Critics, to be sure, were not slow to point out that the effectiveness of _The Ancestress_ was due less to poetical qualities than to theatrical--unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Müllner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish a text for an opera. Grillparzer replied that the subject would perhaps yield a tragedy. The idea took hold of him; without delay or pause for investigation he made his plan; and in three weeks his second play was ready for the stage. Written in July, 1817, _Sappho_ was produced at the _Hofburgtheater_ on April 21, 1818. Grillparzer said that in creating _Sappho_ he had plowed pretty much with Goethe's steer. In form his play resembles _Iphigenia_ and in substance it is not unlike _Tasso;_ but upon closer examination _Sappho_ appears to be neither a classical play of the serene, typical quality of _Iphigenia_ nor a _Künstlerdrama_ in the sense in which _Tasso_ is one. Grillparzer was not inspired by the meagre tradition of the Lesbian poetess, nor yet by anything more than the example of Goethe; he took only the outline of the story of Sappho and Phaon; his play is almost to be called a romantic love story, and the influence strongest upon him in the writing of it was that of Wieland. The situation out of which the tragedy of Sappho develops is that of a young man who deceives himself into believing that admiration for a superior woman is love, and who is undeceived when a _naïve_ maiden awakens in him sentiments that really are those of love. This situation occurs again and again in the voluminous works of Wieland--most obviously perhaps in the novelette _Menander and Glycerion_ (1803), but also in the novel _Agathon_ (1766-1767), and in the epistolary novel _Aristippus_ (1800-1802). Moreover, it is the essential situation in Mme. de Staël's _Corinne_ (1807). In the third place, this situation was Grillparzer's own, and it is so constantly found in his dramas that it may be called the characteristic situation for the dramatist as well as for the man. In this drama, finally, we have a demonstration of Grillparzer's profound conviction that the artistic temperament is ill suited to the demands of practical life, and in the solitary sphere to which it is doomed must fail to find that contentment which only life can afford. Sappho is not assailed by life on all sides as Tasso is; but she makes an egregious mistake in her search for the satisfactions of womanhood, thereby unfitting herself for the priesthood of poetry as well as forfeiting her life.