For that just balance of contents and form which makes for perfection, Schnitzler's renaissance drama The Veil of Beatrice is the most noteworthy specimen. But in all his work his style is his greatest achievement. It is of a rare spontaneity, vivacity and grace—qualities that make his dialogue appear an impromptu performance rather than a carefully planned structure. It abounds in paradoxes that do not blind the vision, but reveal vistas, and that do not impress as high lights added for effect, but as organic parts of the whole. It scintillates with wit, though it lacks humor. It is the just medium of expression for his characters, those types of modern intellectuals, affected by the corrosive skepticism of the period and in turn buoyed by the light-hearted temperament and depressed by the passive melancholy that are indigenous to Vienna. It is this literary excellence that renders works like Literature (1902) and The Green Cockatoo (1899) enjoyable to readers to whom their spirit may be absolutely foreign. It is their polish that robs their cynicism of its sting and brings into relief only their formal beauty. Literature deals effectively with the literary exploitation of intimate personal experience: it presents characters which with due local modification can be found in every intellectual centre and is a little masterpiece of irony. In The Green Cockatoo the poet has seen his theme in a sort of phantasmagorical perspective; he plays with reality and appearance in a play within a play which is unique in literature. He makes his spectators feel the hot breath of the French Revolution without burdening them with the ideas that were back of it. It is the most solidly constructed of his works and the one most sure of success on any stage. Exquisite as is the art of Schnitzler, it is deeply rooted in life and does not approach that art for art's sake which was one of the striking phenomena of that period.
Yet the atmosphere of Vienna and the leisurely pace of its life seem to favor the development of an art that has little or no connection with the pressing realities of the day and is bent upon seeking the beauty of the word rather than the truth of its message. Such a movement had been inaugurated in German letters in 1890 by Stefan George, who gathered about him a small group of collaborators in the privately circulated magazine Blätter für die Kunst. It stood for a remoteness from reality which formed a strong contrast to the naturalistic creed and for a formal craftsmanship which set out to counteract the grooving tendency to break away from the fetters of conventional forms. The work of the group bordered often upon archaic preciosity, yet its influence was wholesome in holding up the ideal of a formalism which is after all one of the basic conditions of art. Though not a native of Vienna, Stefan George settled there after launching the movement and found among its young intellectuals not a few disciples that have since followed in his wake. There is something about an art for art's sake that appeals to an aristocracy of birth and breeding; it touched a responsive chord in the soul of Hugo von Hofmannsthal,[A] whose earlier work distinctly shows its influence and who to that influence still owes his admirable mastery of form.
[Footnote A: For Hofmannsthal, compare Vol. XVII, pp. 482-527.]
Hofmannsthal's descent from an old nobility that had passed the zenith of its power and was but little modified by a strain of the more democratic Hebrew blood, seemed to predestine him for the part he has played in the literature of the present. He made his debut as a mere youth of seventeen, when in 1891 he published the dramatic study Yesterday, giving evidence of an amazingly precocious mind and a prematurely developed formal talent. Gifted writers of that kind are usually doomed to remain prodigies whatever may be their medium of expression. Coming into their heritage, which is the accumulated knowledge and experience of their ancestors, before they have acquired a direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color of age. Knowing and satiated when the mind is most receptive, such individualities rarely develop beyond their first brilliant phase. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was for a long time considered a perfect specimen of that type. For the hero of that first work, as of every work published by him during the first decade of his career, was his double, was Hofmannsthal himself. All the virtuosity of style could not conceal the paucity of invention in subject matter and in the creation of real living characters. Even in that charming Oriental play The Marriage of Sobeide (1899) and The Mine of Falun (1906) the personality of the author obtrudes itself upon the vision of the reader.
These works, however, marked a transition. For with his thirtieth year Hofmannsthal entered upon a new period and a new manner. The study of the antique Greek drama and of early English dramatists diverted him from the self-absorption and self-reflection of his previous work, and may have brought home to him the necessity of finding a more fertile source for his art than his own individual soul. The extraordinary success of Wilde's Salome opened possibilities of applying the pathological knowledge of the present to the interpretation of the past. He chose for this momentous departure the Electra of Sophocles (1903). Taking from the Greek poet the mere skeleton of the story, he modified the characters according to his own vision and the psychopathic viewpoint of the time—a liberty which some critics justified, others branded as an unpardonable license. But the work was a turning-point for Hofmannsthal, for he has since begun to face life more directly and squarely and though he has not reached a wholesome reading of it, he has at least struck new and powerful notes that contrast strongly with the spirit of his previous works. Enforced by the music of Richard Strauss, whose naturalism is the immediate expression of his robust virility, Hofmannsthal's Electra has made the name of the author known throughout the world. To his association with the sturdy Bavarian composer is also due the comedy Der Rosenkavalier (1911), which with its daring situations and touches of drastic burlesque harks back to the spirit of the comedy of Molière's time, though in its way it is also a product of the reaction against the puerile and commonplace inoffensiveness of mid-century letters inaugurated by Young Germany. Since his association with Richard Strauss has weaned Hofmannsthal from the somewhat effete estheticism and pessimism of his youth, it is a matter of interesting conjecture what further effect it may have upon his development.
It seems to follow with the inevitableness of a physical law, that the alternate swing of the pendulum between a naturalism which set above everything the material fact and the cry for truth, and a subtle estheticism which set the word above the spirit, would in the end usher in an art that had profited by and learned to avoid both extremes. There was little surprise when the Royal Schiller prize, which had not been awarded for some years, was in 1908 divided between Karl Schönherr[A] for his play Erde and Ernst Hardt for Tristram the Jester. For Schönherr, the Tyrolese, had drawn his inspiration from the source which ever Antæsus-like renews the strength of humanity, and Hardt had drawn upon the rich source of racial lore. But when a jury consisting of men like Dr. Jacob Minor, Dr. Paul Schlenther, Hermann Sudermann, Carl Hauptmann and others within a few weeks after that contest awarded the popular Schiller prize also to Hardt and for the same play, with a competitor like Hofmannsthal in the race, it seemed safe to argue that this unanimity indicated a turn of the tide. Both Schönherr and Hardt stand for that sane eclecticism which seems destined to pilot German drama out of the contrary currents to which it has long been a prey toward a type more in harmony with the classical ideal.
[Footnote A: For Schönherr, compare Vol. XVI, pp. 410-479.]
Though comparatively unknown when he issued as victor from those contests and suddenly obtained a measure of celebrity, Hardt was by no means a novice in the world of letters. The first book bearing his name, Priests of Death (1898), contained some stories of an epic dignity and a dramatic rhythm that challenged attention and secured interest for the works that followed. These were another volume of fiction, one of poetry, some plays and a number of translations from Taine, Flaubert, Balzac, and other French writers, which are remarkable specimens of his ability to grasp the spirit of a foreign world and to convey its essence through the medium of his native tongue. It seems natural that his familiarity with French literature had some influence upon the character of his prize drama, since he had chosen for its topic a story belonging alike to German and Gallic lore. To re-create the story of Tristan and Isolde upon the foundation of the German source would have challenged comparison not only with the cherished epic of Master Gottfried of Strassburg, but also with the music-drama of Richard Wagner, who had treated it with something like finality,—at least for the present generation. By going back to the old French legend and to J. Bédier's book Le roman de Tristan et Yseult (1900), the author was able to present that most tragic of all love-stories from a different angle. By complicating the plot through the introduction of the second Isolde, jealousy became the secondary, though hardly less powerful theme. This deviation from the comparatively simple plot of the German story is of course more difficult of comprehension upon the stage. It is not easy to convince an audience that jealousy of Isolde White-hand, whom Tristan had married after being banished from Cornwall, blinds Isolde Blond-hair into refusing to recognize him when he returns and pleads his case before her in the disguise of Tristram the Jester. Cavilling critics were quick to discover and to expatiate upon this weakness of the play. But the fine lines upon which it is built and the plastic figures standing out against the medieval background, the glowing color, radiant lights and brooding shadows of its atmosphere, and lastly, the language, the verse-form admirably adapted to the subject,—all this together makes of the drama a work coming very near that perfect balance of contents and form which is the ideal of art.
It is a rather circuitous path which German drama has traveled since the memorable performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play Before Sunrise in 1889. It has outgrown the one-sided naturalism which had seemed the only medium of translating life directly into literature. It has turned aside from the orphic symbolism and verbal artistry rooted only in literature and having nothing in common with life. Men like Karl Schönherr, Carl Hauptmann, and others have found in the native soil and its people and in the problems that confront that people at all times as rich a source of thematic material as previous generations of poets had found in the historic past. Men like Ernst Hardt and others have infused new life into the old legends of racial lore. As German drama is completing this cycle of its development it gives hopeful evidence of returning to the safe middle course of normal growth toward a new type, indigenous to the soil and the soul of the country.