The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann
Chapter 1 : The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann.by Gerhart Hauptmann.VOL 1.PREFACE The present e

The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann.

by Gerhart Hauptmann.

VOL 1.

PREFACE

The present edition of Hauptmann's works contains all of his plays with the exception of a few inconsiderable fragments and the historical drama _Florian Geyer_. The latter has been excluded by reason of its great length, its divergence from the characteristic moods of Hauptmann's art, and that failure of high success which the author himself has implicitly acknowledged. The arrangement of the volumes follows, with such modifications as the increase of material has made necessary, the method used by Hauptmann in the first and hitherto the only collected edition of his dramas. Five plays are presented here which that edition did not include, and hence the present collection gives the completest view now attainable of Hauptmann's activity as a dramatist.

The translation of the plays, seven of which are written entirely in dialect, offered a problem of unusual difficulty. The easiest solution, that namely, of rendering the speech of the Silesian peasants or the Berlin populace into some existing dialect of English, I was forced to reject at once. A very definite set of a.s.sociative values would thus have been gained for the language of Hauptmann's characters, but of values radically different from those suggested in the original. I found it necessary, therefore, to invent a dialect near enough to the English of the common people to convince the reader or spectator, yet not so near to the usage of any cla.s.s or locality as to interpose between him and Hauptmann's characters an Irish or a c.o.c.kney, a Southern or a New England atmosphere. Into this dialect, with which the work of my collaborators has been made to conform, I have sought to render as justly and as exactly as possible the intensely idiomatic speech that Hauptmann employs. In doing this I have had to take occasional liberties with my text, but I have tried to reduce these to a minimum, and always to make them serve a closer interpretation of the original shade of thought or turn of expression. The rendering of the plays written in normal literary prose or verse needs no such explanation nor the plea for a measure of critical indulgence which that explanation implies.

I owe hearty thanks to Dr. Hauptmann for the promptness and cordiality with which he has either rectified or confirmed my view of the development and meaning of his thought and art as stated in the Introduction, and to my wife for faithful a.s.sistance in the preparation of these volumes.

LUDWIG LEWISOHN.

COLUMBUS, O., June, 1912.

INTRODUCTION

I

Gerhart Hauptmann, the most distinguished of modern German dramatists, was born in the Silesian village of Obersalzbrunn on November 15, 1862.

By descent he springs immediately from the common people of his native province to whose life he has so often given the graveness of tragedy and the permanence of literature. His grandfather, Ehrenfried, felt in his own person the bitter fate of the Silesian weavers and only through energy and good fortune was enabled to change his trade to that of a waiter. By 1824 he was an independent inn-keeper and was followed in the same business by the poet's father, Robert Hauptmann. The latter, a man of solid and not uncultivated understanding, married Marie Straehler, daughter of one of the fervent Moravian households of Silesia, and had become, when his sons Carl and Gerhart were born, the proprietor of a well-known and prosperous hotel, _Zur Preussischen Krone_.

From the village-school of Obersalzbrunn, where he was but an idle pupil, Gerhart was sent in 1874 to the _Realschule_ at Breslau. Here, in the company of his older brothers, Carl and Georg, the lad remained for nearly four years, having impressed his teachers most strongly, it appears, by a lack of attention. For this reason, but also perhaps because his father, injured by compet.i.tors and by a change in local conditions, had lost his independence, Gerhart was withdrawn from school in 1878. He was next to become a farmer and, to this end, was placed in the pious family of an uncle. Gradually, however, artistic impulses began to disengage themselves--he had long modelled in a desultory way--and in October, 1880, at the advice of his maturer brother Carl Hauptmann proceeded to Breslau and was enrolled as a student in the Royal College of Art.

The value of this restless s.h.i.+fting in his early years is apparent. For the discontent that marked his unquiet youth made for a firm retention of impressions. Observation, in the saying of Balzac, springs from suffering, and Hauptmann saw the Silesian country-folk and the artists of Breslau with an almost morbid exactness of vision. Actual conflict sharpened his insight. Three weeks after entering the art-school he received a disciplinary warning and early in 1881 he was rusticated for eleven weeks. Nevertheless he remained in Breslau until April, 1882, when he joined his brother Carl and became a special student at the University of Jena. Here he heard lectures by Liebmann, Eucken and Haeckel. But the academic life did not hold him long. Scarcely a year pa.s.sed and Hauptmann is found at Hamburg, the guest of his future parents-in-law and his brother's. Thence he set out on an Italian journey, travelling by way of Spain and the South of France to Genoa, and visiting Naples, Capri and Rome. Although his delight in these places was diminished by his keen social consciousness, he returned to Italy the following year (1884) and, for a time, had a sculptor's studio in Rome. Overtaken here by typhoid fever, he was nursed back to health by his future wife, Marie Thienemann, and returned to Germany to gather strength at the Thienemann country house.

So far, sculpture had held him primarily; it was now that the poetic impulse a.s.serted itself. Seeking a synthesis of these tendencies in a third art, Hauptmann determined, for a time, to adopt the calling of an actor. To this end he went to Berlin. Here, however, the interest in literature soon grew to dominate every other and, in 1885, the year of his marriage to Fraulein Thienemann, he published his first work: _Promethidenlos_.

The poem is romantic and amorphous and gives but the faintest promise of the masterly handling of verse to be found in _The Sunken Bell_ and _Henry of Aue_. Its interest resides solely in its confirmation of the facts of Hauptmann's development. For the hero of _Promethidenlos_ vacillates between poetry and sculpture, but is able to give himself freely to neither art because of his overwhelming sense of social injustice and human suffering. And this, in brief, was the state of Hauptmann's mind when, in the autumn of 1885, he settled with his young wife in the Berlin suburb of Erkner.

The years of his residence here are memorable and have already become the subject of study and investigation. And rightly so; for during this time there took place that impact of the many obscure tendencies of the age upon the most sensitive and gifted of German minds from which sprang the naturalistic movement. That movement dominated literature for a few years. Then, in Hauptmann's own temper and in his own work, arose a vigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe technique and incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far toward producing--for a second time--a new vision and a new art. The conditions amid which this development originated are essential to a full understanding of Hauptmann's work.

II

At the end of the Franco-Prussian war, united Germany looked forward to a literary movement commensurate with her new greatness. That movement did not appear. It was forgotten that men in the maturity of their years and powers could not suddenly change character and method and that the rise of a new generation was needed. So soon, however, as the first members of that generation became articulate, a bitter and almost merciless warfare arose in literature and in the drama. The brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, vigorous in both critical and creative activity, a.s.serted as early as 1882 that German literature was then, at its best, the faint imitation of an outworn cla.s.sicism, and the German drama a transference of the basest French models. It is easy to see to-day that their view was partisan and narrow. Neither Wilbrandt and Heyse, on the one hand, nor Lindau and L'Arronge, on the other, represented the whole literary activity of the empire. It is equally easy, however, to understand their impatience with a literature which, upon the whole, lacked any breath of greatness, and handled the stuff of human life with so little freshness, incisiveness and truth.

What direction was the new literature to take? The decisive influence was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. For the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy.

Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement.

But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern--everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the intuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with which one rubs elbows!" Such, with whatever later developments, was the central doctrine of young Germany in the eighties; such the belief that gradually expressed itself in a number of definite organisations and publications.

The most noteworthy of these, prior to the founding of the _Freie Buhne_, were the magazine _Die Gesellschaft_ (1885), edited by Michael Conrad, the most ardent of German Zolaists, and the society _Durch_ (1886), in which the revolutionary spirits of Berlin united to promulgate the art canons of the future. "Literature and criticism," Conrad declared, must first of all be "liberated from the tyranny of the conventional young lady:" the programme of _Durch_ announced that the poet must give creative embodiment to the life of the present, that he shall show us human beings of flesh and blood and depict their pa.s.sions with implacable fidelity; that the ideal of art was no longer the Antique, but the Modern. Nor was there wanting creative activity in the spirit of these views. Franzos and Kretzer, to name but a few, originated the modern realistic novel in Germany, and Liliencron brought back vigour and concreteness to the lyric.

Into the tense atmosphere of this literary battle Hauptmann was cast when he took up his residence at Erkner. The house he occupied was the last in the village, half buried in woods and with far prospects over the heaths and deep green, melancholy waters of Brandenburg. Hither came, among many others, the brothers Hart, the novelist Kretzer, Wilhelm Bolsche, the inexhaustible prophet of the new science and the new art, and finally, the founder of German naturalism as distinguished from that of France--Arno Holz, The efforts of all these men harmonised with Hauptmann's mood. Naturalistic art goes for its subject matter to the forgotten and disinherited of the earth, and it was with these that Hauptmann was primarily concerned. He read Darwin and Karl Marx, Saint-Simon and Zola. He was absorbed not by any problem of art but by the being and fate of humanity itself.

Under these influences and governed by such thoughts, he began his career as a man of letters anew. But his progress was slow and uncertain. In 1887 he published in Conrad's _Gesellschaft_ an episodic story, _Bahnwarter Thiel_, weak in narrative technique and obviously inspired by Zola. Even the sudden expansion of human characters into demonic symbols of their ruling pa.s.sions is imitated. The medium clearly irked him and gave him no opportunity for personal expression. For many months his activity was tentative and fruitless. Early in 1889, however, Arno Holz, known until then only by a volume of brave and resonant verse, visited Erkner and brought with him his theory of "consistent naturalism" as ill.u.s.trated by _Papa Hamlet_ and _Die Familie Selicke_, sketches and a drama in ma.n.u.script. This meeting gave Hauptmann one of those illuminating technical hints which every creative artist knows. It brought him an immediate method such as neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky had been able to bring, and decided him for naturalism and for the drama.

He had found himself at last. During a visit to his parents he gave himself up to intense labour and returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889 with his first drama, _Before Dawn_, completed.

The play might have waited indefinitely for performance, had not Otto Brahm and Paul Schlenther, both critical thinkers of some significance, founded the free stage society (_Freie Buhne_) earlier in the same year.

It was the aim of this society to give at least eight annual performances in the city of Berlin which should be wholly free from the influence of the censor and from the pressure of economic needs. The greater number of the first series of performances had already been prepared for by a selection of foreign plays--Tolstoi, Goncourt, Ibsen, Bjornsen, Strindberg--when, at the last moment, a young German dramatist presented himself and succeeded in having his play accepted. Thus the society, long since dead, had the good fortune of fulfilling the function for which it was created: it launched the naturalistic movement; it cradled the modern drama of Germany.

The first performance of _Before Dawn_ (Oct. 20, 1889) was tumultuous. It recalled the famous _Hernani_ battle of French romanticism. But the victory of Hauptmann was not long in doubt. With his third play he conquered the national stage of which he has since been, with whatever variations of immediate success, the undisputed master.

III

The "consistent naturalism" of Holz and his collaborator Johannes Schlaf is the technical foundation of Hauptmann's work. He has long transcended its narrow theory and the shallow positivism on which it was based. It discarded verse and he has written great verse; it banished the past from art and he has gone to legend and history for his subjects; it forbade the use of symbols and he has, at times, made an approach to his meaning unnecessarily difficult. But Hauptmann has never quite abandoned the practice of that form of art which resulted from the theories of Holz.

From history and poetry he has always returned to the naturalistic drama.

_Rose Bernd_ follows _Henry of Aue_, and _Griselda_ immediately preceded _The Rats_. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed him into the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulously devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and human. Hence it is clear that an a.n.a.lysis of the consistent naturalism of German literature is, with whatever modifications, an a.n.a.lysis of Hauptmann's work in its totality. Like nearly all the greater dramatists he had his forerunners and his prophets: he proceeds from a school of art and thought which, even in transcending, he ill.u.s.trates.

The consistent naturalists, then, aimed not to found a new art but, in any traditional sense, to abandon it. They desired to reduce the conventions of technique to a minimum and to eliminate the writer's personality even where Zola had admitted its necessary presence--in the choice of subject and in form. For style, the very religion of the French naturalistic masters, there was held to be no place, since there was to be, in this new literature, neither direct exposition, however impersonal, nor narrative. In other words, none of the means of representation were to be used by which art achieves the illusion of life; since art, in fact, was no longer to create the illusion of reality, but to _be_ reality. The founders of the school would have admitted that the French had done much by the elimination of intrigue and a liberal choice of theme. They would still have seen--and rightly according to their premises--creative vision and not truth even in the oppressive pathology of _Germinie Lacerteux_ and the morbid brutalities of _La Terre_. The opinion of Flaubert that any subject suffices, if the treatment be excellent, was modified into: there must be neither intentional choice of theme nor stylistic treatment. For style supposes rearrangement, personal vision, unjust selection of detail, and literature must be an exact rendition of the actual.

Stated so baldly the doctrine of consistent naturalism verges on the absurd. Eliminate selection of detail and personal vision, and art becomes not only coextensive with life, but shares its confusion and its apparent purposelessness. It loses all interpretative power and ceases to be art. Practically, however, the doctrine led to a very definite form--the naturalistic drama. For, if all indirect treatment of life be discarded, nothing is left but the recording of speech and, if possible, of speech actually overheard. The juxtaposition of such blocks of scrupulously rendered conversation const.i.tutes, in fact, the earliest experiments of Arno Holz. Under the creative energy of Hauptmann, however, the form at once grew into drama, but a drama which sought to rely as little as possible upon the traditional devices of dramaturgic technique. There was to be no implication of plot, no culmination of the resulting struggle in effective scenes, no superior articulateness on the part of the characters. A succession of simple scenes was to present a section of life without rearrangement or heightening. There could be no artistic beginning, for life comes shadowy from life; there could be no artistic ending, for the play of life ends only in eternity.

The development of the drama in such a direction had, of course, been foreshadowed. The plays of Ibsen's middle period tend to a simpler rendering of life, and the cold intellect of Strindberg had rejected the "symmetrical dialogue" of the French drama in order "to let the brains of men work unhindered." But Hauptmann carries the same methods extraordinarily far and achieves a poignant verisimilitude that rivals the pity and terror of the most memorable drama of the past.

These methods lead, naturally, to the exclusion of several devices. Thus Hauptmann, like Ibsen and Shaw, avoids the division of acts into scenes.

The coming and going of characters has the un.o.btrusiveness but seldom violated in life, and the inevitable artifices are held within rigid bounds. In some of his earlier dramas he also observed the unities of time and place, and throughout his work practices a close economy in these respects. It goes without saying that he rejects the monologue, the unnatural reading of letters, the _raisonneur_ or commenting and providential character, the lightly motivised confession--all the devices, in brief, by which the conventional playwright blandly transports information across the footlights, or unravels the artificial knot which he has tied.

In dialogue, the medium of the drama, Hauptmann shows the highest originality and power. Beside the speech of his characters all other dramatic speech, that of Ibsen, of Tolstoi in _The Power of Darkness_, or of Pinero, seems conscious and unhuman. Nor is that power a mere control of dialect. Johannes Vockerat and Michael Kramer, Dr. Scholz and Professor Crampton speak with a human raciness and native truth not surpa.s.sed by the weavers or peasants of Silesia. Hauptmann has heard the inflections of the human voice, the faltering and fugitive eloquence of the living word not only with his ear but with his soul.

External devices necessarily contribute to this effect. Thus Hauptmann renders all dialect with phonetic accuracy and correct differentiation.

In _Before Dawn_, Hoffmann, Loth, Dr. Schimmelpfennig and Helen speak normal High German; all the other characters speak Silesian except the imported footman Edward, who uses the Berlin dialect. In _The Beaver Coat_ the various gradations of that dialect are scrupulously set down, from the impudent vulgarity of Leontine and Adelaide, to the occasional consonantal slips of Wehrhahn. The egregious Mrs. Wolff, in the same play, cannot deny her Silesian origin. Far finer shades of character are indicated by the amiable elisions of Mrs. Vockerat Senior in _Lonely Lives_, the recurrent cra.s.sness of Mrs. Scholz in _The Reconciliation_, and the solemn reiterations of Michael Kramer. Nor must it be thought that such characterisation has anything in common with the set phrases of d.i.c.kens. From the richness and variety of German colloquial speech, from the deep brooding of the German soul over the common things and the enduring emotions of life, Hauptmann has caught the authentic accents that change dramatic dialogue into the speech of man.

IV

In the structure of his drama Hauptmann met and solved an even more difficult problem than in the character of his dialogue. The whole tradition of structural technique rests upon a more or less arbitrary rearrangement of life. _Oth.e.l.lo_, the n.o.blest of tragedies, no less than the most trivial French farce, depends for the continuity of its mere action on an improbable artifice. Desdemona's handkerchief may almost be taken to symbolise that element in the drama which Hauptmann studiously denies himself. And he does so by reason of his more intimate contact with the normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of will with will, the pa.s.sionate crises of human existence are but rarely concentrated into a brief s.p.a.ce of time or culminate in a highly salient situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's _Le gendre de M. Poirier_ the material of life has been dissected into mere shreds and these have been rewoven into a pattern as little akin to reality as the flowers and birds of a Persian rug. Instead of such effective rearrangement Hauptmann contents himself with the austere simplicity of that succession of action which observation really affords.

He shapes his material as little as possible. The intrusion of a new force into a given setting, as in _Lonely Lives_, is as violent an interference with the sober course of things as he admits. From his n.o.blest successes, _The Weavers_, _Drayman Henschel_, _Michael Kramer_, the artifice of complication is wholly absent.

It follows that his fables are simple and devoid of plot, that comedy and tragedy must inhere in character and that conflict must grow from the clash of character with environment or of character with character in its totality. In other words: since the adventurous and unwonted are rigidly excluded, dramatic complication can but rarely, with Hauptmann, proceed from action. For the life of man is woven of "little, nameless, unremembered acts" which possess no significance except as they ill.u.s.trate character and thus, link by link, forge that fate which is identical with character. The constant and bitter conflict in the world does not arise from pointed and opposed notions of honour and duty held at some rare climacteric moment, but from the far more tragic grinding of a hostile environment upon man or of the imprisonment of alien souls in the cage of some social bondage.

These two motives, appearing sometimes singly, sometimes blended, are fundamental to Hauptmann's work. In _The Reconciliation_ an unnatural marriage has brought discord and depravity upon earth; in _Lonely Lives_ a seeker after truth is throttled by a murky world; in _The Weavers_ the whole organization of society drives men to tragic despair; in _Colleague Crampton_ a cold blooded woman all but destroys the gentle-hearted painter; in _The Beaver Coat_ the motive is ironically inverted and a base shrewdness triumphs over the stupid social machine; in _Rose Bernd_ traditional righteousness hounds a pure spirit out of life; and in _Gabriel Schilling's Flight_, his latest play, Hauptmann returns to a favourite motive: woman, strong through the narrowness and intensity of her elemental aims, destroying man, the thinker and dreamer, whose will, dissipated in a hundred ideal purposes, goes under in the unequal struggle.

The fable and structure of _Michael Kramer_ ill.u.s.trate Hauptmann's typical themes and methods well. The whole of the first act is exposition. It is not, however, the exposition of antecedent actions or events, but wholly of character. The conditions of the play are entirely static. Kramer's greatness of soul broods over the whole act. Mrs.

Kramer, the narrow-minded, nagging wife, and Arnold, the homely, wretched boy with a spark of genius, quail under it. Michaline, the brave, whole-hearted girl, stands among these, pitying and comprehending all. In the second act one of Arnold's sordid and piteous mistakes comes to light. An inn-keeper's daughter complains to Kramer of his son's grotesque and annoyingly expressed pa.s.sion for her. Kramer takes his son to task and, in one of the n.o.blest scenes in the modern drama, wrestles with the boy's soul. In the third act the inn is shown. Its rowdy, semi-educated habitues deride Arnold with coa.r.s.e gibes. He cannot tear himself away. Madly sensitive and conscious of his final superiority over a world that crushes him by its merely brutal advantages, he is goaded to self-destruction. In the last act, in the presence of his dead son, Michael Kramer cries out after some reconciliation with the silent universe. The play is done and nothing has happened. The only action is Arnold's suicide and that action has no dramatic value. The significance of the play lies in the unequal marriage between Kramer and his wife, in Arnold's character--in the fact that such things _are_, and that in our outlook upon the whole of life we must reckon with them.

Hauptmann's simple management of a pregnant fable may be admirably observed, finally, by comparing _Lonely Lives_ and _Rosmersholm_.

Hauptmann was undoubtedly indebted to Ibsen for his problem and for the main elements of the story: a modern thinker is overcome by the orthodox and conservative world in which he lives. And that world conquers largely because he cannot be united to the woman who is his inspiration and his strength. In handling this fable two difficult questions were to be answered by the craftsman: by what means does the hostile environment crush the protagonist? Why cannot he take the saving hand that is held out to him? Ibsen practically s.h.i.+rks the answer to the first question.