says not a single word in this first Act. He is still suffering from what Naukleros calls “der alte Trübsinn”, brought on by his mother's death. But although he does not speak in Act I, he does (urged on by Naukleros) raise his eyes from the ground at the point in the ceremony when Hero stands in front of him and speaks the formula to renounce Hymen. As their eyes meet, she is overcome with confusion, expressed by her hesitation, which she excuses by saying that she has forgotten the tongs for putting incense on the altar fire—only to be told that she is holding them in her hand! When she begins to speak the formula, it is the wrong one, and she then clumsily puts too much incense on, making the flame surge up. It is quite natural that Leander should attract her, for he is a peaceable fellow, has been a good son to his mother, and his friend calls him “dumpfer Träumer, blöder Schlucker”. Although these details are given only later, she must see from his whole appearance that he is quite unlike what she has hitherto understood a man to be. In Das goldene Vlieβ Medea's irresistible attraction to Jason is something we must accept as a datum. That in Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen Grillparzer gives such clear indications of what basis Hero has for her love for Leander shows how much more the emphasis is on love here.

Act II draws Leander's character as Act I has done Hero's. He still says little, and Naukleros does nearly all the talking. He is used to Leander's gloomy silence, but learns now of its new cause. Leander's despair is expressed in the one terse line: “Ich wuβt' es ja. Komm Nacht! Und so ists aus” (l. 677). When Hero enters, on her way to draw water, her song of Leda and the swan (to which she repeatedly returns even though her uncle has forbidden it to her) shows that she is not now quite uninterested in love. That such a song should rise to her lips at this juncture is as significant as Gretchen's singing of “Der König in Thule” just after the first encounter with the handsome young stranger. Leander is too shy to approach her (a touch very true to his character) and he has to be taunted by the forward and cheeky Naukleros before he can bring himself to rush forward and fling himself at her feet. Naukleros tells her, in his usual forthright manner, that her eyes have made Leander a sick man, and she reacts sharply—as she had twice done in Act I—to suggestions that she is capable of love:

                                                                      frech ist der Menge Sinn,
Und ehrfurchtslos, und ohne Scheu und Sitte.

But when Leander raises his head and she sees that he is the youth whose eyes she had caught at the festival, she changes her tone and addresses him as “guter Jüngling”. There is no further trace of anger, and at this stage she feels, if not love, then at least compassion, calling him “armer Mann” and saying: “Er ist so schön, so jugendlich, so gut.” When her uncle arrives, she does not hesitate to deceive him in order to explain why she is in conversation with the two youths. He urges them to leave at once, for they have no right to stay after midday:

Denn wenn die Sonn auf ihres Wandels Zinne
Mit durst'gen Zügen auf die Schatten trinkt,
Dann tönen her vom Tempel krumme Hörner
Dem Feste Schluβ, dir kündigend Gefahr.

(ll. 836-9)

The use of this striking image to state the shortening of shadows at midday is a good example of Grillparzer's manner of conveying ordinary facts. [Cf. below … for other examples and comment on Grillparzer's method.]

At the beginning of Act III we see how greatly Hero's mind is pre-occupied with Leander. She is unresponsive to her uncle's long speeches as he introduces her to the tower where she is to live as priestess. He is hurt by her obvious indifference to what moves him so deeply, and warns her not to be unfaithful to her charge:

Du fändest auch in mir den Mann, der willig,
Das eigne Blut aus diesen Adern gösse,
Wüβte er nur einen Tropfen in der Mischung,
Der Unrecht birgt, und Unerlaubtes hegt.

Both Hero and Leander have been, and are to be, warned repeatedly that to indulge their passion will be dangerous to themselves and others. The priest's remark in Act I about a bridegroom for her was not the tactless joking for which she took it, but a determination on his part to make quite sure that she is suited for the celibate life. Just before the consecration ceremony he said: “Wüβt' ich sie schwach, noch jetzt entlieβ' ich sie” (l. 407). Here, in Act III, he is at first reassured when she answers his reproach with an assurance that “Sammlung wird mir werden, glaube mir”. He becomes ecstatic at the thought of the efficacy of “Sammlung”—but when she declares that such flights are beyond her he finds her pedestrian attitude to her exalted vocation “ärmlich”, and his memory of the incident in the grove with the two youths makes him go on to warn her, saying “Den ersten Anlaβ meid!” When he has left, she voices her awareness that this single day has changed her more than whole years have done, and that whole years will not suffice to obliterate it:

Wie vieles lehrt ein Tag, und ach, wie wenig
Gibt und vergiβt ein Jahr.—Nun er ist fern.

When shortly afterwards Leander enters her room, she indeed again calls him “guter Jüngling”, but firmly bids him go. At this stage she still feels first and foremost a priestess, and tells him how her people treat a priestess who has a lover:

Mein Volk …
Es schonet zwar das Leben der Verirrten
Allein stöβt aus sie, und verachtet sie,
Zugleich ihr ganzes Haus und all die Ihren.

It is thus clear that her later surrender is not due to ignorance of what is at stake. Nor do these words imply that she wishes to continue to see Leander but is afraid of the consequences, for she gives the information only in reply to his inquiry about the fate of an erring priestess, and makes it quite clear that the principal reason for her rejection of him is “weil ich nur schwach erwidre deine Meinung”. Grillparzer himself noted that “nie soll Hero darauf ein besonderes Gewicht legen, daβ jenes Verhältnis verbothen, oder vielmehr strafbar sey. Es ist mehr ihr Inneres, das sich früher nicht zur Liebe hinneigte, und das nicht ohne Widerstreben nachgibt, als daβ sie ein Äuβeres fürchtete” (I, 19, 232). Thus in Act I she renounced love because she had never known it. When she comes to know it she at first resists it: she tries to dissuade Leander both in Act II, in the grove, and here in Act III, in the tower. But these new feelings she finds so disturbing rapidly come to dominate her, and the very title of the play alludes to the change which is wrought in her. Up to Act III the sea is calm:

                                                                      Der Hellespont
Läβt Kindern gleich die frommen Wellen spielen;
Sie flüstern kaum, so still sind sie vergnügt

(ll. 1027-9)

But the rise of a strong wind can completely transform it, as Hero's initial calm contentment with the religious life is transformed by her encounter with Leander. Both the waves of the sea and those of love can arise suddenly with destructive force to which all else must yield.

The fourth Act is the longest of all, yet contains little outer action. Hero is shown as thinking only of her love, and makes no attempt to hide evidence that incriminates her—her fatigue after the sleepless night, her change of attitude to Ianthe. She is needlessly tactless to the Tempelhüter, and actually provokes him into seeking evidence of her guilt. And he in turn influences the priest, who throughout the Act gropes his way towards the conclusion that she is guilty. Grillparzer noted, in continuation of the passage last quoted, that “Im IV Akte ist … keine Spur von Ängstlichkeit in Heros Wesen, obschon es ihr ziemlich nahe liegt daβ man Verdacht geschöpft habe. Sie ist schon wieder ins Gleichgewicht des Gefühls gekommen, aber eines neuen, des Gefühls als Weib.” Once again we see how independent she is. To decide what is right or wrong she follows not convention nor authority, but her own feelings. In Act IV she defines duty as:

                                                            das alles, was ein ruhig Herz,
Im Einklang mit sich selbst und mit der Welt,
Dem Recht genüber stellt der andern Menschen.

(ll. 1732-4)

Her view of her rights and duties changes because her feelings, on which this view is based, change so drastically in the course of the play.

The priest has three important monologues in this fourth Act. They serve to show how he is gradually convinced by the mounting evidence of Hero's guilt, and also to underline that it is as custodian of the divine law that he acts to thwart the lovers. Thus he says: “In meinem Innern reget sich ein Gott” (l. 1365) and he addresses Leander in his thoughts:

Unseliger, was strecktest du die Hand
Nach meinem Kind, nach meiner Götter Eigen?

(ll. 1517-18)

Unfortunately his behaviour in Act V suggests that his motives are not as pure and disinterested as he wishes to represent them. When Leander's body is discovered, he lies to Ianthe about Hero's relation to the youth (ll. 1910-13), even though he had earlier said

Der Tücht'ge sieht in jedem Soll ein Muβ
Und Zwang, als erste Pflicht, ist ihm die Wahrheit.

(ll. 415-16)

And he resorts to mean threats in order to ensure that the whole matter will be hushed up. It is difficult to avoid the inference that he fears Hero's transgression will be punished upon her whole family, as she herself had said would be the case. The scorn with which Ianthe treats him at the end is a just indictment of the way his concern with his own status has led him to drive Hero to her death. It is only in Act V that his behaviour appears in any way selfish, and the obtrusion of such motives comes as something of a shock after his apparent disinterestedness. It was doubtless with Act V in mind that Grillparzer said “die Figur des Priesters ist zu kurz gekommen” (II, 10, 178).

In his third monologue in Act IV he makes a final attempt to convince himself of Hero's innocence, but she herself provides the evidence of her guilt by lighting the lamp which is to guide Leander to her tower. When she falls asleep, exhausted after the day which the priest has deliberately made as tiring as possible for her, he turns to the lamp and cries: “Der Götter Sturm verlösche deine Flamme.” The Tempelhüter's monologue expresses the suspense we all feel at this crucial point in the action. He asks, as the priest is about to extinguish the lamp: “Was sinnt er nur? Mir wird so bang und schwer.” In Grillparzer's sources it was put out by a storm, but he changed this contingency into an action motivated primarily by impersonal devotion to religious principles. The priest's purity of motive is suggested by contrast with the Tempelhüter, who has been stung by Hero's taunts into making a damning case against her. Now that he has done so, he begins to pity her:

                                                                                —Unselig Mädchen!
Erwacht sie? Nein. So warnet dich kein Traum?
Mich schaudert. Weh! Hätt' ich mein Oberkleid!

Unlike the priest, who is an educated man with his principles very much in mind, the Tempelhüter is an unsophisticated person whose actions are prompted directly by his feelings—first resentment and here sympathy. To use the monologue to voice such fears and misgivings at a crucial moment is a common dramatic device. We have only to think of Leicester's monologue as Maria Stuart is executed, or of Mirza's while Judith and Holofernes are together in the tent.¹⁰

Act IV consists of three scenes, and the central one takes us back to Naukleros and Leander, who are now in Abydos. This scene fills out the time interval between the first, which takes place after Leander's departure from Sestos in the morning, and the last of the Act, in which Hero falls asleep as she waits for him to return in the evening. It also shows the marked change that has come over him in consequence of the vitalizing experience of love. It is the last time we are to see him alive, and the words of the priest at the end of the previous scene as he lays the snare make us very conscious of the peril that awaits him. It is tragically ironical that he has now lost all traces of his former melancholy. His defiance of Naukleros, who tries to restrain him, forms one of the few rhetorical, declamatory outbursts in the play:

Tor, der du bist! und denkst du den zu halten,
Den alle Götter schützen, leitet ihre Macht?
Was mir bestimmt, ich wills, ich werds erfüllen:
Kein Sterblicher hält Götterwalten auf.

His prayer to the gods is in the same style:

                                                                      Poseidon, mächt'ger Gott!
Der du die Wasser legtest an die Zügel,
Den Tod mir scheuchtest von dem feuchten Mund.
Zeus, mächtig über Allen, hehr und groβ!
Und Liebesgöttin, du, die mich berief,
Den kundlos Neuen, lernend zu belehren
Die Unberichteten was dein Gebot.
Steht ihr mir bei und leitet wie bisher!

Comparable passages are spoken by Hero in Act V when she turns on her uncle and curses him loudly, instead of concealing what has happened, and then bids the dead Leander farewell. Such declamation is the more effective because restricted to points of powerful emotion, and also because the zest of the lover, the indignation of the wronged and the grief of the bereaved are of general interest. Tragedy commonly includes speeches which, even in isolation from their context, appeal because they express ideas and emotions of general interest. For maximum effectiveness each speech must be relevant to the situation in which it is made (as Grillparzer himself insisted, see above, …) and not form an unrelated strand. But if it is of no interest in itself, but only a means of reaching a final tragic situation, we might well be bored before the end. Grillparzer makes both these points by implication when he says: “Das ist der innere Zusammenhang des Drama, daβ jede Szene ein Bedürfnis erregen, und jede eines befriedigen muβ” (II, 11, 75). And the latter end can be achieved if the scene includes passages which are relevant to a wider context than their immediate one. The following extract from Hero's farewell to Leander, for instance, expresses not merely her personal emotion, but the bewilderment universally felt at the sudden loss of one to whom one is conscious of owing much:

Nie wieder dich zu sehn, im Leben nie!
Der du einhergingst im Gewand der Nacht
Und Licht mir strahltest in die dunkle Seele,
Aufblühen machtest all, was hold und gut,
Du fort von hier an einsam dunkeln Ort,
Und nimmer sieht mein lechzend Aug' dich wieder?
Der Tag wird kommen und die stille Nacht,
Der Lenz, der Herbst, des langen Sommers Freuden,
Du aber nie, Leander, hörst du? nie!
Nie, nimmer, nimmer, nie!

When I speak of the “rhetoric” of this and other speeches in the play, I have in mind features of style and diction that are often present when a speaker expresses emotion to an audience. In real life a sincere public speaker may use expressions which would not be used in conversation, and he may employ figures of speech, repetitions, inversions, enumerations and other peculiarities as the spontaneous result of his emotional delivery. A speaker may also employ them to simulate an emotion, and in either case we may call his style “rhetorical”. Now the dramatic character is a creation of the dramatist, and so his words will not normally be the spontaneous effect of emotion. We cannot suppose that Grillparzer, writing Hero's farewell to Leander, felt the full strength of emotion he represents her as feeling. Nevertheless, what she is made to say is effective because the emotion she expresses is one with which we are familiar, and in which we are ready to participate, and also because the whole play has built up this situation in which a strong expression of this emotion is appropriate. If either circumstance were altered—if the emotion were unfamiliar or appeared uncalled for—we should be conscious of the artificiality of what she says, and this would destroy all appearance of sincerity. Even when the emotion is familiar and appropriate the effect may be destroyed if the style is recognizably derived from some literary model or if a particular trick is repeated so often that we become aware of it. I indicated above (pp. 2-4) that this is sometimes the case (or has often been regarded as so, …) in Grillparzer's earliest plays.

Hero's death when the priest tears her from Leander's body is intelligible not only from her independence (the factor stressed by Scherer) but also from the swiftness with which one drastic change in her life has followed another. Grillparzer noted in his autobiography that one reason for concentrating the events of a play into a short period is that “die Zeit ist nicht nur die äuβere Form der Handlung: sie gehört auch unter die Motive: Empfindungen und Leidenschaften werden stärker oder schwächer durch die Zeit” (I, 16, 168). What he surely had in mind is that when events follow each other quickly the characters are forced into reactions they would not have chosen had the pace been more leisurely. In this play, Hero is unable to adjust herself to her sudden bereavement which follows so hard upon an equally drastic change from priestess to lover.

Of all Grillparzer's plays this one has perhaps suffered most from the “close analysis” that informs so much recent literary criticism. Miss Atkinson's discussion of it ([Atkinson, “Grillparzer's use of symbol and image in ‘Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen,’”] pp. 261 ff.) is a good example. In Act I Hero is seen against a background of sunlight, is said to tread a radiant path in casting aside earthly ties to become a priestess, and can find no pleasure in nocturnal vigils. Miss Atkinson infers that these details link her with sunlight so closely that later references to it may plausibly be interpreted as meaning her! Leander, on the other hand, “is immediately identified with darkness”, for he is dark-skinned and depressed, and so references to shadows are likely to be really references to him. It is from these premises that Miss Atkinson comments on the four lines in which the priest explains to Naukleros and Leander that they must depart by midday (see above, p. 74), and she argues that his image of the sun drinking the shadows is “a hint that Hero's love has the power to disperse the shadows that beset Leander” (i.e. his depression). Miss Atkinson has herself shown very clearly that some of the references to light in Act I bring out the cheerfulness, happiness and confidence the heroine feels at this stage, and that many later references to light and darkness are natural enough in a play in which lovers are prevented by guards from meeting except at night, and the catastrophe is brought about by the extinction of a light. It seems, then, unnecessary to assume the complicated symbolism that she invokes on such a flimsy basis.

Papst's interpretation of the play is likewise in part spoiled by this quest for symbols. He also will correlate two words or incidents which have some similarity (however trivial) and assign a like symbolic meaning to both. At the end of Act IV Hero loosens her shoe as she assumes a reclining posture and thereby indicates that she will not be able to remain awake for long. Papst links this with the end of Act I where, he says, “Hero, hurried off by the Priest, fumbles at her shoe, while her eyes glance over her right shoulder and alight once more on Leander” ([“Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen,”] p. 27). His argument is that in both cases her behaviour to the shoe symbolizes “a relaxation of her powers of conscious control”. But in actual fact she does not “fumble at” her shoe in Act I, but merely looks over her shoulder at Leander as if she were looking at some defect in her shoe that had drawn her attention. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Papst has made the shoe more prominent in this incident and has made her at least touch, if not loosen it, in order to link this with the later loosening and so facilitate a common symbolic interpretation of both.

Notes

1. Yates, ([Grillparzer: A Critical Biography,] p. 53) however, thinks that this is her motive for suicide. But the passage he quotes in support (ll. 1995-8) does not imply that she has wronged the gods.

2. Ehrhard's discussion of the play illustrates how perplexing critics have found its ending. He declares that her suicide would be intelligible enough if it resulted from her disappointment in love, but that such a motive is nowhere suggested in her final speech, where (he alleges) she poses as a higher being who must die as a punishment for having sullied herself with what is lowly. This he finds absurd, and asks how the poet can write about love, despair, and other emotions, if he is a superior being who must never experience them. He concludes that we can only accept Sappho's suicide if we suppose that, in spite of her apparent calm, her grief at Phaon's betrayal makes continuation of life impossible for her. ([Ehrhard, Grillparzer: le théâtre en Autriche,] pp. 259–60)

3. Quoted by Backmann ([Backmann, “Vom Werdegang des ‘Goldenen Vlieβes,’”] p. 168). Cf. I, 17, 308.

4. Quoted from Grillparzer's manuscript by Backmann ([“Vom Werdegang des ‘Goldenen Vlieβes,’”] p. 176). Cf. I, 17, 196 and 301.

5. For instance, Stefan Hock complains, in his otherwise excellent introduction to the play, that “sie hat die Schranken überschritten, die ihrem Wesen gesetzt sind, sie ist sich nicht treu geblieben, die Barbarin hat sich dem Griechen, die Zauberin dem Menschen verbunden. Sie hat die Heimat verlassen, ihr Magdtum preisgegeben. …” The moral standpoint is even clearer in the criticism of Jason that follows. “Auch er überschreitet die Schranken seiner Natur; er geht in ein Land, das ihm fremd ist und bleibt, er vermischt sich mit Greulichem, das dem Menschen stets fernbleiben soll” ([Hock, Grillparzers Werke,] pp. 28–9). An attitude of moral condemnation towards Medea is apparently supported by a note Grillparzer made while writing the play: “Vergiβ nie, daβ der Grundgedanke des letzten Stückes der ist, daβ Medea, nachdem sie Kolchis verlassen, tadellos seyn will, aber es nicht seyn kann” (I, 17, 300). But, as Backmann has observed, Grillparzer's original plan made her guilty of the murder of Pelias on her arrival in Greece, and he seems to have made this note before he abandoned this plan. Backmann also notes that Medea's estrangement from her brutal father in the first two plays places her “in jene für sie so characteristische Mittelstellung zwischen Barbarei und Hellenentum. … Sie wird zu gut für Kolchis und doch nicht gut genug für Griechenland, zu einer tragischen Person gleich von vornherein” ([“Vom Werdegang des ‘Goldenen Vlieβes,’”] pp. 133–4, 167, 173).

6. In his “Vorarbeiten” Grillparzer wrote of Kreon's “strenge Gesetzlichkeit” and “Rechtlichkeit” (I, 17, 294 and 300). Coenan, however, finds it “impossible to detect any sense of justice” in him ([Coenan, “Grillparzer's Portraiture of Men,”] p. 20).

7. Stiefel ([Stiefel, “Grillparzer's ‘Golden Vlieβ,’”] p. 40) quotes Grillparzer's note of 1820: “Medeas Gefühl gegen die Kinder muβ gemischt sein aus Haβ gegen den Vater, Jason, von dem sie weiβ, daβ er die Kinder liebt und ihr Tod ihm schmerzlich wird; aus Grimm gegen die Kinder, die sie flohen und ihren Feinden den schmerzlichen Triumpf über sie verschafften; aus Liebe gegen eben diese Kinder, die sie nicht mutterlos unter Fremden zurücklassen will; aus Stolz, ihre Kinder nicht in der Gewalt ihrer Feinde zu lassen” (cf. I, 17, 306). Although he did not necessarily follow this early plan rigorously, it does show that he envisaged complex motivation of Medea's deed.

8. Backmann notes ([“Vom Werdegang des ‘Goldenen Vlieβes’”] p. 167) that Grillparzer was so anxious to find “äuβerer Zwang für Medeas gräβliche Tat” that he planned a scene in which she is provoked by the noise of a banquet in the palace and by shouts of “Jason hoch! Jason und Kreusa!”.

9. Grillparzer noted that in her final appearance she speaks with Jason “etwa wie ein abgeschiedener Geist über das Ereignis reden könnte, etwa wie der Chor bei den Alten” (I, 17, 297).

10. Schiller, Maria Stuart, Act V, scene 10; Hebbel, Judith, Act V.

Abbreviations

DD = Das deutsche Drama von Barock bis zur Gegenwart. Interpretationen, hrsg. B. von Wiese, Bagel, Düsseldorf, 1958, Bd. I.

G = Grillparzer

GLL = German Life and Letters, New Series, Blackwell, Oxford.

JGG = Jahrbuch der Grillparzergesellschaft, Konegen, etc., Wien.

MLR = Modern Language Review, publ. by Modern Humanities Research Association.

Works Cited

Atkinson, M. E., “G's use of symbol and image in ‘Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen’”, GLL, IV, 1951.

Atkinson, M. E. edn. of Tieck, Der Blonde Eckbert, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952.

Backmann, R., “Vom Werdegang des ‘Goldenen Vlieβes,’” G-studien, ed. Kataan, Gerlach & Wiedling, Wien, 1924.

Carlyle, T., German playwrights, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Chapman & Hall, London, 1894, vol. I.

Coenan, F. E., “G's Portraiture of Men,” Univ. of N. Carolina Studies in the Germanic Langs. and Lits., No. 4, Chapel Hill, 1951.

Ehrhard, A., G: le théâtre en Autriche, Société d'Imprimerie, Paris, 1900.

Hock, S., Gs Werke, T1. IV, Bong, Berlin, etc., n.d.

Lessing, O. E., Schillers Einfluβ auf G, Bulletin of Univ. of Wisconsin, Philos. and Lit. Series, LIV, 1902.

Lessing, O. E., G und das Neue Drama, Piper, Leipzig, 1905.

Papst, E. E., edn. of Der arme Spielmann, Nelson, London, 1960.

Papst, E. E., “G's ‘Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen’”, Studies in German Lit., ed. Forster and Rowley, No. 9, Arnold, London, 1967.

Ranke, L. von, Vom Religionsfieden bis zum dreiβigjährigen Kriege, in Sämtliche Werke, 54–vol. edn., Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig, 1868, VII.

Rippmann, W., edn. of Sappho, MacMillan, London, 1942.

Sauer, A., “Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn,” JGG, III, 1893.

Scherer, W., G, in Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Gesch. des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich, Weidmann, Berlin, 1874.

Stiefel, R., “Gs ‘Goldenes Vlieβ’”, Basler Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, Hft. 21, 1959.

Yates, D., G: a Critical Biography, Blackwell, Oxford, 1946 (repr. 1964).

Yuill, W. E., edn. of Der Traum ein Leben, Nelson, London, 1955.