Some reference should be made to Wedekind's less important works—to the somewhat inferior farce, Der Liebestrank; to the highly serious So ist das Leben, a work whose psychology and symbolism are analogous to Ibsen's Volksfiend[3]; to the amusing, but not particularly significant Marquis von Keith, with its mixture of the problem, the extravaganza, and the character study, and its delightful comedy passage, when a boy wins his way with his father by blackmailing him with suicide; to Minnehaha, the prose-poem, compounded of the spirits of the classics and the coulisses; to the satiric grotesque, Oaha, an elaborate skit on the celebrated Munich journal with its chronic confiscations by the police and its special "prison-editor"; and to Hidalla, that rollicking burlesque tragedy of Free Love and Eugenics. On a higher plane, however, are the volume of short stories, Feuerwerk, and the collection of poems entitled Die Vier Jahrzeiten. Like Guy de Maupassant, Wedekind treats only the one subject. His technique, however, is different, and while the Frenchman crowns each tale with a climax, the German clothes it with an atmosphere. Feuerwerk, moreover, is worth reading, if only for the style, with its noble simplicity and its majestic roll. The masterpiece of the series is Der Greise Freier, where, set in the background of an Italian honeymoon, lies painted the grey romance of a young girl realising her love in the very arms of death. Matchless, again, as a mock heroic tour de force is Rabbi von Ezra, a philosophic sermon by an aged Hebrew, delivered in the grandiose style of the prophets, on his comparative experiences with the wife of his bosom and the strange woman. The poems, also, are, with a few exceptions, innumerable variations of the eternal theme. With all its fantastic bizarrerie, reminiscent of Baudelaire, Poe, or Verlaine, the mood is throughout more masculine, not to say more brutal. No lover has yet set his enamoured features to a grin of such tigerish ferocity; no writer of songs has yet refined melodious lyrics with such Nietzschean gusto, such Satanic exultation. Keuscheit, in particular, is truly the apotheosis of the super-brutal. In a more normal vein, making quite a new departure in the art of light verse, is the charming poem beginning:
"Ich habe meine Tante geschlachtet,
Meine Tante war alt und schwach."
Of course it is inevitable that, like the Secessionist painters, seeking, as he does, such drastic effects by such drastic means, when he falls, he should fall with overwhelming heaviness. Occasionally, instead of being powerful, he is merely crude. At his best, however, his poems exhibit the swing and ripple of the authentic lyric. Typical of him at his best are Heimweh and Der Blinde Knabe. Yet now and again the cry of the sufferer pierces the cynic's mask.
"Ich stehe schuldlos vor meinem Verstand,
Und fühle des Schicksals zermalmende Hand."
Among Wedekind's more recent works we would mention Zensur and Schloss von Wetterstein and, far more particularly, Musik and Franziska.
Zensur, with its sub-title a Theodicy, is an apologia pro vitâ suâ, arising more particularly out of the fact that the play, Die Büchse von Pandora, was actually censored even in Munich. The protagonist of this work, Walter Buridan, is without disguise Frank Wedekind, for the postulate of the Wedekindian personality, as a fundamental element in contemporary national culture, is as important in Germany as was some years ago the postulate of the Shavian personality in England. And, indeed, with all his clownings and buffooneries, Wedekind is frequently as serious as Mr. Shaw himself. It will therefore be appreciated that the passage which we are now going to quote out of the dialogue between Buridan and the Court official is meant deliberately, not as a mere piece of impudence but in all earnestness.
BURIDAN. But can you adduce anything out of my writings which hasn't for its ultimate object to glorify and represent artistically that eternal justice before which we all bend the knee with all humility?
DR. PRANTL. What do you mean by eternal justice?
BURIDAN. I understand by eternal justice the same thing as that which John the Evangelist called the Logos. I understand by it the same thing as that which the whole of Christendom worships as the Holy Ghost. In no one of my works have I put forward the good as bad or the bad as good. I have never falsified the consequences which accrue to a man as the result of his actions. I have simply portrayed those consequences in all their inexorable necessity.
In a somewhat different vein is the weird trilogy, In Allen Satteln Gerecht (Ready for Everything), Mit Allen Hüden Gehetzt (Up to Everything), and In Allen Wassern Gewaschen, which have been recently published together, under the title of Schloss von Wetterstein. In these three plays the lascivious and the intellectual, the monstrous and the real, the comic and the tragic, are linked together in a union which, though to some extent burlesque, is on the whole successful. The dialogue, in particular, in this hybrid of tragedy and extravaganza, with its ingenious twists, its lusty thwackings, its shrewd, violent thrusts, not merely home, but, as it were, right through the body, is in its own way packed with genius. Effie, in particular, with her insatiable appetite in the erotic sphere, is the greatest enfant terrible in the whole of modern European literature. And truly tragic is her dismay when she discovers that that Unersättlichkeit in Liebe, on which she has built her whole philosophy of life, is simply to be attributed to chronic indigestion, and that the instantaneous effect which she produces upon males is simply due to a diseased liver.
More serious, though with the usual Wedekindian sardonic undercurrent, is Musik. This play consists of four "pictures" from the life of a young singing student, Klara Hûhnerwadel, studying her art in the household of a professor who is married to another woman. Events take their normal course, but there is a great uproar owing to the arrest and trial of the woman, through whose illegal assistance Klara had successfully escaped the natural corollary of her rash romanticism. Klara is consequently packed off across the frontier to avoid arrest herself. She returns, however, is duly arrested, and the second "picture" shows her in prison. In the third "picture," she is once more back at the professor's house, and once more does history repeat itself, though in this case the legal ordinances are not infringed. In the fourth "picture," Klara has given birth to a son, of whom she is devotedly fond. With true Wedekindian irony, however, the child dies on the stage. Such is the skeleton of the plot, squalid, though no doubt highly plausible. But the play must be read itself to appreciate the sheer force of its sinister realism. The characters in this piece are among the most convincing that ever walked the boards of a Wedekind play, painted too in colours far more sober than those fantastic luridities with which this author is accustomed to disport himself. It is, in fact, if we may draw a slightly startling analogy, a "slice of life" play of the Galsworthian genre. Before passing from Musik, we would like to quote the passage describing the child's death as typically characteristic of the author's brutal pathos.