is
undeceived when a _naive_ maiden awakens in him sentiments that really
are those of love. This situation occurs again and again in the
voluminous works of Wieland--most obviously perhaps in the novelette
_Menander and Glycerion_ (1803), but also in the novel _Agathon_
(1766-1767), and in the epistolary novel _Aristippus_ (1800-1802).
Moreover, it is the essential situation in Mme. de Stael's _Corinne_
(1807). In the third place, this situation was Grillparzer's own, and it
is so constantly found in his dramas that it may be called the
characteristic situation for the dramatist as well as for the man. In
this drama, finally, we have a demonstration of Grillparzer's profound
conviction that the artistic temperament is ill suited to the demands of
practical life, and in the solitary sphere to which it is doomed must
fail to find that contentment which only life can afford. Sappho is not
assailed by life on all sides as Tasso is; but she makes an egregious
mistake in her search for the satisfactions of womanhood, thereby
unfitting herself for the priesthood of poetry as well as forfeiting her
life.

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

"His camp alone explains his fault and crime,"

so Grillparzer rightly perceived that the explanation to modern minds of
so incredible a crime as Medea's must be sought and presented in the