A very deceptive mask is literature. Here is your Nietzsche with his
warrior pen slashing away at the conventional lies of civilisation, a
terrific figure of outraged manhood, though in private life he was the
gentlest of men, self-sacrificing, lovable, modest, and moral to a
painful degree. But see what his imitators have made of him. And in
all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the
story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being
is better than a half-god.
Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the
notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to
recognition in New York is his Spring's Awakening, produced at the
Irving Place Theatre seasons ago. I had seen this moving drama of
youth more than once in the Kammerspielhaus of the Deutsches Theatre,
Berlin, and earlier the same poet's drama Erdgeist (in the summer,
1903), and again refused to shudder at its melodramatic atrocities.
Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers,
for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his
spiritual depravity--forgetting that the two qualities cannot be
blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of
the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits
like Goethe's Mephisto, who perpetually deny. On the contrary, he is
one of the most affirmative voices in the new German literature.
He is always asserting. If he bowls away at some rickety ninepin of a
social lie, he does it with a gusto that is exhilarating. To be sure,
whatever the government is, he is against it; which only means he is a
rebel born, hating constraint and believing with Stendhal that one's
first enemies are one's own parents. No doubt, after bitter
experience, Wedekind discovered that his bitterest foe was himself.
That he is a tricky, Puck-like nature is evident. He loves to shock, a
trait common to all romanticists from Gautier down. He sometimes says
things he doesn't mean. He contradicts himself as do most men of
genius, and, despite his poetic temperament, there is in him much of
the lay preacher. I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and
Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom,
for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is
thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one's soul into a spiritual
bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his
shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism. In Germany every one sports
his Weltanschauung, his personal interpretation of life and its
meanings. In a word, a working philosophy--and a fearsome thing it is
to see young students with fresh sabre cuts on their honest
countenances demolishing Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche only to set
up some other system.
Always a system, always this compartmentising of the facts of
existence. Scratch the sentimentalism and aestheticism of a German, and
you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this
national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for
youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His
admirers speak of him as a unicum, a man so original as to be without
forerunners, without followers. A monster? For no one can escape the
common law of descent, whether physical or spiritual. Wedekind has had
plenty of teachers, not excepting the most valuable of all, personal
experience. The sinister shadow cast by Ibsen fell across the
shoulders of the young poet, and he has read Max Stirner and Nietzsche
not wisely, but too well. He is as frank as Walt Whitman (and as
shameless) concerning the mysteries of life, and as healthy (and as
coarse) as Rabelais. Furthermore, Strindberg played a marked role in
his artistic development. Without the hopeless misogyny of the Swede,
without his pessimism, Wedekind is quite as drastic. And the realism
of the Antoine Theatre should not be omitted.
He exhibits in his menagerie of types--many of them new in the
theatre--a striking collection of wild animals. In the prologue to one
of his plays he tells his audience that to Wedekind must they come if
they wish to see genuine wild and beautiful beasts. This sounds like
Stirner. He lays much stress on the fact that literature, whether
poetic or otherwise, has become too "literary"--hardly a novel idea;
and boasts that none of his characters has read a book. The curse of
modern life is the multiplication of books. Very true, and yet I find
that Wedekind is "literary," that he could exclaim with Stephan
Mallarme: "La chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tous les livres."
Regarding the modern stage he is also positive. He believes that for
the last twenty years dramatic literature is filled with half-humans,
men who are not fit for fatherhood, women who would escape the burden
of bearing children because of their superior culture. This is called
"a problem play," the hero or heroine of which commits suicide at the
end of the fifth act to the great delight of neurotic, dissatisfied
ladies and hysterical men. Weak wills--in either sex--have been the
trump card of the latter-day dramatist; not a sound man or woman who
isn't at the same time stupid, can be found in the plays of Ibsen or
Hauptmann or the rest. Wedekind mentions no names, but he tweaks
several noses prominent in dramatic literature.
He is the younger generation kicking in the panels of the doors in
the old houses. There is a hellish racket for a while, and then when
the dust clears away you discern the revolutionist calmly ensconced in
the seats of the bygone mighty and passionately preaching from the
open window his version of New Life; he is become reformer himself and
would save a perishing race--spiritually speaking--from damnation by
the gospel of beauty, by shattering the shackles of love--especially
the latter; love to be love must be free, preaches Wedekind; love is
still in the swaddling clothes of Oriental prejudice. George Meredith
once said the same in Diana of the Crossways, although he said it more
epigrammatically. For Wedekind religion is a symbol of our love of
ourselves; nevertheless, outside of his two engrossing themes, love
and death, he is chiefly concerned with religion, not alone as
material for artistic treatment, but as a serious problem of our
existence. A Lucifer in pride, he tells us that he has never made of
good evil, or vice versa; he, unlike Baudelaire, has never
deliberately said: Evil, be thou my good! That he has emptied upon the
boards from his Pandora-box imagination the greatest gang of
scoundrels, shady ladies, master swindlers, social degenerates, circus
people, servants, convicts, professional strong men, half-crazy
idealists, irritable rainbow-eaters--the demi-monde of a subterranean
world--that ever an astonished world saw perform their antics in front
of the footlights is not to be denied, but it must be confessed that
his criminal supermen and superwomen usually get their deserts. Like
Octave Mirbeau, he faces the music of facts, and there are none too
abhorrent that he doesn't transform into something significant.
On the technical side Strindberg has taught him much; he prefers the
one-act form, or a series of loosely joined episodes. Formally he is
not a master, nor despite his versatility is he objective. With
Strindberg he has been called "Shakespearian"--fatal word--but he is
not; that in the vast domain of Shakespeare there is room for them
both I do not doubt; room in the vicinity of the morbid swamps and
dark forests, or hard by the house of them that are melancholy mad.
The oftener I see or read Wedekind the more I admire his fund of
humour. But I feel the tug of his theories. The dramatist in him is
hampered by the theorist who would "reform" all life--he is neither a
socialist nor an upholder of female suffrage--and when some of his
admiring critics talk of his "ideals of beauty and power," then I know
the game is up--the prophet, the dogmatist, the pedant, not the poet,
artist, and witty observer of life, are thrust in the foreground.
There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of
Wedekind--Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre,
the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or
liquid you desire from his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas,
or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the
marionettes of the fashionable world! Frank Wedekind is less of the
stage prestidigitator and more sincere. We must, perforce, listen to
his creatures as they parade their agony before us, and we admire his
clever rogues--the never-to-be-forgotten Marquis of Keith heads the
list--and smile at their rough humour and wisdom. For me, the real
Frank Wedekind is not the prophet, but the dramatist. As there is much
of his stark personality in his plays, it would not be amiss to glance
at his career.
He has "a long foreground," as Emerson said of Walt Whitman. He was
born at Hanover, July 24, 1864, and consequently was only twenty-seven
years old when, in 1891, he wrote his most original, if not most
finished, drama, Spring's Awakening. He studied law four terms at
Munich, two at Zurich: but for this lawless soul jurisprudence was not
to be; it was to fulfil a wish of his father's that he consented to
the drudgery. A little poem which has been reproduced in leaflet form,
Felix and Galathea, is practically his earliest offering to the muse.
Like most beginnings of fanatics and realists, it fairly swims and
shimmers with idealism. His father dead, a roving existence and a
precarious one began for the youthful Frank. He lived by his wits in
Paris and London, learned two languages, met that underworld which
later was to figure in his vital dramatic pictures, wrote
advertisements for a canned soup--in Hauptmann's early play,
Friedensfest, Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a reclame
agent--was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an
actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side,
whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences
produced their inevitable reaction--disillusionment. Finally in 1905
Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress
Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father
of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the
least changed, to judge from his play, Franziska, a Modern Mystery.
Personally, Wedekind was never an extravagant, exaggerated man. A
sorrowful face in repose is his, and when he appeared on Hans von
Wolzogen's Ueberbrettl, or sang at the Munich cabaret called the
Eleven Hangmen, his songs--he composes at times--Ilse, Goldstueck,
Brigitte B, Mein Liebchen, to the accompaniment of his guitar, there
was a distinct individuality in his speech and gesture very attractive
to the public.
But as an actor Wedekind is not distinguished, though versatile. I've
only seen him in two roles, as Karl Hetman in his play of Hidalla (now
renamed after the leading role), and as Ernest Scholtz in The Marquis
of Keith. As Jack the Ripper in The Box of Pandora I am glad to say
that I have not viewed him, though he is said to be a gruesome figure
during the few minutes that he is in the scene. His mimetic methods
recalled to me the simplicity of Antoine--who is not a great actor,
yet, somehow or other, an impressive one. Naturally, Wedekind is the
poet speaking his own lines, acting his own creations, and there is,
for that reason, an intimate note in his interpretations, an
indescribable sympathy, and an underscoring of his meanings that even
a much superior actor might miss. He is so absolutely unconventional
in his bearing and speech as to seem amateurish, yet he secures with
his naturalism some poignant effects. I shan't soon forget his Karl
Hetman, the visionary reformer.
Wedekind, like Heine, has the faculty of a cynical, a consuming
self-irony. He is said to be admirable in Der Kammersaenger. It must
not be forgotten that he has, because of a witty lampoon in the
publication Simplicissimus, done his "little bit" as they say in
penitentiary social circles. These few months in prison furnished him
with scenic opportunities; there is more than one of his plays with a
prison set. And how he does lay out the "system." He, like Baudelaire,
Flaubert, and De Maupassant, was summoned before the bar of justice
for outraging public morals by the publication of his play, The Box of
Pandora, the sequel to Erdgeist. He had to withdraw the book and
expunge certain offensive passages, but he escaped fine and
imprisonment, as did his publisher, Bruno Cassirer. He rewrote the
play, the second act of which had been originally printed in French,
the third in English, and its republication was permitted by the
sensitive authorities of Berlin.
If a critic can't become famous because of his wisdom he may
nevertheless attain a sort of immortality, or what we call that
elusive thing, by writing himself down an ass. The history of critical
literature would reveal many such. Think of such an accomplished
practitioner as the late M. Brunetiere, writing as he did of Flaubert
and Baudelaire. And that monument to critical ineptitude,
Degeneration, by Max Nordau. A more modern instance is the judgment of
Julius Hart in the publication, _Tag_ (1901), concerning our
dramatist. He wrote: "In German literature to-day there is nothing as
vile as the art of Frank Wedekind." Fearing this sparkling gem of
criticism might escape the notice of posterity, Wedekind printed it as
a sort of motto to his beautiful poetic play (1902), Such Is Life.
However, the truth is that our poet is often disconcerting. His swift
transition from mood to mood disturbs the spectator, especially when
one mood is lofty, the next shocking. He has also been called "the
clown of the German stage," and not without reason, for his mental
acrobatics, his grand and lofty tumblings from sheer transcendentalism
to the raw realism, his elliptical style, are incomprehensible even
to the best trained of audiences. As Alfred Kerr rightfully puts it,
you must learn to see anew in the theatre of Wedekind. All of which is
correct, yet we respectfully submit that the theatre, like a picture,
has its optics: its foreground, middle distance, background, and
foreshortening. Destroy the perspective and the stage is transformed
into something that resembles staring post-Impressionist posters. The
gentle arts of development, of characterisation, of the conduct of a
play may not be flouted with impunity. The author more than the
auditor is the loser. Wedekind works too often in bold, bright primary
colours; only in some of his pieces is the modulation artistic, the
character-drawing summary without being harsh. His climaxes usually go
off like pistol-shots. Fruehlings Erwachen (1891), the touching tale of
Spring's Awakening in the heart of an innocent girl of fourteen, a
child, Gretchen, doomed to tragic ending, set all Germany by the ears
when it was first put on in the Kammerspielhaus, Berlin, by Director
Reinhardt at the end of 1906. During fifteen years two editions had
been sold, and the work was virtually unknown till its stage
presentation. Mr. Shaw is right in saying that if you wish to make
swift propaganda seek the theatre, not the pulpit, nor the book. With
the majority Wedekind's name was anathema. A certain minority called
him the new Messiah, that was to lead youth into the promised land of
freedom. For a dramatist all is grist that makes revolve the sails of
his advertising mill, and as there is nothing as lucrative as
notoriety, Wedekind must have been happy.
He is a hard hitter and dearly loves a fight--a Hibernian trait--and
his pen was soon transformed into a club, with which he rained blows
on the ribs of his adversaries. That he was a fanatical moralist was
something not even the broadest-minded among them suspected; they only
knew that he meddled with a subject that was hitherto considered
tacenda, and with dire results. Nowadays the thesis of Spring's
Awakening is not so novel. In England Mr. H. G. Wells was considerably
exercised over the problem when he wrote in The New Machiavelli such a
startling sentence as "Multitudes of us are trying to run this
complex, modern community on a basis of 'hush,' without explaining to
our children or discussing with them anything about love or marriage."
I find in Spring's Awakening a certain delicate poetic texture that
the poet never succeeded in recapturing. His maiden is a dewy
creature; she is also the saddest little wretch that was ever wept
over in modern fiction. Her cry when she confesses the worst to her
dazed mother is of a poignancy. As for the boys, they are interesting.
Evidently, the piece is an authentic document, but early as it was
composed it displayed the principal characteristics of its author:
Freakishness, an abnormal sense of the grotesque--witness that
unearthly last scene, which must be taken as an hallucination--and its
swift movement; also a vivid sense of caricature--consider the trial
scene in the school; but created by a young poet of potential gifts.
The seduction scene is well managed at the Kammerspielhaus. We are not
shown the room, but a curtain slightly divided allows the voices of
the youthful lovers to be overheard. A truly moving effect is thereby
produced. Since the performance of this play, the world all over has
seen a great light. Aside from the prefaces of Mr. Shaw on the subject
of children and their education, plays, pamphlets, even legislation
have dealt with the theme. A reaction was bound to follow, and we do
not hear so much now about "sex initiation" and coeducation. Suffice
it to say that Frank Wedekind was the first man to put the question
plumply before us in dramatic shape.
A favourite one-act piece is Der Kammersaenger (1899), which might be
translated as The Wagner Singer, for therein is laid bare the soul of
the Wagnerian tenor, Gerardo, whose one week visit to a certain city
results in both comedy and tragedy. He has concluded a brilliantly
successful Gastspiel, singing several of the Wagnerian roles, and when
the curtain rises we see him getting his trunks in order, his room at
the hotel filled with flowers and letters. He must sing Tristan the
next night in Brussels, and has but an hour to spare before his train
departs. If he misses it his contract will be void, and in Europe that
means business, tenor or no tenor. He sends the servant to pack his
costumes, snatches up the score of Tristan, and as he hums it, he is
aware that some one is lurking behind one of the window-curtains. It
is a young miss, presumably English--she says: "Oh, yes"--and she
confesses her infatuation. Vain as is our handsome singer he has no
time for idle flirtations. He preaches a tonic sermon, the girl weeps,
promises to be good, promises to study the music of Wagner instead of
his tenors, and leaves with a paternal kiss on her brow. The comedy is
excellent, though you dimly recall a little play entitled: Frederic
Lemaitre. It is a partial variation on that theme. But what follows is
of darker hue. An old opera composer has sneaked by the guard at the
door and begs with tears in his eyes that the singer will listen to
his music. He is met with an angry refusal. Gradually, after he has
explained his struggles of a half-century, he, the friend of Wagner,
to secure a hearing of his work, the tenor, who is both brutal and
generous, consents, though he is pressed for time. Then the tragedy of
ill luck is unfolded. The poor musician doesn't know where to begin,
fumbles in his score, while the tenor, who has just caught another
woman behind a screen, a piano teacher--here we begin to graze the
edge of burlesque--grows impatient, finally interrupts the composer,
and in scathing terms tells him what "art" really means to the world
at large and how useless has been his sacrifice to that idol "art"
with a capital "A." I don't know when I ever enjoyed the exposition of
the musical temperament. The Concert, by Bahr, is mere trifling in
comparison, all sawdust and simian gestures. We are a luxury for the
bourgeois, the tenor tells his listener, who do not care for the music
or words we sing. If they realised the meanings of Walkuere they would
fly the opera-house. We singers, he continues, are slaves, not to our
"art," but to the public; we have no private life.
He dismisses the old man.
Then a knock at the door, a fresh interruption. This time it is surely
serious. A young, lovely society woman enters. She has been his love
for the week, the understanding being that the affair is to terminate
as it began, brusquely, without arriere-pensee. But she loves Gerardo.
She clamours to be taken to Brussels. She will desert husband,
children, social position, she will ruin her future to be with the man
she adores. She is mad with the despair of parting. He is inexorable.
He gently reminds her of their agreement. His contract does not permit
him to travel in company with ladies, nor may he scandalise the
community in which he resides. Tenors, too, must be circumspect.
She swears she will kill herself. He smiles and bids her remember her
family. She does shoot herself, and he sends for a policeman,
remembering that an arrest by superior force will but temporarily
abrogate his contract. No policeman is found by the distracted hotel
servants, and, exclaiming: "To-morrow evening I must sing Tristan in
Brussels," the conscientious artist hurries away to his train, leaving
the lifeless body of his admirer on the sofa. Played by a versatile
actor, this piece ought to make a success in America, though the
biting irony of the dialogue and the cold selfishness of the hero
might not be "sympathetic" to our sentiment-loving audiences. The poet
has protested in print against the alteration of the end of this
little piece, _i. e._, one acting version made the impassioned lady
only a pretended suicide, which quite spoils the motivation.
Ibsen must have felt sick when such an artist as Duse asked him to let
her make Nora in Doll's House return to her family. But he is said to
have consented. Wedekind consented, because he was ill, but he made
his protest, and justly so.
The Marquis of Keith is a larger canvas. It is a modern rogues'
comedy. Barry Lyndon is hardly more entertaining. The marquis is the
son of an humble tutor in the house of a count whose son later figures
as Ernest Scholtz. The marquis is a swindler in the grand manner. He
is a Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, for he has lived in the United
States, but instead of a lively sketch is a full-length portrait
painted by a master. You like him despite his scampishness. He is
witty. He has a heart--for his own woes--and seems intensely
interested in all the women he loves and swindles. He goes to Munich,
where he invents a huge scheme for an exhibition palace and fools
several worthy and wealthy brewers, but not the powerful Consul
Casimir, the one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When
his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next
day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel
Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from
Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself.
His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the
Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond
of delineating. He would save the world from itself, rescue it from
the morass of materialism, but he relapses into a pathological
mysticism which ends in a sanitarium for nervous troubles. The marquis
is a Mephisto; he is not without a trace of idealism; altogether a
baffling nature, Faust-like, and as chock-full of humour as an egg is
full of meat. He goes to smash. His plans are checkmated. His beloved
deserts him for the enemy. His wife commits suicide. His life
threatened, and his liberty precarious, he takes ten thousand marks
from Consul Casimir, whose name he has forged in a telegram, and with
a grin starts for pastures new. Will he shoot himself? No! After all,
life is very much like shooting the chutes. The curtain falls. This
stirring and technically excellent comedy has never been a favourite
in Germany. Perhaps its cynicism is too crass. It achieved only a few
performances in Berlin to the accompaniment of catcalls, hisses, and
derisive laughter. I wonder why? It is entertaining, with all its
revelation of a rascally mean soul and its shady episodes.
Space, I am sorry to say, forbids me from further exposition of such
strong little pieces as Musik, a heart-breaking drama of a betrayed
girl studying singing who goes to jail while the real offender, the
man, remains at liberty (1907), or of Die Zensur, with its discussion
of art and religion--the poet intrudes--and its terrible cry at the
close: "Oh, God! why art thou so unfathomable?" Or of the so-called
Lulu tragedy (Erdgeist and The Box of Pandora) of which I like the
first act of the former and the second act of the latter--you are
reminded at this point of the gambling scene in Sardou's Fernande--but
as I do not care to sup on such unmitigated horrors, I prefer to let
my readers judge for themselves from the printed plays.
Karl Hetman is an absorbing play in which a man loses the world but
remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than
exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist
Hetman--who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in
part of the dramatist--there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who
succeeds with the very ideas which Hetman couldn't make viable, ideas
in fact which brought about his disaster. They are two finely
contrasted portraits, and what a grimace of disgust is aroused when
Launhart tells the woman who loves Hetman: "O Fanny, Fanny, a living
rascal is better for your welfare than the greatest of dead prophets."
What Dead-Sea-fruit wisdom! The pathos of distance doesn't appeal to
the contemporary soul of Wedekind. He writes for the young, that is,
for to-morrow.
The caprice, the bizarre, the morbid in Wedekind are more than
redeemed by his rich humanity. He loves his fellow man even when he
castigates him. He is very emotional, also pragmatic. The second act
of his Franziska, a Karnevalgroteske, was given at the Dresden
Pressfestival, February 7, 1913, with the title of Matrimony in the
Year 2000, the author and his wife appearing in the leading roles with
brilliant success. It contains in solution the leading motives from
all his plays and his philosophy of life. It is fantastic, as
fantastic as Strindberg's Dream Play, but amusing. In 1914 his
biblical drama, Simson (Samson), was produced with mixed success.
Translated Wedekind would lose his native wood-note wild, and
doubtless much of his dynamic force--for on the English stage he would
be emasculated. And I wonder who would have the courage to produce his
works.
Musik, for example, if played in its entirety might create a profound
impression. It is pathetically moving and the part of the unhappy
girl, who is half crazy because of her passion for her singing-master,
is a role for an accomplished actress. If the public can endure
Brieux's Damaged Goods, why not Musik? The latter is a typical case
and is excellent drama; the French play is neither. For me all the man
is summed up in the cry of one of his characters in Erdgeist: "Who
gives me back my faith in mankind, will give me back my life." An
idealist, surely.
The last time I saw him was at the Richard Strauss festival in
Stuttgart, October, 1912. He had changed but little and still reminded
me of both David Belasco and an Irish Catholic priest. In his eyes
there lurked the "dancing-madness" of which Robert Louis Stevenson
writes. A latter-day pagan, with touches of the perverse, the
grotesque, and the poetic; thus seems to me Frank Wedekind.