Gerhart Hauptmann by Brian W

GERHART HAUPTMANN BY BRIAN W. DOWNS THE practice of dividing literary history into periods leads to abuse; it does, however, seem to have a justification in fact. Very rarely do we find a solitary great man rising above the dead level of his fellows like the Peak of Teneriffe from the ocean; geniuses more generally stand near together in time, and, even when one o'ertops them all, he is some Mont Blanc with Monte Rosa and other giants not far off and smaller eminences clustered round. The corollary to this has been less frequently remarked on. Every history embraces periods when the energies of men lie reposing and the movements of the day derive their impulse from activities of years gone past. No new leaders appear and the old content themselves with a repetition of former successes. As such periods in English literature we can designate the dozen years or so which lie between The Dunciad and the emergence of Samuel Richardson and, almost exactly one hundred years later, the interval from the death of Byron and the breakdown of Scott to the rise to fa,me of Tennyson, Browliing and Dickens. It is not improbable that we, at the present day, after the lapse of yet another century are living in another such fallow time; but that it is impossible to discern accurately at so close a range, and the last of its kind which we can definitely recognize is that of the eighteen-eighties, roughly delimited by the death of George Eliot and the publication of Plain Tales from the Hills. This scheme can be paralleled in other lands: indeed it is prob able that the alternating aggregation and disappearance of genius is, like the booms and slumps of commerce, international—though again as with trade, the dates of each cycle may not exactly tally in all parts of the world. In all Western literatures, certainly, on a time of considerable distinction half way through last century there followed, thirty years later, one of hesitation and decline in PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED GERHART HAUPTMANN 103 achievement; and their present character is determined by the genius of the great writers who first emerged from that minor chaos. One of the earliest and most important among these was the acknowledged doyen of German letters, Herr Gerhart Haupt- mann, who not only attained to that position at an uncommonly early age, but has also maintained his prestige and fame more successfully than most of his surviving peers—so that, indeed, certain acute observers of current events believe he may inspire and lead the new generation of German writers as he stood in the van of the old, that he will yet prove himself Lessing and Goethe (say Johnson and Coleridge) in one. II In Germany the literary outlook about the year 1885 struck observers as more unpromising perhaps than in any other country. From Konstanz to Konigsberg, from Greifswald to Graz, the older men remarked with sorrow that no one seemed waiting for the empty shoes of Freytag, Spielhagen, Geibel, Auerbach and the other veterans who had charmed their genera tion, and that the most striking and disquieting success of the decade had been gained by Theodor Fontane at the age of sixty and more; the middle-aged, uneasily jubilant at the national unity welded by Bismarck, lamented the weakness of man power wherewith to win an artistic supremacy comparable with that of arms; and the young (or "Youngest", as they pleased to call themselves) could do no more than lay down laws to govern the new writers, if and when they should deign to appear. Prominent among the latter stood the brothers Hart and certain cronies of theirs who foregathered in the Berlin suburb of Friedrichshagen, and precisely to their obscure lodgings, while they were pontifi cating in full throat, did the coltish steps of a certain young Herr Hauptmann lead him. In him, with his shock of wild hair and uncouth, docile energy, his artistic ambitions and his freedom from any compromising literary Past, the " Friedrichshagener Kreis" (Circle) quickly espied the raw material which it could knead into the new model patented by themselves; and where is the young man of twenty-three who would not surrender himself gladly PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 104 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW to such man-handling—particularly if his writing desk lay buried already with completed and half-completed MSS: sketches of a drama and epic on Arminius, among other things, a Life of Christ which should knock David Strauss and Renan into a cocked hat, and the elegiac epic of Promethidenloos {The Lot of Prometheus's Kin), all ready for the publisher? To the flattering interest and the theories of Julius and Hein- rich Hart, then, young Herr Hauptmann yielded himself, and at Erkner—^just down the railway-line from Friedrichshagen—he set himself to justify the interest and practice the theories. Promethidenloos duly appeared before the year was out (1885); its author wrote a grim short story about a homicidal signalman; he turned out a set of lyrics; he began an autobiographical novel, which no doubt told of his birth and childhood in his father's h6tel "Zur Preussischen Krone" at ObersalzbrUnn in Prussian Silesia, of the impression that Schiller's poem of Der Taucher (The Diver) made on his very young consciousness, of the second ary school at Breslau where he spent four inglorious years, of the Moravian relatives who tried to make a pietistic farmer of him (as, many years later, he was to tell again in Anna), of the provincial School of Art from which he was expelled and of another abortive attempt to turn sculptor, of the pilgrimage to Italy and of the ideals and sufferings from which Promethiden loos grew, and of the three Thienemann sisters whom he and his two brothers so precociously and symmetrically had married. At Erkner too he wrote the tragedy to which at first he gave the title of Der Samann (The Sower), but later altered to Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise). Into this play of a young prig who, in fear of alcoholically tainted offspring, runs away from his betrothed, thereby driving her to suicide, the author put all he knew of the doctrines that his friends had preached to him and had tentatively been introducing into practice. It disdains kin ship with Heyse, Wildenbruch and the other post-Romantics of the day, and as evidently derives its ancestry from Zola's Assom- moir, Tolstoy's Power of Darkness and Hebbel's Maria Magda lene; it turns away from the smart metropolitan society of drawing-room plays to treat of the actual social conditions (wretched, of course) in the easily identified locality of Weiss- PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED GERHART HAUPTMANN 105 stein, within five miles of Herr Hauptmann's birthplace; it eschews all suggestiveness and mercilessly fixes attention on the bases of suggestiveness—incontinence, rape and childbirth; it freely pat ronizes what the theatre calls "ideas" by referring, for instance, to Professor Dahn's most worthy novel Bin Kampf um Rom {A Fight for Rome) and the temperance-propaganda of the enthusias tic Bunge, whose statistics the hero, clad in his nice Jaeger coat, unblushingly quotes at length. Small wonder, then, that the "Verein Freie Buhne" (Free Stage Society), newly founded by the Harts and others, accepted For SonnenaM/graw^ for presentation immediately after their inaugural performance of Ibsen's Ghosts and that its production on October 20,1889, should have been con sidered in advance as an epoch-making event, for which the first night of Victor Hugo's Hernani alone offered a worthy parallel. Now, doctrinaire of the tenets of Naturalism as Vor Sonnenauf- gang was both in intention and in broad outline, keen eyes per ceived that it was something less highfalutin at the same time. The hero, Alfred Loth, might unintentionally be presented as a fool and a monster, but the qualities by which unbiassed observers recognized him as such were skilfully turned to dramatic account, if indeed they had not been forced upon the author by purely dramatic exigences; the action might exhibit almost all the hor rors attending upon sexual appetite, but it led also to some lus ciously sentimental incidents, and the drunken assault of a father upon his daughter or the shrieks of childbed could still titillate senses jaded by a surfeit of silk stockings and double-meanings; the ordinary playgoer might anxiously apprehend the horrid spectre of Ibsen or Zola under the groaning, but manifestly rotten, board spread in Act I or behind the realistic dunghills of Act II, but Loth himself came forward to reassure him by describing their works as "medicine" and insisting that literature, ranging beyond the actual, should describe men as they should he; and, lastly, all the prattle about books and ideas proved most grateful to the class of human beings, not peculiar to any single race or age, which always enjoys something better if for its pleasure it can find some reason quite unconnected with enjoyment. At once, then, Herr Hauptmann found himself not alone the standby of the "Verein Freie Buhne" but also—what proved of PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 106 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW much greater moment—the charmer of an influential playgoing public. Piece followed piece in rapid and approved succession: in 1890 Das Friedensfest (The Festival of Peace), best characterized by its sub-title of "a family catastrophe"; in 1891 Einsame Menschen (Lonely Folk), another Prig's Tragedy, in which how ever it is the Ph.D.

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