Essays on Modern Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

The next novel, Der Katzensteg, is more pretentious than Frau Sorge, but not nearly so fine a book. It abounds in dramatic scenes, and glows with fierce passion. It seems more like a melodrama than a story, and it is not surprising that its author immediately discovered—perhaps in the very composition of this romance—his genius for the stage. It is a historical novel, but the chief interest, as always in Sudermann, is psychological. The element of Contrast—so essential to true drama, and which is so strikingly employed in Die Ehre, Sodoms Ende, Heimat, and Johannes—is the mainspring of Der Katzensteg. We have here the irrepressible conflict between the artificial and the natural. The heroine of the story is a veritable child of nature, with absolutely elemental passions, as completely removed from civilisation as a wild beast. She was formerly the mistress of the hero's father, and for a long time is naturally regarded with loathing by the son. But she transfers her dog-like fidelity from the dead parent to the morbid scion of the house. The more cruelly the young man treats her, the deeper becomes her love for him. Nor does he at first suspect the hold she has on his heart. He imagines himself to be in love with the pastor's daughter in the village, who has been brought up like a hothouse plant. This simpering, affected girl, who has had all the advantages of careful nurture and education, is throughout the story contrasted with the wild flower, Regina. The contrast is thorough—mental, moral, physical. The educated girl has no real mind; she has only accomplishments. Her morality has nothing to do with the heart; it is a bundle of conventions. And finally, while Regina has a magnificent, voluptuous physique, the hero discovers—by the light of the moon—that the lady of his dreams is too thin! This is unendurable. He rushes away from the town to the heights where stands his lonely dwelling, cursing himself for his folly in being so long blind to the wonderful charm and devotion of the passionate girl who, he feels sure, is waiting for him. He hastens on the very wings of love, wild with his new-found happiness. But the very fidelity of the child of nature has caused her death. She stood out on the bridge—der Katzensteg—to warn her lover of his danger. There she is shot by her drunken father, and the impatient lover sees her dead body in the stream below.

Now he has leisure to reflect on what a fool he has been. He sees how much nobler are natural passions than artificial conventions. Regina had lived "on the other side of good and evil," knowing and caring nothing for the standards of society. The entire significance of the novel is summed up in this paragraph:—

"And as he thought and pondered, it seemed to him as if the clouds which separate the foundations of human being from human consciousness" (that is, things as they are from our conceptions of them,—den Boden des menschlichen Seins vom menschlichen Bewusstsein) "were dispersed, and he saw a space deeper than men commonly see, into the depths of the unconscious. That which men call Good and Bad, moved restless in the clouds around the surface; below, in dreaming strength, lay the Natural (das Natürliche). 'Whom Nature has blessed,' he said to himself, 'him she lets safely grow in her dark depths and allows him to struggle boldly toward the light, without the clouds of Wisdom and Error surrounding and bewildering him.'"

But there is nothing new or original in this doctrine, however daring it may be. One can find it all in Nietzsche and in Rousseau. The best thing about the novel is that it once more illustrates Sudermann's sympathy for the outcast and the despised.

An extraordinarily powerful study in morbid psychology is shown in one of his short stories, called Der Wunsch. The tale is told backward. It begins with the discovery of a horrible suicide, the explanation of which is furnished to the prostrated lover by the dead woman's manuscript. A man and his wife, at first happily married, encounter the dreadful obstacles of poverty and disease; the fatal illness of his wife plunges the husband into a hard, bitter melancholy. From this he is partially saved by the appearance of his wife's younger sister on the scene, who comes to take care of the sick woman. The close companionship of the two, previously fond of each other, and now united daily by their care of the invalid, results in love; but both are absolutely loyal to the suffering wife. They cannot help thinking, however, of the wonderful happiness that might be theirs, were the man free; nevertheless, they do everything possible to solace the last hours of the woman for whom they feel an immense compassion. One night, as the sister watches at the bedside, and gazes on the face of her sister, she suddenly feels the uncontrollable and fatal wish—"Would that she might die!" She is so smitten with remorse that after the death of the invalid she commits suicide. For although her wish had nothing to do with this event, she nevertheless regards herself as a murderer, and goes to self-execution. The physician remarks that this psychological wish is not uncommon; that during his professional services he has often seen it legibly written on the faces of relatives by the bedside—sometimes actuated by avarice, sometimes by other forms of personal greed.

The next regular novel, Es War, is the study of a past sin on a man's character, temperament, and conduct. The hero, Leo, has committed adultery with the wife of a disagreeable husband, and, being challenged by the latter to a duel, has killed him. Thus having broken two of the commandments, he departs for South America, where for four years he lives a joyous, care-free, savage existence, with murder and sensuality a regular part of the day's work. It is perhaps a little hard on South America that Leo could live there in such liberty and return to Germany unscathed by the arm of the law; but this is essential to the story. He returns a kind of Superman, rejoicing in his magnificent health and absolutely determined to repent nothing. He will not allow the past to obscure his happiness. But unfortunately his friend Ulrich, whom he has loved since childhood with an affection passing the love of women, has married the guilty widow, in blissful unconsciousness of his friend's guilt. And here the story opens. It is a long, depressing, but intensely interesting tale. At the very close, when it seems that wholesale tragedy is inevitable, the clouds lift, and Leo, who has found the Past stronger than he, regains something of the cheerfulness that characterises his first appearance in the narrative. Nevertheless es war; the Past cannot be lightly tossed aside or forgotten. It comes near wrecking the lives of every important character in the novel. Yet the idea at the end seems to be that although sin entails fearful punishment, and the scars can never be obliterated, it is possible to triumph over it and find happiness once more. The most beautiful and impressive thing in Es War is the friendship between the two men—so different in temperament and so passionately devoted to each other. A large group of characters is splendidly kept in hand, and each is individual and clearly drawn. One can never forget the gluttonous, wine-bibbing Parson, who comes eating and drinking, but who is a terror to publicans and sinners.

Last year appeared Das hohe Lied, which, although it lacks the morbid horror of much of Sudermann's work, is the most pessimistic book he has ever written. The irony of the title is the motive of the whole novel. Between the covers of this thick volume we find the entire detailed life-history of a woman. She passes through much debauchery, and we follow her into many places where we should hesitate to penetrate in real life. But the steps in her degradation are not put in, as they so often are in Guy de Maupassant, merely to lend spice to the narrative; every event has a definite influence on the heroine's character. The story, although very long, is strikingly similar to that in a recent successful American play, The Easiest Way. Lilly Czepanek is not naturally base or depraved. The manuscript roll of her father's musical composition, Das hohe Lied, which she carries with her from childhood until her final submission to circumstances, and which saves her body from suicide but not her soul from death, is emblematic of the élan which she has in her heart. With the best intentions in the world, with noble, romantic sentiments, with a passionate desire to be a rescuing angel to the men and women whom she meets, she gradually sinks in the mire, until, at the end, her case is hopeless. She struggles desperately, but each struggle finds her stock of resistance reduced. She always ends by taking the easiest way. Like a person in a quicksand, every effort to escape sinks the body deeper; or, like a drowning man, the more he raises his hands to heaven, the more speedy is his destruction. Much of Lilly's degradation is caused by what she believes to be an elevating altruistic impulse. And when she finally meets the only man in her whole career who respects her in his heart, who really means well by her, and whose salvation she can accomplish along with her own,—one single evening, where she begins with the best of intentions and with a sincere effort toward a higher plane, results in complete damnation. Then, like the heroine in The Easiest Way, she determines to commit suicide, and really means to do it. But the same weakness that has made it hitherto impossible for her to triumph over serious obstacles, prevents her from taking this last decisive step. As she hears the splash of her talisman in the cold, dark water, she realises that she is not the stuff of which heroines are made, either in life or in death.

"And as she heard that sound, then she knew instantly that she would never do it.—No indeed! Lilly Czepanek was no Heroine. No martyr of her love was Lilly Czepanek. No Isolde, who in the determination not to be, sees the highest self-assertion. She was only a poor brittle, crushed, broken thing, who must drag along through her days as best she can."

And with this realisation she goes wearily back to a rich lover she had definitely forsaken, knowing that in saving her life she has now lost it for ever.

This is the last page of the story, but unfortunately it does not end here. Herr Sudermann has chosen to add one paragraph after the word "Schluss." By this we learn that in the spring of the following year the aforesaid rich lover marries Lilly, and takes her on a bridal trip to Italy, which all her life had been in her dreams the celestial country. She is thus saved from the awful fate of the streets, which during the whole book had loomed threatening in the distance. But this ending leaves us completely bewildered and depressed. It seems to imply that, after all, these successive steps in moral decline do not make much difference, one way or the other; for at the very beginning of her career she could not possibly have hoped for any better material fate than this. The reader not only feels cheated; he feels that the moral element in the story, which through all the scenes of vice has been made clear, is now laughed at by the author. This is why I call the book the most pessimistic of all Sudermann's writings. A novel may take us through woe and sin, and yet not produce any impression of cynicism; but one that makes a careful, serious study of subtle moral decay through over six hundred pages, and then implies at the end that the distinction between vice and virtue is, after all, a matter of no consequence, leaves an impression for which the proverbial "bad taste in the mouth" is utterly inadequate to describe. Some years ago, Professor Heller, in an admirable book on Modern German Literature, remarked, in a comparison between Hauptmann and Sudermann, that the former has no working theory of life, which the latter possessed. That Hauptmann's dramas offer no solution, merely giving sordid wretchedness; while Sudermann shows the conquest of environment by character. Or, as Mr. Heller puts it, there is the contrast between the "driving and the drifting." I think this distinction in the main will justify itself to anyone who makes a thoughtful comparison of the work of these two remarkable men. Despite the depreciation of Sudermann and the idolatry of Hauptmann, an attitude so fashionable among German critics at present, I believe that the works of the former have shown a stronger grasp of life. But the final paragraph of Das hohe Lied is a staggering blow to those of us who have felt that Sudermann had some kind of a Weltanschauung. It is like Chopin's final movement in his great Sonata; mocking laughter follows the solemn tones of the Funeral March.