The automata who in the ‘realist’ novel execute mock-movements, and between whom the dullest and most miserable back-stair sentimentality is played off, are always the same: a gentleman, an ex-officer whenever possible, who, we are assured, is engaged upon ‘works on socialism’ (of what kind we never learn, it is simply asserted that they are ‘very important’); a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment of the ewig-Weibliche; and a realist painter who plans or executes pictures destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the millennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ‘modernism’ of the ‘Young-German’ realism: quotation of the names of the Berlin streets, rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses, a little Berlinese dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse and stupid eroticism, unctuous allusions to socialism and phrases on painting, such as a goose-fattener grown rich might make if she wished to pass herself off as a lady. Of the three persons who are always the supporters of this ‘modernity’ the waitress is the only really original one. The merit of this treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of novels entitled Schlechte Gesellschaft. She is a conglomeration of all the fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in poetry: a winged chimæra, a sphinx with lion’s claws, and a siren with a fish’s tail, all at one and the same time. She contains in herself every charm and every gift, love and wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by the waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative power of the German ‘realist’ can be most accurately gauged.
If Tovote is a representative type—by no means diseased, but merely incapable beyond conception—of intruders into literature with which they will at most be connected as peddling hawkers of trashy novels, we meet in Hermann Bahr with a clearly pathological individuality. Bahr is an advanced hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself talked about, and has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result by books. Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks to captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he calls the book most characteristic of his method among those he has hitherto published, Die gute Schule; Seelenstände.[462] Seelenstände literally means ‘states of soul.’ He had read and not understood the term états d’âme in the new French authors, état having been used in the political sense which it has in tiers-états.
In the story related in the Seelenstände, a part at least of the recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an Austrian painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living alone, he picks up a girl in the street, who, contrary to the orthodox procedure, is not a waitress, but a dressmaker, possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical excellence of the ‘Young German’ barmaid; he lives with her for a time, then wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she leaves him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom she induces to buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned lover.
This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ‘state’ of his hero’s ‘soul.’ This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate type, such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria. Not a single author of any individuality who has passed before his eyes has been able to escape his rage for servile imitation. The principle of the ‘Good School’—the misery of a painter who struggles with the conception of a work of art intended to express his whole soul, and who recognises with despair his impotence to realize it—is subtilized from Zola’s L’[Œuvre, All the details, as we shall see, he has taken from Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French Impressionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a parody of inimitably exquisite absurdity.
The painter’s distress of mind is ‘the lyrism of red. His whole soul was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all his desires, in sonnets of lament and hope; and in general a complete biography of red, what took place in him and usually whatever could happen to him.... But this lofty canticle of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple tones of daily life.... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which he embodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and gaiety of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations. But the great and supreme confession of his whole soul hung on a purple tablecloth with heavy folds, on which the sun shone, a narrow shaft, but with all the more fiery glow.’ If the struggle with the ‘biography of the red’ was a torture to him, even worse things were about to happen. One day ‘the curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon, juicy and sweet, which one would never have suspected of perfidy as it lay cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich herb sauce.’ (A cooked salmon cradling itself! This must have produced a ghostly effect. And this uncanny salmon struck him ‘behind,’ although it was on the table before him!) But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green herbs, the pride of the cook—yes, it was this that did it. It was this that conquered him. He had never seen anything like it—never before, as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter green, at once so languishing and so joyous that one could have sung and shouted for joy. The whole rococo was in it, only in a much more gracious, yearning note. It had to go into his picture. But he could never hit off that green sauce, and this was the tragedy of his life. He ‘kept the truth locked up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it; he did not give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming work of his breast,’ namely, the green sauce! ‘He would have liked to make a gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a burning screw ... deep, very deep, till there was a great hole ... an immense triumphal gate of his art, through which the internals could spit it out.’
What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the purpose of overcoming it in a ‘healing and redeeming’ work of art, so irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is written in an entirely serious view, and without the least idea of joking!
Bahr describes his own style in these words: ‘A wild, feverish, tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name in the ordinary idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of finding unheard-of, obscure, and strange neologisms, in a forced and singular combination.’
The painter’s mistress must have been a superb creature, to judge by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in the street ‘she slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids haughtily raised, and her little head thrown back sideways, she began to hum softly, sharply snapping her fingers with impatience, in such a way as to rouse his desire to persevere in his useless suit.’ This behaviour induces Bahr to call her a ‘majestically inaccessible young lady.’ But she is far more remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she is in the street. ‘Often, when under the greetings of the morning, which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she plaited her hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded by his desires, and stretched, moistened, and slowly curved, with twitching fingers which glittered like swift serpents, quite gently and persistently, her tangled [!] eyelashes, her dishevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew round with silent whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue hissed, shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed slowly, cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the little nose, fearful of the dust, turned aside,’ the painter, as may be imagined, became so amorous that ‘he licked the soap from her fingers to refresh his fevered gums.’ ‘Suddenly standing upright on one leg, with a swing of the other she kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by a nimble, firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.’ ‘Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very gently, very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her breasts, deep into her knees, while her lips moved; sometimes, while her hips turned in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously into swan-like [!] curves towards her obsequious image.’ This sight filled her lover with such enthusiasm that it seemed to him ‘as if from a thousand springs blasted [!] torrents blazed through his veins.’
It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this style, which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either in formation, use of terms, or construction. I wish merely to show to what degree Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy of Nietzsche: ‘Always the same. He ought to do this, and not to do that; the same litany from his first infancy—always and only; he should and he shouldn’t. What he would was the only thing never demanded of him; and thus, in this frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense desire to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish at being always someone else eternally.’ ‘To say that everyone only came out of himself to penetrate into another ... to dominate him! That a man could never, should never, he himself, not have one hour of bliss, but everlastingly renounce, transform, annihilate himself for another’s gratification.... Alone—alone; why would they not leave one alone?’ ... ‘To make a desert for himself—a still silent desert.’ ‘Others had not this sentiment of the “I” to such an exuberant and immeasurable extent.’ ‘The joyous hatred of men and the world.’ Here we have Ibsen: ‘He wished to go into the country—he himself, precisely as proposed by the other, certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue of his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal of another.... And rather than bend to another’s will he renounced his own. Moreover, since another wished it, the pleasure of wishing it himself was lost to him.’ Here the De Goncourts: ‘There was around her out of the sorrowful violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.’ ‘His feeling was always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow ground—dirty yellow—gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.’ ‘It was chaste voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly gray, melting into faint violet.’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘He was bound to establish the new love.... The question was of doing it in the style of electricity and steam. An Edison-love ... yes, a machine-like love.’ A mixture of Baudelaire and Huysmans: ‘In the undulating silver dust of the light a lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green vapour, bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down.... He wished utterly to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood—blood. He only felt at ease when it streaked [!] down.... He established a theory according to which this was the way towards the new love, viz., by torture.’ ‘There lay the meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes ... and hopes, the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its pride and with imperial mourning walked a huge gray sunflower, silent and pale, on the arm of an awkward fat stinking thistle, which trailed noisily afar with large rough gold.’ ‘This now became for him true art, the art which alone could redeem and make happy—the art of odours.... From pale and moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs, he awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,’ etc. The rehardness, ainder is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans’ novel, A Rebours. As to the passages full of a heat which clamours for a strait-jacket, and simulates satyriasis and Sadism; as to the quaint confusions and orthographical errors in French names which the author, who poses as a Parisian, commits at every step; and as to his frequent manifestation of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things are not essential, but they contribute to make Bahr’s book the only product of hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing in German literature.
The greater number of Young-German plagiarists have not yet risen to the monumental productions of a Tovote or a Bahr, and have stopped at short pieces of lyric poetry.