For the rest, Heeren assures us, that in practice Heyne was truly a good man; altogether just; diligent in his own honest business, and ever ready to forward that of others; compassionate; though quick-tempered, placable; friendly, and satisfied with simple pleasures. He delighted in roses, and always kept a bouquet of them in water on his desk. His house was embowered among roses; and in his old days he used to wander through the bushes with a pair of scissors. Farther, says Heeren, in spite of his short sight, he was fond of the fields and skies, and could lie for hours reading on the grass. A kindly old man! With strangers, hundreds of whom visited him, he was uniformly courteous; though latterly, being a little hard of hearing, less fit to converse. In society he strove much to be polite; but had a habit (which ought to be general) of yawning, when people spoke to him and said nothing. praise, surely; yet, as we must think, one not | perhaps, is not very singular among commenunfounded, and which, indeed, in all parts of tators. Europe, is becoming more and more confirmed. So much, in the province to which he devoted his activity, is Heyne allowed to have accomplished. Nevertheless, we must not assert that, in point of understanding and spiritual endowment, he can be called a complete, or even, in strict speech, a great man. Wonderful perspicuity, unwearied diligence, are not denied him; but to philosophic order, to classical adjustment, clearness, polish, whether in word or thought, he seldom attains; nay, many times, it must be avowed, he involves himself in tortures, long-winded verbosities, and stands before us little better than one of that old school which his admirers boast that he displaced. He appears, we might almost say, as if he had wings but could not well use them. Or, indeed, it might be that, writing constantly in a dead language, he came to write heavily; working for ever on subjects where learned armorat-all-points cannot be dispensed with, he at last grew so habituated to his harness that he would not walk abroad without it; nay perhaps it had rusted together, and could not be unclasped! A sad fate for a thinker! Yet one which threatens many commentators, and overtakes many. As a man encrusted and encased, he exhibits himself, moreover, to a certain degree, in his moral character. Here too, as in his intellect, there is an awkwardness, a cumbrous inertness; nay, there is a show of dulness, of hardness, which nowise intrinsically belongs to him. He passed, we are told, for less religious, less affectionate, less enthusiastic than he was. His heart, one would think, had no free course, or had found itself a secret one; outwardly he stands before us, cold and still, a very wall of rock; yet within lay a well, from which, as we have witnessed, the stroke of some Moses'-wand (the death of a Theresa) could draw streams of pure feeling. Callous as a man seems to us, he has a sense for all natural beauty; a merciful sympathy for his fellow-men: his own early distresses never left his memory: for similar distresses his pity and help were at all times in store. This form of character may also be the fruit partly of his employments, partly of his sufferings, and, called for so many books, that his reception there grew rather of the coolest. It was Johann Winkelmann. Meditating his journey for Italy, he was then laying in preparation for it. Thus did these two men become, if not confidential, yet acquainted; who at that time, both still in darkness and poverty, could little suppose, that in a few years, they were to be the teachers of cultivated Europe, and the ornaments of their nation." On the whole, the Germans have some reason to be proud of Heyne; who shall deny that they have here once more produced a scholar of the right old stock; a man to be ranked, for honesty of study and of life, with the Scaligers, the Bentleys, and old illustrious men, who, though covered with academic dust and harsh with polyglot vocables, were true men of endeavour, and fought like giants, with such weapons as they had, for the good cause? To ourselves, we confess, Heyne, highly interesting for what he did, is not less but more so for what he was. This is another of the proofs, which minds like his are from time to time sent hither to give, that the man is not the product of his circumstances, but that, in a far higher degree, the circumstances are the product of the man. While beneficed clerks and other sleek philosophers, reclining on their cushions of velvet, are demonstrating that to make a scholar and man of taste, there must be co-operation of the upper classes, society of gentlemen-commoners, and an income of four hundred a year;-arises the son of a Chemnitz weaver, and with the very wind of his stroke sweeps them from the scene. Let no man doubt the omnipotence of Nature, doubt the majesty of man's soul; let no lonely unfriended son of genius despair! Let him not despair; if he have the will, the right will, then the power also has not been denied him. It is but the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens; the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years. GERMAN PLAYWRIGHTS.* [FOREIGN REVIEW, 1829.] In this stage of society, the playwright is as essential and acknowledged a character as the millwright, or cartwright, or any other wright whatever; neither can we see why, in general estimation, he should rank lower than these his brother artisans, except perhaps, for this one reason: that the former, working in timber and iron, for the wants of the body, produce a completely suitable machine, while the latter, working in thought and feeling, for the wants of the soul, produces a machine which is incompletely suitable. In other respects, we confess, we cannot perceive that the balance lies against him: for no candid man, as it seems to us, will doubt but the talent, which constructed a Virginius or a Bertram, might have sufficed, had it been properly directed, to make not only wheelbarrows and wagons, but even mills of considerable complicacy. However, if the public is niggardly to the playwright in one point, it must be proportionably liberal in another; according to Adam Smith's observation, that trades which are reckoned less reputable have higher money-wages. Thus, one thing compensating the other, the playwright may still realize an existence; as, in fact, we find that he does: for playwrights were, are, and probably will always be; unless, indeed, in process of years, the whole dramatic concern be finally abandoned by mankind; or, as in the case of our Punch and Mathews, every player becoming his own playwright, this trade may merge in the other and older one. The British nation has its own playwrights, several of them cunning men in their craft: yet here, it would seem, this sort of carpentry does not flourish; at least, not with that preeminent vigour which distinguishes most other branches of our national industry. In hardware and cotton goods, in all sorts of chemical, mechanical, or other material processes, England outstrips the world: nay, in many departments of literary manufacture also, as, for instance, in the fabrication of novels, she may safely boast herself peerless: but in this matter of the Drama, to whatever cause it be owing, she can claim no such superiority. In theatri * Die Ahnfrau. (The Ancestress.) A Tragedy, in five Acts. By F. Grillparzer. Fourth Edition. Vienna, 1823. König Ottokars Glück und Ende. (King Ottocar's Fortune and End.) A Tragedy, in five Acts. By F. Grillparzer. Vienna, 1825. Sappho. A Tragedy, in five Acts. By F. Grillparzer. 2. Faust. A Tragedy, in five Acts. By August Klingemann. Leipzig and Altenburg, 1815. Third Edition. Vienna, 1822. Ahasuer. A Tragedy, in five Acts. By August Klingemann. Brunswick, 1827. 3. Müllner's Dramatische Werke. Erste rechtmässige, vollständige, und vom Verfasser verbesserte Gesammt-Ausgabe. (Müllner's Dramatic Works. First legal collecfive Edition, complete and revised by the Author.) 7 vols. Brunswick, 1828. cal produce she yields considerably to France; and is, out of sight, inferior to Germany. Nay, do not we English hear daily, for the last twenty years, that the Drama is dead, or in a state of suspended animation; and are not medical men sitting on the case, and propounding their remedial appliances, weekly, monthly, quarterly, to no manner of purpose?—whilst in Germany the Drama is not only, to all appearance, alive, but in the very flush and heyday of superabundant strength; indeed, as it were, still only sowing its first wild oats! For if the British Playwrights seem verging to ruin, and our Knowleses, Maturins, Shiels, and Shees stand few and comparatively forlorn, like firs on an Irish bog, the playwrights of Germany are a strong, triumphant body, so numerous that it has been calculated, in case of war, a regiment of foot might be raised, in which, from the colonel down to the drummer, every officer and private sentinel might show his drama or dramas. To investigate the origin of so marked a superiority would lead us beyond our purpose. Doubtless the proximate cause must lie in a superior demand for the article of dramas; which superior demand again may arise either from the climate of Germany, as Montesquieu might believe; or perhaps more naturally and immediately from the political condition of that country; for man is not only a working but a talking animal, and where no Catholic Questions, and Parliamentary Reforms, and Select Vestries are given him to discuss in his leisure hours, he is glad to fall upon plays or players, or whatever comes to hand, whereby to fence himself a little against the inroads of Ennui. Of the fact, at least, that such a superior demand for dramas exists in Germany, we have only to open a newspaper to find proof. Is not every Literaturblatt and Kunstblatt stuffed to bursting, with theatricals? Nay, has not the "able Editor" established correspondents in every capital city of the civilized world, who report to him on this one matter and on no other? For, be our curiosity what it may, let us have profession of "intelligence from Munich," "intelligence from Vienna," intelligence from Berlin," is it intelligence of any thing but of greenroom controversies and negotiations, of tragedies and operas and farces acted and to be acted? Not of men, and their doings, by hearth and hall, in the firm earth; but of mere effigies and shells of men, and their doings in the world of pasteboard, do these unhappy correspondents write. Unhappy we call them; for, with all our tolerance of playwrights, we cannot but think that there are limits, and very strait ones, within which their activity should be restricted. Here, in England, our "theatrical reports" are nuisance enough; and many persons who love | Constitutional History of a Rookery? Let the their life, and therefore "take care of their courteous reader take heart, then; for he is in time, which is the stuff life is made of," regu-hands that will not, nay, what is more, that larly lose several columns of their weekly cannot, do him much harm. One brief, shy newspaper in that way: but our case is pure glance into this huge bivouac of Playwrights, luxury, compared with that of the Germans, all sawing and planing with such tumult; and who, instead of a measurable and sufferable we leave it, probably for many years. spicing of theatric matter, are obliged, metaphorically speaking, to breakfast and dine on it, have in fact nothing else to live on but that highly unnutritive victual. We ourselves are occasionally readers of German newspapers, and have often, in the spirit of Christian humanity, meditated presenting to the whole body of German editors a project, which, however, must certainly have ere now occurred to themselves, and for some reason been found inapplicable; it was, to address these correspondents of theirs, all and sundry, in plain language, and put the question: whether, on studiously surveying the Universe from their several stations, there was nothing in the Heavens above, on the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, nothing visible but this one business, or rather shadow of business, that had an interest for the minds of men? If the correspondents still answered that nothing was visible, then of course they must be left to continue in this strange state: prayers, at the same time, being put up for them in all churches. The German Parnassus, as one of its own denizens remarks, has a rather broad summit: yet only two Dramatists are reckoned, within the last half century, to have mounted thither; -Schiller and Goethe; if we are not, on the strength of his Minna von Barnhelm and Emilie Galeotti, to account Lessing of the number. On the slope of the Mountain may be found a few stragglers of the same brotherhood; among these, Tieck and Maler Müller, firmly enough stationed at considerable elevations; while, far below, appear various honest persons climbing vehemently, but against precipices of loose sand, to whom we wish all speed. But the reader will understand that the bivouac we speak of, and are about to enter, lies not on the declivity of the Hill at all; but on the level ground close to the foot of it; the essence of a Playwright being that he works not in Poetry, but in Prose, which more or less cunningly resembles it. And here, pausing for a moment, the reader observes that he is in a civilized country; for there, on the very boundary line of Parnassus, rises a gallows with the figure of a man hung in chains! It is the figure of August von Kotzebue, and has swung there for many years, as a warning to all too audacious Playwrights, who nevertheless, as we see, pay little heed to it. Ill-fated Kotzebue, once the darling of theatrical Europe! This was the prince of all Playwrights, and could manufacture Plays with a speed and felicity surpassing even Edinburgh novels. For his muse, like other doves, hatched twins in the month; and the world gazed on them with an admiration too deep for mere words. What is all past or present popularity to this? Were not these Plays translated into almost every language of articulate-speaking men; acted, at least, we may literally say, in every theatre from Kamtschatka to Cadiz? Nay, did they not melt the most obdurate hearts in all countries; and, like the music of Orpheus, draw tears down iron cheeks? We ourselves have However, leaving every able Editor to fight his own battle, we address ourselves to the task in hand: meaning here to inquire a very little into the actual state of the dramatic trade in Germany, and exhibit some detached features of it to the consideration of our readers. For, seriously speaking, low as this province may be, it is a real, active, and ever-enduring province of the literary republic; nor can the pursuit of many men, even though it be a profitless and foolish pursuit, ever be without claim to some attention from us, either in the way of furtherance or of censure and correction. Our avowed object is to promote the sound study of foreign literature; which study, like all other earthly undertakings, has its negative as well as its positive side. We have already, as occasion served, borne testimony to the merits of various German poets, and must now say a word on certain German poetasters; hoping that it may be chiefly a re-known the flintiest men, who professed to have gard to the former which has made us take even this slight notice of the latter: for the bad is in itself of no value, and only worth describing lest it be mistaken for the good. At the same time, let no reader tremble, as if we meant to overwhelm him, on this occasion, with a whole mountain of dramatic lumber, poured forth in torrents, like shot-rubbish, from the play-house-garrets, where it is mouldering and evaporating into nothing, silently and without harm to any one. Far be this from us! Nay, our own knowledge of this subject is in the highest degree limited; and, indeed, to exhaust it, or attempt discussing it with scientific precision, would be an impossible enterprise. What man is there that could assort the whole furniture of Milton's Limbo of Vanity; or where is the Hallam that would think it worth his while to write us the wept over them, for the first time in their lives. So was it twenty years ago; how stands it today? Kotzebue, lifted up on the hollow balloon of popular applause, thought wings had been given him that he might ascend to the Immortals: gay he rose, soaring, sailing, as with supreme dominion; but in the rarer azure deep, his windbag burst asunder, or the arrows of keen archers pierced it; and so at last we find him a compound-pendulum, vibrating in the character of scarecrow, to guard from forbidden fruit! O ye Playwrights, and literary quacks of every feather, weep over Kotzebue, and over yourselves! Know that the loudest roar of the million is not fame; that the windbag, are ye mad enough to mount it, will burst, or be shot through with arrows, and your bones too shall act as scarecrows. But, quitting this idle allegorical vein, let us at length proceed in plain English, and as beseems mere prose Reviewers, to the work laid out for us. Among the hundreds of German dramatists, as they are called, three individuals, already known to some British readers, and prominent from all the rest in Germany, may fitly enough stand here as representatives of the whole Playwright class; whose various craft and produce the procedure of these three may in some small degree serve to illustrate. Of Grillparzer, therefore, and Klingemann, and Mülner, in their order. Franz Grillparzer seems to be an Austrian; which country is reckoned nowise fertile in poets; a circumstance that may perhaps have contributed a little to his own rather rapid celebrity. Our more special acquaintance with Grillparzer is of very recent date; though his name and samples of his ware have for some time been hung out, in many British and foreign Magazines, often with testimonials which might have beguiled less timeworn customers. Neither, after all, have we found there testimonials falser than other such are, but rather not so false; for, indeed, Grillparzer is a most inoffensive man, nay positively rather meritorious; nor is it without reluctance that we name him under this head of Playwrights, and not under that of Dramatists, which he aspires to. Had the law with regard to mediocre poets relaxed itself since Horace's time, all had been well with Grillparzer; for undoubtedly there is a small vein of tenderness and grace running through him, a seeming modesty also, and real love of his art, which gives promise of better things. But gods and men and columns are still equally rigid in that unhappy particular of mediocrity, even pleasing mediocrity; and no scene or line is yet known to us of Grillparzer's which exhibits any thing more. Non concessere, therefore, is his sentence for the present; and the louder his well-meaning admirers extol him, the more emphatically should it be pronounced and repeated. Nevertheless Grillparzer's claim to the title of Playwright is perhaps more his misfortune than his crime. Living in a country where the Drama engrosses so much attention, he has been led into attempting it, without any decisive qualification for such an enterprise; and so his allotment of talent, which might have done good service in some prose department, or even in the sonnet, elegy, song, or other outlying province of Poetry, is driven, as it were, in spite of fate, to write Plays, which, though regularly divided into scenes and separate speeches, are essentially monological; and though swarming with characters, too often express only one character, and that no very extraordinary one, the character of Franz Grillparzer himself. What is an increase of misfortune, too, he has met with applause in this career, which therefore to which he belongs in the genus Playwright. But it is a universal feature of him that he attempts, by prosaic, and as it were mechanical means, to accomplish an end which, except by poetical genius, is absolutely not to be accomplished. For the most part, he has some knack, or trick of the trade, which by close inspection can be detected, and so the heart of his mystery be seen into. He may have one trick, or many; and the more cunningly he can disguise these, the more perfect is he as a craftsman; for were the public once to penetrate into this his slight of hand, it were all over with him,-Othello's occupation were gone. No conjuror, when we once understand his method of fire-eating, can any longer pass for a true thaumaturgist, or even entertain us in his proper character of quack, though he should eat Mount Vesuvius itself. But happily for Playwrights and others, the Public is a dim-eyed animal; gullible to almost all lengths,-nay, which often seems to prefer being gulled. Of Grillparzer's peculiar knack, and recipe for play-making, there is not very much to be said. He seems to have tried various kinds of recipes, in his time; and, to his credit be it spoken, seems little contented with any of them. By much the worst Play of his, that we have seen, is the Ahnfrau (Ancestress); a deep tragedy of the Castle Spectre sort; the whole mechanism of which was discernible and condemnable at a single glance. It is nothing but the old Story of Fate; an invisible Nemesis visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation; a method almost as common and sovereign in German Art, at this day, as the method of steam is in British mechanics; and of which we shall anon have more occasion to speak. In his Preface, Grillparzer endeavours to palliate or deny the fact of his being a Schicksal-Dichter (Fate-Tragedian); but to no purpose; for it is à fact grounded on the testimony of the seven senses: however, we are glad to observe that, with this one trial, he seems to have abandoned the Fate-line, and taken into better, at least into different ones. With regard to the Ahnfrau itself, we may remark that few things struck us so much as this little observation of Count Borotins, occurring, in the middle of the dismalest night-thoughts, so unexpectedly as follows: he is likely to follow farther and farther, let BERTHA (is just condoling with him, in these words) :— nature and his stars say to it what they will. The characteristic of a Playwright is that he writes in Prose, which Prose he palms, probably, first on himself, and then on the simpler part of the public, for Poetry: and the manner, in which he effects this legerdemain, constitutes his specific distinction, fixes the species And the welkin, starless, Glares from empty eye-holes, COUNT. How the hours do linger! shrewish queens; the whole set off by a proper intermixture of coronation ceremonies, Hungarian dresses, whiskered halberdiers, alarms of battle, and the pomp and circumstance of glorious war. There is even some attempt at delineating character in this play; certain of the dramatis persone are evidently meant to differ from certain others, not in dress and name only, but in nature and mode of being; so much indeed they repeatedly assert, or hint, and do their best to make good,-unfortunately, however, with very indifferent success. In fact these dramatis persona are rubrics and titles rather than persons; for most part, mere theatrical automata, with only a mechanical existence. The truth of the matter is, Grillparzer cannot communicate a poetic life to any character or object; and in this, were it in no other way, he evinces the intrinsically prosaic nature of his talent. These personages of his have, in some instances, a certain degree of metaphysical truth; that is to say, one portion of their structure, psychologically viewed, corresponds with the other;-so far all is well enough: but to unite these merely scientific and inanimate qualities into a living man is work not for a Playwright, but for a Dramatist. Nevertheless, König Ottokar is comparatively a harmless tragedy. It is full of action, striking enough, though without any discernible coherence; and with so much both of flirting, and fighting, with so many weddings, funerals, processions, encampments, it must be, we should think, if the tailor and decorationist do their duty, a very comfortable piece to see acted, especially on the Vienna boards, where it has a national interest, Rodolph of Hapsburg being a main personage in it. A more delicate turn, we venture to say, is rarely to be met with in tragic dialogue. As to the story of the Ahnfrau, it is, naturally enough, of the most heart-rending description. This Ancestress is a lady, or rather the ghost of a lady, for she has been defunct some centuries, who in life had committed what we call an "indiscretion;" which indiscretion the unpolite husband punished, one would have thought sufficiently, by running her through the body. However, the Schicksal of Grillparzer does not think it sufficient; but farther dooms the fair penitent to walk as goblin, till the last branch of her family be extinct. Accordingly she is heard, from time to time, slamming doors and the like, and now and then seen with dreadful goggle-eyes and other ghost appurtenances, to the terror not only of servant people, but of old Count Borotin, her now sole male descendant, whose afternoon nap she, on one occasion, cruelly disturbs. This Count Borotin is really a worthy, prosing old gentleman; only he had a son long ago drowned in a fish-pond (body not found); and has still a highly accomplished daughter, whom there is none offering to wed, except one Jaromir, a person of unknown extraction, and to all appearance, of the lightest purse; nay, as it turns out afterwards, actually the head of a Banditti establishment, which had long infested the neighbouring forests. However, a Captain of foot arrives, at this juncture, utterly to root out these Robbers; and now the strangest things come to light. For who should this Jaromir prove to be but poor old Borotin's drowned son, not drowned, but stolen and bred up by these Outlaws; the brother, therefore, of his intended; a most truculent fellow, who fighting for his life unwittingly The model of this Ottokar we imagine to kills his own father, and drives his bride to have been Schiller's Piccolomini; a poem of poison herself; in which wise, as was also similar materials and object; but differing Giles Scroggins' case, he "cannot get married." from it as a living rose from a mass of dead The reader sees all this is not to be accom-rose-leaves, or even of broken Italian gumplished without some jarring and tumult. In flowers. It seems as though Grillparzer had fact, there is a frightful uproar everywhere hoped to subdue us by a sufficient multitude throughout that night; robbers dying, mus- of wonderful scenes and circumstances, withquetry discharging, women shrieking, men out inquiring, with any painful solicitude, swearing, and the Ahnfrau herself emerging whether the soul and meaning of them were at intervals, as the genius of the whole dis- presented to us or not. Herein truly, we becord. But time and hours bring relief, as they lieve, lies the peculiar knack or playwrightalways do. Jaromir, in the long run, likewise, mystery of Ottokar; that its effect is calculated succeeds in dying; whereupon the Borotin to depend chiefly on its quantity: on the mere lineage having gone to the Devil, the Ances- number of astonishments, and joyful or detress also retires thither, at least makes the plorable adventures there brought to light; upper world rid of her presence, and the abundance in superficial contents compensatpiece ends in deep stillness. Of this poor An- ing the absence of callida junctura. Which cestress we shall only say farther: wherever second method of tragic manufacture we hold she be, requiescat! requiescat! to be better than the first, but still far from As we mentioned above, the Fate method good. At the same time, it is a very common of manufacturing tragic emotion seems to have method, both in Tragedy and elsewhere; nay, yielded Grillparzer himself little contentment; we hear persons whose trade it is to write for after this Ahnfrau, we hear no more of it. metre, or be otherwise "imaginative," proHis König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ot-fessing it openly as the best they know. Do tokar's Fortune and End) is a much more not these men go about collecting "features;" innocent piece, and proceeds in quite a dif- ferreting out strange incidents, murders, duels, ferent strain; aiming to subdue us not by old ghost-apparitions, over the habitable globe; of women's fables of Destiny, but by the accu- which features and incidents, when they have mulated splendour of thrones and principali-gathered a sufficient stock, nothing more is ties, the cruel or magnanimous pride of Austrian Emperors and Bohemian conquerors, the wit of chivalrous courtiers, and beautiful but needed than that they be ample enough, highcoloured enough, though huddled into any case (Novel, Tragedy, or Metrical Romance) that |