VII
Such, then, is the naturalistic drama of Hauptmann. By employing the real speech of man, by emphasising being rather than action, by creating the very atmosphere and gesture of life, it succeeds in presenting characters whose vital truth achieves the intellectual beauty and moral energy of great art.
Early in his career, however, an older impulse stirred in Hauptmann. He remembered that he was a poet. Pledged to naturalism by personal loyalty and public combat he broke through its self-set limitations tentatively and invented for that purpose the dream-technique of The Assumption of Hannele(1893). Pure imagination was outlawed in those years and verse was a pet aversion of the consistent naturalists. Hence both were transferred to the world of dreams which has an unquestionable reality, however subjective, but in which the will cannot govern the shaping faculties of the soul. The letter of the naturalistic law was adhered to, though Hannele's visions have a richness and sweetness, the verses of the angels a winsomeness and majesty which transcend any possible dream of the poor peasant child, The external encouragement which the attempt met was great, for with it Hauptmann conquered the Royal Playhouse in Berlin.
Three years later he openly vindicated the possibility of the modern poetic drama by writing The Sunken Bell, his most far-reaching success both on the stage and in the study. In it appears for the first time the disciplinary effect of naturalism upon literature in its loftiest mood. The blank verse is the best in the German drama, the only German blank verse, in truth, that satisfies an ear trained on the graver and more flexible harmony of English; the lyrical portions are of sufficient if inferior beauty. But there is no trace of the pseudo-heroic psychology of the romantic play. The interpretation of life is thoroughly poetic, but it is based on fact. The characters have tangible reality; they have the idiosyncrasies of men. The pastor is profoundly true, and so is Magda, though the interpretative power of poetry raises both into the realm of the enduringly significant. Similarly Heinrich is himself, but also the creative worker of all time. Driven by his ideal from the warm hearthstones of men, he falters upon that frosty height: seeking to realise impersonal aims and rising to a hardy rapture, he is broken in strength at last by the "still, sad music of humanity."
Except for the half humorous and not wholly successful interlude of Schluck and Jau, Hauptmann neglected the poetic drama until 1902, when he presented on the boards of the famous Burgtheater at Vienna, Henry of Aue. There is little doubt but that this play will ultimately rank as the most satisfying poetic drama of its time. Less derivative and uncertain in quality than the plays of Stephen Phillips, less fantastic and externally brilliant than those of Rostand, it has a soundness of subject matter, a serene nobility of mood, a solidity of verse technique above the reach of either the French or the English poet. Hauptmann chose as his subject the legend known for nearly seven hundred years through the beautiful Middle High German poem of Hartmann von der Aue—the legend of that great knight and lord who was smitten with leprosy, and whom, according to the mediaeval belief, a pure maiden desired to heal through the shedding of her blood. But God, before the sacrifice could be consummated, cleansed the knight's body and permitted to him and the maiden a united temporal happiness. This story Hauptmann takes exactly as he finds it. But the characters are made to live with a new life. The stark mediaeval conventions are broken and the old legend becomes living truth. The maiden is changed from an infant saint fleeing a vale of tears into a girl in whom the first sweet passions of life blend into an exaltation half sexual and half religious, but pure with the purity of a great flame. The miracle too remains, but it is the miracle of love that subdues the despairing heart, that reconciles man to his universe, and that slays the imperiousness of self. Thus Henry, firmly individualised as he is, becomes in some sense, like all the greater protagonists of the drama, the spirit of man confronting eternal and recurrent problems. The minor figures—Gottfried, Brigitte, Ottacker—have the homely and delightful truth that is the gift of naturalism to modern, literature.
Hauptman's next play was a naturalistic tragedy, one of the best in that order, Rose Bernd. Then followed, from 1905 to 1910, a series of plays in which he let the creative imagination range over time and space. In Elga he tells the story of an old sorrow by means of the dream-technique of Hannele; in And Pippa Dances, he lets the flame of life and love flicker its iridescent glory before man and super-man, savage and artist; in The Maidens of the Mount he celebrates the dream of life which is life's dearest part; in Charlemagne's Hostage and in Griselda he returns to the interpretation and humanising of history and legend.
The last of these plays is the most characteristic and important. It takes up the old story of patient Grizzel which the Clerk of Oxford told Chaucer's pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. But a new motive animates the fable. Not to try her patience, not to edify womankind, does the count rob Griselda of her child. His burning and exclusive love is jealous of the pangs and triumphs of her motherhood in which he has no share. It is passion desiring the utter absorption of its object that gives rise to the tragic element of the story. But over the whole drama there plays a blithe and living air in which, once more, authentic human beings are seen with their smiling or earnest faces.
A stern and militant naturalistic drama, The Rats (1911), and yet
another play of the undoing of the artist through the woman, Gabriel
Schilling's Flight (1912), close, for the present, the tale of
Hauptmann's dramatic works.