It was Matthew Arnold who Englished Joubert's soul's cry, "You hurt me!" In this moving and gloomy and largely planned tragedy of the lowly, Hauptmann holds no brief for anarchy, plays upon no class sentiment. He seems as objective as Flaubert, yet no play that I ever witnessed is such a judgment of man and his cruelty to his fellow-beings.
The ancients, who sounded the abysmal depths of despair, crime, and terror, nevertheless contrived some relief; if no other, the artistic form itself palliated the awful content of a tragedy of Æschylus. But Hauptmann, with absolute indifference to our moral epidermis, strips bare for us human nature, and we revolt naturally enough. The truth, naked and unadorned, is always unpleasant. Pascal once wrote: "When I see the blindness and the misery of man; when I survey the whole dumb universe and man without light, left to himself and lost, as it were, in this corner of the universe, not knowing who placed him here, what he has come to do, what will become, of him when he dies, and incapable of any knowledge whatever, I fall into terror, like that of a man who, having been carried in his sleep to an island, desert and terrible, should awake ignorant of his whereabouts and with no means of escape, and therefore I wonder how those in so miserable a state do not fall into despair." What would he not have written after witnessing this play?
The Weavers is a parable. The Weavers is a symphony in five movements, with one grim, leading motive—hunger. In every act you hear that ominous, that sickening word "hunger." The necessity of such a play is chilling to our pampered and capricious appetites. Hunger! What a horrible theme for an art work! The northern novelist, Knut Hamsun, has in a more personal style used the same theme. We love blithe art, art imbued with deep serenity,—heiterkeit, Winckelmann called it,—so away with this grim phantom, evoked by a ruthless imagination! But what if it be true? That is the affair of the Commissioner of Charities. We pay our taxes. Go to, Herr Hauptmann, go to! We prefer illusionists, not unmaskers of grim truths. Yet hunger!
"There is," wrote Thomas Hardy, "a size at which dignity begins; farther on there is a size at which grandeur begins; farther on there is a size at which solemnity begins; farther on a size at which ghastliness begins."
The novelist was speaking of the interstellar universe. In Die Weber there are depths where ghastliness begins. It is not a play, it is a chorale of woe, malediction, and want. The people, hardly civilized, are put before us, a marvellous vitascope of pain and disease. What avails criticism before such a spectacle?
It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the grewsome story of this play—how the weavers starved, how the weavers revolted, and that wonderful ending, old age stiffened in death and childhood merrily unconscious. It recalls Victor Hugo's precipice with its single crannied rose in full bloom. And The Weavers was the first modern play that deals with the life of the proletarians.
College Crampton (1892), Der Biberpelz (1893), Hannele (1893), Florian Geyer (1896), Die Versunkene Glocke (1897), Fuhrmann Henschel(1898), Schluck und Jau (1900), Michael Kramer (1900), Der rote Hahn (1901), Der Arme Heinrich (1902), Rose Bernd (1903), complete the list thus far of this fecund and remarkable man. He has felt his way through naturalistic drama to comedy, and in the latter without much success; and from comedy to historical drama, with no success at all; indeed, Florian Geyer was a failure, though in its amended version as given last October 22, in Berlin, at the Lessing Theatre, it won approval, critical and popular. The poet has written a new five-act comedy for the same theatre, which he calls The Merry Maiden of Bishopsberg.
The Beaver-Coat and The Red Cock—the symbol of fire—are folk-plays, the comedy rather grim, the sense of actuality strong. The first is a "thieves' comedy" and the fooling is heavy enough in both pieces; the latter is a continuation. German officialism is parodied. Schluck und Jau was also a failure. Written partially in prose and verse, it recalls Calderon, Grillparzer, Shakespeare's prologue to The Taming of the Shrew, and Hauptmann himself. Although Fuhrmann Henschel followed Hannele and The Sunken Bell, we prefer to speak of it and several other plays before those two masterpieces. Wagoner Henschel was a surprise and a deep disappointment to many of Hauptmann's admirers. He seemed to return to the most sordid of topics, yet it contains passages of spiritual beauty; while as a whole the note it sounds is a supernatural one, despite the vileness of its surroundings. The psychologic depiction of Henschel's downfall is masterly. He is a stolid teamster whose first wife in her death-bed makes him promise not to marry the servant girl, Hanna Scholl. But he does, for some one must look after his daughter. The moral dégringolade begins. The woman is a vicious slattern. She is unfaithful. Things go badly. Henschel comes to believe that his first wife haunts him, and kills himself. It is very morbid, but it fits in the Hauptmann scheme, as Professor J. F. Coar in his Studies in German Literature shows: "Hannele contrasted spiritual consciousness with moral consciousness. And Henry in The Sunken Bell fails because he attempts what his creator, Hauptmann, attempted in Hannele. How, then, shall a poet find his quest rewarded? Only by seeking the spiritual mirrored in the moral. Hauptmann is far from having such a vision in Teamster Henschel; still he is to be credited with the effort to obtain it. Again, he could only see the misery of life.... In constantly narrowing circles the thoughts of Henschel turn about the one tense feeling of wrong committed when he married again in violation of his promise. The infidelity of the second wife appears to him like the judgment of God.... At night the figure of his dead wife lies down with him.... There is no trace of dialectical reasoning in this simple Silesian teamster. He stands facing existence without the ability to apply his reason to anything but the humdrum affairs of life. Once forced beyond the bounds of these, reason gives way, and he is gradually led into a pessimistic fatalism from which there is no escape. But to create by transforming spiritual life into moral action is the law of individual existence, and men, as Hauptmann sees them, are in the world for this purpose."
On the material side Fuhrmann Henschel might be called a drama of insomnia. The majority of the Hauptmann plays record the struggle of mankind to widen its spiritual horizon. College Crampton is an exception. It is merely an entertaining piece shorn of tragic meanings. Moreover, it contains some excellent comedy and characterization. The hero—a sorry one—drinks. Michael Kramer ends with the suicide of a foolish talented young fellow, who is jeered to the desperate deed by a lot of idlers in a Silesian café. The types are local. Kramer, his father, is an austere artist. The milieu is the artistic, though as drama we are never carried off our feet. Loosely joined episodes and too much dialogue mar the piece. There are, however, many deft touches, and the scene wherein Kramer views his dead son is full of reserve power and suggestiveness. Nearly all these plays enumerated thus far are irregular on the constructive side, withal effective and human. Hauptmann has ever been careless in his technics. The well-made play is never in his thoughts, for he works from within to external details. Even in his imitative period he betrayed this creative impulse.
Der Arme Heinrich is not Hauptmann at his happiest, despite rare flashes of beauty and power in this replica of a mediæval miracle play. The theme is unpleasant, a leprous knight rescued by the unselfish pure love of a maiden—an idea as old as The Flying Dutchman, though set forth in different terms, framed by another environment. It is rather to Hannele and Die Versunkene Glocke we must turn for the greater Hauptmann.