GERHART HAUPTMANN
Der Mensch, das ist ein Ding Das sich von ungefâhr bei uns verfing: Von dieser Welt und doch auch nicht von ihr: Zur Hälfte—wo? wer weiss?—zur Hälfte hier. Halb unser Bruder und aus uns Geboren Uns feind und freund zur Hälfte und verloren.
—Die Versunkene Glocke.
In the figure of Gerhart Hauptmann we encounter a man of genius, a man of European significance, and more than the standard-bearer of Young Germany. True, Hauptmann did graduate from the seminary of the realists,—the heads of which were Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf,—writing, under the name of Bjarne P. Holmsen, that delectable, ironic fantasy, Papa Hamlet But the dramatic poetic instincts of the Silesian youth—he was born at Salzbrunn, 1862, the son of a hotel-keeper—were not long to be penned behind the bars of a formula. As in Goethe's Faust, two spirits travailed furiously within him. Ultra-idealist in his boyhood, he suffered from the green-sickness of Byronism, and wrote poems in imitation of Byron, Hebbel, Schiller. He studied sculpture at Rome for a time and set up an atelier there. His epic, Promethidenlos (1885), was as subjective as a restless, unhappy young man of twenty-three could make it. Yet there is no mistaking the chord set clanging by its immature music—the chord of sympathy with human suffering, the true Hauptmann leit-motiv that may be equally heard in his first drama, Before Sunrise, and in his latest, Rose Bernd.
The critical allotment of Hauptmann to the Ibsen domain is easy, too easy; he has been greatly influenced by the "red star of the north," though it has not been a baleful one. He owes as much to Zola as to Ibsen, as Zola owes in his turn much to Victor Hugo and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Young Germany itself, Karl Bleibtreu, Conrad Alberti, Sudermann, Halbe, Conradi, Kretzer, and the rest were in the fashioning of the Freie Bühne heavily indebted to Antoine and his revolutionary Théâtre Libre. Under the spell of the mystic and lyric prose of Friedrich Nietzsche—surely among the most musical that issued from German lips—individualism became an all-absorbing element in the production of art works. It was the old leaven of Max Stirner and his Der Einzige. John Henry Mackay, the Scotch-German, hymned in almost delirious verse the rights of the Ego; even the cool-headed East Prussian Sudermann felt the impact of this lyric anarchism when he published his Three Heron Feathers. As to Hauptmann, whose lyre was ever more sensitive to the mobility of the moral atmosphere, this wind of individualism swept him along and he wrote Before Sunrise. It was produced in 1889, and at once its author was recognized as a force.
Socialistic, this play is almost as rank as La Terre. Technically it has many weak spots, but the basic idea is capital. The Krauses, suddenly come into money, afforded the dramatist opportunities for his still immature but profoundly true gifts of characterization. It is a depressing crowd he sets before us, drunkenness being the least of its defects. Helene Krause is betrothed to the lover of her step-mother, and when Alfred Loth, a high-minded socialist, appears, she naturally falls in love with him. Loth, warned by a doctor—an excellently conceived character—that it were insane to marry into a tainted family, leaves a letter for Helene and vanishes. She promptly kills herself. The final curtain is harrowing. There is exaggerated realism and also that curious tendency, which has developed instead of abating, of dealing with depraved types. Friedensfest (1890), which followed, begins to show Hauptmann more conscious of his own talents. The Scholz family is accurately studied and presented. The dénouement baldly stated—an unhappy father come home to die in a household from which he has been banished by his conduct—smacks of German sentimentality. Here the poet demonstrated that all lies in the individual handling of the theme. The moral is "Peace on earth, good will to men," and this unhappy pessimistic family is made to realize the strength of the collectivist ideal. The same year Einsame Menschen appeared, in which Ibsen's influence is paramount. It reads like a variant of Rosmersholm, diluted though it be. If it proves anything, it is that the unpurified is to be distrusted because it brings unhappiness in its train. The Vockerat family is a fairly contented group until the appearance of Anna Mahr, a young woman from Zurich University who has absorbed the unsettling culture of the day. She speedily unseats the judgment of John Vockerat, and in becoming his affinity she makes him neglect his lovely wife. It is all so Ibsenian that we note with a sense of the incongruous the scene of the action, the Müggelsee near Berlin. John hates the religion of his parents, becomes estranged from these kindly folk, throws himself on the mercy of Anna, who, after lecturing him in the true-blue cerebral style of the emancipated woman, goes away. Distracted, the young man drowns himself.
Notwithstanding technical and psychologic advances, this effort is not so convincing as Before Sunrise. One feels the thesis prepared, the task attacked, and not the spontaneous work of art. Charles Henry Meltzer, Hauptmann's friend and English translator, declares that Before Sunrise was written while the poet was still filled with admiration of Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness, and after many conversations with Arno Holz and Bruno Wille, the socialist. In one respect it is very remarkable—the evocation of atmosphere. And some critics see in Anna Mahr a forerunner to Hilda Wangel of The Master Builder.
When, however, Die Weber was printed (1892), all Germany knew that the master had appeared. It was not until February, 1893, that the first performances took place on the Freie Bühne, Deutsches Theatre, Berlin. The drama stands at the parting of the ways. Not since Wagner's Die Meistersinger had such an attempt been made to clear the German stage of its gingerbread rhetoric, its pasteboard mock-antiques, its moonshine romantics. And while the Wagner comedy was all grace, sweetness, and light and only epical in its vast machinery of narration, The Weavers was a quivering transcript from life—and such life! Germany took fire from the blaze of the dramatist's generous wrath. Socialism or anarchy, what you will, were swallowed up in the presentment of this veracious document of wretched lives. Yet, while its tendenz is unmistakably an arraignment of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois master weavers, as is Zola's stern denunciation in Germinal of unfeeling mine owners, Hauptmann, being the finer artist, does not drive his lesson home with a moral sledge-hammer. He paints the picture; his audience finds the indictment. Here is a new German art at last.
And not altogether unprepared for this violent drama should have been his admirers. His short nouvelle, Bahnwärter Thiel, is full of pity for the downtrodden. This story sounds like a transposition of a Zola melodrama to a finer key. The companion tale in the same volume, The Apostle, might have been written by Dostoïevsky.
In Die Weber,—or De Waber, as it is called in the patois of Silesia,—Hauptmann is for the first time Hauptmann. Zola and Ibsen are no longer felt, for the resemblance to An Enemy of the People is of the vaguest. Henceforth it is the masses, not the individual. Raised in the weaving districts of Silesia, his grandfather a weaver and a witness of a similar strike with its dire consequences,—Robert Hauptmann, his father, also sat at the loom—the subject was one that could be treated with epic breadth and eloquence by the poet. The mob is the hero, for old Hilfe is only a representative of his class. Baumert the soldier, Ansorge, the women, the blind wife, and the climax where old Hilfe is dead and the little Mielchen tells with babyish joy the story of the shooting—every character, every incident, rings true, and rang so widely and so well that it set pealing the bells of the world. If Hauptmann had died after writing Die Weber, he would have been acclaimed a great dramatist.