y reveal their
full merit only to connoisseurs. They are the work of a man who was
better able than most men of his generation to prove all things, and who
held fast to that which he found good. His art is not forward-looking,
like that of Kleist, nor backward-looking, like that, say, of Theodor
Koerner. It is in the strictest sense complementary and co-ordinate to
that of Goethe and Schiller, a classicism modified by romantic
tendencies toward individuation and localization. He did not aim at the
typical. He felt, and rightly, that a work of art, being something
individual, should be created with concentrated attention upon the
attainment of its perfection as an individual; this perfection attained,
the artist would attain to typical, symbolical connotation into the
bargain. From anything like the grotesqueness of exaggerated
characterization Grillparzer was saved by his sense of form. He had as
fertile an imagination and as penetrating an intellect as Kleist, and he
excelled Kleist in the reliability of his common sense. It was no play
upon words, but the expression of conviction when he wrote, in 1836:
"Poetry is incorporation of the spirit, spiritualization of the body,
feeling of the understanding, and thought of the feeling." In its
comprehensive appeal to all of these faculties a work of art commends
itself and carries its meaning through its existence as an objective
reality, like the phenomena of nature herself. A comprehensive
sensitiveness to such an appeal, whether of art or of nature, was
Grillparzer's ideal of individual nature and culture. He thought the
North Germans had cultivated their understanding at the expense of their
feeling, and had thereby impaired their esthetic sense. He thought the
active life in general inevitably destroyed the harmony of the faculties
and substituted an extrinsic for an intrinsic good. In the mad rush of
our own time after material wealth and power we may profitably
contemplate the picture which Grillparzer drew of himself in the
following characteristic verses:

THE ANGLER

Below lies the lake hushed and tranquil,
And I sit here with idle hands,
And gaze at the frolicking fishes
Which glide to and fro o'er the sands.

They come, and they go, and they tarry;
But if I now venture a cast,
Of a sudden the playground is empty,
As my basket remains to the last.

Mayhap if I stirred up the water,
My angling might lure the shy prey.
But th