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.
VIII
These works, viewed in their totality, take on a higher significance than resides in the literary power of any one of them. Hauptmann's career began in the years when the natural sciences, not content with their proper triumphs, threatened to engulf art, philosophy and religion; in the years when a keen and tender social consciousness, brooding over the temporal welfare of man, lost sight of his eternal good. And so Hauptmann begins by illustrating the laws of heredity and pleading, through a creative medium, for social justice. The tacit assumptions of these early plays are stringently positivistic: body and soul are the obverse and reverse of a single substance; earth is the boundary of man's hopes.
With The Assumption of Hannele a change comes over the spirit of his work. A thin, faint voice vibrates in that play—the voice of a soul yearning for a warmer ideal. But the rigorous teachers of Hauptmann's youth had graven their influence upon him, and the new faith announced by Heinrich in The Sunken Bell is still a kind of scientific paganism. In Michael Kramer (1900), however, he has definitely conquered the positivistic denial of the overwhelming reality of the ultimate problems. For it is after some solution of these that the great heart of Kramer cries out. In Henry of Aue the universe, no longer a harsh and monstrous mechanism, irradiates the human soul with the spirit of its own divinity. These utterances are, to be sure, dramatic and objective. But the author chooses his subject, determines the spirit of its treatment and thus speaks unmistakably.
Nor is directer utterance lacking, "The Green Gleam," Hauptmann writes in the delicately modelled prose of his Griechischer Frühling, "the Green Gleam, which mariners assert to have witnessed at times, appears at the last moment before the sun dips below the horizon…. The ancients must have known the Green Gleam…. I do not know whether that be true, but I feel a longing within me to behold it. I can imagine some Pure Fool, whose life consisted but in seeking it over lands and seas, in order to perish at last in the radiance of that strange and splendid light. Are we not all, perhaps, upon a similar quest? Are we not beings who have exhausted the realm of the senses and are athirst for other delights for both our senses and our souls?" The author of Before Dawn has gone a long journey in the land of the spirit to the writing of these words, and of still others in Gabriel Schilling's Flight: "Behind this visible world another is hidden, so near at times that one might knock at its gate…." But it is the journey which man himself has gone upon during the intervening years.
Thus Hauptmann's work has not only created a new technique of the drama; it has not only added unforgettable figures to the world of the imagination: it has also mirrored and interpreted the intellectual history of its time. His art sums up an epoch—an epoch full of knowledge and the restraints of knowledge, still prone, so often, before the mechanical in life and thought; but throughout all its immedicable scepticism full of strange yearnings and visited by flickering dreams; and even in its darkest years and days still stretching out hands in love of a farther shore. Once more the great artist, his vision fixed primarily upon his art, has most powerfully interpreted man to his own mind.