SCHÖN. Don't look at me so shamelessly.
LULU. No one is keeping you here.
The Circæan witchery is complete, and the man, transformed, writes, at the dictation of the enchantress, a letter breaking off his engagement.
In the fourth act, nemesis is at hand. His marriage with Lulu shatters the constitution of the aging journalist, who falls a victim to persecution-mania. Lulu, though genuinely in love with him, surrenders herself almost mechanically to the kisses of his son. The journalist can stand no more—such a creature is not fit to live—she must commit suicide with the revolver which he produces. Simply as a matter of self-preservation, she turns the weapon against the man himself. Then ensues the most devilish scene of all. Fearing the prison-cage, the brute turns for help to the child of its prey: "I shot him because he wanted to shoot me. I loved no man in the world like I did him. Alwa, demand what you will. Look at me, Alwa; look at me, man, look at me."
Those anxious for the further history of Lulu should turn to the livid pages of Die Büchse von Pandora. There, in flaming characters, they will read of her imprisonment, of how, being deprived of a mirror, she at last found relief by seeing her reflection in a new spoon, of her rescue therefrom by her inamorata, the Countess Geschwitz, and of her flight to Paris with Alwa Schön; they will read of her life there among souteneurs, blackmailers, and millionaires, of her migration from Paris to London, of her degradation to the streets, and her final assassination at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Wedekind, who to the métier of the artist joins that of the enfant terrible, strains in this play every nerve to shock. As the susceptibilities of the left wing of most of the English intellects are about on a par with those of the right wing of the German æsthetic movement, from our own point of view he more than overshoots the mark. None the less, the English reader, though stifled amid the fumes of the monstrous debauch, is forced to admire here and there passages of a potency truly infernal. The final scene in the wet and noisome garret is indisputably tragic, when the squalid thing gazes at Schwarz's pierrot picture of her dead beauty, only to throw it in revulsion out of the window, or where Alwa and Schigolch analyse the melancholy past.
ALWA. She should have been a Catherine of Russia.
SCHIGOLCH. That beast!
ALWA. Although her development was precocious, she once had the expression of a gay and healthy child of five years old. She was then only three years younger than I. In spite of her marvellous superiority to me in practical matters, she let me explain to her the meaning of Tristan and Isolde, and how fascinating she was when I read it to her and she grasped its meaning. From the little sister that felt herself like a schoolgirl in her first marriage, she became the wife of an unfortunate and hysterical artist; from being the wife of the artist, she became the wife of my late father; from being the wife of my father, she became my mistress; so flows the stream of the world. Who can swim against it?
So ends a play not without some resemblance to Hogarth's Harlot's Progress, if one can imagine the fanatical moralist treating such a subject with the artistic irony of a very much Germanised Aubrey Beardsley.
But Wedekind's most serious contribution to dramatic literature is to be found in Frühlingserwachen. The orthodox stage-conventions, it is true, are sweepingly ignored; the scene is changed with more than Shakespearean frequency; the characters indulge in prolonged romantic soliloquies; none the less, the night of genuine tragedy broods over the whole piece.
The first act opens with a conversation between Frau Bergman and her daughter Wendla. The girl is growing up, fit to wear longer dresses, and exhibiting the morbidity appropriate to her years. In the next scene we see schoolboys at talk; with intense gravity they travel from their work to religion, and from religion to sex, discussing the Platonic and American systems of education, remarking that Superstition is the Charybdis into which one flies out of the Scylla of religious mania, or comparing notes on the growth of their respective manhoods. Melchior, the leading spirit of the knot, promises to provide his less experienced friend, Moritz, with a written synopsis of the mechanism of life. In the third scene, we get the other side of the medal, when a bevy of girls discuss life. How shall we dress our children? Which is it better to be—a girl, or a man? Then, again, the scene is filled with schoolboys, and we see the academic enthusiasm of young Germany.
"I've got my move," cried Melchior. "I've got my move—now the world can go to pot—if I hadn't got my move, I'd have shot myself." A British youth with his cricket or football "colours" fresh on his victorious head could not possibly have manifested a more sacred joy, and one thinks incidentally of the Viennese student who shot the professor who had ploughed him in his viva voce.