A very deceptive mask is literature. Here is your Nietzsche with his warrior pen slashing away at the conventional lies of civilisation, a terrific figure of outraged manhood, though in private life he was the gentlest of men, self-sacrificing, lovable, modest, and moral to a painful degree. But see what his imitators have made of him. And in all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being is better than a half-god.
Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to recognition in New York is his Spring\'s Awakening, produced at the Irving Place Theatre seasons ago. I had seen this moving drama of youth more than once in the Kammerspielhaus of the Deutsches Theatre, Berlin, and earlier the same poet\'s drama Erdgeist (in the summer, 1903), and again refused to shudder at its melodramatic atrocities. Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers, for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his spiritual depravity—forgetting that [Pg 122] the two qualities cannot be blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits like Goethe\'s Mephisto, who perpetually deny. On the contrary, he is one of the most affirmative voices in the new German literature.
He is always asserting. If he bowls away at some rickety ninepin of a social lie, he does it with a gusto that is exhilarating. To be sure, whatever the government is, he is against it; which only means he is a rebel born, hating constraint and believing with Stendhal that one\'s first enemies are one\'s own parents. No doubt, after bitter experience, Wedekind discovered that his bitterest foe was himself. That he is a tricky, Puck-like nature is evident. He loves to shock, a trait common to all romanticists from Gautier down. He sometimes says things he doesn\'t mean. He contradicts himself as do most men of genius, and, despite his poetic temperament, there is in him much of the lay preacher. I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom, for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one\'s soul into a spiritual bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism. In Germany every one sports his Weltanschauung, his personal interpretation of [Pg 123] life and its meanings. In a word, a working philosophy—and a fearsome thing it is to see young students with fresh sabre cuts on their honest countenances demolishing Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche only to set up some other system.
Always a system, always this compartmentising of the facts of existence. Scratch the sentimentalism and ?stheticism of a German, and you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His admirers speak of him as a unicum, a man so original as to be without forerunners, without followers. A monster? For no one can escape the common law of descent, whether physical or spiritual. Wedekind has had plenty of teachers, not excepting the most valuable of all, personal experience. The sinister shadow cast by Ibsen fell across the shoulders of the young poet, and he has read Max Stirner and Nietzsche not wisely, but too well. He is as frank as Walt Whitman (and as shameless) concerning the mysteries of life, and as healthy (and as coarse) as Rabelais. Furthermore, Strindberg played a marked r?le in his artistic development. Without the hopeless misogyny of the Swede, without his pessimism, Wedekind is quite as drastic. And the realism of the Antoine Theatre should not be omitted.
[Pg 124] He exhibits in his menagerie of types—many of them new in the theatre—a striking collection of wild animals. In the prologue to one of his plays he tells his audience that to Wedekind must they come if they wish to see genuine wild and beautiful beasts. This sounds like Stirner. He lays much stress on the fact that literature, whether poetic or otherwise, has become too "literary"—hardly a novel idea; and boasts that none of his characters has read a book. The curse of modern life is the multiplication of books. Very true, and yet I find that Wedekind is "literary," that he could exclaim with Stephan Mallarmé: "La chair est triste, hélas! et j\'ai lu tous les livres."
Regarding the modern stage he is also positive. He believes that for the last twenty years dramatic literature is filled with half-humans, men who are not fit for fatherhood, women who would escape the burden of bearing children because of their superior culture. This is called "a problem play," the hero or heroine of which commits suicide at the end of the fifth act to the great delight of neurotic, dissatisfied ladies and hysterical men. Weak wills—in either sex—have been the trump card of the latter-day dramatist; not a sound man or woman who isn\'t at the same time stupid, can be found in the plays of Ibsen or Hauptmann or the rest. Wedekind mentions no names, but he tweaks several noses prominent in dramatic literature.
He is the younger generation kicking in the [Pg 125] panels of the doors in the old houses. There is a hellish racket for a while, and then when the dust clears away you discern the revolutionist calmly ensconced in the seats of the bygone mighty and passionately preaching from the open window his version of New Life; he is become reformer himself and would save a perishing race—spiritually speaking—from damnation by the gospel of beauty, by shattering the shackles of love—especially the latter; love to be love must be free, preaches Wedekind; love is still in the swaddling clothes of Oriental prejudice. George Meredith once said the same in Diana of the Crossways, although he said it more epigrammatically. For Wedekind religion is a symbol of our love of ourselves; nevertheless, outside of his two engrossing themes, love and death, he is chiefly concerned with religion, not alone as material for artistic treatment, but as a serious problem of our existence. A Lucifer in pride, he tells us that he has never made of good evil, or vice versa; he, unlike Baudelaire, has never deliberately said: Evil, be thou my good! That he has emptied upon the boards from his Pandora-box imagination the greatest gang of scoundrels, shady ladies, master swindlers, social degenerates, circus people, servants, convicts, professional strong men, half-crazy idealists, irritable rainbow-eaters—the demi-monde of a subterranean world—that ever an astonished world saw perform their antics in front of the footlights is not to be denied, [Pg 126] but it must be confessed that his criminal supermen and superwomen usually get their deserts. Like Octave Mirbeau, he faces the music of facts, and there are none too abhorrent that he doesn\'t transform into something significant.
On the technical side Strindberg has taught him much; he prefers the one-act form, or a series of loosely joined episodes. Formally he is not a master, nor despite his versatility is he objective. With Strindberg he has been called "Shakespearian"—fatal word—but he is not; that in the vast domain of Shakespeare there is room for them both I do not doubt; room in the vicinity of the morbid swamps and dark forests, or hard by the house of them that are melancholy mad.
The oftener I see or read Wedekind the more I admire his fund of humour. But I feel the tug of his theories. The dramatist in him is hampered by the theorist who would "reform" all life—he is neither a socialist nor an upholder of female suffrage—and when some of his admiring critics talk of his "ideals of beauty and power," then I know the game is up—the prophet, the dogmatist, the pedant, not the poet, artist, and witty observer of life, are thrust in the foreground.
There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of Wedekind—Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre, the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or liquid you desire from [Pg 127] his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas, or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the marionettes of the fashionable world! Frank Wedekind is less of the stage prestidigitator and more sincere. We must, perforce, listen to his creatures as they parade their agony before us, and we admire his clever rogues—the never-to-be-forgotten Marquis of Keith heads the list—and smile at their rough humour and wisdom. For me, the real Frank Wedekind is not the prophet, but the dramatist. As there is much of his stark personality in his plays, it would not be amiss to glance at his career.
He has "a long foreground," as Emerson said of Walt Whitman. He was born at Hanover, July 24, 1864, and consequently was only twenty-seven years old when, in 1891, he wrote his most original, if not most finished, drama, Spring\'s Awakening. He studied law four terms at Munich, two at Zurich: but for this lawless soul jurisprudence was not to be; it was to fulfil a wish of his father\'s that he consented to the drudgery. A little poem which has been reproduced in leaflet form, Felix and Galathea, is practically his earliest offering to the muse. Like most beginnings of fanatics and realists, it fairly swims and shimmers with idealism. His father dead, a roving existence and a precarious one began for the youthful Frank. He lived by his wits in Paris and London, learned two languages, met that underworld which later [Pg 128] was to figure in his vital dramatic pictures, wrote advertisements for a canned soup—in Hauptmann\'s early play, Friedensfest, Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a réclame agent—was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side, whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences produced their inevitable reaction—disillusionment. Finally in 1905 Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the least changed, to judge from his play, Franziska, a Modern Mystery.
Personally, Wedekind was never an extravagant, exaggerated man. A sorrowful face in repose is his, and when he appeared on Hans von Wolzogen\'s Ueberbrettl, or sang at the Munich cabaret called the Eleven Hangmen, his songs—he composes at times—Ilse, Goldstück, Brigitte B, Mein Liebchen, to the accompaniment of his guitar, there was a distinct individuality in his speech and gesture very attractive to the public.
But as an actor Wedekind is not distinguished, though versatile. I\'ve only seen him in two r?les, as Karl Hetman in his play of Hidalla (now renamed after the leading r?le), and as Ernest Scholtz in The Marquis of Keith. [Pg 129] As Jack the Ripper in The Box of Pandora I am glad to say that I have not viewed him, though he is said to be a gruesome figure during the few minutes that he is in the scene. His mimetic methods recalled to me the simplicity of Antoine—who is not a great actor, yet, somehow or other, an impressive one. Naturally, Wedekind is the poet speaking his own lines, acting his own creations, and there is, for that reason, an intimate note in his interpretations, an indescribable sympathy, and an underscoring of his meanings that even a much superior actor might miss. He is so absolutely unconventional in his bearing and speech as to seem amateurish, yet he secures with his naturalism some poignant effects. I shan\'t soon forget his Karl Hetman, the visionary reformer.
Wedekind, like Heine, has the faculty of a cynical, a consuming self-irony. He is said to be admirable in Der Kammers?nger. It must not be forgotten that he has, because of a witty lampoon in the publication Simplicissimus, done his "little bit" as they say in penitentiary social circles. These few months in prison furnished him with scenic opportunities; there is more than one of his plays with a prison set. And how he does lay out the "system." He, like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and De Maupassant, was summoned before the bar of justice for outraging public morals by the publication of his play, The Box of Pandora, the sequel to Erdgeist. He had to withdraw the book and expunge certain offensive [Pg 130] passages, but he escaped fine and imprisonment, as did his publisher, Bruno Cassirer. He rewrote the play, the second act of which had been originally printed in French, the third in English, and its republication was permitted by the sensitive authorities of Berlin.
If a critic can\'t become famous because of his wisdom he may nevertheless attain a sort of immortality, or what we call that elusive thing, by writing himself down an ass. The history of critical literature would reveal many such. Think of such an accomplished practitioner as the late M. Brunetière, writing as he did of Flaubert and Baudelaire. And that monument to critical ineptitude, Degeneration, by Max Nordau. A more modern instance is the judgment of Julius Hart in the publication, Tag (1901), concerning our dramatist. He wrote: "In German literature to-day there is nothing as vile as the art of Frank Wedekind." Fearing this sparkling gem of criticism might escape the notice of posterity, Wedekind printed it as a sort of motto to his beautiful poetic play (1902), Such Is Life. However, the truth is that our poet is often disconcerting. His swift transition from mood to mood disturbs the spectator, especially when one mood is lofty, the next shocking. He has also been called "the clown of the German stage," and not without reason, for his mental acrobatics, his grand and lofty tumblings............