Frank Wedekind
“Alike in the comedies and dream-plays too You see but a domesticated Zoo, Their blood so thin that in that hot-house air They batten on a vegetable fare, And revel chronically in chat and calls, Sitting like our friends yonder in the stalls, One’s stomach of liqueurs will disapprove, Another wonders if he really love, Another hero starts with threats to pass From this foul world to one perhaps more divine, But through five mortal acts behold him whine, Yet no kind friend supplies the coup de grâce, But the real thing, the wild and beauteous beast, I, ladies, only I provide that feast.”
These lines, delivered by a lion-tamer in the due professional panoply of riding-coat, top-boots, and a revolver, are extracted from the prologue of Frank Wedekind’s tragedy, Die Erdgeist, and illustrate efficiently the bizarre and Mephistophelian genius of a German dramatist alike in his qualities and his defects indisputably unique. Buccaneering no small way in front of the very left wing of the æsthetic movement, Wedekind is at once the bête noire of the reactionaries and the spoilt darling of the ultra-moderns. To his enemies he is a mere shoddy Anti-Christ, to his friends a dramatic Messiah leading back the inner circles of the chosen intellects into the promised land of vice and crime. It cannot be denied that his subject-matter gives considerable colour to both these theories. Life, as seen through the medium of his plays, is but a torrent of sex foaming over the jagged rocks of crime and insanity. Take examples from his three most powerful plays. In Die Erdgeist, the theme of which is the baleful glamour of the “Evil Woman,” three of the four acts are punctuated with almost complete regularity by a death; Frühlingserwachen, again, deals with hoydens and hobbledehoys, whose only occupation appears to be the creation, discussion, and destruction of life: In Die Totentanz, on the other hand, the scene is laid in a “private hotel” (if one may borrow the highly convenient euphemism of Mr. Shaw), while a charming interlude in lyrics is provided by one of the boarders and a temporary visitor, and the hero and proprietor is a “marquis,” who psychologically is much more closely related to Hamlet than to Sir George Crofts. Add to this choice of subject-matter a violently impressionist technique and a hangman humour, whose grin is at its broadest amid the sharpest agonies of the victims, and one can form an approximately accurate idea of an author, conceivably somewhat poisonous to anæmic constitutions, but certainly both piquant and stimulating to the hardened and the adventurous. To arrive, however, at a correct appreciation of so monstrous a phenomenon, it will be advisable to investigate first the literary and social tendencies by which it has been produced, together with the character of the audience for whose edification it disports itself, and then by the light of such investigations to proceed to an analysis of his individual works.
For the ten or fifteen years following 1880, both the novel and the drama in Germany were transformed into a Zolaesque laboratory, where interesting human experiments were conducted by skilled operators with scientific precision. There were three chief causes for this: firstly, a healthy reaction against the colourless and conventional school which had held the stage for so many years, a school somewhat analogous to that of our own Mid-Victorians with their strong silent men and sweet insipid women; secondly, a dogmatic and uncompromising materialism was the creed of the most ambitious and efficient intellects who found their chief mental diet in Zola, Taine, Darwin, and Haeckel; thirdly, the abstract theory of the struggle for existence had received an excessively concrete exemplification in the Franco-German war and the colossal commercial impetus that followed in the wake of a united Germany. Naturalism, however, was destined by the very character of the nation to be but a passing phase. Even apart from the inevitable swing of the pendulum and the powerful Catholic and religious reaction, whose force is seen at a glance in the numerical majority of the Centrum, the German temperament is in its essence as romantic as the French is logical. The nation, moreover, being at bottom religious, “the death of God,” to use the classic phrase of Nietzsche, left a most crying lacuna. The philosopher of the Superman adroitly filled the vacancy by the deification of Man. Human life became an end in itself embraced with the most poetic exaltation and pursued with all the zeal of religious martyrdom. The struggle for existence, ceasing to be a bare scientific formula, was metamorphosed into a classic arena in which the “life-artist” battled for the crown of his Dionysiac agonies, finding the most delicious music in the perpetual clash of brain with brain, and experiencing a sweetness in the very bitterness of the conflict.1
Crushed then by the force of these tendencies, pure realism died. Die Ehre and Die Weber, it is true, still hold the German stage, but in Johannes and in Die Versunkene Glocke respectively both Sudermann and Hauptmann have deserted to the Romantic camp, taking with them, however, a good proportion of the Realistic equipment. Particularly typical of this amalgamation of the two forces is Hannele, where the pathological and mystical explanations are to be accepted concurrently and not as alternatives, as in Mr. Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. As was, however, only natural, there was a considerable reaction, and orthodox naturalism was deliberately flouted by the Secessionsbühne in 1899 with their penchant for fairy-dramas and their genuinely æsthetic project of stretching between the stage and the audience a veil of transparent gauze intended to draw the scene into a misty distance. The rankest idealism seemed for a time the order of the day. “All that the young and the moderns have fought against with such animosity between 1880 and 1890, pseudo-idealism, bookish dialogue, false and artificial characterisation, clap-trap stagecraft, all this celebrates in this drama a joyous resurrection; let us acknowledge it; we have lost the battle against falsehood and stupidity, conventionalism, and the public, lost it absolutely,” writes Julius Hart in the Tag of 1902.
But the most interesting direction was given to this neo-romanticism by the æsthetic movement and Kunstschwarmerei which began to sweep over music, literature, painting, and the drama with an almost Nietzschean intensity. Pure realism and pure romanticism, then, both being extinct, and an agressive horde of exuberant and heretical artists being alive, the solution for the artistic problem was found in the æsthetic and romantic treatment of realistic themes. The prose of the human document became illuminated with the poesy of the human imagination. Realism and Romanticism went into partnership in the freest of unions, and Wedekind is one of the most interesting fruits of this drastic alliance.
The realistic method might be worse than useless for æsthetic purposes, but the realistic stock-in-trade was invaluable material for spirits bursting with an almost morbid healthiness, spirits for whom no subject was too terrible, no sensation too violent. Let us, however, turn to the official pronouncement of Wedekind’s preface to his revised and expurgated edition of Die Büchse von Pandora, in which he states his defence to the prosecution which the first edition of that interesting book had brought upon his martyred head: “Wedekind is an apostle of the modern movement. It is the motto of this movement to effect a transvaluation of æsthetic values in style and stagecraft. The followers of this movement have for over fifteen years repudiated the claims of the so-called ‘æsthetic-content’ and of mere formal beauty; they hold it permissible to depict artistically and to represent on the stage the ugly, the crude, the repulsive, and even the vulgar, provided always that such characteristics are not treated as ends in themselves—that is to say, when the work is not created by love of the abhorrent for its own sake but is merely the medium for the expression of an artistic idea. Wedekind, accordingly, as the disciple of these authors, chooses to shed a light upon the darkest crannies of vice, and in particular to surround with a poetic framework those sexual subjects which have been the peculiar subject of medical science. The end and goal of his writings is to awaken fear and pity.”
Such an apologia can scarcely be said to be superfluous when one of the sub-plots of the play in question deals with the heroic, if somewhat nauseating, rebellion of a woman in the determination of whose lot nature has made a somewhat unfortunate mistake.
Before, however, we proceed to gaze upon the black and lurid pictures of our dramatic artist, it is advisable to turn very briefly to the audience for whose particular benefit they exercise their hellish fascination. Wedekind’s audience, in a word, is the extreme left wing. The German left wing, however, is considerably more numerous, more advanced, and more dangerous than the English. Our own æsthetic movement was killed almost instantaneously by the Wilde debacle. We still, of course, have our ultra-modern movement, such as it is, but for practical purposes no one could be more amiable or innocuous than the ladies and gentlemen who used to constitute the highly respectable audiences of the Court Theatre, or who find in the Stage Society a mildly audacious means of spending their Sabbath evenings. Germany, however, with its vastly superior education, and its horde of professional men and women, schoolmasters and piano-mistresses, lawyers, doctors, poets, and littérateurs, has the disease of modernity with a vengeance, carrying through each symptom to its logical conclusion with a violence and intensity to which our own fluttering unconventionalism affords but the faintest and most shadowy parallel. Free-love, which, with the possible exception of a certain ephemeral incident successfully immortalised in three or four recent novels, is in England little more than a name, the mythical bogey with which the halfpenny press pretend to frighten their delighted readers, or is at best among the smart and the semi-educated rich the philosophic sanction for highly unphilosophic impulses, is in Germany a theoretic dogma almost as sacred as that of woman suffrage and demanding almost as devout sacrifices on the shrine of its philosophic altar. When again the subtle souls of Great Britain will so far break the ice of their insular reserve as to discourse about the tragedy of existence, the far more heroic spirits of German modernity will have recourse to all the æsthetic delights of a fine and artistic suicide, which indeed in the most advanced circles is almost a fashionable analogue to our own appendicitis, or will find in the modern dogma of “living their own life” the substantial though possibly slightly less exhausting equivalent to our English hunger-strike. How strong is the neo-æsthetic movement may be gauged by the phenomenal success in Berlin of Salome and Monna Vanna, the great scenes of which were followed avidly by young girls with an enthusiasm which was more than æsthetic. It may also be mentioned incidentally that Wilde’s De Profundis was published in German before it appeared in England, a circumstance due quite as much to a keener intellectual enthusiasm as to superior commercial enterprise.
Realising, then, that while it is orthodox in England to be ashamed of one’s passions and emotions, the German ambition is to plume oneself on taking everything an grand sérieux, let us turn to a consideration of those plays in which, on a large canvas and in big bold splashes reminiscent of the not unanalogous methods of the Secessionist painters, Wedekind is pleased to present framed in gigantic irony:
“Les immondes chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices.”
It will, perhaps, be well to start with that little masterpiece of a dramatic caricature, Der Kammersänger. A fashionable singer, having completed his engagements in a provincial town, is snatching at last a few minutes’ well-earned repose prior to catching his train. He has given strict orders that he is at home to no one. But there is no repose for the famed. An English school miss, who has waited two hours in the rain, smuggles herself into the room: she prattles her enthusiasm with pretty infantile gush: a few deft words of paternal advice and she is summarily dismissed. But again the great man’s seclusion is desecrated by the entrance of a brother artist, a pathetically grotesque figure of a megalomaniac failure whose publisher complains that he spoils his one chance of success by refusing to die and thus afford an opportunity for posthumous discovery. But the genial tolerance of the illustrious one is considerably harshened when his colleague insists on playing his own compositions in a scene every whit as racy and delightful as the classic episode in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer, where Major Oldfox, having tied down the Widow Blackacre, discharges at her helpless person the most deadly poetical fusillade. Exit, however, the composer, after an interesting philosophic lecture by his victim on the singer’s life and of the contempt which as a practical man (for at an early period in his career he was “in carpets”) he has for his fashionable bourgeois audience for whom he is a mere article of luxury as much in request as a motor-car or a new dress. Then, as the climax of this crescendo of invaders, enter Helene: a formal invitation to elope: the artist, however, has his contracts to fulfil and his train to catch, and the favour is declined with thanks: tears and threats of suicide: he endeavours to pacify her, and she promises to be good: he will miss his train if he is not quick. The romantic woman, however, unable to bear the final parting, shoots herself on the spot. The remorseful lover follows her example? Not a bit of it. He is politely regretful for the contretemps, but after all business is business, and he must catch his train. It is impossible without copious quotations to give a full idea of the piquant irony with which the comedy is salted; the truth and reality of the theme stand out all the more brilliant from their garb of romantic travesty, while the superb impudence of utilising death as an essentially comic climax is without parallel in European literature.
Let us, however, now turn from light comedy to serious tragedy in the shape of Der Totentanz. The scene, as already mentioned, is laid in a “private hotel.” Where Shaw, however, sees but the problem, Wedekind has only eyes for the poetry. To Shaw the irony is a weapon, to Wedekind an end in itself. Elfrida, a young lady in Reformkleid, one of the most militant members of a suppression society, interviews the proprietor, the Marquis Casti Piani, on the subject of a former maid of hers, for whom she has been searching for some years. The girl is identified, and the whole question philosophically discussed. The proprietor, moreover, who is an extremely well-dressed gentleman with a first-class education, polished manners, and all the introspective subtlety of the most modern of decadents, neatly turns the tables by announcing that the real impetus which made the girl change her calling was the “suppression literature” which the puritanical young woman had with unpardonable carelessness left lying about. The ice being thus broken, he proceeds in his capacity of sexual expert to diagnose the respective psychologies of his tête-à-tête and himself. Why, they are both tarred with the same brush. If he, the trafficker, pursues his unpopular vocation even more as a matter of sexual mania than of commercial enterprise, so does she, the philanthropist, ply her good work out of an equally morbid craving to move in a congenial atmosphere. Are they not both but the obverse and reverse of the same medal? Paradoxical and super-Shavian dissertations on the theory of woman are then followed by blandishments and caresses, in respect of which with a marvellous genius for brutality he chaffs her on the crudity and inexperience of her technique. Then comes the most outré scene of the play when Casti Piani and Elfrida watch from behind a screen the courtship of Lisiska, the missing servant-girl, by a young man in a check knickerbocker suit; the bizarre paradox is but accentuated by the swing and beauty of the lyrics in which this wooing is conducted, and the distorted idealism of the girl, who, as the martyr-priestess of the joie de vivre, is almost genuinely convinced of the sanctity of her mission. The interlude over, the audience come from behind the curtain. Stung to the wildest pitch of emulation, the extreme limit of self-sacrificing ecstasy, the neurotic woman completes the cycle of her psychic revolution by the supplication, “Verkaufen Sie mich.” The marquis, who has thus succeeded beyond his most sanguine expectations, in a fit of nervous revulsion shoots himself before the girl’s eyes. Three of the inmates rush from three distinct doors, and the over-civilised satyr expires with their kisses on his lips, kisses savoured and criticised with all the frenzy of the moribund connoisseur—“Küsse mich—nein, das war nicht—Küsse—küsse mich anders.”
It is impossible to express more cogently the whole tragedy of the dying sensualist.
No normal Englishman can be expected to enjoy such a play; in justice, however, to the author, this freny is æsthetic as well as sexual. New worlds, in fact, have been needed to regale the insatiate appetites of the dramatist and his hearers; “Heaven has been blown to pieces by the artillery of science; earth is cold, stale and unpalatable; perforce let us batten on the fires of hell,” would run his motto. As Baudelaire in verse, and Beardsley in painting, found their theme in the vicious and the abhorrent, so does Wedekind in the drama. As an ordinary play, Der Totentanz falls outside judgment; as a sheer literary curiosity, a dramatic fantasia on the sex-motif, a deliberate essay in the art of the ironical and the brutal, the piece achieves its own and peculiar ambition.
Die Junge Welt, on the other hand, flows in a current which, in spite of the eventual madness of the principal male character, is limpid and playful by comparison with the Phlegethontian course of the Totentanz. The theme of the comedy is the woman movement. In the prologue, one of his most aery and delicious pieces of work, Wedekind shows us a bevy of schoolgirls at lessons, chattering, fooling, and “ragging” their master with the most delightful naïveté. They have a pretty taste in literature, forsooth, reading surreptitious copies of The Arabian Nights, talking gravely of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and quoting with the prettiest of pedantry Schiller, Goethe, and even Ovid. No mere prattlers, however. Glorying in their grievance, they found a league, the solemn oath of whose members is never to marry until the most glaring outrages in the education of the young are remedied. Towards the end of the scene some youthful figures of the opposite sex enter. How long will the league last?
Then we come to the actual play where the sacred circle has been already cut by a marriage of one of the members. The whole comedy, in fact, shows how irresistibly the Life Force claims its own. The brisk racy dialogue and the satiric character drawing of the ultra-moderns are equally delicious. Particularly charming are Anna, masking the temperament of her Shavian namesake beneath the pose of the new woman; Karl, the picturesque scamp, who has married a seamstress on abstract socialistic principles; and Meyer, the modern poet, who, when his fiançée presents herself to recite a poem which he has written, in the most faithful of Cupid costumes, is most righteously indignant because—the dress fails to harmonise with the subtle spirit of his masterpiece.
A masterly little piece of irony, again, is the celebrated stage-direction, when, at the climax of an intense passage, a baby squalls, and is carried off the stage by its mother, to the accompaniment of music. Perhaps, however, the deftest touch of satire is the analysis of the decline of the détraqué littérateur, accustomed to transcribe each kiss fresh from the lips of his beloved into his artistic note-book.—“When I made my psychological studies on Anna, then Anna becomes unnatural—on some other specimen—she became jealous—there was no other alternative but to make them on myself.”
Wedekind’s dramatic masterpieces, however, are Die Erdgeist. and Frühlingserwachen, which merit, consequently, a somewhat more detailed analysis. Die Erdgeist, as has been already remarked, deals with the theme of the modern Lilith, not from the point of view of orthodox dramatic technique like Mr. Pinero, not scientifically like Zola, but æsthetically. No show of esoteric detail, no orthodox dénouement; simply atmosphere. The play, together with its sequel, Die Büchse von Pandora, constitutes the epic of the courtesan. In the first act, Schwarz, a painter, is at work on the portrait, in pierrot costume, of the wife of a Dr. Goll, a lady rejoicing in the various Christian names of Nellie, Eva, and Lulu. A middle-aged journalist, named Schön, who is in the studio, is on old and friendly terms with Frau Goll. The fact that female beauty is the raison être of the creature’s existence is soon made apparent by the following dialogue:
LULU. Here I am.
SCHÖN. Splendid.
LULU. Well?
SCHÖN. You put the wildest imagination to the blush.
LULU. Do you find me nice?
SCHÖN. You’re a picture that makes artists despair.
The pompous conventionalism of the doctor is seen almost immediately, when he suggests with heavy gravity that she is not wearing her costume with sufficient reserve. The artist proceeds to work, and the mere mechanism of posing brings out at once the sheer sexuality of the animal which he is painting. Goll is carried off by Schön, and the artist and the pierrot are left alone. The young painter proves more attractive than the old professor, who arrives towards the climax of a wild scene. In the scuffle, Goll is killed. Death, however, is a pet theme of Wedekind, who proceeds to batten thereon with abnormal gusto.
SCHWARZ. The doctor is bound to be here in a minute.
LULU. Doctoring won’t help him.
SCHWARZ. Still, in a case like this, one does what one can.
LULU. He doesn’t believe in doctors.
SCHWARZ. Won’t you, at any rate, change?
LULU. Yes, at once.
SCHWARZ. Why are you waiting?
LULU. I say—
SCHWARZ. What?
LULU. Please close his eyes.
SCHWARZ. They are awful.
LULU. Nothing like as awful as you.
SCHWARZ. As I?
LULU. You’re a depraved character.
SCHWARZ. Doesn’t all this affect you?
LULU. Yes, I too am as well moved.
SCHWARZ. Then I ask you not to say anything.
LULU. You are moved as well.
Shocked by her comparative callousness, Schwarz subjects her to a catechism—does she believe in a Creator, a soul, or anything—only to find himself beating against an eternal “I don’t know.”
So ends the first act, and this creature, whose hair is a net of murder, whose lips are poisoned fruit, and whose eyes are pits of hell, has already one death to her credit.
The second act discloses Schwarz married to Lulu, and in the heyday of artistic fame and fortune. A fleeting light is cast on the swamp, from which the fiend has emerged, by the entry and departure of Schigolch, her old ragamuffin of a sire. Then follows a tête-à-tête between Lulu and Schön. Combining, as she does, the soul of an Ibsen woman with the body of a Phryne, she complains of her husband’s obtusity: “He is not a child—he is commonplace—he has no education—he realises nothing—he realises neither me nor himself—he is blind, blind—he doesn’t know me, but he loves me; that is an unbridgeable gulf.” The painter returns, and is given by Schön the outlines of his wife’s past. Schön had picked her out of the gutter at the age of twelve, and had had her educated; her antecedents were ghastly; after the death of Schön’s wife, Lulu wished to marry him; to obviate that, he made her marry Dr. Goll with his half a million. Lulu is anxious to be good, but must be taken seriously. The painter then commits suicide, and the author feasts again on the carnage in a scene which, for sheer horror, challenges even Macbeth.
“After you,” says Lulu, after they have heard the body fall, and Schön has opened the door.
SCHÖN. There’s the end of my engagement. Ten minutes ago he lay here.2
SCHÖN. That is your husband’s blood.
LULU. It leaves no stain.
SCHÖN. Monster!
LULU. Of course you will marry me.
Then, by way of a really strong curtain, they send for a reporter, and dictate the official version of the thrilling story. The third act is the dressing-room of Lulu; she has gone on the music-hall stage as a barefoot dancer of classical measure; Schön, having temporarily freed himself from the spell, is about to marry a charming, “innocent child,” whom he has brought to witness the spectacle. The insult stimulates the girl to a supernormal fascination. Having refused the proposals of a prince, she deliberately sets herself to cast her wand over the journalist. She mocks him brazenly, with her magic potency over him, in a scene of the most subtle cruelty.
SCHÖN. Don’t look at me so shamelessly.
LULU. No one is keeping you here.
The Circæan witchery is complete, and the man, transformed, writes, at the dictation of the enchantress, a letter breaking off his engagement.
In the fourth act, nemesis is at hand. His marriage with Lulu shatters the constitution of the aging journalist, who falls a victim to persecution-mania. Lulu, though genuinely in love with him, surrenders herself almost mechanically to the kisses of his son. The journalist can stand no more—such a creature is not fit to live—she must commit suicide with the revolver which he produces. Simply as a matter of self-preservation, she turns the weapon against the man himself. Then ensues the most devilish scene of all. Fearing the prison-cage, the brute turns for help to the child of its prey: “I shot him because he wanted to shoot me. I loved no man in the world like I did him. Alwa, demand what you will. Look at me, Alwa; look at me, man, look at me.”
Those anxious for the further history of Lulu should turn to the livid pages of Die Büchse von Pandora. There, in flaming characters, they will read of her imprisonment, of how, being deprived of a mirror, she at last found relief by seeing her reflection in a new spoon, of her rescue therefrom by her inamorata, the Countess Geschwitz, and of her flight to Paris with Alwa Schön; they will read of her life there among souteneurs, blackmailers, and millionaires, of her migration from Paris to London, of her degradation to the streets, and her final assassination at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
Wedekind, who to the métier of the artist joins that of the enfant terrible, strains in this play every nerve to shock. As the susceptibilities of the left wing of most of the English intellects are about on a par with those of the right wing of the German æsthetic movement, from our own point of view he more than overshoots the mark. None the less, the English reader, though stifled amid the fumes of the monstrous debauch, is forced to admire here and there passages of a potency truly infernal. The final scene in the wet and noisome garret is indisputably tragic, when the squalid thing gazes at Schwarz’s pierrot picture of her dead beauty, only to throw it in revulsion out of the window, or where Alwa and Schigolch analyse the melancholy past.
ALWA. She should have been a Catherine of Russia.
SCHIGOLCH. That beast!
ALWA. Although her development was precocious, she once had the expression of a gay and healthy child of five years old. She was then only three years younger than I. In spite of her marvellous superiority to me in practical matters, she let me explain to her the meaning of Tristan and Isolde, and how fascinating she was when I read it to her and she grasped its meaning. From the little sister that felt herself like a schoolgirl in her first marriage, she became the wife of an unfortunate and hysterical artist; from being the wife of the artist, she became the wife of my late father; from being the wife of my father, she became my mistress; so flows the stream of the world. Who can swim against it?
So ends a play not without some resemblance to Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, if one can imagine the fanatical moralist treating such a subject with the artistic irony of a very much Germanised Aubrey Beardsley.
But Wedekind’s most serious contribution to dramatic literature is to be found in Frühlingserwachen. The orthodox stage-conventions, it is true, are sweepingly ignored; the scene is changed with more than Shakespearean frequency; the characters indulge in prolonged romantic soliloquies; none the less, the night of genuine tragedy broods over the whole piece.
The first act opens with a conversation between Frau Bergman and her daughter Wendla. The girl is growing up, fit to wear longer dresses, and exhibiting the morbidity appropriate to her years. In the next scene we see schoolboys at talk; with intense gravity they travel from their work to religion, and from religion to sex, discussing the Platonic and American systems of education, remarking that Superstition is the Charybdis into which one flies out of the Scylla of religious mania, or comparing notes on the growth of their respective manhoods. Melchior, the leading spirit of the knot, promises to provide his less experienced friend, Moritz, with a written synopsis of the mechanism of life. In the third scene, we get the other side of the medal, when a bevy of girls discuss life. How shall we dress our children? Which is it better to be—a girl, or a man? Then, again, the scene is filled with schoolboys, and we see the academic enthusiasm of young Germany.
“I’ve got my move,” cried Melchior. “I’ve got my move—now the world can go to pot—if I hadn’t got my move, I’d have shot myself.” A British youth with his cricket or football “colours” fresh on his victorious head could not possibly have manifested a more sacred joy, and one thinks incidentally of the Viennese student who shot the professor who had ploughed him in his viva voce.
Scene V, after a short philosophic exposition by Melchior of the universality of egoism, contains an episode between himself and Wendla, when at her own request he hits and beats her, so that, forsooth, she may realise the sufferings of a friend of hers similarly handled by her parents. After we have paid a visit to Melchior’s study, where Melchior and Moritz are reading Faust together, we are transported once again to the house of Wendla and her mother. This scene is the most pathetic in the first act. The old fairy tales about the stork cease to obtain credence, but the birthright of knowledge claimed by the child is refused by the mother.
“Why can’t you tell me, Mother dear—see, I kneel at your feet and lay my head upon your lap—you put your skirt over my head and tell me, and tell me as if you were alone in the room. I promise not to move—I promise not to shriek.”
Could the dim forebodings of innocence, the harrowing consciousness of mystery, be more poignantly delineated?
In the third act, events move apace. A poetic nemesis befalls the prudish mother, for the child surrenders all unwitting to the ardour of Melchior. Spring has indeed awakened. Moritz, however, has been unsuccessful at school; he wanders into the forest to make the end. Four pages of soliloquy; a dramatic device, no doubt, but none the less indicative of the exaggerated introspective pedantry of the average German schoolboy. “I wander to the altar like the youth in old Etruria, whose death-rattle purchased deliverance for his brothers in the coming year.” Then, when his thoughts are at their darkest, a pretty little artist’s model comes tripping along barefoot; gay and sparkling is her careless life. “Come home with me.” But the schoolboy has his lessons to do, and he hies himself to his final task. Act III.—Apprehensive of a suicide epidemic, the masters hold a meeting in which the question of whether the window shall be open or shut is apparently of as much importance as the expulsion of Melchior. Then comes the funeral of Moritz; the father repudiates the paternity of so prodigal a son, while the classical professor sapiently remarks, “If he had only learnt his history of Greek literature, he would have had no occasion to hang himself.” Melchior, however, is still at large, and after a harrowing dialogue between his father and mother, is packed off to a reformatory.
But the transformation scene goes merrily on, and we behold first the reformatory, from which Melchior effects an escape, and then Wendla’s sick-room. Amid the most trenchant satire on the pompous fashionable doctor, it becomes apparent that the child has brought home to her mother the full wages of innocence.
FRAU BERGMANN. You have a child.
WENDLA. But that is not possible, Mother. I am not married. Oh, Mother, why did you not tell me everything?
The finale of the play is laid in the churchyard, over whose wall there clambers the escaped Melchior; he walks past the tombstone of Wendla, dead from her mother’s heroic efforts to save her reputation; after an interview with Moritz, out for a nocturnal stroll, with his head tucked under his arm, he meets a mysterious stranger, who launches him in the world.
Such is a synopsis of a play produced in Germany amid the wildest acclamation and disparagement. Its success is largely due to the fact that it is pregnant with a problem which, in Germany, at any rate, is of peculiar moment. “Is such a subject capable of artistic treatment?” demands the man of the old school. If, however, the treatment is somewhat more drastic than in Longfellow’s
“Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,”
the subject is the same, the reason for the difference being that German blood flows with a swifter current and a fuller volume than the thin New England trickle of the early nineteenth century. As a sheer piece of psychology, the work is as great as James’s The Awkward Age, if one may compare a Vulcanic forge with a Daedalean web. That, indeed, the theme is unfit for tragic treatment, let those maintain whose ideally balanced temperaments have never experienced the throes and travails that attend the birth of manhood or womanhood.
Some reference should be made to Wedekind’s less important works—to the somewhat inferior farce, Der Liebestrank; to the highly serious So ist das Leben, a work whose psychology and symbolism are analogous to Ibsen’s Volksfiend3; to the amusing, but not particularly significant Marquis von Keith, with its mixture of the problem, the extravaganza, and the character study, and its delightful comedy passage, when a boy wins his way with his father by blackmailing him with suicide; to Minnehaha, the prose-poem, compounded of the spirits of the classics and the coulisses; to the satiric grotesque, Oaha, an elaborate skit on the celebrated Munich journal with its chronic confiscations by the police and its special “prison-editor”; and to Hidalla, that rollicking burlesque tragedy of Free Love and Eugenics. On a higher plane, however, are the volume of short stories, Feuerwerk, and the collection of poems entitled Die Vier Jahrzeiten. Like Guy de Maupassant, Wedekind treats only the one subject. His technique, however, is different, and while the Frenchman crowns each tale with a climax, the German clothes it with an atmosphere. Feuerwerk, moreover, is worth reading, if only for the style, with its noble simplicity and its majestic roll. The masterpiece of the series is Der Greise Freier, where, set in the background of an Italian honeymoon, lies painted the grey romance of a young girl realising her love in the very arms of death. Matchless, again, as a mock heroic tour de force is Rabbi von Ezra, a philosophic sermon by an aged Hebrew, delivered in the grandiose style of the prophets, on his comparative experiences with the wife of his bosom and the strange woman. The poems, also, are, with a few exceptions, innumerable variations of the eternal theme. With all its fantastic bizarrerie, reminiscent of Baudelaire, Poe, or Verlaine, the mood is throughout more masculine, not to say more brutal. No lover has yet set his enamoured features to a grin of such tigerish ferocity; no writer of songs has yet refined melodious lyrics with such Nietzschean gusto, such Satanic exultation. Keuscheit, in particular, is truly the apotheosis of the super-brutal. In a more normal vein, making quite a new departure in the art of light verse, is the charming poem beginning:
“Ich habe meine Tante geschlachtet,
Meine Tante war alt und schwach.”
Of course it is inevitable that, like the Secessionist painters, seeking, as he does, such drastic effects by such drastic means, when he falls, he should fall with overwhelming heaviness. Occasionally, instead of being powerful, he is merely crude. At his best, however, his poems exhibit the swing and ripple of the authentic lyric. Typical of him at his best are Heimweh and Der Blinde Knabe. Yet now and again the cry of the sufferer pierces the cynic’s mask.
“Ich stehe schuldlos vor meinem Verstand,
Und fühle des Schicksals zermalmende Hand.”
Among Wedekind’s more recent works we would mention Zensur and Schloss von Wetterstein and, far more particularly, Musik and Franziska.
Zensur, with its sub-title a Theodicy, is an apologia pro vitâ suâ, arising more particularly out of the fact that the play, Die Büchse von Pandora, was actually censored even in Munich. The protagonist of this work, Walter Buridan, is without disguise Frank Wedekind, for the postulate of the Wedekindian personality, as a fundamental element in contemporary national culture, is as important in Germany as was some years ago the postulate of the Shavian personality in England. And, indeed, with all his clownings and buffooneries, Wedekind is frequently as serious as Mr. Shaw himself. It will therefore be appreciated that the passage which we are now going to quote out of the dialogue between Buridan and the Court official is meant deliberately, not as a mere piece of impudence but in all earnestness.
BURIDAN. But can you adduce anything out of my writings which hasn’t for its ultimate object to glorify and represent artistically that eternal justice before which we all bend the knee with all humility?
DR. PRANTL. What do you mean by eternal justice?
BURIDAN. I understand by eternal justice the same thing as that which John the Evangelist called the Logos. I understand by it the same thing as that which the whole of Christendom worships as the Holy Ghost. In no one of my works have I put forward the good as bad or the bad as good. I have never falsified the consequences which accrue to a man as the result of his actions. I have simply portrayed those consequences in all their inexorable necessity.
In a somewhat different vein is the weird trilogy, In Allen Satteln Gerecht (Ready for Everything), Mit Allen Hüden Gehetzt (Up to Everything), and In Allen Wassern Gewaschen, which have been recently published together, under the title of Schloss von Wetterstein. In these three plays the lascivious and the intellectual, the monstrous and the real, the comic and the tragic, are linked together in a union which, though to some extent burlesque, is on the whole successful. The dialogue, in particular, in this hybrid of tragedy and extravaganza, with its ingenious twists, its lusty thwackings, its shrewd, violent thrusts, not merely home, but, as it were, right through the body, is in its own way packed with genius. Effie, in particular, with her insatiable appetite in the erotic sphere, is the greatest enfant terrible in the whole of modern European literature. And truly tragic is her dismay when she discovers that that Unersättlichkeit in Liebe, on which she has built her whole philosophy of life, is simply to be attributed to chronic indigestion, and that the instantaneous effect which she produces upon males is simply due to a diseased liver.
More serious, though with the usual Wedekindian sardonic undercurrent, is Musik. This play consists of four “pictures” from the life of a young singing student, Klara Hûhnerwadel, studying her art in the household of a professor who is married to another woman. Events take their normal course, but there is a great uproar owing to the arrest and trial of the woman, through whose illegal assistance Klara had successfully escaped the natural corollary of her rash romanticism. Klara is consequently packed off across the frontier to avoid arrest herself. She returns, however, is duly arrested, and the second “picture” shows her in prison. In the third “picture,” she is once more back at the professor’s house, and once more does history repeat itself, though in this case the legal ordinances are not infringed. In the fourth “picture,” Klara has given birth to a son, of whom she is devotedly fond. With true Wedekindian irony, however, the child dies on the stage. Such is the skeleton of the plot, squalid, though no doubt highly plausible. But the play must be read itself to appreciate the sheer force of its sinister realism. The characters in this piece are among the most convincing that ever walked the boards of a Wedekind play, painted too in colours far more sober than those fantastic luridities with which this author is accustomed to disport himself. It is, in fact, if we may draw a slightly startling analogy, a “slice of life” play of the Galsworthian genre. Before passing from Musik, we would like to quote the passage describing the child’s death as typically characteristic of the author’s brutal pathos.
ELSE. The bath will do him good (with her bare arm in the water)—it’s all cooking salt—the salt won’t hurt him, will it, doctor?
DR. SCHWARZKOPF (by the cot, dully). There is nothing more to be done. The child is dead.
KLARA (gives an agonised shriek).
[The LANDLADY picks up the tub of water from the floor and carries it out.
In Franziska (1912), Wedekind has given fresh rein to his fantastic exuberance. This weird drama deals with the experiences of an ultra-modern Mademoiselle de Maupin, who, having sold herself to the devil in the shape of an impresario, who holds her strictly to her bargain, proceeds to see life like a veritable twentieth-century female Faust. And life, forsooth, she sees with a vengeance, playing the smart “blood” in a gay Weinstube; marrying a rich heiress, so naïve and so unsophisticated as to put everything down to sheer frigidity on the part of her imagined husband; successfully masquerading in silk knee-breeches to a silly old monarch as a genuine spirit, only finally, like a contemporary
“In veterem Cæneus revoluta figuram,”
to subside both purified and enlightened byher kaleidoscopic experiences into the healthy bliss of the quasi-domestic life with a new, honest, and well-meaning lover.
The wild, rollicking humour of this play will perhaps appeal in vain to the more stolid of our English minds. Some help may perhaps be found for the due appreciation of this, and, indeed, of all Wedekind’s plays, if it be borne in mind that for a modern woman to live her own life in Southern Germany (sich auszuleben, to employ the technical and official phrase) is not revolutionary but elementary, and is far more of a cliché than a new departure. Further, the play claims to be treated not by the standards of the ordinary drama, but as a problem farce, an Aristophanic modernity, a philosophic extravaganza, a dramatic anomaly, very much sui generis, and consequently requiring very special critical standards. Judging it by these standards, it is impossible not to be swept away by the high spirits of this strange piece of art. Who, too, can gainsay the practical up-to-dateness of a play where maidens insure against children, wives against infidelity, monarchs against madness? And who will not admire the almost morbid conscientiousness of Franziska, who, having had one lover of the name of Veit, and another lover of the name of Ralph, and becoming subsequently a mother, determines, out of comprehensive precaution and sheer sense of fairness, to call the little boy by the impartial designation of Veitralph? It is, however, only fair to state, as we have already hinted, that the play finishes up on a note of genuine pathos and semi-conjugal affection.
What, then, is Wedekind’s final claim? As a play-wright in the ordinary sense of the word, his pretensions are negligible. One of the most marked features, however, of the last decade and a half has been the evolution of fresh species in the genus drama. Thus, apart from the drama or play of action, with its orthodox dénouement and climax, we have the “idea” play, as in Mr. Shaw; the “slice of life” play, as in Mr. Galsworthy; or the “æsthetic atmosphere” play, as in Maeterlinck. Whether we call such work drama, or quasi-drama, is as immaterial from the larger standpoint as the surname we choose to give to the individual who did, or who did not, write Hamlet. Even, however, with this extended classification, it is difficult to docket into any definite pigeon-hole so idiosyncratic a temperament. If we have to commit ourselves, we would say that the Wedekind play is the lyric play of irony—irony both comic and tragic. Even making all due allowances for defects, for the superfluous thickness with which sometimes he places his harsh and violent colours, or for occasional amorphous construction, as in Frühlingserwachen, as a master of irony he is indisputably a genius. No sœva indignatio, it is true, lends its ethical sanction, no Hellenic εἰρονεία its delicate grace: it is for his own fiendish delectation that he plies his knout on that world of abnormalities called into existence for this express purpose, and writhing prettily in the most ingenious of dances. Yet with what art and dexterity does he operate, finding with unerring aim the raw place of his victims, and drawing from these apparent grotesques the blood of genuine humanity. Your specialist will no doubt diagnose him a decadent, yet he is tense with a frenzied virility. It is, as we have said before, the very exuberance and violence of his energy that leads him plumb the abyss. He has himself well expressed his whole outlook on life, and indeed the whole Nietzschean standpoint, in the following lines:
“For them your kind and gracious face,
For me the sword smiles sweet,
For me the savage bear’s embrace,
For them old Bruin’s meat.
The brutal foe’s own strife I choose,
They the humanities of truce.”
Notes
1 Cf. the lines of Ricarda Huch to life: “Denn du bist suss in deinen Bitternessen.”
2 It is curious to notice that almost identical words were used in Irene Wycherley.
3 “Volksfiend” (sic); German is “Volksfeind”, Norwegian is “Folkefiende”—transcriber’s note—M.D.