ion
which for more than a decade carried all before it.

Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses,
finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and
sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish
antics. Of his various plays, _The Sons of the Valley_ (1803) and the
_Cross on the Baltic_ (1806) deserve mention for their religious
and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an
explanation, though without adding to their understanding. _Martin
Luther, or the Consecration of Power_ (1807) is a pageant play of
great interest. Its recantation, _The Power of Weakness_, was written
after Werner's conversion. More important than these is his so-called
"fate tragedy," _The 24th of February_ (1810 per formed in Weimar;
published 1815). This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it
he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend. He
therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and
on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the
persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general
atmosphere of fatalism. The play started a whole series; some of
these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer's _The
Ancestress_, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by
something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the
minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the
philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it
concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has
both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so
far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition
scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar
imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the
_genre_, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's
_The Fateful Fork_ (1826).

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person. Like
his fellow-Koenigsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest
dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol. He was
a painter, a writer, and a musician. His ability in the pictorial arts
was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically
Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he
started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the ar