Realising, then, that while it is orthodox in England to be ashamed of one's passions and emotions, the German ambition is to plume oneself on taking everything an grand sérieux, let us turn to a consideration of those plays in which, on a large canvas and in big bold splashes reminiscent of the not unanalogous methods of the Secessionist painters, Wedekind is pleased to present framed in gigantic irony:
"Les immondes chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices."
It will, perhaps, be well to start with that little masterpiece of a dramatic caricature, Der Kammersänger. A fashionable singer, having completed his engagements in a provincial town, is snatching at last a few minutes' well-earned repose prior to catching his train. He has given strict orders that he is at home to no one. But there is no repose for the famed. An English school miss, who has waited two hours in the rain, smuggles herself into the room: she prattles her enthusiasm with pretty infantile gush: a few deft words of paternal advice and she is summarily dismissed. But again the great man's seclusion is desecrated by the entrance of a brother artist, a pathetically grotesque figure of a megalomaniac failure whose publisher complains that he spoils his one chance of success by refusing to die and thus afford an opportunity for posthumous discovery. But the genial tolerance of the illustrious one is considerably harshened when his colleague insists on playing his own compositions in a scene every whit as racy and delightful as the classic episode in Wycherley's Plain Dealer, where Major Oldfox, having tied down the Widow Blackacre, discharges at her helpless person the most deadly poetical fusillade. Exit, however, the composer, after an interesting philosophic lecture by his victim on the singer's life and of the contempt which as a practical man (for at an early period in his career he was "in carpets") he has for his fashionable bourgeois audience for whom he is a mere article of luxury as much in request as a motor-car or a new dress. Then, as the climax of this crescendo of invaders, enter Helene: a formal invitation to elope: the artist, however, has his contracts to fulfil and his train to catch, and the favour is declined with thanks: tears and threats of suicide: he endeavours to pacify her, and she promises to be good: he will miss his train if he is not quick. The romantic woman, however, unable to bear the final parting, shoots herself on the spot. The remorseful lover follows her example? Not a bit of it. He is politely regretful for the contretemps, but after all business is business, and he must catch his train. It is impossible without copious quotations to give a full idea of the piquant irony with which the comedy is salted; the truth and reality of the theme stand out all the more brilliant from their garb of romantic travesty, while the superb impudence of utilising death as an essentially comic climax is without parallel in European literature.
Let us, however, now turn from light comedy to serious tragedy in the shape of Der Totentanz. The scene, as already mentioned, is laid in a "private hotel." Where Shaw, however, sees but the problem, Wedekind has only eyes for the poetry. To Shaw the irony is a weapon, to Wedekind an end in itself. Elfrida, a young lady in Reformkleid, one of the most militant members of a suppression society, interviews the proprietor, the Marquis Casti Piani, on the subject of a former maid of hers, for whom she has been searching for some years. The girl is identified, and the whole question philosophically discussed. The proprietor, moreover, who is an extremely well-dressed gentleman with a first-class education, polished manners, and all the introspective subtlety of the most modern of decadents, neatly turns the tables by announcing that the real impetus which made the girl change her calling was the "suppression literature" which the puritanical young woman had with unpardonable carelessness left lying about. The ice being thus broken, he proceeds in his capacity of sexual expert to diagnose the respective psychologies of his tête-à-tête and himself. Why, they are both tarred with the same brush. If he, the trafficker, pursues his unpopular vocation even more as a matter of sexual mania than of commercial enterprise, so does she, the philanthropist, ply her good work out of an equally morbid craving to move in a congenial atmosphere. Are they not both but the obverse and reverse of the same medal? Paradoxical and super-Shavian dissertations on the theory of woman are then followed by blandishments and caresses, in respect of which with a marvellous genius for brutality he chaffs her on the crudity and inexperience of her technique. Then comes the most outré scene of the play when Casti Piani and Elfrida watch from behind a screen the courtship of Lisiska, the missing servant-girl, by a young man in a check knickerbocker suit; the bizarre paradox is but accentuated by the swing and beauty of the lyrics in which this wooing is conducted, and the distorted idealism of the girl, who, as the martyr-priestess of the joie de vivre, is almost genuinely convinced of the sanctity of her mission. The interlude over, the audience come from behind the curtain. Stung to the wildest pitch of emulation, the extreme limit of self-sacrificing ecstasy, the neurotic woman completes the cycle of her psychic revolution by the supplication, "Verkaufen Sie mich." The marquis, who has thus succeeded beyond his most sanguine expectations, in a fit of nervous revulsion shoots himself before the girl's eyes. Three of the inmates rush from three distinct doors, and the over-civilised satyr expires with their kisses on his lips, kisses savoured and criticised with all the frenzy of the moribund connoisseur—"Küsse mich—nein, das war nicht—Küsse—küsse mich anders."
It is impossible to express more cogently the whole tragedy of the dying sensualist.
No normal Englishman can be expected to enjoy such a play; in justice, however, to the author, this freny is æsthetic as well as sexual. New worlds, in fact, have been needed to regale the insatiate appetites of the dramatist and his hearers; "Heaven has been blown to pieces by the artillery of science; earth is cold, stale and unpalatable; perforce let us batten on the fires of hell," would run his motto. As Baudelaire in verse, and Beardsley in painting, found their theme in the vicious and the abhorrent, so does Wedekind in the drama. As an ordinary play, Der Totentanz falls outside judgment; as a sheer literary curiosity, a dramatic fantasia on the sex-motif, a deliberate essay in the art of the ironical and the brutal, the piece achieves its own and peculiar ambition.
Die Junge Welt, on the other hand, flows in a current which, in spite of the eventual madness of the principal male character, is limpid and playful by comparison with the Phlegethontian course of the Totentanz. The theme of the comedy is the woman movement. In the prologue, one of his most aery and delicious pieces of work, Wedekind shows us a bevy of schoolgirls at lessons, chattering, fooling, and "ragging" their master with the most delightful naïveté. They have a pretty taste in literature, forsooth, reading surreptitious copies of The Arabian Nights, talking gravely of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and quoting with the prettiest of pedantry Schiller, Goethe, and even Ovid. No mere prattlers, however. Glorying in their grievance, they found a league, the solemn oath of whose members is never to marry until the most glaring outrages in the education of the young are remedied. Towards the end of the scene some youthful figures of the opposite sex enter. How long will the league last?
Then we come to the actual play where the sacred circle has been already cut by a marriage of one of the members. The whole comedy, in fact, shows how irresistibly the Life Force claims its own. The brisk racy dialogue and the satiric character drawing of the ultra-moderns are equally delicious. Particularly charming are Anna, masking the temperament of her Shavian namesake beneath the pose of the new woman; Karl, the picturesque scamp, who has married a seamstress on abstract socialistic principles; and Meyer, the modern poet, who, when his fiançée presents herself to recite a poem which he has written, in the most faithful of Cupid costumes, is most righteously indignant because—the dress fails to harmonise with the subtle spirit of his masterpiece.
A masterly little piece of irony, again, is the celebrated stage-direction, when, at the climax of an intense passage, a baby squalls, and is carried off the stage by its mother, to the accompaniment of music. Perhaps, however, the deftest touch of satire is the analysis of the decline of the détraqué littérateur, accustomed to transcribe each kiss fresh from the lips of his beloved into his artistic note-book.—"When I made my psychological studies on Anna, then Anna becomes unnatural—on some other specimen—she became jealous—there was no other alternative but to make them on myself."
Wedekind's dramatic masterpieces, however, are Die Erdgeist. and Frühlingserwachen, which merit, consequently, a somewhat more detailed analysis. Die Erdgeist, as has been already remarked, deals with the theme of the modern Lilith, not from the point of view of orthodox dramatic technique like Mr. Pinero, not scientifically like Zola, but æsthetically. No show of esoteric detail, no orthodox dénouement; simply atmosphere. The play, together with its sequel, Die Büchse von Pandora, constitutes the epic of the courtesan. In the first act, Schwarz, a painter, is at work on the portrait, in pierrot costume, of the wife of a Dr. Goll, a lady rejoicing in the various Christian names of Nellie, Eva, and Lulu. A middle-aged journalist, named Schön, who is in the studio, is on old and friendly terms with Frau Goll. The fact that female beauty is the raison être of the creature's existence is soon made apparent by the following dialogue: