"Alike in the comedies and dream-plays too You see but a domesticated Zoo, Their blood so thin that in that hot-house air They batten on a vegetable fare, And revel chronically in chat and calls, Sitting like our friends yonder in the stalls, One's stomach of liqueurs will disapprove, Another wonders if he really love, Another hero starts with threats to pass From this foul world to one perhaps more divine, But through five mortal acts behold him whine, Yet no kind friend supplies the coup de grâce, But the real thing, the wild and beauteous beast, I, ladies, only I provide that feast."
These lines, delivered by a lion-tamer in the due professional panoply of riding-coat, top-boots, and a revolver, are extracted from the prologue of Frank Wedekind's tragedy, Die Erdgeist, and illustrate efficiently the bizarre and Mephistophelian genius of a German dramatist alike in his qualities and his defects indisputably unique. Buccaneering no small way in front of the very left wing of the æsthetic movement, Wedekind is at once the bête noire of the reactionaries and the spoilt darling of the ultra-moderns. To his enemies he is a mere shoddy Anti-Christ, to his friends a dramatic Messiah leading back the inner circles of the chosen intellects into the promised land of vice and crime. It cannot be denied that his subject-matter gives considerable colour to both these theories. Life, as seen through the medium of his plays, is but a torrent of sex foaming over the jagged rocks of crime and insanity. Take examples from his three most powerful plays. In Die Erdgeist, the theme of which is the baleful glamour of the "Evil Woman," three of the four acts are punctuated with almost complete regularity by a death; Frühlingserwachen, again, deals with hoydens and hobbledehoys, whose only occupation appears to be the creation, discussion, and destruction of life: In Die Totentanz, on the other hand, the scene is laid in a "private hotel" (if one may borrow the highly convenient euphemism of Mr. Shaw), while a charming interlude in lyrics is provided by one of the boarders and a temporary visitor, and the hero and proprietor is a "marquis," who psychologically is much more closely related to Hamlet than to Sir George Crofts. Add to this choice of subject-matter a violently impressionist technique and a hangman humour, whose grin is at its broadest amid the sharpest agonies of the victims, and one can form an approximately accurate idea of an author, conceivably somewhat poisonous to anæmic constitutions, but certainly both piquant and stimulating to the hardened and the adventurous. To arrive, however, at a correct appreciation of so monstrous a phenomenon, it will be advisable to investigate first the literary and social tendencies by which it has been produced, together with the character of the audience for whose edification it disports itself, and then by the light of such investigations to proceed to an analysis of his individual works.
For the ten or fifteen years following 1880, both the novel and the drama in Germany were transformed into a Zolaesque laboratory, where interesting human experiments were conducted by skilled operators with scientific precision. There were three chief causes for this: firstly, a healthy reaction against the colourless and conventional school which had held the stage for so many years, a school somewhat analogous to that of our own Mid-Victorians with their strong silent men and sweet insipid women; secondly, a dogmatic and uncompromising materialism was the creed of the most ambitious and efficient intellects who found their chief mental diet in Zola, Taine, Darwin, and Haeckel; thirdly, the abstract theory of the struggle for existence had received an excessively concrete exemplification in the Franco-German war and the colossal commercial impetus that followed in the wake of a united Germany. Naturalism, however, was destined by the very character of the nation to be but a passing phase. Even apart from the inevitable swing of the pendulum and the powerful Catholic and religious reaction, whose force is seen at a glance in the numerical majority of the Centrum, the German temperament is in its essence as romantic as the French is logical. The nation, moreover, being at bottom religious, "the death of God," to use the classic phrase of Nietzsche, left a most crying lacuna. The philosopher of the Superman adroitly filled the vacancy by the deification of Man. Human life became an end in itself embraced with the most poetic exaltation and pursued with all the zeal of religious martyrdom. The struggle for existence, ceasing to be a bare scientific formula, was metamorphosed into a classic arena in which the "life-artist" battled for the crown of his Dionysiac agonies, finding the most delicious music in the perpetual clash of brain with brain, and experiencing a sweetness in the very bitterness of the conflict.[1]
Crushed then by the force of these tendencies, pure realism died. Die Ehre and Die Weber, it is true, still hold the German stage, but in Johannes and in Die Versunkene Glocke respectively both Sudermann and Hauptmann have deserted to the Romantic camp, taking with them, however, a good proportion of the Realistic equipment. Particularly typical of this amalgamation of the two forces is Hannele, where the pathological and mystical explanations are to be accepted concurrently and not as alternatives, as in Mr. Henry James's Turn of the Screw. As was, however, only natural, there was a considerable reaction, and orthodox naturalism was deliberately flouted by the Secessionsbühne in 1899 with their penchant for fairy-dramas and their genuinely æsthetic project of stretching between the stage and the audience a veil of transparent gauze intended to draw the scene into a misty distance. The rankest idealism seemed for a time the order of the day. "All that the young and the moderns have fought against with such animosity between 1880 and 1890, pseudo-idealism, bookish dialogue, false and artificial characterisation, clap-trap stagecraft, all this celebrates in this drama a joyous resurrection; let us acknowledge it; we have lost the battle against falsehood and stupidity, conventionalism, and the public, lost it absolutely," writes Julius Hart in the Tag of 1902.
But the most interesting direction was given to this neo-romanticism by the æsthetic movement and Kunstschwarmerei which began to sweep over music, literature, painting, and the drama with an almost Nietzschean intensity. Pure realism and pure romanticism, then, both being extinct, and an agressive horde of exuberant and heretical artists being alive, the solution for the artistic problem was found in the æsthetic and romantic treatment of realistic themes. The prose of the human document became illuminated with the poesy of the human imagination. Realism and Romanticism went into partnership in the freest of unions, and Wedekind is one of the most interesting fruits of this drastic alliance.
The realistic method might be worse than useless for æsthetic purposes, but the realistic stock-in-trade was invaluable material for spirits bursting with an almost morbid healthiness, spirits for whom no subject was too terrible, no sensation too violent. Let us, however, turn to the official pronouncement of Wedekind's preface to his revised and expurgated edition of Die Büchse von Pandora, in which he states his defence to the prosecution which the first edition of that interesting book had brought upon his martyred head: "Wedekind is an apostle of the modern movement. It is the motto of this movement to effect a transvaluation of æsthetic values in style and stagecraft. The followers of this movement have for over fifteen years repudiated the claims of the so-called 'æsthetic-content' and of mere formal beauty; they hold it permissible to depict artistically and to represent on the stage the ugly, the crude, the repulsive, and even the vulgar, provided always that such characteristics are not treated as ends in themselves—that is to say, when the work is not created by love of the abhorrent for its own sake but is merely the medium for the expression of an artistic idea. Wedekind, accordingly, as the disciple of these authors, chooses to shed a light upon the darkest crannies of vice, and in particular to surround with a poetic framework those sexual subjects which have been the peculiar subject of medical science. The end and goal of his writings is to awaken fear and pity."
Such an apologia can scarcely be said to be superfluous when one of the sub-plots of the play in question deals with the heroic, if somewhat nauseating, rebellion of a woman in the determination of whose lot nature has made a somewhat unfortunate mistake.
Before, however, we proceed to gaze upon the black and lurid pictures of our dramatic artist, it is advisable to turn very briefly to the audience for whose particular benefit they exercise their hellish fascination. Wedekind's audience, in a word, is the extreme left wing. The German left wing, however, is considerably more numerous, more advanced, and more dangerous than the English. Our own æsthetic movement was killed almost instantaneously by the Wilde debacle. We still, of course, have our ultra-modern movement, such as it is, but for practical purposes no one could be more amiable or innocuous than the ladies and gentlemen who used to constitute the highly respectable audiences of the Court Theatre, or who find in the Stage Society a mildly audacious means of spending their Sabbath evenings. Germany, however, with its vastly superior education, and its horde of professional men and women, schoolmasters and piano-mistresses, lawyers, doctors, poets, and littérateurs, has the disease of modernity with a vengeance, carrying through each symptom to its logical conclusion with a violence and intensity to which our own fluttering unconventionalism affords but the faintest and most shadowy parallel. Free-love, which, with the possible exception of a certain ephemeral incident successfully immortalised in three or four recent novels, is in England little more than a name, the mythical bogey with which the halfpenny press pretend to frighten their delighted readers, or is at best among the smart and the semi-educated rich the philosophic sanction for highly unphilosophic impulses, is in Germany a theoretic dogma almost as sacred as that of woman suffrage and demanding almost as devout sacrifices on the shrine of its philosophic altar. When again the subtle souls of Great Britain will so far break the ice of their insular reserve as to discourse about the tragedy of existence, the far more heroic spirits of German modernity will have recourse to all the æsthetic delights of a fine and artistic suicide, which indeed in the most advanced circles is almost a fashionable analogue to our own appendicitis, or will find in the modern dogma of "living their own life" the substantial though possibly slightly less exhausting equivalent to our English hunger-strike. How strong is the neo-æsthetic movement may be gauged by the phenomenal success in Berlin of Salome and Monna Vanna, the great scenes of which were followed avidly by young girls with an enthusiasm which was more than æsthetic. It may also be mentioned incidentally that Wilde's De Profundis was published in German before it appeared in England, a circumstance due quite as much to a keener intellectual enthusiasm as to superior commercial enterprise.