"Alike in the comedies and dream-plays too You see but
a domesticated Zoo, Their blood so thin that in that
hot-house air They batten on a vegetable fare, And revel
chronically in chat and calls, Sitting like our friends
yonder in the stalls, _One's_ stomach of liqueurs will
disapprove, Another wonders if he really love, Another
hero starts with threats to pass From this foul world to
one perhaps more divine, But through five mortal acts
behold him whine, Yet no kind friend supplies the _coup
de grâce_, But the real thing, the wild and beauteous
beast, I, ladies, only I provide that feast."
These lines, delivered by a lion-tamer in the due professional
panoply of riding-coat, top-boots, and a revolver, are extracted
from the prologue of Frank Wedekind's tragedy, _Die Erdgeist_, and
illustrate efficiently the bizarre and Mephistophelian genius of a
German dramatist alike in his qualities and his defects indisputably
unique. Buccaneering no small way in front of the very left wing of
the æsthetic movement, Wedekind is at once the _bête noire_ of the
reactionaries and the spoilt darling of the ultra-moderns. To his
enemies he is a mere shoddy Anti-Christ, to his friends a dramatic
Messiah leading back the inner circles of the chosen intellects into
the promised land of vice and crime. It cannot be denied that his
subject-matter gives considerable colour to both these theories. Life,
as seen through the medium of his plays, is but a torrent of sex
foaming over the jagged rocks of crime and insanity. Take examples
from his three most powerful plays. In _Die Erdgeist_, the theme
of which is the baleful glamour of the "Evil Woman," three of the
four acts are punctuated with almost complete regularity by a death;
_Frühlingserwachen_, again, deals with hoydens and hobbledehoys, whose
only occupation appears to be the creation, discussion, and destruction
of life: In _Die Totentanz_, on the other hand, the scene is laid in
a "private hotel" (if one may borrow the highly convenient euphemism
of Mr. Shaw), while a charming interlude in lyrics is provided by one
of the boarders and a temporary visitor, and the hero and proprietor
is a "marquis," who psychologically is much more closely related to
Hamlet than to Sir George Crofts. Add to this choice of subject-matter
a violently impressionist technique and a hangman humour, whose grin is
at its broadest amid the sharpest agonies of the victims, and one can
form an approximately accurate idea of an author, conceivably somewhat
poisonous to anæmic constitutions, but certainly both piquant and
stimulating to the hardened and the adventurous. To arrive, however,
at a correct appreciation of so monstrous a phenomenon, it will be
advisable to investigate first the literary and social tendencies by
which it has been produced, together with the character of the audience
for whose edification it disports itself, and then by the light of such
investigations to proceed to an analysis of his individual works.
For the ten or fifteen years following 1880, both the novel and the
drama in Germany were transformed into a Zolaesque laboratory, where
interesting human experiments were conducted by skilled operators
with scientific precision. There were three chief causes for this:
firstly, a healthy reaction against the colourless and conventional
school which had held the stage for so many years, a school somewhat
analogous to that of our own Mid-Victorians with their strong silent
men and sweet insipid women; secondly, a dogmatic and uncompromising
materialism was the creed of the most ambitious and efficient
intellects who found their chief mental diet in Zola, Taine, Darwin,
and Haeckel; thirdly, the abstract theory of the struggle for
existence had received an excessively concrete exemplification in the
Franco-German war and the colossal commercial impetus that followed
in the wake of a united Germany. Naturalism, however, was destined by
the very character of the nation to be but a passing phase. Even apart
from the inevitable swing of the pendulum and the powerful Catholic and
religious reaction, whose force is seen at a glance in the numerical
majority of the Centrum, the German temperament is in its essence as
romantic as the French is logical. The nation, moreover, being at
bottom religious, "the death of God," to use the classic phrase of
Nietzsche, left a most crying lacuna. The philosopher of the Superman
adroitly filled the vacancy by the deification of Man. Human life
became an end in itself embraced with the most poetic exaltation and
pursued with all the zeal of religious martyrdom. The struggle for
existence, ceasing to be a bare scientific formula, was metamorphosed
into a classic arena in which the "life-artist" battled for the crown
of his Dionysiac agonies, finding the most delicious music in the
perpetual clash of brain with brain, and experiencing a sweetness in
the very bitterness of the conflict.[1]
Crushed then by the force of these tendencies, pure realism died. _Die
Ehre_ and _Die Weber_, it is true, still hold the German stage, but in
_Johannes_ and in _Die Versunkene Glocke_ respectively both Sudermann
and Hauptmann have deserted to the Romantic camp, taking with them,
however, a good proportion of the Realistic equipment. Particularly
typical of this amalgamation of the two forces is _Hannele_, where the
pathological and mystical explanations are to be accepted concurrently
and not as alternatives, as in Mr. Henry James's _Turn of the Screw_.
As was, however, only natural, there was a considerable reaction, and
orthodox naturalism was deliberately flouted by the Secessionsbühne in
1899 with their penchant for fairy-dramas and their genuinely æsthetic
project of stretching between the stage and the audience a veil of
transparent gauze intended to draw the scene into a misty distance. The
rankest idealism seemed for a time the order of the day. "All that the
young and the moderns have fought against with such animosity between
1880 and 1890, pseudo-idealism, bookish dialogue, false and artificial
characterisation, clap-trap stagecraft, all this celebrates in this
drama a joyous resurrection; let us acknowledge it; we have lost the
battle against falsehood and stupidity, conventionalism, and the
public, lost it absolutely," writes Julius Hart in the _Tag_ of 1902.
But the most interesting direction was given to this neo-romanticism by
the æsthetic movement and _Kunstschwarmerei_ which began to sweep over
music, literature, painting, and the drama with an almost Nietzschean
intensity. Pure realism and pure romanticism, then, both being extinct,
and an agressive horde of exuberant and heretical artists being alive,
the solution for the artistic problem was found in the æsthetic and
romantic treatment of realistic themes. The prose of the human document
became illuminated with the poesy of the human imagination. Realism
and Romanticism went into partnership in the freest of unions, and
Wedekind is one of the most interesting fruits of this drastic alliance.
The realistic method might be worse than useless for æsthetic purposes,
but the realistic stock-in-trade was invaluable material for spirits
bursting with an almost morbid healthiness, spirits for whom no subject
was too terrible, no sensation too violent. Let us, however, turn to
the official pronouncement of Wedekind's preface to his revised and
expurgated edition of _Die Büchse von Pandora_, in which he states his
defence to the prosecution which the first edition of that interesting
book had brought upon his martyred head: "Wedekind is an apostle
of the modern movement. It is the motto of this movement to effect
a transvaluation of æsthetic values in style and stagecraft. The
followers of this movement have for over fifteen years repudiated the
claims of the so-called 'æsthetic-content' and of mere formal beauty;
they hold it permissible to depict artistically and to represent on
the stage the ugly, the crude, the repulsive, and even the vulgar,
provided always that such characteristics are not treated as ends in
themselves--that is to say, when the work is not created by love of the
abhorrent for its own sake but is merely the medium for the expression
of an artistic idea. Wedekind, accordingly, as the disciple of these
authors, chooses to shed a light upon the darkest crannies of vice, and
in particular to surround with a poetic framework those sexual subjects
which have been the peculiar subject of medical science. The end and
goal of his writings is to awaken fear and pity."
Such an apologia can scarcely be said to be superfluous when one of the
sub-plots of the play in question deals with the heroic, if somewhat
nauseating, rebellion of a woman in the determination of whose lot
nature has made a somewhat unfortunate mistake.
Before, however, we proceed to gaze upon the black and lurid pictures
of our dramatic artist, it is advisable to turn very briefly to the
audience for whose particular benefit they exercise their hellish
fascination. Wedekind's audience, in a word, is the extreme left
wing. The German left wing, however, is considerably more numerous,
more advanced, and more dangerous than the English. Our own æsthetic
movement was killed almost instantaneously by the Wilde debacle. We
still, of course, have our ultra-modern movement, such as it is, but
for practical purposes no one could be more amiable or innocuous
than the ladies and gentlemen who used to constitute the highly
respectable audiences of the Court Theatre, or who find in the Stage
Society a mildly audacious means of spending their Sabbath evenings.
Germany, however, with its vastly superior education, and its horde
of professional men and women, schoolmasters and piano-mistresses,
lawyers, doctors, poets, and littérateurs, has the disease of modernity
with a vengeance, carrying through each symptom to its logical
conclusion with a violence and intensity to which our own fluttering
unconventionalism affords but the faintest and most shadowy parallel.
Free-love, which, with the possible exception of a certain ephemeral
incident successfully immortalised in three or four recent novels,
is in England little more than a name, the mythical bogey with which
the halfpenny press pretend to frighten their delighted readers, or
is at best among the smart and the semi-educated rich the philosophic
sanction for highly unphilosophic impulses, is in Germany a theoretic
dogma almost as sacred as that of woman suffrage and demanding almost
as devout sacrifices on the shrine of its philosophic altar. When again
the subtle souls of Great Britain will so far break the ice of their
insular reserve as to discourse about the tragedy of existence, the
far more heroic spirits of German modernity will have recourse to all
the æsthetic delights of a fine and artistic suicide, which indeed
in the most advanced circles is almost a fashionable analogue to our
own appendicitis, or will find in the modern dogma of "living their
own life" the substantial though possibly slightly less exhausting
equivalent to our English hunger-strike. How strong is the neo-æsthetic
movement may be gauged by the phenomenal success in Berlin of _Salome_
and _Monna Vanna,_ the great scenes of which were followed avidly
by young girls with an enthusiasm which was more than æsthetic. It
may also be mentioned incidentally that Wilde's _De Profundis_ was
published in German before it appeared in England, a circumstance
due quite as much to a keener intellectual enthusiasm as to superior
commercial enterprise.
Realising, then, that while it is orthodox in England to be ashamed of
one's passions and emotions, the German ambition is to plume oneself on
taking everything _an grand sérieux_, let us turn to a consideration
of those plays in which, on a large canvas and in big bold splashes
reminiscent of the not unanalogous methods of the Secessionist
painters, Wedekind is pleased to present framed in gigantic irony:
"Les immondes chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices."
It will, perhaps, be well to start with that little masterpiece of
a dramatic caricature, _Der Kammersänger_. A fashionable singer,
having completed his engagements in a provincial town, is snatching
at last a few minutes' well-earned repose prior to catching his
train. He has given strict orders that he is at home to no one. But
there is no repose for the famed. An English school miss, who has
waited two hours in the rain, smuggles herself into the room: she
prattles her enthusiasm with pretty infantile gush: a few deft words
of paternal advice and she is summarily dismissed. But again the great
man's seclusion is desecrated by the entrance of a brother artist, a
pathetically grotesque figure of a megalomaniac failure whose publisher
complains that he spoils his one chance of success by refusing to die
and thus afford an opportunity for posthumous discovery. But the genial
tolerance of the illustrious one is considerably harshened when his
colleague insists on playing his own compositions in a scene every whit
as racy and delightful as the classic episode in Wycherley's _Plain
Dealer_, where Major Oldfox, having tied down the Widow Blackacre,
discharges at her helpless person the most deadly poetical fusillade.
Exit, however, the composer, after an interesting philosophic lecture
by his victim on the singer's life and of the contempt which as
a practical man (for at an early period in his career he was "in
carpets") he has for his fashionable bourgeois audience for whom he is
a mere article of luxury as much in request as a motor-car or a new
dress. Then, as the climax of this crescendo of invaders, enter Helene:
a formal invitation to elope: the artist, however, has his contracts
to fulfil and his train to catch, and the favour is declined with
thanks: tears and threats of suicide: he endeavours to pacify her, and
she promises to be good: he will miss his train if he is not quick.
The romantic woman, however, unable to bear the final parting, shoots
herself on the spot. The remorseful lover follows her example? Not a
bit of it. He is politely regretful for the contretemps, but after all
business is business, and he must catch his train. It is impossible
without copious quotations to give a full idea of the piquant irony
with which the comedy is salted; the truth and reality of the theme
stand out all the more brilliant from their garb of romantic travesty,
while the superb impudence of utilising death as an essentially comic
climax is without parallel in European literature.
Let us, however, now turn from light comedy to serious tragedy in
the shape of _Der Totentanz_. The scene, as already mentioned, is
laid in a "private hotel." Where Shaw, however, sees but the problem,
Wedekind has only eyes for the poetry. To Shaw the irony is a weapon,
to Wedekind an end in itself. Elfrida, a young lady in Reformkleid,
one of the most militant members of a suppression society, interviews
the proprietor, the Marquis Casti Piani, on the subject of a former
maid of hers, for whom she has been searching for some years. The girl
is identified, and the whole question philosophically discussed. The
proprietor, moreover, who is an extremely well-dressed gentleman with
a first-class education, polished manners, and all the introspective
subtlety of the most modern of decadents, neatly turns the tables
by announcing that the real impetus which made the girl change her
calling was the "suppression literature" which the puritanical young
woman had with unpardonable carelessness left lying about. The ice
being thus broken, he proceeds in his capacity of sexual expert to
diagnose the respective psychologies of his _tête-à-tête_ and himself.
Why, they are both tarred with the same brush. If he, the trafficker,
pursues his unpopular vocation even more as a matter of sexual mania
than of commercial enterprise, so does she, the philanthropist, ply
her good work out of an equally morbid craving to move in a congenial
atmosphere. Are they not both but the obverse and reverse of the same
medal? Paradoxical and super-Shavian dissertations on the theory of
woman are then followed by blandishments and caresses, in respect of
which with a marvellous genius for brutality he chaffs her on the
crudity and inexperience of her technique. Then comes the most _outré_
scene of the play when Casti Piani and Elfrida watch from behind
a screen the courtship of Lisiska, the missing servant-girl, by a
young man in a check knickerbocker suit; the bizarre paradox is but
accentuated by the swing and beauty of the lyrics in which this wooing
is conducted, and the distorted idealism of the girl, who, as the
martyr-priestess of the _joie de vivre_, is almost genuinely convinced
of the sanctity of her mission. The interlude over, the audience come
from behind the curtain. Stung to the wildest pitch of emulation, the
extreme limit of self-sacrificing ecstasy, the neurotic woman completes
the cycle of her psychic revolution by the supplication, "Verkaufen Sie
mich." The marquis, who has thus succeeded beyond his most sanguine
expectations, in a fit of nervous revulsion shoots himself before the
girl's eyes. Three of the inmates rush from three distinct doors,
and the over-civilised satyr expires with their kisses on his lips,
kisses savoured and criticised with all the frenzy of the moribund
connoisseur--"Küsse mich--nein, das war nicht--Küsse--küsse mich
anders."
It is impossible to express more cogently the whole tragedy of the
dying sensualist.
No normal Englishman can be expected to enjoy such a play; in justice,
however, to the author, this freny is æsthetic as well as sexual. New
worlds, in fact, have been needed to regale the insatiate appetites of
the dramatist and his hearers; "Heaven has been blown to pieces by the
artillery of science; earth is cold, stale and unpalatable; perforce
let us batten on the fires of hell," would run his motto. As Baudelaire
in verse, and Beardsley in painting, found their theme in the vicious
and the abhorrent, so does Wedekind in the drama. As an ordinary play,
_Der Totentanz_ falls outside judgment; as a sheer literary curiosity,
a dramatic fantasia on the sex-motif, a deliberate essay in the art of
the ironical and the brutal, the piece achieves its own and peculiar
ambition.
_Die Junge Welt_, on the other hand, flows in a current which, in
spite of the eventual madness of the principal male character, is
limpid and playful by comparison with the Phlegethontian course of the
_Totentanz._ The theme of the comedy is the woman movement. In the
prologue, one of his most aery and delicious pieces of work, Wedekind
shows us a bevy of schoolgirls at lessons, chattering, fooling, and
"ragging" their master with the most delightful _naïveté_. They have a
pretty taste in literature, forsooth, reading surreptitious copies of
_The Arabian Nights_, talking gravely of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
and quoting with the prettiest of pedantry Schiller, Goethe, and even
Ovid. No mere prattlers, however. Glorying in their grievance, they
found a league, the solemn oath of whose members is never to marry
until the most glaring outrages in the education of the young are
remedied. Towards the end of the scene some youthful figures of the
opposite sex enter. How long will the league last?
Then we come to the actual play where the sacred circle has been
already cut by a marriage of one of the members. The whole comedy, in
fact, shows how irresistibly the Life Force claims its own. The brisk
racy dialogue and the satiric character drawing of the ultra-moderns
are equally delicious. Particularly charming are Anna, masking the
temperament of her Shavian namesake beneath the pose of the new woman;
Karl, the picturesque scamp, who has married a seamstress on abstract
socialistic principles; and Meyer, the modern poet, who, when his
fiançée presents herself to recite a poem which he has written, in
the most faithful of Cupid costumes, is most righteously indignant
because--the dress fails to harmonise with the subtle spirit of his
masterpiece.
A masterly little piece of irony, again, is the celebrated
stage-direction, when, at the climax of an intense passage, a
baby squalls, and is carried off the stage by its mother, to the
accompaniment of music. Perhaps, however, the deftest touch of
satire is the analysis of the decline of the _détraqué littérateur,_
accustomed to transcribe each kiss fresh from the lips of his beloved
into his artistic note-book.--"When I made my psychological studies on
Anna, then Anna becomes unnatural--on some other specimen--she became
jealous--there was no other alternative but to make them on myself."
Wedekind's dramatic masterpieces, however, are _Die Erdgeist_. and
_Frühlingserwachen_, which merit, consequently, a somewhat more
detailed analysis. _Die Erdgeist_, as has been already remarked,
deals with the theme of the modern Lilith, not from the point of view
of orthodox dramatic technique like Mr. Pinero, not scientifically
like Zola, but æsthetically. No show of esoteric detail, no orthodox
_dénouement_; simply atmosphere. The play, together with its sequel,
_Die Büchse von Pandora_, constitutes the epic of the courtesan. In the
first act, Schwarz, a painter, is at work on the portrait, in pierrot
costume, of the wife of a Dr. Goll, a lady rejoicing in the various
Christian names of Nellie, Eva, and Lulu. A middle-aged journalist,
named Schön, who is in the studio, is on old and friendly terms with
Frau Goll. The fact that female beauty is the _raison être_ of the
creature's existence is soon made apparent by the following dialogue:
LULU. Here I am.
SCHÖN. Splendid.
LULU. Well?
SCHÖN. You put the wildest imagination to the blush.
LULU. Do you find me nice?
SCHÖN. You're a picture that makes artists despair.
The pompous conventionalism of the doctor is seen almost immediately,
when he suggests with heavy gravity that she is not wearing her costume
with sufficient reserve. The artist proceeds to work, and the mere
mechanism of posing brings out at once the sheer sexuality of the
animal which he is painting. Goll is carried off by Schön, and the
artist and the pierrot are left alone. The young painter proves more
attractive than the old professor, who arrives towards the climax of a
wild scene. In the scuffle, Goll is killed. Death, however, is a pet
theme of Wedekind, who proceeds to batten thereon with abnormal gusto.
SCHWARZ. The doctor is bound to be here in a minute.
LULU. Doctoring won't help him.
SCHWARZ. Still, in a case like this, one does what one
can.
LULU. He doesn't believe in doctors.
SCHWARZ. Won't you, at any rate, change?
LULU. Yes, at once.
SCHWARZ. Why are you waiting?