Chapter II: Act III: (which seems to me indispensable, none the less), and

_Pandora’s Box_, Act I--a commendable compression, because the whole cholera episode is morbid and nearly incredible, and a swift flight to France after Schön’s murder is quite thinkable without the long, mostly undramatic speeches that overload the present commencement of _Pandora’s Box_.

The pessimism of the last act is terrific and leads straight to the mood of _Damnation!_--a sort of satyr-play, concluding the three tragedies. In it, quite unrealistically, is passionately expressed what _Pandora’s Box_ implies--the hopelessness, the impossibility of happiness (for one, that is, whose conception of happiness is physical) from life as at present organized. This was the mission--this and the various remedies that Wedekind proposed--which the world persistently, unshakably condemned. Wedekind writhed. Between _Pandora’s Box_ and _Damnation!_ (1905) appeared two scarcely disguised subjective plays, _King Nicolo_, or _Such is Life_, which is very largely autobiography transferred to fourteenth-century Italy, a swift, dramatic and pathetic tale genuinely engaging our sympathies; and _Hidalla_, or _The Giant Dwarf_, which partly by satire, partly by outright propaganda, sets forth the Wedekindian point of view--the necessity for a new morality, for those who are rich enough to afford it: a morality that puts beauty, not material welfare, first among its objects, and especially revolutionizes sexual life. The worthlessness, for Wedekind, of intellectual concepts, theories, spirituality and all other abstractions--his utter absorption in the darker, inner world of feeling, will and instinct, especially the world of his own jarring soul, unheeding others or society at large, robs this one-sided drama of true tragic force. He tried again to justify himself in his next two plays: _Music_, a quite objective study of the havoc artistic education, seduction, abortion, the punishment of abortion, etc., etc., may cause; and _Censorship_, a wholly subjective one-act written after the lawsuits over _Pandora’s Box_ had been settled, and striving, not too transparently, to show the world his truly self-sacrificial and missionary spirit. By this time disciples were beginning to come to him; he married; and the force of his irritation spent itself. His last period begins.

It had little that was new to offer. _Schloss Wetterstein_ is an engrossing, if extravagant, sex-tragedy in three semi-independent acts, reminiscent of the _Lulu_ plays but laid in an aristocratic environment. The Jack the Ripper of its grewsome end is an American millionaire--an artist in sadism. Had Wedekind been reading of Harry Thaw? _Franziska_ is a parody of _Faust_, a sort of feminine Faust, a phantasmagoria in which there every now and then outcrops a striking, profound, or even beautiful moment. Franziska finishes not in Faust’s heaven, but in domesticity, and one cannot clearly discover whether this is mockery or a real change of view. _Samson_, or _Shame and Jealousy_, and _Herakles_, are blank-verse plays of Hebrew or Hellenic legends, written with lessening power and intensity,--plays dramatic, poetic, passionate enough to rank with Hauptmann’s work of the same period but not “so fair, so wild, so brightly flecked” as Wedekind once had been. In the first year of the War, finally, appeared a curiously objective historical character-study in eight scenes, _Bismarck_, plainly forerunning Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_ and its successors, and utterly un-Wedekindian in style--not a word of sex, of satire, or of himself. The full tale of his work includes, besides the above, four very light satiric farces--one of them, _The World of Youth_, dated 1889, a most interesting prelude to nearly all his later ideas; two esoteric verse-dialogues, two pantomime scenarios constructed in the ’90’s, the time of his greatest power, and anticipating modern movie and ballet technique; a large number of poems, mostly erotic ballads that he sang to his own accompaniment (I was reminded of them, and him, when I first heard Bobby Edwards of Greenwich Village), and some prose tales, shorter than _Minne-haha_.

Always he dealt in will, in inner urges, often specifically in “the hellish drive out of which no joy remains alive.” His characters, no matter how often balked, derided, or wounded, return to the attack Until they are killed. Emotion is an inexhaustible force. The drama of opposed views, of contrasted attitudes on points of conduct or belief, can offer nothing so enthralling as this insatiable struggle for the most fundamental pleasures humanity knows--which never ultimately or for long are pleasures! And the same Satanic return to the attack, repeated efforts at destruction, are seen in Wedekind’s own life, hurling play after play against conventional society. At last, after his death, conventional society broke down, and the forces of disruption honored him, and the confused masses sought in his other, Utopian, constructive work for light upon the society that is to come. To few writers is such posthumous homage given; by few can such a reversal of judgment be expected. Wedekind remained ever true to himself, his deeply divided, contrary self, now appearing through his plays, now vanishing again behind his characters, but always vividly alive: one could feel _him_, one had the sense of human passion and struggle, of something personally experienced and sweated out, in almost all his work. Hence, in the last analysis, his hold upon our later generation: we too want life, not literature--personality, not limpid art--original thought, even destructive and extravagant, not old truths, even the deepest, newly dressed. Wedekind, like Strindberg, like Andreiev, and like Shaw, meets these demands. If America should ever have reason to turn pessimistic, Wedekind will be waiting; and even as America is, in Wedekind she can find much that is vital, life-promoting, of immediate power and worth.

SAMUEL A. ELIOT, JR. Smith College, January, 1923.

SPRING’S AWAKENING

(FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN)

A Children’s Tragedy

_Dedicated to_

THE MUFFLED GENTLEMAN

CHARACTERS

MELCHIOR GABOR }
MORITZ STIEFEL }
HÄNSCHEN RILOW }
ERNEST ROEBEL } _Schoolboys, aged 14 to 17_
LÄMMERMEIER }
OTTO }
GEORGE }
ROBERT }

DIETHELM }
REINHOLD }
RUPRECHT } _Boys in a House of Correction_
HELMUTH }
GASTON }

MR. GABOR, a Judge }
MRS. FANNY GABOR } _Melchior’s Parents_

MR. STIEFEL, _Moritz’s Father_
MR. ZIEGENMELKER, _his Friend_
MR. PROBST, _Moritz’s Uncle_
REV. MR. KAHLBAUGH, _Pastor_

DR. SONNENSTICH, Principal }
DR. AFFENSCHMALZ }
DR. KNOCHENBRUCH } _The Faculty of the
DR. ZUNGENSCHLAG } Boys’ School_
DR. KNÜPPELDICK }
DR. HUNGERGURT }
DR. FLIEGENTOD }

HABEBALD, _the School Beadle_
DR. PROKRUSTES, _Head of the House of Correction_
A LOCKSMITH
DR. VON BRAUSEPULVER, M.D.
THE MUFFLED GENTLEMAN

MRS. BERGMANN
INA MÜLLER, _her married daughter_
WENDLA BERGMANN, _her 14-year-old daughter_
MARTHA BESSEL }
THEA } _Wendla’s Friends_
ILSE, _an older girl, an artist’s model_

The Scene is laid in Southern Germany or in Switzerland. The Time is from May to November, 1892.

A NOTE ON THE STAGING

SPRING’S AWAKENING is divided into Nineteen Scenes as follows:

ACT I: SCENE 1. In Mrs. Bergmann’s House.
SCENE 2. A Park.
SCENE 3. The Same.
SCENE 4. The School Yard.
SCENE 5. In the Woods.

ACT II: SCENE 1. Melchior’s Study.
SCENE 2. Same as I, 1.
SCENE 3. In the Rilow House.
SCENE 4. A Hayloft.
SCENE 5. Mrs. Gabor’s Room.
SCENE 6. The Bergmann Garden.
SCENE 7. A Path near the River.