Chapter 16

SeeDanmark’s Riges Histoire, vol. v. (Copenhagen, 1897-1905); Jörgenson,Peter Schumacher-Griffenfeldt(Copenhagen, 1893-1894); O. Vaupell,Rigskansler Grev Griffenfeldt(Copenhagen, 1880-1882); Bain,Scandinavia, cap. x. (Cambridge, 1905).

(R. N. B.)

GRIFFIN[O’Griobta,O’Greeva],GERALD(1803-1840), Irish novelist and dramatic writer, was born at Limerick of good family, on the 12th of December 1803. His parents emigrated in 1820 to America, but he was left with an elder brother, who was a medical practitioner at Adare. As early as his eighteenth year he undertook for a short time the editorship of a newspaper in Limerick. Having written a tragedy,Aguire, which was highly praised by his friends, he set out in 1823 for London with the purpose of “revolutionizing the dramatic taste of the time by writing for the stage.” In spite of the recommendations of John Banim, he had a hard struggle with poverty. It was only by degrees that his literary work obtained any favour.The Noyades, an opera entirely in recitative, was produced at the English Opera House in 1826; and the success ofHolland Tide Tales(1827) led toTales of the Munster Festivals(3 vols., 1827), which were still more popular. In 1829 appeared his fine novel,The Collegians, afterwards successfully adapted for the stage by Dion Boucicault under the title ofThe Colleen Bawn. He followed up this success withThe Invasion(1832),Tales of my Neighbourhood(1835),The Duke of Monmouth(1836), andTalis Qualis, or Tales of the Jury-room(1842). He also wrote a number of lyrics touched with his native melancholy. But he became doubtful as to the moral influence of his writings, and ultimately he came to the conclusion that his true sphere of duty was to be found within the Church. He was admitted into a society of the Christian Brothers at Dublin, in September 1838, under the name of Brother Joseph, and in the following summerhe removed to Cork, where he died of typhus fever on the 12th of June 1840. Before adopting the monastic habit he burned all his manuscripts; butGisippus, a tragedy which he had composed before he was twenty, accidentally escaped destruction, and in 1842 was put on the Drury Lane stage by Macready with great success.

The collected works of Gerald Griffin were published in 1842-1843 in eight volumes, with aLifeby his brother William Griffin, M.D.; an edition of hisPoetical and Dramatic Works(Dublin, 1895) by C. G. Duffy; and a selection of his lyrics, with a notice by George Sigerson, is included in theTreasury of Irish Poetry, edited by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (London, 1900).

GRIFFIN,a city and the county-seat of Spalding county, Georgia, U.S.A., 43 m. S. of Atlanta, and about 970 ft. above the sea. Pop. (1890) 4503; (1900) 6857 (3258 negroes); (1910) 7478. It is served by the Southern and the Central of Georgia railways, and is the southern terminus of the Griffin & Chattanooga Division of the latter. The city is situated in a rich agricultural region, and just outside the corporate limits is an agricultural experiment station, established by the state but maintained by the Federal government. Griffin has a large trade in cotton and fruit. The principal industry is the manufacture of cotton and cotton-seed oil. Buggies, wagons, chairs and harness are among the other manufactures. The municipality owns and operates the water and electric-lighting systems. Griffin was founded in 1840 and was chartered as a city in 1846.

GRIFFIN,GriffonorGryphon(from Fr.griffon, Lat.gryphus, Gr.γρύψ), in the natural history of the ancients, the name of an imaginary rapacious creature of the eagle species, represented with four legs, wings and a beak,—the fore part resembling an eagle and the hinder a lion. In addition, some writers describe the tail as a serpent. This animal, which was supposed to watch over gold mines and hidden treasures, and to be the enemy of the horse, was consecrated to the Sun; and the ancient painters represented the chariot of the Sun as drawn by griffins. According to Spanheim, those of Jupiter and Nemesis were similarly provided. The griffin of Scripture is probably the osprey, and the name is now given to a species of vulture. The griffin was said to inhabit Asiatic Scythia, where gold and precious stones were abundant; and when strangers approached to gather these the creatures leapt upon them and tore them in pieces, thus chastising human avarice and greed. The one-eyed Arimaspi waged constant war with them, according to Herodotus (iii. 16). Sir John de Mandeville, in hisTravels, described a griffin as eight times larger than a lion.

The griffin is frequently seen as a charge in heraldry (seeHeraldry, fig. 163); and in architectural decoration is usually represented as a four-footed beast with wings and the head of a leopard or tiger with horns, or with the head and beak of an eagle; in the latter case, but very rarely, with two legs. To what extent it owes its origin to Persian sculpture is not known, the capitals at Persepolis have sometimes leopard or lion heads with horns, and four-footed beasts with the beaks of eagles are represented in bas-reliefs. In the temple of Apollo Branchidae near Miletus in Asia Minor, the winged griffin of the capitals has leopards’ heads with horns. In the capitals of the so-called lesser propylaea at Eleusis conventional eagles with two feet support the angles of the abacus. The greater number of those in Rome have eagles’ beaks, as in the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and their tails develop into conventional foliage. A similar device was found in the Forum of Trajan. The best decorative employment of the griffin is found in the vertical supports of tables, of which there are two or three examples in Pompeii and others in the Vatican and the museums in Rome. In some of these cases the head is that of a lion at one end of the support and an eagle at the other end, and there is only one strongly developed paw; the wings circling round at the top form conspicuous features on the sides of these supports, the surfaces below being filled with conventional Greek foliage.

GRIFFITH, SIR RICHARD JOHN(1784-1878), Irish geologist, was born in Dublin on the 20th of September 1784. He obtained in 1799 a commission in the Royal Irish Artillery, but a year later, when the corps was incorporated with that of England, he retired, and devoted his attention to civil engineering and mining. He studied chemistry, mineralogy and mining for two years in London under William Nicholson (editor of theJournal of Nat. Phil.), and afterwards examined the mining districts in various parts of England, Wales and Scotland. While in Cornwall he discovered ores of nickel and cobalt in material that had been rejected as worthless. He completed his studies under Robert Jameson and others at Edinburgh, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1807, a member of the newly established Geological Society of London in 1808, and in the same year he returned to Ireland. In 1809 he was appointed by the commissioners to inquire into the nature and extent of the bogs in Ireland, and the means of improving them. In 1812 he was elected professor of geology and mining engineer to the Royal Dublin Society. During subsequent years he made many surveys and issued many reports on mineral districts in Ireland, and these formed the foundation of his first geological map of the country (1815). In 1822 Griffith became engineer of public works in Cork, Kerry and Limerick, and was occupied until 1830 in repairing old roads and in laying out many miles of new roads. Meanwhile in 1825 he was appointed to carry out the perambulation or boundary survey of Ireland, the object of which was to ascertain and mark the boundaries of every county, barony, parish and townland in preparation for the ordnance survey. This work was finished in 1844. He was also called upon to assist in preparing a bill for the general valuation of Ireland; the act was passed in 1826, and he was appointed commissioner of valuation, in which capacity he continued to act until 1868. On “Griffith’s valuation” the various local and public assessments were made. His extensive investigations furnished him with ample material for improving his geological map, and the second edition was published in 1835. A third edition on a larger scale (1 in. to 4 m.) was issued under the Board of Ordnance in 1839, and it was further revised in 1855. For this great work and his other services to science he was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society in 1854. In 1850 he was made chairman of the Irish Board of Works, and in 1858 he was created a baronet. He died in Dublin on the 22nd of September 1878.

Among his many geological works the following may be mentioned:Outline of the Geology of Ireland(1838);Notice respecting the Fossils of the Mountain Limestone of Ireland, as compared with those of Great Britain, and also with the Devonian System(1842);A Synopsis of the Characters of the Carboniferous Limestone Fossils of Ireland(1844) (with F. McCoy);A Synopsis of the Silurian Fossils of Ireland(1846) (with F. McCoy). See memoirs inQuart. Journ. Geol. Soc.xxxv. 39; andGeol. Mag., 1878, p. 524, with bibliography.

GRILLE,a French term for an enclosure in either iron or bronze; there is no equivalent in English, “grating” applying more to a horizontal frame of bars over a sunk area, and “grate” to the iron bars of an open fireplace. The finest examples of the grille are those known as therejas, which in Spanish churches form the enclosures of the chapels, such as therejain the Capilla Real at Granada in wrought iron partly gilt (1522). Similar grilles are employed to protect the ground-floor windows of mansions not only in Spain but in Italy and Germany. In England the most beautiful example is that in front of Queen Eleanor’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, in wrought iron. The finest grilles in Italy are the enclosures of the tombs of the Della Scalas at Verona (end of 13th century), in Germany the grille of the cenotaph of Maximilian at Innsbruck (early 16th century) and in France those which enclose the Place Stanislaus, the Place de la Carrière and the churches of Nancy, which were wrought by Jean Lamour in the middle of the 18th century. Generally, however, throughout Germany the wrought iron grilles are fine examples of forging, and they are employed for the enclosures of the numerous fountains, in the tympana of gateways, and for the protection of windows. At Danzig in the Marienkirche are some fine examples in brass.

GRILLPARZER, FRANZ(1791-1872), the greatest dramatic poet of Austria, was born in Vienna, on the 15th of January 1791. His father, severe, pedantic, a staunch upholder of the liberal traditions of the reign of Joseph II., was an advocateof some standing; his mother, a nervous, finely-strung woman, belonged to the well-known musical family of Sonnleithner. After a desultory education, Grillparzer entered in 1807 the university of Vienna as a student of jurisprudence; but two years later his father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and Franz, the eldest son, was obliged to turn to private tutoring. In 1813 he received an appointment in the court library, but as this was unpaid, he accepted after some months a clerkship that offered more solid prospects, in the Lower Austrian revenue administration. Through the influence of Graf Stadion, the minister of finance, he was in 1818 appointed poet to the Hofburgtheater, and promoted to theHofkammer(exchequer); in 1832 he became director of the archives of that department, and in 1856 retired from the civil service with the title ofHofrat. Grillparzer had little capacity for an official career and regarded his office merely as a means of independence.

In 1817 the first representation of his tragedyDie Ahnfraumade him famous, but before this he had written a long tragedy in iambics,Bianca von Castilien(1807-1809), which was obviously modelled on Schiller’sDon Carlos; and even more promising were the dramatic fragmentsSpartacusandAlfred der Grosse(1809).Die Ahnfrauis a gruesome “fate-tragedy” in the trochaic measure of the Spanish drama, already made popular by Adolf Müllner in hisSchuld; but Grillparzer’s work is a play of real poetic beauties, and reveals an instinct for dramatic as opposed to merely theatrical effect, which distinguishes it from other “fate-dramas” of the day. Unfortunately its success led to the poet’s being classed for the best part of his life with playwrights like Müllner and Houwald.Die Ahnfrauwas followed bySappho(1818), a drama of a very different type; in the classic spirit of Goethe’sTasso, Grillparzer unrolled the tragedy of poetic genius, the renunciation of earthly happiness imposed upon the poet by his higher mission. In 1821 appearedDas goldene Vliess, a trilogy which had been interrupted in 1819 by the death of the poet’s mother—in a fit of depression she had taken her own life—and a subsequent visit to Italy. Opening with a powerful dramatic prelude in one act,Der Gastfreund, Grillparzer depicts inDie ArgonautenJason’s adventures in his quest for the Fleece; whileMedea, a tragedy of noble classic proportions, contains the culminating events of the story which had been so often dramatized before. The theme is similar to that ofSappho, but the scale on which it is represented is larger; it is again the tragedy of the heart’s desire, the conflict of the simple happy life with that sinister power—be it genius, or ambition—which upsets the equilibrium of life. The end is bitter disillusionment, the only consolation renunciation. Medea, her revenge stilled, her children dead, bears the fatal Fleece back to Delphi, while Jason is left to realize the nothingness of human striving and earthly happiness.

For his historical tragedyKönig Ottokars Glück und Ende(1823, but owing to difficulties with the censor, not performed until 1825), Grillparzer chose one of the most picturesque events in Austrian domestic history, the conflict of Ottokar of Bohemia with Rudolph von Habsburg. With an almost modern realism he reproduced the motley world of the old chronicler, at the same time not losing sight of the needs of the theatre; the fall of Ottokar is but another text from which the poet preached the futility of endeavour and the vanity of worldly greatness. A second historical tragedy,Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn(1826, performed 1828), attempts to embody a more heroic gospel; but the subject—the superhuman self-effacement of Bankbanus before Duke Otto of Meran—proved too uncompromising an illustration of Kant’s categorical imperative of duty to be palatable in the theatre. With these historical tragedies began the darkest ten years in the poet’s life. They brought him into conflict with the Austrian censor—a conflict which grated on Grillparzer’s sensitive soul, and was aggravated by his own position as a servant of the state; in 1826 he paid a visit to Goethe in Weimar, and was able to compare the enlightened conditions which prevailed in the little Saxon duchy with the intellectual thraldom of Vienna. To these troubles were added more serious personal worries. In the winter of 1820-1821 he had met for the first time Katharina Fröhlich (1801-1879), and the acquaintance rapidly ripened into love on both sides; but whether owing to a presentiment of mutual incompatibility, or merely owing to Grillparzer’s conviction that life had no happiness in store for him, he shrank from marriage. Whatever the cause may have been, the poet was plunged into an abyss of misery and despair to which his diary bears heart-rending witness; his sufferings found poetic expression in the fine cycle of poems bearing the significant titleTristia ex Ponto(1835).

Yet to these years we owe the completion of two of Grillparzer’s greatest dramas,Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen(1831) andDer Traum, ein Leben(1834). In the former tragedy, a dramatization of the story of Hero and Leander, he returned to the Hellenic world ofSappho, and produced what is perhaps the finest of all German love-tragedies. His mastery of dramatic technique is here combined with a ripeness of poetic expression and with an insight into motive which suggests the modern psychological drama of Hebbel and Ibsen; the old Greek love-story of Musaeus is, moreover, endowed with something of that ineffable poetic grace which the poet had borrowed from the great Spanish poets, Lope de Vega and Calderon.Der Traum, ein Leben, Grillparzer’s technical masterpiece, is in form perhaps even more Spanish; it is also more of what Goethe called a “confession.” The aspirations of Rustan, an ambitious young peasant, are shadowed forth in the hero’s dream, which takes up nearly three acts of the play; ultimately Rustan awakens from his nightmare to realize the truth of Grillparzer’s own pessimistic doctrine that all earthly ambitions and aspirations are vanity; the only true happiness is contentment with one’s lot, “des Innern stiller Frieden und die schuldbefreite Brust.”Der Traum, ein Lebenwas the first of Grillparzer’s dramas which did not end tragically, and in 1838 he produced his only comedy,Weh’ dem, der lügt. ButWeh’ dem, der lügt, in spite of its humour of situation, its sparkling dialogue and the originality of its idea—namely, that the hero gains his end by invariably telling the truth, where his enemies as invariably expect him to be lying—was too strange to meet with approval in its day. Its failure was a blow to the poet, who turned his back for ever on the German theatre. In 1836 Grillparzer paid a visit to Paris and London, in 1843 to Athens and Constantinople. Then came the Revolution which struck off the intellectual fetters under which Grillparzer and his contemporaries had groaned in Austria, but the liberation came too late for him. Honours were heaped upon him; he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences; Heinrich Laube, as director of the Burgtheater, reinstated his plays on the repertory; he was in 1861 elected to the AustrianHerrenhaus; his eightieth birthday was a national festival, and when he died in Vienna, on the 21st of January 1872, the mourning of the Austrian people was universal. With the exception of a beautiful fragment,Esther(1861), Grillparzer published no more dramatic poetry after the fiasco ofWeh’ dem, der lügt, but at his death three completed tragedies were found among his papers. Of these,Die Jüdin von Toledo, an admirable adaptation from the Spanish, has won a permanent place in the German classical repertory;Ein Bruderzwist im Hause Habsburgis a powerful historical tragedy andLibussais perhaps the ripest, as it is certainly the deepest, of all Grillparzer’s dramas; the latter two plays prove how much was lost by the poet’s divorce from the theatre.

Although Grillparzer was essentially a dramatist, his lyric poetry is in the intensity of its personal note hardly inferior to Lenau’s; and the bitterness of his later years found vent in biting and stinging epigrams that spared few of his greater contemporaries. As a prose writer, he has left one powerful short story,Der arme Spielmann(1848), and a volume of critical studies on the Spanish drama, which shows how completely he had succeeded in identifying himself with the Spanish point of view.

Grillparzer’s brooding, unbalanced temperament, his lack of will-power, his pessimistic renunciation and the bitterness which his self-imposed martyrdom produced in him, made him peculiarly adapted to express the mood of Austria in the epoch of intellectualthraldom that lay between the Napoleonic wars and the Revolution of 1848; his poetry reflects exactly the spirit of his people under the Metternich régime, and there is a deep truth behind the description ofDer Traum, ein Lebenas the AustrianFaust. His fame was in accordance with the general tenor of his life; even in Austria a true understanding for his genius was late in coming, and not until the centenary of 1891 did the German-speaking world realize that it possessed in him a dramatic poet of the first rank; in other words, that Grillparzer was no mere “Epigone” of the classic period, but a poet who, by a rare assimilation of the strength of the Greeks, the imaginative depth of German classicism and the delicacy and grace of the Spaniards, had opened up new paths for the higher dramatic poetry of Europe.

Grillparzer’sSämtliche Werkeare edited by A. Sauer, in 20 vols., 5th edition (Stuttgart, 1892-1894); also, since the expiry of the copyright in 1901, innumerable cheap reprints.Briefe und Tagebücher, edited by C. Glossy and A. Sauer (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1903).Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft, edited by K. Glossy (the publication of the Grillparzer Society) (Vienna, 1891 ff.). See also H. Laube,Franz Grillparzers Lebensgeschichte(Stuttgart, 1884); J. Volkelt,Franz Grillparzer als Dichter des Tragischen(Nördlingen, 1888); E. Reich,Franz Grillparzers Dramen(Dresden, 1894); A. Ehrhard,Franz Grillparzer(Paris, 1900) (German translation by M. Necker, Munich, 1902); H. Sittenberger,Grillparzer, sein Leben und Wirken(Berlin, 1904); Gustav Pollak,F. Grillparzer and the Austrian Drama(New York, 1907). Of Grillparzer’s works, translations have appeared in English ofSappho(1820, by J. Bramsen; 1846, by E. B. Lee; 1855, by L. C. Cumming; 1876, by E. Frothingham); and ofMedea(1879, by F. W. Thurstan and J. A. Wittmann). Byron’s warm admiration ofSappho(Letters and Journals, v. 171) is well known, while Carlyle’s criticism, in his essay onGerman Playwrights(1829), is interesting as expressing the generally accepted estimate of Grillparzer in the first half of the 19th century. See the bibliography in K. Goedeke’sGrundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 2nd ed., vol. viii. (1905).

(J. G. R.)

GRIMALD(orGrimoald),NICHOLAS(1519-1562), English poet, was born in Huntingdonshire, the son probably of Giovanni Baptista Grimaldi, who had been a clerk in the service of Empson and Dudley in the reign of Henry VII. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1540. He then removed to Oxford, becoming a probationer-fellow of Merton College in 1541. In 1547 he was lecturing on rhetoric at Christ Church, and shortly afterwards became chaplain to Bishop Ridley, who, when he was in prison, desired Grimald to translate Laurentius Valla’s book against the allegedDonation of Constantine, and theDe gestis Basiliensis Conciliiof Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II.). His connexion with Ridley brought him under suspicion, and he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. It is said that he escaped the penalties of heresy by recanting his errors, and was despised accordingly by his Protestant contemporaries. Grimald contributed to the original edition (June 1557) ofSonges and Sonettes(commonly known asTottel’s Miscellany), forty poems, only ten of which are retained in the second edition published in the next month. He translated (1553) Cicero’sDe officiis as Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties(2nd ed., 1556); a Latin paraphrase of Virgil’sGeorgics(printed 1591) is attributed to him, but most of the works assigned to him by Bale are lost. Two Latin tragedies are extant;Archipropheta sive Johannes Baptista, printed at Cologne in 1548, probably performed at Oxford the year before, andChristus redivivus(Cologne, 1543), edited by Prof. J. M. Hart (for the Modern Language Association of America, 1886, separately issued 1899). It cannot be determined whether Grimald was familiar with Buchanan’sBaptistes(1543), or with J. Schoeppe’sJohannes decollatus vel Ectrachelistes(1546). Grimald provides a purely romantic motive for the catastrophe in the passionate attachment of Herodias to Herod, and constantly resorts to lyrical methods. As a poet Grimald is memorable as the earliest follower of Surrey in the production of blank verse. He writes sometimes simply enough, as in the lines on his own childhood addressed to his mother, but in general his style is more artificial, and his metaphors more studied than is the case with the other contributors to theMiscellany. His classical reading shows itself in the comparative terseness and smartness of his verses. His epitaph was written by Barnabe Googe in May 1562.

See C. H. Herford,Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany(pp. 113-119, 1886).A Catalogue of printed books ... by writers bearing the name of Grimaldi(ed. A. B. Grimaldi), printed 1883; and Arber’s reprint oíTottel’s Miscellany.

GRIMALDI, GIOVANNI FRANCESCO(1606-1680), Italian architect and painter, named Il Bolognese from the place of his birth, was a relative of the Caracci family, under whom it is presumed he studied first. He was afterwards a pupil of Albani. He went to Rome, and was appointed architect to Pope Paul V., and was also patronized by succeeding popes. Towards 1648 he was invited to France by Cardinal Mazarin, and for about two years was employed in buildings for that minister and for Louis XIV., and in fresco-painting in the Louvre. His colour was strong, somewhat excessive in the use of green; his touch light. He painted history, portraits and landscapes—the last with predilection, especially in his advanced years—and executed engravings and etchings from his own landscapes and from those of Titian and the Caracci. Returning to Rome, he was made president of the Academy of St Luke; and in that city he died on the 28th of November 1680, in high repute not only for his artistic skill but for his upright and charitable deeds. His son Alessandro assisted him both in painting and in engraving. Paintings by Grimaldi are preserved in the Quirinal and Vatican palaces, and in the church of S. Martino a’Monti; there is also a series of his landscapes in the Colonna Gallery.

GRIMALDI, JOSEPH(1779-1837), the most celebrated of English clowns, was born in London on the 18th of December 1779, the son of an Italian actor. When less than two years old he was brought upon the stage at Drury Lane; at the age of three he began to appear at Sadler’s Wells; and he did not finally retire until 1828. As the clown of pantomime he was considered without an equal, his greatest success being inMother Goose, at Covent Garden (1806 and often revived). Grimaldi died on the 31st of May 1837.

HisMemoirsin two volumes (1838) were edited by Charles Dickens.

GRIMKÉ, SARAH MOORE(1792-1873) andANGELINA EMILY(1805-1879), American reformers, born in Charleston, South Carolina—Sarah on the 6th of November 1792, and Angelina on the 20th of February 1805—were daughters of John Fachereau Grimké (1752-1819), an artillery officer in the Continental army, a jurist of some distinction, a man of wealth and culture and a slave-holder.

Their older brother,Thomas Smith Grimké(1786-1834), was born in Charleston; graduated at Yale in 1807; was a successful lawyer, and in 1826-1830 was a member of the state Senate, in which he, almost alone of the prominent lawyers of the state, opposed nullification; he strongly advocated spelling-reform, temperance and absolute non-resistance, and publishedAddresses on Science, Education and Literature(1831). His early intellectual influence on Sarah was strong.

In her thirteenth year Sarah was godmother to her sister Angelina. Sarah in 1821 revisited Philadelphia, whither she had accompanied her father on his last illness, and there, having been already dissatisfied with the Episcopal Church and with the Presbyterian, she became a Quaker; so, too, did Angelina, who joined her in 1829. Both sisters (Angelina first) soon grew into a belief in immediate abolition, strongly censured by many Quakers, who were even more shocked by a sympathetic letter dated “8th Month, 30th, 1835” written by Angelina to W. L. Garrison, followed in 1836 by herAppeal to the Christian Women of the South, and at the end of that year, by anEpistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, written by Sarah, who now thoroughly agreed with her younger sister. In the same year, at the invitation of Elizur Wright (1804-1885), corresponding secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Angelina, accompanied by Sarah, began giving talks on slavery, first in private and then in public, so that in 1837, when they set to work in Massachusetts, they had to secure the use of large halls. Their speaking from public platforms resulted in a letter issued by some members of the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts, calling on the clergy to close theirchurches to women exhorters; Garrison denounced the attack on the Grimké sisters and Whittier ridiculed it in his poem “The Pastoral Letter.” Angelina pointedly answeredMiss Beecher on the Slave Question(1837) in letters in theLiberator. Sarah, who had never forgotten that her studies had been curtailed because she was a girl, contributed to the BostonSpectatorpapers on “The Province of Woman” and publishedLetters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes(1838)—the real beginning of the “woman’s rights” movement in America, and at the time a cause of anxiety to Whittier and others, who urged upon the sisters the prior importance of the anti-slavery cause. In 1838 Angelina married Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895), a reformer and abolition orator and pamphleteer, who had taken part in the famous Lane Seminary debates in 1834, had left the Seminary for the lecture platform when the anti-slavery society was broken up by the Lane trustees, but had lost his voice in 1836 and had become editor of the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society.1They lived, with Sarah, at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1838-1840, then on a farm at Belleville, New Jersey, and then conducted a school for black and white alike at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, from 1854 to 1864. Removing to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, the three were employed in Dr Lewis’s school. There Sarah died on the 23rd of December 1873, and Angelina on the 26th of October 1879. Both sisters indulged in various “fads”—Graham’s diet, bloomer-wearing, absolute non-resistance. Angelina did no public speaking after her marriage, save at Pennsylvania Hall (Philadelphia), destroyed by a mob immediately after her address there; but besides her domestic and school duties she was full of tender charity. Sarah at the age of 62 was still eager to study law or medicine, or to do something to aid her sex; at 75 she translated and abridged Lamartine’s life of Joan of Arc.

See Catherine H. Birney,The Grimké Sisters(Boston, 1885).

1Weld was the author of several anti-slavery books which had considerable influence at the time. Among them areThe Bible against Slavery(1837),American Slavery as It Is(1839), a collection of extracts from Southern papers, andSlavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the U.S.(1841).

GRIMM, FRIEDRICH MELCHIOR,Baron von(1723-1807), French author, the son of a German pastor, was born at Ratisbon on the 26th of December 1723. He studied at the University of Leipzig, where he came under the influence of Gottsched and of J. A. Ernesti, to whom he was largely indebted for his critical appreciation of classical literature. When nineteen he produced a tragedy,Banise, which met with some success. After two years of study he returned to Ratisbon, where he was attached to the household of Count Schönberg. In 1748 he accompanied August Heinrich, Count Friesen, to Paris as secretary, and he is said by Rousseau to have acted for some time as reader to Frederick, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha. His acquaintance with Rousseau, through a mutual sympathy in regard to musical matters, soon ripened into intimate friendship, and led to a close association with the encyclopaedists. He rapidly obtained a thorough knowledge of the French language, and acquired so perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed effaced. A witty pamphlet entitledLe Petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda(1753), written by him in defence of Italian as against French opera, established his literary reputation. It is possible that the origin of the pamphlet is partly to be accounted for by his vehement passion1for Mlle Fel, theprima donnaof the Italian company. In 1753 Grimm, following the example of the abbé Raynal, began a literary correspondence with various German sovereigns. Raynal’s letters,Nouvelles littéraires, ceased early in 1755. With the aid of friends, especially of Diderot and Mme d’Épinay, during his temporary absences from France, Grimm himself carried on the correspondence, which consisted of two letters a month, until 1773, and eventually counted among his subscribers Catherine II. of Russia, Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, and many princes of the smaller German States. It was probably in 1754 that Grimm was introduced by Rousseau to Madame d’Épinay, with whom he soon formed aliaisonwhich led to an irreconcilable rupture between him and Rousseau. Rousseau was induced by his resentment to give in hisConfessionsa wholly mendacious portrait of Grimm’s character. In 1755, after the death of Count Friesen, who was a nephew of Marshal Saxe and an officer in the French army, Grimm becamesecrétaire des commandementsto the duke of Orleans, and in this capacity he accompanied Marshal d’Estrées on the campaign of Westphalia in 1756-57. He was named envoy of the town of Frankfort at the court of France in 1759, but was deprived of his office for criticizing the comte de Broglie in a despatch intercepted by Louis XV. He was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1775. His introduction to Catherine II. of Russia took place at St Petersburg in 1773, when he was in the suite of Wilhelmine of Hesse-Darmstadt on the occasion of her marriage to the czarevitch Paul. He became minister of Saxe-Gotha at the court of France in 1776, but in 1777 he again left Paris on a visit to St Petersburg, where he remained for nearly a year in daily intercourse with Catherine. He acted as Paris agent for the empress in the purchase of works of art, and executed many confidential commissions for her. In 1783 and the following years he lost his two most intimate friends, Mme d’Épinay and Diderot. In 1792 he emigrated, and in the next year settled in Gotha, where his poverty was relieved by Catherine, who in 1796 appointed him minister of Russia at Hamburg. On the death of the empress Catherine he took refuge with Mme d’Épinay’s granddaughter, Émilie de Belsunce, comtesse de Bueil. Grimm had always interested himself in her, and had procured her dowry from the empress Catherine. She now received him with the utmost kindness. He died at Gotha on the 19th of December 1807.

The correspondence of Grimm was strictly confidential, and was not divulged during his lifetime. It embraces nearly the whole period from 1750 to 1790, but the later volumes, 1773 to 1790, were chiefly the work of his secretary, Jakob Heinrich Meister. At first he contented himself with enumerating the chief current views in literature and art and indicating very slightly the contents of the principal new books, but gradually his criticisms became more extended and trenchant, and he touched on nearly every subject—political, literary, artistic, social and religious—which interested the Parisian society of the time. His notices of contemporaries are somewhat severe, and he exhibits the foibles and selfishness of the society in which he moved; but he was unbiassed in his literary judgments, and time has only served to confirm his criticisms. In style and manner of expression he is thoroughly French. He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle; and it was the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire. His religious and philosophical opinions were entirely negative.

Grimm’sCorrespondance littéraire, philosophique et critique ..., depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1769, was edited, with many excisions, by J. B. A. Suard and published at Paris in 1812, in 6 vols. 8vo;deuxième partie, de 1771 à 1782, in 1812 in 5 vols. 8vo; andtroisième partie, pendant une partie des années 1775 et 1776, et pendant les années 1782 à 1790 inclusivement, in 1813 in 5 vols. 8vo. A supplementary volume appeared in 1814; the whole correspondence was collected and published by M. Jules Taschereau, with the assistance of A. Chaudé, in aNouvelle Edition, revue et mise dans un meilleur ordre, avec des notes et des éclaircissements, et où se trouvent rétablies pour la première fois les phrases supprimées par la censure impériale(Paris, 1829, 15 vols. 8vo); and theCorrespondance inédite, et recueil de lettres, poésies, morceaux, et fragments retranchés par la censure impériale en 1812 et 1813was published in 1829. The standard edition is that of M. Tourneux (16 vols., 1877-1882). Grimm’sMémoire historique sur l’origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l’impératrice Catherine II jusqu’au décès de sa majesté impériale, and Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm (1774-1796) were published by J. Grot in 1880, in theCollectionof the Russian Imperial Historical Society. She treats him very familiarly, and calls him Héraclite, Georges Dandin, &c. At the time of the Revolution she begged him to destroy her letters, but he refused, and after his death they were returned to St Petersburg. Grimm’s side of the correspondence, however, is only partially preserved. He signs himself“Pleureur.” Some of Grimm’s letters, besides the official correspondence, are included in the edition of M. Tourneux; others are contained in theErinnerungen einer Urgrossmutterof K. von Bechtolsheim, edited (Berlin, 1902) by Count C. Oberndorff. See also Mme d’Épinay’sMémoires; Rousseau’sConfessions; the notices contained in the editions quoted; E. Scherer,Melchior Grimm(1887); Sainte-Beuve,Causeries du lundi, vol. vii. For further works bearing on the subject, see K. A. Georges,Friedrich Melchior Grimm(Hanover and Leipzig, 1904).

1Rousseau’s account of this affair (Confessions, 2nd part, 8th book) must be received with caution.

GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG CARL(1785-1863), German philologist and mythologist, was born on the 4th of January 1785 at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer, died while he was a child, and the mother was left with very small means; but her sister, who was lady of the chamber to the landgravine of Hesse, helped to support and educate her numerous family. Jacob, with his younger brother Wilhelm (born on the 24th of February 1786), was sent in 1798 to the public school at Cassel. In 1802 he proceeded to the university of Marburg, where he studied law, a profession for which he had been destined by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a long and severe illness, and likewise began the study of law. Up to this time Jacob Grimm had been actuated only by a general thirst for knowledge and his energies had not found any aim beyond the practical one of making himself a position in life. The first definite impulse came from the lectures of Savigny, the celebrated investigator of Roman law, who, as Grimm himself says (in the preface to theDeutsche Grammatik), first taught him to realize what it meant to study any science. Savigny’s lectures also awakened in him that love for historical and antiquarian investigation which forms the basis of all his work. Then followed personal acquaintance, and it was in Savigny’s well-provided library that Grimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer’s edition of the Old German minnesingers and other early texts, and felt an eager desire to penetrate further into the obscurities and half-revealed mysteries of their language. In the beginning of 1805 he received an invitation from Savigny, who had removed to Paris, to help him in his literary work. Grimm passed a very happy time in Paris, strengthening his taste for the literatures of the middle ages by his studies in the Paris libraries. Towards the close of the year he returned to Cassel, where his mother and Wilhelm had settled, the latter having finished his studies. The next year he obtained a situation in the war office with the very small salary of 100 thalers. One of his grievances was that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail. But he had full leisure for the prosecution of his studies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonaparte, king of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Cassel had been incorporated by Napoleon. Jerome appointed him an auditor to the state council, while he retained his other post. His salary was increased in a short interval from 2000 to 4000 francs, and his official duties were hardly more than nominal. After the expulsion of Jerome and the reinstalment of an elector, Grimm was appointed in 1813 secretary of legation, to accompany the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the books carried off by the French, and in 1814-1815 he attended the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return he was again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. Meanwhile Wilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Völkel. On the death of Völkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be advanced to the first and second librarianships respectively, and were much dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel, keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Göttingen, where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian, Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on theGermaniaof Tacitus. At this period he is described as small and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the manuscript which most German professors rely on, and he spoke extempore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates written on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begun the work of teaching so late in life; and as a lecturer he was not successful: he had no idea of digesting his facts and suiting them to the comprehension of his hearers; and even the brilliant, terse and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost much of their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dry facts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the king of Hanover’s abrogation of the constitution established some years before, he was dismissed from his professorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover. He returned to Cassel together with his brother, who had also signed the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin, where they both received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any obligation to lecture, Jacob seldom did so, but together with his brother worked at the great dictionary. During their stay at Cassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy, where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The best known of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brother Wilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin of language. He also described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works.

Grimm died in 1863, working up to the last. He was never ill, and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He was not at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to be refreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrote for the press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder of his brother, “Wilhelm reads his manuscripts over again before sending them to press!” His temperament was uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany. The spirit which animated his work is best described by himself at the end of his autobiography. “Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.”

The purely scientific side of Grimm’s character developed slowly. He seems to have felt the want of definite principles of etymology without being able to discover them, and indeed even in the first edition of his grammar (1819) he seems to be often groping in the dark. As early as 1815 we find A. W. Schlegel reviewing theAltdeutsche Wälder(a periodical published by the two brothers) very severely, condemning the lawless etymological combinations it contained, and insisting on the necessity of strict philological method and a fundamental investigation of the laws of language, especially in the correspondence of sounds. This criticism is said to have had a considerable influence on the direction of Grimm’s studies.

The first work he published,Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang(1811), was of a purely literary character. Yet even in this essay Grimm showed thatMinnesangandMeistersangwere really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of theLiedinto three strophic parts.

His text-editions were mostly prepared in common with his brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient fragments of theHildebrandsliedand theWeissenbrunner Gebet, Jacob having discovered what till then had never been suspected—the alliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had little taste for text-editing, and, as he himself confessed, the evolving of acritical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classical philology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre. Both brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads or popular tales. They published in 1816-1818 an analysis and critical sifting of the oldest epic traditions of the Germanic races under the title ofDeutsche Sagen. At the same time they collected all the popular tales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people, partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812-1815 the first edition of thoseKinder- und Hausmärchenwhich have carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the civilized world, and founded the science of folk-lore. The closely allied subject of the satirical beast epic of the middle ages also had a great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published an edition of theReinhart Fuchsin 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs, undertaken conjointly with his brother, published in 1815, which, however, was not followed by any more. The first edition of hisDeutsche Mythologieappeared in 1835. This great work covers the whole range of the subject, tracing the mythology and superstitions of the old Teutons back to the very dawn of direct evidence, and following their decay and loss down to the popular traditions, tales and expressions in which they still linger.

Although by the introduction of the Code Napoléon into Westphalia Grimm’s legal studies were made practically barren, he never lost his interest in the scientific study of law and national institutions, as the truest exponents of the life and character of a people. By the publication (in 1828) of hisRechtsalterthümerhe laid the foundations of that historical study of the old Teutonic laws and constitutions which was continued with brilliant success by Georg L. Maurer and others. In this work Grimm showed the importance of a linguistic study of the old laws, and the light that can be thrown on many a dark passage in them by a comparison of the corresponding words and expressions in the other old cognate dialects. He also knew how—and this is perhaps the most original and valuable part of his work—to trace the spirit of the laws in countless allusions and sayings which occur in the old poems and sagas, or even survive in modern colloquialisms.

Of all his more general works the boldest and most far-reaching is hisGeschichte der deutschen Sprache, where at the same time the linguistic element is most distinctly brought forward. The subject of the work is, indeed, nothing less than the history which lies hidden in the words of the German language—the oldest national history of the Teutonic tribes determined by means of language. For this purpose he laboriously collects the scattered words and allusions to be found in classical writers, and endeavours to determine the relations in which the German language stood to those of the Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and many other nations whose languages are known only by doubtfully identified, often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek and Latin authors. Grimm’s results have been greatly modified by the wider range of comparison and improved methods of investigation which now characterize linguistic science, and many of the questions raised by him will probably for ever remain obscure; but his book will always be one of the most fruitful and suggestive that have ever been written.

Grimm’s famousDeutsche Grammatikwas the outcome of his purely philological work. The labours of past generations—from the humanists onwards—had collected an enormous mass of materials in the shape of text-editions, dictionaries and grammars, although most of it was uncritical and often untrustworthy. Something had even been done in the way of comparison and the determination of general laws, and the conception of a comparative Teutonic grammar had been clearly grasped by the illustrious Englishman George Hickes, at the beginning of the 18th century, and partly carried out by him in hisThesaurus. Ten Kate in Holland had afterwards made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of the Teutonic languages. Even Grimm himself did not at first intend to include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothic, that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of the Low German dialects, including English, and that the rich literature of Scandinavia could as little be ignored. The first edition of the first part of theGrammar, which appeared in 1819, and is now extremely rare, treated of the inflections of all these languages, together with a general introduction, in which he vindicated the importance of an historical study of the German language against the a priori, quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.

In 1822 this volume appeared in a second edition—really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, it cost him little reflection to mow down the first crop to the ground. The wide distance between the two stages of Grimm’s development in these two editions is significantly shown by the fact that while the first edition gives only the inflections, in the second volume phonology takes up no fewer than 600 pages, more than half of the whole volume. Grimm had, at last, awakened to the full conviction that all sound philology must be based on rigorous adhesion to the laws of sound-change, and he never afterwards swerved from this principle, which gave to all his investigations, even in their boldest flights, that iron-bound consistency, and that force of conviction which distinguish science from dilettanteism; up to Grimm’s time philology was nothing but a more or less laborious and conscientious dilettanteism, with occasional flashes of scientific inspiration; he made it into a science. His advance must be attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporary R. Rask. Rask was born two years later than Grimm, but his remarkable precocity gave him somewhat the start. Even in Grimm’s first editions his Icelandic paradigms are based entirely on Rask’s grammar, and in his second edition he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing his treatment of Old English in the two editions; the difference is very great. Thus in the first edition he declinesdæg,dæges, pluraldægas, not having observed the law of vowel-change pointed out by Rask. There can be little doubt that the appearance of Rask’s Old English grammar was a main inducement for him to recast his work from the beginning. To Rask also belongs the merit of having first distinctly formulated the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages, especially in the vowels, those more fleeting elements of speech which had hitherto been ignored by etymologists.

This leads to a question which has been the subject of much controversy,—Who discovered what is known asGrimm’s law? This law of the correspondence of consonants in the older Indo-germanic, Low and High German languages respectively was first fully stated by Grimm in the second edition of the first part of his grammar. The correspondence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors; but the one who came nearest to the discovery of the complete law was the Swede J. Ihre, who established a considerable number of “literarum permutationes,” such asbforf, with the examplesbæra = ferre,befwer = fiber. Rask, in his essay on the origin of the Icelandic language, gives the same comparisons, with a few additions and corrections, and even the very same examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to his first edition expressly mentions this essay of Rask, there is every probability that it gave the first impulse to his own investigations. But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutations of his predecessors and the comprehensive generalizations under which he himself ranged them. The extension of the law to High German is also entirely his own. The only fact that can be adduced in support of the assertion that Grimm wished to deprive Rask of his claims to priority is that he does not expressly mention Rask’s results in his second edition. But this is part of the plan of his work, viz. to refrain from all controversy or reference to the works of others. In his first edition he expressly calls attention to Rask’s essay, and praises it most ungrudgingly. Rask himself refers as little to Ihre, merely alluding in a general way to Ihre’s permutations, although his own debt to Ihre is infinitely greater than that of Grimm toRask or any one else. It is true that a certain bitterness of feeling afterwards sprang up between Grimm and Rask, but this was the fault of the latter, who, impatient of contradiction and irritable in controversy, refused to acknowledge the value of Grimm’s views when they involved modification of his own. The importance of Grimm’s generalization in the history of philology cannot be overestimated, and even the mystic completeness and symmetry of its formulation, although it has proved a hindrance to the correct explanation of the causes of the changes, was well calculated to strike the popular mind, and give it a vivid idea of the paramount importance of law, and the necessity of disregarding mere superficial resemblance. The most lawless etymologist bows down to the authority of Grimm’s law, even if he honours it almost as much in the breach as in the observance.

The grammar was continued in three volumes, treating principally of derivation, composition and syntax, which last was left unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of which only one part, comprising the vowels, appeared in 1840, his time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. The grammar stands alone in the annals of science for comprehensiveness, method and fullness of detail. Every law, every letter, every syllable of inflection in the different languages is illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of material. It has served as a model for all succeeding investigators. Diez’s grammar of the Romance languages is founded entirely on its methods, which have also exerted a profound influence on the wider study of the Indo-Germanic languages in general.

In the great German dictionary Grimm undertook a task for which he was hardly suited. His exclusively historical tendencies made it impossible for him to do justice to the individuality of a living language; and the disconnected statement of the facts of language in an ordinary alphabetical dictionary fatally mars its scientific character. It was also undertaken on so large a scale as to make it impossible for him and his brother to complete it themselves. The dictionary, as far as it was worked out by Grimm himself, may be described as a collection of disconnected antiquarian essays of high value.

Grimm’s scientific character is notable for its combination of breadth and unity. He was as far removed from the narrowness of the specialist who has no ideas, no sympathies beyond some one author, period or corner of science, as from the shallow dabbler who feverishly attempts to master the details of half-a-dozen discordant pursuits. Even within his own special studies there is the same wise concentration; no Mezzofanti-like parrot display of useless polyglottism. The very foundations of his nature were harmonious; his patriotism and love of historical investigation received their fullest satisfaction in the study of the language, traditions, mythology, laws and literature of his own countrymen and their nearest kindred. But from this centre his investigations were pursued in every direction as far as his unerring instinct of healthy limitation would allow. He was equally fortunate in the harmony that subsisted between his intellectual and moral nature. He made cheerfully the heavy sacrifices that science demands from its disciples, without feeling any of that envy and bitterness which often torment weaker natures; and although he lived apart from his fellow men, he was full of human sympathies, and no man has ever exercised a profounder influence on the destinies of mankind. His was the very ideal of the noblest type of German character.

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