The Viennese Dramatists
Erna McArthur
Onedoes not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young writers called “Young Vienna,” in a collective way, who were supposed to be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something new and original of their own.
Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play,Before Sunrise, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.
A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements—for realism as well as neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio. He had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.
So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of everything modern—which meant “crazy” to the good citizen of the day. It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now to take its place again.
Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the bourgeoisiethere were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the cafés, which had always been Vienna’s center of social life, and to talk things over—the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who didn’t like the whole business called it the café of the crazy self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed, but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning till night—and till morning again.
In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day. It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play—Dumas, Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.
But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North German. Thus an element of color and light—the soul of modern impressionism—entered in his creations, breaking through the severe contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his tragedy ofHero and Leanderperhaps the warmest love tragedy ever written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the grandmother of Schnitzler’s sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)
There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer’s personality and work which Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert’s music and feel it in the charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an upper sphere of fairies and magicians,whereas the life of the human beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.
Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set against it. He was a man of vigor andlebensbejahung(affirmation of life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.
Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of modern art—be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic—to his own work and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart’s sentiment under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him—how he was lonely, poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor, because nothing can happen to him—because everything around belongs to him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world in general.
Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber’s traditions could not be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a year after Anzengruber’s death. This wasAnatol, a little work full of grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes were connected only by Anatol’s figure was perfectly original. It was really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not found anywhere else.
Women’s influence penetrated this art—in Austria just as in the Latin countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into the center. It was written around her and it was written for her.Anatolbelongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,—a melancholic of love, he calls himself.
The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well, so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to translate them in good form. He says:
Well, let’s begin the play,Playing our own pieceEarly matured, sad and tender,Our own soul’s comedy;Our feelings past and present,Dark things lightly said,Smooth words, joyous pictures,Vague emotions, half experienced,Agonies and episodes.
Well, let’s begin the play,Playing our own pieceEarly matured, sad and tender,Our own soul’s comedy;Our feelings past and present,Dark things lightly said,Smooth words, joyous pictures,Vague emotions, half experienced,Agonies and episodes.
Well, let’s begin the play,Playing our own pieceEarly matured, sad and tender,Our own soul’s comedy;Our feelings past and present,Dark things lightly said,Smooth words, joyous pictures,Vague emotions, half experienced,Agonies and episodes.
Well, let’s begin the play,Playing our own pieceEarly matured, sad and tender,Our own soul’s comedy;Our feelings past and present,Dark things lightly said,Smooth words, joyous pictures,Vague emotions, half experienced,Agonies and episodes.
Well, let’s begin the play,
Playing our own piece
Early matured, sad and tender,
Our own soul’s comedy;
Our feelings past and present,
Dark things lightly said,
Smooth words, joyous pictures,
Vague emotions, half experienced,
Agonies and episodes.
The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola and Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most interesting and unknown land of all—the over soul. And here the complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions fascinated the young artists. Personality itself, though the center, took rather a passive part,—it simply came to be the scene of action, the meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier time had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the outward world, whereas now they held themselves open to new impressions, observed them and their effect on theIand then reproduced their observations in artistic form. Impressionism, predominant in painting at that time, had taken hold of literature. Of course, this passivity could only be a stage of transition, because each artistic individuality tends fromthe passive to the active; but this impressionism was a good means of assimilating all the new possibilities in the inside and outside world.
Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and prepared to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a sure scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective benevolence, and tender forbearance for all sides of human life.
Anatol, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as theraisonneur,—a remembrance of the French play,—and seven different types of womanhood. Here they all are—the simple sweet girl, loving with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with men; the lady of the world, she who would like to love, but has not courage to do it.
The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes—for he tried to express himself in all these forms—all speak of love and death. For the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol’s frivolousness. The presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation—the end of love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler’s most elementary conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true—the call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears the call of life—she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him—always—without the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel, come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more. These are his words—the drama’s conclusion: “Youlive, Marie, and it was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, middaysky. And this is living—not less than it was on that night when your darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing names as murder and love.”
The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful words. It is Schnitzler’s greatest art to lift us to a sphere where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.
The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded lines—all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna’s charm to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had received from her.
Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu—The Green Cockatoo, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; andBeatrice’s Veil, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist in those days. This epoch’s refinement, the powerful personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their life—in all this they saw something akin to their own life’s ideal.
Schnitzler’s plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like Manet’s small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft contours diffused in light.
He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second part of Goethe’sFaust; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time calledThe Young Medardus, but the Emperor himself remains in the background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg’s castle near Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized—these people so easily moved, soeasily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor, principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus—a cousin, if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back—and the beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them together to a unity.
It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way—he is fifty years old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a marionettes’ theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play; the marionettes appear—all Schnitzler’s own figures: the complicated hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there, full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live theirown life. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads; the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half bewildered, “Who are you?” But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.
The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town’s limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of men with a strict “Art for Art’s sake” program, exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to be his follower.
These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d’Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures equally well.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding, sonorous name.
He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to Vienna. He perused all history’s epochs and took the material for his dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with the old mystery playEverywoman. Some of his little plays are lovely—the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt is an arrangement ofElektrafor the modern stage. His Greeks are barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity. Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.
Since Richard Strauss putElektrainto music, Hofmannsthal has devoted his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of his music.
Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day life. But he discovered a little secret,namely, that the ordinary is really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the miraculous is there, everywhere.Fairy Tales of Lifehe calls one of his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck’sBlue Birdthe wonderful is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not worth the relating,—but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world and things in a new light.
Peter Altenberg uses the most original style—one might call it a telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.
Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street, who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may be—principally in the cafes.
All the women must love him—for he has sung their praises all his life, like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.