om their love-making. With all due respect for the
great dead, from whose laurel tree I do not intend to pluck a single
leaf, be it said that the piece has something ridiculous about it when
it is played; it is a thunderstorm during which two turtle-doves are
billing and cooing. There is some difference in _William Tell_, Bertha
and Rudenz are more modest and more sparing with their sighs, tears, and
premonitions. But the depicted situation is accidental, and under
similar circumstances is repeated everywhere, therefore one cannot judge
the Germanic nature by it--even if we include Switzerland as a
representative of this nature--any more than one can judge of a man by
the portrait which has been made of him during his illness. Neither am I
able to find the spectacle of the strength that breaks external fetters
so edifying as many others do: Why did it allow itself to be enchained?
Kleist's _Hermann's Battle_ and his _Prince of Homburg_ carry us, the
one too far back and the other too far forward. Uhland chose historic
events better than Kleist, he treated them more worthily and more nobly
than Schiller. For this reason, if for no other, he stands in the
foreground of this discussion."

In the same place the question is raised: What is the conception of
religion or fate from which our tragic drama has emanated? Wienbarg
skips over the question, or at least takes the answers to it too
lightly. Nevertheless here is the root of the whole tree. Human nature
and human destiny, these are the two riddles that the drama strives to
solve. The difference between the drama of the ancients and the drama of
the moderns lies in this: the ancients sought to illumine the labyrinths
of fate by means of the torch of poetry; we moderns try to refer human
nature, in whatever form or contortion it presents itself before us, to
certain eternal and changeless principles, as to an immovable
foundation. What to us is the means, was to them the end, and _vice
versa._

With the ancients the suffering results from the action; their tragedy
was really a triumph of instinct. The first bold lightning flash of
half-awakened consciousness illuminated the empty Olympus, and because
man found the halls of the gods deserted, he sought in his own breast a
centre for the circle of his existence. But when, revolving around
himself and thereby denying the pole of the world, he stood, in his
stubborn isolation, in the way of the great whole, the invisible
fly