t of painting. The art of music is most
germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to the
peculiarities of the Austrian disposition in the difference between
Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss, on the one hand, and
Haendel, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner on the other. Moreover, the
Austrians are in all respects conservative, in literary taste no less
than in politics and religion. The pseudo-classicism of Gottsched
maintained its authority in Austria not merely after the time of
Lessing, but also after the time of Schiller. Wieland was a favorite
long before Goethe began to be appreciated; and as to the romantic
movement, only the gentle tendencies of such a congenial spirit as
Eichendorff found a sympathetic echo on the shores of the Danube.
Romance influences, however, more particularly Spanish, were manifest
there even before the time when they became strong upon Grillparzer.

Franz Grillparzer was born in Vienna on the fifteenth of January, 1791.
His father, Wenzel Grillparzer, a self-made man, was a lawyer of the
strictest probity, who occupied a respectable position in his
profession; but, too scrupulous to seize the opportunities for profit
that lawyers easily come upon, he lived a comparatively poor man and in
1809 died in straitened circumstances. At home he was stern and
repressive.

[Illustration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER]

Both his legal habit of mind and also his true discipleship of the age
of enlightenment in which he grew up disposed him to intellectual
tyranny over everything that looked like sentimentality or foolish
fantasy in wife or children. His own hobbies, however, such as long
walks in the country and the cultivation of flowers or--strangely
enough--the reading of highly romantic novels, he indulged in as matters
of course. It is with some surprise that we find him married to a woman
of abnormal nervousness, who was given to mysticism and was feverishly
devoted to music. Marianne Grillparzer, born Sonnleithner, belonged to a
substantial middle-class family. Her father was a friend of Haydn and
Mozart and was himself a composer of music; her brothers became men of
note in the history of the Viennese operatic stage; and she herself
shared in the artistic temperament of the family, but with ominously
pathological over-development in one direction. She took her own life in
1819 and transmitted to her sons a tendency to moodiness and melancholy
which led to the suicide of one and t