The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann by Gerhart Hauptmann

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THE DRAMATIC WORKS

OF

GERHART HAUPTMANN

(Authorized Edition)

Edited By LUDWIG LEWISOHN

Assistant Professor in The Ohio State University

VOLUME ONE: SOCIAL DRAMAS

1912

PREFACE

The present edition of Hauptmann's works contains all of his plays with
the exception of a few inconsiderable fragments and the historical drama
_Florian Geyer_. The latter has been excluded by reason of its great
length, its divergence from the characteristic moods of Hauptmann's art,
and that failure of high success which the author himself has implicitly
acknowledged. The arrangement of the volumes follows, with such
modifications as the increase of material has made necessary, the method
used by Hauptmann in the first and hitherto the only collected edition of
his dramas. Five plays are presented here which that edition did not
include, and hence the present collection gives the completest view now
attainable of Hauptmann's activity as a dramatist.

The translation of the plays, seven of which are written entirely in
dialect, offered a problem of unusual difficulty. The easiest solution,
that namely, of rendering the speech of the Silesian peasants or the
Berlin populace into some existing dialect of English, I was forced to
reject at once. A very definite set of associative values would thus have
been gained for the language of Hauptmann's characters, but of values
radically different from those suggested in the original. I found it
necessary, therefore, to invent a dialect near enough to the English of
the common people to convince the reader or spectator, yet not so near to
the usage of any class or locality as to interpose between him and
Hauptmann's characters an Irish or a Cockney, a Southern or a New England
atmosphere. Into this dialect, with which the work of my collaborators
has been made to conform, I have sought to render as justly and as
exactly as possible the intensely idiomatic speech that Hauptmann
employs. In doing this I have had to take occasional liberties with my
text, but I have tried to reduce these to a minimum, and always to make
them serve a closer interpretation of the original shade of thought or
turn of expression. The rendering of the plays written in normal literary
prose or verse needs no such explanation nor the plea for a measure of
critical indulgence which that explanation implies.

I owe hearty thanks to Dr. Hauptmann for the promptness and cordiality
with which he has either rectified or confirmed my view of the
development and meaning of his thought and art as stated in the
Introduction, and to my wife for faithful assistance in the preparation
of these volumes.

LUDWIG LEWISOHN.

COLUMBUS, O., June, 1912.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
_By the Editor._

BEFORE DAWN (Vor Sonnenaufgang)
_Translated by the Editor._

THE WEAVERS (Die Weber)
_Translated by Mary Morison._

THE BEAVER COAT (Der Biberpelz)
_Translated by the Editor._

THE CONFLAGRATION (Der rote Hahn)
_Translated by the Editor._

INTRODUCTION

I

Gerhart Hauptmann, the most distinguished of modern German dramatists,
was born in the Silesian village of Obersalzbrunn on November 15, 1862.
By descent he springs immediately from the common people of his native
province to whose life he has so often given the graveness of tragedy and
the permanence of literature. His grandfather, Ehrenfried, felt in his
own person the bitter fate of the Silesian weavers and only through
energy and good fortune was enabled to change his trade to that of a
waiter. By 1824 he was an independent inn-keeper and was followed in the
same business by the poet's father, Robert Hauptmann. The latter, a man
of solid and not uncultivated understanding, married Marie Straehler,
daughter of one of the fervent Moravian households of Silesia, and had
become, when his sons Carl and Gerhart were born, the proprietor of a
well-known and prosperous hotel, _Zur Preussischen Krone_.

From the village-school of Obersalzbrunn, where he was but an idle pupil,
Gerhart was sent in 1874 to the _Realschule_ at Breslau. Here, in the
company of his older brothers, Carl and Georg, the lad remained for
nearly four years, having impressed his teachers most strongly, it
appears, by a lack of attention. For this reason, but also perhaps
because his father, injured by competitors and by a change in local
conditions, had lost his independence, Gerhart was withdrawn from school
in 1878. He was next to become a farmer and, to this end, was placed in
the pious family of an uncle. Gradually, however, artistic impulses began
to disengage themselves--he had long modelled in a desultory way--and in
October, 1880, at the advice of his maturer brother Carl Hauptmann
proceeded to Breslau and was enrolled as a student in the Royal College
of Art.

The value of this restless shifting in his early years is apparent. For
the discontent that marked his unquiet youth made for a firm retention of
impressions. Observation, in the saying of Balzac, springs from
suffering, and Hauptmann saw the Silesian country-folk and the artists of
Breslau with an almost morbid exactness of vision. Actual conflict
sharpened his insight. Three weeks after entering the art-school he
received a disciplinary warning and early in 1881 he was rusticated for
eleven weeks. Nevertheless he remained in Breslau until April, 1882, when
he joined his brother Carl and became a special student at the University
of Jena. Here he heard lectures by Liebmann, Eucken and Haeckel. But the
academic life did not hold him long. Scarcely a year passed and Hauptmann
is found at Hamburg, the guest of his future parents-in-law and his
brother's. Thence he set out on an Italian journey, travelling by way of
Spain and the South of France to Genoa, and visiting Naples, Capri and
Rome. Although his delight in these places was diminished by his keen
social consciousness, he returned to Italy the following year (1884) and,
for a time, had a sculptor's studio in Rome. Overtaken here by typhoid
fever, he was nursed back to health by his future wife, Marie Thienemann,
and returned to Germany to gather strength at the Thienemann country
house.

So far, sculpture had held him primarily; it was now that the poetic
impulse asserted itself. Seeking a synthesis of these tendencies in a
third art, Hauptmann determined, for a time, to adopt the calling of an
actor. To this end he went to Berlin. Here, however, the interest in
literature soon grew to dominate every other and, in 1885, the year of
his marriage to Fraulein Thienemann, he published his first work:
_Promethidenlos_.

The poem is romantic and amorphous and gives but the faintest promise of
the masterly handling of verse to be found in _The Sunken Bell_ and
_Henry of Aue_. Its interest resides solely in its confirmation of the
facts of Hauptmann's development. For the hero of _Promethidenlos_
vacillates between poetry and sculpture, but is able to give himself
freely to neither art because of his overwhelming sense of social
injustice and human suffering. And this, in brief, was the state of
Hauptmann's mind when, in the autumn of 1885, he settled with his young
wife in the Berlin suburb of Erkner.

The years of his residence here are memorable and have already become the
subject of study and investigation. And rightly so; for during this time
there took place that impact of the many obscure tendencies of the age
upon the most sensitive and gifted of German minds from which sprang the
naturalistic movement. That movement dominated literature for a few
years. Then, in Hauptmann's own temper and in his own work, arose a
vigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe technique
and incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far toward
producing--for a second time--a new vision and a new art. The conditions
amid which this development originated are essential to a full
understanding of Hauptmann's work.

II

At the end of the Franco-Prussian war, united Germany looked forward to a
literary movement commensurate with her new greatness. That movement did
not appear. It was forgotten that men in the maturity of their years and
powers could not suddenly change character and method and that the rise
of a new generation was needed. So soon, however, as the first members of
that generation became articulate, a bitter and almost merciless warfare
arose in literature and in the drama. The brothers Heinrich and Julius
Hart, vigorous in both critical and creative activity, asserted as early
as 1882 that German literature was then, at its best, the faint imitation
of an outworn classicism, and the German drama a transference of the
basest French models. It is easy to see to-day that their view was
partisan and narrow. Neither Wilbrandt and Heyse, on the one hand, nor
Lindau and L'Arronge, on the other, represented the whole literary
activity of the empire. It is equally easy, however, to understand their
impatience with a literature which, upon the whole, lacked any breath of
greatness, and handled the stuff of human life with so little freshness,
incisiveness and truth.

What direction was the new literature to take? The decisive influence
was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. For
the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in
science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy.
Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement.
But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with
him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French
naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The
modern--everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the
intuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with which one
rubs elbows!" Such, with whatever later developments, was the central
doctrine of young Germany in the eighties; such the belief that gradually
expressed itself in a number of definite organisations and publications.

The most noteworthy of these, prior to the founding of the _Freie Buehne_,
were the magazine _Die Gesellschaft_ (1885), edited by Michael Conrad,
the most ardent of German Zolaists, and the society _Durch_ (1886), in
which the revolutionary spirits of Berlin united to promulgate the art
canons of the future. "Literature and criticism," Conrad declared, must
first of all be "liberated from the tyranny of the conventional young
lady:" the programme of _Durch_ announced that the poet must give
creative embodiment to the life of the present, that he shall show us
human beings of flesh and blood and depict their passions with implacable
fidelity; that the ideal of art was no longer the Antique, but the
Modern. Nor was there wanting creative activity in the spirit of these
views. Franzos and Kretzer, to name but a few, originated the modern
realistic novel in Germany, and Liliencron brought back vigour and
concreteness to the lyric.

Into the tense atmosphere of this literary battle Hauptmann was cast when
he took up his residence at Erkner. The house he occupied was the last in
the village, half buried in woods and with far prospects over the heaths
and deep green, melancholy waters of Brandenburg. Hither came, among many
others, the brothers Hart, the novelist Kretzer, Wilhelm Boelsche, the
inexhaustible prophet of the new science and the new art, and finally,
the founder of German naturalism as distinguished from that of
France--Arno Holz, The efforts of all these men harmonised with
Hauptmann's mood. Naturalistic art goes for its subject matter to the
forgotten and disinherited of the earth, and it was with these that
Hauptmann was primarily concerned. He read Darwin and Karl Marx,
Saint-Simon and Zola. He was absorbed not by any problem of art but by
the being and fate of humanity itself.

Under these influences and governed by such thoughts, he began his career
as a man of letters anew. But his progress was slow and uncertain. In
1887 he published in Conrad's _Gesellschaft_ an episodic story,
_Bahnwaerter Thiel_, weak in narrative technique and obviously inspired by
Zola. Even the sudden expansion of human characters into demonic symbols
of their ruling passions is imitated. The medium clearly irked him and
gave him no opportunity for personal expression. For many months his
activity was tentative and fruitless. Early in 1889, however, Arno Holz,
known until then only by a volume of brave and resonant verse, visited
Erkner and brought with him his theory of "consistent naturalism" as
illustrated by _Papa Hamlet_ and _Die Familie Selicke_, sketches and a
drama in manuscript. This meeting gave Hauptmann one of those
illuminating technical hints which every creative artist knows. It
brought him an immediate method such as neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky
had been able to bring, and decided him for naturalism and for the drama.
He had found himself at last. During a visit to his parents he gave
himself up to intense labour and returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889
with his first drama, _Before Dawn_, completed.

The play might have waited indefinitely for performance, had not Otto
Brahm and Paul Schlenther, both critical thinkers of some significance,
founded the free stage society (_Freie Buehne_) earlier in the same year.
It was the aim of this society to give at least eight annual performances
in the city of Berlin which should be wholly free from the influence of
the censor and from the pressure of economic needs. The greater number of
the first series of performances had already been prepared for by a
selection of foreign plays--Tolstoi, Goncourt, Ibsen, Bjoernsen,
Strindberg--when, at the last moment, a young German dramatist presented
himself and succeeded in having his play accepted. Thus the society, long
since dead, had the good fortune of fulfilling the function for which it
was created: it launched the naturalistic movement; it cradled the modern
drama of Germany.

The first performance of _Before Dawn_ (Oct. 20, 1889) was tumultuous. It
recalled the famous _Hernani_ battle of French romanticism. But the
victory of Hauptmann was not long in doubt. With his third play he
conquered the national stage of which he has since been, with whatever
variations of immediate success, the undisputed master.

III

The "consistent naturalism" of Holz and his collaborator Johannes Schlaf
is the technical foundation of Hauptmann's work. He has long transcended
its narrow theory and the shallow positivism on which it was based. It
discarded verse and he has written great verse; it banished the past from
art and he has gone to legend and history for his subjects; it forbade
the use of symbols and he has, at times, made an approach to his meaning
unnecessarily difficult. But Hauptmann has never quite abandoned the
practice of that form of art which resulted from the theories of Holz.
From history and poetry he has always returned to the naturalistic drama.
_Rose Bernd_ follows _Henry of Aue_, and _Griselda_ immediately preceded
_The Rats_. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed him
into the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulously
devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and
human. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism of
German literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis of
Hauptmann's work in its totality. Like nearly all the greater dramatists
he had his forerunners and his prophets: he proceeds from a school of art
and thought which, even in transcending, he illustrates.

The consistent naturalists, then, aimed not to found a new art but, in
any traditional sense, to abandon it. They desired to reduce the
conventions of technique to a minimum and to eliminate the writer's
personality even where Zola had admitted its necessary presence--in the
choice of subject and in form. For style, the very religion of the French
naturalistic masters, there was held to be no place, since there was to
be, in this new literature, neither direct exposition, however
impersonal, nor narrative. In other words, none of the means of
representation were to be used by which art achieves the illusion of
life; since art, in fact, was no longer to create the illusion of
reality, but to _be_ reality. The founders of the school would have
admitted that the French had done much by the elimination of intrigue and
a liberal choice of theme. They would still have seen--and rightly
according to their premises--creative vision and not truth even in the
oppressive pathology of _Germinie Lacerteux_ and the morbid brutalities
of _La Terre_. The opinion of Flaubert that any subject suffices, if the
treatment be excellent, was modified into: there must be neither
intentional choice of theme nor stylistic treatment. For style supposes
rearrangement, personal vision, unjust selection of detail, and
literature must be an exact rendition of the actual.

Stated so baldly the doctrine of consistent naturalism verges on the
absurd. Eliminate selection of detail and personal vision, and art
becomes not only coextensive with life, but shares its confusion and its
apparent purposelessness. It loses all interpretative power and ceases to
be art. Practically, however, the doctrine led to a very definite
form--the naturalistic drama. For, if all indirect treatment of life be
discarded, nothing is left but the recording of speech and, if possible,
of speech actually overheard. The juxtaposition of such blocks of
scrupulously rendered conversation constitutes, in fact, the earliest
experiments of Arno Holz. Under the creative energy of Hauptmann,
however, the form at once grew into drama, but a drama which sought to
rely as little as possible upon the traditional devices of dramaturgic
technique. There was to be no implication of plot, no culmination of the
resulting struggle in effective scenes, no superior articulateness on the
part of the characters. A succession of simple scenes was to present a
section of life without rearrangement or heightening. There could be no
artistic beginning, for life comes shadowy from life; there could be no
artistic ending, for the play of life ends only in eternity.

The development of the drama in such a direction had, of course, been
foreshadowed. The plays of Ibsen's middle period tend to a simpler
rendering of life, and the cold intellect of Strindberg had rejected the
"symmetrical dialogue" of the French drama in order "to let the brains of
men work unhindered." But Hauptmann carries the same methods
extraordinarily far and achieves a poignant verisimilitude that rivals
the pity and terror of the most memorable drama of the past.

These methods lead, naturally, to the exclusion of several devices. Thus
Hauptmann, like Ibsen and Shaw, avoids the division of acts into scenes.
The coming and going of characters has the unobtrusiveness but seldom
violated in life, and the inevitable artifices are held within rigid
bounds. In some of his earlier dramas he also observed the unities of
time and place, and throughout his work practices a close economy in
these respects. It goes without saying that he rejects the monologue, the
unnatural reading of letters, the _raisonneur_ or commenting and
providential character, the lightly motivised confession--all the
devices, in brief, by which the conventional playwright blandly
transports information across the footlights, or unravels the artificial
knot which he has tied.

In dialogue, the medium of the drama, Hauptmann shows the highest
originality and power. Beside the speech of his characters all other
dramatic speech, that of Ibsen, of Tolstoi in _The Power of Darkness_, or
of Pinero, seems conscious and unhuman. Nor is that power a mere control
of dialect. Johannes Vockerat and Michael Kramer, Dr. Scholz and
Professor Crampton speak with a human raciness and native truth not
surpassed by the weavers or peasants of Silesia. Hauptmann has heard the
inflections of the human voice, the faltering and fugitive eloquence of
the living word not only with his ear but with his soul.

External devices necessarily contribute to this effect. Thus Hauptmann
renders all dialect with phonetic accuracy and correct differentiation.
In _Before Dawn_, Hoffmann, Loth, Dr. Schimmelpfennig and Helen speak
normal High German; all the other characters speak Silesian except the
imported footman Edward, who uses the Berlin dialect. In _The Beaver
Coat_ the various gradations of that dialect are scrupulously set down,
from the impudent vulgarity of Leontine and Adelaide, to the occasional
consonantal slips of Wehrhahn. The egregious Mrs. Wolff, in the same
play, cannot deny her Silesian origin. Far finer shades of character are
indicated by the amiable elisions of Mrs. Vockerat Senior in _Lonely
Lives_, the recurrent crassness of Mrs. Scholz in _The Reconciliation_,
and the solemn reiterations of Michael Kramer. Nor must it be thought
that such characterisation has anything in common with the set phrases of
Dickens. From the richness and variety of German colloquial speech, from
the deep brooding of the German soul over the common things and the
enduring emotions of life, Hauptmann has caught the authentic accents
that change dramatic dialogue into the speech of man.

IV

In the structure of his drama Hauptmann met and solved an even more
difficult problem than in the character of his dialogue. The whole
tradition of structural technique rests upon a more or less arbitrary
rearrangement of life. _Othello_, the noblest of tragedies, no less than
the most trivial French farce, depends for the continuity of its mere
action on an improbable artifice. Desdemona's handkerchief may almost be
taken to symbolise that element in the drama which Hauptmann studiously
denies himself. And he does so by reason of his more intimate contact
with the normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of
will with will, the passionate crises of human existence are but rarely
concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient
situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have
been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so
telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's _Le
gendre de M. Poirier_ the material of life has been dissected into mere
shreds and these have been rewoven into a pattern as little akin to
reality as the flowers and birds of a Persian rug. Instead of such
effective rearrangement Hauptmann contents himself with the austere
simplicity of that succession of action which observation really affords.
He shapes his material as little as possible. The intrusion of a new
force into a given setting, as in _Lonely Lives_, is as violent an
interference with the sober course of things as he admits. From his
noblest successes, _The Weavers_, _Drayman Henschel_, _Michael Kramer_,
the artifice of complication is wholly absent.

It follows that his fables are simple and devoid of plot, that comedy and
tragedy must inhere in character and that conflict must grow from the
clash of character with environment or of character with character in its
totality. In other words: since the adventurous and unwonted are rigidly
excluded, dramatic complication can but rarely, with Hauptmann, proceed
from action. For the life of man is woven of "little, nameless,
unremembered acts" which possess no significance except as they
illustrate character and thus, link by link, forge that fate which is
identical with character. The constant and bitter conflict in the world
does not arise from pointed and opposed notions of honour and duty held
at some rare climacteric moment, but from the far more tragic grinding of
a hostile environment upon man or of the imprisonment of alien souls in
the cage of some social bondage.

These two motives, appearing sometimes singly, sometimes blended, are
fundamental to Hauptmann's work. In _The Reconciliation_ an unnatural
marriage has brought discord and depravity upon earth; in _Lonely Lives_
a seeker after truth is throttled by a murky world; in _The Weavers_ the
whole organization of society drives men to tragic despair; in _Colleague
Crampton_ a cold blooded woman all but destroys the gentle-hearted
painter; in _The Beaver Coat_ the motive is ironically inverted and a
base shrewdness triumphs over the stupid social machine; in _Rose Bernd_
traditional righteousness hounds a pure spirit out of life; and in
_Gabriel Schilling's Flight_, his latest play, Hauptmann returns to a
favourite motive: woman, strong through the narrowness and intensity of
her elemental aims, destroying man, the thinker and dreamer, whose will,
dissipated in a hundred ideal purposes, goes under in the unequal
struggle.

The fable and structure of _Michael Kramer_ illustrate Hauptmann's
typical themes and methods well. The whole of the first act is
exposition. It is not, however, the exposition of antecedent actions or
events, but wholly of character. The conditions of the play are entirely
static. Kramer's greatness of soul broods over the whole act. Mrs.
Kramer, the narrow-minded, nagging wife, and Arnold, the homely, wretched
boy with a spark of genius, quail under it. Michaline, the brave,
whole-hearted girl, stands among these, pitying and comprehending all. In
the second act one of Arnold's sordid and piteous mistakes comes to
light. An inn-keeper's daughter complains to Kramer of his son's
grotesque and annoyingly expressed passion for her. Kramer takes his son
to task and, in one of the noblest scenes in the modern drama, wrestles
with the boy's soul. In the third act the inn is shown. Its rowdy,
semi-educated habitues deride Arnold with coarse gibes. He cannot tear
himself away. Madly sensitive and conscious of his final superiority over
a world that crushes him by its merely brutal advantages, he is goaded to
self-destruction. In the last act, in the presence of his dead son,
Michael Kramer cries out after some reconciliation with the silent
universe. The play is done and nothing has happened. The only action is
Arnold's suicide and that action has no dramatic value. The significance
of the play lies in the unequal marriage between Kramer and his wife, in
Arnold's character--in the fact that such things _are_, and that in our
outlook upon the whole of life we must reckon with them.

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