there were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into
a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed.
Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most
representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was
a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the
cafés, which had always been Vienna's center of social life, and to talk
things over--the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be
famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who
didn't like the whole business called it the café of the crazy
self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to
it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed,
but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the
hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning
till night--and till morning again.
In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary
tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own
places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day.
It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play--Dumas,
Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked
for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.
But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber
felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous
softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North
German. Thus an element of color and light--the soul of modern
impressionism--entered in his creations, breaking through the severe
contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set
great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his
tragedy of _Hero and Leander_ perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever
written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of
Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated
priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of
reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the
grandmother of Schnitzler's sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears
a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her
lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The
modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a
little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a
few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so
you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)
There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer's personality and work which
Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the
light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy
and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of
Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert's music and feel it in the
charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an
upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the human
beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.
Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer
suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and
warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the
same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set
against it. He was a man of vigor and _lebensbejahung_ (affirmation of
life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin
people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together
with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.
Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of
modern art--be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic--to his own work
and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been
treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was
to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart's sentiment
under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their
reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff
in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary
German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old
stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He
relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him--how he was lonely,
poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying
on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable
hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes
to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor,
because nothing can happen to him--because everything around belongs to
him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling
expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good
humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at
their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst
plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least
with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world
in general.
Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be
opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against
the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could
feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there
nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his
veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply
influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young
Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know
what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber's traditions could not
be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his
strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced
by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a
year after Anzengruber's death. This was _Anatol_, a little work full of
grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes
were connected only by Anatol's figure was perfectly original. It was
really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of
Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of
ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café
raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a
lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not
found anywhere else.
Women's influence penetrated this art--in Austria just as in the Latin
countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with
this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into
the center. It was written around her and it was written for her.
_Anatol_ belongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live
for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he
is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather
quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,--a melancholic of love, he
calls himself.
The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend
in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well,
so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to
translate them in good form. He says:
Well, let's begin the play,
Playing our own piece
Early matured, sad and tender,
Our own soul's comedy;
Our feelings past and present,
Dark things lightly said,
Smooth words, joyous pictures,
Vague emotions, half experienced,
Agonies and episodes.
The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola and
Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most
interesting and unknown land of all--the over soul. And here the
complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions fascinated
the young artists. Personality itself, though the center, took rather a
passive part,--it simply came to be the scene of action, the
meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier time
had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the outward
world, whereas now they held themselves open to new impressions,
observed them and their effect on the _I_ and then reproduced their
observations in artistic form. Impressionism, predominant in painting at
that time, had taken hold of literature. Of course, this passivity could
only be a stage of transition, because each artistic individuality tends
from the passive to the active; but this impressionism was a good means
of assimilating all the new possibilities in the inside and outside
world.
Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and prepared
to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a sure
scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective benevolence, and
tender forbearance for all sides of human life.
_Anatol_, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see
the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as the
_raisonneur_,--a remembrance of the French play,--and seven different
types of womanhood. Here they all are--the simple sweet girl, loving
with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with men; the lady of
the world, she who would like to love, but has not courage to do it.
The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes--for he tried to
express himself in all these forms--all speak of love and death. For the
pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol's frivolousness. The
presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation--the end of love,
the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this
permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this
earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it
lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing
the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler's most elementary
conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true--the
call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears
the call of life--she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who
never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him--always--without
the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a
young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his
arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can
stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping
potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events
go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a
curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel,
come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for
her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and
shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the
corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who
can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these
breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy
dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for
her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and
kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more.
These are his words--the drama's conclusion: "You _live_, Marie, and it
was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on
for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside
flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, midday
sky. And this is living--not less than it was on that night when your
darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today
appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if
later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not
cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you
have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing
names as murder and love."
The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful
words. It is Schnitzler's greatest art to lift us to a sphere where
everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy
and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is
full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its
importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of
a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.
The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined
men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several
circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished
material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself
grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the
fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops
line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful
charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded
lines--all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from
childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one
else he brought Vienna's charm to our consciousness. And so he returned
to Vienna what he had received from her.
Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu--_The Green
Cockatoo_, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian
atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and
_Beatrice's Veil_, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist
in those days. This epoch's refinement, the powerful personalities
peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their
life--in all this they saw something akin to their own life's ideal.
Schnitzler's plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like
Manet's small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft
contours diffused in light.
He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It
takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second
part of Goethe's _Faust_; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time
called _The Young Medardus_, but the Emperor himself remains in the
background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in
Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal
march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg's castle near
Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized--these people so
easily moved, so easily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for
Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor,
principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear
news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the
drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus--a cousin,
if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back--and the
beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue
against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself
and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting
episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them
together to a unity.
It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way--he is fifty years
old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his
own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he
influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his
figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded
humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do
not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised
his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a
marionettes' theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play;
the marionettes appear--all Schnitzler's own figures: the complicated
hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there,
full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there
is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live their
_own life_. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the
stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads;
the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half
bewildered, "Who are you?" But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an
enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it
apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures
with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.
The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town's
limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from
Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic
valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in
Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of
men with a strict "Art for Art's sake" program, exclusive and intended
only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric
poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of
form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or
Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the
Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense
organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones,
and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and
form, grew to be his follower.
These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was
crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world,
Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with
these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d'Annunzio. It was an
eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures
equally well.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete,
with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently
in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a
deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who
liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay
of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost
refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the
sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving
him a well-sounding, sonorous name.
He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest
understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to
something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to
Vienna. He perused all history's epochs and took the material for his
dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite
epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not
intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he
did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with
the old mystery play _Everywoman_. Some of his little plays are
lovely--the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of
Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt
is an arrangement of _Elektra_ for the modern stage. His Greeks are
barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under
the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of
the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity.
Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the
spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the
concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.
Since Richard Strauss put _Elektra_ into music, Hofmannsthal has devoted
his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as
libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of
his music.
Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no
dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name
of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary
compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things
told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the
essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the
extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes
very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day
life. But he discovered a little secret, namely, that the ordinary is
really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the
miraculous is there, everywhere. _Fairy Tales of Life_ he calls one of
his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call
them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck's _Blue Bird_ the wonderful
is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg
has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They
might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not
worth the relating,--but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world
and things in a new light.
Peter Altenberg uses the most original style--one might call it a
telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected
literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one
sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.
Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street,
who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may
be--principally in the cafes.
All the women must love him--for he has sung their praises all his life,
like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.
Editorials
Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago
Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to
give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts
Building--an event which has already filled us with the keenest
anticipations. There will be three on the war:--_Woman and War_, _War
and Christianity_, and _The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War_.
There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against
the tyranny of the past:--an introductory one on the significance of art
in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian,
German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These
will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and
offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On
Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets,
Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing
with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at
the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North
Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue.
How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which
attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly "safe" subjects making
its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and
sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of
terror.
The Philistinization of College Students
A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should
rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is
quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if THE
LITTLE REVIEW will not succeed in creating a _Drang und Sturm_ epoch; if
it will not "stir the hearts of college men and women--those who have
not yet been completely philistinized by their 'vocational guides';
college men and women who in other countries have always been the
torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and
ideals." It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to
THE LITTLE REVIEW; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have
turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are
sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are
so close to the _Drang und Sturm_ ourselves that perhaps we cannot see
clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes THE LITTLE
REVIEW our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally,
we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many
other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any
subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the
colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to
lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college
students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip
by.
Witter Bynner on the Imagists