SKETCHES OF CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LETTERS' I. GERHART HAUPTMANN'S FUHRMANN HENSCHEL (DECEMBER, 1898) AFTER the appearance of Gerhart Hauptmann's Die Versunkene Glocke, not a few of his admirers thought that this drama would mark a turning-point in the poet's development, that he had at last struggled through the gloom of his early imaginings, that from now on he would accentuate the joyous, the harmonious notes of human life. This hope has been cruelly disappointed by his latest production, Fuhrmann Henschel, a dialect tragedy which has been the doleful pièce de résistance of the Deutsches Theater of Berlin during the last few weeks. Nothing could be I The following sketches, being impressions of the moment and having been written, in part at least, as letters from abroad, are here reprinted in the chronological order in which they first appeared; and no attempt has been made to efface discrepancies between them, due to the different mood of different moments. gloomier and more depressing than this mournful picture of Silesian peasant life. Even Tolstoi's The Power of Darkness, which undoubtedly suggested the outline of characters and the general trend of action in Hauptmann's drama, is, in its final effect, less oppressive and saddening; for although it presents to us a succession of the most horrible atrocities, it leads in the end to a genuine delivery of soul, to a spiritual purification such as we experience in all truly great works of art. In Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Henschel, on the other hand, there is much less of outward offense against the laws of society, much less of violation of the accepted code of morality; and yet we seem to sink resistlessly and irretrievably into utter degradation and ruin. The plot as well as the characters of the drama are of the simplest. Henschel, a teamster in a Silesian mountain village, has hitherto been leading a humdrum and uneventful married existence. Both he and his wife have passed middle life when the first child is born. As a consequence of childbed the mother falls into a lingering illness from which she does not recover. Shortly before her death, she exacts from her husband a promise that he will not marry their servant-girl, whose ambitious schemes upon the unsuspecting man she has discerned with the mental clear-sightedness that comes from bodily weakness. This is the end of the first act. In the second act we see the helpless widower, struggling along in his loneliness and isolation, seeking comfort in idealizing the memories of the past, but at the same time unconsciously breaking away from them; constantly holding before himself the promise that he made to his dying wife, yet by this constant ruminating over it weakening his sense of moral obligation to it, and thus gradually drifting into a second marriage. In the third act, Hanna, the servant-girl, has attained her purpose: she has become the mistress of the house; and now she reveals her true character. She treats her husband with brutal scornfulness; she lets the child of the first marriage die from sheer neglect; she dismisses an old and trusted manservant; she flirts with all sorts of doubtful characters; she ill disguises her wrath and disgust when the good-natured husband, thinking to please her thereby, adopts the offspring of a former liaison of hers whom she had left to misery |