The fable and structure of Michael Kramer illustrate Hauptmann's typical themes and methods well. The whole of the first act is exposition. It is not, however, the exposition of antecedent actions or events, but wholly of character. The conditions of the play are entirely static. Kramer's greatness of soul broods over the whole act. Mrs. Kramer, the narrow-minded, nagging wife, and Arnold, the homely, wretched boy with a spark of genius, quail under it. Michaline, the brave, whole-hearted girl, stands among these, pitying and comprehending all. In the second act one of Arnold's sordid and piteous mistakes comes to light. An inn-keeper's daughter complains to Kramer of his son's grotesque and annoyingly expressed passion for her. Kramer takes his son to task and, in one of the noblest scenes in the modern drama, wrestles with the boy's soul. In the third act the inn is shown. Its rowdy, semi-educated habitués deride Arnold with coarse gibes. He cannot tear himself away. Madly sensitive and conscious of his final superiority over a world that crushes him by its merely brutal advantages, he is goaded to self-destruction. In the last act, in the presence of his dead son, Michael Kramer cries out after some reconciliation with the silent universe. The play is done and nothing has happened. The only action is Arnold's suicide and that action has no dramatic value. The significance of the play lies in the unequal marriage between Kramer and his wife, in Arnold's character—in the fact that such things are, and that in our outlook upon the whole of life we must reckon with them.
Hauptmann's simple management of a pregnant fable may be admirably observed, finally, by comparing Lonely Lives and Rosmersholm. Hauptmann was undoubtedly indebted to Ibsen for his problem and for the main elements of the story: a modern thinker is overcome by the orthodox and conservative world in which he lives. And that world conquers largely because he cannot be united to the woman who is his inspiration and his strength. In handling this fable two difficult questions were to be answered by the craftsman: by what means does the hostile environment crush the protagonist? Why cannot he take the saving hand that is held out to him? Ibsen practically shirks the answer to the first question. For it is not the bitter zealot Kroll, despite his newspaper war and his scandal-mongering, who breaks Rosmer's strength. It is fate, fate in the dark and ancient sense. "The dead cling to Rosmersholm"—that is the keynote of the play. The answer to the second question is interwoven with an attempt to rationalise the fatality that broods over Rosmersholm. The dead cling to it because a subtle and nameless wrong has been committed against them. And that sin has been committed by the woman who could save Rosmer. At the end of the second act Rebecca refuses to be his wife. The reason for that refusal, dimly prefigured, absorbs his thoughts, and through two acts of consummate dramaturgic suspense the sombre history is gradually unfolded. And no vague phrases concerning the ennobling of humanity can conceal the central fact: the play derives its power from a traditional plot and a conventional if sound motive—crime and its discovery, sin and its retribution.
In Lonely Lives the two questions apparently treated in Rosmersholm are answered, not in the terms of effective dramaturgy, but of life itself. Johannes Vockerat lives in the midst of the world that must undo him—subtly irritated by all to which his heart clings. Out of that world he has grown and he cannot liberate himself from it. His good wife and his admirable parents are bound to the conventional in no base or fanatical sense. He dare scarcely tell them that their preoccupations, that their very love, slay the ideal in his soul. And so the pitiless attrition goes on. There is no action: there is being. The struggle is rooted in the deep divisions of men's souls, not in unwonted crime or plotting. And Anna Mahr, the free woman of a freer world, parts from Johannes because she recognises their human unfitness to take up the burden of tragic sorrow which any union between them must create. The time for such things has not come, and may never come. Thus Johannes is left desolate, powerless to face the unendurable emptiness and decay that lie before him, destroyed by the conflicting loyalties to personal and ideal ends which are fundamental to the life of creative thought.
V
Drama, then, which relies so little upon external action, but finds action rather in "every inner conflict of passions, every consequence of diverging thoughts," must stress the obscurest expression of such passions and such thoughts. Since its fables, furthermore, are to arise from the immediate data of life, it must equally emphasise the significant factor of those common things amid which man passes his struggle. And so the naturalistic drama was forced to introduce elements of narrative and exposition usually held alien to the genre. Briefly, it has dealt largely and powerfully with atmosphere, environment and gesture; it has expanded and refined the stage-direction beyond all precedent and made of it an important element in dramatic art.
The playwrights of the middle of the last century who made an effort to lead the drama back to reality, knew nothing of this element. Augier does not even suspect its existence; in Robertson it is a matter of "properties" and "business." Any appearance of this kind Hauptmann avoids. The play is not to remind us of the stage, but of life. A difference in vision and method difficult to estimate divides Robertson's direction: "Sam. (astonished L. corner)" from Hauptmann's "Mrs. John rises mechanically and cuts a slice from a loaf of bread, as though under the influence of suggestion." Robertson indicates the conventionalised gesture of life; Hauptmann its moral and spiritual density.
The descriptive stage direction, effectively used by Ibsen, is further expanded by Hauptmann. But it remains impersonal and never becomes direct comment or even argument as in Shaw. It is used not only to suggest the scene but, above all, its atmosphere, its mood. Through it Hauptmann shows his keen sense of the interaction of man and his world and of the high moral expressiveness of common things. To define the mood more clearly he indicates the hour and the weather. The action of Rose Bernd opens on a bright Sunday morning in May, that of Drayman Henschel during a bleak February dawn. The desperate souls in The Reconciliation meet on a snow-swept Christmas Eve; the sun has just set over the lake in which Johannes Vockerat finds final peace. In these indications Hauptmann rarely aims at either irony or symbolism. He is guided by a sense for the probabilities of life which he expresses through such interactions between the moods of man and nature as experience seems to offer. Only in The Maidens of the Mount has the suave autumnal weather a deeper meaning, for it was clearly Hauptmann's purpose in this play
"To build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea."
Hauptmann has also become increasingly exacting in demanding that the actor simulate the personal appearance of his characters as they arose in his imagination. In his earlier plays the descriptions of men and women are at times brief; in The Rats even minor figures are visualised with remarkable completeness. Pastor Spitta, for instance, is thus introduced: "Sixty years old. A village parson, somewhat 'countrified.' One might equally well take him to be a surveyor or a landowner in a small way. He is of vigorous appearance—short-necked, well-nourished, with a squat, broad face like Luther's. He wears a slouch hat, spectacles, and carries a cane and a coat over his arm. His clumsy boots and the state of his other garments show that they have long been accustomed to wind and weather." Such directions obviously tax the mimetic art of the stage to the very verge of its power. Thus, by the precision of his directions both for the scenery and the persons of each play, and by unmistakable indications of gesture and expression at all decisive moments of dramatic action, Hauptmann has placed within narrow limits the activity of both stage manager and actor. He alone is the creator of his drama, and no alien factitiousness is allowed to obscure its final aim—the creation of living men.