Gerhart Hauptmann is the dramatist of whom it may be justly said that he
revolutionized the spirit of dramatic art in Germany: the last Mohican
of a group of four--Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, and Hauptmann--who
illumined the horizon of the nineteenth century. Of these Hauptmann,
undoubtedly the most human, is also the most universal.
It is unnecessary to make comparisons between great artists: life is
sufficiently complex to give each his place in the great scheme of
things. If, then, I consider Hauptmann more human, it is because of his
deep kinship with every stratum of life. While Ibsen deals exclusively
with _one_ attitude, Hauptmann embraces all, understands all, and
portrays all, because nothing human is alien to him.
Whether it be the struggle of the transition stage in "Lonely Lives," or
the conflict between the Ideal and the Real in "The Sunken Bell," or
the brutal background of poverty in "The Weavers," Hauptmann is never
aloof as the iconoclast Ibsen, never as bitter as the soul dissector
Strindberg, nor yet as set as the crusader Tolstoy. And that because of
his humanity, his boundless love, his oneness with the disinherited of
the earth, and his sympathy with the struggles and the travail, the hope
and the despair of every human soul. That accounts for the bitter
opposition which met Gerhart Hauptmann when he made his first appearance
as a dramatist; but it also accounts for the love and devotion of those
to whom he was a battle cry, a clarion call against all iniquity,
injustice and wrong.
In "Lonely Lives" we see the wonderful sympathy, the tenderness of
Hauptmann permeating every figure of the drama.
_Dr. Vockerat_ is not a fighter, not a propagandist or a soapbox orator;
he is a dreamer, a poet, and above all a searcher for truth; a
scientist, a man who lives in the realm of thought and ideas, and is out
of touch with reality and his immediate surroundings.
His parents are simple folk, religious and devoted. To them the world is
a book with seven seals. Having lived all their life on a farm,
everything with them is regulated and classified into simple ideas--good
or bad, great or small, strong or weak. How can they know the infinite
shades between strong and weak, how could they grasp the endless
variations between the good and the bad? To them life is a daily routine
of work and prayer. God has arranged everything, and God manages
everything. Why bother your head? Why spend sleepless nights? "Leave it
all to God." What pathos in this childish simplicity!
They love their son _John_, they worship him, and they consecrate their
lives to their only boy; and because of their love for him, also to his
wife and the newly born baby. They have but one sorrow: their son has
turned away from religion. Still greater their grief that _John_ is an
admirer of Darwin, Spencer and Haeckel and other such men,--sinners,
heathens all, who will burn in purgatory and hell. To protect their
beloved son from the punishment of God, the old folks continuously pray,
and give still more devotion and love to their erring child.
_Kitty_, _Dr. Vockerat's_ wife, is a beautiful type of the Gretchen,
reared without any ideas about life, without any consciousness of her
position in the world, a tender, helpless flower. She loves _John_; he
is her ideal; he is her all. But she cannot understand him. She does not
live in his sphere, nor speak his language. She has never dreamed his
thoughts,--not because she is not willing or not eager to give the man
all that he needs, but because she does not understand and does not
know how.
Into this atmosphere comes _Anna Mahr_ like a breeze from the plains.
_Anna_ is a Russian girl, a woman so far produced in Russia only,
perhaps because the conditions, the life struggles of that country have
been such as to develop a different type of woman. _Anna Mahr_ has spent
most of her life on the firing line. She has no conception of the
personal: she is universal in her feelings and thoughts, with deep
sympathies going out in abundance to all mankind.
When she comes to the Vockerats, their whole life is disturbed,
especially that of _John Vockerat_, to whom she is like a balmy spring
to the parched wanderer in the desert. She understands him, for has she
not dreamed such thoughts as his, associated with men and women who, for
the sake of the ideal, sacrificed their lives, went to Siberia, and
suffered in the underground dungeons? How then could she fail a
Vockerat? It is quite natural that _John_ should find in _Anna_ what his
own little world could not give him,--understanding, comradeship, deep
spiritual kinship.
The Anna Mahrs give the same to any one, be it man, woman or child. For
theirs is not a feeling of sex, of the personal; it is the selfless, the
human, the all-embracing fellowship.
In the invigorating presence of _Anna Mahr_, _John Vockerat_ begins to
live, to dream and work. Another phase of him, as it were, comes into
being; larger vistas open before his eyes, and his life is filled with
new aspiration for creative work in behalf of a liberating purpose.
Alas, the inevitability that the ideal should be besmirched and
desecrated when it comes in contact with sordid reality! This tragic
fate befalls _Anna Mahr_ and _John Vockerat_.
Old _Mother Vockerat_, who, in her simplicity of soul cannot conceive of
an intimate friendship between a man and a woman, unless they be husband
and wife, begins first to suspect and insinuate, then to nag and
interfere. Of course, it is her love for _John_, and even more so her
love for her son's wife, who is suffering in silence and wearing out her
soul in her realization of how little she can mean to her husband.
_Mother Vockerat_ interprets _Kitty's_ grief in a different manner:
jealousy, and antagonism to the successful rival is her most convenient
explanation for the loneliness, the heart-hunger of love. But as a
matter of fact, it is something deeper and more vital that is born in
_Kitty's_ soul. It is the awakening of her own womanhood, of her
personality.
_Kitty._ I agree with Miss Mahr on many points. She was saying
lately that we women live in a condition of degradation. I think she
is quite right there. It is what I feel very often.... It's as
clear as daylight that she is right. We are really and truly a
despised and ill-used sex. Only think that there is still a law--so
she told me yesterday--which allows the husband to inflict a
moderate amount of corporal punishment on his wife.
And yet, corporal punishment is not half as terrible as the punishment
society inflicts on the Kittys by rearing them as dependent and useless
beings, as hot-house flowers, ornaments for a fine house, but of no
substance to the husband and certainly of less to her children.
And _Mother Vockerat_, without any viciousness, instills poison into the
innocent soul of _Kitty_ and embitters the life of her loved son.
Ignorantly, _Mother Vockerat_ meddles, interferes, and tramples upon the
most sacred feelings, the innocent joys of true comradeship.
And all the time _John_ and _Anna_ are quite unaware of the pain and
tragedy they are the cause of: they are far removed from the
commonplace, petty world about them. They walk and discuss, read and
argue about the wonders of life, the needs of humanity, the beauty of
the ideal. They have both been famished so long: _John_ for spiritual
communion, _Anna_ for warmth of home that she had known so little
before, and which in her simplicity she has accepted at the hand of
_Mother Vockerat_ and _Kitty_, oblivious of the fact that nothing is so
enslaving as hospitality prompted by a sense of duty.
_Miss Mahr._ It is a great age that we live in. That which has so
weighed upon people's minds and darkened their lives seems to me to
be gradually disappearing. Do you not think so, Dr. Vockerat?
_John._ How do you mean?
_Miss Mahr._ On the one hand we were oppressed by a sense of
uncertainty, of apprehension, on the other by gloomy fanaticism.
This exaggerated tension is calming down, is yielding to the
influence of something like a current of fresh air, that is blowing
in upon us from--let us say from the twentieth century.
_John._ But I don't find it possible to arrive at any real joy in
life yet. I don't know....
_Miss Mahr._ It has no connection with our individual fates--our
little fates, Dr. Vockerat!... I have something to say to you--but
you are not to get angry; you are to be quite quiet and good.... Dr.
Vockerat! we also are falling into the error of weak natures. We
must look at things more impersonally. We must learn to take
ourselves less seriously.
_John._ But we'll not talk about that at present.... And is one
really to sacrifice everything that one has gained to this cursed
conventionality? Are people incapable of understanding that there
can be no crime in a situation which only tends to make both parties
better and nobler? Do parents lose by their son becoming a better,
wiser man? Does a wife lose by the spiritual growth of her husband?
_Miss Mahr._ You are both right and wrong.... Your parents have a
different standard from you. Kitty's again, differs from theirs. It
seems to me that in this we cannot judge for them.
_John._ Yes, but you have always said yourself that one should not
allow one's self to be ruled by the opinion of others--that one
ought to be independent?
_Miss Mahr._ You have often said to me that you foresee a new, a
nobler state of fellowship between man and woman.
_John._ Yes, I feel that it will come some time--a relationship in
which the human will preponderate over the animal tie. Animal will
no longer be united to animal, but one human being to another.
Friendship is the foundation on which this love will rise,
beautiful, unchangeable, a miraculous structure. And I foresee more
than this--something nobler, richer, freer still.
_Miss Mahr._ But will you get anyone, except me, to believe this?
Will this prevent Kitty's grieving herself to death?... Don't let us
speak of ourselves at all. Let us suppose, quite generally, the
feeling of a new, more perfect relationship between two people to
exist, as it were prophetically. It is only a feeling, a young and
all too tender plant which must be carefully watched and guarded.
Don't you think so, Dr. Vockerat? That this plant should come to
perfection during our lifetime is not to be expected. We shall not
see or taste its fruits. But we may help to propagate it for future
generations. I could imagine a person accepting this as a life-task.
_John._ And hence you conclude that we must part.
_Miss Mahr._ I did not mean to speak of ourselves. But it is as you
say ... we must part. Another idea ... had sometimes suggested
itself to me too ... momentarily. But I could not entertain it now.
I too have felt as if it were the presentiment of better things. And
since then the old aim seems to me too poor a one for us--too
common, to tell the truth. It is like coming down from the
mountain-top with its wide, free view, and feeling the narrowness,
the nearness of everything in the valley.
Those who feel the narrow, stifling atmosphere must either die or leave.
_Anna Mahr_ is not made for the valley. She must live on the heights.
But _John Vockerat_, harassed and whipped on by those who love him most,
is unmanned, broken and crushed. He clings to _Anna Mahr_ as one
condemned to death.
_John._ Help me, Miss Anna! There is no manliness, no pride left in
me. I am quite changed. At this moment I am not even the man I was
before you came to us. The one feeling left in me is disgust and
weariness of life. Everything has lost its worth to me, is soiled,
polluted, desecrated, dragged through the mire. When I think what
you, your presence, your words made me, I feel that if I cannot be
that again, then--then all the rest no longer means anything to me.
I draw a line through it all and--_close my account_.
_Miss Mahr._ It grieves me terribly, Dr. Vockerat, to see you like
this. I hardly know how I am to help you. But one thing you ought to
remember--that we foresaw this. We knew that we must be prepared for
this sooner or later.
_John._ Our prophetic feeling of a new, a free existence, a far-off
state of blessedness--that feeling we will keep. It shall never be
forgotten, though it may never be realized. It shall be my guiding
light; when this light is extinguished, my life will be extinguished
too.
_Miss Mahr._ John! one word more! This ring--was taken from the
finger of a dead woman, who had followed her--her husband to
Siberia--and faithfully shared his suffering to the end. Just the
opposite to our case.... It is the only ring I have ever worn. Its
story is a thing to think of when one feels weak. And when you look
at it--in hours of weakness--then--think of her--who, far
away--lonely like yourself--is fighting the same secret
fight--Good-bye!
But John lacks the strength for the fight. Life to him is too lonely,
too empty, too unbearably desolate. He has to die--a suicide.
* * * * *
What wonderful grasp of the deepest and most hidden tones of the human
soul! What significance in the bitter truth that those who struggle for
an ideal, those who attempt to cut themselves loose from the old, from
the thousand fetters that hold them down, are doomed to lonely lives!
Gerhart Hauptmann has dedicated this play "to those who have lived this
life." And there are many, oh, so many who must live this life, torn out
root and all from the soil of their birth, of their surroundings and
past. The ideal they see only in the distance--sometimes quite near,
again in the far-off distance. These are the lonely lives.
This drama also emphasizes the important point that not only the parents
and the wife of _John Vockerat_ fail to understand him, but even his own
comrade, one of his own world, the painter _Braun_,--the type of
fanatical revolutionist who scorns human weaknesses and ridicules those
who make concessions and compromises. But not even this
arch-revolutionist can grasp the needs of _John_. Referring to his
chum's friendship with _Anna_, _Braun_ upbraids him. He charges _John_
with causing his wife's unhappiness and hurting the feelings of his
parents. This very man who, as a propagandist, demands that every one
live up to his ideal, is quick to condemn his friend when the latter,
for the first time in his life, tries to be consistent, to be true to
his own innermost being.
The revolutionary, the social and human significance of "Lonely Lives"
consists in the lesson that the real revolutionist,--the dreamer, the
creative artist, the iconoclast in whatever line,--is fated to be
misunderstood, not only by his own kin, but often by his own comrades.
That is the doom of all great spirits: they are detached from their
environment. Theirs is a lonely life--the life of the transition stage,
the hardest and the most difficult period for the individual as well as
for a people.