II. THE ‘YOUNG-GERMAN’ PLAGIARISTS
THIS chapter is not, properly, within the scope of this book. It must not be forgotten that I did not wish to write a history of literature, nor to indulge in current æsthetic criticism, but to demonstrate the unhealthy mental condition of the imitators of fashionable literary tendencies. It does not enter into my plan to deal with those degenerates or lunatics who evolve their works from their own morbid consciousness, and themselves discover the artistic formula for their own eccentricities--in other words, with those leaders who go their own way because they choose or because they must. Mere imitators I have neglected on principle throughout the whole of my inquiry, first because the genuine degenerates only form a feeble minority among them, while the great majority is a perfectly responsible rabble of swindlers and parasites, and next because even the few diseased persons who are found in their ranks do not belong to the class of ‘higher’ degenerates, but are poor weak minds who, taken separately, possess no importance whatever, and at most only deserve a fleeting mention in so far as they testify to the influence of their masters on ill-balanced minds.
If, then, in spite of this, I devote a special chapter to the so-called ‘Young-German’ ‘realists,’ while I have despatched in a few words the Italian and Scandinavian Zolaists, it is verily and by no means because the former are any more worthy than the latter. On the contrary, some of the Italian ‘Verists,’ the Dane, J. P. Jakobsen, the Norwegian, Arne Garborg, the Swede, Auguste Strindberg, devoid as they are of real originality, possess, nevertheless, more vigour and talent in their little finger than all ‘Young-Germany’ put together. I only dwell on the latter because the history of the propagation of a mental contagion in his own country is not without importance for the German reader, and also because the way in which this group has appeared and permeated shows up certain traits in which we can detect the neurosis of the age, and, lastly, because some few of their members are good examples of intensive hysteria, having, in addition to complete incapacity and a general feebleness of mind, that malicious and anti-social ego-mania, that moral obtuseness, that irresistible need of attracting attention to themselves, no matter by what means, that facetious vanity and self-approbation, which characterizes the complaint.
I will not deny that when I turn towards the ‘Young-German’ movement I can scarcely maintain the cool equanimity with which, according to scientific method, I have hitherto observed any given phenomena. As a German writer I feel deep shame and sorrow at the spectacle of the literature which has been so long and so brutally proclaimed, with flourish of trumpets, and with systematic disdain of all that did not bear its seal, as the unique and exclusively German literature of the present time, and even that of the future.[458]
Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German literature has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. We were the inventors, foreigners were the imitators. We provisioned the world with poetic forms and ideas. Romanticism originated among us, and only became a literary and artistic fashion in France a good many years later, whence it passed on into England. Görres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and Oscar Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism and neo-Catholicism among us, and these have only just reached France. Our poet-precursors of the revolution of 1848, Karl Beck, George Herwegh, Freiligrath, Ludwig Seeger, Friedrich von Sallet, R. E. Prutz, etc., had even then sung of the misery, the uprisings, and the hopes of the disinherited, before the Walt Whitmans, the William Morrises, and the Jules Jouys, were born, men whom to-day people in America, England, and France, would like to consider as the discoverers of the Fourth Estate for lyric poetry. Pessimism was embodied almost at the same time in Italy (in Leopardi) and among us in Nicholas Lenau, more than a generation before French naturalism built its art upon it. Goethe created symbolic poetry in the second part of Faust half a century before Ibsen and the French Symbolists parodied this tendency. Every healthy current and every pathological current in contemporary poetry and art can be traced back to a German source, every progress and every decadence in this sphere have their point of departure in Germany. The philosophical theory of every novel method of thought, as well as of every new error, which, during a hundred years, have gained a hold over civilized humanity, has been furnished by the Germans. Fichte gave us the theory of romanticism; Feuerbach (almost at the same time as Auguste Comte), that of the mechanical conception of the world; Schopenhauer, that of pessimism; the Hegelians, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx, that of the most rigid ego-mania and the most rigid collectivism, etc. And now we suffer the humiliation of seeing a heap of contemptible plagiarists hawking about the dullest and coarsest counterfeit of French imitations (which all the clever men in France have already abandoned and repudiated) as ‘the most modern’ production offered by Germany, as the flower of German literature, present and future. We even permit foreign critics to say: ‘Ancient fashions disdained in France even by village beauties, are to be seen exhibited in German shop-windows as the greatest novelties, and credulously accepted by the public.’ The realists naturally deny that they are mere repeaters and limping belated followers.[459] But he who knows a little more of art and poetry than is learnt in a Berlin tavern frequented by realists, or in a low newspaper informed by this sort of company; he who contemplates in its entire range the contemporary movement of thought without stopping on the frontiers of his own country, can have no doubt whatever that German realism, as a local phenomenon, may have for Germany itself a melancholy importance, but does not exist at all for universal literature, because all trace of personal or national originality is lacking. To the chorus in which the voices of humanity express its feelings and thoughts, not the faintest new note has been added by it.
Plagiarists so low down in the scale as the German realists are not in the least entitled to a detailed individual examination. To do this would be to make one’s self both ridiculous in the eyes of competent judges and of a piece with strolling players, to whom it is a matter of small importance whether they are praised or blamed, provided they are mentioned. Other motives also warn me to be prudent in the choice of examples I propose to lay before the reader. I am firmly convinced that in a few years all this movement will be forgotten even to the name itself. The lads who now pretend to be the future of German literature will discover little by little that the business to which they have devoted themselves is less agreeable and lucrative than they had imagined.[460] Those among them who yet possess a last remnant of health and strength will find the way to their natural vocation, and become restaurant-waiters or servants, night-watchmen or peddlers, and I should fear to injure their advancement in these honest professions if I nailed here the remembrance of their aberration of past days, which would otherwise be forgotten by all. The feebler and weaker among them, who could not manfully resolve to earn their bread by a decent occupation, will disappear probably as drunkards, vagabonds, beggars, perhaps even in a house of correction, and if, after the lapse of years, a serious reader happened to come across their names in this book, he would be right in exclaiming, ‘What sort of bad joke is this? What does the author want to make me believe? There never have been such men!’ Finally, an absolutely incapable pseudo-writer is individually deprived of all importance, and only acquires it as one of a number. He cannot therefore be treated critically, but merely statistically. For all these reasons I shall only draw from the whole number a few characters and works, to show with their help what German ‘realism’ really is.
The founder of the realist school is Karl Bleibtreu. He accomplished this work of foundation by publishing a brochure of which the principal feature was a cover of brilliant red furrowed by black lightning in zigzags, and which bore this title like the roll of a kettledrum, Revolution in Literature. In this literary ‘tout’ Bleibtreu, without the slightest attempt at substantiation, but with a brazen brow, depreciated a whole series of esteemed and successful authors, swore with great oaths that they were dead and buried, and announced the dawn of a new literary epoch, which already counted a certain number of geniuses, at the head of whom he himself stood.
As an author Bleibtreu, in spite of the many and various works he has already published, does not yet count for much. It would, however, be unjust to ignore his great ability as a book-maker. In this respect Revolution in der Literatur is a model production. With skilful address, he mingled authors of repute whom he hacked into sausage-meat with a few shallow scribblers in vogue, whom it was no doubt rather foolish to fight, with the grand airs of a gladiator, but whom no one would have defended against a smiling disdain. The presence of these unwarranted intruders into the group whom he undertook to extirpate from literature, may give to his raising of the standard a semblance of reason in the eyes of superficial readers. Not less cleverly chosen were the people whom he presented to readers as the new geniuses. With the exception of two or three decent mediocrities, for whom there is always a little modest corner in the literature of a great people, these were complete nullities from whom he himself never had to fear a dangerous competition. The greatest of his geniuses is, for example, Max Kretzer, a man who writes, in the German of a Cameroon-Negro, some professedly ‘Berlin’ novels, of which the best known, Die Verkommenen, is ‘Berlinish’ to such a degree that it simply dilutes the history of the widow Gras and the workman Gaudry, which took place in Paris in 1877. This event, celebrated as the first adventure with cocottes in which vitriol played a part, could only happen in Paris, and under the conditions of Parisian life. It is specifically Parisian. But Kretzer calmly removed the Paris trade-mark, replacing it with that of Berlin, and he thus created a ‘Berlin’ novel, vaunted by Bleibtreu as the ideal of a ‘genuine’ and ‘true’ exposition. He reclothes his newly-discovered ‘geniuses,’ who recall Falstaff’s recruits, Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (King Henry IV., Part II.), in a uniform which he could not have chosen more effectively. He dressed them out in the costume of Schiller’s brigands in the Bohemian forests; he pronounced them to be a troop of rebels, fighters at barricades, Lützow huntsmen in the struggle for freedom against hypocrisy perukes, and pig-tails, and all obstructionists; and he hoped that youth and the friends of progress would take him for something serious, on seeing him march at the head of his poor, infirm cripples and knockknees, thus disguised.
His plan, although excellently contrived and conducted, was only partially successful. Scarcely had he in a certain measure organized and drilled his little troop, when it mutinied and drove him away. It did not choose another captain, for each private soldier wished himself to be chief, and the feeblest and most timid of the band alone recognised any other genius outside his own. Bleibtreu has not to this day got over the ingratitude of the people who had taken his mystification seriously, and had really looked upon themselves as the geniuses he had proclaimed them to be, without, as he thought, running any risks; and in his last publication he still utters his sorrow in these bitter verses (Aus einem lyrischen Tagebuch):
‘For what purpose this long struggle? ’Tis vain! And my hand is paralyzed. Long live falsehood, stupidity, folly! Adieu, thou German piggery! The earth of the tomb will extinguish the conflagration. I have been, as long as I could think, a veritable booby. I was no honest German, I was a wounded swan.’
Bleibtreu could not give any talent to the realists invented by him, but the latter borrowed from him a few of his turns of expression. To make an impression on the ignorant, they have associated with themselves as honorary members some respectable authors whom one is surprised to meet with dans ce galère. Thus the realists include among their numbers, for example, Théodore Fontane, a true poet, whose novels honourably hold their place among the best productions of the kind in any literature of Europe; H. Heiberg, of vigorous although unequal talent; unfortunately compelled, as it would seem, by external circumstances to hasty and excessive work, against which, perhaps, his artistic conscience vainly protests; and Detlev von Liliencron, who is by no means a genius, but a good lyric poet with a sense of style, and who may rank by the side of epigoni such as a Hans Hopfen, a Hermann Lingg, a Martin Greif. Considering the high level that German lyric poetry--the first in the world even in the judgment of foreign nations--has occupied uninterruptedly since Goethe, it is giving a German poet no small praise if one can say he is not inferior to the average of the last seventy years. Liliencron, however, does not surpass it, and I do not see how he can be fairly placed above Rudolf Baumbach, for example, whom the realists affect to despise, probably because he has disdained to join their gang. It is not incomprehensible that a Fontane or a Heiberg should consent to suffer the importunate promiscuousness of the realists. The Church, too, admits sometimes to serve in the Mass young rogues from the street, who have only to swing the censer. The sole thing that is demanded of them as realists honoris causâ, is to bear silently and smilingly this compromise of an honourable name. Liliencron alone thinks himself obliged to make some concessions to his new companions, in using here and there in his last poems, not his own language, but theirs.
Besides the smuggling in of some esteemed names among theirs, the realists have carefully practised and cultivated another business-trick of Bleibtreu’s--that of effective disguise. They assumed (in the collection of lyric poetry entitled Young Germany, Friedenau and Leipzig, 1886) the name of ‘Young Germany,’ which calls up a faint remembrance of the great and bold innovators of 1830, as well as ideas of blooming youth and spring, with a false nose of modernism tied on. But let us here at once remark that the realists, plagiarists to the backbone, do not even possess sufficient independence to find a name peculiarly their own, but have quietly plagiarized the denomination under which the Heine-Boerne-Gutzkow group has become renowned.
As the first specimen of ‘realist’ literature of ‘Young Germany,’ I will quote the novel by Heinz Tovote, Im Liebesrausch.[461] He relates the history of a landed proprietor and former officer, Herbert von Düren, who makes the acquaintance of a certain Lucy, formerly a waitress at an inn, and the mistress of quite a number of young men in succession. He makes her his mistress, and indulges in his passion until, being unable to live without her, he induces her to marry him. Herbert, who is only partially acquainted with Lucy’s past, presents her to his mother. The latter, who very soon perceives the relations existing between her son and this person, nevertheless gives her consent, and the marriage takes place. In the aristocratic and military society of Berlin, in which the couple move for a time, Lucy’s antecedents soon become known, and she is ‘cut’ by all the world. Herbert himself remains faithfully attached to her, until he discovers one day by accident, at the house of one of his friends--of course a ‘realist’ painter--a picture representing the nude figure of Lucy bathing in the sea! He very logically concludes that his wife had posed as a model to the painter, and he drives her away. As a matter of fact, however, the ‘realist’ had painted the nude figure from imagination, and involuntarily given it Lucy’s features, because of the respectful admiration he secretly cherishes for her. (Judge for a moment how that could be if she had been disreputable!) Then Herbert, smitten with remorse, seeks the vanished Lucy, whom he discovers, after heart-breaking efforts, in his own house, where she has lived for months unknown to him. The reconciliation of husband and wife takes place amid general pathos, and the young wife dies in giving birth to a child, and uttering affecting sentiments.
I will not waste time by pointing out the silliness of this story. The essential part in a novel, moreover, is not the plot, but the form, in both the narrower and the broader sense--language, style, composition--and these I will examine a little later.
The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man who assumes to write for the public, i.e., for the educated people of his own nation, is evidently that he should be master of his own language. Now, Heinz Tovote has no idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest errors every moment--solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of the value of words--which make one’s hair stand on end. Some few of these abominable faults of language are tolerably widespread, others belong to the jargon of the roughest class of the people; but there are some that Tovote could never have heard. They are the result of his personal ignorance of German grammar.
Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in order to determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses, on principle, the adjective naturally contained in that substantive. Here are some examples of this intolerable tautology: ‘An icy January storm.’ ‘In the Friedrichstrasse light elegant equipages were crowded.’ ‘Incarnation of the most lovable grace.’ ‘A slowly creeping fever’ ‘A lazy somnolence.’ ‘They glowed fiery in the last light.’ ‘She suffered cruel torments,’ etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect for himself, his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers, would put such words together. There is no necessity, in hunting for the ‘rare and precious epithet,’ to go so far as the French stylists, but such a sweeping together of the stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive adjectives is not literature; it is properly, to echo the French critic, the work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Düren was ‘keenly interested, from its first appearance,’ in Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. ‘Now that it had cast off its English garb, it seemed to him still more indigenous.’ Thus he seriously declares that an English operetta has seemed to a German more indigenous in the German language than in English. ‘Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury against this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he, who was habitually politeness itself to everyone, did not return the salute, and turned away.’ Not to respond to a salute by way of expressing his ‘senseless fury’ is truly not very ferocious on the part of an old officer. ‘The horses were hanging their heads sadly, and sleeping.’ That it is possible to sleep sadly or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ‘Like walls, the colossi of houses stood crowding against each other.’ Like walls? One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly as if Tovote had said: ‘Like men, the people stood crowding against each other.’
When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful style, the result we get is as follows: ‘Yet there lay in the slender perfectly levelled lines a slumbering strength.’ (What can the lines be which are ‘slender,’ i.e., not thick and ‘perfectly levelled’?) ‘She was already smiling through her tears, and her face resembled a summer landscape which, while the rain still falls on the corn, is bathed again in the bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.’ Thus, what we are first to think of when contemplating a face is a summer landscape. ‘He felt how her lips clung [sich klammerten!] to his.’ ‘It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has the incontestable genius of a lively conception,’ etc.
Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the French naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness, and vigour of which the following quotations will enable us to admire. (End of a theatrical representation:) ‘In the stalls the seats clapped back with a muffled sound.... The audience rose, doors were opened, curtains were drawn back, and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few isolated spectators alone remained in their places.’ ‘Unceasingly, the whole night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lay on the bare branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped in a thick mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the standard roses, the snow clung, and formed strange figures; it lay a foot high on the walls, and delicately veiled the points of the iron railings. All tracks were effaced. The wind, which drove the flakes before it, threw them into all the hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses disappeared.’ ‘They stood high above the sea, which spread around them like an infinite plain.’ ‘The sun had set.... The clouds, heavily encamped on the horizon, still glowed with flaming crimson purple; then they passed into violet, which changed into a colourless gray [so there is a coloured gray also?] until night descended, and all colours gradually died out.’ (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit ‘impressionism’ with the French models quoted in the preceding chapter.) ‘The night had completely closed in--a dark, profoundly black night.’ (Consider the juxtaposition of these two adjectives.) ‘The moon alone hung mournfully above the waters [the moon in a night both ‘dark’ and ‘profoundly black!’], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light into the distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar in the spite of a thousand years[!], and licked the creviced rocks.’ A ‘raving spite’ which ‘licks’ does not appear to be a very dangerous spite. ‘She retained the deep wound over her eye as a little scar all her life long.’ If she had a ‘little scar,’ she did not therefore keep a deep wound ‘all her life long.’ ‘Above them, in the blue sky, a vulture wheeled in circles with outspread wings, lost like a black point in this sea of light.’ In a vulture which is only seen as ‘a black point,’ it is not possible to distinguish the ‘outspread wings.’ Here is the description of a face: ‘Two full fresh lips, chaste[!], bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly tilted, but parting in a narrow straight line from the forehead.’ We will leave the reader the trouble of imagining for himself this ‘little nose imperceptibly tilted’ in ‘the narrow straight line.’ ‘The engine of the express train panted across the level plain which stretched all round like a burning desert. Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards and verdant meadows.’ Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a ‘burning[?] desert’? ‘The half-closed eyes, with their white membranes, look at him so steadily.’ This does not mean, as one might suppose, the eyes of a bird, but those of a human being, in which our novelist professes to have discovered these incomprehensible ‘white membranes.’
We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive tic of naturalism have become in the hands of Tovote. I will now show how this ‘realist’ can observe and reproduce reality in the smallest as in the greatest things. Herbert, the first evening of his acquaintance with Lucy, takes her to a restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of burgundy. ‘The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the table, in a flourishing curve.’ Burgundy in ‘pot-bellied’ bottles! They eat soup, served in ‘silver bowls’(!), green peas and a capon, the excellence of which forms the subject of their incredible conversation at table, and when this repast is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette, she asks for oysters, which are brought and eaten by her ‘served according to the rules of art.’ I should certainly not reproach anyone for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which stage of a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up amongst oysters and burgundy, but it would be more honest not to speak of these good things till one knows something of them. Let us give a passing notice to the unconscious respect, mingled with envy, for the difficult and distinguished occupation of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in this admiring declaration, that Lucy has oysters ‘served’(?) ‘according to the rules of art,’ and the backwoodsman’s ignorance of the most elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in making a man of the world talk incessantly at table about the food. To continue. Lucy’s lover has travelled, viâ Brussels, ‘from Havre to Egypt.’ In that case he must have chartered a steamer on his own account, as there is no regular line of steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manuscripts. ‘He rummaged through this heap of yellow manuscripts.’ Under shelter the worst ligneous fibre paper itself would certainly not turn yellow in the space of a few months. The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible care by Herbert for his Lucy, has ‘blue silk curtains,’ and ‘pale pink satin’ seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided by the better second-hand dealers even in their shop windows.
I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insignificant. They must not be passed over, however, when committed by a ‘realist,’ who boasts of ‘observation’ and ‘truth.’ Graver still are the impossible actions and characters of the men. In a moment of grief Lucy lets ‘fall her arms on the table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly before her, biting her under lip.’ Has anyone ever seen or done such a thing in this state of mind? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses thus: ‘“Kiss me,” she implored, and her whole being seemed to wish to lose itself in him--“kiss me!”’ Herbert had made her acquaintance in Heligoland, where she lived with an Englishman named Ward, and had taken her to be Ward’s betrothed. A German officer of good family, being considerably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as his betrothed! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of the working class, learnt English with Ward in less than a year so perfectly that she was everywhere mistaken for an Englishwoman, and played the piano so well that she could execute pieces from operettas, etc.
I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French words, confounds tourniquet with moulinet, and speaks of cabinets séparés instead of cabinets particuliers. A German does not require to know French. It would be a good thing indeed if he knew German. Good taste, however, would prevent his making a display of scraps of a language of which he knows absolutely nothing.
The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incomparably weaker than in analogous passages by Zola, but they are peculiarly repulsive because, in spite of the absolute incapacity of Tovote to rise above the coarseness of commercial travellers relating their love adventures in hotels, they, nevertheless, betray his determination to be violently sensational and subtly sensual.
If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work, so far below the level of literature, it is because of its being thoroughly typical of German realism. The language transgresses the simplest rules of grammar. Not one expression is accurately chosen, and really characterizes the object or the concept that is brought before the reader. That an author should speak not only accurately, but expressively, that he should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas in an original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the value and delicate sense of words; of this Tovote has not the slightest idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to raise a blush on the cheek of the police reporter of a low class paper. Nothing is seen, nothing is felt; the whole is but a droning echo of reading of the worst sort. ‘Modernism’ consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is partly located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded, very justly, that the German novel should rest on a solid basis, that it should be worked out in some well-known period, amid real surroundings, in the German capital of our day. This demand has produced the ‘Berlinese’ novel of the plagiarists. The especial and characteristic Berlinism of this novel consists in this, that the author whenever he has to mention a street, displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at the ‘Panoptikum’ (the Grévin Museum in Berlin), because he finds the street full of people, carriages, and shops, and seeks opportunities to quote the names of the streets in this capital. This method is within the reach of every hotel porter. In order to introduce such Berlinism into a bad novel, the author need only possess a plan of the town, and perhaps a guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are represented by passages such as this: ‘On both sides of the pavement [he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the street] a dense crowd of people surged, and in the middle of the avenue, under the trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered multitude, resembling the irregular [?] waves of a flood, pushed on to get out of the town.’ Or: ‘On all the pavements people walking and pushing against each other in confusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge from the deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy omnibuses, with their roofs fully occupied,’ etc. Thus, the only thing Tovote sees in Berlin is what a peasant from Buxtehude would remark, who has left his village for the first time, and cannot recover from his astonishment in finding more people and carriages than in his own village street. This is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices, and which need not be specially described, because it is implied in the concept of a ‘town,’ and, above all, of a ‘large town,’ and is, notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, etc., present exactly the same sight.
Socialism enters into the ‘modern’ novel like Pilate into the Creed. Tovote relates, e.g., how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who has disappeared; he arrives at last at the workman’s quarter in Berlin, which supplies the author with this fine picture: ‘Everywhere the blue and gray-red blouse of the workman, which is never seen Unter den Linden, who stands, day after day, near the panting machine, at the work-table, where he carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the same manual labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard as iron.’ Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has thought of the callosities of the workmen!
The automata who in the ‘realist’ novel execute mock-movements, and between whom the dullest and most miserable back-stair sentimentality is played off, are always the same: a gentleman, an ex-officer whenever possible, who, we are assured, is engaged upon ‘works on socialism’ (of what kind we never learn, it is simply asserted that they are ‘very important’); a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment of the ewig-Weibliche; and a realist painter who plans or executes pictures destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the millennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ‘modernism’ of the ‘Young-German’ realism: quotation of the names of the Berlin streets, rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses, a little Berlinese dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse and stupid eroticism, unctuous allusions to socialism and phrases on painting, such as a goose-fattener grown rich might make if she wished to pass herself off as a lady. Of the three persons who are always the supporters of this ‘modernity’ the waitress is the only really original one. The merit of this treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of novels entitled Schlechte Gesellschaft. She is a conglomeration of all the fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in poetry: a winged chimæra, a sphinx with lion’s claws, and a siren with a fish’s tail, all at one and the same time. She contains in herself every charm and every gift, love and wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by the waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative power of the German ‘realist’ can be most accurately gauged.
If Tovote is a representative type--by no means diseased, but merely incapable beyond conception--of intruders into literature with which they will at most be connected as peddling hawkers of trashy novels, we meet in Hermann Bahr with a clearly pathological individuality. Bahr is an advanced hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself talked about, and has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result by books. Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks to captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he calls the book most characteristic of his method among those he has hitherto published, Die gute Schule; Seelenstände.[462] Seelenstände literally means ‘states of soul.’ He had read and not understood the term états d’âme in the new French authors, état having been used in the political sense which it has in tiers-états.
In the story related in the Seelenstände, a part at least of the recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an Austrian painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living alone, he picks up a girl in the street, who, contrary to the orthodox procedure, is not a waitress, but a dressmaker, possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical excellence of the ‘Young German’ barmaid; he lives with her for a time, then wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she leaves him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom she induces to buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned lover.
This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ‘state’ of his hero’s ‘soul.’ This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate type, such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria. Not a single author of any individuality who has passed before his eyes has been able to escape his rage for servile imitation. The principle of the ‘Good School’--the misery of a painter who struggles with the conception of a work of art intended to express his whole soul, and who recognises with despair his impotence to realize it--is subtilized from Zola’s L’[Œuvre, All the details, as we shall see, he has taken from Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French Impressionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a parody of inimitably exquisite absurdity.
The painter’s distress of mind is ‘the lyrism of red. His whole soul was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all his desires, in sonnets of lament and hope; and in general a complete biography of red, what took place in him and usually whatever could happen to him.... But this lofty canticle of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple tones of daily life.... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which he embodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and gaiety of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations. But the great and supreme confession of his whole soul hung on a purple tablecloth with heavy folds, on which the sun shone, a narrow shaft, but with all the more fiery glow.’ If the struggle with the ‘biography of the red’ was a torture to him, even worse things were about to happen. One day ‘the curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon, juicy and sweet, which one would never have suspected of perfidy as it lay cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich herb sauce.’ (A cooked salmon cradling itself! This must have produced a ghostly effect. And this uncanny salmon struck him ‘behind,’ although it was on the table before him!) But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green herbs, the pride of the cook--yes, it was this that did it. It was this that conquered him. He had never seen anything like it--never before, as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter green, at once so languishing and so joyous that one could have sung and shouted for joy. The whole rococo was in it, only in a much more gracious, yearning note. It had to go into his picture. But he could never hit off that green sauce, and this was the tragedy of his life. He ‘kept the truth locked up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it; he did not give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming work of his breast,’ namely, the green sauce! ‘He would have liked to make a gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a burning screw ... deep, very deep, till there was a great hole ... an immense triumphal gate of his art, through which the internals could spit it out.’
What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the purpose of overcoming it in a ‘healing and redeeming’ work of art, so irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is written in an entirely serious view, and without the least idea of joking!
Bahr describes his own style in these words: ‘A wild, feverish, tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name in the ordinary idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of finding unheard-of, obscure, and strange neologisms, in a forced and singular combination.’
The painter’s mistress must have been a superb creature, to judge by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in the street ‘she slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids haughtily raised, and her little head thrown back sideways, she began to hum softly, sharply snapping her fingers with impatience, in such a way as to rouse his desire to persevere in his useless suit.’ This behaviour induces Bahr to call her a ‘majestically inaccessible young lady.’ But she is far more remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she is in the street. ‘Often, when under the greetings of the morning, which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she plaited her hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded by his desires, and stretched, moistened, and slowly curved, with twitching fingers which glittered like swift serpents, quite gently and persistently, her tangled [!] eyelashes, her dishevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew round with silent whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue hissed, shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed slowly, cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the little nose, fearful of the dust, turned aside,’ the painter, as may be imagined, became so amorous that ‘he licked the soap from her fingers to refresh his fevered gums.’ ‘Suddenly standing upright on one leg, with a swing of the other she kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by a nimble, firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.’ ‘Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very gently, very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her breasts, deep into her knees, while her lips moved; sometimes, while her hips turned in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously into swan-like [!] curves towards her obsequious image.’ This sight filled her lover with such enthusiasm that it seemed to him ‘as if from a thousand springs blasted [!] torrents blazed through his veins.’
It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this style, which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either in formation, use of terms, or construction. I wish merely to show to what degree Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy of Nietzsche: ‘Always the same. He ought to do this, and not to do that; the same litany from his first infancy--always and only; he should and he shouldn’t. What he would was the only thing never demanded of him; and thus, in this frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense desire to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish at being always someone else eternally.’ ‘To say that everyone only came out of himself to penetrate into another ... to dominate him! That a man could never, should never, he himself, not have one hour of bliss, but everlastingly renounce, transform, annihilate himself for another’s gratification.... Alone--alone; why would they not leave one alone?’ ... ‘To make a desert for himself--a still silent desert.’ ‘Others had not this sentiment of the “I” to such an exuberant and immeasurable extent.’ ‘The joyous hatred of men and the world.’ Here we have Ibsen: ‘He wished to go into the country--he himself, precisely as proposed by the other, certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue of his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal of another.... And rather than bend to another’s will he renounced his own. Moreover, since another wished it, the pleasure of wishing it himself was lost to him.’ Here the De Goncourts: ‘There was around her out of the sorrowful violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.’ ‘His feeling was always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow ground--dirty yellow--gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.’ ‘It was chaste voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly gray, melting into faint violet.’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘He was bound to establish the new love.... The question was of doing it in the style of electricity and steam. An Edison-love ... yes, a machine-like love.’ A mixture of Baudelaire and Huysmans: ‘In the undulating silver dust of the light a lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green vapour, bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down.... He wished utterly to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood--blood. He only felt at ease when it streaked [!] down.... He established a theory according to which this was the way towards the new love, viz., by torture.’ ‘There lay the meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes ... and hopes, the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its pride and with imperial mourning walked a huge gray sunflower, silent and pale, on the arm of an awkward fat stinking thistle, which trailed noisily afar with large rough gold.’ ‘This now became for him true art, the art which alone could redeem and make happy--the art of odours.... From pale and moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs, he awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,’ etc. The rehardness, ainder is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans’ novel, A Rebours. As to the passages full of a heat which clamours for a strait-jacket, and simulates satyriasis and Sadism; as to the quaint confusions and orthographical errors in French names which the author, who poses as a Parisian, commits at every step; and as to his frequent manifestation of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things are not essential, but they contribute to make Bahr’s book the only product of hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing in German literature.
The greater number of Young-German plagiarists have not yet risen to the monumental productions of a Tovote or a Bahr, and have stopped at short pieces of lyric poetry.
Special mention ought to be accorded to Gerhart Hauptmann, who has, unfortunately, permitted himself to be enrolled among the ‘Young Germans.’ It is difficult to confuse him with them, for if he makes concessions to their æsthetics of the commonplace with a carelessness which of itself betrays a disquieting obtuseness of artistic taste and conscience, he nevertheless may be distinguished from them by some great qualities. He possesses a luscious, vivid vocabulary, full of expression and feeling, even though it is a dialect. He knows how to see reality, and he has the power to render it in poetry.
It will not occur to anyone to pronounce any final judgment on this author of thirty years of age. As yet only his début can be mentioned, and hopes be formed for his future development. What he has hitherto produced has been surprisingly unequal. Side by side with originality his works present a barren imitation; with high artistic insight, a schoolboy’s awkwardness and ingenuousness; with flights of genius, the most afflicting commonplaces. One scarcely knows if he is a novelist or a dramatic writer. In two of his pieces, in fact, Vor Sonnenaufgang and College Crampton, there is such a complete absence of progressive action, a condition of things so purely stationary and devoid of development, that even the instinct of a natural talent for the stage could never have so forgotten itself. Perhaps Hauptmann is only temporarily under the spell of an æsthetic theory, from which he will free himself later. He desires, indeed, to describe the ‘milieu’ faithfully and closely, and loses sight in so doing of the principal thing in poetry--of the characters and their fate. His dramas frequently fall asunder for this reason into a series of episodes, in themselves well observed and characteristic, but only distantly, or it may be not at all, connected with the plot, as, e.g., in the play Vor Sonnenaufgang, the appearance of Hopslabär, the servant Mary who is leaving, the coachman’s wife stealing the milk, etc. All are pictures of manners, but at the same time cease to form united compositions.
If Hauptmann has borrowed from the French realists the excessive and useless accentuation of the ‘milieu,’ he has taken from Ibsen the charlatanism of ‘modernity’ and the affectation of the ‘thesis.’ On the model of the Norwegian poet he suddenly inserts into some commonplace history belonging exclusively to no particular period or locality, some intrusive phrase containing an obscure allusion to ‘the great times in which we live,’ or the ‘mighty events which are coming to pass,’ etc. For example, Einsame Menschen (Lonely Folk) is the needlessly pretentious title of a drama in which we are shown a really Ibsenian idiot, who fancies himself misunderstood by his excellent wife, and becomes enamoured of a Russian girl-student, who is their visitor. As is generally the case with such feeble wights, he desires to possess the Russian, while not losing his wife; he has neither the courage to wound his wife by openly separating from her, nor the strength to conquer his guilty passion for the stranger. In his torment he tries to deceive himself, to persuade himself that his feelings towards the Russian are only those of friendship and of gratitude, that she has understood him and intellectually stimulated him. The Russian, however, is more clear-sighted, and is about to leave the house. The end of the story is that the idiot drowns himself. The conception of a weak man vacillating between two women, of whom one is the embodiment of duty, and the other of presumptive happiness, is as old as the theatre itself. It has nothing to do with the times. It can only be made to pass as ‘modernism’ by prevarication. And in this feeble drama Hauptmann makes his characters hold learned conversations full of allusions, such as the following:
FRÄULEIN ANNA (the Russian). These are, indeed, great times in which we are living. I seem to feel as if something close and oppressive were gradually lifting off from us. Do you not agree with me, Doctor?
JOHANNES (the idiot). In what way?
FRÄULEIN ANNA. On one side, a stifling dread was mastering us; on the other, a gloomy fanaticism. The excessive strain seems now to be straightened. Something like a breath of fresh air, let us say from the twentieth century, has come in upon us.[463]
The same swagger of modernity made the author decide on this title, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), for his first work, and to qualify it as a ‘social drama.’ It is no more ‘social’ than any other drama, and has no connection whatever with ‘sunrise’ in a metaphorical sense. It reveals the state of affairs in a Silesian village, where the discovery of coal-mines on their land has made the peasants millionaires. The contrast between the coarseness of the rustics and their opulence furnishes good scenes for a farce; but what has it to do with the age and its problems? A fragment of thesis is dovetailed into the farce. The peasant millionaire is a drunkard. The daughter may have inherited her father’s vice. And so a man who has become attached and engaged to her leaves her with sorrowful determination on learning that the old man drinks. This thesis is an absurdity. A drunkard can transmit his vice to his children, but is not bound to do so, and, in the instance in point, the grown-up daughter does not betray the slightest inclination to drink. His thesis is worked out on the model of Ibsenian maunderings, and is as little taken from life as the lover who subordinates his love to a very uncertain theory. In this man we recognise our old friend, the type of the recipe for realist novels, who makes vague allusions to socialistic studies which he is reputed to pursue,[464] and proves himself, by these shadowy indications, to be a ‘modern’ man.
Hauptmann is true and strong only when he makes the poor of the lowest class speak in their own dialect. The maidservants in Vor Sonnenaufgang are excellent. The nurse, who sings the baby to sleep; the laundress, Frau Lehmann, who laments her domestic troubles, are by far the most successful characters in Einsame Menschen. And if Die Weber is the best work he has hitherto produced, it is because only the poorest people, speaking only their own dialect, appear in it. But as soon as he has to deal with more complex human beings of the educated classes--beings who are not perishing with hunger nor suffering from poverty, who speak high German, and have a wider intellectual horizon--he becomes uncertain and flat, and catches up the pattern-album of realism instead of taking reality as his model.
Die Weber (The Weavers) is the only real drama among the five which Hauptmann has hitherto written.[465] There is not much action in this piece; but it is sufficient, and it progresses. First, we see the profound misery in which the weavers are perishing; then we behold the rousing of their fury at their intolerable condition, and then their passion gradually developed before our eyes in ever-deepening intensity, rising into frenzy, destructive madness, tumults and riots, with all their tragic consequences. The extraordinary part of this drama is that the author has triumphed, with a genius which entitles him to our respect, over the enormous difficulty of captivating and stirring our human feelings, without making any individual character the centre-point of his piece, and of distributing the action between a great number of persons and a multitude of individual traits, without its ever ceasing to be a united and compact whole. These features, revealing a painfully minute observation, necessarily belong to individuals; nevertheless, they excite a very lively interest, sympathy and pity, not for the person, but for a whole class of men. We reach through emotion a generalization which usually is only a work of the intellect, through a poetic composition to a feeling which usually is excited only by history. In making this possible, Hauptmann rises infinitely above the bog of barren imitation, and creates a truly new form, viz., the drama in which the hero is not an individual, but the crowd; he succeeds, by artistic means, in presenting us with the hallucination that we are constantly seeing before us the nameless millions, while naturally there are never more than a few persons in the scene who suffer, speak, and act. Besides this great and radical innovation, other burning æsthetic questions are solved in the piece with overpowering beauty and sobriety. We have here a drama without love, and at the same time a proof that other sentiments besides the one instinct of sex can powerfully stir the soul of the reader. The piece is, moreover, a curious contribution to the wholly new ‘psychology of the masses,’ with which Sighele, Fournial, and others have been occupied,[466] and it gives an absolutely exact picture of the delirium and hallucinations which take possession of the individual in the midst of an excited crowd, and transforms his character and all his instincts after the model of the usually criminal leaders. It comprises, finally, this demonstration, which I have nowhere found so fully in all the international literature with which I am acquainted, viz., that beautiful effects, when rightly employed, can be obtained even with repulsive subjects. A poor weaver, who has not touched meat for two years, asks a comrade--not having the heart to do it himself--to kill a pretty little dog which had run up to him, and his wife roasts it for him. He cannot control his craving, and begins dipping into the saucepan almost before the meat is done. His stomach, however, cannot bear the dainty, and to his great despair he is forced to reject it.[467] The incident in itself is not appetizing. But here it becomes beautiful and deeply affecting, for it describes with incomparably tragic power the misery of these woebegone starving people.
This piece, apparently so realistic in the sense attached to this word by superficial talkers, is, on the whole, the most convincing refutation of the theory of realism. For it is incredible that all the incidents which mark the dreadful position of the weavers could have been condensed into exactly one hour of the day, and into one single room of the workman Dreissiger’s house; it is, if not wholly impossible, at all events very improbable, that the soldier’s murderous bullet should happen to kill the weaver Hilse, the only man trusting in God and resigned to his fate, who remained quietly at his work when all the others rushed out to pillage and riot in the streets. The poet has not depicted ‘real’ life here, but has freely utilized the materials which he has gained through his observation of life in order to give artistic expression to his personal ideas. His desire was to excite our pity as vividly as that felt by himself for a definite form of human misery. With this object he collected with the sure hand of an artist, into a narrow compass, events which in life would be distributed over months or years, and at long intervals, and he has guided the flight of a blindly unconscious bullet in such a way that it commits, like a villain endowed with reason, a peculiarly dastardly crime, thus raising our compassion for the poor weavers to the height of indignation. The piece, then, shows us the ideas and designs of the poet, his manner of viewing and interpreting reality; it enables us to discern the sentiments aroused in him by the drama of life. It is, then, in the highest degree a ‘subjective’ work, i.e., the opposite of a ‘realistic’ copy of fact, which would have to be photographically objective.
How does it happen that an artist, who applies his means with so fine a taste and with so skilful a calculation of the effect, can commit at the same time such naïvetés as, for example, these stage-directions in Vor Sonnenaufgang: ‘Frau Krause, at the moment of seating herself, remembers [!] that grace has not yet been said, and mechanically folds her hands, though without otherwise controlling her malice.’ ‘It is the peasant Krause who, as always [!], is the last to leave the inn.’ ‘He embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla,’ etc. How is an actor to set to work by his awkwardness to make a spectator think precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that, ‘as always,’ he is the last to leave the inn? More especially, how is it to be explained that this same Hauptmann, who has created Die Weber, should after this lofty composition have written the novels Der Apostel and Bahnwärter Thiel?[468] Here we fall back into the lowest depths of Young-German incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism, the story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought when the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and slipshod enough to make one weep. No words must be wasted on Der Apostel. A dreamer, manifestly touched by insanity, perambulates the streets of Zürich in the costume of an Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the crowd who worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in such a way that we never know whether the narrative is telling what the Apostle dreamed or what really happened. His ideas and sentiments are an echo of Nietzsche. Zarathustra has incontestably got into Hauptmann’s head, and left him no peace till he had himself produced a second infusion of this idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has lost his wife at the birth of their first child. Constantly away from home on duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child of her own, ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel’s warnings, she one day leaves her stepchild on the rails untended, and it is crushed by a train. The signalman then murders his wife and her child with a hatchet in the most horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a lunatic asylum as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his descriptions: ‘In the obscurity ... the signalman’s hut was transformed into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman on the table before him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he read and sang alternately the whole night through, interrupted only by the trains tearing past at intervals, and fell into an ecstasy so intense that he saw visions of the dead woman standing before his eyes.’ ‘The [telegraphic] pole, at the southern extremity of the section, had a particularly full and beautiful chord.... The signalman experienced a solemn feeling--as at church. And then in time he came to distinguish a voice which recalled to him his dead wife. He imagined that it was a chorus of blessed spirits in which her voice was mingled, and this idea awakened in him a longing, an emotion amounting to tears.’ The ‘Young German’ speaks with contempt of Berthold Auerbach, because he depicts sentimental peasants. Is there a single one of Auerbach’s Black Forest folk impregnated with such a rose-watery sentimentality as this signalman of the ‘realist’ Hauptmann, who leans against a telegraph-pole, and is moved to tears at its sound? Again, the passage (pp. 22, 23) which shows us Thiel in amorous excitement at the sight of his wife (‘from the woman an invincible, inevitable power seemed to emanate, which Thiel felt himself impotent to resist’) Hauptmann has drawn from Zola’s novels, and not from the observations of German signalmen. Or has he rather desired to depict in a general way a madman who has always been such long before his furious insanity broke out? In this case he has drawn the picture very falsely.
And the style of this unhappy book! ‘The Scotch firs ... rubbed their branches squeaking against each other,’ and ‘a noisy squeaking, rattling, clattering, and clashing [of a train with the brake on] broke upon the stillness of the evening.’ One and the same word to describe the noise of branches rubbing each other, and of a train with the brake on! ‘Two red round lights [those of a locomotive] pierced the darkness like the fixed and staring eyes of a gigantic monster.’ ‘The sun ... sparkling at its rising like an enormous blood-red jewel.’ ‘The sky which caught, like a gigantic and stainlessly blue bowl of crystal, the golden light of the sun.’ And once again: ‘The sky like an empty pale-blue bowl of crystal.’ ‘The moon hung, comparable to a lamp, above the forest.’ How can an author who has any respect for himself employ comparisons which would make a journeyman tailor who dabbled in writing blush? Besides, what countless slovenlinesses! ‘Before his eyes floated pell-mell little yellow points like glow-worms.’ Glow-worms do not give out a yellow, but a bluish, light. ‘His glassy pupils moved incessantly.’ This is a phenomenon which no one has yet seen. ‘The trunks of the fir-trees stretched like pale decayed bones between the summits.’ Bones are that part of the body which does not decay. ‘The blood which flowed was the sign of combat.’ Truly a reliable sign! Even great faults in grammar are not wanting, but I consent to take these as printer’s mistakes. If Gerhart Hauptmann has true friends, their imperative duty is to rouse his conscience. Having shown what excellent things he is capable of producing, he has not the right to scribble carelessly like the first paltry ‘Young-German’ writer. He must be strict with himself, and endeavour always to remain the artist he has shown himself in Die Weber.
Hauptmann’s successes have not let Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf rest, and both have joined to imitate his Vor Sonnenaufgang. Their united efforts produced the Familie Selicke, a drama in which nothing happens, of which alcohol is likewise the subject, and where the personages also speak in dialect. For ‘modernity’s’ sake they have introduced a theological candidate who has become a free-thinker, yet none the less wishes to obtain an incumbency. I mention this insignificant patchwork play only because the realists usually quote it as one of their magna opera.
Such are the Young-German realists, among whose number I will not include, as I said before, a sterling author like Gerhart Hauptmann. They do not know German, are incapable of even observing life, still more of understanding it; they know nothing, learn nothing, and experience nothing whatsoever; have nothing to say, have neither a true sentiment nor a personal thought to express, yet never cease writing; and their scribbling, in the eyes of a great number, passes as the sole German literature of the present and future. They plagiarize the stalest of foreign fashions, and call themselves innovators and original geniuses. They append on the signboard before their shops, ‘At the Sign of Modernity,’ and nothing is to be found in them but the discarded breeches of bygone poetasters. If the few lines in which they mutter about the obscure Socialistic ‘studies’ and ‘works’ of the hero be excluded from all they have published up to the present time, there will remain a miserable balderdash, without colour, taste, or connection with time and space, and which a tolerably conscientious editor of a newspaper even half a century ago would have thrown into the waste-paper basket as altogether too musty. They know that very well, and to be beforehand with those who would reproach them with their charlatanism, they audaciously attribute it to those respectable authors whom they cover with their slaver. Thus, Hans Merian dares to say: ‘Spielhagen makes it appear as though he had drawn the fundamental ideas and conflicts in his novels from the great questions which are stirring the present time. But closely examined, all this magnificence evaporates into a vain phantasmagoria.’ And: ‘To the fabricators of novels à la Paul Lindau, recently dealing with realism, we address the reproach of false realism.’[469] And this same Hans Merian finds that the realism of Max Kretzer and of Karl Bleibtreu is genuine, and that their Parisian cocotte-stories, transported contraband into Berlin, and their adventures of mythical waitresses, are ‘drawn from the great questions of the day’! Is not this the practice of thieves who scamper away at full speed before a policeman, shouting as they run louder than anyone else, ‘Stop thief!’ The movement of the Young German is an incomparable example in literature of that tendency to form cliques which I described in the first volume of this work. It began by a foundation in due form. A man arrogated to himself the rank of captain, and enrolled armed companions in order to repair with them into the Bohemian forests. The purpose was the same as that of every other band of criminals--the ‘Maffia,’ the ‘Mala Vita,’ the ‘Mano negra,’ etc., viz., that of living well without working, by plundering the rich, by blackmailing the poor, by favouring acts of vengeance by the members on persons whom they envy, hate, or fear, by satisfying with impunity the leaning to license and crime, kept down by custom and law. Like the ‘Mala Vita’ and analogous associations, this band palliates its acts and deeds by stock phrases intended to secure the favour, or at least the indulgence, of the crowd, incapable of judgment and easy to move. Brigands always profess that they are guided by the desire to repair, to the utmost of their power, the injustice of fate, by relieving the rich of their superfluities, and by then alleviating the misery of the poor. Thus, this band asserts that it defends the cause of truth, liberty, and progress, with the indecent love adventures of tavern-maidservants and prostitutes! Membership is acquired by formal admission after predetermined tests have been undergone. He must first publicly bespatter a well-known and meritorious author with mud. With the predominance of low and bad emotions in members of the band, they experience more gratification in maligning a man they envy than in being praised themselves. Next, the candidate must worship as geniuses one or more members of the band, and finally give proof, in verse or prose, that he also is able to express, in the language of a souteneur, the ideas of a convict, and the sensations of a noisome beast. Having undergone these three ordeals with success, he is received into the band and declared a genius. Just as the bands of brigands have their haunts, their receivers of stolen goods, and their secret or affiliated allies among the tradespeople, so this band possesses its own newspaper, its appointed editors (who, at first at least, accepted everything from it), and secret understandings with the critics of respectable papers. Its influence extends even to foreign countries--a phenomenon frequently observed in the formation of bands, and expressly confirmed by Lombroso. ‘The Mattoids,’ he says, ‘as opposed to geniuses and fools, are linked together by a sympathy of interests and hatred; they form a kind of freemasonry so much the more powerful that it is less regular. It is founded on the need of resistance to ridicule which is common to all, and inexorably pursues them everywhere on the necessity of uprooting, or at least combating, the natural antithesis, which, for them, is the man of genius; and, in spite of their hating each other, they stand firmly by one another.’[470]
He who from a height surveys a horizon of a certain extent can easily observe the labour of the apostles of this international freemasonry. M. Téodar de Wyzewa, already mentioned, who introduced to the French the insane Nietzsche as the most remarkable author that Germany has produced in the second half of this century, speaks in La Revue bleue and in Le Figaro of Conrad Alberti as the ‘poet’ who will dominate German literature in the twentieth century. The ‘new reviews’ of the Symbolists and Instrumentists, La Revue blanche, La Plume, etc., translate the ‘Erlebte Gedichte’ of O. J. Bierbaum. On the other hand, O. E. Hartleben offers the German public the so-called ‘poetry’ of the Belgian Symbolist, Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, and H. Bahr mutters with transport over the Parisian mystics. Ola Hansson is enthusiastic before German readers over the realists of the North, and carries into Sweden the good news of Young-German realism, etc.
The actions of the band have not done much good to itself, but they have caused serious injuries to German literature. It has necessarily exerted a baneful attraction over the young who have come to the front in the last seven or eight years. If we consider the enormous difficulties to which a beginner is exposed, who without protection or influence, depending wholly on himself, enters into the Via Crucis leading to literary success, we shall find it quite comprehensible that the tyros should be eager to join themselves to a society possessing a powerful organization, its own periodicals and publishers, as well as a definite public, and always ready to take the part of its members with the unscrupulousness and pugnacity of cut-throats. As members of the band, they are freed from all the difficulties of beginners. The most vigorous talents alone--such, for example, as Hermann Sudermann--disdained to lighten their struggles with the help of such allies. The others willingly allowed themselves to be affiliated. The result was, on the one hand, that wholly incompetent lads were drawn into the profession of authors, who would never have come before the public if they had not had special depôts to which they could cart all their rubbish; and, on the other hand, that of procuring for others, who were perhaps not wholly devoid of talent, periodicals and publishers for their childish effusions, the appearance of which in print would have been inconceivable before the formation of the band. Some threw themselves into the literary profession at an age when they should have been studying for a long time to come, and thereby remained ignorant, immature, and superficial; others acquired slipshod and slovenly habits into which they would never have fallen if, in the absence of the conveniences which the organization of the band offered them, they had been obliged to submit to some discipline, and develop their capacities with care. The existence of this literary ‘Maffia’ assisted the plagiarists against independent minds, the common herd against the solitary, the scribbler against the artist, and the obscene against the refined, so powerfully that competition was almost out of the question. The luxuriant growth of silly, boyish, and crude book-making is the result of this fostering of incapacity and immaturity, and this premium granted to vulgarity. I will demonstrate in one instance only the disastrous effect of the band. The case of the Darmstadt Gymnasium (public school) boy may be remembered, who wrote under the pseudonym of Hans G. Ludwigs, and committed suicide in 1892 at the age of seventeen. For two years he had offered incense to the realist ‘geniuses,’ and published idiotic novels in the official periodicals of Young Germany, and he committed suicide because, as he wrote, ‘this cursed boxed-in life,’ i.e., the obligation to learn and work regularly in class, ‘broke down his strength.’ A good many gymnasium boys write trumpery things and send them to the papers; but as these are not printed, they gradually recover their reason. Their heads do not get turned, and they do not come to imagine that they are much too good to do their lessons, and diligently prepare for their examinations. Ludwigs would perhaps have been cured of his folly; he might have lived till the present day, and become a useful man, if the criminal realist periodicals had not printed his twaddle, and thus diverted him from his studies, and intensified his unwholesome boyish vanity into megalomania.
That this invasion by main force, this revolt of slaves into literature, to use Nietzsche’s expression, was to a certain extent successful, can be accounted for by the state of Germany. Its literature after 1870 had, in fact, become stagnant. It could not be otherwise. The German people had been obliged to exert their whole strength to conquer their unity in terrible wars. Now, it is not possible simultaneously to make history on a great scale and lead a nourishing artistic life; it must be one or the other. In the France of Napoleon I. the most celebrated authors were Delille, Esménard, Parseval de Grandmaison, and Fontanes. The Germany of William I., of Moltke and Bismarck, could not produce a Goethe or a Schiller. This can be explained without any mysticism. From the mighty events of which they are witnesses and collaborators the nation obtains a standard of comparison, by the side of which all works of art shrink together, and poets and artists, especially those most gifted and conscientious, feel depressed and discouraged, often even paralyzed, by the double perception that their compatriots only peruse their works distractedly and superficially, and that their creations absolutely cannot attain to the grandeur of the historical events passing before their eyes. In this critical period of transient mental collapse the Young-German band made its appearance, and profited greatly by what even honest and sensible people were obliged to acknowledge as well-founded attacks--even while they condemned the form of them--on many of the then reigning literary senators.
But another and weightier ground is the anarchy which reigns at present in German literature. Our republic of letters is neither governed nor defended. It has neither authorities nor police, and that is the reason a small but determined band of evildoers can make a great stir at their pleasure. Our masters do not concern themselves about their posterity as used to be the case. They have no sense of the duty which success and glory impose upon them. Let me not be misunderstood. Nothing is further from my thoughts than the wish to transform literature into a closed corporation, and to require the new arrivals to become apprentices and journeymen (although, in fact, every new generation unconsciously forms itself on the works of its intellectual ancestors). But they have not the right to be indifferent to what will come after them. They are the intellectual leaders of the people. They have their ear. On them is the task incumbent of facilitating the first steps of the beginner, and presenting them to the public. By this much would be obtained--continuity of development, formation of a literary tradition, respect and gratitude for predecessors, severe and early suppression of individuals of absolutely unjustifiable pretensions, economy of power, which in these days a young author must fritter away in order to come out of his shell. But our literary chiefs have no understanding for all this. Each one thinks only of himself, and is furiously jealous of his colleagues and his followers. Not one of them says that in the intellectual concert of a great people there is room enough for dozens of different artists, each one of whom plays his own instrument. Not one takes into consideration that after him new talent will be born, that this is a fact he cannot prevent, and that he is preparing for himself a better old age by levelling the paths, instead of viciously trying to close them to those who, whatever he may do, will still be his successors in public favour. Who amongst us has ever received a word of encouragement from one of our literary grandees? To whom amongst us have they testified their interest and benevolence? Not one of us owes them anything whatsoever; not one feels obliged to be just towards them, nor to make himself their champion; and when the band fell upon them like a lot of brigands, to drive them off with blows, and put themselves in their place, not a hand was raised to defend them, and they were cruelly punished for having lived and acted in isolation and secret mutual hostility, sternly repulsing the young, and indifferent to the tastes of the people whenever their own works were not in question.
And as we have no Council of Ancients, so we lack also all critical police. The reviewer may praise the most wretched production, kill by silence or drag through the mire the highest masterpiece, state as the contents of a book things of which there is not the slightest mention, and no one calls him to account, no one stigmatizes his ineptitude, his effrontery, or his falsehood. Thus a public that is neither led nor counselled by its ancients, nor protected by its critical police, becomes the predestined prey of all charlatans and impostors.
Book V
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
I. PROGNOSIS
OUR long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital--for as such we have recognised, if not all civilized humanity, at all events the upper stratum of the population of large towns to be--is ended. We have observed the various embodiments which degeneration and hysteria have assumed in the art, poetry, and philosophy of our times. We have seen the mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself chiefly in the following forms: Mysticism, which is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centres; Ego-mania, which is an effect of faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great predominance of organic sensations over representative consciousness; and false Realism, which proceeds from confused æsthetic theories, and characterizes itself by pessimism and the irresistible tendency to licentious ideas, and the most vulgar and unclean modes of expression. In all three tendencies we detect the same ultimate elements, viz., a brain incapable of normal working, thence feebleness of will, inattention, predominance of emotion, lack of knowledge, absence of sympathy or interest in the world and humanity, atrophy of the notion of duty and morality. From a clinical point of view somewhat unlike each other, these pathological pictures are nevertheless only different manifestations of a single and unique fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be ranked by the alienist in the genus melancholia, which is the psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system.
Superficial or unfair critics have foisted on me the assertion that degeneration and hysteria are the products of the present age. The attentive and candid reader will bear witness that I have never circulated such an absurdity. Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization. Certain micro-organisms engendering mortal diseases have always been present also--for example, the bacillus of cholera; but they only cause epidemics when circumstances arise intensely favourable for their rapid increase. In the same way the body constantly harbours parasites which only injure it when another bacillus has invaded and devastated it. For example, we are always inhabited by staphylococcus and streptococcus, but the influenza bacillus must first appear for them to swarm and produce mortal suppurations. Thus, the vermin of plagiarists in art and literature becomes dangerous only when the insane, who follow their own original paths, have previously poisoned the Zeitgeist, weakened by fatigue, and rendered it incapable of resistance.
We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: ‘What is to come next?’
This question of eventuality presents itself to the physician in every serious case, and however delicate and rash, above all, however little scientific any prediction may be, he cannot evade the necessity of establishing a prognosis. For that matter, this is not purely arbitrary, not a blind leap into the dark; the most attentive observation of all the symptoms, assisted by experience, permits a generally just conclusion on the ulterior evolution of the evil.
It is possible that the disease may not have yet attained its culminating point. If it should become more violent, gain yet more in breadth and depth, then certain phenomena which are perceived as exceptions or in an embryo condition would henceforth increase to a formidable extent and develop consistently; others, which at present are only observed among the inmates of lunatic asylums, would pass into the daily habitual condition of whole classes of the population. Life would then present somewhat the following picture:
Every city possesses its club of suicides. By the side of this exist clubs for mutual assassination by strangulation, hanging, or stabbing. In the place of the present taverns houses would be found devoted to the service of consumers of ether, chloral, naphtha, and hashish. The number of persons suffering from aberrations of taste and smell has become so considerable that it is a lucrative trade to open shops for them where they can swallow in rich vessels all sorts of dirt, and breathe amidst surroundings which do not offend their sense of beauty nor their habits of comfort the odour of decay and filth. A number of new professions are being formed--that of injectors of morphia and cocaine; of commissioners who, posted at the corners of the streets, offer their arms to persons attacked by agoraphobia, in order to enable them to cross the roads and squares; of companies of men who by vigorous affirmations are charged to tranquillize persons afflicted with the mania of doubt when taken by a fit of nervousness, etc.
The increase of nervous irritability, far beyond the present standard, has made it necessary to institute certain measures of protection. After it has frequently come to pass that overexcited persons, being unable to resist a sudden impulsion, have killed from their windows with air-guns, or have even openly attacked, the street boys who have uttered shrill whistles or piercingly sharp screams without rhyme or reason; that they have forced their way into strange houses where beginners are practising the piano or singing, and there committed murder; that they have made attempts with dynamite against tramways where the conductor rings a bell (as in Berlin) or whistles--it has been forbidden by law to whistle and bawl in the street; special buildings, managed in such a way that no sound penetrates to the outside, have been established for the practice of the piano and singing exercises; public conveyances have no right to make a noise, and the severest penalty is at the same time attached to the possession of air-guns. The barking of dogs having driven many people in the neighbourhood to madness and suicide, these animals cannot be kept in a town until after they have been made mute by severing the ‘recurrent’ nerve. A new legislation on subjects connected with the press forbids journalists, under severe penalties, to give detailed accounts of violence, or suicides under peculiar circumstances. Editors are responsible for all punishable actions committed in imitation of their reports.
Sexual psychopathy of every nature has become so general and so imperious that manners and laws have adapted themselves accordingly. They appear already in the fashions. Masochists or passivists, who form the majority of men, clothe themselves in a costume which recalls, by colour and cut, feminine apparel. Women who wish to please men of this kind wear men’s dress, an eye-glass, boots with spurs and riding-whip, and only show themselves in the street with a large cigar in their mouths. The demand of persons with the ‘contrary’ sexual sentiment that persons of the same sex can conclude a legal marriage has obtained satisfaction, seeing they have been numerous enough to elect a majority of deputies having the same tendency.[471] Sadists, ‘bestials,’ nosophiles, and necrophiles, etc., find legal opportunities to gratify their inclinations. Modesty and restraint are dead superstitions of the past, and appear only as atavism and among the inhabitants of remote villages. The lust of murder is confronted as a disease, and treated by surgical intervention, etc.
The capacity for attention and contemplation has diminished so greatly that instruction at school is at most but two hours a day, and no public amusements, such as theatres, concerts, lectures, etc., last more than half an hour. For that matter, in the curriculum of studies, mental education is almost wholly suppressed, and by far the greater part of the time is reserved for bodily exercises; on the stage only representations of unveiled eroticism and bloody homicides, and to this, flock voluntary victims from all the parts, who aspire to the voluptuousness of dying amid the plaudits of delirious spectators.
The old religions have not many adherents. On the other hand, there are a great number of spiritualist communities who, instead of priests, maintain soothsayers, evokers of the dead, sorcerers, astrologers, and chiromancers, etc.
Books such as those of the present day have not been in fashion for a very long time. Printing is now only on black, blue, or golden paper; on another colour are single incoherent words, often nothing but syllables, nay, even letters or numbers only, but which have a symbolical significance which is meant to be guessed by the colour and print of the paper and form of the book, the size and nature of the characters. Authors soliciting popularity make comprehension easy by adding to the text symbolical arabesques, and impregnating the paper with a definite perfume. But this is considered vulgar by the refined and connoisseurs, and is but little esteemed. Some poets who publish no more than isolated letters of the alphabet, or whose works are coloured pages on which is absolutely nothing, elicit the greatest admiration. There are societies whose object it is to interpret them, and their enthusiasm is so fanatical that they frequently have fights against each other ending in murder.
It would be easy to augment this picture still further, no feature of which is invented, every detail being borrowed from special literature on criminal law and psychiatria, and observations of the peculiarities of neurasthenics, hysterics, and mattoids. This will be, in the near future, the condition of civilized humanity, if fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and the diseases and degeneration conditioned by them, make much greater progress.
Will it come to this? Well, no; I think not. And this, for a reason which scarcely perhaps permits of an objection: because humanity has not yet reached the term of its evolution; because the over-exertion of two or three generations cannot yet have exhausted all its vital powers. Humanity is not senile. It is still young, and a moment of over-exertion is not fatal for youth; it can recover itself. Humanity resembles a vast torrent of lava, which rushes, broad and deep, from the crater of a volcano in constant activity. The outer crust cracks into cold, vitrified scoriæ, but under this dead shell the mass flows, rapidly and evenly, in living incandescence.
As long as the vital powers of an individual, as of a race, are not wholly consumed, the organism makes efforts actively or passively to adapt itself, by seeking to modify injurious conditions, or by adjusting itself in some way so that conditions impossible to modify should be as little noxious as possible. Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not capable of adaptation. Therefore they are fated to disappear. That which inexorably destroys them is that they do not know how to come to terms with reality. They are lost, whether they are alone in the world, or whether there are people with them who are still sane, or more sane than they, or at least curable.
They are lost if they are alone: for anti-social, inattentive, without judgment or prevision, they are capable of no useful individual effort, and still less of a common labour which demands obedience, discipline, and the regular performance of duty. They fritter away their life in solitary, unprofitable, æsthetic debauch, and all that their organs, which are in full regression, are still good for is enervating enjoyment. Like bats in old towers, they are niched in the proud monument of civilization, which they have found ready-made, but they themselves can construct nothing more, nor prevent any deterioration. They live, like parasites, on labour which past generations have accumulated for them; and when the heritage is once consumed, they are condemned to die of hunger.
But they are still more surely and rapidly lost if, instead of being alone in the world, healthy beings yet live at their side. For in that case they have to fight in the struggle for existence, and there is no leisure for them to perish in a slow decay by their own incapacity for work. The normal man, with his clear mind, logical thought, sound judgment, and strong will, sees, where the degenerate only gropes; he plans and acts where the latter dozes and dreams; he drives him without effort from all the places where the life-springs of Nature bubble up, and, in possession of all the good things of this earth, he leaves to the impotent degenerate at most the shelter of the hospital, lunatic asylum, and prison, in contemptuous pity. Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop, or the noctambulist Des Esseintes of the Decadents, sniffing and licking his lips, or Ibsen’s “solitary powerful” Stockmann, and his Rosmer lusting for suicide--let us imagine these beings in competition with men who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke our laughter.
Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy. But the latter--and the vast masses of the people still include unnumbered millions of them--will rapidly and easily adapt themselves to the conditions which new inventions have created in humanity. Those who, by marked deficiency of organization, are unable to do so, among the generation taken unawares by these inventions, fall out of the ranks; they become hysterical and neurasthenical, engender degenerates, and in these end their race;[472] but the more vigorous, although they at first also have become bewildered and fatigued, recover themselves little by little, their descendants accustom themselves to the rapid progress which humanity must make, and soon their slow respiration and their quieter pulsations of the heart will prove that it no longer costs them any effort to keep pace and keep up with the others. The end of the twentieth century, therefore, will probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine, and to satisfy the demands of a circle of ten thousand acquaintances, associates, and friends. It will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions, and will be able, with nerves of gigantic vigour, to respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable claims of existence.
If, however, the new civilization should decidedly outstrip the powers of humanity, if even the most robust of the species should not in the long-run grow up to it, then ulterior generations will settle with it in another way. They will simply give it up. For humanity has a sure means of defence against innovations which impose a destructive effort on its nervous system, namely, ‘misoneism,’ that instinctive, invincible aversion to progress and its difficulties that Lombroso has studied so much, and to which he has given this name.[473] Misoneism protects man from changes of which the suddenness or the extent would be baneful to him. But it does not only appear as resistance to the acceptation of the new; it has another aspect, to wit, the abandonment and gradual elimination of inventions imposing claims too hard on man. We see savage races who die out when the power of the white man makes it impossible for them to shut out civilization; but we see also some who hasten with joy to tear off and throw away the stiff collar imposed by civilization, as soon as constraint is removed. I need only recall the anecdote, related in detail by Darwin, of the Fuegian Jemmy Button, who, taken as a child to England and brought up in that country, returned to his own land in the patent-leather shoes and gloves and what not of fashionable attire, but who, when scarcely landed, threw off the spell of all this foreign lumber for which he was not ripe, and became again a savage among savages.[474] During the period of the great migrations, the barbarians constructed block-houses in the shadow of the marble palaces of the Romans they had conquered, and preserved of Roman institutions, inventions, arts and sciences, only those which were easy and pleasant to bear. Humanity has, to-day as much as ever, the tendency to reject all that it cannot digest. If future generations come to find that the march of progress is too rapid for them, they will after a time composedly give it up. They will saunter along at their own pace or stop as they choose. They will suppress the distribution of letters, allow railways to disappear, banish telephones from dwelling-houses, preserving them only, perhaps, for the service of the State, will prefer weekly papers to daily journals, will quit cities to return to the country, will slacken the changes of fashion, will simplify the occupations of the day and year, and will grant the nerves some rest again. Thus, adaptation will be effected in any case, either by the increase of nervous power or by the renunciation of acquisitions which exact too much from the nervous system.
As to the future of art and literature, with which these inquiries are chiefly concerned, that can be predicted with tolerable clearness. I resist the temptation of looking into too remote a future. Otherwise I should perhaps prove, or at least show as very probable, that in the mental life of centuries far ahead of us art and poetry will occupy but a very insignificant place. Psychology teaches us that the course of development is from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to judgment, from rambling to regulated association of ideas. Attention replaces fugitive ideation; will, guided by reason, replaces caprice. Observation, then, triumphs ever more and more over imagination and artistic symbolism--i.e., the introduction of erroneous personal interpretations of the universe is more and more driven back by an understanding of the laws of Nature. On the other hand, the march followed hitherto by civilization gives us an idea of the fate which may be reserved for art and poetry in a very distant future. That which originally was the most important occupation of men of full mental development, of the maturest, best, and wisest members of society, becomes little by little a subordinate pastime, and finally a child’s amusement. Dancing was formerly an extremely important affair. It was performed on certain grand occasions, as a State function of the first order, with solemn ceremonies, after sacrifices and invocations to the gods, by the leading warriors of the tribe. To-day it is no more than a fleeting pastime for women and youths, and later on its last atavistic survival will be the dancing of children. The fable and the fairy-tale were once the highest productions of the human mind. In them the most hidden wisdom of the tribe and its most precious traditions were expressed. To-day they represent a species of literature only cultivated for the nursery. The verse which by rhythm, figurative expression, and rhyme trebly betrays its origin in the stimulations of rhythmically functioning subordinate organs, in association of ideas working according to external similitudes, and in that working according to consonance, was originally the only form of literature. To-day it is only employed for purely emotional portrayal; for all other purposes it has been conquered by prose, and, indeed, has almost passed into the condition of an atavistic language. Under our very eyes the novel is being increasingly degraded, serious and highly cultivated men scarcely deeming it worthy of attention, and it appeals more and more exclusively to the young and to women. From all these examples, it is fair to conclude that after some centuries art and poetry will have become pure atavisms, and will no longer be cultivated except by the most emotional portion of humanity--by women, by the young, perhaps even by children.
But, as I have said, I merely venture on these passing hints as to their yet remote destinies, and will confine myself to the immediate future, which is far more certain.
In all countries æsthetic theorists and critics repeat the phrase that the forms hitherto employed by art are henceforth effete and useless, and that it is preparing something perfectly new, absolutely different from all that is yet known. Richard Wagner first spoke of ‘the art-work of the future,’ and hundreds of incapable imitators lisp the term after him. Some among them go so far as to try to impose upon themselves and the world that some inexpressive banality, or some pretentious inanity which they have patched up, is this art-work of the future. But all these talks about sunrise, the dawn, new land, etc., are only the twaddle of degenerates incapable of thought. The idea that to-morrow morning at half-past seven o’clock a monstrous, unsuspected event will suddenly take place; that on Thursday next a complete revolution will be accomplished at a single blow, that a revelation, a redemption, the advent of a new age, is imminent--this is frequently observed among the insane; it is a mystic delirium. Reality knows not these sudden changes. Even the great revolution in France, although it was directly the work of a few ill-regulated minds like Marat and Robespierre, did not penetrate far into the depths, as has been shown by H. Taine and proved by the ulterior progress of history; it changed the outer more than the inner relations of the French social organism. All development is carried on slowly; the day after is the continuation of the day before; every new phenomenon is the outcome of a more ancient one, and preserves a family resemblance to it. ‘One would say,’ observes Renan with quiet irony, ‘that the young have neither read the history of philosophy nor Ecclesiastes: “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.”’[475] The art and poetry of to-morrow, in all essential points, will be the art and poetry of to-day and yesterday, and the spasmodic seeking for new forms is nothing more than hysterical vanity, the freaks of strolling players and charlatanism. Its sole result has hitherto been childish declamation, with coloured lights and changing perfumes as accompaniments, and atavistic games of shadows and pantomimes, nor will it produce anything more serious in the future.
New forms! Are not the ancient forms flexible and ductile enough to lend expression to every sentiment and every thought? Has a true poet ever found any difficulty in pouring into known and standard forms that which surged within him, and demanded an issue? Has form, for that matter, the dividing, predetermining, and delimitating importance which dreamers and simpletons attribute to it? The forms of lyric poetry extend from the birthday-rhyming of the ‘popular poet of the occasion,’ who works to order and publishes his address in the paper, to Schiller’s Lay of the Bell; dramatic form includes at the same time the Geschundener Raub-ritter (The Highwayman Fleeced), acted some time ago at Berlin, and Goethe’s Faust; the epic form embraces Kortum’s Jobsiade and Dante’s Divina Commedia, Heinz Tovote’s Im Liebesrauche and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. And yet there are bleatings for ‘new forms’? If such there be, they will give no talent to the incapable, and those who have talent know how to create something even within the limits of old forms. The most important thing is the having something to say. Whether it be said under a lyric, dramatic, or epic form is of no essential consequence, and the author will not easily feel the necessity of leaving these forms in order to invent some dazzling novelty in which to clothe his ideas. The history of art and poetry teaches us, moreover, that new forms have not been found for three thousand years. The old ones have been given by the nature of human thought itself. They would only be able to change if the form of our thought itself became changed. There is, of course, evolution, but it only affects externals, not our inmost being. The painter, for example, discovers the picture on the easel after the picture on the wall; sculpture, after the free figure, discovers high relief, and still later low relief, which already intrenches in a way not free from objection on the domain of the painter; the drama renounces its supernatural character, and learns to unfold itself in a more compact and condensed exposition; the epos abandons rhythmic language, and makes use of prose, etc. In these questions of detail evolution will continue to operate, but there will be no modification in the fundamental lines of the different modes of expression for human emotion.
All amplifications of given artistic frames have hitherto consisted in the introduction of new subjects and figures, not in the invention of new forms. It was an advance when, instead of the gods and heroes which till that time alone had peopled the epic poem, Petronius introduced into narrative poetry (The Banquet of Trimalchio) the characters of contemporary Roman life, or when the Netherlanders of the seventeenth century discovered for painting--which knew of naught save religious and mythological events, or great proceedings of state--the world of fairs, popular festivals, and rustic taverns. Quevedo and Mendoza, who represent the beggars in the ‘Picaresque’ novel--the model of the German Grimmelshausen writings--Richardson, Fielding, J. J. Rousseau, who take as the subject of their novels, instead of extraordinary adventures, the reflections and emotions of ordinary average beings; Diderot, who in Le Fils naturel and Le Père de Famille places his townspeople on the arrogant French stage, which till then had only known insignificant people as figuring in comedies and farces, but in serious drama, kings and great lords alone--all these authors invented, it is true, no new forms, but gave to old forms a different content from that of tradition. We observe also an advance of this kind in the poetry and art of our own day. They have given to the proletariat the rights of citizenship in art and literature. They show the labourer, not as a coarse or ridiculous figure, not with the object of producing a comic or coarse effect, but as a serious, frequently tragic being, worthy of our sympathy. Art is hereby enriched in the same way as it once was by the introduction of rascals and adventurers, of a Clarissa, a Tom Jones, a Julie (Nouvelle Héloïse), a Werther, a Constance (Le Fils naturel), etc., into the circle of its representations. Nevertheless, when many people in bewilderment exclaim hereupon, ‘The art of to-morrow will be socialistic!’ they utter unfathomable nonsense. Socialism is a conception of the laws which ought to determine the production and distribution of property. With this, art has nothing to do. Art cannot take any side in politics, nor is it its business to find and propose solutions to economic questions. Its task is to represent the eternally human causes of the socialist movement, the suffering of the poor, their yearning after happiness, their struggle against hostile forces in Nature and in the social mechanism, and their mighty elevation from the abyss into a higher mental and moral atmosphere. When art fulfils this task, when it shows the proletariat how it lives and suffers, how it feels and aspires, it awakens in us an emotion which becomes the mother of projects for alteration, transformation, and reform. It is in exciting such fruitful emotions, and by them the desire to heal the hurt, that art co-operates with progress, and not by socialist declamations, and perhaps still less by executing pictures of the state and the society of the future. Bellamy’s patchwork, Looking Backward, is outside art, and the twentieth century will surely not favour books of this quality. The glorification of the proletariat by a Karl Henckell, who practises with regard to the fourth estate a more shocking Byzantinism than was ever displayed by a tail-wagging courtier to a king, is entirely incapable of awakening interest and sympathy for the working man. Neither is true and useful emotion to be expected either by such false nonsense as, for example, Ludwig Fulda’s Verlorene Paradies,[476] or Ernst von Wildenbruch’s Haubenlerche.[477] A brave woman like Minna Wettstein-Adelt,[478] who obtains employment as a daily workwoman in a factory, and simply relates what she experienced there; a plucky man of sound sense and a warm heart like Gœhre, who depicts the life of a factory-hand according to his own experience;[479] a Gerhart Hauptmann, too, with his closely-observed details in Die Weber, do more for the proletariat than all the Emile Zolas, with their empty theorizing in Germinal and L’Argent, than all the William Morrises, with their high-flown rhymings on the noble workman, who becomes under their pen a caricature of the ‘noble savage’ so much laughed at in the old novel-writers on the primeval forests, and yet more still than all the scribblers who strew their pottage with socialist phrases by way of ‘modern’ seasoning. Mrs. Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not preach against slavery, nor risk projects in favour of its suppression. But this book has drawn tears from millions of readers, and caused negro slavery to be felt as a disgrace to America, and thus contributed essentially to its abolition. Art and poetry can do for the proletariat what Mrs. Beecher-Stowe has done for the negroes of the United States. They cannot and will not do more.
It is not unusual at present to meet this sentence: ‘The art and poetry of the future will be scientific.’ Those who say this assume extraordinarily conceited attitudes, and consider themselves unmistakably as extremely progressive and ‘modern.’ I ask myself in vain what these words can mean. Do the good people who mean so well by science imagine that sculptors will in the future chisel microscopes in marble, that painters will depict the circulation of the blood, and that poets will display in rich rhymes the principles of Euclid? Even this would not be science, but merely a mechanical occupation with the external apparatus of science. But this will surely not occur. In the past a confusion between art and science was possible; in the future it is unimaginable. The mental activity of man is too highly developed for such an amalgamation. Art and poetry have emotion for their object, science has knowledge. The former are subjective, the latter objective. The former work with the imagination, i.e., with the association of ideas directed by emotion; the latter works with observation, i.e., with the association of ideas determined by sense-impressions, of which the acquisition and reinforcement are the work of attention. Province, object, and method in art and science are so different, and in part so opposed, that to confuse them would signify a retrogression of thousands of years. One thing only is correct: the images issuing from the old anthropomorphic conception, the allusions to obsolete states of things and ideas which Fritz Mauthner has called ‘dead symbols’--all this will disappear from art. I think that in the twentieth century it will no longer occur to any painter to compose pictures like Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Rospigliosi Palace, and that a poet would be laughed at who should represent the moon looking amorously into a pretty girl’s room. The artist is the child of his times, the conception dominant in the world is his also, and in spite of all his tendency to atavism his method of expression is that with which contemporary culture furnishes him. No doubt the art of the future will avoid more than hitherto the great errors in universally recognised doctrines of science, but it will never become science.
The feelings of pleasure which a man receives from art result from the gratification of three different organic inclinations or tendencies. He needs the incitement which the variety offers him; he takes pleasure in recognising the originals in the imitations; he represents to himself the feelings of his fellow-creatures, and shares in them. He finds variety in works transporting him into wholly different scenes from those he knows, and which are familiar to him. The pleasurable feeling of recognition he obtains by the careful imitations of familiar realities. His sympathy makes him share with lively personal emotions every strongly and clearly expressed emotion of the artist. There will always be in the future, as heretofore, amateurs of works of imagination, which transport the reader or spectator into remote times and countries, or relate extraordinary adventures; others will prefer works in which the faithful observation of the known will prevail; the most refined and the most advanced will find pleasure only in those in which a soul, with its most secret feelings and thoughts, reveals itself. The art of the future will not be wholly romantic, wholly realistic, or wholly individualistic, but will appeal from first to last as much by its story to curiosity, as by imitation to the pleasure of recognition, and by the externalism of the artist’s personality to sympathy.
Two tendencies which have long been rivals will presumably contend still more violently in the future for supremacy, viz., observation and the free flight of imagination, or, to speak more briefly, though more inaccurately, realism and romanticism. Good artists, doubtless, in consequence of their higher mental development, will always be more prone and more apt accurately to perceive and accurately to interpret the phenomena of the world. But the crowd will no less certainly demand of artists in the future something different from the average reality of the world. Among creators, the desire for realism will exist, as among recipients, the need of romanticism. For--and this seems to be an important point--the task of art in the coming century, will be to exert over men that charm of variety which reality will no longer offer, and which the brain cannot relinquish. All that is called ‘picturesque’ will necessarily disappear more and more from the earth. Civilization ever becomes more uniform. The distinctive is felt as an inconvenience by those who are marked by it, and got rid of. Ruins delight a foreigner’s eye, but they inconvenience the native, and he sweeps them away. The traveller is disgusted at seeing the beauty of Venice profaned by steamers, but for the Venetian it is a benefit to cover long distances quickly for ten centesimi. Soon the last Redskin will wear a frock-coat and tall hat; the regulation railway buildings will display their prosaic outlines and hues along the great wall of China and under the palm-trees of Tuggurt in the Sahara; and Macaulay’s celebrated Maori will no longer contemplate the ruins of Westminster, but a trashy imitation of the palace at Westminster will serve as a Maori House of Parliament. The unique Yosemite Park, which the Americans in their very wise foresight wish to preserve intact in its prehistoric wildness, will not satisfy the craving for something new, different, picturesque, romantic, which humanity demands, and the latter will claim from art what civilization--clean, curled, and smart--will no longer offer.
I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis. The hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate, will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity. The aberrations of art have no future. They will disappear when civilized humanity shall have triumphed over its exhausted condition. The art of the twentieth century will connect itself at every point with the past, but it will have a new task to accomplish--that of introducing a stimulating variety into the uniformity of civilized life, an influence which probably science alone will be in a position to exert, many centuries later, over the great majority of mankind.