Still another and the latest meaning has been applied to realism; it

stands for the systematic treatment of the lower ranks of life, and

commonplace men and things. According to this definition, the works

in which labourers, peasants, petty bourgeois, etc., appear, would

be realistic, and those in which gods, heroes, kings, etc., take

part, idealistic. Louis XIV., according to the well-known anecdote

when Teniers’ tavern-scenes were exhibited before him, let fall

the indignant and disdainful comment, ‘Take away these grotesque

things!’ He would not have condemned an artistic method and manner

of representation, but the baseness of the subject only would have

offended his Olympian eye. This explanation of the term ‘realism’ is

a little more comprehensible than the others; but I have no need to

show how grossly external and how philosophically and æsthetically

worthless it is. We have seen, in fact, above, how the simplest

feelings and ideas of peasants may be attributed to gods and to

kings; and, conversely, there is no lack of works in which a royal

crown or a saintly halo hovers invisibly over the heads of human

beings in the lowest social position. In Gregory Samarow’s novels,

emperors and kings disport themselves who feel, think, and speak like

the commercial travellers of a third-rate wine business; in Berthold

Auerbach’s village stories we see peasants who in heart and head are

of the highest nobility, sometimes even semi-divine. The one kind is

as unreal as the other, only in the first we discern the craft of

the sensation-monger, in the second there speaks to us the refined

and tender-souled poet. In _The Mill on the Floss_, by George Eliot,

we find a farm-servant, Luke, and a miller’s daughter, Maggie, who

would do honour to any Pantheon in the grandeur of their character and

morals; in Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ we are shown a Marquis of Steyne,

very magnificent and very proud, and another such, Earl Bareacres,

with neither of whom would any decent man shake hands. Those are as

true as these; but whereas the former betray the heart of a poet full

of love and pity, the latter reveal the soul of an artist overflowing

with bitterness and wrath. Which, now, is noble--the emperors and

kings of Samarow or the Black Forest peasants of Auerbach? Which is

plebeian--the farming men of George Eliot or the powerful English peers

of Thackeray? And which of these works must be qualified as realistic,

which as idealistic, if realism signifies being occupied with inferior

persons and conditions, idealism with those that are superior?

Hence to serious investigation, which does not stop at the mere jingle

of words, the expressions ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ convey no meaning.

We will now see what the partisans of M. Emile Zola give out as his

originality, in what he himself claims to be a model and a pioneer, and

how he justifies his pretension of impersonating a totally new epoch in

the history of literature.

M. Zola’s disciples boast of his art of description and his

‘impressionism.’ I make a great difference between the two. Description

endeavours to seize upon the characteristic features of the phenomenon

by all the senses at once, and convey them in words; impressionism

shows the conscious state of a person receiving impressions in the

domain of one sense only, seeing things only, hearing them only,

feeling them only, etc. Description is the work of a brain which

comprehends the things it perceives in their connection and their

essence; impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the

phenomenon only the sensuous elements--and by a one-sided aspect--of

knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer recognises in a

tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this concept includes. The

impressionist sees before him merely a mass of colour composed of

spots of different greens, on which the sun flashes here and there

points and rays of light. Description for its own sake, as well as

impressionism, are, in poetry, an æsthetic and psychological error,

as will be demonstrated as briefly as possible; but even this error

was not invented by M. Zola, for long before him the romanticists,

and Théophile Gautier particularly, cultivated the broad style of

description, inorganically interpolated into literary composition; and,

on the subject of impressionism, the brothers De Goncourt showed M.

Zola the way.

The purely objective description of objects is science, when it is

worth anyone’s while to acquire of them as clear a representation

as may be communicated by words without the assistance of image or

number. Such description is simply child’s play and waste of time,

when no one is interested to pause and look at the things described,

either because they are too well known or because they are without

importance.[436] Finally, it rises into art while remaining of an

inferior species, when it chooses words so well that it follows the

most delicate peculiarities of the objects, and at the same time calls

out the emotions that the observer experiences during his observations,

_i.e._, when the words employed have not only the value of a just

portrayal of sensuously perceptible properties, but have an emotional

colouring, and appear accompanied by images and metaphors. We may

cite as examples of art of portrayal all good descriptions of travel,

from the _Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent_,

by Alexander Humboldt, to _Sahara and Soudan_, by Nachtigal, _Im

Herzen Afrikas_, by Schweinfurth, or Edmond de Amicis’ books on

_Constantinople_, _Morocco_, _Spain_, _Holland_, etc. But these have

nothing in common with imaginative writing, which always has for its

object man, with his ideas and sentiments, not excepting fables of

animals, parables, allegories, fairy-tales, all the hybrid forms in

which the human element of all imagination appears disguised as an

anthropomorphism applied to animals, and even to inanimate objects. The

material frame, the scene and surrounding, have no importance in an

imaginative work, except in so far as they affect the person or persons

of whom it treats. The imaginative writer may be regarded either as a

spectator who narrates human events as they develop before his eyes,

or as an actor in these events, which he looks upon and feels with the

consciousness of one of the personages concerned. In both cases he can

naturally only perceive in the material surroundings whatever plays a

part in the events themselves. If he is a spectator, he will certainly

not let his eyes wander over the field of vision indifferently, but

will pause before a scene which attracts his attention, and for which

he seeks to arouse our interest. If he has himself adopted the disguise

of one of the actors, he will be even more completely absorbed by the

human events in which he himself co-operates, and will preserve still

less any inclination to stroll indifferently by the side of scenes

which have nothing to do with his given state of mind, and divert him

from acts and feelings with which he is preoccupied at the moment.

Hence an imaginative work which is true to human nature will only

contain descriptions of such material surroundings as a spectator

(absorbed in the actual events which form the subject of the work, or

as one of its actors) is in a state to perceive, _i.e._, only what

is directly connected with the events. If the description includes

extraneous matter, it is psychologically false; it disturbs moods,

interrupts events, diverts the attention from what ought to be the

essential point in the work of art, and transforms the latter into a

patchwork; showing signs that its author lacked artistic earnestness,

that the work is not born from the need to give poetic expression to a

genuine emotion.

A very much worse error than desultory, cold-blooded description

in imaginative writing is impressionism. In painting it has its

authorization. The latter reproduces the impressions of the visual

senses, and the painter is within the limits of his art when he

presents his purely optical perceptions without composing, or without

relating a story, _i.e._, without introducing any idea into the scene

he reproduces, without combining any activity of his highest centres of

ideation with the activity of the centres of perception. The picture

produced according to this method will be very inferior from an

æsthetic point of view, but it will be a picture, and can be defended

as such. Poetical impressionism, on the other hand, is a complete

misconception of the essence of imaginative work; it is the negation

and suppression of it. The medium of poetry is language. Now this is

an activity, not of the centres of perception, but of the centres of

ideation and judgment. The immediate phonetic reaction upon sensory

excitations is merely an exclamation. Without the co-operation of the

highest centres a perception cannot express itself phonetically except

by an ‘Ah!’ or an ‘Oh!’ But in the same ratio that the purely emotional

cry of an animal rises to the height of intelligible grammatically

articulated human speech, the purely sensuous perception rises also to

the height of concept and judgment, and it is psychologically quite

false so to depict the language of the external world as if it set free

only a sensation of colour or of sound, and provoked neither ideas,

concepts, nor judgments. Impressionism in literature is an example of

that atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature

in the mental life of degenerates. It carries back the human mind to

its brute-beginnings, and the artistic activity of its present high

differentiation to an embryonic state; that state in which all the arts

(which were later to emerge and diverge) lay side by side inchoate and

inseparate. Consider, as an example, these impressionist descriptions

by the brothers De Goncourt: ‘Above it a great cloud lowered, a heavy

mass of a sombre purple, a scud from the north.... This cloud rose and

ended in sharp rents against a brightness where pale green merged

into rose. Then the sky became dull, of the colour of tin, swept by

fragments of other gray clouds.... Beyond the softly-swaying pinetops,

under which the broad garden walk could be seen bare, leafless, red,

almost carmine, ... the eye took in the whole space between the dome

of the Salpétrière and the mass of the Observatory; first, a great

plane of shadow resembling a wash of Indian ink on a red ground, a

zone of warm bituminous tones, burnt with those frost-touched reds and

those wintry glows that are found on an English artist’s water-colour

palette; then, in the infinite delicacy of a degraded tint, a whitish

streak arose, a milky nacreous vapour, pierced by the bright tones of

new buildings.’ ‘The delicate tones of an old man’s complexion played

on the yellowish and bluish pink of his face. Through his tender,

wrinkled ears--ears of paper interwoven by filaments--the day in

passing became orange.’ ‘The air, streaked with water, had an over-wash

of that violet blue with which the painter imitates the transparency

of thick glass.... The first vivid smile of green began on the black

branches of the trees, where, like strokes from a brush, touches of

spring could be discerned leaving behind it light coatings of green

dust.’[437]

Such is the procedure of impressionism. The writer gives himself the

air of a painter; he professes to seize the phenomenon, not as a

concept, but to feel it as simple sense-stimulation. He writes down the

names of colours as an artist lays on his washes, and he imagines that

he has herewith given the reader a particularly strong impression of

reality. But it is a childish illusion, for the reader, nevertheless,

comes to see no colours, but merely words. He has to transform these

names of colours, like every other word, into images, and with the same

mental effort he would procure himself a much livelier impression if,

instead of heavily enumerating to him one after another of the optical

elements of the phenomenon, the phenomenon were presented to him ready

elaborated into a concept. M. Zola has borrowed this absurdity from

the De Goncourt brothers with some exactitude, but it was not he who

invented it.

Another of his originalities is said to be the observation and

reproduction of the _milieu_, the environment, human and material,

of the persons represented. Coming after the indulgence in useless

description, and after impressionism, the theory of the ‘milieu’

produces a most comical effect, since it is the exact contrary of

the psychological theory which forms the point of departure of

impressionism and of the mania for description. The impressionist

places himself over against some phenomenon as a mere sense, as

photographer or phonographist, etc. He registers the nerve-vibrations.

He denies himself all higher comprehension, the elaboration of

perceptions into concepts, and the classification of the concepts

in the experiences which, as general knowledge, pre-exist in his

consciousness. The theorist of the ‘milieu,’ on the contrary,

systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the phenomenon,

but to its causal connection; he is not a sense which perceives, but

a philosopher who endeavours to interpret and explain according to a

system. What, in fact, does the theory of the ‘milieu’ mean? It means

that the imaginative writer asserts that the individuality and mode

of conduct of any person are a consequence of the influences that his

environment, living or dead, exert upon him, and that he is trying

to discover these influences, and the nature of their action on that

person. The theory in itself is right, but, again, it is not M. Zola

who invented it, for it is as old as philosophic thought itself. In

our own times, Taine has distinctly conceived and established it,

and, long before M. Zola, Balzac and Flaubert sought to introduce its

operation into their novels. And yet this theory, extremely fertile as

it is in anthropology and sociology, and giving, as it does, an impulse

to meritorious research, is in imaginative writing but another error,

and constitutes a confusion of kinds engendered by vague thought. The

task of the man of science is to investigate the causes of phenomena.

Sometimes he finds them, frequently he does not; often he believes he

has discovered them, till more exact observation subsequently tells

him he has deceived himself and must rectify his hypotheses. The

investigation of the conditions under which man acquires his various

physical and mental qualities is in full progress, but is only at its

commencement, and has as yet furnished extremely few positive facts.

We do not even know why one human race is tall or another short in

stature; why this one has blue eyes and fair hair, that one dark

eyes and hair; and yet these are incomparably simpler, more external

and more accessible properties than the subtle peculiarities of mind

and character. On the causes of these peculiarities we know nothing

definite. We can make conjectures on this subject, but, meanwhile, even

the most plausible of these have still the character of hypotheses, of

probable, but not of verified, truth. And here the imaginative writer

would like to come upon the scene, carry off unfinished scientific

hypotheses, complete them by means of his own fantastic conceits,

and teach: ‘Do you see? this man whom I show you has become what he

is because his parents have had such and such attributes, because he

has lived here or there, because when a child he received such and

such impressions, because he has been thus nurtured, thus educated,

has had such and such intercourse, etc.’ He is here doing what is

not his office. Instead of an artistic creation he attempts to give

us science, and he gives us false science, since he has no suspicion

of the influences which really form the man, and the details of the

‘milieu’ which he throws into relief as being the causes of individual

peculiarities are probably the least essential, and, in any case, only

a minimum portion of what, in the formation of the personality, has

played a really determining part. Think of it for a moment. The one

question as to the origin of the criminal has produced in these last

twenty years thousands of books and pamphlets; hundreds of medical men,

jurists, economists, and philosophers of the first rank, have devoted

to it the most profound and assiduous research, and we are still far

from being able to indicate with certainty what share heredity, social

influences (_i.e._, the ‘milieu,’ properly so called) and unknown

biological peculiarities of the individual, have in the formation of

the criminal type. And then there comes a wholly ignorant writer,

who, quite by himself, with the sovereign infallibility claimed for

himself by the author in his own province, decides a question which

the combined ten years’ labour of a whole generation of professional

investigators has brought but very little nearer to a solution! This is

an audacity only explicable by this fact, that the writer has not the

very smallest idea of the weight of the task which he undertakes with

so light a heart.

If, in spite of this, Balzac and Flaubert seem to have produced

excellent works with this theory of the ‘milieu,’ it is an optical

illusion. They have devoted great attention and detailed descriptions

to the environment of their characters (especially Flaubert in _Madame

Bovary_), and the superficial reader thereby receives the impression

that there exists a connection of causality between the environment

and the being and doing of the personages, it being one of the most

elementary and tenacious peculiarities of human thought to link

causally one with another all phenomena which present themselves

simultaneously or successively. This peculiarity is one of the most

fruitful sources of defective conclusions, and it cannot be overcome

except by the most attentive observation, often even only with the help

of experiment. In the novels of Balzac and Flaubert, where the ‘milieu’

plays so great a part, the ‘milieu,’ in fact, explains nothing. For the

personages who move in the same ‘milieu’ are, notwithstanding, wholly

different. Everyone reacts on the influences of the ‘milieu’ in his

own particular way. This distinctive character must be the datum, it

cannot be the result, of the ‘milieu.’ The latter has, at most, the

significance of an immediate proximate cause, but the most remote

causes of the effect in question are found in the distinctive character

of the personality, and on the latter, the ‘milieu’ that the poet

depicts gives us no real enlightenment.

On the pretension of M. Zola and his partisans, that his novels

are ‘slices from real life’ (_tranches de vie_), it is useless to

linger. We have seen above that M. Zola is far from being capable

of transcribing in his novels life as real and as a whole. Like all

the imaginative writers before him, he also makes a choice; from a

million thoughts of his personages, he reproduces one only; from

ten thousand functions and actions, one only; from years of their

life, some minutes, or merely seconds; his supposed ‘slice from

life’ is a condensed and rearranged conspectus of life, artificially

ordered according to a definite design, and full of gaps. Like all

other imaginative writers, he also makes his choice according to his

particular personal inclinations, and the only difference is that these

inclinations, which we shall at once recognise, are very dissimilar

from those of other writers.

M. Zola calls his novels ‘human documents’ and ‘experimental novels.’

I have already, thirteen years ago, expressed myself so fully on this

double pretension, that I have now nothing more to add to what I

said then. Does he think that his novels are serious documents from

which science can borrow facts? What childish folly! Science can have

nothing to do with fiction. She has no need of invented persons and

actions, however _ben trovati_ they may be; but she wants beings who

have lived, and actions which have taken place. The novel treats of

individual destinies, or at most those of families; science has need

of information on the destinies of millions. Police reports, lists

of imposts, tables of commerce, statistics of crimes and suicides,

information on the prices of provisions, salaries, the mean duration

of human life, the marriage rate, the birth rate, legitimate and

illegitimate--these are ‘human documents.’ From them we learn how

people live, whether they progress, whether they are happy or unhappy,

pure or corrupt. The history of civilization, when it wants facts,

puts M. Zola’s entertaining novels aside as of no account, and has

recourse to tedious statistical tables. And a very much more singular

whim still is his ‘experimental novel.’ This term would prove that M.

Zola, if he employs it in good faith, does not even suspect the nature

of scientific experiment. He thinks he has made an experiment when he

invents neuropathic personages, places them in imaginary conditions,

and makes them perform imaginary actions. A scientific experiment is

an intelligent question addressed to Nature, and to which Nature must

reply, and not the questioner himself. M. Zola also puts questions.

But to whom? To Nature? No; to his own imagination. And his answers

are to have the force of proof. The result of scientific experiment is

constraining. Every man in possession of his senses can perceive it.

The results at which M. Zola arrives in his pretended ‘experiment’ do

not exist objectively; they exist only in his imagination; they are

not facts, but assertions, in which every man can believe, or not, at

his pleasure. The difference between experiments, and what M. Zola

calls such, is so great that it is difficult for me to impute the

abusive application of the term to ignorance only, or to incapacity

for thought. I believe rather in a conscious premeditated snare. The

appearance of M. Zola occurred at a time when mysticism was not yet the

fashion in France, and when the favourite catch-words of the writing

and gossiping gang were positivism and natural science. In order to

recommend himself to the masses, a man had to represent himself as a

positivist and as scientific. Grocers, hotel-keepers, small inventors,

etc., have everywhere and always the habit of decorating their

sign-boards or their produce with a name which is connected with an

idea dominant with the public. At the present day a hotel-keeper or

a tradesman recommends his house or his shop by such titles as ‘The

Progress’ or ‘International Commerce;’ and a manufacturer extols his

goods as ‘Electric’ braces or ‘Magnetic’ ink. We have seen that the

Nietzscheans designate their tendency as ‘psycho-physiological.’ In

the same way Zola long before them hung out the catch-word sign to his

novels--‘Y^e scientificke experimente.’ But his novels had no more

visible connection with natural science and experiment than the ink

above mentioned with magnetism, and the braces with electricity.

M. Zola boasts of his method of work; all his books emanate from

‘observation.’ The truth is that he has never ‘observed;’ that he has

never, following Goethe, ‘plunged into the full tide of human life,’

but has always remained shut up in a world of paper, and has drawn

all his subjects out of his own brain, all his ‘realistic’ details

from newspapers and books read uncritically. I need only recall a few

cases in which his sources have been placed within his reach. All the

information on the life, manners, habits, and language of the Parisian

workmen in _L’Assommoir_ are borrowed from a study by M. Denis Poulot,

_Le Sublime_. The adventure of _Une Page d’Amour_ is taken from the

_Mémoires de Casanova_. Certain features in which the masochism or

passivism of Count Muffat is declared in _Nana_, M. Zola found in a

quotation from Taine relative to the _Venice Preserved_ of Thomas

Otway.[438] The scene of the confinement, in _La Joie de Vivre_, the

description of the Mass, in _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_, etc., are

copied word for word from an obstetric manual and a Mass-book. One

reads sometimes in the newspapers very pretentious statements of the

‘studies’ to which M. Zola gives himself up when he undertakes a new

novel. These ‘studies’ consist, on his part, in making a visit to the

Bourse when he wishes to write on speculation, in undertaking a trip

on a locomotive when he desires to describe the working of a railway,

in once casting a glance round some available bedroom when he means

to depict the mode of life of the Parisian _cocottes_. Such a manner

of ‘observation’ resembles that of a traveller who passes through a

country in an express train. He may perceive some external details, he

may notice some scenes and arrange them later in descriptions rich in

colour, if wholly inaccurate; but he learns nothing of the real and

essential peculiarities of the country, and the life and ways of its

inhabitants. Like all degenerates, M. Zola, too, is a complete stranger

to the world in which he lives. His eyes are never directed towards

nature or humanity, but only to his own ‘Ego.’ He has no first-hand

knowledge of anything, but acquires, by second or third hand, all that

he knows of the world or life. Flaubert has created, in _Bouvard et

Pécuchet_, the characters of two blockheads, who, with unsuspecting

ingenuousness, attack all the arts and sciences, and imagine they have

acquired them when they have dipped into, or, more correctly, have

skimmed through, the first book on the subject which falls into their

hands. Zola is an ‘observer’ of the Bouvard et Pécuchet species, and on

reading Flaubert’s posthumous novel one is tempted to believe in places

that when describing the ‘studies’ of his heroes he was thinking, at

least amongst others, of Zola.

I think I have shown that M. Zola has not the priority in any one of

the peculiarities which constitute his method. For all of them he

has had models, and some few are as old as the world. The supposed

realism, mania for description, impressionism, the emphasis on the

‘milieu,’ the human document, the slices of life--all these are so many

æsthetic and psychological errors, but Zola has not even the doubtful

merit of having conceived them. The only thing he has invented is the

word ‘naturalism,’ substituted by him for ‘realism’ (the sole term

in vogue till then), and the expression ‘experimental novel,’ which

means absolutely nothing, but possesses a piquant little smattering of

science which Zola’s public, at the period when this novelist made his

appearance, felt as an agreeable seasoning.

The only real and true things contained in M. Zola’s novels are the

little traits borrowed by him from the items of news in the daily

papers and from technical works. But these also become false from the

lack of criticism and taste with which he employs them. In fact, in

order that the borrowed detail should remain faithful to reality, it

must preserve its right relation to the whole phenomenon, and this

is what never happens with M. Zola. To quote only two examples. In

_Pot-Bouille_, among the inhabitants of a single house in the Rue

de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the space of a few months all the

infamous things he has learnt in the course of thirty years, by reports

from his acquaintances, by cases in courts of law, and various facts

from newspapers about apparently honourable bourgeois families; in

_La Terre_, all the vices imputed to the French peasantry or rustic

people in general, he crams into the character and conduct of a few

inhabitants of a small village in Beauce; he may in these cases have

supported every detail by cuttings from newspapers or jottings, but the

whole is not the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue.

The self-styled innovator who, it is asserted, has invented hitherto

unknown methods of construction and exposition in the province of the

novel, is in reality a pupil of the French romanticists, from whom he

has appropriated and employed all the tricks of the trade, and whose

tradition he carries on, walking in the straight road of historical

continuity, without interruption and without deviation. This is what

is most clearly proved by the descriptions, which reflect not the

world, but the view that the poet is capable of taking of the world. I

will quote, for the sake of comparison, some characteristic passages

from _Notre Dame de Paris_, by Victor Hugo, and from different novels

by Zola, which will show the reader that both could be very easily

confounded, the self-styled inventor of ‘naturalism’ and the extreme

romanticist. ‘The broom ransacked the corners with an irritated

growling.’ ‘The Kyrie Eleison ran like a shiver into this kind of

stable.’ ‘The pulpit ... stood in front of a clock with weights,

enclosed in a walnut wood case, and the hollow vibrations of which

shook the whole church, like the beatings of an enormous heart,

hidden somewhere beneath the flag-stones.’ ‘The rays [of the sun],

more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the

square, and mount perpendicularly along the gabled front, making its

thousand bas-reliefs spring out from their shadow, while the great

central rose-window blazes like a Cyclop’s eye inflamed by the glow

of the forge.’ ‘When the priest ... quitted the altar ... the sun

remained sole master of the church. It had rested in its turn on the

altar cloth, illuminated the door of the tabernacle with splendour,

celebrating the fruitful promise of May. A warmth arose from the

flag-stones. The whitewashed walls, the great Virgin, the great Christ

himself, took on a shiver of vital sap [!], as if death had been

vanquished by the eternal youth of the earth.’ ‘In a crevice of this

spout two pretty gilliflowers in blossom, shaken and animated by the

breath of the air, made sportive salutations to each other.’ ‘At one of

the windows a great service-tree reared itself, throwing its branches

across the broken panes, extending its shoots as if to look within.’

‘Towards the east, the morning breeze chased some white flocks of

down across the sky, torn from the foggy fleece of the hills.’ ‘The

closed windows slept. Some few, here and there, brightly lit, opened

their eyes, and seemed to make certain corners squint.’ ‘Already some

whiffs of smoke were disgorged here and there over all that surface of

roofs, as by the fissures of an immense sulphur-kiln.’ ‘A miserable

guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed, which seems always afraid of

being caught _in flagrante delicto_, so quickly does it disappear after

having given its blow.’ ‘The alembic went on dully, without a flame, or

any gaiety in the extinct reflexions of its coppers, letting flow its

alcoholic sweat, like a slow and obstinate spring, which should end by

invading the rooms, spreading over the boulevards without inundating

the immense hollow of Paris.’ ‘At the barrier, the herd-like trampling

went on in the cold of the morning.... This crowd, from a distance, was

a chalky blur, a neutral tone, in which a faded blue and dirty gray

predominated. Occasionally, a workman stopped short ... while around

him the others walked on, without a smile, without a word to a comrade,

with cadaverous cheeks, faces turned towards Paris, which, one by one,

devoured them by the gaping street of the Faubourg Poissonnière.’ ‘And

then, as he dived farther into the street, legless cripples, blind

and lame men multiplied around him; the one-armed and the one-eyed,

and the lepers with their wounds, some coming from the houses, some

from the adjacent small streets, some from the air-holes of cellars,

howling, bellowing, screaming, all limpingly, lamely, rushing towards

the light, and wallowing in the mire like snails after rain.’ ‘The

square ... presented ... the appearance of a sea, in which five or six

streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged new waves of heads

at every instant.... The great stairs, ascended and descended without

intermission by a double stream ... flowed incessantly into the square,

like a cascade into a lake.’ ‘The flickering brightness of the flames

made them appear to move. There were serpents which had the appearance

of laughing, gargoyles that one seemed to hear yelping, salamanders

which breathed in the fire, dragons which sneezed in the smoke.’ ‘And

the steam-engine, ten paces off, went on steadily breathing, steadily

spitting from its scorched metal throat.’ ‘These were no longer the

cold windows of the morning; now they appeared as if warmed and

vibrating with internal tremor. There were people looking at them,

women, standing still, squeezing against the plate-glass, quite a crowd

brutalized by covetousness. And the stuffs seemed alive in this passion

of the pavement: the laces shivered, fell back and hid the depths of

the shop, with a disquieting air of mystery.’ It would be easy to

extend these comparisons to some hundreds of pages. I have indulged in

the little joke of not adding the author’s name to the passages quoted.

By the nature of the object described the specially attentive reader

will perhaps be able to guess in one or another of these quotations,

whether they are from Victor Hugo or from Emile Zola; I have tried to

facilitate the matter by borrowing the passages by Victor Hugo from the

_Notre Dame de Paris_ alone; but the greatest number he will certainly

not know to whom to attribute until I tell him that examples three,

five, seven, nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, are from

Victor Hugo, and all the others from Zola.

This is because the latter is an out-and-out romanticist in his way

of envisaging the world and in his artistic method. He constantly

practises in the most extensive and intensive fashion that atavistic

anthropomorphism and symbolism, consequent on undeveloped or mystically

confused thought, which is found among savages in a natural form, and

among the whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental

activity. Like Victor Hugo, and like second-class romanticists, M. Zola

sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and weirdly distorted. It

becomes for him, as for the savage, a fetish to which he attributes

evil and hostile designs. Machines are horrible monsters dreaming of

destruction; the streets of Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour

the human masses; a _magasin de modes_ is an alarming, supernaturally

powerful being, panting, fascinating, stifling, etc. Criticism has

long since declared, though without comprehending the psychiatrical

significance of this trait, that in every one of M. Zola’s novels

some phenomenon dominates, like an obsession, forms the main feature

of the work, and penetrates, like an appalling symbol, into the

life and actions of all the characters. Thus, in _L’Assommoir_, the

still; in _Pot-Bouille_, the ‘solemn staircase’; in _Au Bonheur des

Dames_, the draper’s shop; in _Nana_, the heroine herself, who is

no ordinary harlot, but ‘_je ne sais quel monstre géant à la croupe

gonflée de vices, une enorme Vénus populaire, aussi lourdement bête

que grossièrement impudique, une espèce d’idole hindoue qui n’a

seulement qu’à laisser tomber ses voiles pour faire tomber en arrêt

les vieillards et les collégiens, et qui, par instants, se sent

elle-même planer sur Paris et sur le monde_.’[439] This symbolism we

have encountered among all degenerates, among symbolists properly so

called, and other mystics, as well as among diabolists, and principally

in Ibsen. It never fails in the madness of doubt or negation.[440]

The would-be ‘realist’ sees the sober reality as little as a

superstitiously timid savage, or a lunatic afflicted by hallucinations.

He puts into it his own mental dispositions. He disposes of phenomena

arbitrarily, so that they appear to express an idea which is

dominating him. He gives to inanimate objects a fantastic life, and

metamorphoses them into so many goblins endowed with feeling, will,

cunning and ideas; but of human beings he makes automata through whom

a mysterious power declares itself, a fatality in the ancient sense, a

force of Nature, a principle of destruction. His endless descriptions

delineate nothing but his own mental condition. No image of reality

is ever obtained by them, for the picture of the world is to him like

a freshly varnished oil-painting to which one stands too close in a

disadvantageous light, and in which the reflection of one’s own face

may be discerned.

M. Zola calls his series of novels ‘The Natural and Social History

of a Family under the Second Empire,’ and he seeks in this way to

awaken the double idea that the Rougon-Macquarts are a typical average

family of the French middle class, and that their history represents

the general social life of France in the time of Napoleon III. He

expressly asserts, as the fundamental principle of art, that the

novelist should only relate the everyday life observed by himself.[441]

I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led astray by his swagger,

and credulously accepted his novels as sociological contributions to

the knowledge of French life. Now I know better. The family whose

history Zola presents to us in twenty mighty volumes is entirely

outside normal daily life, and has no necessary connection whatever

with France and the Second Empire. It might just as well have lived in

Patagonia, and at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. He who ridicules

the ‘idealists’ as being narrators of ‘exceptional cases,’ of that

which ‘never happened,’ has chosen for the subject of his _magnum opus_

the most exceptional case he could possibly have found--a group of

degenerates, lunatics, criminals, prostitutes, and ‘mattoids,’ whose

morbid nature places them apart from the species; who do not belong

to a regular society, but are expelled from it, and at strife with

it; who conduct themselves as complete strangers to their epoch and

country, and are, by their manner of existence, not members of any

modern civilized people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive

wild men of bygone ages. M. Zola affirms that he describes life as

he has observed it, and persons he has seen. He has in reality seen

nothing and observed nothing, but has drawn the idea of his _magnum

opus_, all the details of his plan, all the characters of his twenty

novels, solely from one printed source, remaining hitherto unknown

to all his critics, a characteristic circumstance due to the fact

that not one of them possesses the least knowledge of the literature

of mental therapeutics. There is in France a family of the name of

Kérangal, who came originally from Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany, and whose

history has for the last sixty years filled the annals of criminal

justice and mental therapeutics. In two generations it has hitherto

produced, to the knowledge of the authorities, seven murderers and

murderesses, nine persons who have led an immoral life (one the keeper

of a disorderly house, one a prostitute who was at the same time an

incendiary, committed incest, and was condemned for a public outrage on

modesty, etc.), and besides all these, a painter, a poet, an architect,

an actress, several who were blind, and one musician.[442] The history

of this Kérangal family has supplied M. Zola with material for all

his novels. What would never have been afforded him in the life he

really knows he found ready to his hand in the police and medical

reports on the Kérangals, viz., an abundant assortment of the most

execrable crimes, the most unheard-of adventures, and the maddest and

most disordered careers, permeated by artistic inclinations which make

the whole particularly piquant. If any common fabricator of newspaper

novels had had the luck to discover the treasure he would probably

have made a hash of the subject. M. Zola, with his great power and his

sombre emotionalism, has known how to profit very effectively by it.

Nevertheless, the subject he broaches is the _roman du colportage_,

_i.e._, of a perishing romanticism which transports his dreams into

no palaces like the flourishing romanticism, but into dens, prisons,

and lunatic asylums, which are quite as far from the middle stratum

of sane life as the latter, only in an opposite direction, tending

not upwards, but downwards. But if M. Zola has infinitely more talent

than the German romanticists, to whom we owe such works as _Rinaldo

Rinaldini_, _Die blutige Nonne um Mitternacht_, _Der Scharfrichter

vom Schreckenstein_, etc., he has, on the other hand, infinitely less

honesty than they. For they, at least, admit that they relate the most

marvellous and unique horrors of their kind, while Zola issues his

chronicles of criminals and madmen, the fruits of his reading, as a

normal account of French society, drawn from the observation of daily

life.

By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraordinary

and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbolism and

anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal survey of the world,

the ‘realist’ Zola proves himself to be the immediate descendant in

a direct line of the romanticists. His works are distinguished from

those of his literary ancestors by only two peculiarities, which M.

Brunetière has well discerned, viz., by ‘pessimism and premeditated

coarseness.’[443] These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally

with a characteristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism,

which we should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological,

æsthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which has

nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all, the

premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity.

Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the superstition of

primitive times, which looked upon man as the centre and end of the

universe. It is one of the philosophic forms of ego-mania. All the

objections of pessimist philosophers to Nature and life have but one

meaning, if their premise be correct as to the sovereignty of man in

the Cosmos. When the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is

immoral, Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but: I do not

understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may understand her;

Nature does not consider what is for my utility alone, and yet she has

no other task than to be useful to me; Nature grants me but a short

period of existence, often crossed by troubles, and yet it is her duty

to make provision for the eternity of my life and my continual joys?

When Oscar Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between

himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But have

Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainländer, Bahnsen, done anything more than

inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde’s ingenuous self-conceit? and that

with terrible seriousness. Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric

conception of the world as its postulate. It stands and falls with

the Ptolemaic doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Copernican point

of view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature the

measure of our logic, our morals, and our own advantage, and there

ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational, immoral, or cruel.

But what is also true is that pessimism is not a philosophy, but a

temperament. ‘The systemic or organic sensations which arise from the

simultaneous states of the several organs, digestive, respiratory,

etc.,’ says Professor James Sully, ‘appear, as Professor Ferrier

has lately pointed out, to be the basis of our emotional life. When

the condition of these organs is a healthy one, and their functions

vigorous, the psychical result is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable

feeling. When the state of the organs is unhealthy, and their

functions feeble or impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of

disagreeable feeling.’[444] Pessimism is always the form under which

the patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and first

and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. _Tædium vitæ_, or disgust of

life, is an early premonition of insanity, and constantly accompanies

neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident that a period which suffers

from general organic fatigue must necessarily be a pessimistic period.

We recognise also the constant habit which consciousness has of

inventing, _post facto_, apparently plausible motives, borrowed from

its store of representations, and in conformity with the rules of its

formal logic, to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired

the knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition

of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there arises

the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of interpretative

consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with the speculative tendency

and high intellectual culture of the German people, this state of

mind has sought expression in philosophical systems. In France it has

adopted an artistic form in accordance with the predominating æsthetic

character of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are

the French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philosophical

pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in the world but

brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption, corresponds with all

that we know of the laws of thought. We know that the association

of ideas is strongly influenced by emotion. A Zola, filled from the

outset with organically unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world

those phenomena alone which accord with his organically fundamental

disposition, and does not notice or take into consideration those which

differ from or contradict it. And from the associated ideas which

every perception awakens in him, consciousness likewise only retains

the disagreeable, which are in sympathy with the fundamentally sour

disposition, and suppresses the others. Zola’s novels do not prove that

things are badly managed in this world, but merely that Zola’s nervous

system is out of order.

His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid phenomenon.

‘They’ (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ‘love to talk of obscenities....

This is a peculiar tendency of mind observable specially among

degenerates; it is as natural to them as a wholesome “tone” is

to normal minds.’[445] Gilles de la Tourette has coined the word

‘coprolalia’ (mucktalk) for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and

obscenities which characterize a malady described most exhaustively

by M. Catrou, and called by him ‘disease of convulsive tics.’[446]

M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is a

necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his consciousness is

continually pursued by representations referring to ordure, abdominal

functions, and everything connected with them. Andreas Verga described

some years ago a form of onomatomania, or word-madness, which he

called _mania blasphematoria_, or oath-madness. It is manifested when

the patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or

blasphemies. Verga’s diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It can only

be interpreted as _mania blasphematoria_, when in _La Terre_ he gives

the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature afflicted with flatulency,

and that without any artistic necessity or any aiming thereby at

æsthetic effect either of cheerfulness or of local colour. Finally, he

has a striking predilection for slang, for the professional language of

thieves and bullies, etc., which he does not only employ when making

personages of this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author,

in descriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly

noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the born

criminal.[447]

The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic writings,

in his invention of the word ‘naturalism,’ in his conception of

the ‘experimental novel,’ his instinctive inclination to depict

demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and semi-maniacs,[448] his

anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his pessimism, his coprolalia,

and his predilection for slang, sufficiently characterize M. Zola as

a high-class degenerate. But he shows in addition some peculiarly

characteristic stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis.

That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page of his

novels. He revels continually in representations from the region of

the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in all the events of his

novels without being able in any way to assign an artistic reason for

this forced introduction. His consciousness is peopled with images of

unnatural vice, bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he

is not satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such

a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see _La Terre_, pp.

9, 10). The sight of a woman’s linen produces a peculiar excitation

in him, and he can never speak without betraying, by the emotional

colouring of his descriptions, that representations of this kind

are voluptuously accentuated in him. This effect of female linen on

degenerates affected by sexual psychopathy is well known in mental

therapeutics, and has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso,

and others.[449]

Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the part played

in him by the olfactory sensations. The predominance of the sense

of smell and its connection with the sexual life is very striking

among many degenerates. Scents acquire a high importance in their

works. Tolstoi (in _War and Peace_) represents to us Prince Pierre

suddenly deciding on marrying the Princess Hélène when he smells her

fragrance at a ball.[450] In the narrative entitled _The Cossacks_

he never mentions the uncle Ieroschka without speaking of the smell

he emitted.[451] We have seen in the previous chapters with what

satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire, Huysmans, etc.,

lingered on odours, and especially on bad odours. M. Barrès makes his

little princess say, in _L’Ennemi des Lois_: ‘I go every morning to the

stables. Oh, that little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant! And she

inhaled with a pretty[!] sensual expression....’[452] M. de Goncourt

describes, in _La Faustin_, how the actress lets her Lord Annandale

smell her bosom: ‘“Smell! What do you smell?” she asked Lord Annandale.

“Why, carnations!” he replied, tasting it with his lips. “And what

else?” “Your skin!”’[453] M. A. Binet declares that ‘it is the odours

of the human body which are the causes responsible for a certain

number of marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates

belonging to their households. For certain men, the most essential

thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation of character; it is

her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour determines them to pursue

some ugly, old, vicious, degraded woman. Carried to this point, the

pleasure in smell becomes a malady of love’[454]--a malady, I will

add, from which only the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet

quotes in the course of his work, and which can be there referred to,

as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this abundantly;

and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ‘close connection between

the sexual and the olfactory sense,’ nevertheless expressly declares:

‘At all events, the perceptions of smell play a very subordinate

part within the physiological limits (_i.e._, within the limits of

the healthy life).[455] Even after the abstraction of its sexual

significance, the development of the sense of smell among degenerates,

not only of the higher, but even of the lowest type, has struck many

observers. Séguin speaks of ‘idiots who discriminated species of woods

and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight, and who,

nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the smell and taste of

human ordure, and whose sense of touch was obtuse and unequal.’[456]

M. Zola’s case belongs to this series. He shows at times an unhealthy

predominance of the sensations of smell in his consciousness, and

a perversion of the olfactory sense which make the worst odours,

especially those of all human excretions, appear to him particularly

agreeable and sensually stimulating. The inspector of the Montpellier

Academy, Leopold Bernard, has taken the trouble, in an elaborate

work--which, curiously, has remained almost unknown[457]--to bring

together all the passages in Zola’s novels which touch on the question

of odours, and to show that men and things do not present themselves to

him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance as optical

and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory perceptions. He characterizes

all his personages by their smell. In _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_,

Albine appears ‘like a great nosegay of strong scent.’ Serge, at the

seminary, was ‘a lily whose sweet scent charmed his masters’(!!)

Désirée ‘smells of health.’ Nana ‘_dégage une odeur de vie, une

toute-puissance de femme_.’ In _Pot-Bouille_, Bachelard exhales ‘une

odeur de débauche canaille’; Madame Campardon has ‘a good fresh

perfume of autumn fruit.’ In _Le Ventre de Paris_, Françoise ‘smells

of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.’ In the same novel the

‘cheese-symphony’ occurs, as celebrated among Zola’s enthusiasts as

the minute description of the variety of offensive smells of the dirty

linen in _L’Assommoir_.

To the ‘comprehensives’ whom we have learnt to know, this insistence

on the odours emitted by men and things is naturally one more merit

and perfection. A poet who scents so well and receives through the

nose such rich impressions of the world, is ‘a more keenly vibrating

instrument of observation,’ and his art in representing things is more

many-sided than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from

fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in poetry?

Has it not the same rights as all the other senses? And thereupon

they rapidly built an æsthetic theory which, as we have seen, induces

Huysmans’ Des Esseintes to compose a symphony of perfumes, and prompts

the Symbolists to accompany the recital of their compositions on the

stage with odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of

the verses. The ‘comprehensive’ drivellers do not for a moment suspect

that they are simply fencing with the march of organic evolution in

the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the good pleasure of a being

to construct for himself his idea of the external world with the help

of a group of such or such sense-perceptions. In this respect he is

completely subservient to the conformation of his nervous system.

The senses which predominate are those which his being utilizes in

acquiring knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed

senses help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand

the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture; to

the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation; to the

dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of smell in

particular, it has its central seat in the so-called olfactory lobe

of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as the frontal lobe is

developed. The more we descend in the vertebrates the greater is the

olfactory, the smaller the frontal, lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is

quite subordinated, and the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the

highest mental functions, including language, greatly predominates.

The consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our

influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further share in

man’s knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the external world no

longer by the nose, but principally by the eye and ear. The olfactory

perceptions only furnish a minimum contribution to the concepts which

are formed out of ideational elements. It is only in the most limited

degree that smells can awaken abstract concepts, _i.e._, a higher and

complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying emotions; a

‘symphony of perfumes’ in the Des Esseintes sense can, therefore, no

longer give the impression of moral beauty, this being an idea which

is elaborated by the centres of conception. In order to inspire a man

with logical sequences of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts

by scents alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, its

changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, his frontal

lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a dog substituted

for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond the capacity of

‘comprehensive’ imbeciles, however fanatically they may preach their

æsthetic folly. Smellers among degenerates represent an atavism going

back, not only to the primeval period of man, but infinitely more

remote still, to an epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades

to animals amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by

odoriferous substances, as it is still at the present day in the

muskdeer, or who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world

by the action of their noses.

The extraordinary success of Zola among his contemporaries is not

explained by his high qualifications as an author, that is, by the

extraordinary force and power of his romantic descriptions, and by

the intensity and truth of his pessimistic emotion, which makes his

representation of suffering and sorrow irresistibly impressive; but

by his worst faults, his triviality and lasciviousness. This can be

proved by the surest of methods, that of figures. Let us consult as

to the diffusion of his different novels, the printed indications,

for example, at the beginning of the last edition of _L’Assommoir_

(bearing the date 1893). They have been put down as follows: Of _Nana_,

160,000; _La Débâcle_, 143,000; _L’Assommoir_, 127,000; _La Terre_,

100,000; _Germinal_, 88,000; _La Bête humaine_ and _Le Rêve_, each

83,000; _Pot-Bouille_, 82,000; as a contrast, _L’[Œuvre_, 55,000; _La

Joie de Vivre_, 44,000; _La Curée_, 36,000; _La Conquête de Plassans_,

25,000; of the _Contes à Ninon_ not even 2,000 copies, etc. Thus, the

novels which have had the greatest sale are those in which lust and

bestial coarseness appear most flagrantly, and the demand diminishes

with mathematical exactitude in proportion as the layer of obscenity,

spread by Zola over his work as with a mason’s trowel, becomes more

thin and less ill-smelling. Three novels appear as an exception to this

rule: _La Débâcle_, _Germinal_, and _Le Rêve_. Their high position as

regards the number of the editions is explained by the fact that the

first treats of the war of 1870, the second of socialism, the third of

mysticism. These three works appeal to the frame of mind of the period.

They swim with the fashionable current. But all the rest have owed

their success to the lowest instincts of the masses, to its brutish

passion for the sight of crime and voluptuousness.

M. Zola was bound to make a school--first, because of his successes

in the book trade, which drove into his wake the whole riff-raff of

literary intriguers and plagiarists, and then because of the facility

with which his most striking peculiarities can be imitated. His art

is accessible to every bungler of the day who dishonours the literary

vocation by his slovenly hand. An empty and mechanical enumeration of

completely indifferent aspects under the pretext of description exacts

no effort. Every porter of a brothel is capable of relating a low

debauch with the coarsest expressions. The only thing which might offer

some difficulty would be the invention of a plot, the construction of a

frame of action. But M. Zola, whose strength does not lie in the gift

of story-telling, boasts of this imperfection as a special merit, and

proclaims as a rule of art that the poet must have nothing to relate.

This rule suits excellently the noxious insects who crawl behind him.

Their impotence becomes their most brilliant qualification. They know

nothing, they can do nothing, and they are on that account particularly

adapted to ‘_die Moderne_,’ as they say in Germany. Their so-called

‘novels’ depict neither human beings, nor characters, nor destinies;

but, thou poor Philistine who canst not see it, it is precisely this

which constitutes their value!

Moreover, justice exacts that among Zola’s imitators two groups should

be distinguished. The one cultivates chiefly his pessimism, and

accepts his obscenities into the bargain, though without enthusiasm,

and often even with visible embarrassment and secret repugnance. It

consists of hysteric and degenerate subjects who are _bonâ fide_,

who, in consequence of their organic constitution, actually feel

pessimistic, and have found in Zola the artistic formula which

corresponds most truly with their sentiments. I place in this group

some dramatic authors of the ‘Théâtre-Libre’ in Paris, directed by M.

Antoine; and the Italian ‘Verists.’ The naturalistic theatre is the

most untrue thing that has been seen hitherto, even more untrue than

the operetta and the fairy-play. It cultivates the so-called ‘cruel

terms,’ _i.e._, phrases in which the persons openly make a display

of all the pitiable, infamous and cowardly ideas and feelings which

surge through their consciousness, and systematically neglect this

most primitive and palpable fact, that by far the most widespread and

tenacious characteristic of man is hypocrisy and dissimulation. The

forms of customs survive incalculably longer than morality, and man

simulates the greater honesty, and hides his baseness under appearances

so much the more seeming-pious, as his instincts are more crafty and

mean. The Verists, among whom are many powerful literary natures, are

one of the most surprising and distressing phenomena in contemporary

literature. One understands pessimism in sorely-tried France; one

comprehends it also in the insupportable narrowness of social life in

the crepuscular North, with its cloudy gray skies and its scourge of

alcoholism. Eroticism, too, is comprehensible among the overexcited

and exhausted Parisian population, and in the Scandinavian North, as

a kind of revolt against the zealous discipline and morose constraint

of a bigotry without joy, and mortifying to the flesh. But how could

pessimism spring up under the radiant sunshine and eternally blue sky

of Italy, in the midst of a handsome and joyous people who sing even in

speaking (invalids like Leopardi might naturally appear as exceptions

everywhere)? and how did Italians arrive at insane lubricity, when in

their country there still exists, living in the temples and in the

fields, a souvenir of the artlessly robust sensuality of the pagan

world, with its symbols of fecundity; where also natural and healthy

sexuality has always preserved through centuries the right to express

itself innocently in art and literature? If Verism is anything else but

an example of the propagation of intellectual epidemics by imitation,

the task devolves upon the scientific Italian critic to explain this

paradox in the history of manners.

The other group of Zola’s imitators is not composed of superior

degenerates, unhealthy persons who sincerely give themselves out for

what they are, and express often with talent what they feel; but of

people who morally and mentally stand on a level with supporters of

evil, who, instead of the trade of night-birds, have chosen the less

dangerous and hitherto more esteemed vocation of authors of novels

and dramas, when the theory of naturalism had made it accessible

to them. This brood has only taken immodesty from M. Zola, and

conformably with the degree of culture has carried it into obscenity

without circumlocution. To this group belong the professional Parisian

pornographers, whose daily and weekly papers, stories, pictures, and

theatrical representations in M. de Chirac’s style, continually give

employment to the correctional tribunals; the Norwegian authors of

novels on street-walkers; and, unhappily, also a portion of our ‘Young

German’ realists. This group stands outside of literature. It forms a

portion of that riff-raff of great towns who professionally cultivate

immorality, and have chosen this trade with full responsibility, solely

from horror of honest work and greed for lucre. It is not mental

therapeutics, but criminal justice, which is competent to judge them.

CHAPTER II.

THE ‘YOUNG-GERMAN’ PLAGIARISTS.

THIS chapter is not, properly, within the scope of this book. It must

not be forgotten that I did not wish to write a history of literature,

nor to indulge in current æsthetic criticism, but to demonstrate the

unhealthy mental condition of the imitators of fashionable literary

tendencies. It does not enter into my plan to deal with those

degenerates or lunatics who evolve their works from their own morbid

consciousness, and themselves discover the artistic formula for their

own eccentricities--in other words, with those leaders who go their

own way because they choose or because they must. Mere imitators I

have neglected on principle throughout the whole of my inquiry, first

because the genuine degenerates only form a feeble minority among

them, while the great majority is a perfectly responsible rabble of

swindlers and parasites, and next because even the few diseased persons

who are found in their ranks do not belong to the class of ‘higher’

degenerates, but are poor weak minds who, taken separately, possess no

importance whatever, and at most only deserve a fleeting mention in so

far as they testify to the influence of their masters on ill-balanced

minds.

If, then, in spite of this, I devote a special chapter to the so-called

‘Young-German’ ‘realists,’ while I have despatched in a few words the

Italian and Scandinavian Zolaists, it is verily and by no means because

the former are any more worthy than the latter. On the contrary, some

of the Italian ‘Verists,’ the Dane, J. P. Jakobsen, the Norwegian, Arne

Garborg, the Swede, Auguste Strindberg, devoid as they are of real

originality, possess, nevertheless, more vigour and talent in their

little finger than all ‘Young-Germany’ put together. I only dwell on

the latter because the history of the propagation of a mental contagion

in his own country is not without importance for the German reader, and

also because the way in which this group has appeared and permeated

shows up certain traits in which we can detect the neurosis of the age,

and, lastly, because some few of their members are good examples of

intensive hysteria, having, in addition to complete incapacity and a

general feebleness of mind, that malicious and anti-social ego-mania,

that moral obtuseness, that irresistible need of attracting attention

to themselves, no matter by what means, that facetious vanity and

self-approbation, which characterizes the complaint.

I will not deny that when I turn towards the ‘Young-German’ movement

I can scarcely maintain the cool equanimity with which, according to

scientific method, I have hitherto observed any given phenomena. As

a German writer I feel deep shame and sorrow at the spectacle of the

literature which has been so long and so brutally proclaimed, with

flourish of trumpets, and with systematic disdain of all that did not

bear its seal, as the unique and exclusively German literature of the

present time, and even that of the future.[458]

Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German literature has ever

taken the lead in civilized humanity. We were the inventors, foreigners

were the imitators. We provisioned the world with poetic forms and

ideas. Romanticism originated among us, and only became a literary

and artistic fashion in France a good many years later, whence it

passed on into England. Görres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and Oscar

Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism and neo-Catholicism among us,

and these have only just reached France. Our poet-precursors of the

revolution of 1848, Karl Beck, George Herwegh, Freiligrath, Ludwig

Seeger, Friedrich von Sallet, R. E. Prutz, etc., had even then sung

of the misery, the uprisings, and the hopes of the disinherited,

before the Walt Whitmans, the William Morrises, and the Jules Jouys,

were born, men whom to-day people in America, England, and France,

would like to consider as the discoverers of the Fourth Estate for

lyric poetry. Pessimism was embodied almost at the same time in Italy

(in Leopardi) and among us in Nicholas Lenau, more than a generation

before French naturalism built its art upon it. Goethe created symbolic

poetry in the second part of _Faust_ half a century before Ibsen and

the French Symbolists parodied this tendency. Every healthy current

and every pathological current in contemporary poetry and art can be

traced back to a German source, every progress and every decadence in

this sphere have their point of departure in Germany. The philosophical

theory of every novel method of thought, as well as of every new error,

which, during a hundred years, have gained a hold over civilized

humanity, has been furnished by the Germans. Fichte gave us the theory

of romanticism; Feuerbach (almost at the same time as Auguste Comte),

that of the mechanical conception of the world; Schopenhauer, that of

pessimism; the Hegelians, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx, that of the most

rigid ego-mania and the most rigid collectivism, etc. And now we suffer

the humiliation of seeing a heap of contemptible plagiarists hawking

about the dullest and coarsest counterfeit of French imitations (which

all the clever men in France have already abandoned and repudiated)

as ‘the most modern’ production offered by Germany, as the flower of

German literature, present and future. We even permit foreign critics

to say: ‘Ancient fashions disdained in France even by village beauties,

are to be seen exhibited in German shop-windows as the greatest

novelties, and credulously accepted by the public.’ The realists

naturally deny that they are mere repeaters and limping belated

followers.[459] But he who knows a little more of art and poetry

than is learnt in a Berlin tavern frequented by realists, or in a low

newspaper informed by this sort of company; he who contemplates in its

entire range the contemporary movement of thought without stopping

on the frontiers of his own country, can have no doubt whatever that

German realism, as a local phenomenon, may have for Germany itself

a melancholy importance, but does not exist at all for universal

literature, because all trace of personal or national originality is

lacking. To the chorus in which the voices of humanity express its

feelings and thoughts, not the faintest new note has been added by it.

Plagiarists so low down in the scale as the German realists are not in

the least entitled to a detailed individual examination. To do this

would be to make one’s self both ridiculous in the eyes of competent

judges and of a piece with strolling players, to whom it is a matter

of small importance whether they are praised or blamed, provided they

are mentioned. Other motives also warn me to be prudent in the choice

of examples I propose to lay before the reader. I am firmly convinced

that in a few years all this movement will be forgotten even to the

name itself. The lads who now pretend to be the future of German

literature will discover little by little that the business to which

they have devoted themselves is less agreeable and lucrative than they

had imagined.[460] Those among them who yet possess a last remnant of

health and strength will find the way to their natural vocation, and

become restaurant-waiters or servants, night-watchmen or peddlers, and

I should fear to injure their advancement in these honest professions

if I nailed here the remembrance of their aberration of past days,

which would otherwise be forgotten by all. The feebler and weaker

among them, who could not manfully resolve to earn their bread by a

decent occupation, will disappear probably as drunkards, vagabonds,

beggars, perhaps even in a house of correction, and if, after the

lapse of years, a serious reader happened to come across their names

in this book, he would be right in exclaiming, ‘What sort of bad joke

is this? What does the author want to make me believe? There never

have been such men!’ Finally, an absolutely incapable pseudo-writer

is individually deprived of all importance, and only acquires it as

one of a number. He cannot therefore be treated critically, but merely

statistically. For all these reasons I shall only draw from the whole

number a few characters and works, to show with their help what German

‘realism’ really is.

The founder of the realist school is Karl Bleibtreu. He accomplished

this work of foundation by publishing a brochure of which the principal

feature was a cover of brilliant red furrowed by black lightning in

zigzags, and which bore this title like the roll of a kettledrum,

_Revolution in Literature_. In this literary ‘tout’ Bleibtreu, without

the slightest attempt at substantiation, but with a brazen brow,

depreciated a whole series of esteemed and successful authors, swore

with great oaths that they were dead and buried, and announced the dawn

of a new literary epoch, which already counted a certain number of

geniuses, at the head of whom he himself stood.

As an author Bleibtreu, in spite of the many and various works he has

already published, does not yet count for much. It would, however, be

unjust to ignore his great ability as a book-maker. In this respect

_Revolution in der Literatur_ is a model production. With skilful

address, he mingled authors of repute whom he hacked into sausage-meat

with a few shallow scribblers in vogue, whom it was no doubt rather

foolish to fight, with the grand airs of a gladiator, but whom no one

would have defended against a smiling disdain. The presence of these

unwarranted intruders into the group whom he undertook to extirpate

from literature, may give to his raising of the standard a semblance

of reason in the eyes of superficial readers. Not less cleverly chosen

were the people whom he presented to readers as the new geniuses. With

the exception of two or three decent mediocrities, for whom there is

always a little modest corner in the literature of a great people,

these were complete nullities from whom he himself never had to fear a

dangerous competition. The greatest of his geniuses is, for example,

Max Kretzer, a man who writes, in the German of a Cameroon-Negro,

some professedly ‘Berlin’ novels, of which the best known, _Die

Verkommenen_, is ‘Berlinish’ to such a degree that it simply dilutes

the history of the widow Gras and the workman Gaudry, which took

place in Paris in 1877. This event, celebrated as the first adventure

with cocottes in which vitriol played a part, could only happen in

Paris, and under the conditions of Parisian life. It is specifically

Parisian. But Kretzer calmly removed the Paris trade-mark, replacing

it with that of Berlin, and he thus created a ‘Berlin’ novel, vaunted

by Bleibtreu as the ideal of a ‘genuine’ and ‘true’ exposition. He

reclothes his newly-discovered ‘geniuses,’ who recall Falstaff’s

recruits, Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (_King Henry

IV._, Part II.), in a uniform which he could not have chosen more

effectively. He dressed them out in the costume of Schiller’s brigands

in the Bohemian forests; he pronounced them to be a troop of rebels,

fighters at barricades, Lützow huntsmen in the struggle for freedom

against hypocrisy perukes, and pig-tails, and all obstructionists; and

he hoped that youth and the friends of progress would take him for

something serious, on seeing him march at the head of his poor, infirm

cripples and knockknees, thus disguised.

His plan, although excellently contrived and conducted, was only

partially successful. Scarcely had he in a certain measure organized

and drilled his little troop, when it mutinied and drove him away.

It did not choose another captain, for each private soldier wished

himself to be chief, and the feeblest and most timid of the band

alone recognised any other genius outside his own. Bleibtreu has not

to this day got over the ingratitude of the people who had taken his

mystification seriously, and had really looked upon themselves as the

geniuses he had proclaimed them to be, without, as he thought, running

any risks; and in his last publication he still utters his sorrow in

these bitter verses (_Aus einem lyrischen Tagebuch_):

‘For what purpose this long struggle? ’Tis vain! And my hand is

paralyzed. Long live falsehood, stupidity, folly! Adieu, thou German

piggery! The earth of the tomb will extinguish the conflagration.

I have been, as long as I could think, a veritable booby. I was no

honest German, I was a wounded swan.’

Bleibtreu could not give any talent to the realists invented by him,

but the latter borrowed from him a few of his turns of expression.

To make an impression on the ignorant, they have associated with

themselves as honorary members some respectable authors whom one is

surprised to meet with _dans ce galère_. Thus the realists include

among their numbers, for example, Théodore Fontane, a true poet, whose

novels honourably hold their place among the best productions of the

kind in any literature of Europe; H. Heiberg, of vigorous although

unequal talent; unfortunately compelled, as it would seem, by external

circumstances to hasty and excessive work, against which, perhaps, his

artistic conscience vainly protests; and Detlev von Liliencron, who

is by no means a genius, but a good lyric poet with a sense of style,

and who may rank by the side of _epigoni_ such as a Hans Hopfen, a

Hermann Lingg, a Martin Greif. Considering the high level that German

lyric poetry--the first in the world even in the judgment of foreign

nations--has occupied uninterruptedly since Goethe, it is giving a

German poet no small praise if one can say he is not inferior to the

average of the last seventy years. Liliencron, however, does not

surpass it, and I do not see how he can be fairly placed above Rudolf

Baumbach, for example, whom the realists affect to despise, probably

because he has disdained to join their gang. It is not incomprehensible

that a Fontane or a Heiberg should consent to suffer the importunate

promiscuousness of the realists. The Church, too, admits sometimes

to serve in the Mass young rogues from the street, who have only to

swing the censer. The sole thing that is demanded of them as realists

_honoris causâ_, is to bear silently and smilingly this compromise of

an honourable name. Liliencron alone thinks himself obliged to make

some concessions to his new companions, in using here and there in his

last poems, not his own language, but theirs.

Besides the smuggling in of some esteemed names among theirs, the

realists have carefully practised and cultivated another business-trick

of Bleibtreu’s--that of effective disguise. They assumed (in the

collection of lyric poetry entitled _Young Germany_, Friedenau and

Leipzig, 1886) the name of ‘Young Germany,’ which calls up a faint

remembrance of the great and bold innovators of 1830, as well as ideas

of blooming youth and spring, with a false nose of modernism tied on.

But let us here at once remark that the realists, plagiarists to the

backbone, do not even possess sufficient independence to find a name

peculiarly their own, but have quietly plagiarized the denomination

under which the Heine-Boerne-Gutzkow group has become renowned.

As the first specimen of ‘realist’ literature of ‘Young Germany,’

I will quote the novel by Heinz Tovote, _Im Liebesrausch_.[461]

He relates the history of a landed proprietor and former officer,

Herbert von Düren, who makes the acquaintance of a certain Lucy,

formerly a waitress at an inn, and the mistress of quite a number of

young men in succession. He makes her his mistress, and indulges in

his passion until, being unable to live without her, he induces her

to marry him. Herbert, who is only partially acquainted with Lucy’s

past, presents her to his mother. The latter, who very soon perceives

the relations existing between her son and this person, nevertheless

gives her consent, and the marriage takes place. In the aristocratic

and military society of Berlin, in which the couple move for a time,

Lucy’s antecedents soon become known, and she is ‘cut’ by all the

world. Herbert himself remains faithfully attached to her, until he

discovers one day by accident, at the house of one of his friends--of

course a ‘realist’ painter--a picture representing the nude figure of

Lucy bathing in the sea! He very logically concludes that his wife had

posed as a model to the painter, and he drives her away. As a matter

of fact, however, the ‘realist’ had painted the nude figure from

imagination, and involuntarily given it Lucy’s features, because of

the respectful admiration he secretly cherishes for her. (Judge for a

moment how that could be if she had been disreputable!) Then Herbert,

smitten with remorse, seeks the vanished Lucy, whom he discovers, after

heart-breaking efforts, in his own house, where she has lived for

months unknown to him. The reconciliation of husband and wife takes

place amid general pathos, and the young wife dies in giving birth to a

child, and uttering affecting sentiments.

I will not waste time by pointing out the silliness of this story.

The essential part in a novel, moreover, is not the plot, but the

form, in both the narrower and the broader sense--language, style,

composition--and these I will examine a little later.

The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man who assumes

to write for the public, _i.e._, for the educated people of his own

nation, is evidently that he should be master of his own language. Now,

Heinz Tovote has no idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest

errors every moment--solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of the

value of words--which make one’s hair stand on end. Some few of these

abominable faults of language are tolerably widespread, others belong

to the jargon of the roughest class of the people; but there are some

that Tovote could never have heard. They are the result of his personal

ignorance of German grammar.

Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in order to

determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses, on principle,

the adjective naturally contained in that substantive. Here are some

examples of this intolerable tautology: ‘An icy January storm.’ ‘In the

Friedrichstrasse light elegant equipages were crowded.’ ‘Incarnation of

the most lovable grace.’ ‘A slowly creeping fever’ ‘A lazy somnolence.’

‘They glowed fiery in the last light.’ ‘She suffered cruel torments,’

etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect for himself,

his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers, would put such

words together. There is no necessity, in hunting for the ‘rare and

precious epithet,’ to go so far as the French stylists, but such a

sweeping together of the stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive

adjectives is not literature; it is properly, to echo the French

critic, the work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is

its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Düren was ‘keenly

interested, from its first appearance,’ in Sullivan’s operetta _The

Mikado_. ‘Now that it had cast off its English garb, it seemed to him

still more indigenous.’ Thus he seriously declares that an English

operetta has seemed to a German more indigenous in the German language

than in English. ‘Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury against

this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he, who was habitually

politeness itself to everyone, did not return the salute, and turned

away.’ Not to respond to a salute by way of expressing his ‘senseless

fury’ is truly not very ferocious on the part of an old officer.

‘The horses were hanging their heads sadly, and sleeping.’ That it

is possible to sleep sadly or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ‘Like

walls, the colossi of houses stood crowding against each other.’ Like

walls? One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly as

if Tovote had said: ‘Like men, the people stood crowding against each

other.’

When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful style, the

result we get is as follows: ‘Yet there lay in the slender perfectly

levelled lines a slumbering strength.’ (What can the lines be which

are ‘slender,’ _i.e._, not thick and ‘perfectly levelled’?) ‘She

was already smiling through her tears, and her face resembled a

summer landscape which, while the rain still falls on the corn, is

bathed again in the bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.’

Thus, what we are first to think of when contemplating a face is a

summer landscape. ‘He felt how her lips clung [_sich klammerten!_]

to his.’ ‘It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has the

incontestable genius of a lively conception,’ etc.

Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the French

naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness, and vigour

of which the following quotations will enable us to admire. (End

of a theatrical representation:) ‘In the stalls the seats clapped

back with a muffled sound.... The audience rose, doors were opened,

curtains were drawn back, and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few

isolated spectators alone remained in their places.’ ‘Unceasingly,

the whole night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lay on

the bare branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in

winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped in a thick

mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the standard roses, the snow

clung, and formed strange figures; it lay a foot high on the walls,

and delicately veiled the points of the iron railings. All tracks

were effaced. The wind, which drove the flakes before it, threw them

into all the hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses

disappeared.’ ‘They stood high above the sea, which spread around them

like an infinite plain.’ ‘The sun had set.... The clouds, heavily

encamped on the horizon, still glowed with flaming crimson purple;

then they passed into violet, which changed into a colourless gray [so

there is a coloured gray also?] until night descended, and all colours

gradually died out.’ (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit

‘impressionism’ with the French models quoted in the preceding

chapter.) ‘The night had completely closed in--a dark, profoundly black

night.’ (Consider the juxtaposition of these two adjectives.) ‘The moon

alone hung mournfully above the waters [the moon in a night both ‘dark’

and ‘profoundly black!’], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light

into the distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar

in the spite of a thousand years[!], and licked the creviced rocks.’

A ‘raving spite’ which ‘licks’ does not appear to be a very dangerous

spite. ‘She retained the deep wound over her eye as a little scar all

her life long.’ If she had a ‘little scar,’ she did not therefore

keep a deep wound ‘all her life long.’ ‘Above them, in the blue sky,

a vulture wheeled in circles with outspread wings, lost like a black

point in this sea of light.’ In a vulture which is only seen as ‘a

black point,’ it is not possible to distinguish the ‘outspread wings.’

Here is the description of a face: ‘Two full fresh lips, chaste[!],

bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly tilted, but parting

in a narrow straight line from the forehead.’ We will leave the reader

the trouble of imagining for himself this ‘little nose imperceptibly

tilted’ in ‘the narrow straight line.’ ‘The engine of the express train

panted across the level plain which stretched all round like a burning

desert. Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards

and verdant meadows.’ Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a ‘burning[?]

desert’? ‘The half-closed eyes, with their white membranes, look at him

so steadily.’ This does not mean, as one might suppose, the eyes of a

bird, but those of a human being, in which our novelist professes to

have discovered these incomprehensible ‘white membranes.’

We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive _tic_ of naturalism

have become in the hands of Tovote. I will now show how this ‘realist’

can observe and reproduce reality in the smallest as in the greatest

things. Herbert, the first evening of his acquaintance with Lucy,

takes her to a restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of

burgundy. ‘The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the table, in a

flourishing curve.’ Burgundy in ‘pot-bellied’ bottles! They eat soup,

served in ‘silver bowls’(!), green peas and a capon, the excellence

of which forms the subject of their incredible conversation at table,

and when this repast is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette,

she asks for oysters, which are brought and eaten by her ‘served

according to the rules of art.’ I should certainly not reproach anyone

for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which stage of

a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up amongst oysters

and burgundy, but it would be more honest not to speak of these good

things till one knows something of them. Let us give a passing notice

to the unconscious respect, mingled with envy, for the difficult and

distinguished occupation of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in

this admiring declaration, that Lucy has oysters ‘served’(?) ‘according

to the rules of art,’ and the backwoodsman’s ignorance of the most

elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in making a man of the

world talk incessantly at table about the food. To continue. Lucy’s

lover has travelled, viâ Brussels, ‘from Havre to Egypt.’ In that

case he must have chartered a steamer on his own account, as there is

no regular line of steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months

Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manuscripts. ‘He

rummaged through this heap of yellow manuscripts.’ Under shelter the

worst ligneous fibre paper itself would certainly not turn yellow in

the space of a few months. The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible

care by Herbert for his Lucy, has ‘blue silk curtains,’ and ‘pale pink

satin’ seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided by

the better second-hand dealers even in their shop windows.

I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insignificant.

They must not be passed over, however, when committed by a ‘realist,’

who boasts of ‘observation’ and ‘truth.’ Graver still are the

impossible actions and characters of the men. In a moment of grief Lucy

lets ‘fall her arms on the table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly

before her, biting her under lip.’ Has anyone ever seen or done such

a thing in this state of mind? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses

thus: ‘“Kiss me,” she implored, and her whole being seemed to wish to

lose itself in him--“kiss me!”’ Herbert had made her acquaintance in

Heligoland, where she lived with an Englishman named Ward, and had

taken her to be Ward’s betrothed. A German officer of good family,

being considerably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman

living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as his

betrothed! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of the working

class, learnt English with Ward in less than a year so perfectly that

she was everywhere mistaken for an Englishwoman, and played the piano

so well that she could execute pieces from operettas, etc.

I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French words,

confounds _tourniquet_ with _moulinet_, and speaks of _cabinets

séparés_ instead of _cabinets particuliers_. A German does not require

to know French. It would be a good thing indeed if he knew German.

Good taste, however, would prevent his making a display of scraps of a

language of which he knows absolutely nothing.

The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incomparably weaker

than in analogous passages by Zola, but they are peculiarly repulsive

because, in spite of the absolute incapacity of Tovote to rise above

the coarseness of commercial travellers relating their love adventures

in hotels, they, nevertheless, betray his determination to be violently

sensational and subtly sensual.

If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work, so far

below the level of literature, it is because of its being thoroughly

typical of German realism. The language transgresses the simplest

rules of grammar. Not one expression is accurately chosen, and really

characterizes the object or the concept that is brought before

the reader. That an author should speak not only accurately, but

expressively, that he should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas

in an original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the

value and delicate sense of words; of this Tovote has not the slightest

idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to raise a blush on the cheek

of the police reporter of a low class paper. Nothing is seen, nothing

is felt; the whole is but a droning echo of reading of the worst sort.

‘Modernism’ consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is

partly located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism

and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded, very justly,

that the German novel should rest on a solid basis, that it should be

worked out in some well-known period, amid real surroundings, in the

German capital of our day. This demand has produced the ‘Berlinese’

novel of the plagiarists. The especial and characteristic Berlinism

of this novel consists in this, that the author whenever he has to

mention a street, displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at

the ‘Panoptikum’ (the Grévin Museum in Berlin), because he finds the

street full of people, carriages, and shops, and seeks opportunities to

quote the names of the streets in this capital. This method is within

the reach of every hotel porter. In order to introduce such Berlinism

into a bad novel, the author need only possess a plan of the town, and

perhaps a guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are

represented by passages such as this: ‘On both sides of the pavement

[he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the street] a dense

crowd of people surged, and in the middle of the avenue, under the

trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered multitude, resembling the

irregular [?] waves of a flood, pushed on to get out of the town.’ Or:

‘On all the pavements people walking and pushing against each other

in confusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid

falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge from the

deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy omnibuses, with

their roofs fully occupied,’ etc. Thus, the only thing Tovote sees in

Berlin is what a peasant from Buxtehude would remark, who has left his

village for the first time, and cannot recover from his astonishment

in finding more people and carriages than in his own village street.

This is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices,

and which need not be specially described, because it is implied in

the concept of a ‘town,’ and, above all, of a ‘large town,’ and is,

notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since Breslau, Hamburg,

Cologne, etc., present exactly the same sight.

Socialism enters into the ‘modern’ novel like Pilate into the

Creed. Tovote relates, _e.g._, how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who has

disappeared; he arrives at last at the workman’s quarter in Berlin,

which supplies the author with this fine picture: ‘Everywhere the blue

and gray-red blouse of the workman, which is never seen _Unter den

Linden_, who stands, day after day, near the panting machine, at the

work-table, where he carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the

same manual labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard

as iron.’ Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the

narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has thought

of the callosities of the workmen!

The automata who in the ‘realist’ novel execute mock-movements, and

between whom the dullest and most miserable back-stair sentimentality

is played off, are always the same: a gentleman, an ex-officer

whenever possible, who, we are assured, is engaged upon ‘works on

socialism’ (of what kind we never learn, it is simply asserted that

they are ‘very important’); a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment

of the _ewig-Weibliche_; and a realist painter who plans or executes

pictures destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the

millennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ‘modernism’ of the

‘Young-German’ realism: quotation of the names of the Berlin streets,

rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses, a little Berlinese

dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse and stupid eroticism,

unctuous allusions to socialism and phrases on painting, such as a

goose-fattener grown rich might make if she wished to pass herself off

as a lady. Of the three persons who are always the supporters of this

‘modernity’ the waitress is the only really original one. The merit

of this treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the

admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of novels

entitled _Schlechte Gesellschaft_. She is a conglomeration of all the

fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in poetry: a winged

chimæra, a sphinx with lion’s claws, and a siren with a fish’s tail,

all at one and the same time. She contains in herself every charm and

every gift, love and wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by

the waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative

power of the German ‘realist’ can be most accurately gauged.

If Tovote is a representative type--by no means diseased, but merely

incapable beyond conception--of intruders into literature with which

they will at most be connected as peddling hawkers of trashy novels,

we meet in Hermann Bahr with a clearly pathological individuality.

Bahr is an advanced hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself

talked about, and has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result

by books. Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks

to captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he calls

the book most characteristic of his method among those he has hitherto

published, _Die gute Schule; Seelenstände_.[462] _Seelenstände_

literally means ‘states of soul.’ He had read and not understood the

term _états d’âme_ in the new French authors, _état_ having been used

in the political sense which it has in _tiers-états_.

In the story related in the _Seelenstände_, a part at least of the

recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an Austrian

painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living alone, he picks up a

girl in the street, who, contrary to the orthodox procedure, is not a

waitress, but a dressmaker, possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical

excellence of the ‘Young German’ barmaid; he lives with her for a time,

then wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she leaves

him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom she induces to

buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned lover.

This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ‘state’ of his

hero’s ‘soul.’ This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate type,

such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria. Not a single

author of any individuality who has passed before his eyes has been

able to escape his rage for servile imitation. The principle of

the ‘Good School’--the misery of a painter who struggles with the

conception of a work of art intended to express his whole soul, and

who recognises with despair his impotence to realize it--is subtilized

from Zola’s _L’[Œuvre_, All the details, as we shall see, he has taken

from Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French

Impressionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a parody

of inimitably exquisite absurdity.

The painter’s distress of mind is ‘the lyrism of red. His whole soul

was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all his desires, in

sonnets of lament and hope; and in general a complete biography of red,

what took place in him and usually whatever could happen to him.... But

this lofty canticle of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple

tones of daily life.... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which

he embodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his

languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and gaiety

of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations. But the great

and supreme confession of his whole soul hung on a purple tablecloth

with heavy folds, on which the sun shone, a narrow shaft, but with all

the more fiery glow.’ If the struggle with the ‘biography of the red’

was a torture to him, even worse things were about to happen. One day

‘the curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon, juicy

and sweet, which one would never have suspected of perfidy as it lay

cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich herb sauce.’ (A cooked

salmon cradling itself! This must have produced a ghostly effect. And

this uncanny salmon struck him ‘behind,’ although it was on the table

before him!) But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green

herbs, the pride of the cook--yes, it was this that did it. It was this

that conquered him. He had never seen anything like it--never before,

as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter green, at once

so languishing and so joyous that one could have sung and shouted for

joy. The whole rococo was in it, only in a much more gracious, yearning

note. It had to go into his picture. But he could never hit off that

green sauce, and this was the tragedy of his life. He ‘kept the truth

locked up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it; he did not

give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming work of

his breast,’ namely, the green sauce! ‘He would have liked to make a

gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a burning screw ... deep,

very deep, till there was a great hole ... an immense triumphal gate of

his art, through which the internals could spit it out.’

What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the purpose

of overcoming it in a ‘healing and redeeming’ work of art, so

irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is written in an entirely

serious view, and without the least idea of joking!

Bahr describes his own style in these words: ‘A wild, feverish,

tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name in the ordinary

idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of finding unheard-of,

obscure, and strange neologisms, in a forced and singular combination.’

The painter’s mistress must have been a superb creature, to judge

by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in the street ‘she

slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids haughtily raised,

and her little head thrown back sideways, she began to hum softly,

sharply snapping her fingers with impatience, in such a way as to

rouse his desire to persevere in his useless suit.’ This behaviour

induces Bahr to call her a ‘majestically inaccessible young lady.’

But she is far more remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she

is in the street. ‘Often, when under the greetings of the morning,

which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she plaited her

hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded by his desires, and

stretched, moistened, and slowly curved, with twitching fingers which

glittered like swift serpents, quite gently and persistently, her

tangled [!] eyelashes, her dishevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew

round with silent whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue

hissed, shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant

forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed slowly,

cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the little nose,

fearful of the dust, turned aside,’ the painter, as may be imagined,

became so amorous that ‘he licked the soap from her fingers to refresh

his fevered gums.’ ‘Suddenly standing upright on one leg, with a swing

of the other she kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by

a nimble, firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.’

‘Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very gently,

very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her breasts, deep

into her knees, while her lips moved; sometimes, while her hips turned

in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously into swan-like [!] curves

towards her obsequious image.’ This sight filled her lover with such

enthusiasm that it seemed to him ‘as if from a thousand springs blasted

[!] torrents blazed through his veins.’

It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this style,

which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either in formation,

use of terms, or construction. I wish merely to show to what degree

Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy of Nietzsche: ‘Always the

same. He ought to do this, and not to do that; the same litany from

his first infancy--always and only; he should and he shouldn’t. What

he would was the only thing never demanded of him; and thus, in this

frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense desire

to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish at being

always someone else eternally.’ ‘To say that everyone only came out

of himself to penetrate into another ... to dominate him! That a man

could never, should never, he himself, not have one hour of bliss, but

everlastingly renounce, transform, annihilate himself for another’s

gratification.... Alone--alone; why would they not leave one alone?’

... ‘To make a desert for himself--a still silent desert.’ ‘Others had

not this sentiment of the “I” to such an exuberant and immeasurable

extent.’ ‘The joyous hatred of men and the world.’ Here we have Ibsen:

‘He wished to go into the country--he himself, precisely as proposed by

the other, certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue

of his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal of

another.... And rather than bend to another’s will he renounced his

own. Moreover, since another wished it, the pleasure of wishing it

himself was lost to him.’ Here the De Goncourts: ‘There was around

her out of the sorrowful violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.’

‘His feeling was always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow

ground--dirty yellow--gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a

death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.’ ‘It was chaste

voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly gray, melting into

faint violet.’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘He was bound to establish the

new love.... The question was of doing it in the style of electricity

and steam. An Edison-love ... yes, a machine-like love.’ A mixture of

Baudelaire and Huysmans: ‘In the undulating silver dust of the light

a lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green vapour,

bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down.... He wished utterly

to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood--blood. He only felt at ease

when it streaked [!] down.... He established a theory according to

which this was the way towards the new love, viz., by torture.’ ‘There

lay the meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes ... and hopes,

the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its pride and with

imperial mourning walked a huge gray sunflower, silent and pale, on the

arm of an awkward fat stinking thistle, which trailed noisily afar with

large rough gold.’ ‘This now became for him true art, the art which

alone could redeem and make happy--the art of odours.... From pale and

moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs, he

awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,’ etc. The rehardness, ainder

is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans’ novel, _A Rebours_.

As to the passages full of a heat which clamours for a strait-jacket,

and simulates satyriasis and Sadism; as to the quaint confusions and

orthographical errors in French names which the author, who poses as a

Parisian, commits at every step; and as to his frequent manifestation

of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things are not

essential, but they contribute to make Bahr’s book the only product of

hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing in German literature.

The greater number of Young-German plagiarists have not yet risen to

the monumental productions of a Tovote or a Bahr, and have stopped at

short pieces of lyric poetry.

Special mention ought to be accorded to Gerhart Hauptmann, who has,

unfortunately, permitted himself to be enrolled among the ‘Young

Germans.’ It is difficult to confuse him with them, for if he makes

concessions to their æsthetics of the commonplace with a carelessness

which of itself betrays a disquieting obtuseness of artistic taste and

conscience, he nevertheless may be distinguished from them by some

great qualities. He possesses a luscious, vivid vocabulary, full of

expression and feeling, even though it is a dialect. He knows how to

see reality, and he has the power to render it in poetry.

It will not occur to anyone to pronounce any final judgment on this

author of thirty years of age. As yet only his début can be mentioned,

and hopes be formed for his future development. What he has hitherto

produced has been surprisingly unequal. Side by side with originality

his works present a barren imitation; with high artistic insight, a

schoolboy’s awkwardness and ingenuousness; with flights of genius,

the most afflicting commonplaces. One scarcely knows if he is a

novelist or a dramatic writer. In two of his pieces, in fact, _Vor

Sonnenaufgang_ and _College Crampton_, there is such a complete absence

of progressive action, a condition of things so purely stationary and

devoid of development, that even the instinct of a natural talent for

the stage could never have so forgotten itself. Perhaps Hauptmann is

only temporarily under the spell of an æsthetic theory, from which

he will free himself later. He desires, indeed, to describe the

‘milieu’ faithfully and closely, and loses sight in so doing of the

principal thing in poetry--of the characters and their fate. His dramas

frequently fall asunder for this reason into a series of episodes,

in themselves well observed and characteristic, but only distantly,

or it may be not at all, connected with the plot, as, _e.g._, in the

play _Vor Sonnenaufgang_, the appearance of Hopslabär, the servant

Mary who is leaving, the coachman’s wife stealing the milk, etc. All

are pictures of manners, but at the same time cease to form united

compositions.

If Hauptmann has borrowed from the French realists the excessive and

useless accentuation of the ‘milieu,’ he has taken from Ibsen the

charlatanism of ‘modernity’ and the affectation of the ‘thesis.’ On the

model of the Norwegian poet he suddenly inserts into some commonplace

history belonging exclusively to no particular period or locality, some

intrusive phrase containing an obscure allusion to ‘the great times

in which we live,’ or the ‘mighty events which are coming to pass,’

etc. For example, _Einsame Menschen_ (Lonely Folk) is the needlessly

pretentious title of a drama in which we are shown a really Ibsenian

idiot, who fancies himself misunderstood by his excellent wife, and

becomes enamoured of a Russian girl-student, who is their visitor. As

is generally the case with such feeble wights, he desires to possess

the Russian, while not losing his wife; he has neither the courage

to wound his wife by openly separating from her, nor the strength to

conquer his guilty passion for the stranger. In his torment he tries

to deceive himself, to persuade himself that his feelings towards

the Russian are only those of friendship and of gratitude, that she

has understood him and intellectually stimulated him. The Russian,

however, is more clear-sighted, and is about to leave the house. The

end of the story is that the idiot drowns himself. The conception of a

weak man vacillating between two women, of whom one is the embodiment

of duty, and the other of presumptive happiness, is as old as the

theatre itself. It has nothing to do with the times. It can only be

made to pass as ‘modernism’ by prevarication. And in this feeble drama

Hauptmann makes his characters hold learned conversations full of

allusions, such as the following:

FRÄULEIN ANNA (_the Russian_). These are, indeed, great times in which

we are living. I seem to feel as if something close and oppressive

were gradually lifting off from us. Do you not agree with me, Doctor?

JOHANNES (_the idiot_). In what way?

FRÄULEIN ANNA. On one side, a stifling dread was mastering us; on

the other, a gloomy fanaticism. The excessive strain seems now to be

straightened. Something like a breath of fresh air, let us say from

the twentieth century, has come in upon us.[463]

The same swagger of modernity made the author decide on this title,

_Vor Sonnenaufgang_ (Before Sunrise), for his first work, and to

qualify it as a ‘social drama.’ It is no more ‘social’ than any other

drama, and has no connection whatever with ‘sunrise’ in a metaphorical

sense. It reveals the state of affairs in a Silesian village, where

the discovery of coal-mines on their land has made the peasants

millionaires. The contrast between the coarseness of the rustics and

their opulence furnishes good scenes for a farce; but what has it to

do with the age and its problems? A fragment of thesis is dovetailed

into the farce. The peasant millionaire is a drunkard. The daughter may

have inherited her father’s vice. And so a man who has become attached

and engaged to her leaves her with sorrowful determination on learning

that the old man drinks. This thesis is an absurdity. A drunkard can

transmit his vice to his children, but is not bound to do so, and,

in the instance in point, the grown-up daughter does not betray the

slightest inclination to drink. His thesis is worked out on the model

of Ibsenian maunderings, and is as little taken from life as the lover

who subordinates his love to a very uncertain theory. In this man we

recognise our old friend, the type of the recipe for realist novels,

who makes vague allusions to socialistic studies which he is reputed to

pursue,[464] and proves himself, by these shadowy indications, to be a

‘modern’ man.

Hauptmann is true and strong only when he makes the poor of the

lowest class speak in their own dialect. The maidservants in _Vor

Sonnenaufgang_ are excellent. The nurse, who sings the baby to sleep;

the laundress, Frau Lehmann, who laments her domestic troubles, are

by far the most successful characters in _Einsame Menschen_. And if

_Die Weber_ is the best work he has hitherto produced, it is because

only the poorest people, speaking only their own dialect, appear in

it. But as soon as he has to deal with more complex human beings

of the educated classes--beings who are not perishing with hunger

nor suffering from poverty, who speak high German, and have a wider

intellectual horizon--he becomes uncertain and flat, and catches up the

pattern-album of realism instead of taking reality as his model.

_Die Weber_ (The Weavers) is the only real drama among the five which

Hauptmann has hitherto written.[465] There is not much action in this

piece; but it is sufficient, and it progresses. First, we see the

profound misery in which the weavers are perishing; then we behold

the rousing of their fury at their intolerable condition, and then

their passion gradually developed before our eyes in ever-deepening

intensity, rising into frenzy, destructive madness, tumults and riots,

with all their tragic consequences. The extraordinary part of this

drama is that the author has triumphed, with a genius which entitles

him to our respect, over the enormous difficulty of captivating and

stirring our human feelings, without making any individual character

the centre-point of his piece, and of distributing the action between a

great number of persons and a multitude of individual traits, without

its ever ceasing to be a united and compact whole. These features,

revealing a painfully minute observation, necessarily belong to

individuals; nevertheless, they excite a very lively interest, sympathy

and pity, not for the person, but for a whole class of men. We reach

through emotion a generalization which usually is only a work of the

intellect, through a poetic composition to a feeling which usually

is excited only by history. In making this possible, Hauptmann rises

infinitely above the bog of barren imitation, and creates a truly new

form, viz., the drama in which the hero is not an individual, but

the crowd; he succeeds, by artistic means, in presenting us with the

hallucination that we are constantly seeing before us the nameless

millions, while naturally there are never more than a few persons in

the scene who suffer, speak, and act. Besides this great and radical

innovation, other burning æsthetic questions are solved in the piece

with overpowering beauty and sobriety. We have here a drama without

love, and at the same time a proof that other sentiments besides

the one instinct of sex can powerfully stir the soul of the reader.

The piece is, moreover, a curious contribution to the wholly new

‘psychology of the masses,’ with which Sighele, Fournial, and others

have been occupied,[466] and it gives an absolutely exact picture of

the delirium and hallucinations which take possession of the individual

in the midst of an excited crowd, and transforms his character and

all his instincts after the model of the usually criminal leaders. It

comprises, finally, this demonstration, which I have nowhere found so

fully in all the international literature with which I am acquainted,

viz., that beautiful effects, when rightly employed, can be obtained

even with repulsive subjects. A poor weaver, who has not touched

meat for two years, asks a comrade--not having the heart to do it

himself--to kill a pretty little dog which had run up to him, and his

wife roasts it for him. He cannot control his craving, and begins

dipping into the saucepan almost before the meat is done. His stomach,

however, cannot bear the dainty, and to his great despair he is forced

to reject it.[467] The incident in itself is not appetizing. But here

it becomes beautiful and deeply affecting, for it describes with

incomparably tragic power the misery of these woebegone starving people.

This piece, apparently so realistic in the sense attached to this

word by superficial talkers, is, on the whole, the most convincing

refutation of the theory of realism. For it is incredible that all

the incidents which mark the dreadful position of the weavers could

have been condensed into exactly one hour of the day, and into one

single room of the workman Dreissiger’s house; it is, if not wholly

impossible, at all events very improbable, that the soldier’s murderous

bullet should happen to kill the weaver Hilse, the only man trusting

in God and resigned to his fate, who remained quietly at his work

when all the others rushed out to pillage and riot in the streets.

The poet has not depicted ‘real’ life here, but has freely utilized

the materials which he has gained through his observation of life in

order to give artistic expression to his personal ideas. His desire was

to excite our pity as vividly as that felt by himself for a definite

form of human misery. With this object he collected with the sure hand

of an artist, into a narrow compass, events which in life would be

distributed over months or years, and at long intervals, and he has

guided the flight of a blindly unconscious bullet in such a way that

it commits, like a villain endowed with reason, a peculiarly dastardly

crime, thus raising our compassion for the poor weavers to the height

of indignation. The piece, then, shows us the ideas and designs of the

poet, his manner of viewing and interpreting reality; it enables us

to discern the sentiments aroused in him by the drama of life. It is,

then, in the highest degree a ‘subjective’ work, _i.e._, the opposite

of a ‘realistic’ copy of fact, which would have to be photographically

objective.

How does it happen that an artist, who applies his means with so fine

a taste and with so skilful a calculation of the effect, can commit at

the same time such naïvetés as, for example, these stage-directions in

_Vor Sonnenaufgang_: ‘Frau Krause, at the moment of seating herself,

remembers [!] that grace has not yet been said, and mechanically folds

her hands, though without otherwise controlling her malice.’ ‘It is

the peasant Krause who, as always [!], is the last to leave the inn.’

‘He embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla,’ etc. How is an

actor to set to work by his awkwardness to make a spectator think

precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that, ‘as always,’ he is the

last to leave the inn? More especially, how is it to be explained

that this same Hauptmann, who has created _Die Weber_, should after

this lofty composition have written the novels _Der Apostel_ and

_Bahnwärter Thiel_?[468] Here we fall back into the lowest depths of

Young-German incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism,

the story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and

lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought when

the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and slipshod enough

to make one weep. No words must be wasted on _Der Apostel_. A dreamer,

manifestly touched by insanity, perambulates the streets of Zürich in

the costume of an Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the

crowd who worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in

such a way that we never know whether the narrative is telling what

the Apostle dreamed or what really happened. His ideas and sentiments

are an echo of Nietzsche. _Zarathustra_ has incontestably got into

Hauptmann’s head, and left him no peace till he had himself produced

a second infusion of this idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has

lost his wife at the birth of their first child. Constantly away from

home on duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared

for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child of her own,

ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel’s warnings, she one

day leaves her stepchild on the rails untended, and it is crushed

by a train. The signalman then murders his wife and her child with

a hatchet in the most horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a

lunatic asylum as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his

descriptions: ‘In the obscurity ... the signalman’s hut was transformed

into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman on the table before

him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he read and sang alternately the

whole night through, interrupted only by the trains tearing past at

intervals, and fell into an ecstasy so intense that he saw visions

of the dead woman standing before his eyes.’ ‘The [telegraphic] pole,

at the southern extremity of the section, had a particularly full and

beautiful chord.... The signalman experienced a solemn feeling--as at

church. And then in time he came to distinguish a voice which recalled

to him his dead wife. He imagined that it was a chorus of blessed

spirits in which her voice was mingled, and this idea awakened in him a

longing, an emotion amounting to tears.’ The ‘Young German’ speaks with

contempt of Berthold Auerbach, because he depicts sentimental peasants.

Is there a single one of Auerbach’s Black Forest folk impregnated with

such a rose-watery sentimentality as this signalman of the ‘realist’

Hauptmann, who leans against a telegraph-pole, and is moved to tears

at its sound? Again, the passage (pp. 22, 23) which shows us Thiel

in amorous excitement at the sight of his wife (‘from the woman an

invincible, inevitable power seemed to emanate, which Thiel felt

himself impotent to resist’) Hauptmann has drawn from Zola’s novels,

and not from the observations of German signalmen. Or has he rather

desired to depict in a general way a madman who has always been such

long before his furious insanity broke out? In this case he has drawn

the picture very falsely.

And the style of this unhappy book! ‘The Scotch firs ... rubbed their

branches squeaking against each other,’ and ‘a noisy squeaking,

rattling, clattering, and clashing [of a train with the brake on] broke

upon the stillness of the evening.’ One and the same word to describe

the noise of branches rubbing each other, and of a train with the brake

on! ‘Two red round lights [those of a locomotive] pierced the darkness

like the fixed and staring eyes of a gigantic monster.’ ‘The sun ...

sparkling at its rising like an enormous blood-red jewel.’ ‘The sky

which caught, like a gigantic and stainlessly blue bowl of crystal,

the golden light of the sun.’ And once again: ‘The sky like an empty

pale-blue bowl of crystal.’ ‘The moon hung, comparable to a lamp,

above the forest.’ How can an author who has any respect for himself

employ comparisons which would make a journeyman tailor who dabbled in

writing blush? Besides, what countless slovenlinesses! ‘Before his eyes

floated pell-mell little yellow points like glow-worms.’ Glow-worms do

not give out a yellow, but a bluish, light. ‘His glassy pupils moved

incessantly.’ This is a phenomenon which no one has yet seen. ‘The

trunks of the fir-trees stretched like pale decayed bones between the

summits.’ Bones are that part of the body which does not decay. ‘The

blood which flowed was the sign of combat.’ Truly a reliable sign! Even

great faults in grammar are not wanting, but I consent to take these

as printer’s mistakes. If Gerhart Hauptmann has true friends, their

imperative duty is to rouse his conscience. Having shown what excellent

things he is capable of producing, he has not the right to scribble

carelessly like the first paltry ‘Young-German’ writer. He must be

strict with himself, and endeavour always to remain the artist he has

shown himself in _Die Weber_.

Hauptmann’s successes have not let Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf rest,

and both have joined to imitate his _Vor Sonnenaufgang_. Their united

efforts produced the _Familie Selicke_, a drama in which nothing

happens, of which alcohol is likewise the subject, and where the

personages also speak in dialect. For ‘modernity’s’ sake they have

introduced a theological candidate who has become a free-thinker,

yet none the less wishes to obtain an incumbency. I mention this

insignificant patchwork play only because the realists usually quote it

as one of their _magna opera_.