In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day. It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play—Dumas, Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.
But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North German. Thus an element of color and light—the soul of modern impressionism—entered in his creations, breaking through the severe contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his tragedy of Hero and Leander perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the grandmother of Schnitzler’s sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)
There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer’s personality and work which Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert’s music and feel it in the charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the human beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.
Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set against it. He was a man of vigor and lebensbejahung (affirmation of life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.
Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of modern art—be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic—to his own work and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart’s sentiment under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him—how he was lonely, poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor, because nothing can happen to him—because everything around belongs to him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world in general.
Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber’s traditions could not be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a year after Anzengruber’s death. This was Anatol, a little work full of grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes were connected only by Anatol’s figure was perfectly original. It was really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not found anywhere else.
Women’s influence penetrated this art—in Austria just as in the Latin countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into the center. It was written around her and it was written for her. Anatol belongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,—a melancholic of love, he calls himself.
The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well, so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to translate them in good form. He says:
Well, let’s begin the play,
Playing our own piece