recovered the seductive charm of his youth after his play about
Casanova, Der Abenteurer und die Sangerin, while Arthur
Schnitzler, the leading representative of Viennese literature
properly so called, succeeded in achieving dramatic concentra-
tion only in his one-act plays, in which there is a kind of chemical
fusion between the man of the world's sceptical analysis of souls
and a rare delicacy of dialogue. Hermann Bahr, who only writes
poetry as a secondary occupation, mainly devoted himself to
writing brilliant essays on artistic and literary subjects.
Richard Becr-Hofmann, who can claim kindred with both the last-mentioned playwrights, created in Jadkobs Traum an es- sentially lyric drama with a Zionist tendency. His earliest play, Der Graf von Charolais, is of interest for English readers in that it is founded upon Massinger's The Fatal Dowry. The Viennese Anton Wildgans had begun in his early play Armut to give Naturalism a literary style of its own. Other attempts at reform had already proceeded from the school of Stefan George, out of which a dramatic branch arose, little as that hierophantic master occupied himself with the profane structures of the stages.
Carl Vollmoller took a subject from the Middle Ages in his Catherina Grdfin von Armagnac, gave it a form something like the ballad and arranged it as if it were in strophes. From the later accretions to the Tristan legend Ernst Hardt derived his technically ingenious drama Tantris der Narr, which won both the Schiller Prize and a lasting success on the stage. The cul- mination of the romantic drama was achieved by Eduard Stucken with two mystery plays, the grail-cycle Gawan and Lamval, which lulled the German public, but only very transiently, in an at- mosphere of incense. All these endeavours were directed against the supremacy of Gerhart Hauptmann, who was, from a one-sided point of view, regarded as a mere Naturalist. Paul Ernst, ex- cellent as an essayist, trifled with experiments in an archaic style; Hermann Burte, Wilhelm von Scholz, Eberhard Konig, Kurt Geucke indulged in sentimental flourishes of trumpets which sounded particularly patriotic in ears that were not too sensitive; but none of these could drown the calm poetic power of Gerhart Hauptmann's voice.
Herbert Eulenberg was regarded as a hope by many as the fulfilment of a hope; he was an absolute romanticist who turned his face away from commonplace reality, a singer of quixotic passions, who let the hot ferment of the blood course like a ceaseless melody through his lyric dramas (Alles um Geld; Alles um Liebe; Belinda). His personages are all poets and visionaries, bewitchers or bewitched; but the morbid beauty of his plays soon began to fade because it did not clothe any real bones and sinews of dramatic structure.
All these exponents of a new style, all these neo-romanticists, were displaced by Frank Wedekind, once he had won his way to recognition. Especially after the censorship, which had been very hostile to him, had been abolished by the revolution, he dominated simultaneously with August Strindberg the repertory of the German stage. Compared with Hauptmann's more passive or more vegetative nature, the productivity of which seems al- most unconscious, Wedekind is a real fighter, a fanatic, a satan- ist, who exhibits with unparalleled audacity the conflict between society and the relentlessness of sexual passion. Wedekind has not designedly sought a style, because in this instance the man is the style, because he habitually speaks with his own peculiar accent of cynicism through all his personages. His world is like a circus or a theatre of marionettes, and the most natural behaviour for his characters is the grotesque. Next to the enduring work of his youth, Fruhlings Erwachen, his plays Erdgeist and Die Bilchse der Pandora and Francisca have had the greatest vogue, and that not least because of the audacity of the subjects with which they deal. A rival to Wedekind arose in Carl Sternheim, who, with the intention of becoming a German Moliere, attacked the bourgeoisie in all its exhibitions of moral and social hypocrisy. His reliance upon the keenness of his dialectics makes him the sworn enemy of all naturalistic portrayal of situations. Stern- heim invented for his own use a " telegraphic style " of extraor- dinary precision, the most laconic kind of dialogue possible (or sometimes impossible) within the limits of German grammar, a
method by which every figure in the play caricatures itself. His chief plays, Die Hose, Burger Schippel, Der Snob and "ip/j," are an unbroken series of invectives against the German bourgeoi- sie. In them the storm of war and revolution already seems to be discharging it's lightnings. Sternheim's satire had been exhausted by 1921, because his method of comedy lacked the fructifying elements of love and warmth. His Impressionism, carried as it is to the extreme point, could only have Expressionism as its sequel.
The real battle for the new art, which at the same time meant an entirely new view of life, was opened in 1912 by Reinhardt Sorge's Betller, shortly followed by Walter Hasenclever's Sohn and by Paul Kornfeld's Verfilhrung. In these plays, the last vestiges of Naturalism have vanished; the milieu exercises no constraint; there is no longer any psychological control; even the law of causation, with which a dramatist can hardly dispense, appears to be eliminated. The new generation declares war against everything which exists. Sons kill their fathers without hesitation in the name of life, which is the sole standard of value and which wins its right to every kind of fulfilment. In Mcnschen and Jenseits Hasenclever almost becomes an occultist ; youth de- clares ecstasy to be its normal condition. Under the influence of war and revolution, frequently in anticipation of them, this kind of work, inspired by spiritual aspirations and by intense emotion, includes socialist and pacifist ideas amongst those which it absorbs. This school of drama likewise attracts a kind of talent which, with a stronger inclination than its own for plastic art, originates in an older tradition. Reinhardt Goring has written a fine drama in Sccschlacht. The virile power of his band of six sailors, who during the battle of Jutland work and die in the turret of a battleship, substitutes concentrated lyric force for dramatic effect. Fritz von Unruh, a playwright of great talent, took the subject of his Prinz Louis Ferdinand from Prussian history. In his tragedy Ein Gcschlecht all the horrors of violence have found expression. Pacificism, communism, ethical utopian- ism, have laid hold of this new form of dramatic art in the persons of many of its young exponents. The motif of humanity suffering in the mass and conducted by the poet-apostle towards a less guilty future runs through all these plays. Politically Ernst Toller and Paul Zech are extremists; H. J. Rehfisch, Hans Johst, and the sympathetic Rolf Lauckner, rather seek to mediate.
This whole development, both in its ethical and in its formal aspects, is reflected in the many-sided work of Georg Kaiser, which elastically adapts itself to every varying mood of the times. His is a talent which is spasmodic and always surprising, but which lacks the tenacity of a development governed by the will of its possessor. His dramatic method is constantly becoming more incorporeal; it resembles a crystal in which he ever finds new facets to polish. Kaiser's chief characteristic is a tempestu- ous speed of action, which finds its most natural expression in Von Morgen bis Mitternacht, the tragedy, raised to symbolic significance, of a criminal hounded to death by his vain pursuit of enjoyment. Koralle and Gas represent the end or the suicide of the industrial and capitalist age. Kaiser's nature is coldly artistic rather than ethical. The tyranny of Expressionism has seized him and carried him away. It is in the nature of this school that, being intelligence transmuted into will, its supreme object is not to produce works of art about life, but by means of art to increase the potentialities of life itself. The era of Ex- pressionism was not yet quite over in 1921, but its cycle would be completed if the truth were once more recognized that no art can begin by designedly ignoring nature, least of all dramatic art, the business of which is and remains the portrayal of men and women.
IV. The Novel. The novel in Germany during the period 1910-21 started with an imposing inheritance from the past, an inheritance for which it had to thank talented women as regards the greater part of its productivity. Clara Viebig represented Naturalism, Helene Bohlau a soulful realism. Erica von Handel- Mazzetti gave literary form to Catholic tradition, and Ricarda Huch proved herself to be a great romanticist, distinguished alike by the colour which pervades her visions and by the exquis- ite art of her style. The delicate talent of Count Eduard Keyser- ling has a temperamental element that is almost feminine; it
