He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to Vienna. He perused all history’s epochs and took the material for his dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with the old mystery play Everywoman. Some of his little plays are lovely—the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt is an arrangement of Elektra for the modern stage. His Greeks are barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity. Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.
Since Richard Strauss put Elektra into music, Hofmannsthal has devoted his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of his music.
Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day life. But he discovered a little secret, namely, that the ordinary is really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the miraculous is there, everywhere. Fairy Tales of Life he calls one of his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird the wonderful is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not worth the relating,—but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world and things in a new light.
Peter Altenberg uses the most original style—one might call it a telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.
Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street, who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may be—principally in the cafes.
All the women must love him—for he has sung their praises all his life, like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.
Editorials
Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago
Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts Building—an event which has already filled us with the keenest anticipations. There will be three on the war:—Woman and War, War and Christianity, and The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War. There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against the tyranny of the past:—an introductory one on the significance of art in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian, German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets, Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at the office of The Little Review; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue. How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly “safe” subjects making its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of terror.