JAMES HUNEKER (continued 3)

"Man sees clearly at the hour which is striking that he will never know anything of the supreme cause of the universe, or of his own destiny. Nevertheless he wishes to be talked to about all that." And Ibsen has talked to us much about all these things, following Goethe's axiom that "no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the poet knows how to use it." The theatre director in Faust remarks, "He who brings much, brings something to every one."

Octave Uzanne wrote, "People the orchestra and galleries of a theatre with a thousand Renans and a thousand Herbert Spencers, and the combination of these two thousand brains of genius will not produce aught but the soul of a concierge."

So much for the power of collectivity. This theme which Gustave Le Bon has treated in The Mob and The Psychology of the Peoples—literally a drag-net psychology—? may be found lucidly discussed in Mr. A. B. Walkley's Dramatic Criticism. The modern audience, he says, is no longer a great baby, like the mediæval one, but an intelligent adult. "On this crowd depends our future hopes of the stage."

With all the authorities, apologists, and panegyrists, Ibsen remains a difficult nut to crack. His perversities of execution, aberrations in sentiment, contrarieties, and monumental obstinacy are too much for the average commentator's nerves—why, then, should he be enjoyed by the public when doctors of the drama disagree? His warmest admirers deny him the gift of humour, but we believe that he is the greatest humorist, as well as dramatist, of the nineteenth century. No man, not even Browning, has kept such rigid features in the very face of idiotic abuse and still more silly praise. Not a sense of humour! After A Doll's House came Ghosts, totally contravening the thesis, or supposed thesis, of that problem play; after Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, which declared for the rights of the individual; after this piece the maddening and angular ironies of The Wild Duck, in which he mocks himself, his theories; and then as if to explode the whole Ibsen mine, Rosmersholm appeared. Therein the reformer, whether idealist or of the ordinary peddling political stripe, is mercilessly flayed, and Rebekka West, his wonderful incarnation of passion, deceits, femininity, and renunciation, sacrifices her life to a false ideal, to "Rosmersholm ideals," and mocks herself as she joins in the double suicide. No humour! What, then, of Hedda Gabler, the young woman of to-day; shallow-cultured, her religious underpinning gone, vacillating, cerebral, all nerves full of a Bashkirtseff-like charm, this Hedda who is so modern, who peeps over moral precipices, shudders and peeps again—what preconceived theories of Ibsen did Hedda not upset?

Followed the fantastic Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awake, each mutually destructive of what we supposed Ibsen stood for, destructive of the fumbling decadent that spite depicts him. Not a humorist! Why, Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift, Dumas fils, and Calvin (who was fond of roasting his religious foes) rolled into one is about the happiest formula we can express for the tense-lipped old humorist of Norway!

Like the John Henry Newman of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his chief concern is with the soul. To call him hard names is to betray the inner anxieties that assail us at some time of our existence. "What if this man were telling the truth?" we shiveringly ask. Then we incontinently proceed to stone him to death with scabrous adjectives!

Ibsen never condescended to newspaper polemics—usually the refuge of second-rate men. And his scorn and cruelty are but a disguised kindness; if he lays bare our rickety social systems, our buckram politics, exposes the falsetto of our ideals, the flabbiness of our culture, the cowardice of our ethics, the sleek optimism of our public counsellors, and the dry rot of loveless marriage, it is to blazon our moral maladies that we may seek their cure.

Like John Knox with Mary Stuart, he rudely raps at the door of our hearts, bidding us awaken and open them. He is a voice crying in the wilderness of shams—shams social, the shams of sentiment, of money-getting. And he sometimes fails to discriminate the sheep and goats, tweaking the foolish, self-satisfied noses of the former so sadly, that he has been accused of mixing his moral values. But like Tennyson he knows that there is often honest faith in doubt. His words and works may be compared to that serpent of brass erected by Moses in the midst of his ailing nation, which was at once a symbol and a prophylactic.

Ibsen, the cunning contriver of sinewy, vital dramas, swift in action, with all extraneous flesh lopped away like the muscular figure of a Greek athlete, this Ibsen of overarching poetic power, is a man disdainful of our praise or our blame, knowing, with the subtle prevision of genius, that one day the world will go to him for the consolations of his austere art.

II

AUGUST STRINDBERG

To search for God and to find the Devil! that is what happened to me.—STRINDBERG'S Inferno.

A critic is a man who expects miracles. So it has become the general practice to ignore a poet in his totality and seek only for isolated traits. And then the trouble we take to search for what a man is not: the lack of humour in Shelley, the lack of spirituality in Byron, the lack of sanity in Nietzsche, the lack of melody in Richard Strauss! The case of Johann August Strindberg has also proved tempting to critical head-hunters. Long before we read his books we knew of his neurasthenia, and after his reputation as a many-sided man of genius had been established in Europe his matrimonial affairs were employed as an Exhibit A to divorce him from public and critical favour. And yet this poet, romancer, and novelist, who has created such a profusion of types as to be called "The Shakespeare of Sweden," this more than countryman of Swedenborg in his powers of intense vision, this seer and chemist, possesses such a robust, tangible personality that the world is hardly to be censured for being curious about the man before studying his works.

His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden. In the seventeenth century his ancestors were living in the little village of Strinne. Tremendous in physique and intermingled with clerical strains, Strindberg inherits both his big frame and sensitive conscience from his mixed forebears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that of Renan, Anatole France, Barrès, Bernard Shaw, as René Schickele has suggested. A simple pagan he is not; nor would his particular case have been so complicated. His lyric pessimism and his gift of distilling his bitter experiences into a tale or a play are to-day merged in the broad currents of his historical dramas and socialistic novels. Even his misogyny has become ameliorated,—those episodes in which are crystallized the petty misery of a married couple,—unpaid debts, unloved children, the bailiff knocking at the back door!—let us believe that they, too, were but a phase of his development. Played in Germany and France,—Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable, and its author as a confrère,—popular in Russia, recognized though not without many years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be said to have achieved what he set out to do,—"to search for God and find the devil," and once more to find his God.

Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German translator of Strindberg, related to me this anecdote. On the writing-desk of Ibsen there stands, or stood, a photograph of Strindberg the Swede, once Ibsen's foe. To a visitor's surprise, Ibsen, after gazing in silence for some time at the picture, said, "There is one who will be greater than I."

Whether this story be true or not Strindberg is a man of genius, a crazy one at times, fascinating as a writer and interesting as a psychiatric study. And he answers to the chief test of the dramatist—he is a prime creator of character. Edmund Gosse pronounced him to be "certainly the most remarkable creative talent started by the philosophy of Nietzsche"; and in speaking of his novel, Inferno, he says that it "is a record of wretchedness and superstition and squalor, told by a maniac who is a positive Lucifer of the intellect.... in France not only has he a large following, but he exercises a positive influence." Yet this erratic man has planned technical revolutions for the dramatic stage—on the mechanical as well as the spiritual side—that are as startling as were Richard Wagner's in the music drama. It is not necessary here to describe his scheme for presenting his long historical dramas without a change of front scene.

Strindberg is a man with an abnormal emotional temperament which he has often allowed to master his judgment. If he had been a composer, while his symphonies would have undoubtedly provoked abuse, they would not have scandalized moralists—such is the peculiar vagueness of that art in the domain of articulate thought. Some day the tone-symbols of music will become a part of our consciousness, and then we may confidently expect arrests, prosecutions, transportations, perhaps executions. Luckily for the bold and imaginative thinkers, music remains the only art, the last sanctuary wherein originality may reveal itself in the face of fools and not pierce their mental opacity.

August Strindberg is a name little known to the English stage or reading public. Yet his dramatic work dates back to 1872, when Meister Olaf was composed. In this youthful essay he anticipated by seven years the Nora type presented by Ibsen. His first novel appeared in 1879, and in 1884, when Giftas was published, the stories in this violent book nearly sent him to the Stockholm jail. It was 1888 before Gräfin Julie was put forth, and this play originally in three acts brought Strindberg European fame. Gläubiger, in 1889, confirmed the first critical impression that a writer and thinker of a high order was come. Strindberg's career has been a disordered one. Poverty interrupted his studies at the Upsala University, made him a "super" in a theatre, and drove him to journalism, and to become a doctor's assistant. Always unhappy in his relation with women, often quite mad, and usually living on the treacherous borderland of hallucination, his existence has been fevered and miserable, though his successes are brilliant. Sanity has not been his cardinal quality—he has more than once gone to the asylum, emerging in a few months cured, and, remarkable as it sounds, remembering the details of his mania. Détraqué, sick and cracked, he nevertheless plunged into the study of chemistry, searching for a universal solvent—a mad dream that would interest Balzac. Ideas almost consumed the brain of this cérébral.

But hard work calmed his nerves, as was the case with Dostoïevsky. Strindberg's scientific investigations are full of the flashes of divination that at times lend value to the theories of imaginative men. He has written an Introduction à une Chimie unitaire, which was favourably received. It was a conclusion foregone that his impulsive and overwrought emotional nature would lead him into extravagances. Inferno and the double drama, Nach Damaskus, reveal his eroticism, his exasperated imagination, his harsh atheism. He has confessed in one of his autobiographical outpourings—for he lays bare his soul with the same naïveté as did Tolstoy and Rousseau—that in his youth he was a believer, that the modulation to free-thinking and rank atheism was an easy one. Then, after a period of turbulence, he became the dispassionate ponderer; and finally socialism, with its remote horizons, its heroisms, its substitution of humanity for the old gods, caught his wandering soul.

He lives no longer in Paris, a whirlpool for a man of his nature, and since his third marriage, to Harriet Bosse, the popular Swedish actress, called by her admirers the "Scandinavian Duse," he has resided in Stockholm. There his great historical plays have been heard and praised and abused; there he shows in his later writings a mystic strain; there last autumn after some years of exaltation he agreed to separate from his wife, for the clash of two such opposing temperaments "hindered their free development"—so says his faithful biographer. The separation caused much commotion in artistic and dramatic circles. It was, however, a perfectly amicable one; Harriet Bosse declared that she needed more liberty, for she hopes to travel throughout Europe. A laudable ambition. Strindberg, notwithstanding his unhappy unions, is a staunch monogamist, and allowed the woman to go her way. He has already drawn her portrait in the powerful historical play Christine. Therein the soul of the actress is set before us as the counterfeit Queen of Sweden; winning and masculine, flattering and harsh, a heartless demon and a tender maiden begging for sympathy; anon a mocking tyrant, a wild cat, a second Messalina. It would appear that the poet lost no time in studying Fru Strindberg's characteristics. She, on her side, had made a contract with her manager not to appear in any of her husband's plays, though she has enjoyed triumphs in Fräulein Julie and Samum. Perhaps this was the first little rift in the domestic lute.

Biologists believe that after forty a man of genius—who is in Darwinian parlance a sport—returns to his tribe; resumes in himself the traits of his parents. Perhaps Strindberg has reached the grand climacteric and may give us less disturbing masterpieces. In 1902, under the title of Elf Einakter, a German translation of eleven of his one-act plays was published. This collection contains the ripest offering thus far of his unquestionable genius. It begins with Gräfin Julie, condensed by the dramatist into a one-act piece. "A tragedy of naturalism," he calls it. It is an emotional bombshell. The social world seems topsy-turvied after a first reading. After a second, while the gripping power does not relax, one realizes the writer's deep, almost abysmal knowledge of human nature. Imagine a Joseph Andrews made love to by a Lady Booby, youthful, fascinating. But Fielding aims light shafts of satire; Strindberg calls up ghosts with haunting eyes. Passion there is, and a horrible atmosphere of reality. You know the affair has happened; you see the valet, Jean, chucking his cook-sweetheart under the chin as she feeds him with dainties in the kitchen; you witness the appearance on the scene of Julie enamoured; frantic, unhappy Julie; and you view the crumbling of her soul, depicted as in one of those drawings of Giulio Romano from which you avert your head. The finale makes Ghosts an entertainment for urchins.

Everything is brought about naturally, inevitably. Be it understood, Strindberg is never pornographic, nor does he show a naked soul merely to afford charming diversion, which is the practice of some French dramatists.

What would our Ibsen-hating critics say after Gräfin Julie or Gläubiger! That kitchen—fancy a kitchen as a battlefield of souls!—with its good-hearted and pious cook, the impudent scoundrel of a valet eager for revenge on his superiors, and the hallucinated girl from above stairs—it is a tiny epic of hatred, of class against mass.

Julie is neurotic. She has coolly snapped the betrothal vows made with a titled young man of the district It is St. John's Eve. The villa of the Count, Julie's father, is empty save for the two servants, Jean and Christina—the latter is the cook. Julie, bored by her colourless life and fevered by a midsummer's madness, throws herself at the valet's head. He is frightened. His servant nature has the upper hand until the pair, forced to hide because of the intrusion of rough country folk, reappear. Then the male brute is smirking, triumphant. Justin Huntly McCarthy made a translation of the piece for an English magazine in 1892. Here is an excerpt:—

[JULIE enters, sees the disorder in the kitchen, and clasps her hands. Then she lakes a powder puff and powders her face.]

JEAN. [Enters excited] There, you see and you hear. Do you still think it possible to remain here?

JULIE. No, I do not. But what shall we do?

JEAN. Fly; travel; fly away from here.

JULIE. Travel? Yes! But where?

JEAN. To Switzerland, to the Italian lakes. Have you ever been there?

JULIE. No. Is it beautiful?

JEAN. An eternal summer. Orange trees, laurels—ah!

JULIE. But what shall we do there afterwards?

JEAN. We will start a first-class hotel for first-class guests.

JULIE. A hotel!

JEAN. That is the life to live, believe me. Always new faces, new languages, not a moment's leisure for worrying or dreaming, no seeking after employment, for work comes of itself. Night and day the bell rings, the trains whistle, the omnibuses come and go while the gold pieces roll into the till. That is a life to live.

JULIE. That is a life to live. And what of me?

JEAN. You shall be the mistress of the house, the ornament of the firm. With your appearance and your manners we are sure of a colossal success. You sit like a queen in the office and set your slaves in motion with one touch on the electric bell; the guests march past your throne and lay their treasures humbly on the table. You cannot imagine how people tremble when they get a bill. I will salt the accounts and you will sugar them with your most bewitching smile. Yes, let us travel far from here. He takes a time-table from his pockety Good. By the next train we are in Malmö at 6.30, in Hamburg at 8.40 to-morrow morning, from Frankfort to Basle in one day, and we are in Como by the St. Gothard route in, let me see, three days. Three days!

JULIE. That is ah very fine. But, Jean, you must give me courage. Say that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.

JEAN. [Hesitating] I would like to, but I dare not. Not here in this house. I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?

JULIE. YOU! Say "thou" to me. Between us there are no longer any barriers. Say "thou."

JEAN. [Troubled] I cannot. There are still barriers between us so long as we remain in this house. It recalls the past, it recalls the Count. I have never met any man who compelled such respect from me. I have only to see his glove lying on a table to feel quite small. I have only to hear his bell and I start like a shying horse. And when I look at his boots standing there so stiff and stately, it makes me shiver. [He pushes the boots away with his foot.] Superstition, prejudice, which has been driven into us from childhood, but which we can never get free of. If you will only come into another country, into a republic, then people shall kneel down before my porter's livery, people shall kneel down. But I shall not kneel down. I am not born to kneel, for there is stuff in me; there is character in me; and if once I reach the lowest branch, you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a lackey, but next year I am a proprietor; in a few years I shall have an income, and then I run off to Roumania, where I buy a decoration. I can—mark well that I say can—die a count.

JULIE. Beautiful, beautiful!

JEAN. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then you will be a countess, my countess.

JULIE. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you love me, or else—ah, what am I else?

JEAN. I will say it a thousand times—later on. But not here. And above all, no hysterics, or all is lost. We must manage the affair quietly, like sensible people. [He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and lights it.] Sit down there, and I will sit here, and then we can chat as if nothing had happened.

JULIE. Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?

JEAN. I! why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can command my feelings.

JULIE. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and now—

JEAN. [Coldly] Yes, before. But now we have something else to think about.

The scamp sounds her as to the money she possesses. She has none. He compels her to rob her father. He kills her bird. She curses him, for her poor brain is going under from the strain put upon it. She throws herself upon the mercy of the cook; but Christina, who is a good woman, repels and rebukes the sinner. The Count returns. He rings. Jean again becomes the servant, though not until he has given Julie his razor, bidding her use it. She goes out and kills herself, unable to resist the stronger will.

In this shocking drama is crystallized all the bitterness of Strindberg, for he once married a Countess; he, too, has lived in the Inferno. Again we say the ending revolts; in comparison, the coda of Ibsen's Ghosts is a mild exercise in emotional arpeggios. Strindberg's heavy fist smashes out music, sinister and murderous, in this ruthless play.

Julie is a close study of a girl whose blood is tainted before birth, whose education has been false, whose life in society has inflamed her passions. She falls easily when the cunning Jean tempts her at the psychologic moment. I saw Julie at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin, last autumn, Frau Eysoldt—Sorma suffering from a bruised arm—assuming the title rôle, deciphering with skill the abnormal hieroglyphics of the character.

In Gläubiger, a tragic comedy, Strindberg treats, with his accustomed omniscience, a sweet little story about a man who follows his runaway wife to a seaside resort and becomes acquainted with the new husband—unknown to the lady, who is away for a week. Here we catch a glimpse of another hell, the cruelty of a powerful intellect. The weaker man is a painter, turned sculptor, and—subtle irony—he models only his wife's figure. (This was published in 1889; Ibsen certainly read it—witness When We Dead Awake.) The snaring of the poor emotional wretch's soul is masterly. It is all over in an hour, the entire play, and again we feel as if we had mutely assisted at the obsequies of three human beings.

The first husband—who is discovered as such at the end of the play—meets his former wife, and her infamous nature is exposed. The artist hears the conversation, and his fate is not to be spoken of lightly. We pass on.

Paria is after a tale of Ola Hansson. It need not detain us. Poe is a child compared to Strindberg in the analysis of morbid states of soul. Samum is a shuddering ode to revenge. Finally we arrive at Die Stärkere, which met with such acclaim on the Continent. Its chief device of having one silent figure and making the other do the talking is sufficiently novel. But it is again the drama, always the drama with Strindberg. His picture, executed by a kindred and sympathetic interpreter, Edvard Munch, shows the face of one who, like Dante, has seen the nethermost hell.

Played by two artistic actresses, this sardonic little sketch, replete with irony, malice, hatred,—yet full of humanity,—would prove most attractive. It has many sly strokes of humour. The scene of the action is a café on Christmas Eve. Madame X talks to Mademoiselle Y, who remains absolutely silent, yet by glances and gestures contrives to send the other woman scudding along the road from idle, amenable chatter to outrageous recrimination. The two women love the same man. Madame X is his wife. Ferociously she exposes her secrets. Her husband at first has forced her to imitate Mademoiselle Y. But she is now the stronger. She has made him forget his early love, who sits in a dreary café alone on Christmas Eve, while she, his legal wife, will go home to the father and children! It is an ugly episode. In Das Band we reach a play revealing the better characteristics of the poet. It consists only of a court-room scene with jurymen, judge, and officers before whom a husband and wife make their petition for divorce—according to Scandinavian procedure. They are resolved to separate; but there is a child, a son, beloved by both. With this elemental stuff as a subject, Strindberg wrings the heart of you. At the end the parents damn themselves by their own admission, the child is taken from their custody, and they confront each other in the deserted, dim court room, their hearts bursting, their future a foggy, abandoned field. They recall the poet Aldrich's picture of No-man's land, where the soul sees its double, a doppelgänger.

"And who are you?" cried one agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light; "I know not," said the second shape, "I only died last night."

These two souls in the play, once hooked by the steels of marriage and parenthood, realize as they fall loathingly asunder that they are dead, that their life has passed on into the soul of their miserable boy. It is such a play as this that vindicates Strindberg's claim to the mastery of the drama. Here he is at his human best, freed from the bizarre, and his humour and wit illuminate the ghastly darkness with friendly flashes. The jurymen are excellent, and more comical still are the court officers. Many touches throughout would make the translation and performance of Das Band profitable. And not once is the child on the stage. Possibly, as America is a divorce-loving nation, it would reject with indignation the sight of so many bleaching family bones!

Mit dem Feuer Spielen is a comedy of a drastic kind. It shows Nietzsche's influence. The sister of Nietzsche, Frau Förster-Nietzsche, once assured me in Weimar that her brother enjoyed reading Strindberg's novels. And there are several references to Strindberg in the published correspondence of Georg Brandes and Nietzsche.

Debit and Credit also proves that, consciously or unconsciously, Strindberg is a Nietzschean. It is a rogue's comedy with original variations. The chief character evokes laughter, for through the grim and sordid rifts in the plot—it pictures a tawdry great man—we hear bursts of natural fun. There is humour, kindly and mocking. Very Shaw-like, except that it was written in 1892, is Mutterliebe. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mr. Shaw expanded the same grewsome idea. Elsewhere the Irish writer calls Strindberg "the only living genuine Shakespearian dramatist." Strindberg in his fifteen pages traverses a lifetime, and his ending is logical.

In the preface to Fräulein Julie, Strindberg makes a general confession—for him as for Tolstoy a psychologic necessity. "Some people," he says, "have accused my tragedy of being too sad as though one desired a merry tragedy. People call authoritatively for the Joy of Life, and theatrical managers call for farces, as though the Joy of Life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people who each and every one are suffering from St. Vitus's dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in the powerful, terrible struggle of life; and the capability of experiencing something, of learning something, is a pleasure to me. And therefore I have chosen an unusual but instructive subject; in other words, an exception, but a great exception, that will strengthen the rules which offend the apostles of the commonplace. What will further create antipathy in some is the fact that my plan of action is not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of it. An event in life—and this is rather a new discovery—is usually accompanied by a series of more or less deep-seated motives; but the spectator usually generally chooses that one which his power of judgment finds simplest to grasp, or that his gift of judgment considers the most honourable. For example, some one commits suicide: 'Bad business!' says the citizen; 'Unhappy love!' says the woman; 'Sickness!' the sick man; 'Disappointed hopes!' the bankrupt. But it may be that none of these reasons is the real one, and that the dead man hid the real one by pretending another that would throw the most favourable light on his memory."

The Father (produced in 1887 and translated into English by N. Erichsen) is in three short acts. It depicts the destruction of a man's brain through the machinations of his malevolent wife. Strindberg's misogyny is the keynote of his early work. He hates woman. He accuses Ibsen of gynolatry. "My superior intelligence revolts," he cries, "against the gynolatry which is the latest superstition of the free-thinkers." His own married life was so unhappy that he revenges himself by attacking the entire sex. Every book, every play, is a confession. He is the most subjective dramatist and poet of his age. In Comrades he synthesizes the situation:—

To wish to dethrone Man and replace him by Woman—going back to a matriarchy—to dethrone the true master of creation, he who has created civilization and given to the vulgar the benefit of his culture; he who is the generator of great thoughts, of the arts and crafts, of everything, indeed; to dethrone him, I say, in order to elevate "les sales bêtes" of women, who have never taken part in the work of civilization (with a few futile exceptions), is to my mind a provocation to my sex. And at the idea of seeing "arrive" these anthropomorphs, these half apes, this horde of half-developed animals, these women whose intellects are of the age of bronze, the male in me revolts. I feel myself stirred by an angry need of resisting this enemy, inferior in intellect, but superior by her complete absence of moral sense.

In this war to the death between the two sexes it would appear that the less honest and more perverse would come out conqueror, since the chance of man's gaining the battle is very dubious, handicapped as he is by an inbred respect for woman, without counting the advantages that he gives her in supporting her and leaving her time free to equip herself for the fight.

This sex-against-sex manifesto will not make him popular in America, a land peopled with gynolatrists; but his plays and novels may be read with profit; if nothing else, they illustrate the violent rebound of the pendulum in Scandinavia, where the woman question absorbed all others for a time. Besides, Strindberg is a good hater, and good haters are rare and stimulating spectacles.

Inferno is the very quintessence of Strindberg. Written between two attacks—his unstable nerves send him at intervals into retreat—it is the most awful portrayal of mental suffering ever committed to paper. Poe said in one of his Marginalia that the man who dared to write the story of his heart would fire the paper upon which he wrote. This Strindberg has dared to do with a freedom, a diabolical minuteness, that make the naïve stutterings of Verlaine and the sophisticated confessions of Huysmans mere literature. Because of their intensity you are forced to believe Strindberg, though his is only too plainly a pathologic case; the delusions of persecution, of grandeur, of almost the entire lyre of psychiatric woes, are to be detected in this unique book. An enemy, a Russian, haunts him in Paris and plays on the piano poisonous music which warns the listener that he is doomed. It is the history of Strindberg's quarrel with the Polish poet mystic and dramatist, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who really tracked the Swede because he was jealous of his own wife. Strindberg once wrote of Maupassant's La Horla, "I recognize myself in that, and do not deny that insanity has developed."

Margit is a five-act drama, with the sub-title La Femme du Chevalier Bengt. It is a historical play of the times of the Reformation, and it is modern in its glacial analysis of the feminine soul. The picture is more various than is the case with the eternal monologue or dialogues of his shorter pieces—and there is humour of a deadly kind. In Das Geheimnis der Gilde (1879-80) the theme of Ibsen's The Master Builder was anticipated. To enumerate the works of Strindberg would consume columns; Herr Schering of Berlin has literally devoted his life to the task of translating them. Already there are forty volumes of plays, tales, novels, essays, monographs, poems, fables. Even in these times of piping versatility, the many-sided activities of the Swede amaze. His Nach Damaskus reveals a tendency to drift Rome-ward, to that Roman church, the sanctuary for souls weary of the conflict. There is no denying the fact that Strindberg's later productions show a cooler head, steadier nerves, though the motives are usually madness or blood guilt. The latest volume at the time of writing is devoted to three plays,—Die Kronbraut, Schwanenweiss, Ein Traumspiel. Two of these are powerful and painful. The playwright paints the peasantry of his country with the sombre brush of Hauptmann. Ein Traumspiel is that wonderful thing, a real dream put before us with all the wild irrelevancies of a dream, yet with sober and convincing art. As a stage piece it would be superbly fantastic. Strindberg has a faculty, which he shares in common with E. T. W. Hoffmann and Edgar Poe, of catching the ghosts of his brain at their wildest and pinning them down on paper. In such moods he may be truly called a seer. Swedenborg alone equals him in the veracity and intensity of his visions.

These later plays were admittedly composed during the few happy years with his third wife, Fru Strindberg-Bosse. Edwin Bjorkman, who has written with authority of his fellow-countryman, declares that "the motives that move Strindberg are moral."

"One of his favourite doctrines," continues Mr. Bjorkman, "is that social and individual purity is the only solid foundation for physical and mental health, as well as an indispensable condition of true achievement. He speaks somewhere of an artist 'who was yearning for the summit of ambition without being willing to pay the price required of those who are to reach it.'" And then he adds, "The only choice left us by life is between the laurel and our pleasure."

Further he quotes the dramatist, "I let my self be carried away by the heat of the battle [over the woman's emancipation movement, of which he was at that time the only prominent literary antagonist in the Scandinavian countries], and I went so far beyond the limits of propriety that my countrymen feared I had become insane."

An alchemist, a dabbler in spiritualism, a wanderer among the lowly long before Gorky was heard of, Strindberg once wrote to a friend when lack of money kept him a practical prisoner on a small island outside of Stockholm, although his writing-desk was housing the completed manuscripts of six one-act plays and two larger dramas, "I am thinking of becoming a photographer in order to save my talent as a writer."

A later novel is autobiographic. Einsam was published in 1903. It is more reflective than his other books and betrays the loneliness of the returned exile. It registers the poet's dissatisfaction with Lund, to which he went after the tremendous experiences from 1894 to 1898. A most startling play, one of my favourites, is Totentanz. It is a double drama, the shabby hero of which would have pleased the creator of Captain Costigan. His novel Die Gotischen Zimmer (1904) is of socialistic character and contains many eloquent pages. As he was born January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, it will be seen that this erratic man is beginning to reach the cooling period of his genius.

The most vivid of his books, after Inferno, is The Confessions of a Fool (Die Beichte eines Thoren). Strindberg's wife, to marry him, had divorced herself from a baron. Yet the suspicious writer accused her of all the crimes in the calendar. And he also admits that he abused her. Strindberg was suffering from paranoia simplex chronica, according to Dr. William Hirsch, whose valuable work, Genius and Degeneration, contains a study of the Swede's case. What is of peculiar interest is the symptom in his malady called "referential ideas." "The patients," says Dr. Hirsch, "refer all that goes on about to themselves. They suspect that the world is leagued against them." For example: when Strindberg first read Ibsen's Wild Duck, he immediately thought the whole piece was intended for him and was only written on his account He expressed himself as follows:—

It was a drama of the famous Norwegian spy, the inventor of the equality madness. How the book fell into my hands I could not say. But now everything was clear and gave occasion to the worst suspicions concerning the reputation of my wife. The plot of the drama was as follows: A photographer (a nickname I had earned by my novels drawn from real life) has married a person of doubtful repute, who had been formerly the mistress of a great proprietor. The woman supports the husband from a secret fund which she derives from her former partner. In addition, she carries on the business of her husband, a good-for-nothing, who spends his time drinking in the society of persons of no consequence. Now that is a misrepresentation of the facts committed by the reporters. They were informed that Maria [Strindberg's wife] made translations, but they did not know that it was I who particularly corrected them and paid over to her the sums received for them. Matters become bad when the poor photographer discovers that the adored daughter is not his child, and that the wife warned him when she induced him to marry her. To complete his disgrace, the husband consents to accept a large sum as indemnity. By this I understand Maria's loan upon the baron's security, which I endorsed after my wedding.... I prepared a great scene for the afternoon. I wished to catch Maria in cross-examination, to which I wished to give the form of a defence for us both. We had been equally attracted by the scarecrow of the masculinists, who had been paid for the pretty job.

To show how mad were his conclusions it is only necessary to add that he does not resemble in the least the selfish idealist, Hjalmar Ekdal, in The Wild Duck, who never works unless he has to, while Strindberg's literary labours have been enormous. Nor is it conceivable that the baroness, Madame Strindberg, furnished Ibsen with the documents for the portrait of the delightful Gina Ekdal. That woman was drawn from the people. Furthermore, to call Ibsen "the inventor of the equality madness" is absolutely a misstatement of a fact, as Ibsen has been a despiser of democracy and all forms of equality.

With an almost infinite capacity for suffering, let us hope that this great, bruised soul has found surcease from its mental suffering, found some gleams of consolation, in his calmer years—until his next psychical hegira. In rebelling against his existence, in refusing to accept the wisdom of the experienced, Strindberg has suffered intensely because his is an intense temperament. But he is a "culture hero," he has "proved all things," and even from his hell he has brought us the history of experiences not to be forgotten. One is tempted to credit the alleged utterance of Ibsen, "Here is one who will be greater than I!"

III

HENRY BECQUE

Emile Zola once wrote in his sweeping dictatorial manner, "Le théâtre sera naturaliste ou il ne sera pas"; but as Henry Becque said in his mordant style, Zola always convinced one in his pronunciamentos; it was only when he attempted to put his theories into action that they completely broke down. Alas! realism in the theatre after all the gong-sounding of café æstheticians, after the desperate campaigns of the one clairvoyant manager in the movement, Antoine, is as dead as the romanticism of Hernani. After the flamboyant, the drab—and now they are both relegated to the limbo of the tried-and-found-wanting.

When Zola sat down to pen his famous call to arms, Naturalism on the Stage, Antoine was still in the future, Dumas fils and Sardou ruled the Parisian theatre, Uncle Sarcey manufactured his diverting feuilletons, and Augier was become a classic. The author of L'Assommoir had like Alexander sighed for new worlds to subjugate. He had won a victory, thanks to Flaubert and the De Goncourts, in fiction; it remained for the theatre to provoke his ire. It still clung obstinately to old-fashioned conventions and refused to be coerced either by Henrietta Maréchal or by the furious onslaught of Zola and his cohort of writing men.

In the essay referred to, Zola said that a piece of work will always be a corner of nature seen through a temperament. He told the truth when he declared that the "romantic movement was but a skirmish; romanticism, which corresponds to nothing durable, was simply a restless regret of the old world." Stendhal and Balzac had created the modern novel. The stage did not move with the other arts, though Diderot and Mercier "laid down squarely the basis of the naturalistic theatre." Victor Hugo gave the romantic drama its death-blow. Scribe was an ingenious cabinet-maker. Sardou "has no life—only movement." Dumas the younger was spoiled by cleverness—"a man of genius is not clever, and a man of genius is necessary to establish the naturalistic formula in a masterly fashion." Besides, Dumas preaches, always preaches. "Emile Augier is the real master of the French stage, the most sincere"; but he did not know how to disengage himself from conventions, from stereotyped ideas, from made-up ideas.

Who, then, was to be the saviour, according to Zola? And this writer did not underrate the difficulties of the task. He knew that "the dramatic author was enclosed in a rigid frame,... that the solitary reader tolerates everything, goes where he is led, even when he is disgusted; while the spectators taken en masse are seized with prudishness, with frights, with sensibilities of which the author must take notice under pain of a certain fall. But everything marches forward! If the theatre will submit to Sardou's juggling, to the theories and witticisms of Dumas, to the sentimental characters of Augier, the theatre will be left in the onward movement of civilization"; and as Becque said in his Souvenirs of a Dramatic Author, the theatre has reached its end many times, yet somehow it continues to flourish despite the gloomy prophecies of the professors and critical malcontents. Every season, avowed Becque, that same cry rises to heaven,—"La fin du théâtre"; and the next season the curtain rises in the same old houses, on the same old plays.

However, Zola trumpeted forth his opinions. According to him the De Goncourt brothers were the first to put into motion realistic ideas. Henriette Maréchal, with its dialogue copied from the spoken conversation of contemporary life, with its various scenes copied boldly from reality, was a path breaker. And Becque again interrupts; Edmond de Goncourt posed for thirty years as a hissed author, "pour cette panade d'Henriette Maréchal." Away with the mechanism of the polished, dovetailed, machine-made play of Dumas. "I yearn for life with its shiver, its breath, and its strength; I long for life as it is," passionately declaimed the simple-minded bourgeois Zola, who then, in default of other naturalistic dramatists, turned his Thérèse Raquin into a play—and melodrama it was, not without its moments of power, but romantic and old-fashioned to a degree.

And this was Zola's fate: be contumaciously usurped the throne of realism, never realizing his life long that he was a romanticist of the deepest dye, a follower of Hugo, that melodramatic taleteller. All the while he fancied himself a lineal descendant of Balzac and Flaubert. Searching ceaselessly with his Diogenese lantern for a dramatist, he nevertheless overlooked not only a great one, but the true father of the latter-day movement in French dramatic literature—Henry Becque. What a paradox! Here was the unfortunate Becque walking the boulevards night and day with plays under his arm, plays up his sleeve, plays in his hat, plays at home—and always was he shown the door, only to reappear at the managerial window. Calm in his superiority, his temper untouched by his trials, Becque presented the picture of the true Parisian man of genius,—witty, ironical on the subject of his misfortunes, and absolutely undaunted by refusals. He persisted until he forced his way into the Comédie Française, despite the intriguing, the disappointments, the broken promises, and the open hostility of Sarcey, then the reigning pontiff of French dramatic criticism. Jules Clarétie pretended a sympathy that he did not feel, and it was only when pressure was brought by Edouard Thierry that his masterpiece, Les Corbeaux, was put on the stage after many disheartening delays; after it had been refused at the Vaudeville, the Gymnase, the Odéon, the Porte-Saint-Martin, the Gaîté, the Cluny, and the Ambigu. Such perseverance is positively heroic.

I know of few more diverting books than Becque's Memoirs and the record of his Literary Quarrels. If he was gay, careless, and unspoiled by his failures in his daily existence, he must have saved his bile for his books. They are vitriolic. The lashing he gives Sarcey and Clarétie is deadly. He had evidently put his revengeful feelings carefully away and only revived them when the time came, when his successes, his disciples, his election as the master of a powerful school, warranted his decanting the bitter vintage. How it sparkles, how it bites! He pours upon the head of Sarcey his choicest irony. After snubbing the young Becque, after pompously telling him that he had no talent, that he should take Scribe for a model, Sarcey at the end, when he saw Becque as a possible strong figure in the dramatic world, calmly wrote: "Oh! Becque I have known a long time. He brought me, his first piece. He owes it to me that his The Prodigal Son was played." To cap his attack, Becque prints this statement at the end of the miserable history of his efforts to secure a footing. It is almost too good to be true. Diabolically clever also is his imitation of a Sarcey critique on Molière, for Sarcey was no friend of character dramas.

In his preface to The Ravens, Becque announces that he is not a thinker, not a dreamer, not a psychologist, not a believer in heredity. As Jean Jullien truly said, the Becque plays prove nothing, are not photographic, are not deformations of life, but sincere life itself. The author relates that in composing—he had a large apartment on the rue de Matignon—-he spent much time in front of a mirror searching for the exact gesture, for the exact glance of the eye, for the precise intonation. This fidelity to nature recalls a similar procedure of Flaubert, who chanted at the top of his formidable voice his phrases to hear if they would stand the test of breathing. Becque caught the just colour of every speech, and it is this preoccupation with essentials of his art that enabled him to set on their feet most solidly all his characters. They live, they have the breath of life in them; when they walk or talk, we believe in them. The peep he permits us to take into his workshop is of much value to the student.

He admired Antoine, naturally, and his opinion of Zola I have recorded. He rapped Brunetière sharply over the knuckles for assuming that criticism conserves the tradition of literature. Vain words, cries Becque; literature makes itself despite criticism, it is ever in advance of the critics. Only a sterile art is the result of academies. Curiously enough, Becque had a consuming admiration for Sardou. Him he proclaimed the real master, the man of imagination, observation, the masterly manipulator of the character of characters. This is rather disconcerting to those who admire in the Becque plays just those qualities in which Sardou is deficient. Perhaps the fact that Sardou absolutely forced the production of Becque's L'Enfant Prodigue may have accentuated his praise of that prestidigitator of Marly. Becque entertained a qualified opinion of Ibsen and an overwhelming feeling for Tolstoy as dramatist. The Russian's Powers of Darkness greatly affected the Frenchman. (Becque was born in 1837, died in 1900.)

And what is this naturalistic formula of Becque's that escaped the notice of the zealous Zola and set the pace for nearly all the younger men? Is it not the absence of a formula of the tricks of construction religiously handed down by the Scribe-Sardou school? As is generally the case, the disciples have gone their master one better in their disdain of solid workmanship. The taint of the artificial, of the sawdust, is missing in Becque's masterpieces; yet with all their large rhythms, unconventional act-ends, and freedom from the cliché, there is no raggedness in detail; indeed, close study reveals the presence of a delicate, intricate mechanism, so shielded by the art of the dramatist as to illude us into believing that we are in the presence of unreasoned reality. Setting aside his pessimism, his harsh handling of character, his seeming want of sympathy,—a true objectivity, for he never takes sides with his characters,—Becque is as much a man of the theatre as Sardou. He saw the mad futility of the literary men who invaded the theatre full of arrogant belief in their formulas, in their newer conventions that would have supplanted older ones. A practical playwright, our author had no patience with those who attempted to dispense with the frame of the footlights, who would turn the playhouse into a literary farm through which would gambol all sorts of incompetents masquerading as original dramatic thinkers.

Becque's major quality is his gift of lifelike characterization. Character with him is of prime importance. He did not tear down the structure of the drama but merely removed much of the scaffolding which time had allowed to disfigure its façade. While Zola and the rest were devising methods for doing away with the formal drama, Becque sat reading Molière. Molière is his real master—Molière and life, as Augustin Filon truthfully says. In his endeavour to put before us his people in a simple, direct way he did smash several conventions. He usually lands his audience in the middle of the action, omitting the old-fashioned exposition act, careful preparation, and sometimes development, as we know it in the well-regulated drama. But search for his reasons and they are not long concealed. Logical he is, though it is not the cruel logic of Paul Hervieu, his most distinguished artistic descendant. The logic of Becque's events must retire before the logic of his characters, that is all. Humanity, then, is his chief concern. He cares little for literary style. He is not a stylist, though he has style—the stark, individual style of Henry Becque.

Complications, catastrophe, dénouement, all these are attenuated in the Becque plays. Atmosphere supplies the exposition, character painting, action. The impersonality of the dramatist is profound. If he had projected himself or his views upon the scene, then we would have been back with Dumas and his preachments. Are we returning to the Molière comedy of character? Movement in the accepted sense there is but little. Treatment and interpretation have been whittled away to a mere profile, so that in the Antoine repertory the anecdote bluntly expressed and dumped on the boards a slice of real life without comment —without skill, one is tempted to add.

Becque was nearer classic form than Hervieu, Donnay, De Curel, Georges Ancey, Leon Hennique, Emile Fabre, Maurice Donnay, Lemaitre, Henri Lavedan, and the rest of the younger group that delighted in honouring him with the title of supreme master. After all, Becque's was a modified naturalism. He recognized the limitations of his material, and subdued his hand to them. M. Filon has pointed out that Becque and his followers tried to bring their work "into line with the philosophy of Taine," as Dumas and Augier's ideas corresponded with those of Victor Cousin, the eclectic philosopher. Positivism, rather than naked realism, is Becque's note. The cold-blooded pessimism that pervades so unpleasantly many of his comedies was the resultant of a temperament sorely tried by experience, and one steeped in the material-ism of the Second Empire.

So we get from him the psychology of the crowd, instead of the hero ego of earlier dramatists. He contrives a dense atmosphere, into which he plunges his puppets, and often his people appear cold, heartless, cynical. He is a surgeon, more like Ibsen than he would ever acknowledge, in his calm exposure of social maladies. And what a storehouse have been his studies of character for the generation succeeding him! Becque forged the formula, the others but developed it.

The Becque plays! The last edition is in three volumes published by La Plume of Paris. It begins with an opera—fancy an opera by this antagonist of romance!—entitled Sardanapale, in three acts, "imitated" from Lord Byron. Victorin Joncières, a composer of respectable ability, furnished the music. The "machine" was represented for the first time at the Théâtre Lyrique, February 8, 1867. It need not detain us. L'Enfant Prodigue, a four-act vaudeville, saw the light, November 6, 1868, at the Théâtre Vaudeville. It is Becque at his wittiest, merriest best. In an unpremeditated manner it displays a mastery of intrigue that is amazing. For a man who despised mere technical display, this piece is a shining exemplar of virtuosity. Let those who would throw stones at Becque's nihilism in the matter of conventional craftsmanship read The Prodigal Son and marvel at its swiftness of action, its stripping the vessel of all unnecessary canvas, and scudding along under bare poles! The comedy is unfailing, the characterization rich in those cunning touches which are like salt applied to a smarting wound. The plot is slight, the adventures of several provincials who visit Paris and there become entangled in the toils of a shrewd adventuress. The underplot is woven skilfully into the main texture. Hypocrisy is scourged. A father and a son discover that they are trapped by the same woman. There is genre painting that is Dutch in its admirable minuteness and truth; a specimen is the scene at the concierge's dinner. Wicked in the quality called l'esprit gaulois, this farce is inimitable—and also a trifle old-fashioned.

In Michel Pauper,—given at the Porte-Saint-Martin, June, 1870,—Becque was feeling his way to simpler methods. The drama is in five acts and seven tableaux; and while it contains in solution all of Becque, it may be confessed that the outcome is rather an indigestible mess. The brutality of the opening scenes is undeniable. Michel is a clumsy fellow, who does not always retain our sympathy or respect. His courtship has all the delicacy of a peasant at pasture. But he is alive, his is a salient character. The suicide of De La Roseraye has been faithfully copied by Donnay in La Douloureuse, and by many others in Paris, London, and America. Hélène, poor girl, who is so rudely treated by Comte de Rivailler, would call forth a smile on the countenance of any one when she announces her misfortune in this stilted phraseology, "He asked of his own will what he could not obtain from mine." The ending has a suspicion of the "arranged," even of the violent melodramatic. And how shocking is the fall of Hélène! She is the first of the Becque cerebral female monsters, though she has at least more blood than some of his later creations. She loves the Count—the shadow of an excuse for her destruction of her noble-minded husband. However, one does not read Michel Pauper for amusement.

It is in L'Enlèvement that we find Becque managing with consummate address a genuine problem. It was produced at the Vaudeville, November 18, 1871. The three acts pass at a château in the provinces. Emma de Sainte-Croix, rather than endure the neglect and infidelities of her husband, lives in dignified retirement with her mother-in-law. She is a femme savante, though not of the odious blue-stocking variety. She has a daily visitor in the person of a cultivated man who resides in the neighbourhood. At once we are submerged in a situation. De La Rouvre loves Emma. He, too, has been wretchedly mismated. His wife was a despicable voluptuary who cheated him with his domestics. He begs Emma to secure a divorce from her pleasure-loving husband. She refuses. She loathes the divorce courts. She loathes vulgar publicity. He proposes an elopement and is sharply brought to his senses by the woman. She loves the proprieties too much to indulge in romantic adventures, and has she not suffered enough through this love illusion? Her mother-in-law does not approve of the man's presence. Her son is always her son, and she hopes for reconciliation. If only Emma would be a little more lenient!

The prodigal husband returns. He is an admirable blackguard who respects neither his own honour nor that of his family. He flirts with his wife at his mother's instigation, but his heart is not in the game. Descends upon him one of his lady loves. She invades the château and is introduced to his wife as a supposedly casual passer-by. But she is detected as the worthless spouse of De La Rouvre. There is a scene. Later Raoul, the husband, forces his way into his wife's bedchamber and the episode on reading recalls Paul Hervieu's Le Dédale. The outcome, however, is different. Repulsed, the husband curses his wife, and she departs for India, elopes with her lover. Terse in dialogue, compact in construction, L'Enlèvement contains some of the best of Becque. Ibsen and Dumas are writ large in the general plan and dénouement, though the character drawing is wholly Becque's. Despite his economy of action and speech, he seldom gives one the feeling of abruptness in transitional passages. His scenes melt one into the other without a jar, and only after you have read or watched one of his plays do you realize the labour involved to produce such an illusion of life while disguising the controlling mechanism. All the familiar points de repires, the little tricks so dear to the average play-maker, are absent. Becque conceals his technical processes, and in that sense he has great art, though often seeming quite artless. And L'Enlèvement is more than a picture of manners; it is as definitely a problem play as A Doll's House. Only after being driven to it does Emma revolt. She is a révoltée of the cerebral type. The crowning insult is the attempt made upon her right to her person. Hervieu's heroine is passional, and it accounts for her lapse. We feel for her acutely. Emma's departure is logical.

With La Parisienne, Becque is once more on his own ground. Paris and its cynical view of the relations of the sexes is embodied in this diabolically adroit and disconcerting comedy—represented for the first time at the Comédie-Française, September 14, 1882, and reviewed at the Odéon, November 3, 1897. The play is full of a blague now slightly outmoded, but the types remain eternally true—those of the Parisian triangle. Only this three-cornered, even four-cornered, arrangement (for there are two "dear friends") is played with amazing variations.

Clotilde du Mesnil and Lafont are quarrelling over a letter when the curtain rises. He adjures her to resist temptation. "Resist, Clotilde; that is the only honourable course, and the only course worthy of you." She must remain dignified, honourable, the pride of her husband. Suddenly, in the midst of this ignoble squabble, she cries, "Prenez garde, voilà, mon mari!" Up to this moment the audience fancies that it has been witnessing a marital row. The shock is tremendous when the truth is learned. Nor are your feelings spared when later you hear Clotilde accuse Lafont of not being fond of her husband. The two wrangle over the accusation. In another speech she exclaims: "Vous êtes un libre penseur! Je crois que vous vous entendriez très bien avec une maîtresse qui n'aurait pas de religion, quelle horreur!" This extremely naïve statement reveals to us the land on the other side of good and evil in which dwell Becque's characters. Are they even cynical? Hardly, for there is no mockery, no parade of immorality, no speeches with equivocal meanings. The calm assumption of external decency is merely a reversion to the baldest paganism. It is the modern over-cynicism. These people are so bad that, paradoxical as it may sound, they are good. Certainly they are more refreshing and infinitely more moral than that wretched Camille, with her repentant whimperings and her nauseating speeches about soiled doves and their redemption.

And Lafont, stupid, loving, honest according to his lights, Lafont so marvellously presented by Antoine, is he not a being who lives! Clotilde as incarnated by Réjane is the worldling, neither stupid nor witty. She is simply a good-natured, vain woman, who deceives her husband and lover as naturally as she breathes.

Clotilde takes on a new amant, who treats her as badly as she treated Lafont. Deserted, she picks up the old thread and begins to live as before. As Mrs. Craigie says of this play: "There are critics who mistaking the situation for the philosophy have called this piece immoral. One would as soon call Georges Dandin or Tom Jones immoral. A true book, a true play, cannot be otherwise than moral. It is the false picture—no matter how pretty—which makes for immorality."

Throughout, these lovers quarrel like married folk. The social balance is upset, domestic virtues topsy-turvied. And yet the merciless stripping of the conventional romance,—the deluded husband, unhappy wife, and charming consoler of the afflicted,—these old properties of Gallic comedy are cast into the dust-bin. It is safe to say that since La Parisienne no French dramatic author has had the courage to revive the sentimental triangle as it was before this comedy was written. If he ventured to, he would be laughed off the stage. And for suppressing the sentimental married harlot let us be thankful to the memory of Becque.

Les Corbeaux is unique in modern comedy. Never played, to my knowledge, in English, its ideas, its characterization, its ground-plan, have been often ruthlessly appropriated. The verb "to steal" is never conjugated in theatreland. Yet this play's simplicity is appealing. A loving father of a family, a good-tempered bourgeois, dies suddenly. His affairs turn Out badly. His widow and three daughters fall into the hands of the ravens, the partner of their father, his lawyer, his architect, and a motley crew of tradespeople. Ungrateful matter this for dramatic purposes. Scene by scene Becque exposes the outer and inner life of these defenceless women and their secret and malign persecutors. Every character is an elaborate portrait. Naturally, the family go to the dogs, and the wickedest villain of the lot catches in marriage the flower of the unhappy flock. His final speech is sublime, "My child, since your father's death you were hemmed in by a lot of designing scoundrels." And by inference he pats himself on the back, he, the worst scoundrel of all. If you tell me that the theme is not a pleasant or suitable one for the drama, I shall recommend you to the spirit of the late Henry Becque for answer. Les Corbeaux is the bible of the dramatic realists.

Remain seven small pieces, principally in one act. La Navette is wicked—and amusing. It aims at nothing else. Les Honnêtes Femmes might have been written by Dumas. It is a sugar-coated sermon extemporized by a young married woman for the benefit of a presumptive lover. She finds him a bride, and the curtain falls. Le Départ is of sterner metal. Here Becque beats Zola at his own game. The scene represents a working girl's atelier in a Parisian store. The various women are clearly outlined, so clearly that Huysmans in Sœurs Vatard is recalled. One girl is honest. She is honourable enough to refuse an offer of marriage made by the foolish young son of the proprietor, and for this wisdom receives insults from the father and is finally discharged for being too virtuous. She then incontinently goes to the devil. The devastating irony of the dramatist illuminates this little piece with sinister effect And the moral is never far to seek in Becque—perhaps a twisted moral, yet not altogether a negligible one. In Veuve we find our old friend Clotilde of La Parisienne, now a widow. Her behaviour to her faithful admirer is a study of feminine malice, not only seen "through a temperament," but the outcome of unerring observation. Madeleine is a depressing sketch of a woman with a past who is educating her child at a convent It has poignant moments. The other two little affairs, Le Domino à Quart and Une Exécution, are exercises in pure humour of the volatile Parisian sort.

Becque's touch is light in comedy, rather clumsy in set drama. He is, as a rule, without charm, and he never indulges in mock pathos or cheap poetic flights. He excelled in depicting manners, and his dramatic method, as I have endeavoured to show, was direct and free from antique rhetoric and romantic turgidities. He has been superseded by a more comprehensive synthesis; France is become weary of the cynical sinners—yet that does not invalidate the high ranking of this man of genius. Whatever may be his deficiencies in the purely spiritual, Henry Becque will ever remain a commanding figure in the battalion of brilliant French dramatists.

IV

GERHART HAUPTMANN

Der Mensch, das ist ein Ding Das sich von ungefâhr bei uns verfing: Von dieser Welt und doch auch nicht von ihr: Zur Hälfte—wo? wer weiss?—zur Hälfte hier. Halb unser Bruder und aus uns Geboren Uns feind und freund zur Hälfte und verloren.

—Die Versunkene Glocke.

In the figure of Gerhart Hauptmann we encounter a man of genius, a man of European significance, and more than the standard-bearer of Young Germany. True, Hauptmann did graduate from the seminary of the realists,—the heads of which were Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf,—writing, under the name of Bjarne P. Holmsen, that delectable, ironic fantasy, Papa Hamlet But the dramatic poetic instincts of the Silesian youth—he was born at Salzbrunn, 1862, the son of a hotel-keeper—were not long to be penned behind the bars of a formula. As in Goethe's Faust, two spirits travailed furiously within him. Ultra-idealist in his boyhood, he suffered from the green-sickness of Byronism, and wrote poems in imitation of Byron, Hebbel, Schiller. He studied sculpture at Rome for a time and set up an atelier there. His epic, Promethidenlos (1885), was as subjective as a restless, unhappy young man of twenty-three could make it. Yet there is no mistaking the chord set clanging by its immature music—the chord of sympathy with human suffering, the true Hauptmann leit-motiv that may be equally heard in his first drama, Before Sunrise, and in his latest, Rose Bernd.

The critical allotment of Hauptmann to the Ibsen domain is easy, too easy; he has been greatly influenced by the "red star of the north," though it has not been a baleful one. He owes as much to Zola as to Ibsen, as Zola owes in his turn much to Victor Hugo and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Young Germany itself, Karl Bleibtreu, Conrad Alberti, Sudermann, Halbe, Conradi, Kretzer, and the rest were in the fashioning of the Freie Bühne heavily indebted to Antoine and his revolutionary Théâtre Libre. Under the spell of the mystic and lyric prose of Friedrich Nietzsche—surely among the most musical that issued from German lips—individualism became an all-absorbing element in the production of art works. It was the old leaven of Max Stirner and his Der Einzige. John Henry Mackay, the Scotch-German, hymned in almost delirious verse the rights of the Ego; even the cool-headed East Prussian Sudermann felt the impact of this lyric anarchism when he published his Three Heron Feathers. As to Hauptmann, whose lyre was ever more sensitive to the mobility of the moral atmosphere, this wind of individualism swept him along and he wrote Before Sunrise. It was produced in 1889, and at once its author was recognized as a force.

Socialistic, this play is almost as rank as La Terre. Technically it has many weak spots, but the basic idea is capital. The Krauses, suddenly come into money, afforded the dramatist opportunities for his still immature but profoundly true gifts of characterization. It is a depressing crowd he sets before us, drunkenness being the least of its defects. Helene Krause is betrothed to the lover of her step-mother, and when Alfred Loth, a high-minded socialist, appears, she naturally falls in love with him. Loth, warned by a doctor—an excellently conceived character—that it were insane to marry into a tainted family, leaves a letter for Helene and vanishes. She promptly kills herself. The final curtain is harrowing. There is exaggerated realism and also that curious tendency, which has developed instead of abating, of dealing with depraved types. Friedensfest (1890), which followed, begins to show Hauptmann more conscious of his own talents. The Scholz family is accurately studied and presented. The dénouement baldly stated—an unhappy father come home to die in a household from which he has been banished by his conduct—smacks of German sentimentality. Here the poet demonstrated that all lies in the individual handling of the theme. The moral is "Peace on earth, good will to men," and this unhappy pessimistic family is made to realize the strength of the collectivist ideal. The same year Einsame Menschen appeared, in which Ibsen's influence is paramount. It reads like a variant of Rosmersholm, diluted though it be. If it proves anything, it is that the unpurified is to be distrusted because it brings unhappiness in its train. The Vockerat family is a fairly contented group until the appearance of Anna Mahr, a young woman from Zurich University who has absorbed the unsettling culture of the day. She speedily unseats the judgment of John Vockerat, and in becoming his affinity she makes him neglect his lovely wife. It is all so Ibsenian that we note with a sense of the incongruous the scene of the action, the Müggelsee near Berlin. John hates the religion of his parents, becomes estranged from these kindly folk, throws himself on the mercy of Anna, who, after lecturing him in the true-blue cerebral style of the emancipated woman, goes away. Distracted, the young man drowns himself.

Notwithstanding technical and psychologic advances, this effort is not so convincing as Before Sunrise. One feels the thesis prepared, the task attacked, and not the spontaneous work of art. Charles Henry Meltzer, Hauptmann's friend and English translator, declares that Before Sunrise was written while the poet was still filled with admiration of Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness, and after many conversations with Arno Holz and Bruno Wille, the socialist. In one respect it is very remarkable—the evocation of atmosphere. And some critics see in Anna Mahr a forerunner to Hilda Wangel of The Master Builder.

When, however, Die Weber was printed (1892), all Germany knew that the master had appeared. It was not until February, 1893, that the first performances took place on the Freie Bühne, Deutsches Theatre, Berlin. The drama stands at the parting of the ways. Not since Wagner's Die Meistersinger had such an attempt been made to clear the German stage of its gingerbread rhetoric, its pasteboard mock-antiques, its moonshine romantics. And while the Wagner comedy was all grace, sweetness, and light and only epical in its vast machinery of narration, The Weavers was a quivering transcript from life—and such life! Germany took fire from the blaze of the dramatist's generous wrath. Socialism or anarchy, what you will, were swallowed up in the presentment of this veracious document of wretched lives. Yet, while its tendenz is unmistakably an arraignment of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois master weavers, as is Zola's stern denunciation in Germinal of unfeeling mine owners, Hauptmann, being the finer artist, does not drive his lesson home with a moral sledge-hammer. He paints the picture; his audience finds the indictment. Here is a new German art at last.

And not altogether unprepared for this violent drama should have been his admirers. His short nouvelle, Bahnwärter Thiel, is full of pity for the downtrodden. This story sounds like a transposition of a Zola melodrama to a finer key. The companion tale in the same volume, The Apostle, might have been written by Dostoïevsky.

In Die Weber,—or De Waber, as it is called in the patois of Silesia,—Hauptmann is for the first time Hauptmann. Zola and Ibsen are no longer felt, for the resemblance to An Enemy of the People is of the vaguest. Henceforth it is the masses, not the individual. Raised in the weaving districts of Silesia, his grandfather a weaver and a witness of a similar strike with its dire consequences,—Robert Hauptmann, his father, also sat at the loom—the subject was one that could be treated with epic breadth and eloquence by the poet. The mob is the hero, for old Hilfe is only a representative of his class. Baumert the soldier, Ansorge, the women, the blind wife, and the climax where old Hilfe is dead and the little Mielchen tells with babyish joy the story of the shooting—every character, every incident, rings true, and rang so widely and so well that it set pealing the bells of the world. If Hauptmann had died after writing Die Weber, he would have been acclaimed a great dramatist.

It was Matthew Arnold who Englished Joubert's soul's cry, "You hurt me!" In this moving and gloomy and largely planned tragedy of the lowly, Hauptmann holds no brief for anarchy, plays upon no class sentiment. He seems as objective as Flaubert, yet no play that I ever witnessed is such a judgment of man and his cruelty to his fellow-beings.

The ancients, who sounded the abysmal depths of despair, crime, and terror, nevertheless contrived some relief; if no other, the artistic form itself palliated the awful content of a tragedy of Æschylus. But Hauptmann, with absolute indifference to our moral epidermis, strips bare for us human nature, and we revolt naturally enough. The truth, naked and unadorned, is always unpleasant. Pascal once wrote: "When I see the blindness and the misery of man; when I survey the whole dumb universe and man without light, left to himself and lost, as it were, in this corner of the universe, not knowing who placed him here, what he has come to do, what will become, of him when he dies, and incapable of any knowledge whatever, I fall into terror, like that of a man who, having been carried in his sleep to an island, desert and terrible, should awake ignorant of his whereabouts and with no means of escape, and therefore I wonder how those in so miserable a state do not fall into despair." What would he not have written after witnessing this play?

The Weavers is a parable. The Weavers is a symphony in five movements, with one grim, leading motive—hunger. In every act you hear that ominous, that sickening word "hunger." The necessity of such a play is chilling to our pampered and capricious appetites. Hunger! What a horrible theme for an art work! The northern novelist, Knut Hamsun, has in a more personal style used the same theme. We love blithe art, art imbued with deep serenity,—heiterkeit, Winckelmann called it,—so away with this grim phantom, evoked by a ruthless imagination! But what if it be true? That is the affair of the Commissioner of Charities. We pay our taxes. Go to, Herr Hauptmann, go to! We prefer illusionists, not unmaskers of grim truths. Yet hunger!

"There is," wrote Thomas Hardy, "a size at which dignity begins; farther on there is a size at which grandeur begins; farther on there is a size at which solemnity begins; farther on a size at which ghastliness begins."

The novelist was speaking of the interstellar universe. In Die Weber there are depths where ghastliness begins. It is not a play, it is a chorale of woe, malediction, and want. The people, hardly civilized, are put before us, a marvellous vitascope of pain and disease. What avails criticism before such a spectacle?

It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the grewsome story of this play—how the weavers starved, how the weavers revolted, and that wonderful ending, old age stiffened in death and childhood merrily unconscious. It recalls Victor Hugo's precipice with its single crannied rose in full bloom. And The Weavers was the first modern play that deals with the life of the proletarians.

College Crampton (1892), Der Biberpelz (1893), Hannele (1893), Florian Geyer (1896), Die Versunkene Glocke (1897), Fuhrmann Henschel(1898), Schluck und Jau (1900), Michael Kramer (1900), Der rote Hahn (1901), Der Arme Heinrich (1902), Rose Bernd (1903), complete the list thus far of this fecund and remarkable man. He has felt his way through naturalistic drama to comedy, and in the latter without much success; and from comedy to historical drama, with no success at all; indeed, Florian Geyer was a failure, though in its amended version as given last October 22, in Berlin, at the Lessing Theatre, it won approval, critical and popular. The poet has written a new five-act comedy for the same theatre, which he calls The Merry Maiden of Bishopsberg.

The Beaver-Coat and The Red Cock—the symbol of fire—are folk-plays, the comedy rather grim, the sense of actuality strong. The first is a "thieves' comedy" and the fooling is heavy enough in both pieces; the latter is a continuation. German officialism is parodied. Schluck und Jau was also a failure. Written partially in prose and verse, it recalls Calderon, Grillparzer, Shakespeare's prologue to The Taming of the Shrew, and Hauptmann himself. Although Fuhrmann Henschel followed Hannele and The Sunken Bell, we prefer to speak of it and several other plays before those two masterpieces. Wagoner Henschel was a surprise and a deep disappointment to many of Hauptmann's admirers. He seemed to return to the most sordid of topics, yet it contains passages of spiritual beauty; while as a whole the note it sounds is a supernatural one, despite the vileness of its surroundings. The psychologic depiction of Henschel's downfall is masterly. He is a stolid teamster whose first wife in her death-bed makes him promise not to marry the servant girl, Hanna Scholl. But he does, for some one must look after his daughter. The moral dégringolade begins. The woman is a vicious slattern. She is unfaithful. Things go badly. Henschel comes to believe that his first wife haunts him, and kills himself. It is very morbid, but it fits in the Hauptmann scheme, as Professor J. F. Coar in his Studies in German Literature shows: "Hannele contrasted spiritual consciousness with moral consciousness. And Henry in The Sunken Bell fails because he attempts what his creator, Hauptmann, attempted in Hannele. How, then, shall a poet find his quest rewarded? Only by seeking the spiritual mirrored in the moral. Hauptmann is far from having such a vision in Teamster Henschel; still he is to be credited with the effort to obtain it. Again, he could only see the misery of life.... In constantly narrowing circles the thoughts of Henschel turn about the one tense feeling of wrong committed when he married again in violation of his promise. The infidelity of the second wife appears to him like the judgment of God.... At night the figure of his dead wife lies down with him.... There is no trace of dialectical reasoning in this simple Silesian teamster. He stands facing existence without the ability to apply his reason to anything but the humdrum affairs of life. Once forced beyond the bounds of these, reason gives way, and he is gradually led into a pessimistic fatalism from which there is no escape. But to create by transforming spiritual life into moral action is the law of individual existence, and men, as Hauptmann sees them, are in the world for this purpose."

On the material side Fuhrmann Henschel might be called a drama of insomnia. The majority of the Hauptmann plays record the struggle of mankind to widen its spiritual horizon. College Crampton is an exception. It is merely an entertaining piece shorn of tragic meanings. Moreover, it contains some excellent comedy and characterization. The hero—a sorry one—drinks. Michael Kramer ends with the suicide of a foolish talented young fellow, who is jeered to the desperate deed by a lot of idlers in a Silesian café. The types are local. Kramer, his father, is an austere artist. The milieu is the artistic, though as drama we are never carried off our feet. Loosely joined episodes and too much dialogue mar the piece. There are, however, many deft touches, and the scene wherein Kramer views his dead son is full of reserve power and suggestiveness. Nearly all these plays enumerated thus far are irregular on the constructive side, withal effective and human. Hauptmann has ever been careless in his technics. The well-made play is never in his thoughts, for he works from within to external details. Even in his imitative period he betrayed this creative impulse.

Der Arme Heinrich is not Hauptmann at his happiest, despite rare flashes of beauty and power in this replica of a mediæval miracle play. The theme is unpleasant, a leprous knight rescued by the unselfish pure love of a maiden—an idea as old as The Flying Dutchman, though set forth in different terms, framed by another environment. It is rather to Hannele and Die Versunkene Glocke we must turn for the greater Hauptmann.

In Hannele and in his other dramatic productions he has proved himself to possess in a consummate degree the art of arousing certain emotions, of presenting most vividly certain types which have excited his brain into abnormal activity; above all he knows the art of contrasts. He is an idealist, he is a realist, he is a religionist, he is a natural philosopher. After carefully analyzing Hannele, on is tempted to pronounce it the work of a transcendental realist.

The play is the history of a child's soul. It is a psychological study of the brain of a wretched little outcast, who, just before her death, experiences delirious trances, in which condition the events and personages of her unhappy life become objective visions, and these visions are seen by the audience. The story is so simply, so chastely told that one marvels effects can be produced by a verbal machinery of such simplicity. The disgust inspired by the quarrelling, fetid crew of beggars in the almshouse gives way to feelings of the most profound pity at the entrance of the poor little would-be suicide. Her first words, "I'm afraid," inspire sensations of pity at her condition, and horror of the brute who drove her to the commission of such a desperate deed. Hauptmann's touch is so true, so tender, that he evokes with ease the whole past of this wretched girl, whose existence has been one of blows, curses, kicks, and starvation. Her undeveloped soul, cramped as it had been by her neglected life, has awakened under the kindnesses of her teacher Gottwald, and how natural that he should be invested by her with almost supernatural attributes!

Hauptmann conveys all this and more through the half-scared utterances of Hannele, who refuses to respond to the pertinacious questionings of Magistrate Berger, and only speaks when Gottwald asks her to. She appears to be a stubborn girl, but it is a stubbornness born of hard beatings and harsh language. She has been the butt of the village children, and the one ray of light which has entered her life is her teacher, and through him some glimmerings of religion. Heaven to her is a place all golden glory, whose Lord is overflowing with pity for unhappy children, and where she can eat, drink, and be warm. She has been half starved and turned out in the streets on biting cold winter nights. It is most natural that she should long earnestly for this heaven, and her appeals to be allowed to die, so that she could see the Lord, are eloquent to a degree. She is only a beggar girl, this Hannele, and Hauptmann gives her to us in all her rags and misery, and free from mawkish sentimentality.

Pity is the dominating note of the play, especially in part first; Hannele's bruised body, shrinking, sensitive soul, arouse the deepest pity. The transition to an atmosphere where the elements of awe and fear enter is quietly accomplished by the dramatist. Hannele's delirium is the medium. When she first appears in the strong arms of her teacher she is numbed by the icy waters of the pond, but the warmth of the hot drink and the hot bricks soon revive her and she wanders a little in her speech. She tells Gottwald that it was the Lord who beckoned to her in the water, and when she is left alone with Sister Martha, she screams with fear at the sight of old Daddy Pleschke's hat and coat, which hang at the foot of her miserable bed. The child thinks she sees her stepfather.

But mark the skill of Hauptmann. After she is left alone her dreams begin to assume a more definite shape, and then we, sitting in the darkened auditorium, see Mattern, the mason, her brute of a stepfather, as a vile nightmare. He acts and speaks to the little form on the bed as he would in real life, and it writhes in agony, and finally Hannele, her brain on fire with the hideous vision, awakens to his call, and jumps tremblingly out of bed, rushes into a corner for shelter, and there faints.

The return of Sister Martha, the replacing of Hannele on her couch, are followed by the further progress of the fever and delirium. Being alone, a vision of her mother appears. It is the most striking of the play. Her mother consoles her, speaks of heaven in tender and lofty imagery, and hints at her suffering while alive, and just grazes the subject of Hannele's birth. Her suspected father is the examining magistrate Berger, but the idea is lightly dwelt upon—sufficiently, however, to give us a glimmer of the truth and adding a deeper accent to the gloom. Hannele's mother was hounded to her death as was this child. Her body, as we know by the testimony of the wood-cutter, Seidel, was a mass of bruises after death. The interview between mother and daughter is solemn and yet piteously human. The poor child cries aloud after the fading figure and later shows with joy to Sister Martha the supposed flower, Golden Sesame, which her mother gave her. Then this tiny waif of the gutter becomes light-headed and sings of flowers, of her teacher, and of the angels she has seen. From this delirious state she never recovers, and her dreams take on a darker tinge in the second part of the play.

A great dark angel appears and remains dumb to the child's excited questionings. Her visions become involved here, for the Deaconess is also seen, and while she is habited as Sister Martha, her features are those of Hannele's mother. The child notices this and remarks upon it. And now a touch of Hoffmannish fantasy is given in the appearance of the village tailor, who salutes her as the Princess Hannele, and delights her by producing a shining robe and a pair of small slippers. Although she knows she is preparing for her death-bed, she is delighted. Her conversation with the Deaconess has taught her that death is not to be avoided—that it is the gate to joys eternal. There is something subtly sad in this child eagerly asking about death and the hereafter, with the awful symbol of death sitting in grim silence before her. Hauptmann has deeply probed the childish heart. The fantastic tailor retires after deferentially saluting Death, and then some children, headed by Gottwald, enter and beg Hannele's pardon for calling her Princess Rag-tag. Gottwald is bidding her farewell when a lot of the village people appear, and later the crystal coffin into which Hannele is laid. There is nothing repulsive in all this, despite its realism. Hauptmann's art is so far removed from the crude that sequence follows sequence in the most natural fashion and just as in De Quincey's Dream Fugue.

Then comes the most dramatic part of these visions. Mattern slouches in and begins to curse Hannele, and to search for her in the dark corners. The neighbours cluster about the coffin, hiding it from view. The stranger enters and calls Mattern to account. There is a scene between the two. Mattern denies having treated the child badly, and thunder and lightning rebuke him for the lie. He perjures himself, and the mystic flower glows with miraculous light on Hannele's breast. The neighbours, who play the part of Greek chorus, fiercely cry, "Murderer! murderer!" and as one pursued by the Furies the miserable wretch rushes away to hang himself. The stranger assumes a supernatural appearance. He becomes clothed in white, and his brow shines. He advances to the crystal basket wherein lies Hannele, and bids her arise. She does so, and the neighbours flee affrighted. Remember that all this occurs within the darkened chambers of Hannele's sick brain. Its objectivity, so far as we are concerned, is a device of the dramatist. Hannele arises and goes to the stranger, who is a glorified image of her teacher, Gottwald. Some lyrical passages, strongly tinged with Oriental colouring, follow, and an apotheosis closes the scene.

After all this burst of colour and harmony, for there is much music of harps and plucked strings, we are almost instantly transported to the almshouse again, and see Hannele once more in her rags on her squalid bed. The doctor gravely announces, "She is dead," and Sister Martha ends the play by saying, "She is in heaven."

Now make of Hannele what you will. Consider it as a plea against cruelty to children, as a strong pictorial proverb, anything. There is symbolism lurking in its situations. The Christ-idea of pity, an idea new to the pagan world, but not new to Buddhism, may be considered as the key-note of Hannele. Religious it is not. Blasphemous, however, in intention it is not, and one fails to see any similarity between it and Jean Beraud's picture of a Christ attired in nineteenth-century garb and with a modern Magdalen washing his feet.

Hauptmann may tread on remarkably delicate ground at times; but his seriousness and artistic ingenuity have enabled him to produce a most poetic analysis of a soul and give it dramatic rhythms. To have the courage to give permanent shape to such a fantastic dream requires, besides imagination, marked technical abilities.

To me Hannele seems like a huge chant to the glory of death. Death, "whose truer name is Onward," as sang the poet, is the theme, and Death is shown to be Lord and Master. Like Maeterlinck, Hauptmann tries to give emotion in the mass. You remember in L'Intruse and Les Aveugles, how everything is subordinated to the production of the one thrill—that of fear. By dissimilar method Hauptmann gets a similar result. He meets death with a grave sweetness. At first terrible as is the figure of the great Dark Angel, with his dread sword all bathed in greenish light, the Deaconess brings balm to the anxious, questioning soul of the child, and she meets death with dignity and submission. With some of the same gentle and elevated philosophy does Hauptmann approach his theme. The beggar child and her sufferings and dreams serve for him as something which he drapes about with wisdom and poetry.

It is a reversion to the old miracle play cunningly blended with modern realism; it is this that makes its form seemingly amorphous, and renders it both a challenge and stumbling-block to the critics. From the old view-point such a play as this is not fit for the boards. It lacks action, and deals with states of emotion rather than with dramatic events. But a soul life can also be dramatic, and Hauptmann, who knows Parsifal well, has retained an admixture of realism so as to set off by violent contrast the exalted idealism of the later scenes.

Jules Lemaître, the French critic, in praising Hannele, spoke of the persistency in us of early religious impressions, no matter how blurred they become by contact with the world. Oddly enough, this mixture of the real and the supernatural forestalled Gorky and his slum plays. Gorky himself could not have conceived and executed anything more poignant than the story of Hannele—"Petite sœur de la grande Brunnhild endormie aux rochers déserts," as Gabriel Trarieux calls her. A dream poem, a study in mysticism, Hannele evokes memories of Maeterlinck, though it "lacks the unity of his atmosphere," as an English critic has rightly said. But it is moving art, nevertheless.

Hauptmann wears all the earmarks of a genius. He is child of his age to a dangerous degree, and his tremulous, vibrating sensibility mirrored the hysterical agitation, the pessimism, the sad strivings, the individualism, the fret-fire fomentings and unbelief of a dying century. He knows Goethe, and after the last act of The Sunken Bell one feels constrained to cry, "The third part of Faust!" But it is not Faust, neither is it Tannhäuser, though there are analogies; it is realism, it is idealism, it is pantheism, it is Wagnerism. Above all Friedrich Nietzsche towers in the background, and there is poesy, exquisite poesy.

The Sunken Bell is a compound of antagonistic elements. The unities seem askew, yet the result is artistic and illusory. Hauptmann has a clairvoyant quality; he imposes upon his audience his dream of his own fantastic world, and you find yourself five minutes after the rise of the curtain devoutly believing in this queer No-man's land of mischievous water goblins, satyrs, wonderful white nymphs, and sorrowful mortals. It is all a masque—a profound masque of the spirit in labour. Viewed as a symbol, we see in Heinrich the bell-founder, the type of the struggling, the aspiring artist, who, cast down by defeat, is led to more remote and loftier heights by a new ideal, there to live the life of the Uebermensch, the Super-man, of Nietzsche. The fall is inevitable. Dare as dared Faust and Ibsen's Brand to desert the valleys and scale the slopes of Parnassus, and man's fate is assured.

Hauptmann's hero is a bell-founder who, crazed by grief at the loss of his bell in the lake, mounts the peak and lies dying at the door of a witch. It is at a period so charmingly pictured by Heine. The twilight of the gods has begun and the scared peasant caught flashes of faun-like creatures flitting in woodland glade and grove, still saw shining the breasts of the nymph in the brake, and piously crossed himself when toad, snake, and worm crossed his path. Heinrich is found by Rautendelein, an elfish being, an exquisite creation of fire, of flame, something of Ariel, Miranda, Puck, naïve Gretchen, a new Undine, a symbol of the freedom of nature, a creature touched with the vaguer surmise of adolescence, the most poetically conceived since Goethe's, and yet evocative of Hans Christian Andersen. She, like the mermaid of Andersen, loves the unconscious mortal, and despite the jaundiced warnings of an old spirit of the well, she follows the sick man back to his abode. The first act is ably contrived. There is atmosphere, and the well-nigh impossible parts of the faun and the frog man—the latter indulges in the familiar Brek-ke-ke-keks of Aristophanes—become real for the moment. It is the Hauptmann spell that weighs upon our senses. Andersen-like, too, is the discovery by this child fairy that love means pain. She finds a tear in her eye and thinks it is dew. The mystery of womanhood encompasses her.