SCHWARZ. What?
LULU. Please close his eyes.
SCHWARZ. They are awful.
LULU. Nothing like as awful as you.
SCHWARZ. As I?
LULU. You're a depraved character.
SCHWARZ. Doesn't all this affect you?
LULU. Yes, I too am as well moved.
SCHWARZ. Then I ask you not to say anything.
LULU. You are moved as well.
Shocked by her comparative callousness, Schwarz subjects her to a
catechism--does she believe in a Creator, a soul, or anything--only to
find himself beating against an eternal "I don't know."
So ends the first act, and this creature, whose hair is a net of
murder, whose lips are poisoned fruit, and whose eyes are pits of hell,
has already one death to her credit.
The second act discloses Schwarz married to Lulu, and in the heyday of
artistic fame and fortune. A fleeting light is cast on the swamp, from
which the fiend has emerged, by the entry and departure of Schigolch,
her old ragamuffin of a sire. Then follows a _tête-à-tête_ between Lulu
and Schön. Combining, as she does, the soul of an Ibsen woman with
the body of a Phryne, she complains of her husband's obtusity: "He
is not a child--he is commonplace--he has no education--he realises
nothing--he realises neither me nor himself--he is blind, blind--he
doesn't know me, but he loves me; that is an unbridgeable gulf." The
painter returns, and is given by Schön the outlines of his wife's past.
Schön had picked her out of the gutter at the age of twelve, and had
had her educated; her antecedents were ghastly; after the death of
Schön's wife, Lulu wished to marry him; to obviate that, he made her
marry Dr. Goll with his half a million. Lulu is anxious to be good,
but must be taken seriously. The painter then commits suicide, and the
author feasts again on the carnage in a scene which, for sheer horror,
challenges even _Macbeth_.
"After you," says Lulu, after they have heard the body fall, and Schön
has opened the door.
SCHÖN. There's the end of my engagement. Ten minutes ago
he lay here.[2]
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
SCHÖN. That is your husband's blood.
LULU. It leaves no stain.
SCHÖN. Monster!
LULU. Of course you will marry me.
Then, by way of a really strong curtain, they send for a reporter, and
dictate the official version of the thrilling story. The third act is
the dressing-room of Lulu; she has gone on the music-hall stage as a
barefoot dancer of classical measure; Schön, having temporarily freed
himself from the spell, is about to marry a charming, "innocent child,"
whom he has brought to witness the spectacle. The insult stimulates
the girl to a supernormal fascination. Having refused the proposals
of a prince, she deliberately sets herself to cast her wand over the
journalist. She mocks him brazenly, with her magic potency over him, in
a scene of the most subtle cruelty.
SCHÖN. Don't look at me so shamelessly.
LULU. No one is keeping you here.
The Circæan witchery is complete, and the man, transformed, writes, at
the dictation of the enchantress, a letter breaking off his engagement.
In the fourth act, nemesis is at hand. His marriage with Lulu shatters
the constitution of the aging journalist, who falls a victim to
persecution-mania. Lulu, though genuinely in love with him, surrenders
herself almost mechanically to the kisses of his son. The journalist
can stand no more--such a creature is not fit to live--she must commit
suicide with the revolver which he produces. Simply as a matter of
self-preservation, she turns the weapon against the man himself. Then
ensues the most devilish scene of all. Fearing the prison-cage, the
brute turns for help to the child of its prey: "I shot him because he
wanted to shoot me. I loved no man in the world like I did him. Alwa,
demand what you will. Look at me, Alwa; look at me, man, look at me."
Those anxious for the further history of Lulu should turn to the livid
pages of _Die Büchse von Pandora._ There, in flaming characters, they
will read of her imprisonment, of how, being deprived of a mirror,
she at last found relief by seeing her reflection in a new spoon, of
her rescue therefrom by her inamorata, the Countess Geschwitz, and of
her flight to Paris with Alwa Schön; they will read of her life there
among _souteneurs_, blackmailers, and millionaires, of her migration
from Paris to London, of her degradation to the streets, and her final
assassination at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Wedekind, who to the _métier_ of the artist joins that of the
_enfant terrible_, strains in this play every nerve to shock. As the
susceptibilities of the left wing of most of the English intellects
are about on a par with those of the right wing of the German æsthetic
movement, from our own point of view he more than overshoots the mark.
None the less, the English reader, though stifled amid the fumes of the
monstrous debauch, is forced to admire here and there passages of a
potency truly infernal. The final scene in the wet and noisome garret
is indisputably tragic, when the squalid thing gazes at Schwarz's
pierrot picture of her dead beauty, only to throw it in revulsion out
of the window, or where Alwa and Schigolch analyse the melancholy past.
ALWA. She should have been a Catherine of Russia.
SCHIGOLCH. That beast!
ALWA. Although her development was precocious, she
once had the expression of a gay and healthy child of
five years old. She was then only three years younger
than I. In spite of her marvellous superiority to me
in practical matters, she let me explain to her the
meaning of _Tristan and Isolde_, and how fascinating
she was when I read it to her and she grasped its
meaning. From the little sister that felt herself like
a schoolgirl in her first marriage, she became the wife
of an unfortunate and hysterical artist; from being
the wife of the artist, she became the wife of my late
father; from being the wife of my father, she became my
mistress; so flows the stream of the world. Who can swim
against it?
So ends a play not without some resemblance to Hogarth's _Harlot's
Progress_, if one can imagine the fanatical moralist treating such
a subject with the artistic irony of a very much Germanised Aubrey
Beardsley.
But Wedekind's most serious contribution to dramatic literature is to
be found in _Frühlingserwachen._ The orthodox stage-conventions, it
is true, are sweepingly ignored; the scene is changed with more than
Shakespearean frequency; the characters indulge in prolonged romantic
soliloquies; none the less, the night of genuine tragedy broods over
the whole piece.
The first act opens with a conversation between Frau Bergman and her
daughter Wendla. The girl is growing up, fit to wear longer dresses,
and exhibiting the morbidity appropriate to her years. In the next
scene we see schoolboys at talk; with intense gravity they travel
from their work to religion, and from religion to sex, discussing the
Platonic and American systems of education, remarking that Superstition
is the Charybdis into which one flies out of the Scylla of religious
mania, or comparing notes on the growth of their respective manhoods.
Melchior, the leading spirit of the knot, promises to provide his less
experienced friend, Moritz, with a written synopsis of the mechanism
of life. In the third scene, we get the other side of the medal, when
a bevy of girls discuss life. How shall we dress our children? Which
is it better to be--a girl, or a man? Then, again, the scene is filled
with schoolboys, and we see the academic enthusiasm of young Germany.
"I've got my move," cried Melchior. "I've got my move--now the world
can go to pot--if I hadn't got my move, I'd have shot myself." A
British youth with his cricket or football "colours" fresh on his
victorious head could not possibly have manifested a more sacred joy,
and one thinks incidentally of the Viennese student who shot the
professor who had ploughed him in his viva voce.
Scene V, after a short philosophic exposition by Melchior of the
universality of egoism, contains an episode between himself and Wendla,
when at her own request he hits and beats her, so that, forsooth, she
may realise the sufferings of a friend of hers similarly handled by her
parents. After we have paid a visit to Melchior's study, where Melchior
and Moritz are reading _Faust_ together, we are transported once again
to the house of Wendla and her mother. This scene is the most pathetic
in the first act. The old fairy tales about the stork cease to obtain
credence, but the birthright of knowledge claimed by the child is
refused by the mother.
"Why can't you tell me, Mother dear--see, I kneel at
your feet and lay my head upon your lap--you put your
skirt over my head and tell me, and tell me as if you
were alone in the room. I promise not to move--I promise
not to shriek."
Could the dim forebodings of innocence, the harrowing consciousness of
mystery, be more poignantly delineated?
In the third act, events move apace. A poetic nemesis befalls the
prudish mother, for the child surrenders all unwitting to the ardour
of Melchior. Spring has indeed awakened. Moritz, however, has been
unsuccessful at school; he wanders into the forest to make the end.
Four pages of soliloquy; a dramatic device, no doubt, but none the less
indicative of the exaggerated introspective pedantry of the average
German schoolboy. "I wander to the altar like the youth in old Etruria,
whose death-rattle purchased deliverance for his brothers in the coming
year." Then, when his thoughts are at their darkest, a pretty little
artist's model comes tripping along barefoot; gay and sparkling is her
careless life. "Come home with me." But the schoolboy has his lessons
to do, and he hies himself to his final task. Act III.--Apprehensive of
a suicide epidemic, the masters hold a meeting in which the question
of whether the window shall be open or shut is apparently of as much
importance as the expulsion of Melchior. Then comes the funeral of
Moritz; the father repudiates the paternity of so prodigal a son, while
the classical professor sapiently remarks, "If he had only learnt his
history of Greek literature, he would have had no occasion to hang
himself." Melchior, however, is still at large, and after a harrowing
dialogue between his father and mother, is packed off to a reformatory.
But the transformation scene goes merrily on, and we behold first the
reformatory, from which Melchior effects an escape, and then Wendla's
sick-room. Amid the most trenchant satire on the pompous fashionable
doctor, it becomes apparent that the child has brought home to her
mother the full wages of innocence.
FRAU BERGMANN. You have a child.
WENDLA. But that is not possible, Mother. I am not
married. Oh, Mother, why did you not tell me everything?
The finale of the play is laid in the churchyard, over whose wall there
clambers the escaped Melchior; he walks past the tombstone of Wendla,
dead from her mother's heroic efforts to save her reputation; after an
interview with Moritz, out for a nocturnal stroll, with his head tucked
under his arm, he meets a mysterious stranger, who launches him in the
world.
Such is a synopsis of a play produced in Germany amid the wildest
acclamation and disparagement. Its success is largely due to the fact
that it is pregnant with a problem which, in Germany, at any rate, is
of peculiar moment. "Is such a subject capable of artistic treatment?"
demands the man of the old school. If, however, the treatment is
somewhat more drastic than in Longfellow's
"Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,"
the subject is the same, the reason for the difference being that
German blood flows with a swifter current and a fuller volume than the
thin New England trickle of the early nineteenth century. As a sheer
piece of psychology, the work is as great as James's _The Awkward Age_,
if one may compare a Vulcanic forge with a Daedalean web. That, indeed,
the theme is unfit for tragic treatment, let those maintain whose
ideally balanced temperaments have never experienced the throes and
travails that attend the birth of manhood or womanhood.
Some reference should be made to Wedekind's less important works--to
the somewhat inferior farce, _Der Liebestrank_; to the highly
serious _So ist das Leben_, a work whose psychology and symbolism
are analogous to Ibsen's _Volksfiend_[3]; to the amusing, but not
particularly significant _Marquis von Keith_, with its mixture of
the problem, the extravaganza, and the character study, and its
delightful comedy passage, when a boy wins his way with his father
by blackmailing him with suicide; to _Minnehaha_, the prose-poem,
compounded of the spirits of the classics and the coulisses; to the
satiric grotesque, _Oaha_, an elaborate skit on the celebrated Munich
journal with its chronic confiscations by the police and its special
"prison-editor"; and to _Hidalla_, that rollicking burlesque tragedy
of Free Love and Eugenics. On a higher plane, however, are the volume
of short stories, _Feuerwerk_, and the collection of poems entitled
_Die Vier Jahrzeiten_. Like Guy de Maupassant, Wedekind treats only
the one subject. His technique, however, is different, and while the
Frenchman crowns each tale with a climax, the German clothes it with an
atmosphere. _Feuerwerk,_ moreover, is worth reading, if only for the
style, with its noble simplicity and its majestic roll. The masterpiece
of the series is _Der Greise Freier_, where, set in the background of
an Italian honeymoon, lies painted the grey romance of a young girl
realising her love in the very arms of death. Matchless, again, as a
mock heroic _tour de force_ is _Rabbi von Ezra_, a philosophic sermon
by an aged Hebrew, delivered in the grandiose style of the prophets,
on his comparative experiences with the wife of his bosom and the
strange woman. The poems, also, are, with a few exceptions, innumerable
variations of the eternal theme. With all its fantastic bizarrerie,
reminiscent of Baudelaire, Poe, or Verlaine, the mood is throughout
more masculine, not to say more brutal. No lover has yet set his
enamoured features to a grin of such tigerish ferocity; no writer of
songs has yet refined melodious lyrics with such Nietzschean gusto,
such Satanic exultation. _Keuscheit_, in particular, is truly the
apotheosis of the super-brutal. In a more normal vein, making quite a
new departure in the art of light verse, is the charming poem beginning:
"Ich habe meine Tante geschlachtet,
Meine Tante war alt und schwach."
Of course it is inevitable that, like the Secessionist painters,
seeking, as he does, such drastic effects by such drastic means, when
he falls, he should fall with overwhelming heaviness. Occasionally,
instead of being powerful, he is merely crude. At his best, however,
his poems exhibit the swing and ripple of the authentic lyric. Typical
of him at his best are _Heimweh_ and _Der Blinde Knabe_. Yet now and
again the cry of the sufferer pierces the cynic's mask.
"Ich stehe schuldlos vor meinem Verstand,
Und fühle des Schicksals zermalmende Hand."
Among Wedekind's more recent works we would mention _Zensur_ and
_Schloss von Wetterstein_ and, far more particularly, _Musik_ and
_Franziska_.
_Zensur_, with its sub-title _a Theodicy_, is an _apologia pro vitâ
suâ_, arising more particularly out of the fact that the play, _Die
Büchse von Pandora_, was actually censored even in Munich. The
protagonist of this work, _Walter Buridan_, is without disguise
Frank Wedekind, for the postulate of the Wedekindian personality,
as a fundamental element in contemporary national culture, is as
important in Germany as was some years ago the postulate of the Shavian
personality in England. And, indeed, with all his clownings and
buffooneries, Wedekind is frequently as serious as Mr. Shaw himself. It
will therefore be appreciated that the passage which we are now going
to quote out of the dialogue between Buridan and the Court official
is meant deliberately, not as a mere piece of impudence but in all
earnestness.
BURIDAN. But can you adduce anything out of my writings
which hasn't for its ultimate object to glorify and
represent artistically that eternal justice before which
we all bend the knee with all humility?
DR. PRANTL. What do you mean by eternal justice?
BURIDAN. I understand by eternal justice the same thing
as that which John the Evangelist called the Logos. I
understand by it the same thing as that which the whole
of Christendom worships as the Holy Ghost. In no one
of my works have I put forward the good as bad or the
bad as good. I have never falsified the consequences
which accrue to a man as the result of his actions. I
have simply portrayed those consequences in all their
inexorable necessity.
In a somewhat different vein is the weird trilogy, _In Allen Satteln
Gerecht_ (_Ready for Everything_), _Mit Allen Hüden Gehetzt_ (_Up
to Everything_), and _In Allen Wassern Gewaschen_, which have
been recently published together, under the title of _Schloss von
Wetterstein._ In these three plays the lascivious and the intellectual,
the monstrous and the real, the comic and the tragic, are linked
together in a union which, though to some extent burlesque, is on
the whole successful. The dialogue, in particular, in this hybrid
of tragedy and extravaganza, with its ingenious twists, its lusty
thwackings, its shrewd, violent thrusts, not merely home, but, as it
were, right through the body, is in its own way packed with genius.
Effie, in particular, with her insatiable appetite in the erotic
sphere, is the greatest _enfant terrible_ in the whole of modern
European literature. And truly tragic is her dismay when she discovers
that that _Unersättlichkeit in Liebe_, on which she has built her whole
philosophy of life, is simply to be attributed to chronic indigestion,
and that the instantaneous effect which she produces upon males is
simply due to a diseased liver.
More serious, though with the usual Wedekindian sardonic undercurrent,
is _Musik_. This play consists of four "pictures" from the life of
a young singing student, Klara Hûhnerwadel, studying her art in the
household of a professor who is married to another woman. Events take
their normal course, but there is a great uproar owing to the arrest
and trial of the woman, through whose illegal assistance Klara had
successfully escaped the natural corollary of her rash romanticism.
Klara is consequently packed off across the frontier to avoid arrest
herself. She returns, however, is duly arrested, and the second
"picture" shows her in prison. In the third "picture," she is once
more back at the professor's house, and once more does history repeat
itself, though in this case the legal ordinances are not infringed. In
the fourth "picture," Klara has given birth to a son, of whom she is
devotedly fond. With true Wedekindian irony, however, the child dies on
the stage. Such is the skeleton of the plot, squalid, though no doubt
highly plausible. But the play must be read itself to appreciate the
sheer force of its sinister realism. The characters in this piece are
among the most convincing that ever walked the boards of a Wedekind
play, painted too in colours far more sober than those fantastic
luridities with which this author is accustomed to disport himself.
It is, in fact, if we may draw a slightly startling analogy, a "slice
of life" play of the Galsworthian genre. Before passing from _Musik_,
we would like to quote the passage describing the child's death as
typically characteristic of the author's brutal pathos.
ELSE. The bath will do him good (_with her bare arm in
the water_)--it's all cooking salt--the salt won't hurt
him, will it, doctor?
DR. SCHWARZKOPF (_by the cot, dully_). There is nothing
more to be done. The child is dead.
KLARA (_gives an agonised shriek_).
[_The_ Landlady _picks up the tub of water from the
floor and carries it out_.
In _Franziska_ (1912), Wedekind has given fresh rein to his fantastic
exuberance. This weird drama deals with the experiences of an
ultra-modern Mademoiselle de Maupin, who, having sold herself to the
devil in the shape of an impresario, who holds her strictly to her
bargain, proceeds to see life like a veritable twentieth-century female
Faust. And life, forsooth, she sees with a vengeance, playing the smart
"blood" in a gay _Weinstube_; marrying a rich heiress, so naïve and
so unsophisticated as to put everything down to sheer frigidity on
the part of her imagined husband; successfully masquerading in silk
knee-breeches to a silly old monarch as a genuine spirit, only finally,
like a contemporary
"In veterem Cæneus revoluta figuram,"
to subside both purified and enlightened byher kaleidoscopic
experiences into the healthy bliss of the quasi-domestic life with a
new, honest, and well-meaning lover.
The wild, rollicking humour of this play will perhaps appeal in vain
to the more stolid of our English minds. Some help may perhaps be
found for the due appreciation of this, and, indeed, of all Wedekind's
plays, if it be borne in mind that for a modern woman to live her own
life in Southern Germany (_sich auszuleben_, to employ the technical
and official phrase) is not revolutionary but elementary, and is far
more of a cliché than a new departure. Further, the play claims to be
treated not by the standards of the ordinary drama, but as a problem
farce, an Aristophanic modernity, a philosophic extravaganza, a
dramatic anomaly, very much _sui generis_, and consequently requiring
very special critical standards. Judging it by these standards, it is
impossible not to be swept away by the high spirits of this strange
piece of art. Who, too, can gainsay the practical up-to-dateness of a
play where maidens insure against children, wives against infidelity,
monarchs against madness? And who will not admire the almost morbid
conscientiousness of Franziska, who, having had one lover of the
name of Veit, and another lover of the name of Ralph, and becoming
subsequently a mother, determines, out of comprehensive precaution
and sheer sense of fairness, to call the little boy by the impartial
designation of Veitralph? It is, however, only fair to state, as we
have already hinted, that the play finishes up on a note of genuine
pathos and semi-conjugal affection.
What, then, is Wedekind's final claim? As a play-wright in the ordinary
sense of the word, his pretensions are negligible. One of the most
marked features, however, of the last decade and a half has been the
evolution of fresh species in the genus drama. Thus, apart from the
drama or play of action, with its orthodox _dénouement_ and climax, we
have the "idea" play, as in Mr. Shaw; the "slice of life" play, as in
Mr. Galsworthy; or the "æsthetic atmosphere" play, as in Maeterlinck.
Whether we call such work drama, or quasi-drama, is as immaterial
from the larger standpoint as the surname we choose to give to the
individual who did, or who did not, write _Hamlet_. Even, however,
with this extended classification, it is difficult to docket into any
definite pigeon-hole so idiosyncratic a temperament. If we have to
commit ourselves, we would say that the Wedekind play is the lyric play
of irony--irony both comic and tragic. Even making all due allowances
for defects, for the superfluous thickness with which sometimes he
places his harsh and violent colours, or for occasional amorphous
construction, as in _Frühlingserwachen_, as a master of irony he is
indisputably a genius. No _sœva indignatio_, it is true, lends its
ethical sanction, no Hellenic _εἰρονεία_ its delicate grace:
it is for his own fiendish delectation that he plies his knout on that
world of abnormalities called into existence for this express purpose,
and writhing prettily in the most ingenious of dances. Yet with what
art and dexterity does he operate, finding with unerring aim the raw
place of his victims, and drawing from these apparent grotesques the
blood of genuine humanity. Your specialist will no doubt diagnose him a
decadent, yet he is tense with a frenzied virility. It is, as we have
said before, the very exuberance and violence of his energy that leads
him plumb the abyss. He has himself well expressed his whole outlook
on life, and indeed the whole Nietzschean standpoint, in the following
lines:
"For them your kind and gracious face,
For me the sword smiles sweet,
For me the savage bear's embrace,
For them old Bruin's meat.
The brutal foe's own strife I choose,
They the humanities of truce."
[Footnote 1: _Cf._ the lines of Ricarda Huch to life: "Denn du bist
suss in deinen Bitternessen."]
[Footnote 2: It is curious to notice that almost identical words were
used in _Irene Wycherley_.]
[Footnote 3: "Volksfiend" (sic); German is "Volksfeind", Norwegian is
"Folkefiende"--transcriber's note--M.D.]