I
In the present volume I have examined, more out of curiosity than
interest, the figures of Zola's book sales. To my astonishment, not to
say chagrin, I noted that Nana and The Downfall had bigger sales than
the other novels; Nana probably because of its unpleasant coarseness,
and The Downfall because of its national character. Now, neither of
these books gives Zola at his best. Huysmans had not only preceded
Nana by two years, but beat his master, with Marthe--the Paris edition
was quickly suppressed--as it is a better-written and truer book than
the story of the big blonde girl, who was later so wonderfully painted
by Edouard Manet as she stood in her dressing-room at the theatre.
How far we are away from the powerful but crass realism of 1880 I
thought as I sat in the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, and waited for the
curtain to rise on Gerhart Hauptmann's latest play, The Flight of
Gabriel Schilling (Gabriel Schilling's Flucht). And yet how much this
poet and mystic owes to the French naturalistic movement of thirty odd
years ago. It was Arno Holz and the young Hauptmann who stood the
brunt of the battle in Germany for the new realism. Sudermann, too,
joined in the fight, though later. Arthur Schnitzler was then a
medical student in Vienna, and it was not till 1888 that he modestly
delivered himself in a volume of verse, while Frank Wedekind, was just
beginning to stretch his poetical limbs and savour life in Paris and
London. (Eleven years later (1891) he gave us his most pregnant drama,
young as he was, Spring's Awakening.) It is only fair, then, to accord
to the recent winner of the Nobel Prize, Gerhart Hauptmann, the credit
due him as a path breaker in German literature, for if Arno Holz
showed the way, Hauptmann filled the road with works of artistic
value; even at his lowest ebb of inspiration he is significant and
attractive.
But Hauptmann is something more than a realist; if he were only that I
should not have begun my story with a reference to the Zola book
sales. There were published a short time ago the complete works of
Gerhart Hauptmann--poems, social plays, novels, and tales in six
stately volumes. In glancing at the figures of his sales I could not
help thinking of Zola. Whereas Nana stands high on the list, The
Sunken Bell (Die Versunkene Glocke, translated by Charles Henry
Meltzer, and played in English by Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern),
has reached its eightieth edition, and remember that the German
editions are sometimes two thousand or three thousand an edition. What
the translation figures are I have no idea. The next in number to The
Sunken Bell is The Weavers, forty-three editions. Its strong note of
pity, its picture of poignant misery, and its eloquent cry for social
justice, had much to do with the large sales. Hannele is number three
in the order of sales, twenty-three editions being assigned to it. The
same number stands for Der Arme Heinrich, not the best Hauptmann, and
for that most moving human play, Rose Bernd--so marvellously enacted
by Else Lehmann at the Lessing Theatre--there are eighteen editions.
(These are 1913 figures.)
You can't help contrasting Parisian and Berlin taste, though the
German capital is in the grip of pornographic literature and art. But
it does indicate that a nation has not lost its idealism when it reads
such a beautiful work, a work of such imagination as The Sunken Bell,
does it not? I wish I could admire other of Hauptmann's work, such as
Michael Kramer, Der Biberpalz, or the depressing Fuhrmann Henschel.
And I also wish that I could include among his big works his latest,
The Flight of Gabriel Schilling (written in 1906).
It is a drama, the story of slender interest, because the characters
do not particularly interest--the misunderstood humbug of a
woman--but in an original setting, a little island on the east coast
of Germany, called Fischmeisters Oye, the scenic side is very
effective. The piece plays in five acts, one act too many, and is slow
in action, and unusually wordy, even for the German stage, where the
public likes dialogues a half-hour at a stretch. I shall not bore you
with more than a glance at the chief situations. Gabriel Schilling is
a young Berlin painter who is too fond of the Friedrichstrasse cafe
life, which means wine, wenches, and an occasional song. His friend
the sculptor, Professor Mauerer, has persuaded Gabriel to leave Berlin
during the dog-days, leave what the text calls the "hot, stinking
asphalt," and join him at the seaside. Gabriel has a wife, to whom he
is not exactly nice, being fond of a Vienna lady, who bears the name
of Hanna Elias. This Hanna Elias has played, still plays, the chief
role in his miserable existence. He has promised to give her up, she
has promised to go back to her husband and child (the latter supposed
to be the offspring of Gabriel). So his flight to the east coast is a
genuine attempt to gain his liberty; besides, his health is bad, he
suffers from heart trouble. The play opens with the sculptor talking
of Schilling in the ears of a young violinist, a dear friend, who is
summering with him. Unconventional folk, all of them. Hauptmann gets
his character relief by setting off the town visitors with a
background of natives, fishermen, working people. I wish there had
been more of them, for with their uncouth accent, salt speech, and
unconscious humour they are more refreshing than the city folk.
Gabriel arrives. He looks sadly in need of sea air. I suppose Theodore
Loos, who played the part, was coached by the dramatist, so I dare not
criticise the validity of his interpretation. I only know that he did
not make the character sympathetic; perhaps that were an
impossibility. In a word, with his mixture of vapid idealism and
old-fashioned fatalism, he proved monotonous to me. The sculptor is a
formidable bore, the antique raisonneur of French drama, preaching at
every pore every chance he has. The actor who played him, Hans Marr,
made up as a mixture of Lenbach the painter--when he was about
forty-five--and the painter, etcher, and sculptor, Max Klinger. The
violinist was Lina Lossen, and excellent in the part.
Act II is a capitally arranged interior of the inn, with the wooden
shoes of the servant maid clopping around, where the inevitable
happens. Hanna Elias, accompanied by a young Russian girl--whose
German accent furnishes mild humour--promptly swoops down on the
anaemic painter. There is brief resistance on his part. She tells him
she can't, can't live without him--oh, thrice-familiar feminine
music!--and with a double sob that shakes you in your seat the pair
embrace. Curtain. The next act is frittered away in talk, the
principal object seemingly to show how much the sculptor hates Hanna.
In Act IV Gabriel is ill. He has had a fall, but it is really a heart
attack. A doctor, an old friend, is summoned from a neighbouring
island. Unfortunately Mrs. Schilling, the neglected wife is informed
by the not very tactful doctor that her husband is ill. She rushes up
from Berlin, and the best, indeed the only, dramatic scene then
ensues. She is not permitted to see the sick man. She demands the
reason. She is naturally not told, for Hanna is nursing him. She can't
understand, and it is the difficult task of Lucie Heil, the violinist,
to get her away before the fat is in the fire. Unfortunately, at that
critical moment, Hanna Elias walks calmly from Gabriel's sleeping
chamber. The row is soon on. Hanna was enacted by an emotional
actress, Tilla Durieux, whose personality is forthright, whose methods
are natural. (Her Hedda Gabler is strong.) She dressed the character
after the approved Friedrichstrasse style. You must know that the
artistic Bohemienne wears her hair plastered at the sides of her head
a la Merode. The eyes are always "done up," the general expression
suggested, if the lady is dark, being that of Franz von Stuck's
picture, Sin. To look mysterious, sinister, exotic, ah! that appeals
to the stout, sentimental German beer heroes of the opera, theatre,
and studio. Fraeulein Durieux is entirely successful in her assumption
of a woman who is "emancipated," who has thrown off the "shackles" of
matrimony, who drinks beer in the morning, tea in the afternoon,
coffee at night, and smokes cigarettes all the time. It is a
pronounced type in Berlin. She talks art, philosophy, literature, and
she daubs or plays or models. She is the best portrait in the play,
though a thrice-familiar one. The poet showed this "misunderstood
woman" in one of his early works, Before Sunrise.
Hanna Elias stands the reproaches and berating of Evelin Schilling
until her patience fades. Then the two women, despite the warning of
the doctor that his patient must not be disturbed, as it might prove
fatal, go for each other like a pair of fishwives. It is exciting,
though hardly edifying. If you have ever seen two chickens, two hens,
fight over the possession of a shining slug in a barnyard, then you
will know what kind of a quarrel this is between the outraged wife, a
feeble creature, and the bold, strong-willed Hanna. And the disputed
booty is about as worthless as the slug. Gabriel appears. He is half
dead from the excitement. A plague on both the women, he cries, and
the scene closes with his whispered request to the doctor for poison
to end his life. You remember Oswald Alving and his cry: "The sun,
mother, give me the sun!" Act last shows the first scene, the beach,
and a figurehead from a brig which had stranded during a storm some
years before. This carved head and bust of a woman with streaming hair
serves as a symbol. Gabriel is attracted by the wooden image, as is
Lucie. The painter is fascinated by the tale of the shipwreck. He has
escaped the nurse and is out on the dunes watching the figure as it is
intermittently illuminated by the gleam of a revolving lighthouse
further up the coast. He is in an exalted mood. There is some comic
relief in the grave-digger manner between him and a joiner, who is
also the undertaker of the island, a well-conceived character. A storm
is rising. Gabriel, after many wild and whirling words, leaves a
message for his friends. He is bathing. And so he makes by suicide his
last flight, his escape from the horns of the dilemma, too weak to
decide one way or the other. The ending is ineffective, and the sudden
repentance of the middle-aged sculptor (fat men with forty-five-inch
waists never do seem wicked), who promises to marry his Lucie, the
fiddle player, is very flat. Nor does the storm strike terror as it
should. What the moral? I don't know, except that it is dangerous to
keep late hours on the Friedrichstrasse. A clock can't always strike
twelve, and The Flight of Gabriel Schilling, notwithstanding some
striking episodes and at moments poetic atmosphere, is not a
masterpiece of Hauptmann.