The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume I | Page 8

one saw virtuosos playing with the canzone or the
makame. On the whole, however, German lyric poetry is rather made
up of simple formations in the style of the folk-song, especially since
the important rhythmic transformation of this material by Heine created
new possibilities for accommodating the inner form to new subject
matter without conspicuously changing the outer form. For two great
simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been predominant in protecting
our lyric poetry from unfruitful artificiality; the influence of the
folk-song and the connection with music have kept it more full of vital
energy than the too literary lyric poetry of the French, and richer in
variety than the too cultivated lyric of the English. Whoever shut the
door on the influences spoken of, as did Franz Grillparzer or Hebbel,
and, in a different way, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff or Heinrich
Leuthold, at the same time nullified a good part of his efficiency.
The drama almost exclusively assumed a foreign, though kindred, form
as a garb for the more elevated styles of composition: namely, the
blank verse of the English stage, which Lessing's Nathan the Wise had
popularized and A.W. Schlegel's Shakespeare had rendered omnipotent,
and which Schiller forced upon his successors. The Romanticists, by
playing unsuccessfully with different forms, as in Ludwig Tieck's
Octavianus, or Immerman's Alexis, or by adopting pure antique or
Spanish metres, attempted in vain to free themselves from the restraint
of form, the great danger of which consisted in its similarity to
common-place sentence construction, so that the verse ran the risk
either of becoming prosaic, or else, in trying forcibly to avoid this, of
growing bombastic. An escape was provided by inserting, in moments
of emotion, a metre of a more lyrical quality into the uniform structure
of the usual vehicle of dramatic dialogue, particularly when partaking
of the nature of a monologue; as Goethe did, for example, in the "Song
of the Fates" in Iphigenia, that most metrically perfect of all German
dramatic poems, and as Schiller continued to do with increased
boldness in the songs introduced into Mary Stuart. Perhaps the greatest

perfection in such use of the principle of the "free rhythm" as applied to
the drama, was reached by Franz Grillparzer in the Golden Fleece, on
the model of certain fragments by Goethe, such as the Prometheus. On
the other hand, the interesting experiments in the Bride of Messina are
of more importance for the development of the opera into a work of art
complete in itself, than for that of the drama. In general, however, it is
to be remarked as a peculiarity of modern German drama, that it seeks
to escape from monotony, which the French classical theatre hardly
ever succeeded in avoiding, by calling in the aid of the other arts.
Plastic art is often employed for scenic arrangement, and music to
produce effects on and behind the stage. Both were made use of by
Schiller; and it was under his influence that they were tried by Goethe
in his later period--though we find a remarkable sporadic appearance of
them even as early as _Götz_ and Klavigo. The mastery which
Grillparzer also attained in this respect has been striven after by his
fellow countrymen with some degree of success: as, for example, by
Ferdinand Raimund, by Ludwig Anzengruber, and also by Friedrich
Halm and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Besides blank verse, the only other garb in vogue for the serious drama
was prose: this was not only used for realistic pictures of conditions of
a decidedly cheerful type (since Lessing had introduced the bourgeois
dramas of Diderot into Germany), but also for pathetic tragedies, the
vital power of which the lack of stylistic disguising of language was
supposed to increase. This was the form employed in the Storm and
Stress drama, and therefore in the prison scene of Faust, as also in
Schiller's youthful dramas, and again we find it adopted by Hebbel and
the Young Germans, and by the naturalistic school under the leadership
of Ibsen. The Old German rhymed verse found only a temporary place
between these two forms. It was glorified and made almost sacrosanct
by having been used for the greatest of our dramas, Goethe's _Faust_;
Wildenbruch in particular tried to gain new effects with it. Other
attempts also went hand in hand with deeper-reaching efforts to
reconstruct the inner form of the drama; thus the tendency to a veiled
polyphony of language in the folk-scenes of Christian Dietrich Grabbe
and in all the plays of Heinrich von Kleist; this in Hofmannsthal's
Oedipus led to regular choruses, of quite a different type, however,
from those of the Bride of Messina. Gerhart Hauptmann's Weavers and

Florian Geyer may be considered the culminating points of this
movement, in spite of their apparently entirely prosaic form.
Modern German drama,