MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 OF NEW GERMANY- 
 
 PERCIVAL POLLARD
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 MASKS and MINSTRELS 
 of NEW GERMANY 
 
 By Percival Pollard 
 
 JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY 
 BOSTON :::::: 1911
 
 Copyright, 1911 
 BY L. E. BASSETT
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 AN EVENING IN A GERMAN CABARET 
 
 A form of nocturnal entertainment adopted from 
 
 Paris Much fun and a little art 1-9 
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 THE TTBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 
 
 The effort of poets and musicians to improve the 
 German music-hall Success in Munich, 
 Failure in Berlin Von Wolzogen, Bier- 
 baum, Von Recnicek, Oscar Straus, and 
 Simplicissimus 10-21 
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 ON COLLECTING AND ON MINSTRELSY 
 
 Bierbaum's magazine, Die Insel The anti- 
 quarian period following the death of 
 Goethe Revival of the spirit of the trou- 
 badours The lyric's place in our life . 22-34 
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 THE PIONEERS OF GERMANY'S NEW NATIONALISM 
 
 Rebellion against spineless literature The in- 
 surgents of the middle 'eighties Bleibtreu, 
 M. G. Conrad, the Hart brothers, Hermann 
 Conradi, Johannes Schlaf, Arno Holz, Maxi- 
 milian Harden, Hermann Bahr An Amer- 
 ican equivalent, the pamphlet period The 
 inspiration for Hauptmann's " Before Sun- 
 rise" . 35-56 
 
 2041377
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 
 
 Nietzsche's influence on German literature The 
 first note of true nationalism Soldier, 
 country gentleman, magistrate and poet 
 Bierbaum's eulogy 57-83 
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 OTTO ERICH II \i: I l.i.lti: N 
 
 A victim of temperament Facility in anecdote 
 and success in the theatre Selma Hart- 
 leben's glimpses of his personality Her- 
 mann Bahr's " Concert " outdone in real life 84-120 
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 
 
 Most musical minstrel of our time The novel 
 which forecast the iiberbrettl' Wedekind's 
 career hinted in " Stilpe " Troubadour, 
 discoverer of fellow-artists, novelist, and 
 traveler The first fine literature of motor- 
 travel His like, for irony and independ- 
 ence, hard to find in English . . . 121-177 
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 
 
 The Nietzsche-Liliencron parentage Stephan 
 George, Max Dauthendey, Rainer Maria 
 Rilke, Hugo Salus, Richard Schaukal, Karl 
 August Klein 178-191 
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL 
 
 Survivor from the Nietzsche period Some con- 
 temporaries, Gustav Falke, Ludwig Finckh, 
 A. W. Heymel, Rudolf Schroeder The pas- 
 sionate transformations of Dehmel's feeling 
 and art A Cosmic Poet . . . 192-204
 
 CONTENTS vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 MERE ENTERTAINMENT 
 
 Best-sellers and humorists " Rideamus," T. 
 Etzel, Gustav Meyrinck, Thomas Mann, and 
 Marie Madeleine Madeleine's American 
 equivalent, Natalie Barney Margarethe 
 Boehme 205-214 
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 EHNST VON WOLZOGEN 
 
 A versatility, in more than forty volumes Share 
 in the UberbrettP Singing his own songs 
 to his own music The " Maybride " in 
 Wiesbaden Portrait of Liszt in one of his 
 novels Librettos for Richard Strauss 215-226 
 
 CHAPTER TWELVE 
 
 DRAMA AND FRANK WEDEKIND 
 
 Max Halbe, Ludwig Fulda, Ernst Hardt, Otto 
 Ernst Wedekind's bizarre application of 
 the Nietzsche doctrine His tragedies of 
 sex illumination Partner in the Dberbrettl' 
 movement Youthful ideals squandered, bit- 
 ter irony the residue The playwright of the 
 abnormal Preoccupation with the physical 
 
 Psychologist of our primordial savagery 227-256 
 
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 
 LUDWIG THOMA'S " MORAL " 
 
 More amusing than " Mrs. Warren's Profession " 
 
 A pertinent lesson for prudes in New 
 York, Chicago and London Police inter- 
 ference with things artistic . . . 257-264 
 
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE, SCHNITZLER 
 
 The German Map of Temperament Dehmel, 
 philosopher in his passion; Schnitzler, rival-
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ing the Parisians in the finesse of philander- 
 ing Munich the stronghold of artistic lib- 
 erty, where the old Minnesinger spirit came 
 to life again Schnitzler's voice is the voice 
 of Vienna Roda Roda, foremost portrayer 
 of the semi-Oriental borderlands, civil and 
 military 265-283 
 
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 
 
 HUGO VON HOFFMANSTHAt 
 
 A poet of the theatre Rivals D'Annunzio for 
 rhetorical music Librettos for Richard 
 Strauss 284-289 
 
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 
 
 BAHB AKO FINIS 
 
 Leadership of the Young Vienna movement 
 Vienna's triumph with " The Merry Widow " 
 attracts theatrical agents from abroad 
 "The Concert" definitely stills the rumor of 
 Bahr's being, like all the Viennese, " merely 
 clever " Journalist, man of the world, 
 critic, novelist, playwright . . . 290-299
 
 Masks and Minstrels 
 of New Germany
 
 Masks and Minstrek 
 of New Germany 
 
 AN EVENING IN A GERMAN CABARET 
 
 SOMETHING after midnight, one springtime 
 of four or five years ago, a friend and I were 
 homing to our quarters in the old Rue de 
 Varenne. It was a wonderful night for a walk 
 from the boulevards to the Left Bank; you 
 could smell faintly the wondrous blend of blos- 
 soms in the Elysian Fields, of acrid tar, of mist 
 from the Seine, and many other intangible 
 odors the smell of Paris when the year is 
 young. Yet my friend was not happy, and re- 
 fused to believe a certain remark of mine. He 
 was not, you see, in the best of tempers, and 
 though Paris had just been distinctly rude to 
 him, he refused to hear it belittled. 
 
 Our evening had been spent, for the most 
 
 part, at the Marigny. The " revue " in the 
 
 promenoir had entertained us as much as the 
 
 " revue " on the stage, which was not saying 
 
 1
 
 2 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 much. By way of turning our boredom into 
 other channels, my friend insisted upon coffee 
 in one of the many garish places between the 
 Opera and the Vaudeville. He chose one noto- 
 rious as having nothing to say to Parisians, but 
 only to strangers: Brazilians, Anglo-Saxons 
 or Germans; but who was I to dissuade him? 
 Some people proclaim their familiarity with 
 Paris, yet never discover that the places they 
 frequent are merely the obvious traps for 
 greenhorns. Well, we had our coffee, we lis- 
 tened to the music, and we observed the elabo- 
 rate females who were more or less professionally 
 present. Then came the incident which ruined 
 my friend's temper, and left him inaccessible to 
 truth. 
 
 The bill, when we came to settle, was exactly 
 twice what it should have been. My friend 
 spluttered. The waiter shrugged his shoulders, 
 lifted his eyebrows and presumed Monsieur for- 
 got that it was after midnight, that the music 
 was unusually fine, and that the ladies were 
 present in great numbers. After midnight, for 
 the music, and for the ladies, it was well known, 
 he reminded us, that the prices . . . and so on. 
 My friend made the usual mistake: he tried to 
 take it out of the waiter. " I sha'n't tip him ! " 
 he growled, and he didn't. He put down upon 
 the table the exact amount our little platters 
 indicated, and not a sou more. But he had
 
 IN A GERMAN CABARET 3 
 
 reckoned without his waiter. Trust a Parisian 
 to seize a cue for wit ! As we got up, the waiter 
 swept the silver from the cloth with an air for 
 all to observe, and as my friend passed him, 
 bowed low before him. 
 
 " Merci, mon prince ! " said the waiter, as he 
 bowed, and in that " Mon prince ! " was as 
 much sarcasm as any two words in any tongue 
 could hold. 
 
 My friend pretended he had not heard; but 
 he had ; his desire to dispute with me made that 
 clear. The fact was, he was in a most villain- 
 ous temper. So that my harmless little remark 
 definitely enraged him. Yet all I said was this ; 
 as we were crossing in front of the Opera, into 
 streets that were now silent, deserted, almost 
 dark: 
 
 " At this hour, when, as we see, Paris is go- 
 ing to bed, Berlin is just waking up." 
 
 A flood, nothing less than a flood, of rage 
 came at me from my friend. There was Mont- 
 martre, I must remember; there was the Cafe 
 du Pantheon on the Boul' Miche', and there 
 were the boulevards where, as he did not re- 
 mind me, he had just been robbed. As he 
 raved, we walked, none the less, through streets 
 darker and darker, more and more deserted. 
 Silence was all about us ; the noise of our 
 disputing was as a clamor against empty 
 walls.
 
 4 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 It was true, my maddened friend to the con- 
 trary, that Berlin is of all great capitals the 
 one which is liveliest at night. I thought, as 
 I walked toward the Left Bank that night in 
 Paris, of just such nights, several years before, 
 in which the nocturnal wakefulness of Berlin 
 had come home to me. 
 
 Especially I thought of one night, in one of 
 the first years of our new century, when, stroll- 
 ing along the garishly brilliant Leipziger- 
 strasse at an hour wherein most people are 
 thinking of going to bed, I was struck by an 
 insinuating, fantastically outlined sign : " Zum 
 Klimperkasten." 
 
 The words arrested me. Their meaning, if 
 you would have it in English, is, as nearly as 
 possible : " At the Sign of the Hurdy Gurdy." 
 What was going on here, I wondered, " Zum 
 Klimperkasten " ? 
 
 And then, for answer, there came to me a 
 memory of something I had read some little time 
 before something of Otto Julius Bierbaum's. 
 Something in which there had been those rarest 
 qualities, a new sensation, an emotion, an 
 awakening to new interests, to charming revela- 
 tions. 
 
 I looked again at the sign; recalled again 
 what, in that earlier day, had happened as a 
 result of a certain first encounter with Otto 
 Julius in a dingy lane of Hamburg; and the
 
 IN A GERMAN CABARET 5 
 
 next moment I opened the door " Zum Klimper- 
 kasten." 
 
 That was my first, though not by a good deal 
 my last, experience of a German cabaret. 
 
 ORIGINALLY out of the Cafe, by Genius, the 
 breed of cabarets has shown many forms of 
 bastardy, some amusing, some disgusting. 
 Often merely brutish, as in Aristide Bruant's 
 place in Paris or the old Whitechapel Club in 
 Chicago, and often tiresome, the central idea 
 was plausible : it was a place wherein talent was 
 to improvise itself for the public appreciation. 
 It was for the Minnesingers of our period what 
 once a baronial courtyard was. There were 
 such coffee houses as Will's ; you may trace 
 the idea in the Fra^ois Premier, in Pousset's, 
 and in the Chat Noir. In one country coffee, 
 in another absinthe, in another beer was the tap ; 
 the names and externals might change, but the 
 central idea was the same. Whatever in songs, 
 poems, stories, in ballads, in melody or color, 
 had, in this or that smoke-dimmed corner, the 
 odor of the spontaneous that was the thing ! 
 
 A little this side of midnight one went to the 
 cabaret. In one case you paid a mark ; in an- 
 other less; another more. In all you had to 
 buy, if you wished to be inconspicuous, a bottle 
 of wine, champagne or a cheaper article. The 
 cheapest Moselle cost 75 pfennigs the half-bot-
 
 6 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 tie. In some cabarets you could not order a 
 plain liqueur without having had wine first. 
 The wine was invariably bad; but you did not 
 have to be fool enough to drink it. Smoking 
 was general. You could usually eat some sort 
 of supper; so far was commerce the cabaret's 
 ally that in many cases restaurants were affili- 
 ated. 
 
 Good humor and good behavior surrounded 
 you. You felt yourself among persons of in- 
 telligence and good looks, into whose social 
 standing it was impertinent to inquire. The 
 ladies might not be of the world, but they were 
 of the politer half; though not in uniform, 
 there were plenty of officers visible to the know- 
 ing eye. A room scarce as large as a lecture 
 hall. Tables with white napery; long-necked 
 blonde bottles ; champagne coolers. A slightly 
 raised platform holding a piano. At the piano 
 a youth, extracting pleasant improvisations, 
 accompaniments to the general laughter and 
 chatter. On to the platform passed, presently, 
 a smooth-shaven person who, pleasantly, in con- 
 versational tone, reminded the company that, as 
 they knew, the cabaret was the avenue for pub- 
 licity of many budding talents; he had the 
 pleasure of introducing Herr Lautensack. 
 
 Enter, then, Herr Lautensack, a poet. Yes, 
 no more than that: just a poet. Not necessa- 
 rily of the slovenliness or shabbiness pretended
 
 IN A GERMAN CABARET 7 
 
 by certain conventions ; no fine eye in frenzy 
 rolling; just a modern poet who, perhaps, went 
 to the same tailor that you did. First he gave 
 a passionate lyric; you heard echoes of Swin- 
 burne, Dowson or Symons. . . Then an excur- 
 sion into pure nonsense, as of Lear or Burgess. 
 . . . Yet always an approach, a definite ap- 
 proach to art. A something that the music- 
 hall of before the Uberbrettl' had not known. 
 
 The audience applauded the poet as heartily 
 as, some moments before, it had applauded the 
 little Viennese with the soulful eyes who had 
 sung a ballad, the suggestion in which left 
 nothing to the imagination. The public did not 
 get up and leave when the poet appeared. For 
 the poet of the cabaret, like the cabaret itself, 
 had mindful of the Uberbrettl', and mindful 
 also of the champagne come to the quick per- 
 ception of immediate art ; he entertained, enter- 
 tained unfalteringly, even where he also shocked 
 or stimulated. Even the poems, impassioned or 
 absurd, had always to have the quick dramatic 
 climax of comedy or tragedy. 
 
 The master of ceremonies came and went, in- 
 troducing singers of chansonettes, tellers of 
 stories, players of piano parodies. His was 
 simply the old, old method of the British music- 
 hall Chairman made more intimate. Always 
 the conversational tone, however ; occasional 
 dialogues between platform and audience; the
 
 8 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 intimacy of a public salon where no laws save 
 those of taste ruled. You heard, perhaps, little 
 that you might not hear elsewhere; but you 
 heard it differently. You felt you had part in 
 a pleasant conspiracy in entertainment. The 
 songs were written by persons present; the 
 composer was the gentleman at the piano; yet 
 the result was profitable as well as artistic ; the 
 public bought those songs at the shops ; and 
 those writers and composers and performers 
 had the air of being prosperous. Everything 
 was cosy and intimate. Occasionally there were 
 obviously unrehearsed improvisations, however 
 much in the main your sophistication might sus- 
 pect collusion in some of this intimacy. Sudden 
 choruses of parodic ditties were gravely ap- 
 plauded by the master of ceremonies. Compli- 
 ments and the reverse ricocheted between the 
 stage and the audience. 
 
 The chief novelty, if you came to the cabaret 
 fresh from other climes, was the appeal to the 
 intellect. There was no horseplay. The wit 
 was sometimes broad, but always keen; you 
 could have smiled at it in print. . . . Apply 
 that test to the generality in English, and shud- 
 der! . . . Memorable was a parody of the 
 great Erl-King poem, in which the father, rid- 
 ing with his sick child through the Sieges- 
 Allee, sees him die in agony finally when that 
 supreme horror in marble, the Roland von Ber-
 
 IN A GERMAN CABABET 9 
 
 lin statue, is reached. Berlin, careless of the im- 
 perial taste in art, roared with laughter. At 
 passionate serenades to curdle County Council 
 and Comstock blood, and at much else in the 
 cabaret, Berlin laughed as long, always, as they 
 had both art and entertainment in them. 
 
 Here, in short, for amateurs of art and of 
 entertainment, was a distinctly new sensation. 
 Aside from the entertainment, sheerly as such, 
 what was genuinely artistic in the cabaret had 
 come down from the Uberbrettl'.
 
 n 
 
 THE UBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 
 
 THE Uberbrettl' was a movement for the im- 
 provement of the rubbish in vogue in the music- 
 halls and lighter theatres of Germany just be- 
 fore the beginning of the present century. This 
 doggerel, this utter nonsense, this illiterate and 
 unintelligent vaporing, certain rash young 
 poets of Green Germany, Otto Julius Bier- 
 baum at their head, determined to scotch. 
 They meant to replace all that by real lyrics, 
 set to real melodies. 
 
 Those young Germans of the later nineties 
 started their Uberbrettl' ; they wrote their 
 most jaunty verses for it, and the most dexter- 
 ous of their musical fellows wrote music to the 
 verses ; and all this got itself sung, not only 
 on the little stages they controlled, but on the 
 streets of the whole country. What was all this 
 if it was not the Minnesingers come again, the 
 troubadours flaunting their romantic airs in the 
 very halls of the philistine? Once the philistine 
 had been baronial ; now he was bourgeois or 
 as Germany had it then, " Biedermeier " ; and 
 10
 
 THE UBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 11 
 
 the baron of earlier days had been, of the whole 
 crew, the more tolerant of good verse and good 
 melody. But, if the Uberbrettl' was to have 
 a hard fight, and win indirect rather than di- 
 rect triumphs, we can never sufficiently ap- 
 plaud the courage of its leaders. 
 
 By the year 1900 they had reached the point 
 where they could print a goodly little volume 
 of the lyrics that were singing themselves all 
 over the land, namely : " Deutsche Chansons," 
 or " Brettl-lieder," as the sub-title went. In 
 twelve months this had sold 20,000 copies. It 
 was in the preface to the original edition of this 
 little collection that Bierbaum definitely ex- 
 pressed the real hope of the Uberbrettl' move- 
 ment ; the date was September, 1900. Here is 
 the gist of the little proclamation : 
 
 " Art for the music-hall is that not, you 
 say, something of a profanation? Lyrics and 
 the show business, can those be associates? . . . 
 Well, we are going to try, seriously enough, to 
 put art at the service of the music-hall. We 
 happen to have the notion that all life can be 
 made artistic. Artists, to-day, build chairs 
 that are not only beautiful to behold, but com- 
 fortable to sit on. Even so we want to write 
 verses that will be not only for the library but 
 that an amusement-loving people will sing. Ap- 
 plied lyrics there is our text. . . . Firstly
 
 12 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 they must be songs you can sing. Nextly, they 
 must delight not merely a cultivated minority, 
 but the average general public that simply 
 wants to be entertained. . . . Just as the In- 
 dependent Theatres succeeded in raising the 
 wants of the playgoing public, so we hope, by 
 introducing art into the variety-theatres, to 
 better the general taste. . . . Variety-theatres 
 are as much typical expressions of our time and 
 culture as electric street-cars. The townsman 
 of to-day has, if you will permit the phrase, 
 music-hall nerves ; only rarely he troubles to 
 follow great dramatic coherencies ; he wants 
 change variety. If, as artists, we wish to 
 keep in touch with life itself, we must count on 
 this realization. . . . 
 
 " This idea originally came, I believe, from 
 my friend Stilpe. . . . Now we are to lift it 
 from fancy into fact, and no less than friend 
 Wolzogen is to see to that. I count this as no 
 less worthy than the founding, in their day, of 
 the Independent Theatres. . . ." 
 
 Here a necessary, if lame, attempt to explain 
 the title Uberbrettl'. The final " 1 " is, as you 
 may know, the endearing diminutive hailing 
 from Vienna. Where the northern German 
 speaks of " Madchen " the southern says 
 Madl'." " Die Bretter " are in German exactly 
 what in our own stage parlance " the boards "
 
 THE UBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 13 
 
 are ; but for the " Brettl' " we have no equiva- 
 lent ; the term covers all lighter forms of enter- 
 tainment below the " legitimate." Music-hall, 
 variety, cafe-chantant, and even that mongrel 
 product known as musical comedy, would fall 
 under the title of Brettl'. Uber, of course, as 
 all acquainted with the names of Nietzsche, of 
 Richard Strauss, of Bernard Shaw, etc., know, 
 means Super. So from all this you may build 
 a version to suit yourself. An ingenious 
 American promoter of music-halls once coined 
 the term Polite Variety; this German article 
 might be called Artistic Variety. But the saf- 
 est thing, when once you know what is meant, 
 is to call it simply the Uberbrettl'. As that it 
 made history in Germany ; and under that 
 banner its legacies of song and music have come 
 down to us. 
 
 The Uberbrettl' idea flourished into fact in 
 many German towns. There were, to name only 
 a few, the Darmstaedter Spiele as offshoots ; 
 and in Munich the " Elf Sharf richter " gave 
 performances of amazing and memorable dis- 
 tinction. Only in Berlin the climate was too 
 inartistic ; the Trianon Theatre went to pieces 
 with a completeness that prompted Bierbaum to 
 a most delightful sort of Farewell, in which oc- 
 curred the : " This once, and never again ! " 
 One of my most cherished treasures is the issue 
 of Die Insel in which that Farewell ap-
 
 14 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 peared. Later Bierbaum commented on the 
 episode less ironically, and in a way that will 
 help you to understand still more clearly the 
 Uberbrettl' scheme. The passage occurs in 
 " A Little Autumn Motor-tour," which now 
 appears in the 1910 edition of the " Yankee- 
 doodletrip." 
 
 " In Berlin the Uberbrettl' began as a joke, 
 and went to pieces when the joke grew stale. 
 Every effort seriously to realize the truly fine 
 idea of a lyric theatre in music-hall form, was 
 bound to fail there, because the notion of a lit- 
 erary hoax was too closely allied to it. In Mu- 
 nich the idea succeeded, because there the artis- 
 tic definitely prevailed over the joke of the 
 thing; because a really businesslike manage- 
 ment was at the head; and because, more than 
 any town in Germany, Munich enjoys a wise 
 and liberal censorship. The things Frank 
 Wedekind can sing here " (Bierbaum was wri- 
 ting in Munich, in November, 1902), " would be 
 possible in no other German town. More than 
 that : Even if they were allowed, it would be im- 
 possible, because of the attitude of the audiences, 
 to consider them as anything but insults. . . . 
 The chief advantage the * Elf Scharfrichter ' 
 have is that the space in which they play ex- 
 cludes a mob ; it is a room that is hardly more 
 than a corridor, and holds hardly more than 
 a hundred people. Which preserves just the
 
 THE UBERBEETTL' MOVEMENT 15 
 
 intimacy necessary to this sort of art. Also the 
 pleasant lack of pretentiousness. Everything 
 primitive, but in the best taste. Hardly any- 
 thing that smacks of being an ' artistic ' turn, 
 yet hardly anything quite lacking in art. . . . 
 They played, for instance, a satiric farce of 
 Paul Schlesinger's, ' The Improvement Society,' 
 full of the most obvious hits at the highest per- 
 sonage of the German Empire, surpassing any- 
 thing the Simplicissimus ever dared. . . ." 
 
 BIERBAUM'S mention of Simplicissimus brings 
 one to emphasis of the fact that it was not in 
 literature alone that Germany in that period 
 was surprising the rest of the world. In art, 
 too, the younger men were effecting a revolu- 
 tion that was no less tremendous. There is not 
 room here to go into that side of the movement ; 
 but it is nothing less than pertinent to point 
 out that what the men this book is to emphasize 
 were achieving for an awakening of truly Ger- 
 man vigor, for individualism, and above all for 
 irony in writing, their compeers in caricature 
 and in every printed form of art were equaling. 
 Simplicissimus became the foremost organ of 
 political and social satire in the world, and 
 Jugend the most artistic. The legend of a 
 Germany ruled by uniforms, military or bureau- 
 cratic, became hard to discern under a play of 
 wit and criticism in print that no other land in
 
 16 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the world surpassed. Than T. T. Heine it 
 would be hard to find a more mordant artist 
 with the pencil, and in no other artist since 
 Diirer has the hard morality of the North found 
 a sterner satirist. 
 
 If in that artist you have the Teuton brutal- 
 ity and directness, in the late Von Recnicek you 
 had a grace and charm in the depiction of the 
 feminine and fashionable side of life that made 
 the outlander suppose Germany populated, all 
 of a sudden, with beautiful women with Paris- 
 ian taste in gowns. That was, it is true, merely 
 his Hungarian instinct for the beautiful im- 
 posing itself upon Munich; yet it marked a 
 new stage in German artistic development none 
 the less. Germany had left parochialism and 
 taken to cosmopolitan laughter. What Von 
 Recnicek did for frocks and frills, Thony did 
 for the uniforms ; the one satirized the men, the 
 other the women, of fashion ; for in Germany 
 or Austria the man of fashion still does not 
 exist outside of uniform. But if you imagine 
 the backfisch adoration of the officer type still 
 in vogue in this period that the writing and 
 painting men of Germany were introducing, you 
 have only to look at files of Simplicissimus or 
 Jugend to have your fancy exploded. 
 
 The men of Jugend are by now great paint- 
 ers, accepted by the world; one need do no 
 more here than name some of them briefly. The
 
 THE UBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 17 
 
 fantastic Julius Diez; R. M. Eichler; Feld- 
 bauer and Jank, whose horses and soldiers are 
 in the foreground of so many of the Munich 
 exhibitions; Paul Rieth and Adolf Miinzer 
 (whose mural paintings make artistically re- 
 markable the new Kur-Haus in Wiesbaden) giv- 
 ing vividly that Gallic note which has for years 
 been passing out through Munich ; and the late 
 Leo Putz with his strange tricks of satire and 
 decoration. The application of all this art left 
 nothing to be desired, for in step with all such 
 energetic breaking away from old and stilted 
 caricature and illustration the processes of 
 color-printing in Germany reached what 
 is to-day admittedly the first place in the 
 world. 
 
 It were easy to write about what we may call 
 the colored side of this Young German period 
 an entire book; and since I was of those rash 
 mortals who in the days when all this color, all 
 this satire and singing, were new, loved it all, 
 whether it was green, or yellow, or blue, and 
 tried to make others love it, I should like noth- 
 ing better ; but to-day all that may be done 
 is to tell you that part of the history I am re- 
 cording for you is the history of Jugend and 
 of Simplicissimus. It was in the latter paper 
 that some of the Bierbaum ballads were first 
 given to the world. And it was in those pages, 
 too, that there appeared, eventually, the most
 
 18 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 pungent and valuable caricature on the Uber- 
 brettl'. 
 
 The picture was by T. T. Heine, and showed 
 the two leaders in the Uberbrettl' movement, 
 Von Wolzogen and Bierbaum, applauding 
 Schiller in the act of emulating their own activi- 
 ties. " You see, my dear Schiller," they are 
 saying to him, " it's just as I told you: your 
 Song of the Bell will never get right down to 
 the heart of the people until you sing it your- 
 self while balancing a lighted lamp." And so 
 the picture shows him, strumming his accom- 
 paniment on a guitar ; the other two are watch- 
 ing, Wolzogen's length seated, Bierbaum's 
 slight stature standing, both applauding Herr 
 von Schiller's little act. 
 
 DESPITE much ridicule and caricature, and 
 despite the fact that the Uberbrettl' itself, as 
 an actual variation upon the music-hall, ap- 
 peared to perish, many things triumphed and 
 survived from out this delightful plot. The en- 
 tire present school of Viennese and Munich and 
 Berlin operetta may be traced back to it ; there 
 remain to us many poems, much charming 
 music, and even plays. Melodies by Oscar 
 Straus, Victor Hollaender, Paul Lincke, Bo- 
 gumil Zepler, James Rothstein and others, are 
 still with us, relics of that campaign. It was 
 the bit of popularity that came to his ballads
 
 THE UBERBRETTL' MOVEMENT 19 
 
 of love and war when they were sung to haunt- 
 ing tunes from these Uberbrettl' boards which 
 first set that fine poet, Detlev von Liliencron, 
 upon his feet. There remain, purchasable to- 
 day, the Liliencron collection, the Wolzogen col- 
 lection, and others, definite series in the musical 
 editions of that day. There are no better 
 chamber-songs than those to-day, in any tongue. 
 
 So, though this liaison between literature 
 and the stage did not last, it made history, and 
 left valuable legacies. In imperishable print 
 and score we still retain some charming lyrics 
 set to haunting music. Gems by Heine himself 
 were used in this young romantic movement 
 that he might himself have delighted in ; trifles 
 too by that versatile Parisian, Catulle Mendes, 
 were adopted. In all this you could find trace 
 of the great change that was moving over all 
 Continental art. 
 
 The incident of the Uberbrettl', from the 
 view of mere entertainment, is surely not with- 
 out its lesson for English and American emu- 
 lation. Surely we have plenty of talent ; surely 
 the artistic taste of our people, toward miming 
 and toward minstrelsy, chief factors in the 
 Uberbrettl', has been left long enough to the 
 influence of the money-changers. Could not, as 
 in the German cabaret of the better sort, a little 
 art be wedded to a little commerce, so that 
 neither the public's taste nor its intelligence be
 
 20 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 insulted? In England something of the Uber- 
 brettl' idea has, consciously or otherwise, been 
 developed by Pelissier. In America few efforts 
 in this direction have been made, save such as 
 smacked of fashionable pastime for fashionables. 
 The Uberbrettl' aimed at no pink tea elements, 
 no mere fashionable cliques. It was greater 
 than mere cliques. Though dead, it lives ; a 
 vital chapter in the history of young Germany. 
 Alive, too, supremely alive, are those delight- 
 ful songs. Few enough are the corners on either 
 the English or the American side of the Atlan- 
 tic where those melodious songs occasionally fall 
 on the ear; yet, if you are minded to tilt at 
 windmills, to start an Uberbrettl' in New 
 York or London, the way is easy and not far. 
 Just study, first, those songs, that any German 
 music-shop will sell you ; those songs that Bier- 
 baum and the others wrote, that Oscar Straus 
 and the others made tunes for. You do not 
 even have to understand the words. There is at 
 least one genius of the tone world who plays 
 those UberbrettP songs as if she really under- 
 stood them ; she knows no word of German ; the 
 language of lyric and of melody are all she 
 needs.
 
 in 
 
 ON COLLECTING AND ON MINSTRELSY 
 
 IF THE cabaret and the Uberbrettl' furnished 
 the proper amateur of sensation with many new 
 delights, you are not to run away with the idea 
 that these new sensations extended no farther 
 than the province of entertainment. What the 
 Uberbrettl' opened was nothing less than the 
 door to the proper understanding of all that is 
 to-day most vital in current German literature. 
 
 All these sensations, of those early years and 
 the many since, came to me through my first 
 copy of Otto Julius Bierbaum's magazine The 
 Island. 
 
 We are all of us, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, collectors. Too many of us collect 
 mere money; others devote their most vivid 
 moments to the collection of pictures, of books, 
 or of meerschaums. The wisest of all collectors 
 are those, I think, who concern themselves sim- 
 ply with garnering emotion. They are able to 
 dispense with any such crude capital as mere 
 coin; their chief requisite need be no more 
 than a nose for the nai've. The exact opposite 
 of this happiest type of collector is the incur- 
 21
 
 22 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 able sufferer from ennui, who has no longer any 
 ability to discover in himself or elsewhere any 
 emotion whatever. 
 
 All this, by way of apology for certain 
 doubtless unfashionable habits of my own. In 
 an age of machinery I still go about the world 
 collecting sensations that have nothing what- 
 ever to do with machinery. If Herr Baedeker, 
 or another, dares to sketch a sensation for me 
 in advance, the bloom is off ; the music of bell- 
 wethers is a noise I avoid. Nor is such selfish 
 search for uncharted emotions without its re- 
 wards. Had I not gone, for example, potter- 
 ing about some dingy lanes in Hamburg, one 
 day when the nineteenth century was gasping 
 out its last months, I might never have found 
 the key to a most illuminating realization. 
 What began, that day, as a momentarily vivid 
 sensation, has broadened out, as the years 
 passed until now that one keen moment is be- 
 come an appreciation of an entire period of his- 
 tory. The arts have as much to do with the 
 history of peoples as have politics. 
 
 Pottering, as I said, about the streets of 
 Hamburg, I found, in what the Germans charm- 
 ingly call an " antiquarian " bookshop, a set of 
 unbound volumes of a periodical called The 
 Island (Die Insel). Turning the pages of 
 these loose copies, as they lay casually scattered 
 about the tables, I felt the dawn of a sensation.
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 23 
 
 The German literature on which I had fed in 
 my youth had been nothing like this ; I recalled 
 only a more or less mummified atmosphere in 
 which the works of Freytag, Dahn and Ebers 
 mingled. Which had been as fresh, as racial, 
 as, say, the Lew Wallace chariot-races. I had 
 a sudden absurd vision, as I stood there awak- 
 ing to a realization of an actual German litera- 
 ture, of General Wallace's Ben Hur and Georg 
 Ebers's Daughter of a King in Egypt march- 
 ing pompously to the gates of posterity's Par- 
 nassus and having the gate shut in their 
 faces ! I turned the pages ; I let the welter of 
 new names, new notes in prose, in lyric and in 
 play, surge all about me ; at first I caught only 
 the general glamour that shines from youth, 
 from courage, from revival of old hopes, rais- 
 ings of new banners; gradually there emerged 
 essential necessities: I must carry off with me 
 as many of these volumes as possible, I must 
 begin at the beginning and find out what it was 
 all about, this brave stuff of songs and stories 
 in Otto Julius Bierbaum's Island. 
 
 To Otto Julius Bierbaum I owe my first en- 
 thusiasms, and much of my later knowledge of 
 that transition period in modern German litera- 
 ture which the future will, I maintain, come to 
 regard as the beginning of a New Age. It is 
 in a sort of gratitude to Otto Julius that I shall 
 try to hand abroad the message which unwit-
 
 24 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 tingly he began for me in that shop in Ham- 
 burg. The mortal part of him can carry no 
 more messages in story, song, or play ; he died 
 the second of February, 1910. But the ever- 
 lasting child in him, the unquenchable minstrel, 
 will go singing on, lifting us always nearer to 
 the sky. He, and the group in which he be- 
 longed, were proper troubadours of to-day. 
 
 The history of those Teuton minstrels has 
 keen pertinence in England and America. Can 
 we not snatch, from our motors, our machines, 
 and our marts, the brief hours that it will take 
 to listen to these troubadours, and to see how 
 sharply their singing and living have value for 
 our own time, our own peoples, and the peoples 
 to follow us? 
 
 Not this nor many books can ever tell you all 
 the new worlds that opened up to me as I read 
 my way through the pages Otto Julius first 
 revealed to me. Songs, stories, men and women, 
 music, plays, and pictures passed before me so 
 vividly that I felt I must come to closer quar- 
 ters with them. And some of these enthusiasms, 
 which the years have but intensified, I hope to 
 pass on to you. Have but a little patience with 
 these pages, step but ever so quickly through 
 anterooms somewhat crowded, like doctors' 
 waiting-rooms, with decayed literature, and you 
 may be rewarded by a valuable morsel or so. 
 
 The valuable, you say, may also be entertain-
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 25 
 
 ing? Good, you are the one I like. Deliver me 
 from these groaning and grunting rooters after 
 culture! The only reason I like to remember 
 that little anecdote about the Gadarene swine is 
 that I conceive the " steep place " as being a 
 synonym for " culture." 
 
 WHAT the group of Germans hereinafter to 
 be considered represented was nothing less than 
 a rebirth, in this most mechanic age of ours, of 
 the spirit of the wandering minstrels of the 
 middle ages. We need not go scholastically 
 into the history of those wanderers, whether 
 troubadours of Provence or students of Ger- 
 many. But this much is pertinent: the identi- 
 cal bold, vivid, natural, pagan outlook on life 
 that marked those wandering students of the 
 middle ages, marked also the singing of these 
 Germans of the day before yesterday, notably 
 these three: Detlev von Liliencron, Otto Erich 
 Hartleben and Otto Julius Bierbaum. Their 
 singing was the spontaneous expression of 
 youth, of the individual. There was no ques- 
 tion of problem, of morals ; nature and the ego 
 were voiced as blithely as the lark sings. 
 
 You may draw instructive parallels easily 
 enough between that singing of the medieval 
 troubadours and this newer singing. The in- 
 tellectual torpor in Germany that preceded this 
 lyric awakening was exactly that of the middle
 
 26 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 ages. Society, after the triumph of 'Seventy, 
 was hypnotized by its own complacent ortho- 
 doxy; sheer physical prosperity threatened to 
 choke the inward spirit. Puffed up with its vic- 
 tories in the field of battles, Germany held song 
 and story to be no stuff for robust masculinity, 
 just as America to-day, drunken with a dream 
 of financial supremacy, conceives the arts as 
 mere pawns in the market-place. Teuton or 
 English or American and there are those 
 who conceive the world's future as sure to be 
 branded with one of those titles ! we all need 
 divorce from the material, as much as ever 
 Luther longed for divorce from Rome. If we 
 do not wish to choke on dust of steel and con- 
 crete, we must make way for a lyric or so in our 
 lives. We need minstrels, not mechanics. The 
 latter, like weeds, will always flourish. But 
 minstrels we pretend their day is done, for- 
 getting that some of their songs will live when 
 all our towers of stone and steel are in the like- 
 ness of what once was Baalbek. For there is no 
 more wonderful mystery in the world than the 
 handing down from generation to generation, 
 from folk to folk, of songs, of ballads, often 
 even without aid of writing. The singers die; 
 the streets and towns that knew them may be 
 leveled to the dust; only the song survives. 
 
 In Germany, more than anywhere else in the 
 world, the habit of wandering abroad in the
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 27 
 
 world, afoot, in student-days, continues. On 
 any roadside to-day you will meet these young 
 fellows; along the Rhineborders, in the Harz, 
 in Thiiringen, Saxon Switzerland, Switzerland, 
 and even Italy. The term " wander-years " is 
 a commonplace in print and colloquial usage; 
 the fact of a period in a young man's life being 
 devoted to faring forth to see the world with 
 hardly any capital save health and a stout pair 
 of legs is as taken for granted as that if you 
 are able-bodied and have not passed the exami- 
 nation for one-year volunteers, you must serve 
 your three years in the army. A knapsack 
 holds all the essentials, which are likely to con- 
 tain more books than soap ; our German lad is 
 not bothered by neurotic notions about sanita- 
 tion and open plumbing ; the world is his oyster, 
 to be opened at the mere kick of his booted toe. 
 So he goes, year after year, generation after 
 generation, upon his wander-years. To " make 
 one's Italian tour " is the dream not only of 
 youth, of art, but of the solid citizen, not to say 
 the philistine. German or English or American, 
 you can be most execrably puritan or philistine, 
 or both, though you race up and down Italy 
 every year of your lives. The proper wander- 
 ing students, however, were never the ones to 
 enter Venice and sniff at " the drains " ; nor did 
 they sit complacently in Florence and regret 
 that there was only one vast square where you
 
 28 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 could drink Munich beer. They had no money 
 in their purses, no cares ; they worshiped the 
 trinity of wine, woman and song, and the world 
 must help them to enjoy that trinity. 
 
 In Paris (wrote a fine old medieval monk) 
 they seek liberal arts, in Orleans authors, and 
 in no place decent manners. To-day, where we 
 are material rather than monkish, we still can- 
 not give the German wanderer much praise for 
 his manners; as to the rest, he is more like to 
 seek wine in Italy, women in Paris, and come 
 home with his songs. That Italian wine is 
 more than grape; it is the rare wine of art, 
 without which few German poets have come into 
 their own. Hardly a great German but passed 
 through his Italian period. No Byron or Lan- 
 dor or Shelley loved Italy more than Goethe. 
 
 The troubadours of old imparted to posterity 
 no great lessons, solved no great problems. 
 They did not preach. They sang of themselves, 
 their loves, and their lives, naturally and heart- 
 ily, and in so doing, gave us sketches of their 
 type and their time more vivid than if they had 
 gone to finicky painstaking detail. Exactly so, 
 you are presently to see, have these latterday 
 protagonists of the lyric served their country 
 and their age. As they have been natural, spon- 
 taneous, have cut themselves away from quib- 
 bles about styles and formulas turned their 
 backs on phrases like naturalism, impressionism,
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 29 
 
 and the like they have succeeded, as not before 
 in many, many years, in voicing the real Ger- 
 many of their time. They were German poets, 
 not poets who happened to write in German. 
 
 Besides Von Liliencron, Hartleben and Bier- 
 baum, the most notable of these truly German 
 poets, I shall tell you of other, still younger 
 men, but the essence of the lyric spirit may be 
 found in those three. 
 
 It is through those three, also, that you can 
 reach, over an awful gulf of futility and form- 
 alism, to the giant, Goethe, with whom died, 
 in 1832, as you may read in all the solemn doc- 
 uments, German literature. Not since Goethe 
 and Heine had the natural and naive sponta- 
 neity of true lyricism come to expression as in 
 Liliencron ; and if you would enroll yourself as 
 a proper Goethe-worshiper any time in 
 these last fifteen years, you must have had upon 
 your shelves the Goethe Brevier of Otto Erich 
 Hartleben and the annual Goethe Calendars of 
 Otto Julius Bierbaum. I do not compare any 
 of these three with the giant who dominated 
 German literature a hundred years ago ; but I 
 say that much of his raciness of soil, his natu- 
 ralness in song, lay dead and buried until these 
 men revived it. 
 
 SUPPOSE, before we go farther, that we have 
 it out a little upon the lyric note in life. There
 
 30 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 are plenty of you, I know well enough, who are 
 beginning to tremble lest this become a book 
 about poetry. Now, poetry as a certain set of 
 scholiasts determine it, cannot possibly interest 
 you less than it does me. " That day they read 
 no more " is a line I can misquote from Dante 
 with any disciple of Chautauqua ; however little 
 they read of the noble Italian or of many of his 
 stamp, it is more than I have the mind for. I 
 was overdosed with " rosy-fingered morns " in 
 college, and the Homeric has meant laughter 
 to me in all my more sophisticated days. The 
 narrative, cut up into lines of equal length, and 
 arbitrarily begun with capital letters, does not 
 fill me with emotion. The only minstrel who, in 
 this age of print and stereotype, has still logical 
 license to sing his story from generation to 
 generation, is he who does it briefly, musi- 
 cally, spontaneously. Who writes, in short, the 
 lyric. 
 
 What matters, in poetry, as in all letters, is 
 the genuineness of the emotion that is reached; 
 rules matter nothing at all; if the song sings 
 itself into your heart, it is poetry. If it does 
 not do that, they can tell you until they are 
 green with despair that the lines have conformed 
 to all the rules of poetry. Poetry for poets is 
 a circle as futile as literature for literates. The 
 solemn dullards who maintain the Olympian at- 
 titude, who prate of the academic, of standards,
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 31 
 
 and values, of Isms and Ologies, of the princi- 
 ples of criticism, what blind leaders of the blind 
 they are! All such shop-talk never extends the 
 human interest in literature one iota, one milli- 
 metre. Can you see the man in the street, the 
 girl at the typewriter, the unpolished human 
 being in whom taste dwells unknown, being 
 stirred to sudden interest in literature, prose or 
 lyric, by the " literary " phrases of such bab- 
 bling Brahmins? 
 
 No; this lesson in the humanities cannot be 
 learned soon enough: our age needs the lyric, 
 and not alone in poetry. The lyric spirit, and 
 this is what I want to declare to you before you 
 tire too thoroughly of all this matter, can be as 
 vivid in a welltold story, a wellmade play, a 
 beautifully voiced saying, as in a lyric song it- 
 self. You can be lyric merely in your unspoilt 
 youth; your unflecked beauty can be a lyric; 
 there can be the proper lyric note in a rose and 
 golden sunset; or in a landscape flecked with 
 autumn voices. Our age is of machinery ; steel, 
 concrete and electricity loom and whirl about 
 us ; more and more it takes an effort to find the 
 lyric note. Yet, if we would not let our human- 
 ity crumble utterly into dull rust under all this 
 machinery, it is just the lyric note we must con- 
 serve, must foster. Youthfulness, heartiness, 
 proneness to emotion, all these mean nothing but 
 the lyric spirit.
 
 32 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 The true lyric is concerned with primitive 
 emotions. To be lyric is to be as a child. It 
 is to be simple, naive. Simplicity need not mean 
 inability to discriminate. Simplicity is another 
 name for instinct that has not been spoiled. 
 This makes fewer mistakes than carefully rea- 
 soned criticism. My friend Bierbaum saliently 
 remarked once that if the professional critics 
 had had the handing down to us of the popular 
 folk-songs of earlier ages, we would have re- 
 tained no such beautiful fragments as are the 
 result of the people themselves having trans- 
 mitted them. Simplicity, he remarked, is possi- 
 ble in the most sophisticated ; there is no greater 
 sophistication than that of a Frenchman, yet 
 towards art the French can bring the most naive 
 of attitudes. 
 
 Our souls may be all-too-tired in tune with 
 our age of ennui, and yet in contemplation of 
 the beautiful we can be as children that never 
 question the wherefore of their joy. If sophis- 
 tication and ennui could conspire to kill the 
 child in us, there would, of course, be an end 
 to all things lyric. We have not yet, fortu- 
 nately, reached that awful point. And it is the 
 part of lyric art to keep us from ever reaching 
 it. 
 
 The lyric, when true to itself, is not objective. 
 The life of the lyric is feeling. Where there is 
 no heart, no feeling, be the rhythm as perfect as
 
 COLLECTING AND MINSTRELSY 33 
 
 can be, there is no lyric. Feeling is not always 
 the same, in all ages ; to that extent the lyric 
 is flexible in its fashions. The question whether 
 our time has developed an actual lyric style is 
 still open ; the greater question is that the lyric 
 be preserved at all. Goethe, we know, left as 
 legacy a certain lyric style. Heine's melodies 
 for decades rang a little oversweetly in the Ger- 
 man air. It was not until the advent of Lilien- 
 cron on the one hand, Bierbaum on the other, 
 that the heritage was properly furthered. It is 
 to Liliencron that we will first come, since it 
 was he who first gave our own generation the 
 new note that awoke German lyric literature 
 from its long sleep. 
 
 About Liliencron, as, indeed, about this whole 
 awakening, much here told comes from Otto Ju- 
 lius Bierbaum. Just as it was his work which 
 first stirred my interest in this whole matter 
 through the Island, through another brilliant 
 and sumptuous magazine called Pan, in the 
 nineties of the last century, so it was his own 
 poetry, his countless pages of critical apprecia- 
 tion, his novels and stories, that led me farther 
 and farther into the delightful field wherein 
 these contemporaries of his were laying the 
 foundations for the new German literature. 
 He charmed me toward facts, and he lured me 
 into constantly making additions to my collec- 
 tion of sensations.
 
 IV 
 
 THE PIONEERS OF GERMANY'S NEW NATIONALISM 
 
 GERMAN writing, especially in lyric forms, 
 was for something like fifty years after 1832 
 " mere literature " and nothing more. It had 
 nothing to do with the life of Germany or the 
 Germans. Its sex was neuter; its crest was a 
 fig-leaf rampant on a void. Nietzsche called it 
 a period of European feminism, and Michael 
 George Conrad termed it womanized culture. 
 Its criterion was the young lady at the fashion- 
 able finishing school. Her intelligence expended 
 itself on the worship of lieutenants in uniform, 
 and her hair was hanging down her back; but 
 German literature adored every strand of it. 
 What was printed and written was intended 
 sheerly for nice people. 
 
 The parallels between Germany and America 
 and England may be drawn endlessly in this de- 
 tail of a spineless literature following upon a 
 period of militant and material prosperity. 
 After the Victorian era reached its highest 
 point ; after the too dear victory over the Boers, 
 English literature, in any fine lyric sense, suf- 
 84
 
 THE PIONEERS 35 
 
 fered reaction. The dream of outstripping the 
 world financially leaves Americans with little 
 time to waste upon the arts. They may sign 
 cheques for it, but they scorn to give it a real 
 place in their lives. (Let me remark, here, that 
 it is the people of the United States to whom 
 I refer ; their arrogating to themselves the title 
 American is properly punctured not only by the 
 Italian critic, Ferrero, but by the bland inquiry 
 of the average Parisian : " Ah, of the South, or 
 of the North ? " ) Similarly the triumphant Ger- 
 man of 1870, forming a new and lusty nation 
 upon cannons and bayonets, was content to feed, 
 artistically, upon pap for babes. The men who 
 had but lately been behind the guns had no time 
 for song or story, the more so as the song and 
 story offered them were of an emasculation only 
 fit for old wives' Kaffee-Klatsches. You cannot 
 blame them much; the spectacle of an able- 
 bodied German reading the Garterdaube would 
 have been as comic as that of a member of the 
 household cavalry sucking his thumb. 
 
 What was not mere echo, mere imitation of 
 other imitators, was style without substance. 
 Literature was a matter of phrases and man- 
 nerisms ; its devotees disputed about technics, 
 and the air reeked with such shibboleths as de- 
 cadence, milieu, fin de siecle, etc. Modernity, 
 realism, idealism, symbolism, naturalism, and 
 art for art's sake, these words filled the ozoneless
 
 V 
 
 36 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 air. As for anything actually voicing the Ger- 
 man spirit a spirit as yet only in the making, 
 perhaps, but vivid enough it did not exist. 
 The jugglers in phrases went abroad for idols 
 to worship. First they looked to France, and 
 there ensued, for prose, for poetry and play, a 
 flood of French and pseudo-French echoes. The 
 positive and realistic prose of De Maupassant 
 and Bourget had much sway in Germany, and 
 you may trace the influence of the former quite 
 close to the present time, through Liliencron, 
 Schnitzler and others. Baudelaire, Verlaine, 
 Mallarme and Maeterlinck exerted influence on 
 the lyric artists of Germany. After the 
 Frenchmen, came the other nations, the Norwe- 
 gians and the Russians, eventually even the 
 Irishman, Wilde, the Italian D'Annunzio, and 
 the American Whitman. Not a single German 
 of the period immediately after 1870 was of real 
 European importance in fiction, in the theatre, 
 or in song. A writer's reputation went no 
 farther than the German border. National, 
 social, universal questions were left untouched ; 
 parochial family circles might know the names 
 of this or that polite polisher of belles lettres, 
 but the world at large never heard their names. 
 The giants were elsewhere, in Russia and Scan- 
 dinavia, England and France. 
 
 After 1881 began a great dying-off of these 
 undersized talents who had succeeded to the
 
 THE PIONEERS 37 
 
 great period of Goethe and Heine. In 1885 
 appeared a pamphlet by Karl Bleibtreu giving 
 warning of a rebellion against these too long 
 worshiped puny idols of German literature. 
 Against the professorial historians who dug 
 about in Roman ruins and offered the result as 
 a German novel ; against antiquarian researches 
 into the past ; against poetry that reeked of 
 catacombs. The methods of Zola encouraged 
 the young German rebels ; the plays of Ibsen 
 had already been performed in Munich and 
 Berlin ; and such men as Bleibtreu, M. G. Con- 
 rad, Hermann Conradi and the two Harts, 
 Heinrich and Julius, pointed the new paths. 
 
 Not one of these men achieved, individually, 
 great things in German literature, but as 
 bridge-builders, pioneers of a more natural and 
 national period they deserve all possible credit. 
 There has been plenty of scorn spilt upon the 
 period of ferment and disquiet which these men 
 inaugurated. Strife and contumely raged as 
 bitterly as in any political campaign. These 
 new men, these youngsters, had not in them- 
 selves any quality greater than their realization 
 that the namby-pamby literature all about them 
 must not, should not last. That, surely, was 
 enough. The very fury of their secession fruc- 
 tified the field for the real artistic uplift that 
 followed them. 
 
 The rebellion sprang up in many places al-
 
 38 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 most simultaneously, as if from conscious con- 
 spiracy. In Charlottenburg, it was the wor- 
 shiper of Napoleon and Byron, Bleibtreu; in 
 Magdeburg it was Hermann Conradi and Jo- 
 hannes Schlaf, in Paris M. G. Conrad, elsewhere 
 even such journalists as Maximilian Harden and 
 Hermann Bahr took up the rebel cry. The 
 movement for freedom from the old restraints, 
 for the expression of true German youthfulness 
 
 in a word, the Green-German movement, as it 
 was dubbed by both its enemies and its friends 
 
 spread quickly. Away from all conventions, 
 was the cry, even from the convention of Bohe- 
 mia, of poetic wigs and flowing ties and velvet- 
 een ! The rebel cry itself became, eventually, as 
 conventional as the chorus it pretended to de- 
 spise; that was where these bridge-builders 
 failed; yet their bridge remained. 
 
 THE Darwinian theory of evolution in litera- 
 ture will ever appeal to the didactic ; others will 
 continue to maintain that the devil and Dame 
 Chance have quite as much to do with the matter 
 as any logical play of cause and effect. This 
 period of youthful rebellion among the German 
 writers in the latter years of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury had, for example, its equivalent in the 
 United States where, during the 'nineties, some 
 young rebels attempted secession from the 
 stereotype of magazine-literature. A fluttering
 
 THE PIONEERS 39 
 
 of little pamphlets, in imitation of the English 
 chap-books of an earlier century, tried to stir 
 the reading public into realization of this or 
 that rebellious talent. In San Francisco it was 
 the Lark, with Gelett Burgess and Porter Gar- 
 nett doing most of the blithe singing; in Chi- 
 cago it was the Chap-Book, which two young 
 Harvard men, Herbert Stone and Ingalls Kim- 
 ball, had evolved in their Cambridge leisure, and 
 which the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, 
 launched for them to the distress of the conven- 
 tional majority and the delight of the discrim- 
 inating few. This present advocate was himself 
 one of those chap-men. 
 
 That little American rebellion to all appear- 
 ances evaporated futilely. You can find no 
 trace of it in what is being written in America 
 to-day. The rebels mostly conformed; others 
 gave it up with a shrug; the fewest continued 
 in the way of obvious public failure, choosing, 
 sardonically, to spell such failure Success. As 
 far as the reading public is concerned, and the 
 conductors of the paramount public prints, that 
 little rebellion is as if it had never been. Its 
 tiny lyric note seems dead in our commercial air. 
 And yet, because I must believe what I wish to 
 believe, I refuse to think it altogether dead. 
 The cart-tail orators prate forever of our 
 Young Nation ; is that youth to expend itself 
 in the pursuit of Mammon? No, if we would
 
 40 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 really hold our youth alive within us, we must 
 let it echo to the lyric note in life, and let mere 
 lucre go. The " pursuit of happiness " which 
 a certain unintentionally comic document de- 
 clares as the right of all American citizens, is 
 nothing else than a striving in our lives for 
 some few lyric moments. 
 
 The German literary rebellion that we were 
 considering held the seed of an actual national 
 renascence of arts. That seed sprang from 
 much ferment, much froth of party strife, and 
 those who fought and frothed deserve a little 
 attention here. 
 
 HEINRICH and Julius Hart let the new note 
 of rebellion sound bravely in their periodical 
 the Berlin Monthly for Literature, Criticism 
 and the Theatre. Heinrich Hart had already, 
 as early as 1878, sent out a set of songs called 
 " Weltpfingsten," in which he disclosed the 
 same cosmic vastness of conception that he tried 
 to sketch in the " Song of Humanity," pub- 
 lished in 1887. The two together published 
 " Critical Campaigns " in 1882, in which they 
 contended manfully for clearing away the old 
 traditions and formulas that held the writing 
 of their country still in chains. They fought 
 for the right of the individual in criticism ; for 
 style that should voice personality ; for the 
 value of the ego and its impressions. They
 
 THE PIONEEES 41 
 
 flung scorn at the effeminate imitators of Schil- 
 ler. Their critical force did not die with them ; 
 it gave eminent courage and example to the 
 younger men who followed. 
 
 The Harts came from Miinster. Heinrich 
 was born in 1855; Julius in 1859. In 1877 
 they came to Berlin and began the fight that 
 was to mean so much ink, so much passion, so 
 much poverty. Poverty drove them home again, 
 but they returned again to the Berlin arena, as 
 full furnished as ever with plays, poems and 
 plots against the literary complacency of their 
 time. Their life in Berlin has come down to us 
 in many gipsy legends. The strangest figures 
 filled their bare rooms: bankrupt actors, penni- 
 less students, unkempt would-be poets, and all 
 manner of unwashed and homeless geniuses 
 strutted or slept there. They lived there for 
 days or weeks, borrowed and disappeared. Out 
 of the mob of disreputables and thankless ones 
 of those days, some few emerged who later be- 
 came valuable figures in the new movement. The 
 Harts deserve memory not only for the vigor of 
 their critical campaigns, but for the largeness 
 of their hospitality to a ragged and often only 
 too worthless crew. They themselves did not 
 allow their poetic or critical strength to be 
 sapped by the gipsy life that centred about 
 them. Eventually they moved to Friedrichs- 
 hagen, where what was known as the " circle
 
 42 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 by the sea," in which even such as Gerhardt 
 Hauptmann, Hartleben, Halbe, Wedekind, and 
 Strindberg had place, surrounded them. Crit- 
 ically they rose into general prominence; 1887 
 to 1900 the Taegliche Rundschau printed them ; 
 then the Deutsche Zeitung and then Der Tag. 
 Heinrich Hart died in 1906. Ernst von Wol- 
 zogen's comedy " Lumpengesindel " which 
 you may call " Rag, Tag and Bobtail " has 
 been declared based on the Berlin bohemian- 
 ism of the Harts, but it would be wrong 
 to judge the Harts themselves by what, 
 in that play, are obvious and gross carica- 
 tures. 
 
 KARL BLEIBTRETJ sprang from a family of 
 property and culture. His father was Georg 
 Bleibtreu, of Xanten, in the Rhineland, ranking 
 in the early fifties as one of the foremost histor- 
 ical painters in Germany. Karl was born 1859 
 in Berlin. His mind ripened extraordinarily 
 soon ; in art as in science his accomplishments 
 had both the qualities and the defects of pre- 
 cocity. From the university he journeyed 
 abroad in the world ; then settled in Charlotten- 
 burg, a suburb of Berlin, for a period of study 
 and almost feverish composition of novels, 
 poems, plays and battle scenes. Of all the 
 ninety volumes that he flung upon the world, 
 nothing remains that need concern us. His
 
 THE PIONEERS 43 
 
 " Dies Irae," published in 1882, was a series of 
 campaign pictures in prose that had success 
 in its day; but it is only through his 1886 
 pamphlet, " The Revolution in Literature," that 
 he has value for posterity. What he himself 
 wrote was intention rather than accomplish- 
 ment ; his poetry limped after Byron, his prose 
 after Zola. Yet his striving was, always, away 
 from the accepted conventions of his time, and 
 he had in him such ferment of youth and crea- 
 tiveness that he succeeded in furnishing the 
 younger men with courage and battle cries. His 
 intention was to introduce actual modern life 
 into his art, and at the same time to destroy the 
 old idealistic, or pretty-pretty methods of that 
 art. Only his intent remains to us. As in his 
 pamphlet he had declared a youthful revolution, 
 so in The Magazine, which he conducted from 
 1887 to 1888, and in Society, 1888 to 1890, 
 he gave a trumpet to the lips of youth. Soci- 
 ety (Die Gesellschaft) had been founded by 
 Michael Geo. Conrad in Munich, and it was he 
 who later carried it on. The success of Haupt- 
 mann, determined by the performance of " Be- 
 fore Sunrise " on the Free Stage which the 
 Harts and Maximilian Harden and others 
 conspired to start, marked the moment of 
 Bleibtreu's disappearance from the literary 
 arena. Yet he had helped to build the 
 bridge.
 
 44 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 THE youths of 1885 gave freely of themselves 
 in their fight against things as they were. They 
 spilt their enthusiasm and their egos equally. 
 Their enemies accused them of overweening van- 
 ity, and Bleibtreu himself, in a moment of rebel- 
 lion against the rebellion, declared their watch- 
 word to be Megalomania. These youths were 
 full of adolescent ferment; unripeness marked 
 their work; yet they ventured their all upon 
 their beliefs ; they were willing to suffer for their 
 faith. That faith held to the need for revival 
 of an actually national, Germanic note, for di- 
 vorce from foreign idols. " The spirit that 
 moves our songs and our stories," wrote Her- 
 mann Conradi, in 1884, in his preface to " Dich- 
 tercharactere," " is the spirit of revived na- 
 tionalism." 
 
 The title of this book has no adequate equiv- 
 alent in English, though the dictionary might 
 lead you to suppose " Poetic Characters " to 
 serve the purpose. Dictionaries, however, like 
 statistics, are notorious and abominable liars. 
 The Germans use the word " dichter " in a large 
 general sense that we can only feebly approach 
 by " artist." The " dichter " can work in prose, 
 in play or poetry. The word, for the strictly 
 English comprehension, is only slightly more 
 irritating than " schriftsteller," which we must 
 declare to mean simply " writer " in spite of its 
 formidable wealth of syllables. Unless, that is,
 
 THE PIONEERS 45 
 
 you prefer the label " author," which, while it 
 may impress the census-taker and the chamber- 
 maid, always makes me shudder. Some words 
 are like motor-cars and diamonds: the wrong 
 people use them. 
 
 I ask you particularly to note this digres- 
 sion ; the value of this book lies somewhat in its 
 digressions. The facts you may find elsewhere; 
 even I have been able to do that. In a weak 
 moment I undertook to write this book, and 
 what I suffer in consequence, from having to 
 give up, for this interminable space of time, 
 riding across country in the daytime and read- 
 ing The Sporting Times after dark, makes the 
 experience of you, who read, entirely trivial. 
 Do you imagine, however, that such a digression 
 as this is of no pertinence? You are mistaken. 
 It is only as we hold literature to be a slight 
 part of life, that we can retain the proper hu- 
 man charm that shall extend the circle to which 
 we appeal. What is only too much the matter 
 everywhere to-day, as it was with the most 
 ineffectual of the German youths of the 1885 
 period, is that literature is so largely an af- 
 fair of shoptalk for shopmen. Life is the great 
 thing; literature is merely an incident. Only 
 as one remembers that, can the thing written be 
 vital. Even Mr. Howells, now that Mark 
 Twain is dead, admits this. 
 
 One reason why those verdant Germans of
 
 46 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the 'eighties were in themselves so ineffectual 
 though in handing on the torch, they were ef- 
 fectual enough ! was that they were more 
 concerned with programs than with perform- 
 ance. Julius Hart, in a preface to his verses 
 " Homo Sum," announced the new lyric note as 
 keyed to an objective treatment of life, singing 
 single impressions rather than typical ones. 
 That objectivity again became, in the program 
 of Hermann Conradi, a reflection of external 
 things upon the mirror of one's own soul ; para- 
 doxically, subjectivity was reached. All the 
 extremes of poetic intention lay in Conradi's 
 above named volume, which contained also verses 
 by Wilhelm Arent, John Henry Mackay, Mau- 
 rice Reinhold von Stern, and Karl Henckell. 
 
 Conradi died in 1890. He burnt out his 
 life feverishly. He was typical of youth's too 
 furied ferment. All his years were fulfilled with 
 passions ; neither calm nor content ever came to 
 him. Dissatisfaction, longing for tangible be- 
 yonds, and a brutal tearing of all physical veils 
 from sexuality, marked his career. It was his 
 poems, " Songs of a Sinner," and his stories, 
 " Brutalities," that began the modern German 
 psychology of sex, and pointed the path away 
 from the prudery of the Gartenlaube as well as 
 from the cold aestheticism of the professors of 
 science. It was small wonder that he died early, 
 from too much love of living. Yet he too
 
 THE PIONEERS 47 
 
 helped to build the bridge. Direct links span 
 from him to the still living Richard Dehmel. 
 Hermann Conradi was born in 1862, of Mag- 
 deburg parents. Most of his schooling was in 
 that town, though he finished it in Leipzig. He 
 followed the poetic anthology, " Moderne Dich- 
 tercharaktere," with his own stories, " Brutali- 
 ties," in 1887, and the next year plunged into 
 serious philosophy in Munich. Nietzsche came 
 into his world, and the turmoil in him responded 
 fiercely. His soul writhed between pity and pas- 
 sion, from the tragedy of all humanity to the 
 futility of the ego. His nature, always at war 
 with itself, came to exemplify literally the words 
 of Nietzsche: " I tell you, you must have chaos 
 in you, if you would give birth to a dancing 
 star ! " But in Conradi nothing was ever 
 created out of that chaos. In 1889 he went 
 to Wiirzburg to take his degree as doctor of 
 philosophy. The authorities of Leipzig prose- 
 cuted him for blasphemies and immoralities 
 found in his novel, " Adam Mensch," and before 
 conclusion of that trial, 1890, at the age of 
 twenty-eight, he died. He had gone the gamut 
 of artistic sensation and belief. He began 
 idealist, concluded brutal cynic. His youth, 
 warm, tender and trusting, felt too deeply the 
 brutalities of the world, and went, in its pain, 
 to the utterest extreme. But his agonies had 
 helped to liberate his generation from many
 
 48 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 rusty chains. As a psychologist he went deep ; 
 his dissecting knife went sharply into creatures 
 and causes ; and his later pessimism clarified his 
 outlook and even enabled him to see himself 
 without distortion. Futile to speculate, now, 
 upon what he might have done had he lived. He 
 carried on the fire; that was enough. 
 
 Two other contributors to that anthology 
 cannot be slighted, though they have shaped 
 their art to such hard formalism as is the direct 
 opposition to the natural lyric spontaneity in 
 appreciation of which this book is written. 
 These are Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf . 
 
 For years these two worked together. The 
 rhythms of Holz fulfilled more accurately than 
 any others the somewhat vague programs of 
 Henckell and Conradi. He joined those others, 
 the Harts and Bleibtreu, but he refused to share 
 their somewhat chaotic passions. His art was 
 constantly expressing itself more coldly, more 
 scientifically. He tried experiment after experi- 
 ment, announced program after program. No 
 Nikola Tesla ever declared more formulas than 
 Arno Holz ; he treated versification with a skill 
 and a sure application of onomatopoeic method, 
 to delight Maxim or any other scientist. If 
 poetry can be written like that, with conscious 
 deftness of technique, upon set theories and for- 
 mulas, Arno Holz must be ranked as a poet.
 
 THE PIONEERS 49 
 
 There is no denying that he is a fine artist. He, 
 at least, survives of all those Green Germans as 
 something more than a builder of bridges. He 
 remains a creative craftsman, with a place as- 
 sured in the German literature of to-day. 
 
 The program was always paramount with 
 Holz. His collection of verses, " The Book of 
 Time," 1885, exposed an unusual skill in craft, 
 and also the craftsman's theories about his art. 
 Those theories he elaborated specifically in 1891 
 in his " The Nature of Art and its Laws," and 
 in "Revolution of the Lyric" in 1899. He 
 declared the need for new lyric forms to suit 
 the new forms of life itself; he declared words, 
 as words, to be the fittest media, rather than ar- 
 bitrary rhymes and modulations that controlled 
 words. In his " Phantasus " volumes he evolved 
 poetic forms for his theories, and the results 
 cannot but interest us, who recall Whitman, 
 Henley and even the eccentricities of Stephen 
 Crane. Of late years Holz has produced but 
 little ; yet his work must indubitably be reckoned 
 into the valuable German art of our time. From 
 first to last he has fought valiantly; his theo- 
 ries have never lacked interest, and his ambi- 
 tions for a lyric regeneration have been fiery 
 with sincerity. Out of those ambitions, his def- 
 initions of them, the lyric workman of the fu- 
 ture will surely draw profit. His own satisfac- 
 tion with his position as mere pioneer he ad-
 
 50 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 mitted in a contribution made some years ago 
 to a symposium upon the subject of the future 
 of German literature, and in a sentence in his 
 own " Revolution of the Lyric " ; in the former 
 he believed that the dawn of a new drama was 
 at hand, with Germany leading the way, while 
 in the latter he had given up that belief as far 
 as his own land was concerned, concluding: 
 " The dawn will not be ours. We will have 
 sown the seed ; where it will ripen, Heaven only 
 knows." He was content to have been there 
 when the seed was sown. 
 
 Compared to what he formulated, and what 
 he actually accomplished, in lyric art, his pio- 
 neering theories about prose and the drama are 
 negligible. Yet even there at least one detail 
 must be mentioned. Especially as I have seen 
 no mention of it in any of the books about 
 Gerhardt Hauptmann that our language holds. 
 
 Here is the detail: When Arno Holz and 
 Johannes Schlaf were living and writing to- 
 gether, among the volumes by which they 
 blazed a new artistic path was one, dated 1889, 
 called " Papa Hamlet." It was still, despite 
 the rebellion of the few, a period of foreign 
 dominance. Realizing this, Holz and Schlaf 
 elaborated a literary hoax, signing this collec- 
 tion of sketches and tales with the name Bjarne 
 P. Holmsen, and prefacing it with some pages 
 of an alleged translator, Dr. Bruno Franzius,
 
 THE PIONEERS 51 
 
 who told of the life and work of the Norwegian, 
 Holmsen. The trick worked. Success, and the 
 most conflicting welter of critical opinion, came 
 to " Papa Hamlet." And here comes the 
 comedy of the thing, and the detail that is of 
 actual value in following the progress of mod- 
 ern German letters it was this book, and the 
 following play, " The Family Selicke " (per- 
 formed on the Free Stage in 1880), that gave 
 Hauptmann the impetus to write his " Before 
 Sunrise." These technical experiments of Holz 
 and Schlaf were what moved Hauptmann himself 
 to steer away from the conventions of his time. 
 
 " Before Sunrise," when first it appeared, 
 was dedicated to Bjarne P. Holmsen. 
 
 As Hauptmann and others accepted the new 
 formulas, the reason for the farther alliance be- 
 tween Holz and Schlaf ceased. Happiness or 
 material success does not seem to have come to 
 either of these men. Fate dealt unkindly with 
 both in personal ways. Holz once averred, in 
 1896, that he could write no more; but his 
 " Phantasus " volumes, most expressive of his 
 new lyric devices, have since disproven that 
 plaint. It is a fact, however, that for his 450- 
 page " Book of Time " he received the sum of 
 five dollars. 
 
 Holz was born in 1863. His versification 
 first followed the familiar strains of Geibel and 
 Heine, and only later he evolved his rebellious
 
 52 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 creeds. The years with Schlaf were 1887 and 
 1888. Johannes Schlaf was born in 1862, near 
 Merseburg. Magdeburg saw his first schooling, 
 his first itch for ink. He became, with Hermann 
 Conradi, one of the young radicals of that town. 
 He studied further in Halle, and Berlin, and 
 then threw all studies overboard to join his 
 ways with those of Holz. Yet it was only after 
 loosing himself from the latter that he reached, 
 lyrically, something like a natural, spontaneous 
 expression of self and of his race. The vol- 
 umes " In Dingsda " and " Friihling " have 
 Whitmanesque touches upon the note of the 
 ego ; but there is a note, too, of new national- 
 ism that insures him a place in the new literature 
 of Germany. Quite lately, his stories, " Der 
 Prinz " and " Am Toten Punkt," have brought 
 him into front rank as novelist. 
 
 IF we pass the names of the journalists who 
 also had share in this path-blazing pausing 
 only long enough to mention Maximilian Har- 
 den, born in 1861, in Berlin, who was actor 
 before he was journalist; whose career, for 
 readers of English, is bound up with a certain 
 criminal prosecution that caused, not so long 
 ago, a distinctly unpleasant set of disclosures 
 to taint the German air; and whose prose 
 (in his own periodical Die Zukunft, and 
 more succinctly in his volume of character-
 
 THE PIONEERS 53 
 
 studies called " Kopfe " (Heads), 1910, force- 
 ful sketches of the foremost European figures 
 of our time) gives him rank in any gallery of 
 militant men of letters of the type of Kipling 
 and Shaw we come finally to the name of 
 Michael Geo. Conrad. He, more than any of 
 the others, spanned the older period to the new. 
 He, more directly than the others, fostered that 
 poet who best was to lift the new German lyric 
 note, the note of the new Germany. Let us ad- 
 mit him negligible in his creations. He was the 
 godfather of the future; that was enough. 
 
 He was born in 1846, the son of a Frankish 
 peasant. At sixteen he left home to become a 
 teacher ; he studied philosophy ; saw something 
 of the world; lived in Switzerland and Italy. 
 Accident brought first Nietzsche's work, then 
 Nietzsche himself, across his path. He turned 
 writer ; went to Paris ; worshiped Zola ; 
 stayed in Paris until 1882, returning then to 
 Munich. He had share, in 1885, in founding 
 Society, which became the banner of the new 
 generation. Among those who rallied about 
 this banner were Max Halbe, the dramatist, Von 
 Wolzogen and Bierbaum. Bierbaum once said 
 that if ever a history of Green Germany came 
 to be written, that would also be a history of 
 Society, and the first chapter would have to 
 be headed: Michael Georg Conrad. It was his 
 sympathetic and forceful direction that deter-
 
 54 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 mined the entire new movement. It was he 
 and at last we come to the first of the men this 
 book is to try and lure you into appreciating 
 who first gave space to the lyrics of Detlev von 
 Liliencron. Bierbaum teaches us what manner 
 of man Conrad was: despite his years a com- 
 rade to all the younger men whom he encour- 
 aged, a constant stimulus to young ambitions, 
 a flaming sword for friends and against foes, 
 mincing nothing, stopping at nothing, full of 
 fierce hates and loves; just the man for a set 
 of young rebels. Surely fame should accrue to 
 the great editor, as to the artist; to Henley, 
 who discovered talented men, as to Henley, who 
 wrote " In Hospital." Conrad led these young- 
 sters on, and they never looked on him as other 
 than one of themselves. Even so Liliencron, 
 himself of an elder generation, was the first to 
 give the present generation an actual vivid re- 
 newal of such a national note in German lyric 
 literature as had not been heard since 1832.
 
 DETLEV VON ULIENCRON 
 
 NOT until Detlev von Liliencron came was 
 there a revival of an actual note of truly Ger- 
 man nationalism. No such naively singing soul 
 had been heard since Goethe. Only Verlaine, in 
 France, equalled him in lyric spontaneity. He 
 was utterly a German ; he lived as a German ; 
 he put that life directly into his songs and his 
 stories. He lived first, wrote afterwards ; the 
 note of life, of actual experience illumines his 
 every line. You forget, reading him, any ques- 
 tion of craft, just as he himself forgot it, to 
 all appearance. Only nature the German 
 nature, the German scene, the life of himself, a 
 German had anything to teach him ; he fol- 
 lowed in no footsteps, obeyed no formulas. 
 
 He was soldier, huntsman, cavalier, country 
 magistrate first; he lived his life vigorously 
 and variously ; literature was a last resort. 
 You never smelt literature in what he wrote; 
 what you smelt was life; the blood and powder 
 of battles, the soil of his northern lands, the 
 55
 
 56 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 glitter of uniforms ; always life, life. Few 
 men, anywhere, led a life more full of color; 
 few put more of that color into their writing. 
 He spanned the gulfs from the swagger officer 
 to the vagabond; from the magistrate to the 
 infidel; from the rank feudalist to the soldier 
 in liberty's cause; from the balladist of wed- 
 lock to the egoistic Don Juan ; from a birth- 
 right of Danish allegiance to a supporter of 
 the Prussian standards. He lived at top pres- 
 sure; it is for that reason, when he came, late 
 in life, to express his experience in words, those 
 words went straight, full pressure also, to the 
 mark. 
 
 THE need for keeping literature quite inci- 
 dental to life itself is something that cannot 
 too often be declared. The point of view, or 
 the actual expression through art, which sets 
 life subsidiary to literature, results in nothing 
 but " mere literature." This dealing in defini- 
 tions, in explanations, how futile it all is ! The 
 moment, for example, you can put your finger 
 upon a fine bit of singing stuff, and say why 
 and how it charms you ; that moment the 
 charm is off. That, I hope, is one mistake I 
 will avoid in this present book. If I tell you 
 that I found this or that song lilting in my 
 memory for days, or weeks or years, I will be 
 no such fool as to spoil your chances of catch-
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 57 
 
 ing my enthusiasm by dissecting the charm. 
 As well dissect gossamer and star-dust! 
 
 Is there something about the profession of 
 poetry the intention was not ironic, yet for 
 American consumption the phrase's irony re- 
 mains ! that tends to relegate life into a mere 
 medium for literature? All too few are those 
 who resemble Liliencron in the variousness of 
 his life and the naturalness of his work. 
 Against many sorts of poets I have known 
 one sort, for example, which goes to the ex- 
 treme of literary convention by talking to all 
 women as if they were merely eyebrows for an 
 unborn sonnet, and by frequenting those places 
 in the world where other romantic souls once 
 lived and loved; another, which could not see 
 in any garden either trees or flowers or grass, 
 but only a fog of ego and of phrases I have 
 known all too few who, like Liliencron in one 
 place, like Ernest McGaffey in another, were 
 men first, poets afterwards. 
 
 FROM the mummified antiquarian period of 
 German literature, resulting, as we have already 
 seen, in a hue and cry of rebellious youngsters, 
 the step to the naturalism and nationalism of 
 Liliencron is made by way of Richard Wagner 
 and Friedrich Nietzsche. The poet Wagner, 
 and the poet Nietzsche, not the musician or the 
 philosopher. Wagner first used actually Ger-
 
 58 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 man national material, and Nietzsche developed 
 to courage and accomplishment all the young 
 Germans of his time. 
 
 While Nietzsche's philosophy has by now 
 been most thoroughly made available for Eng- 
 lish appreciation most intelligently and fas- 
 cinatingly, I think, through Henry L. Mencken 
 his literary leadership has been insufficiently 
 recognized abroad. He was poet first, philoso- 
 pher only as a result of it. What Hauptmann 
 did for the German drama, Nietzsche did for 
 the lyric. He taught his time to look into its 
 own soul and be satisfied therewith ; he taught 
 the greatness of the German soul; he taught 
 the uselessness of the old existing formulas ; he 
 pointed the way to the culture of beauty, the 
 exploitation of the individual impression. His 
 influence was on every lyric artist of his day. 
 On none more directly than on Liliencron. 
 And the influence of these two, Nietzsche and 
 Liliencron, is, consciously or unconsciously, 
 part of the equipment of every living lyric ar- 
 tist in Germany. 
 
 FRIEDRICH VON LILIENCRON for he used 
 Detlev only as a pen name was of an old 
 Schleswig-Holstein family, that had been raised 
 to baronetcy by the king of Denmark in 1829. 
 He was born in 1844 in Kiel. The lust for sol- 
 diering came on him when he was still a boy,
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCEON 59 
 
 and eventually he was to find himself leading 
 the life of barrack and campaign in grim ear- 
 nest. He was quartered in no less than sixteen 
 different garrisons. For Prussia he fought in 
 1866, in Bohemia, and in '70 in France; he 
 was wounded in both campaigns. His wounds 
 and his debts found him, after the Franco- 
 Prussian war, unable to continue his military 
 career; he retired with the rank of captain of 
 infantry. He went to the United States, and 
 lived through several years of poverty and suf- 
 fering. Returned home again, he opened an 
 old box of letters ; came upon an old battle 
 picture, and a surge of emotion made him scrib- 
 ble some verses on the back of the picture. 
 Those were his first verses. He settled near 
 Hamburg as a country magistrate, but gave 
 that up in 1887, and definitely commenced au- 
 thor, moving to Munich. Again, however, his 
 northern acres called to him, and he returned 
 to Hamburg, Altona, and Kellinghuysen. His 
 life was a constant battle against odds; pov- 
 erty pinched him relentlessly; life was every- 
 thing to him, and he lived it always to the 
 full, no matter what the cost. He held, above 
 all else, his independence dear. Even when, 
 after much effort on the part of his friends, 
 and, indeed, at far too late a day, the Ger- 
 man emperor was induced to grant him a pen- 
 sion.
 
 60 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 So far the bare sketch of the sort you may 
 now find in the Who's Who of every modern 
 land. Let us humanize the sketch a little with 
 some remarks of his own, from what he once 
 contributed about himself to M. G. Conrad's 
 magazine Society. 
 
 " My boyhood years were lonely ones ; the 
 shadow of Denmark was on them. I gathered 
 little from all my schooling; only history fas- 
 cinated me, as it still does to-day. Mathe- 
 matics, still a closed door to me, embittered my 
 earliest years. My joy was in the open, the 
 fields. A day with dog and gun, in wood, field 
 or thicket, remains to me as the only sort of day 
 worth living. Soldiering had always been my 
 dream, but I had to go to Prussia to make it 
 come true. I had the luck to be tossed actively 
 about in my years of service ; I saw seven prov- 
 inces, seventeen garrisons ; I came to know my 
 country and my countrymen. Eighteen hun- 
 dred and sixty-four to 1865 I saw the last 
 Polish rising, and then came the wars with 
 Austria and France. Oh, those glorious years 
 as a young officer ! The good friends and com- 
 rades ; the fine acceptance of duty and service, 
 the subduing of self! ... I was thirty years 
 old when I wrote, accidentally, my first 
 poem." 
 
 And here this detail, of special interest to 
 Americans :
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 61 
 
 " My mother, Adeline Sylvestra, born Von 
 Harten, came from Philadelphia, where my 
 grandfather was a general in the American 
 army. He was, though not half so old in 
 years, one of the last, closest friends of Wash- 
 ington." 
 
 THIS was a real, entire man. Not one-sided, 
 one-ideaed. Not simply soldier, not just a sport- 
 ing squire, not just a lovelorn troubadour. He 
 was all those things and more. To-day they 
 read him in barracks, because he told war- 
 stories as no other German of his time, and be- 
 cause as a barrack-room balladist he ranks well 
 with Kipling ; and they read him in the boudoir 
 because when he sings of love it is not a love of 
 frills and fancies, but a love of flesh and blood. 
 He gave you, always, the tone of a large, all- 
 comprehending, love of life. And this, in a 
 Prussian officer, was no slight thing. That edu- 
 cation, that routine, does not favor the toler- 
 ances. Nor does the education, the routine, the 
 life, of a country squire. 
 
 I know, for I have seen the others. I came 
 within an ace of being a Prussian officer myself. 
 If a grandam of mine had had her way, you 
 might have been spared these present pages. A 
 far-seeing old lady, you may say ? Well ; yours 
 the regret, then; mine, none the less, the con- 
 tinued rejoicing. For I remember always, as
 
 62 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 against Liliencron, the amazing exception, an 
 own uncle of mine, the type. 
 
 Crack officer in a crack regiment of cavalry ; 
 one of the handsomest men, with his fair, wa- 
 ving mustache, his blue uniform of dragoons, 
 that you could lay eyes on anywhere. Lucky, 
 too; tossed into the Franco-Prussian war 
 straight from his very first garrison ; honors 
 and advancement crowding on him in the earli- 
 est years ; commandeered to the great General 
 Staff in Berlin ; sure of all the rewards that can 
 come to any officer in time of peace. But as 
 for a larger view of life than the barracks, the 
 mess-table, the soldiering life in war and peace, 
 it was utterly to seek in him. His life was as 
 ruled as a schoolboy's copybook ; the mechanics 
 of the German military system were all that had 
 passed on to his intelligence ; his conventions of 
 conduct were as narrow as the Regulations for 
 Recruits. Humanity, life, existed for him as 
 mere pawns in a great military scheme of pre- 
 cision. The extraordinary thing was that even 
 when he put off the uniform, retired into pros- 
 perity and the abominably ill-fitting clothes that 
 German civilian tailors have so fully the secret 
 of, the uniform's habit of life and thought still 
 ruled him. 
 
 He was the type. The best of them are like 
 that. Even so, conforming to stiff conventions, 
 purblind to the larger life of to-day, it was that
 
 DETLEV VON LLLIENCRON 63 
 
 type which for decades ruled the imagination 
 of all the girls in Germany. The maiden with 
 her golden tresses, and the officer with his glit- 
 tering epaulets ; these two dummies ruled, until 
 quite lately, the life and the literature of that 
 land. But their day is done. The ladies them- 
 selves have gone to the other extreme. " Any- 
 thing," said a charming young person to me in 
 Wiesbaden only the other week, " but a German 
 officer! Far rather an Englishman, or an 
 American ! " None so cruel as the ladies when 
 they cease to love ! 
 
 The country squire, too, whether in Prussia 
 or England, is, as a type, narrow to a degree. 
 Remember Galsworthy's " Country House," and 
 Sudermann's " Es War." Note the grim, 
 wooden-headed, closed ranks of the agrarian 
 members of the imperial parliament of Ger- 
 many ; there you have the type of the Pom- 
 merscher Junker. Those, too, I know ; I was 
 brought up among them. Bismarck was the 
 supreme instance of that type ; his hugeness of 
 intellectual bulk imposed all the vices and the 
 virtues of that type upon his own time, his own 
 people. 
 
 As a great humanist, Liliencron is the glori- 
 ous exception from this generality of officer 
 and country gentleman. It is as humanist, 
 finally, that posterity will give him his greatest 
 renown.
 
 64 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 THE natural note in the poems of Liliencron 
 startled an audience that had long been accus- 
 tomed to weak dilutions of what, in Goethe and 
 Heine, had been genuine sentiment. The lyrics 
 of the day were written in lavender water. 
 With the publication of his " Adj utantenritte " 
 (Rides of an Adjutant) and the following vol- 
 umes of verse, the discriminating few found 
 that a new man had come to be reckoned with. 
 Here was war in all its color and dirt and 
 tragedy ; here was nature at first, not third or 
 fourth, hand; here was love as it had come to 
 life and song in the arms of a flesh-and-blood 
 girl, not a lay figure patterned upon the formu- 
 las of other poets. The real poet writes life as 
 he sees it and lives it; not as the accumulated 
 documents of the centuries tell him he should 
 see it and live it. Liliencron proved, in his very 
 first volumes of verse he was, as we know, 
 already more than thirty years of age ; he had 
 no youthful fermentations about craft and art 
 to bother him ! that he was an entire man, a 
 proper poet. He wrote as he lived, passion- 
 ately, vividly. Here were no echoes of other 
 men's inky emotions. Here were an evident 
 love for his kind, a keen sense of beauty, a real- 
 ization of his own soul's oneness with all nature, 
 a somewhat melancholy irony, and, above all, a 
 robust masculinity. Reading him, one forgot 
 the petty discussions that had been raging up
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 65 
 
 and down the sterile field of German verse ; for- 
 got whether he was idealist or realist, impres- 
 sionist or naturalist. He was a man ; he sang 
 as a man. 
 
 The circles of milk-and-lavender were natu- 
 rally ruffled by the appearances of this new 
 poet. They called him a noisy swashbuckler 
 with vine-leaves in his hair. But to-day those 
 ruffled circles are forgotten, and Liliencron 
 lives, not only in his own work, but in the pres- 
 ent generation of German writers, which owes 
 to him whatever it has of the masculine, the na- 
 tional and the natural. 
 
 To readers who do not read German it is im- 
 possible to convey a notion of the graphic swift- 
 ness of movement in the early military verses 
 of Liliencron. The musical and dramatic val- 
 ues of short words, and even of syllables, are 
 used most effectively. Sharp, staccato strokes 
 seem to cut out for us slices of breathing, glow- 
 ing life. Note these stanzas from the martial 
 "Riickblick": 
 
 "Ziigel fest, Fanfarenruf, 
 Donnernd schwappt der Rasen. 
 Bald sind wir mit flUchtigem Huf 
 An den Feind geblasen. 
 
 " Anprall, Fluch und Stoss und Hieb, 
 Kann den Arm nicht sparen, 
 Wo mir Helm und Handschuh blieb 
 Hab ich nicht erfahren."
 
 66 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 and the peculiarly beautiful lines, notable for 
 a surpassing vividness compressed into the 
 briefest terms ever yet attempted, I think, in 
 any tongue: 
 
 " Sattelleere, Sturz und Staub, 
 Klingenkreuz und Scharten, 
 Trunken schwenkt die Faust den Raub 
 Flatternder Standarten." 
 
 Since Mr. Kipling sang rather of the bar- 
 racks and departments of peace, than of war, 
 I do not know where to look in English for 
 equivalents to the qualities Liliencron showed 
 in his prose and verse versions of war. In the 
 war stories of Ambrose Bierce you will, I 
 think, come nearest to the color and the irony 
 in this German. He gives us the glitter of the 
 sun shining on the cavalry charge, and he also 
 gives us the eternal irony of things, just as did 
 Bierce in his picture of the splendid horseman 
 riding splendidly and futilely across a bullet- 
 pelted space; just as did Tennyson when he 
 sang of the mad charge at Balaclava, and just 
 as did Bernard Shaw when he declared in 
 " Arms and the Man " that what made a cer- 
 tain cavalryman's ride into apparently sure 
 death possible was not heroism but the fact that 
 his horse was running away with him. The 
 irony of things was constant in Liliencron, but 
 it was an irony tinged with melancholy, with
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 67 
 
 pity. Never more so than in such lines as these, 
 describing just such a cavalry advance as we 
 have had in mind just now: 
 
 " Hor ich nicht plotzlich vor mir, 
 Weit hinter dem Getreideschlag, 
 Schwach wie aus einem Tiilchen steigend, 
 Den Vorwartsmarsch ? 
 Mein Stock pendelt nicht mehr; 
 Ich recke mich, 
 Um iiber die leis im Winde 
 Spielenden Halmspitzen zu schauen. 
 Und, keine Tauschung mehr, 
 Uber den spielenden Halmspitzen, 
 Glitzern blitzende Helmspitzen. 
 Immer deutlicher klingen 
 Die tiirkische Trommel, 
 Die Becken, 
 Die Tuben, 
 
 Voran, auf milchweissem Hengst, 
 Den purpurne Ziertroddeln umtanzen, 
 Der spanischen Schritt geht 
 Wie der Gaul im Kiinstreiterzelt, 
 Fuhrt der Oberst. 
 
 " Und, eine einzige Linie, 
 Folgt sein Regiment: 
 Im Gleichschritt, 
 Ein wenig horbarer 
 Den linken Fuss setzend, 
 Im Takt der Musik, 
 Vor den Fiissen 
 Das wachsende Brot; 
 Hinter den Fiissen 
 Das zerstampfte Brot, 
 Die Wiiste. 
 
 Schrecklich sind der Kriegsbestie 
 Zerkaucnde Kiefer; 
 Aber nie werden sie ruhen, 
 Solange der Menschen " verfluchte Rasse" 
 Die schone Erde bevolkert. 
 Nur vorwarts Grenadiere! 
 Kein Zagetreten!
 
 68 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Ihr verteidigt das Vaterland ! 
 
 Uber euren aufgepflanzten Seitengewehren, 
 
 Im rlicksichtslosen Angriff 
 
 Schwebt die Siegesgottin, 
 
 Hinter ihnen her zieht schnell der Friede. 
 
 Doch ach, ist sein Triumph 
 
 Der Triumph ewiger Dauer ? " 
 
 Now, as sheer pictorial music the fragments 
 I have quoted would stamp their author a great 
 natural talent in any company. In the four- 
 lined stanzas we are made to see the tightened 
 reins, hear the call of the trumpets and the 
 thunder of the hoofs. The shock against the 
 enemy's front, the curses and the slashings, the 
 sudden numbness of the arm, the loss, never 
 noticed till afterwards, of helmet and glove. 
 Then the brief summing up: empty saddles, 
 dust, collapse; blades that cress and clash; 
 and then the reeling victor's fist, waving his 
 captured pennant. In the longer extract, we 
 are made to share with the looker-on from be- 
 hind the corn. First the far faint horn sound- 
 ing the advance; next, above the shining, 
 golden corn, the shining, golden helmets; the 
 drums, and the fifes growing plainer and 
 plainer. The colonel at the head; his snow- 
 white stallion stepping high as if he were a cir- 
 cus horse; the whole regiment, in solid, single 
 line, following, in even step, the left foot just a 
 touch more audible, in time with the music. 
 Growing grain before them, ruined grain be-
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCEON 69 
 
 hind them. Ah, the hideous, greedy jaws of the 
 devil of war, that will never cease from grinding 
 as long as this accursed human race of ours 
 lives on this lovely earth ! On with you, grena- 
 diers ! No hesitating ! You are your father- 
 land's defenders ! Above your arms the goddess 
 of war sails in the sky; and in your wake flies 
 triumphant peace. But oh, that triumph, is it 
 a triumph that will last ? 
 
 THE only poet who in English achieved sim- 
 ilar effects of direct sensation, who seemed to 
 cut slices straight out of the actual and serve 
 them to you lyrically was William Ernest Hen- 
 ley, whose " In Hospital " verses have much 
 that both for manner and matter are close to 
 the battle-piece last quoted. 
 
 Of Liliencron's military songs the most pop- 
 ular was always his " Die Musik Kommt," which 
 is as if you said " Here comes the band." No 
 wonder that in the days of the Uberbrettl' it 
 was hummed and sung all over Germany. I 
 shall here only sketch these stanzas for you. 
 They describe, in syllables that actually set your 
 feet to marching, the passing of the regimental 
 music. First we hear the cymbals, then the 
 great horn, the piccolo, the drums, the flute, 
 and all the other instruments ; and then, in all 
 his finery of glittering sword and uniform, the 
 captain. And then, again, the other officers.
 
 70 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 To each a merry, graphic stanza. Then the 
 privates; the whole regiment; their solid 
 steady step shaking street-lamps and window- 
 panes. And then the girls. Their heads from 
 windows, doors and alleys; their eyes so blue; 
 their hair so golden; they look and look and 
 look, and gone is the music ! The wonder- 
 ful, sweetly, human, truly lyric last stanza de- 
 fies my clumsy touch: 
 
 " Klingling, tschingtsching und Paukencrach, 
 Noch aus der Feme tont es schwach, 
 Ganz leise bumbumbumbum tsching, 
 Zog da ein bunter Schmetterling, 
 Tschingtsching, bum, um die Ecke? " 
 
 Can you not hear the very diminuendo of drum 
 and cymbals, see the stream of gay color get- 
 ting fainter and fainter? Until at last you, 
 too, wonder: Was that a colored butterfly 
 went, zing, boom, round the corner? 
 
 IT was the mood of the careless cavalier, in 
 which such a song as " Bruder Liederlich " was 
 written, that gained Liliencron the worser sort 
 of " wine, woman and song " reputation in the 
 ranks of the dying opposition. I wish I could 
 give but the gist of that ballad of a gay dog 
 who fought, and drank, and loved, wherever, 
 whenever he could ; who found a girl for his 
 delight, and gave her much delight for hers; 
 but, like the fickle cavalier he was, grew tired,
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 71 
 
 and sent her on her way ; and wished to God 
 he had her still, and wished to God he could 
 forget, and " Pass the wine, and shuffle the 
 cards ! " 
 
 But it is futile to do other than quote him in 
 the original, and since space forbids that, the 
 briefest reviews must serve. He sang as much 
 of love and of nature as of things martial, and, 
 whatever he touched in his singing, you forgot 
 manner, and heard the matter of it going di- 
 rectly into your heart. The ability to express 
 the individual impression was peculiarly his. 
 You felt, always, that it was a battle he had 
 seen, a girl he had kissed, of which he sang to 
 you, not of some lithographed melodramatic 
 moment or some model Daphnis or Chloe. In 
 his " Nach dem Ball " you can almost smell the 
 violets, see the tired eyes of the little countess 
 sleeping on his shoulder. 
 
 The actual tone of life, that was what he 
 always gave us, and it was because he was al- 
 ways more the lover of life than anything else. 
 He was the first artist in almost two generations 
 who was not a mere literary man, but man. 
 The literary man never showed through his 
 work ; here was nothing of the abstract acad- 
 emician to whom all things human are vile; 
 here was a plain, hearty German personality: 
 an officer, baron, country gentleman, with all 
 the peculiar qualities and defects of his class.
 
 72 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 This was so plain, so simple an individual, so 
 genuine a character, that he was more inclined 
 to apologize for babbling of his emotions in 
 verse, than of parading himself as poet. Those 
 who had immediately preceded him had twit- 
 tered politely of love in the abstract; he con- 
 fessed in rhyme his love for a definite lady. 
 They had set up wax figures and asked us to 
 admire them ; Liliencron, out of actual experi- 
 ence, out of life, simply and sweetly sang to us, 
 and it is to the credit of the present genera- 
 tion that, before he died, they had come to 
 know the difference between his spontaneous 
 singing, with its living reality, and the 
 pumped-up pattern-mongering of his predeces- 
 sors. 
 
 BEYOND the poetry Liliencron's work ex- 
 pressed itself in several volumes of drama, and 
 short stories. Those of the latter which deal 
 with his army experiences are to be counted 
 with the best in that sort anywhere, with the 
 pictures of war that De Maupassant in France, 
 Verestchagin in Russia, and Bierce in America, 
 have produced. In a posthumous collection of 
 his stories that I happened on in Nieder-Lahn- 
 stein, on the Rhine, just about a year after his 
 death, I found one called " Der Alte Wacht- 
 meister" that made me think sharply of the 
 late Henry Irving in Conan Doyle's play of
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCEON 73 
 
 " Waterloo." In the same volume, which was 
 called simply " Letzte Ernte " (Last Harvest) 
 was another story, of tragedy unrelieved by 
 any " happy " ending, that gave a vivid pic- 
 ture of the North Sea's last devastating inva- 
 sion of the Dutch dikes. I recall this story 
 particularly because its conclusion parallels 
 that of the Liliencron story that I consider his 
 most characteristic bit of prose. This was one 
 in the collection of " Kriegsnovellen " (War 
 Tales) which ended with an unusual dramatic 
 surprise. 
 
 A German division is in French territory; 
 the officers are quartered upon the chateau of 
 the local French magnate. The German gen- 
 eral asserts his commanding rights by paying 
 the most constant court to the daughter of their 
 host, Fanchette. The little subaltern, whose 
 name this story carries, has no more food for 
 his own adoration of Fanchette than unlimited 
 opportunities of noting his general's monopoly 
 of the young lady. Comes an actual skirmish ; 
 the chateau is fired on ; takes fire ; is instantly 
 beyond saving. All escape, save Fanchette, 
 whose form appears suddenly at an upper win- 
 dow when the whole house is a furnace all about 
 her. First to make for the desperate rescue is 
 the general himself; a rifle bullet catches him 
 before he has gone three steps ; catches him and 
 kills him. Then into the blazing breach goes
 
 74 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the little subaltern. His arms seize Fanchette, 
 as she sways, half-fainting at the window. 
 There is still time to save her. And then, in- 
 stead of dragging her to safety, his lips devour 
 with mad kisses her throat, her lips, her eyes, 
 her cheeks until, with a crash, the roof, a 
 very torrent of flame, crashes upon the two, 
 mingling flame with flame, passion with pas- 
 sion. 
 
 It is that story of " Portepeefaenrich Scha- 
 dius " that makes me think that Liliencron was 
 right in averring as he often did to his friend 
 Bierbaum, that he had the talent for drama. 
 As far as actual stage success goes, however, 
 Liliencron is not to be reckoned a dramatist. 
 A certain actual public acclaim did, on the 
 other hand, come to him by way of the Uber- 
 brettl' movement, already referred to. Several 
 of his ballads and lyrics were sung into the pop- 
 ularity of the street, as well as of the library, 
 in this fashion; and a definite start to his 
 never more than slight prosperity was thus 
 given him. He was one of the ten poets even- 
 tually chosen to represent the literature of this 
 movement in the little collection of " Deutsche 
 Chansons," published in 1901 ; the others were 
 O. J. Bierbaum, Richard Dehmel, Arno Holz, 
 Frank Wedekind, Ernst von Wolzogen, Rudolf 
 Schroder, A. W. Heymel, Ludwig Finckh, and 
 Gustav Falke.
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 75 
 
 SUCH a poet, such a natural, spontaneous 
 singer, had, naturally, no easy path before him 
 in a world as conventional, as womanistic, as 
 philistine as that upon which his voice first fell. 
 They said it was wine, not art, that sang in 
 him ; they called him a regimental light-o'-love. 
 But the time came when every other young 
 poet dedicated his first fruits to Liliencron, who, 
 himself and that was the gist of his secret ! 
 was at sixty still the unquenched youth. 
 And, at long last, came a pension from the em- 
 peror, in whose character, by the way, deter- 
 mined flattery might discover a trait or two of 
 Liliencron. That, to be sure, would explain the 
 imperial appreciation as no more than a sop to 
 self-esteem. All the first efforts to interest 
 potentates and powers in the man who as sol- 
 dier and singer had done so much for Germany, 
 failed. Liliencron, disgusted, wrote to Bier- 
 baum, after one of those failures : " An English 
 baronet or an American pork king would be 
 less ignoble than that. . . ." To the poet, even 
 more than to our average, you see, distance 
 lends enchantment; it is just as well this poet's 
 belief in foreign captains of industry was never 
 put to the test. That first, unsuccessful, effort 
 was made in the days of Pan, the sumptuous 
 magazine which Bierbaum dominated. Count 
 Harry Kessler drew Count Kuno Moltke's at- 
 tention to Liliencron's straitened circum-
 
 76 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 stances, and the latter put the case before the 
 emperor. But for neither him, nor the simi- 
 larly situated Ernst von Wildenbruch, was the 
 time ripe. Time and again this great poet, to 
 whom posterity must always date back the mod- 
 ern revival of literature in Germany, lived daily 
 on a couple of eggs, some milk, some coffee, 
 and a little grog, meted out to him by the gen- 
 erosity of a long unpaid landlady. 
 
 He had the soldier's and the minstrel's scorn 
 for money. He drank it up with his friends, 
 and he scattered it with his kisses. In his loves, 
 he was no whit the aristocrat that he was in 
 every other moment of his life. In his writing 
 he was as much the singer of the ego and its 
 experiences as was Nietzsche ; but when he went 
 among the girls his romantic nature played him 
 the most fantastically democratic tricks. He 
 saw a princess in a chambermaid, and many a 
 scullery wench served his muse in lieu of a 
 countess. Well ; these things are not so aston- 
 ishing to the person who recalls his Theophile 
 Gautier. Once, in Munich, Liliencron did ac- 
 tually engage in an affair with a lady whom 
 he persuaded himself was a princess ; as a mat- 
 ter of fact, she was only a lady-in-waiting. But 
 these are merely trifling details in the figure of 
 the man ; I cite them only to prove, once again, 
 the inextinguishable child in him. 
 
 Liliencron expressed, as no other since
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 77 
 
 Goethe, the oneness of nature and the individ- 
 ual. He brought freshness and genuineness 
 into a land that had forgotten both. 
 
 LILIENCEON died the 22d of July, 1909. For 
 the memorial services held the 6th of October 
 of that year in the Artists' House in Dresden, 
 Otto Julius Bierbaum wrote some beautiful 
 words of which I am now to try to give you a 
 notion : 
 
 " Assembled here in memory of Detlev von 
 Liliencron, we are gathered together not in the 
 sign of death, but the sign of life. . . . Lilien- 
 cron not only fulfilled his individual activity, but 
 fructified the whole wide field in which he 
 worked. He lives not only in his works, he lives 
 on in the spirit of all modern German art. We 
 can cry, with the French royalists of old : Lilien- 
 cron is dead, Long live Liliencron ! . . . Not 
 that with Liliencron passed the master of any 
 school, or that he set up any poetic formulas 
 for posterity ; to assert that would be an insult 
 to his very personality and admission of inabil- 
 ity to appreciate his work. With Nietzsche 
 Liliencron had the greatest influence on the 
 poetic energies of our time; but that was no 
 influence of one who invented new systems. He 
 had the faculty of carrying his own personal 
 force over upon others, of stimulating others to 
 be their most natural selves. He had, in the
 
 78 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 highest degree, that ' virtue of giving,' Niet- 
 zsche's own: the gift of giving himself. . . . 
 The human genius in Liliencron was greater 
 than its poetic expression. But for that, we 
 could have put Liliencron into line with such as 
 Byron. . . . 
 
 " Let us not classify or catalog. Liliencron 
 is still too close to us, for us to determine his 
 place among the immortals. But he lives; so 
 much we feel sure of, now that his mortal part 
 has left us. It is an artist's death that reveals 
 for us, mysteriously, as with a sudden illumina- 
 tion, whether indeed we possess of his any last- 
 ing heritage, or whether he simply gave us, from 
 time to time, fragments that entertained us for 
 those moments. ... So it was we realized, as 
 we heard of Liliencron's death, that not just 
 this or that work of his would go on living, 
 but to a certain extent he himself in his entirety. 
 Time will doubtless discard this or that book of 
 his, in which his real essence did not properly 
 lie (as, for instance, in his last novel), but the 
 unique phenomenon Liliencron, in which the per- 
 sonal is as characteristic and valuable as the 
 artistic, will not be easily expunged. 
 
 " All efforts to retouch for this or that pur- 
 pose the picture, the autobiography of Lilien- 
 cron, must always fail. The wonderful and 
 unique thing about him is that, compact of ap- 
 parent opposites, he was so complete. ... It
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 79 
 
 would be as futile as fatuous to exalt in Lilien- 
 cron only the patriotic soldier, and evade the 
 fact that there was a good slice of Bohemia in 
 him : much light-heartedness, and a certain lack 
 of scruples. But it would be unjust to be blind 
 to the grave depths that were under all this 
 lightness. ... It is easily intelligible why the 
 most known and best beloved of his poems are 
 those that voice the joy of living. Yet he was 
 never a mere merry dog; he always held life 
 to be combat rather than pleasaunce, and few 
 men were so constantly mindful of death's eter- 
 nal vigil everywhere. Yet that was not the re- 
 sult of his having looked death in the eye upon 
 the battlefield: it was not the soldier, but the 
 poet Liliencron, who knew so wondrous much of 
 death. Twice in one poem in his earliest book 
 of verse you find the line, ' One of these hours 
 thou diest,' and more than once he repeated that 
 to me, as we came out of the Rathskeller, and 
 looked up at old Peter. When in my presence 
 he first saw the snow-capped chain of the Alps, 
 he exclaimed : ' That confounded old fellow 
 there with the death's-head and the long beard 
 is winking at me. " Isn't your time about up, 
 my lord baron? Time you let me kiss you? " 
 Then he asked me the name of that mountain. 
 When I replied at a venture : ' Perhaps it's the 
 Wild Emperor,' the name sent him into ecsta- 
 sies, and he never afterwards addressed the
 
 80 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 mountain as anything but Your Majesty. 
 Many years later, in Hamburg, he reminded 
 me of it all, concluding with ' A veritable death's 
 head he had.' It would not have disturbed his 
 fancy in the least had I told him that it was not 
 the Wild Emperor at all. 
 
 " Who knows Liliencron's verses knows how 
 familiar the picture of death was to him. He 
 saw him in the eyes of the coursing greyhound, 
 saw him as a fashionable viveur with a monocle, 
 saw him as a skeleton wrestling with an ape for 
 a laurel wreath, saw him as gravedigger, saw 
 him as commodore with a clay pipe in his mouth, 
 saw him as a Viennese fop saw him every- 
 where and always as the great change-artist of 
 life. . . . 
 
 " No, this was not a mere merry dog. His 
 call was a battle call; not only joy, but grim 
 determination was in it. ... And we must not 
 forget who fought against him in his battle. 
 To use his own phrase, it was His Excellency the 
 Philistine. Not that Liliencron himself did not 
 have his touches of philistinism ; he had not 
 been so complete a man, so complete a poet, had 
 he lacked appreciation of that side of life. . . . 
 But he did not let His Excellency down him. 
 It simply came to this : the * ironist of life ' 
 a trait of Goethe that was his from the very 
 start of life led him occasionally to wear a 
 mask in the presence of His Excellency. Lilien-
 
 DETLEV VON LILIENCRON 81 
 
 cron's letters, when they are published, will 
 show how completely he was what Goethe called 
 a Nature. And that the philistines despise. 
 
 " Well for us that this nature has passed on 
 into German poetry ! Well, that this dead man 
 lives ! . . . None so encouraged us to be of the 
 living, and so taught us to love the living, as 
 Liliencron. 
 
 " That, before all, we will keep of him : the 
 living!"
 
 VI 
 
 OTTO EEICH HARTLEBEN 
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN was one with Lilien- 
 cron in his succeeding most with military sub- 
 jects, though he did not there draw from actual 
 experience. In worship of Goethe, as expressed 
 in his " Breviary," he was close to Bierbaum, 
 and slight though his actual artistic achieve- 
 ments were, the best of them were such natural- 
 ness as the old Privy Councillor would have 
 liked. Chiefly, Hartleben was an artist who 
 tried to please, to make you smile. He was the 
 troubadour as much in his anecdotes his short 
 stories were seldom more than elaborated anec- 
 dotes as in his verses ; he improvised charm- 
 ingly, inconsequently, for the general delight. 
 It cannot be said of him, as of Liliencron, that 
 anything survives from him ; but he unfailingly 
 gave pleasure while he lived. And he remained, 
 from first to last, amazingly the child, as you 
 shall see. The man, the temperament, interest 
 me, at any rate, even more than the work he did, 
 which, at best, was of the most fragile texture. 
 Beyond the German borders nothing of 
 Hartleben's was strong enough to pass; his 
 82
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 83 
 
 greatest success, the military comedy " Rosen- 
 montag," though performed on Irving Place, in 
 New York, had no appeal to other than the 
 German intelligence. 
 
 Hartleben's right among the troubadours 
 rests chiefly, I think, upon his absolute devotion 
 to the practice of Martin Luther's trinity. 
 Wine, woman and song very literally fulfilled 
 his life. He sang truly enough from actual ex- 
 perience of the wine-cup and the ladies ; upon 
 that detail of genuinely expressed experience 
 he was one with the crew of young radicals of 
 1885 in their revolt against the namby-pamby 
 tunes of the interim poetasters. It was, indeed, 
 his too great passion for drinking the cup of 
 life, not to say the actual wine-cup, to its dregs, 
 that brought him so early to his grave. He died 
 February 11, 1905, at forty years of age. 
 
 Hartleben was born the third of June, 1864, 
 in Clausthal, in the Harz Mountain region of 
 Hanover. His parents were from a generation 
 of small government officials. Even at school 
 humor and irreverence were his most definite 
 marks. He was to study law in Berlin and 
 Tubingen ; he even came to the practice of 
 criminal law in Magdeburg; but then he could 
 stand it no longer ; he determined upon the ca- 
 reer of pen and ink. He wrote that decision 
 to his grandfather, who had been making him 
 an allowance. The old gentleman was sore
 
 84 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 troubled; literature and poverty had always 
 been identical terms to him. " He thought he 
 would influence me through my love of ease, 
 and wrote thus : ' Yes but if you want to 
 go to Berlin and go in for writing, I'll not send 
 you three hundred marks a month any longer, 
 but only one hundred if you want to risk 
 that . . .?' Well, I risked it." In Berlin he 
 was quickly in the radical current, a member of 
 the Friedrichshagen circle, mentioned earlier in 
 these pages. He came often to Munich, and 
 one of the most vivid sketches of him at that 
 time has been given us by Hermann Bahr, the 
 Viennese journalist and playwright, with whose 
 name and work, at long last, the English peoples 
 have, within this twelvemonth, become so famil- 
 iar. 
 
 " Coming to Munich in the month of March," 
 wrote Bahr, " you will one fine day find the 
 whole town, usually so easy-going and leisurely, 
 suffering from the greatest excitement. That 
 is the day the season's brew of Salvator beer is 
 tapped. . . . That day the good citizens are all 
 in haste and hurry, anxious, nervous lest they 
 miss something of the great occasion. The 
 other side of Munich, the artistic side, also feels 
 the emotion. ... It streams to the railway 
 station, to await the train from Berlin, because 
 it knows: to-day they tap the Salvator, there- 
 fore to-day Otto Erich Hartleben arrives ; that
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 85 
 
 is nothing less than a custom of the country. 
 When the Berlin train steams in, one of the win- 
 dows shows a massive, jovial gentleman, re- 
 sembling a typical elderly student out of the 
 Fliegende Blaetter. He alights ; his greetings 
 have a certain hurried and impatient heartiness ; 
 valuable time is going on time in which one 
 might be at that noble brew. Not until he is 
 on the spot itself, his pince-nez removed so that 
 his devotions may be disturbed by no vision of 
 mere mundane things, raptly and solemnly sip- 
 ping the dark and gentle nectar not until 
 then does he unbosom himself to friendship. 
 Then it matters little what he says ; his emo- 
 tions just stream from him loud and unchecked." 
 
 His health eventually forbade continuation of 
 his too great joy in living. He moved to Salo, 
 on Lake Garda; built a villa there, and meant 
 to make it a rallying point for German art, but 
 died too soon for that. 
 
 Wine and sunshine, the sunshine of success, 
 and of the love of women, were everything to 
 this troubadour. Upon wine and sunshine, in- 
 terpreted literally, he once declared himself 
 philosophically, with an ingenious and yet ro- 
 mantic rationalism. Upon the question why the 
 sun did its business so much better south of the 
 Brenner Pass than north, he declared to Bier- 
 baum, that the difference was in us, not in the 
 sun. Virtue was not in the wine itself, but in
 
 86 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the " grace of the South " ; a mystic phenome- 
 non that came to all who, having obeyed the 
 kindly invitation of the sun, had shaken the dust 
 of conquering Germany from their shoes. 
 Which is not unidentical with Nietzsche's " in- 
 nocence of the South." 
 
 IN his art Hartleben, as we have seen, was at 
 first a rebel with the other rebels. His career 
 showed a gradual weakening of the radical in 
 him, an acceptance of things as they were, of 
 the success and comfort to be had from them. 
 He was one of the best anecdotists that ever 
 lived; he had the most intimate charm in tale- 
 telling; he was a pleasant, entertaining fellow 
 who buttonholed you and amused you with his 
 own adventures. But he never passed beyond 
 the sphere of entertainment. His talent for 
 caricature and parody never hurt the victims 
 much; he always gave his readers the notion 
 that not they, but the other people, were his 
 targets. He drew you to the closest intimacy, 
 so that you listened, fascinated, to his anec- 
 dotes about himself and the others. It was 
 this solution of his personality into his work 
 that gives his career value. 
 
 Personality is seldom permitted intrusion 
 into what is to-day written in English. If it 
 were, we might have something else than a Bar- 
 mecide feast for Brahmins.
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 87 
 
 Hartleben's satire was essentially German. 
 In his earliest days he satirized the old romantic 
 conception of poetry and poets ; proclaimed 
 that the razor and clean clothes were as neces- 
 sary in Bohemia as in Philistia. Under his sat- 
 ire he felt, too, the mystery and melancholy of 
 life; the romantic and the antique fascination 
 of Italy were to have for his later life as great 
 appeal as they had for Goethe in one generation 
 and Bierbaum in our own ; but for the most 
 part he was content to fuse that mystery and 
 melancholy in wine. His greater emotions 
 rarely came to artistic expression. He tired 
 easily ; played dilettante ; sold his artistic 
 birthright for a mess of royalties. There was 
 not much art in his comedy " Rosenmontag," 
 but it became one of the great hits of its 
 year, 1900, and brought him a considerable 
 fortune, as such things go in Germany. Nor 
 was there anything of experience in that 
 play; only when experience went into his 
 verse or his stories did they have artistic 
 value. 
 
 His youthfully insurgent spirit, so soon to 
 disappear, was vividly expressed in two stanzas 
 written in Berlin in 1885: 
 
 "Die jubelnd nie den tibersohaumten Becher 
 Gehoben in der heiligen Mitternaeht, 
 Und denen nie ein dunkles Madchenauge, 
 Zur Siinde lockend, spriihend zugelacht
 
 88 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 " Die nie den ernsten Tand der Welt vergassen 
 Und freudig nie dem Strudel sich vertraut 
 
 sie sind klug, sie bringen's weit im Leben. . . . 
 Ich kann nicht sagen, wie mir davor graut ! " 
 
 Which, that you may gather its gist, if letting 
 the poetry in it escape, might be rendered: 
 
 Who never held the flowing cup on high 
 In holy midnight's merriest din; 
 Who never felt a laughing woman's eyes 
 Move them to laughter and to sin; 
 
 Who never let the solemn world go hang; 
 Whom none e'er called " Poor, careless Dick ! " 
 Oh, these are wise, they will go far in life. . . . 
 
 1 cannot tell you how they make me sick! 
 
 That was to be the note of his lyric art. The 
 best of his singing did follow that note. There 
 were valuable social pictures like the " Konfir- 
 mationskleid " ; and the early " Gottvertrauen 
 zum Bayonett " had excellent and hearty satire 
 in it. He contrasts the affectation for the an- 
 tique idols of art with the conditions of domestic 
 and civic morality in Germany, and repeats his 
 " put your trust in bayonets " in most deli- 
 cious irony. The opening stanza, too, repeated 
 his insurgent scheme of song: 
 
 "O Muse! Ja: ich liebe meine Muse. 
 Es ist ein schones Weib und Jung an Jahren! 
 Nicht allegorish und abstract confuse, 
 Sie schaut mich an rait Augen braun und klaren. 
 Sie redet zu den Mannern in her Blouse, 
 Wie auch zu denen die auf Gummi fahren, 
 Und tragt nicht blaue Strumpfe, sondern keine, 
 Denn sie ist stolz auf ihre weissen Beine."
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 89 
 
 Which charming hit against the ineffectual 
 spinelessness that the men of 1885 tried to 
 abolish, I have put into this lame English : 
 
 My Muse ! Indeed I love her with a passion 
 To suit her lovely figure and her youthful years! 
 She has no allegoric, abstract fashion 
 Of loving, and her eyes can fill with real tears; 
 She is for those who work, and walk, as well as 
 For those who ride on rubber all their life. She begs 
 To wear nor blue, nor hose at all to tell us 
 How finely proud she is of her white, well-formed 
 legs. 
 
 LYRICALLY, Hartleben went farthest in inten- 
 tion rather than performance. His song seldom 
 went beyond mild emotional evocations of 
 Heine. Even in such a piece of description as 
 that of the fortress of Franzensfeste, on the 
 Brenner descent into Italy, " the gate of 
 spring," as the poet called it, there were touches 
 of the banale. 
 
 He tried paraphrases from the French, ren- 
 dering some of the Pierrot poems of Albert 
 Giraud with considerable virtue. But it was 
 not until he wrote his " Story of the Torn-off 
 Button " that he had popular success. 
 
 It is hard, in considering this and the other 
 elaborated anecdotes that display him as tale- 
 teller, to imagine a reputation being based on 
 them. The prevailing short stories in German 
 must indeed have been stilted, rococo, or sex- 
 less, if such thin fun as this could win acclaim.
 
 90 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 It was, once again, undoubtedly the hearty 
 masculine note that did the trick. The robust 
 forthrightness in these tales is undeniable ; they 
 have the air of the smoking-room story but 
 slightly pruned for polite usage. There is an 
 insufficiently known Englishman, Arthur Bim- 
 stead, who writes just like that perhaps bet- 
 ter ! for the Sporting Times in London. And 
 I dare say the London Olympiad would pretend 
 never to have heard of him. Such are the amus- 
 ing contrasts in literary fortune. Allow me, 
 pertinent to this apparent digression, to point 
 out again what happened to German literature 
 when the academical, professorial, too-too liter- 
 ary cliques tried to exclude nature and human- 
 ity from it. You can no more say of literature 
 in general, than of poetry in particular, what 
 it is, or what it must be. 
 
 What lifted the just mentioned story into 
 vitality was its sketch of the heroine, Lore. A 
 light-living, fun-loving type, such as every 
 large urban centre has in thousands. No mor- 
 als to mention ; much skill in managing men ; 
 a born liar, with a gift of deluding herself as 
 well as the others. An arrant little snob, but 
 childishly naive about it. You may find the 
 type at many a telephone or typewriter or mani- 
 cure-desk in New York ; in many of the bound- 
 ary provinces between domesticity and the half- 
 world in any modern capital. Schnitzler gave
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 91 
 
 us the same type in the heroine of " Abschieds 
 Souper," which Charlotte Wiehe played to 
 English audiences in French as " Souper 
 d'Adieu." 
 
 She dowered all her male friends with titles; 
 just as the little soubrette in America turns 
 her " toughest " admirer into " a swell guy 
 from Wall Street," and the little French 
 cocotte persuades herself that the most 
 obvious rasta' from Brazil is a Russian grand 
 duke. 
 
 Into what he wrote of Lore, in one story 
 after another, though least of all in the play 
 he contrived of her, Hartleben put so much 
 nai've self-confession that the result had all the 
 effect of the most intimate revelation. Indeed, 
 it would be hard to equal Hartleben as a prat- 
 tler. He just went yarning on, in the cheeriest, 
 j oiliest way; his little stories were full of pi- 
 quant little scenes, essentially redolent of the 
 German frankness in many things that we pre- 
 tend hesitations about; and his irony played 
 wittily with many an idol cherished both in 
 Philistia and Bohemia. He was of those who 
 invented the " Serenissimus " type, that has 
 now for many years contributed to the laugh- 
 ter of all who understand the German tongue. 
 " Serenissimus " is the type of divinely stupid 
 potentate or official, whose intelligence is even 
 smaller than his kingdom. All the too rigid
 
 92 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 conventions of official and professional classes 
 moved Hartleben to his satire. 
 
 CURIOUSLY enough, it was in the theatre, for 
 which he did not have nearly so spontaneous a 
 gift as for tale-telling, that the greatest success 
 came to Hartleben. In none of his plays did he 
 utter such genuinely experienced emotions as in 
 his stories. Undoubtedly the formal necessities 
 of the theatre irked his spirit. Nevertheless, 
 despite the lesser sincerity of his work for the 
 stage, it was that which lifted him out of ob- 
 scurity as artist. 
 
 True to his type truer then than when 
 success came ! the first time he wrote in 
 stage form it was a burlesque. A burlesque on 
 an Ibsen play. It was performed once, pri- 
 vately, by college students. In his next play, 
 " Angele," performed in 1890, Hartleben voiced 
 the then beginning period of throwing off old 
 moral scruples, of exalting the ego, of listening 
 to Nietzsche. The play shocked the old morali- 
 ties, while the foyer of the theatre was full 
 of young women congratulating the author ; in 
 those contrasting lights you had the temper of 
 the time in Germany. In his two next plays, 
 " Die Erziehung zur Ehe " and " Die Sittliche 
 Forderung," Hartleben proceeded with the 
 program of unmorality. He took an idea 
 of Sudermann's and changed the moralitj'
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 93 
 
 until it became what most would call immoral- 
 ity. 
 
 Only in " Hanna Jagert " did he reach any- 
 thing like really vital comedy. This was, artis- 
 tically, his high point. Here he gave way 
 neither to caricature, as in his earlier pieces, 
 nor to sheer theatricals, as later. At first the 
 piece, the characters in which move through 
 socialism to aristocracy, through an apparent 
 unmorality to a fine tolerance of the accepted 
 moralities, was forbidden by the Berlin censor, 
 and did not come to performance until 1893, 
 at the Lessing Theatre. Two vital realizations 
 figure in the comedy : that the idea of socialism 
 can have permanent appeal only for humanity 
 in the mass, while for the fully developed indi- 
 vidual there can be no other philosophy than 
 an egoistic one, emancipated from all scruples 
 of religion or morals. This was only one of 
 the many plays of that period written under the 
 sign of the sage of Zarathustra. Its conclusion, 
 however, admitted that a development, a per- 
 fection of the human ego, could only come, after 
 all, through an acceptance of a law as old as 
 the centuries ; through that complete fusing 
 of one soul with another which is the finest tri- 
 umph of the monogamic system. The reason 
 " Hanna Jagert " reached a higher plane of art 
 than the other pieces by Hartleben, is that it 
 held not merely artistry, but experience. He
 
 94 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 himself had made the traverse from socialism 
 to individualism, from the radical disciple 
 of the Vorwarts leadership, to intellectual 
 anarchy. 
 
 Of his other plays, which displayed more and 
 more mere theatricals, need be named only 
 " Abschied vom Regiment " and " Rosenmon- 
 tag." Both have proved effective on the stage, 
 and the latter obtained the Grillparzer Prize 
 and made its author's fortune. It became, as 
 such things go in Germany, a sensation com- 
 parable to that of " Alt Heidelberg," the suc- 
 cess of which undoubtedly had impelled Hartle- 
 ben, by this time a cynic acceptor of things as 
 they were, to say to himself: Oh, if that's 
 the sort of thing they want, I can give it to 
 them! 
 
 The one-act piece, " Good-by to the Regi- 
 ment," was artistically higher than " Rosen- 
 montag." Neither can have much to say to 
 English or American minds, because based on 
 hard and fast conceptions of military and cava- 
 lier conduct that seem absurd to us. The final 
 tragedy comes sheerly as a result of the hero's 
 realization that he has broken his word as an 
 officer and a gentleman ! A reading of Schnitz- 
 ler*s famous little monologue, " Lieutenant 
 Gustiy will give you more clearly than any- 
 thing else the state of mind in which the Ger- 
 man or Austrian officer regards his own word
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 95 
 
 of honor. In the middle of the merry carnival 
 air of Rose-Monday Hartleben's hero and hero- 
 ine die together, and the comedy of music, of 
 uniforms, of military glitter and gaiety, ends 
 on the grimmest note of tragedy. Heinrich 
 Leopold Wagner, a friend of Goethe's youth, 
 had written a play in 1776 with a similar cen- 
 tral idea; but Hartleben gave it the skilful 
 touches of theatricalism, of militarism, of con- 
 trast between the worlds of mufti and of regi- 
 mentals, that gained for it popular acclaim. It 
 was first performed in 1900 and remains on the 
 German boards to this day. 
 
 SUEPASSING in value both his artistic inten- 
 tions and performances, was Hartleben's per- 
 sonal, living expression, in himself, in his life, 
 of that which, despite the sore mismouthing that 
 our mob gives the phrase, we must call the ar- 
 tistic temperament. His life ranks with the lives 
 of many other of the vagabond natures of other 
 times and other countries. Though such an 
 individual note need not be taken as a type, yet 
 in the fact that through all his divagations 
 from convention Hartleben remained essen- 
 tially German, you may see what a change has 
 come over the Teuton character in general since 
 the day when our armchair philosophers re- 
 ferred to it as " phlegmatic " and let it go 
 at that.
 
 96 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 NOTHING that has been written or imagined 
 concerning the possibilities of what we call the 
 " artistic temperament " and the German sim- 
 ply " temperament," surpasses for sheer naivete 
 the actual case of Otto Erich Hartleben. Not 
 the novels of George Moore, not the " Brichan- 
 teau " of Claretie, nor the " Beloved Vaga- 
 bond " of Locke, nor the " Kraf t-Mayr " of 
 Von Wolzogen, nor, most modern instance, 
 " The Concert " of Hermann Bahr. 
 
 Life, it is true, has always made literature 
 look timid. Verlaine opened the gulf that may 
 lie between the devil and the angel in one man 
 far wider than did the story of " Dr. Jekyl and 
 Mr. Hyde " ; Oscar Wilde's life was even more 
 frightful than that of his pictured Thos. Grif- 
 fiths Wainewright; and there are plenty of 
 other such cases. If in Verlaine the saint con- 
 stantly opposed the sinner, what the case of 
 Hartleben opens up is that of the imperfectly 
 monogamous disposition of the male human. 
 
 To imagine a greater, finer tolerance than 
 that of the wife in " The Concert " is hard. 
 That play settled in the German countries the 
 reputation from which Bahr had suffered all his 
 career, of being, like most of the other Viennese, 
 merely clever. As journalist, critic, in almost 
 every capacity of the literary and dramatic 
 craft he had proved himself skilful, adroit and 
 penetrating; but the colder men of Northern
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 97 
 
 Germany still denied him the qualities of sin- 
 cerity, of greatness. Now that in " The Con- 
 cert " he has shown such grip of vital human 
 things, such talent not only for sketching char- 
 acter but for letting the intelligence and sim- 
 plicity of real life take the place of old formu- 
 las of conduct that never existed outside the 
 theatre, and such a genius for realizing the 
 greatness to which a wifely soul can rise, it 
 should be useless for even his former detractors 
 to deny him consideration. The play, as we 
 know, approaches its second season on the Ger- 
 man stage; when I saw it this last September 
 in Wiesbaden it was already an accomplished 
 success ; in New York it was produced in Octo- 
 ber, 1910, to become at once the event of the 
 season, and England is to see it very soon. 
 
 It is to be presumed, then, that the attitude 
 of the wife in that play toward the genius to 
 whom she is married is by now fairly familiar 
 to the English peoples. 
 
 Realizing that he is nothing but the eternal 
 child, she has not only patience but pardon for 
 his waywardness, his love-o'-women, much of 
 which is indeed nothing but a sort of infantile 
 greediness for sweets, a fondness for flattery. 
 Still, the fact remains, and becomes the crux of 
 the play, that he does go philandering after 
 other women, and that at last it reaches a point 
 where the wife has to bring him up with a sharp
 
 98 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 turn of the actual, and make him come definitely 
 to decision between his wife and the other 
 woman. She does again what every wise woman 
 knows, and Barrie knew, to be the only thing 
 to do in such a case: she lets her husband and 
 the other woman bore each other stiff. A little 
 physical jealousy is put in play, too ; the genius 
 is allowed to watch his wife adopting, with the 
 other woman's husband, exactly his own tactics 
 of free love. Not a new situation, but never 
 before, perhaps, used with such frank, such 
 human acceptance of the terms of modern intel- 
 ligence. Percy Mackaye used exactly the same 
 device of the two shifted couples in his bur- 
 lesque " Anti-Matrimony." 
 
 Nothing is more disheartening than the mol- 
 lusc-like clinging to theatricals in the mind of 
 the average citizen. About Barrie's play, as 
 about Bahr's, the opinion of the man-in-the- 
 street remains thus : " Say, ain't that a little 
 far-fetched? I don't see me letting my wife go 
 off that way ! " If I have heard that once, I 
 have heard it a hundred times. These good 
 people continue to apply to all human circum- 
 stances the rules, not of common sense, but of 
 melodrama as pictured by the conventional 
 theatres and the yellow newspapers. They 
 might even go so far as to declare, these dear, 
 good slaves of convention, these livers not of 
 their own lives but of lives as they think others
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 99 
 
 thought they ought to be lived, that the heroine 
 in " The Concert " is an impossible person. A 
 charming woman, we admit one fancies them 
 saying but of course it would be humanly, 
 femininely impossible to do what she did. It 
 cannot occur to them, if they deny her actuality, 
 that they are belittling the grand possibilities 
 of a woman's heart, the possibilities, indeed, of 
 the human being. Nothing is more foolish than 
 to say that this or that human action is impos- 
 sible; to the human soul, even more than to 
 modern science, nothing is impossible. 
 
 I will admit, however, that until I came across 
 the actual instance for which I am asking your 
 interest now, I had underrated a wife's capac- 
 ity for patience and for pardon. Each of us 
 whose observation of real life leads to consider- 
 ation of real problems came long ago, I do not 
 doubt, to Barrie's conclusion and to Bahr's ; 
 but few, I venture to think, ever equal in their 
 most optimistic fancies the height of tolerance 
 to which Frau Selma Hartleben reached. 
 
 The detail of Hartleben's relation to woman- 
 kind is what now concerns us; it is upon this 
 relation that much ink a deal of it plentifully 
 dosed with gall has been spilt in the last two 
 years, from 1908 to 1910. His casual dalli- 
 ances quite aside, it appears that there were 
 paramountly two women in his life, his wife and 
 another. As result we have friends of both
 
 100 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 rushing into print with proofs, with volumes of 
 letters. The whole controversy was a little 
 distasteful. 
 
 In 1908 appeared a small volume of " Let- 
 ters to His Wife " that started the opposition 
 into activity. As result came, in 1910, a vol- 
 ume called " Letters of Otto Erich Hartleben to 
 His Friend." It appealed to me from a window 
 in the German town where, last summer, I was 
 making my inquiries into the lives and works 
 of the little group of newer Germans to which 
 Hartleben belonged. The pages themselves, 
 however, appealed not at all ; the whole dispute 
 that they were published to foster took on un- 
 pleasant lights. The fact that he was married 
 to Frau Selma, and at the same time loved Frau 
 Ellen Birr, we might accept as a fact, just as, 
 unless we are clogged with convention, we ac- 
 cept man as something less than an angel, im- 
 perfectly faithful, casually monogamous. Un- 
 pleasant, however, were the tone adopted by 
 those who published these letters to " his 
 friend," and the revelation in the letters them- 
 selves of Hartleben's ability to write himself 
 down a most silly ass. 
 
 It is true, declared the faction of Frau Ellen, 
 that he was married to Selma, but you know 
 perfectly well that he lived with her before he 
 married her, and he only did it in a weak mo- 
 ment of wishing to right her too hazardous
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 101 
 
 position in the world. His love of comfort and 
 ease meant so much to him, that he continued 
 living with his wife long after he had ceased to 
 love her. It was to Frau Ellen that all the later 
 years of his life belonged, it was to be undis- 
 turbed in her society that he bought the Villa 
 Halcyone, at Salo, on Garda. So on, and so 
 on, the Ellenites. They declare that the " Let- 
 ters to His Friend " were in collection and 
 preparation, meaning no harm at all to his law- 
 fully wedded Selma, when, in 1908, appeared 
 the " Letters to His Wife " containing so many 
 references to " the other woman " that it be- 
 came necessary to clear the air. Clearing the 
 air seems to have meant an insistence on all 
 the things in Hartleben's life that might as well 
 have been allowed to rest with that life itself. 
 
 Sherard's " Life of Wilde " is the only sim- 
 ilar triumph of tactlessness that I know of in 
 recent years. And the letters themselves, as I 
 said, detract from the chance of taking Hart- 
 leben seriously. He has, for example, the trick 
 of signing himself " Your little Erich," which 
 for a large, able-bodied man, is essentially silly, 
 even when we have allowed for the average silli- 
 ness to our view of the one-time usual 
 German sentimentality. 
 
 The volume was, in truth, an unusual triumph 
 of unintended disenchantment. It contained, 
 over and above the tactless, or sentimental, or
 
 102 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 silly, or inane letter-press, photographs galore, 
 not only of Otto Erich himself, but of this in- 
 amorata of his, Frau Ellen. 
 
 These pictures brought the beholder, of any 
 nationality save German, once again face to 
 face with the astounding gulf between the Ger- 
 man appreciation of beauty, and their applica- 
 tion of it to their own bodies. To put it 
 plainly : most Germans think, and even fashion, 
 beautiful things, and, doing so, look like the 
 very devil. The moment the detail of beauty 
 approaches their own externals, their concern 
 for it seems to disappear. The clothes of both 
 the men and the women appear to have been 
 wished on while the fire-alarm was ringing des- 
 perately. If you have the faintest real humor 
 and sense of proportion in you, it is nothing 
 less than puzzling to listen to a German lady 
 discourse upon the beauties of landscape, of the 
 arts, the while she herself is a blot upon that 
 landscape, an offence against all art. Let us 
 not use the dread word, consistency, for it is 
 too dear to the narrow pharisaic intelligence. 
 The word is, rather, misinterpretation. These 
 people would pretend, no doubt, that the human 
 body is an incident, and the clothing of it mere 
 artless necessity ; that what matters is the beau- 
 tiful soul. Which is nonsense, as the Greeks 
 knew of old. The really fine sense for beauty 
 has not always the patience to inquire whether
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 103 
 
 a beautiful soul indeed lives behind this or that 
 ugly or unkempt habit. 
 
 SOME years ago, having reached ozone again 
 after a season of the airless Berlin theatres, I 
 evolved the theory that any art which moves 
 eternally in dead air, unventilated, breathed 
 over and over, must presently perish as do all 
 creatures that can no longer breathe. This 
 absence of real freshness was just what kept 
 German literature between 1832 and the late 
 'eighties dead as any mummy; it is just such 
 circling about in a dead centre of commercial- 
 ism hedged about by merely literary pretensions 
 that prevents in America any fresh spontane- 
 ous personality coming to popular utterance. 
 The German theatre has too long asked us to 
 consider vital problems while it gave us devital- 
 ized air to breathe. Similarly, these good peo- 
 ple asked us to go with them on the road to 
 beauty and to art, but to avoid noticing that 
 in their own persons they outraged both. 
 
 A certain delightful and unconscious aristo- 
 crat of my acquaintance the North Amer- 
 ican Indian is the only native American aristo- 
 crat who daily teaches me the primitive hu- 
 manities and complexities of the female mind, 
 has a concrete expression for the occasions, 
 rarer on the American side, when one's sense of 
 the fitness and beauty of things and people is
 
 104 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 outraged. Comes a female faced like a threat, 
 clothed like a disaster; or, again, a fair-faced 
 damsel hung in draperies as with clouds, more 
 suited to the frame of studio or boudoir than 
 of fresh air and sunlight; and my friend of 
 beauty says, with a mocking eye at me : " I'll 
 bet she writes! " And, all too often and too 
 lamentably, the thing is true. We ourselves but 
 rarely, it is true, possess this type; in Ger- 
 many it is national. 
 
 This is not to exclaim against expression of 
 the individual in clothes as well as on canvas, 
 in words or melody ; but it can be done beauti- 
 fully and quietly, without outrage to the general 
 tone. Mere eccentricity, mere variation from 
 the mass, is nothing; nothing is easier. Dis- 
 tinction can be achieved, the ego voiced, in 
 bodily externals, without disturbing the cur- 
 rent of fine and fashionable life by anything 
 more than its sense of our triumph. A man 
 can do this, and stay apparently within the 
 decrees of his sex's fashions ; a woman can do 
 it equally. To be individual, within those re- 
 straints, is far more difficult, takes far finer art, 
 than to be merely lawless. 
 
 All Germany forgets this. I can remember 
 the time when, sitting in what was then still 
 simply Kroll's, in Berlin, if a beautifully 
 gowned young person entered, all Berlin mut- 
 tered : " Aber so zieht sich doch kein anstan-
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 105 
 
 diges Madchen an!" ("But no decent girl 
 would wear a dress like that!") Things are 
 to-day a little better, but not much. Germany 
 as a nation, like England as a nation for the 
 ladies who get their gowns in Paris are a small 
 London minority still holds that for a girl 
 to be slovenly clothed, to wear abominable 
 woolly " tailor-mades " obviously patterned in 
 the dark, to be, in short, either attired for com- 
 fort regardless, or shaped like a cook, is to keep 
 flaming high the torch of virtue. Germany, 
 indeed, goes even farther; even its vice, where 
 it is most national, arrays itself in the garb of 
 the most virtuous cook that ever brewed beer- 
 soup. 
 
 So, I repeat: it was a pity they printed 
 Frau Ellen's picture in the volume intended to 
 prove that she was first in Otto Erich Hart- 
 leben's affections. It only made all his senti- 
 mentality the more absurd. It left more unim- 
 portant than before the wonder of his bigamous 
 affections. In the arts, such situations can be 
 beautifully clothed; but when the personages 
 are actually so quenching to our sense of the 
 beautiful, how the deuce can we be romantic 
 about it all? Hartleben himself, before his 
 health gave way, was a fine enough figure of a 
 man ; but not even that figure could stand the 
 revelations of his silliness through these letters.
 
 106 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 No breach-of-promise case in the public prints 
 of England or America ever held sillier writings. 
 As for the lady they were written to well, 
 let us not be ungallant, or as tactless as her 
 friends, Dr. Fred B. Hardt and the rest. Let 
 us say, simply, that she was, that she looked, 
 very, very German. 
 
 All that these letters told us, as of value to 
 a picture of Hartleben, added but slightly to 
 our knowledge of masculine temperament. He 
 married; later he went back to his first love, 
 and he pouted vastly when the wife's patience 
 sometimes showed the strain. He protested, 
 time and again, that the accident of his passion 
 for his wife having cooled, and that for another 
 keeping the youth and ambition astir in him, 
 should not be made to wear the faces of sin, and 
 wrong, and torture for him. We learn that 
 when he collapsed in December, 1900, after the 
 " Rosenmontag " premiere, Ellen and Selma sat 
 together by his bedside. A picture astonishing 
 enough to the puritan mind! At the end of 
 1902 he and Ellen moved into the villa on Lake 
 Garda, where most of his last stories, plays and 
 verses were composed. From the Vienna pre- 
 miere of " Im Griinen Baum zur Nachtigall " 
 he returned, November, 1904, sick unto death, 
 to Venice and to Ellen, to die, in February fol- 
 lowing, in his villa by the lake. Nothing, in all 
 this, adds to any wish to like Hartleben as a
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 107 
 
 man. He wrote love-letters sillier than the 
 average; he was as selfish and as bigamous as 
 the average; differing only in frankly practis- 
 ing what most only feel. Nothing else about 
 him moved one here. About the woman 
 nothing. 
 
 WHAT a contrast to all this detraction, more 
 effective because unintentional, was the little 
 volume, " Mei Erich," in which Frau Selma 
 Hartleben told a few simple little anecdotes that 
 reveal to us the real genius, the real eternal 
 child, in this man! And here it was, through 
 these little incidents caught casually out of an 
 artist's life, that we came to see the supreme 
 height of patience and of pardon that the female 
 soul can touch. Nothing in literature, as I have 
 said, surpasses what this little book of a short 
 hundred pages discloses; and surely life itself 
 can equal it but seldom. 
 
 Here was restored to kindliness and charm 
 the picture that had been so stained. Here was 
 a Hartleben who was simply all child, with all 
 a child's naughtiness, irresponsibility, charm. 
 A man who could fare forth, with another, into 
 the broad world, even as far as Tunis in Africa, 
 with money enough for six months, spend that 
 in two, and trust to luck for all else. Some- 
 thing, some one, would turn up, to settle bills; 
 and something, some one, always did. A man
 
 108 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 who was constantly bringing home stray, un- 
 washed, graceless vagabonds and trying to help 
 them. There was one such case, recited here, 
 in which Hartleben failed signally. 
 
 A soapless, homeless creature named Hille 
 tempted Hartleben's educational instincts; he 
 bought him a trunk, linen, etc., saw him bathed, 
 barbered, and finally rented a lodging for him. 
 Then, lending him a pack of books from his 
 own house, where they had spent the evening, 
 he sent him forth, satisfied that he had made 
 out of a vagabond a homekeeping youth. 
 Three days later, on the street, with the same 
 pack of books under his arm, the same by now 
 filthy collar, the same unshaven face, Hille 
 meets them. Hartleben shouts at him : " Where 
 from ? Haven't you been home at all ? " And 
 Hille said gently : " You see, Otto Erich, the 
 fact is : I couldn't find my lodgings, and so 
 I went for a little walk." " And where did you 
 sleep? " " Oh, on a bench, in the Thiergarten. 
 One sleeps quite comfortably there." Erich 
 gave up his job as reformer. 
 
 But his naivete about money and about men 
 was nothing to his naivete about women. And 
 here comes the amazing part of it all, the part 
 that, as I said, makes even Bahr's version of the 
 possibilities pale. I wish I could translate these 
 little anecdotes in toto for you ; every word in 
 them belongs to the most valuable, the most in-
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 109 
 
 timate revelation of man and of woman that 
 any life-story has ever given us. We see the 
 man's childish simplicity, his little egoisms, his 
 kindness; we see the woman reading him like a 
 book, knowing all his signs, all his most absurd 
 whims. She knew when he sighed and moped 
 he had something to confess ; and some of the 
 things he confessed may be astonishing to puri- 
 tans, but to men and women of the larger world 
 the only astonishment can be in regard to the 
 wife's attitude. 
 
 Once when he had just spent a delightful eve- 
 ning shocking a respectable Woman's Club in 
 the provinces by choosing for his reading a 
 number of his most dangerous anecdotes, he 
 handed his wife a sheaf of love-letters that had 
 been sent him by adoring damsels ; one of them 
 asked him to wear a rose as sign of his agree- 
 ing to a rendezvous ; he gave it to his wife and 
 bade her wear it, so that the young lady might 
 see which way the wind lay. 
 
 Another time he confessed to her that he had 
 taken pity on a likely looking girl he had met 
 in the street, and wanted his wife's advice and 
 aid. He painted the encounter charmingly: 
 the charming girl, the little episode of a gust of 
 wind displacing her hat, of his picking it up. 
 Her fresh young face not a year over six- 
 teen ! He took her to supper, and she told him 
 her tale of woe. We know those tales of woe ;
 
 110 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 but Hartleben seems always to have been in- 
 genuous. He not only listened, but sent a mes- 
 senger over to his wife for five dollars. . . . 
 " Your note," said Frau Selma, as he confessed, 
 " distinctly said : for something pressing ! " 
 " Well, it was something pressing. Listen : 
 She is an orphan, from the provinces, a Miss 
 Von Burg. Her people had money; but she 
 was unhappy at her guardian's, and a young 
 man eloped with her, here to Berlin, and left her 
 without a penny. . . . You see, if we don't 
 help her, . . . ' Enough; the thing, now, 
 was for Frau Selma to call on the young lady 
 and make sure that she was what she had repre- 
 sented herself to be. She never failed the great 
 big boy in these things ; she went, and she had 
 the other's fairy-tale put into its proper light 
 soon enough. Yet, even then, she made an ef- 
 fort; she asked the girl to come and live with 
 Erich and herself, to begin all over again ; the 
 girl said the landlady would not give up her 
 trunks ; never mind, let those stay, as long as 
 she herself came ; those could be fetched later ; 
 the girl agreed to come on the morrow. She 
 never came. The prospect of a regular orderly 
 life appalled her; that was all. " Too bad, too 
 bad," muttered Otto Erich. "I suppose I'll 
 never learn." 
 
 There was nothing he did not tell his wife. 
 
 He told her of the little factory girl in
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 111 
 
 Rome, for whom he had to buy clothes before 
 he could be seen out with her; and how, some- 
 how, those clothes, though far simpler, had cost 
 so much more than his wife's. He wondered if 
 she wasn't in jail by this time; she was such a 
 little thief. Thief? Yes; he always had to 
 watch her when she sewed buttons on for him; 
 she knew he carried his money in his waistcoat 
 pocket. She was always wanting to sew but- 
 tons on for him. And of course he wouldn't tell 
 her that he knew what she was after ; why spoil 
 her little pleasure? 
 
 He told her what was behind the misspelt and 
 ungrammatical letter which, on an occasion when 
 his affairs demanded her doing that for him, she 
 had opened. This letter announced that the un- 
 dersigned, " Your Emmy," had, with her chum, 
 duly rented the room he had promised to pay the 
 rent of; said he could meet her at the bridge 
 that night with the money ; sent him kisses and 
 respects, addressed to " Lieber Ehrig siser 
 Schaz," the atrocity of which I will not attempt 
 to betray. 
 
 As so often on occasions of this sort, it was 
 over some food and drink at Kempinski's, in 
 Berlin, that he made his explanation. On his 
 way to Berlin he had paused in Leipzig, long 
 enough to visit an old tavern of his student 
 days. And there he had got into conversation 
 with a couple of likely looking serving girls.
 
 112 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 One of them sighed as he said he was bound for 
 Berlin. " Ah, Berlin that's the only place ! 
 They know how to value one there. But here 
 . . . The boss is a beast, makes us polish and 
 scrub all forenoon ; the customers never let up, 
 and there ain't no tips. But Berlin . . . ruf- 
 fles and laces . . . and the fine gentlemen, ah, 
 Berlin ! " It occurred to him as a good j oke to 
 let the old innkeeper whistle for this couple 
 when he came next morning, to have them take 
 French leave. " Girls, come on to Berlin ; I'll 
 pay your tickets, and your room for the first 
 month but it mustn't cost more than thirty 
 marks so sharp five-thirty at the station ; 
 leave the rest to me." He even put them into 
 the dining-car; fed their joy at being able 
 to drink bubble-water at so many miles an hour ; 
 and drank innumerable times the old innkeep- 
 er's health. 
 
 "And now this letter, Erich?" asked his 
 wife. 
 
 " Why, don't you see, now she thinks she has 
 to do the tender ; she can't imagine that I 
 meant to get her that room, without wanting 
 anything for it. ... Yes, I'm going to the 
 rendezvous; I promised that; but you needn't 
 be jealous. . . ." 
 
 His wife merely laughed, and asked only 
 this: 
 
 " Aren't you ever going to be sensible? You,
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 113 
 
 with your forty years, still playing jokes like 
 that!" 
 
 " Oh, well, you see . . . you see, I'm just 
 naturally an old donkey." 
 
 AND now to the two gems of these brief 
 sketches, that give so sharply the picture of 
 the man. One of these is so short, so exquisite 
 in all the finer sense, that I must try to give it 
 to you word for word. It is called " The 
 Aluminum Keys," and it goes thus: 
 
 " One day Professor L., to whom I had gone 
 in my anxiety over severe pain from which I 
 had been suffering, told me I must undergo an 
 operation. I was to send my husband to him. 
 I asked the doctor to forego an interview with 
 Otto, who would only be upset, and would be 
 of no help to me ; in any event my husband was 
 going to Munich in the next few days, and the 
 operation could take place in his absence. The 
 professor would listen to nothing of that, and 
 insisted on the visit. So I delivered his mes- 
 sage, and next day Erich went to see him. 
 
 " When he returned, he was all broken up 
 and in such despair as I'd only seen him once 
 before in his life. His misery and tears were 
 heart-breaking ; there was hardly any soothing 
 him. 
 
 " I assured him he was borrowing trouble, 
 that it wasn't as bad as all that, and all would
 
 114 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 be right again in no time, and the man who, 
 a moment ago, had appeared to be breaking 
 down under his weight of woe, grew calm as a 
 child that has cried itself out, and hardly had 
 my last words died away, when he was peace- 
 fully asleep. 
 
 " Next day he took me to the hospital. 
 When at parting he saw my pleading look, he 
 understood, without words, and said, in an in- 
 jured tone: 'How could you think anything 
 like that of me, my dear; you really need not 
 worry. Particularly how could you think it 
 of me ? now, when you are ill ! ' He be- 
 came almost angry and kissed me time and 
 again. 
 
 " When the operation was happily over, word 
 was sent to him, and on the instant he sent to 
 my bedside a poem, out of the deeps of his 
 heart, to the deeps in mine. As soon as he 
 could, he came to see me; he was so happy, in 
 such tender mood, that the tears Icept streaming 
 down his cheeks. 
 
 " While drying these tears there fell from his 
 pocket with his handkerchief two keys imme- 
 diately in front of my bed. The next moment 
 I had seized the situation ; I could bring no 
 word to my lips ; I only looked at him sadly. 
 As he picked up the keys, he said : * How you 
 do notice everything, every least little thing; 
 I can do what I will ... be as careful as any-
 
 OTTO ERICH HARTLEBEN 115 
 
 thing . . . you always get on to it, no matter 
 how I try.' '. . . Really too tactless ! ' 'Oh, 
 please, you mustn't get excited ... it really 
 isn't my fault. It was she who put the keys in 
 my pocket, when I wouldn't take them, so that 
 I could come at night without bothering 
 and to think they had to fall out just here, in 
 front of your bed . . . just my rotten luck 
 again ! ' 
 
 " With that, he pocketed them again, and as 
 I still remained speechless, he grinned at me 
 like a mischievous boy, and said: 
 
 " * You know, they don't hurt the trousers 
 at all ; they're quite light . . . aluminum ! ' 
 
 " And to this day," concludes Frau Selma, 
 " those keys lie on my desk." 
 
 I PUT that bit from the life of a man and a 
 woman with the most wonderful in that sort 
 that history holds. By its light you can under- 
 stand all the heroes and victims of temperament, 
 and can see that life alone, and not its literary 
 chronicles, achieves the pinnacles. 
 
 YET, though it add nothing to our affection 
 for this overgrown selfish boy, another last tale 
 remains to tell from the tiny post-obit. Once 
 again, we are told, his wife saw the well-known 
 symptoms in him. At long last he gasped his 
 trouble out : " I have a child ! " As she sat
 
 116 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 aghast, he added, "Yes . . . that is . . . 
 they say I'm the father." " And aren't you? " 
 "H'm; well . . . that's just it ... that's 
 what you're to decide ! " 
 
 "I? My God, how can I . . ." 
 " Yes, you." And at last the load flowed off 
 his mind. " Yes, you. You go to Munich with 
 me, find an excuse to visit the girl, look at the 
 baby, and if you find that it's mine, then 
 then we'll adopt it and bring it up." 
 " And if it's not your child? " 
 " Then I'll pay, but nothing more." 
 To make it brief: she did go and see the 
 little seamstress in Munich, and took a look at 
 the fair-haired, blue-eyed child, with the some- 
 what broad cheek-bones, a characteristic of 
 Erich; it might well enough be his child. To 
 his entreaties that she try everything to get 
 the child from its mother she interjected only 
 this, that tells much of his character and hers: 
 " You're doing the disposing again, Erich. 
 Have you ever so much as asked me if I want 
 the child? " 
 
 " But, my dear, that's understood ; you al- 
 ways do what I want." 
 
 Well, they got the child, though under pro- 
 test from the mother, who, all the four or five 
 years that they had the little one, threatened 
 to come for it. When " Rosenmontag " 
 brought its author into the limelight, the
 
 OTTO ERICH HAETLEBEN 117 
 
 mother finally did come up from Munich, and, 
 her extortionate demands being refused, took 
 the child away. And Selma Hartleben con- 
 cludes, quite simply, and sadly: ". . . And so 
 the child that we had loved and fondled for 
 years was torn from us just as it was in its 
 first bloom. To lose that bloom, perhaps, in 
 other, meaner conditions. Erich got over it 
 quickly; other incidents were crowding his 
 life ; but I got over it very very slowly." 
 
 What can one add to such a chapter as that? 
 Comment were fatuous. 
 
 A CHILD, naughty, mischievous, but loving, 
 coming to tell all its joys and troubles to some 
 little mother, that was Otto Erich Hartleben. 
 And the little mother was Selma, his wife. No 
 wife ever sketched an overgrown boy more 
 clearly than she has done in her " Mei Erich." 
 The boy who, when they played the piano too 
 abominably in the flat upstairs, could not work, 
 but gleefully seized Frank Wedekind's appear- 
 ance to sally to Kempinski's ; the boy whose 
 handkerchiefs always wore other initials than 
 his own ; the boy who could be so good, and at 
 his wickedest never seemed horrid to her that 
 was the boy she gave to posterity in her little 
 book. That book, this entire incident, belongs 
 in the forefront of the history of human tem- 
 perament.
 
 118 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 It is as an example of temperament, of the 
 eternal child in man, rather than as creative 
 artist, that Otto Erich Hartleben has place in 
 any adequate account of the newer German 
 literature.
 
 VII 
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 
 
 IF in Detlev von Liliencron we saw a nation- 
 ally German spirit revived through his heroic- 
 ally naive interpretation of life, and in Otto 
 Erich Hartleben the naively childish possibilities 
 of the German temperament somewhat arrest- 
 ingly proclaimed, it was in Otto Julius Bier- 
 baum that the absolutely typical Teuton min- 
 strel definitely reappeared. Here, attuned to 
 our own time, was again the very air of Walther 
 von der Vogelweide himself, and, even more 
 peculiarly, that of Neidhardt von Reuenthal. 
 
 But I must not burden, here at very first, 
 with mere commentaried chatter, that gay and 
 gracious spirit. What I would have you do, 
 if possible, is to catch some share of the delight 
 in him that I have had these several years. The 
 wealth of sensations he has lent me, how shall 
 I spell them for you? I see the map of my 
 years dotted with many happy accidents of 
 travel; none happier than where they brought 
 me another Bierbaum book. This one in Ham- 
 119
 
 120 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 burg ; the " Irrgarten der Liebe " on the Pots- 
 damerstrasse ; the " Deutsche Chansons " in 
 Eisenach ; " Stilpe " aboard the Graf W alder- 
 gee; the " Sentimental Journey in a Motor 
 Car " in Wiesbaden ; and a delightful edition 
 of his early Carnival Plays in Munich the very 
 week that he lay in Dresden dying. 
 
 For never again, in the flesh, will that blithe 
 spirit sing to us ; I feel the loss, I assure you, 
 as of a friend, a man who gave me many, many 
 moments of delight. There went, in him, a 
 charming human creature, who had started hap- 
 piness in many human breasts ; it was his finest 
 quality that one thought of him humanly, 
 rather than as mere man of letters. Though 
 I had never seen him, I felt, that Carnival of 
 1910, that I had suffered in his death the death 
 of somewhat of my own youth. To find a new 
 book of his, hear a new song, follow a new play, 
 was to keep quick those eager sensations that 
 spell youth. Never again may just that spirit 
 of discovery come. ..." Never again " 
 that was a word of Bierbaum's too, and in a 
 quick sketch of the memory it leads to, I hope 
 to arrest your attention, so that you may have 
 patience for the later, soberer, elucidations. 
 
 " NEVER again," said Otto Julius when dis- 
 aster swamped his little Trianon Theatre under 
 the railway arch in Berlin. Ten years ago, as
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 121 
 
 near as need be. He had tried to give the pop- 
 ulace the ballad that would stand print, set to 
 the music that would lift itself into the street 
 upon the lips of the listeners. He had tried to 
 bridge the gulf between literature and the 
 music-halls. He had failed. The public still 
 wanted, as it has always wanted, platitudinous 
 doggerel, and A-B-C music. But he was a 
 humorist. He smiled his " This once, and never 
 again ! " and turned to other things. Always 
 something new, something different. He was a 
 modern. You might not have thought him a 
 German at all, if you had in mind the conven- 
 tional figure of the German scholiast, or the 
 anti-macassar virtues of the Gartenlaube. 
 
 He was one of the few interesting, arresting 
 figures in contemporary art or letters. The 
 picturesque adventurers of the day are not 
 many ; no matter what range of insular, con- 
 tinental or American arts you sweep. Bernard 
 Shaw is become a convention ; Whistler and 
 Mansfield are gone. Youth, alas, is so soon 
 faded. The adventurer of to-day becomes the 
 obese banker of to-morrow. The buccaneer 
 and the butterfly conspire to become taxpaying 
 citizens. Ah, yes, alas ; but there was always, 
 until just the other day, Otto Julius! 
 
 For years I hugged to myself the joy he 
 gave. Whenever I came near serious discovery 
 of him to our English worlds, I always con-
 
 122 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 eluded : No ; let the blind be happy in their 
 blindness. Now, after all, in gratitude perhaps 
 at the greatness of the gifts he gave, I am giv- 
 ing away the secret of much joy. 
 
 Yet only, at first, hinting, sketching. Just 
 as, in his own famous novel, " Stilpe," he 
 sketched an entire movement in modern German 
 culture. The solemn folk will tell you that 
 " Stilpe " is an ineffective piece of work ; you 
 will, if you are worldwise, retort that no book 
 which forecasts actual episodes and characters 
 in the development of German public entertain- 
 ment can be ineffective. 
 
 And then the poetry ! Many volumes of it. 
 It was the poetry that first held me. One is not 
 ever young ; the first fine delight in Swinburne 
 is hardly regained. Life in our hard world 
 leaves little room for enjoyment of the lyric 
 moods. Is it the stress of the world, or the 
 decline in lyricism? Whatever the reason, the 
 fact was patent : the lyric moments that stuck 
 in the memory were all too few. A line or so 
 of Aldrich's or Dobson's, of Carman, of Joaquin 
 Miller, of Hovey; what else? If you recall 
 more, you are more fortunate than I. The 
 Lyric Muse, remember, I am harping on; she 
 happens to be the only lady of the lot who in- 
 terests me as I have said before. It was 
 she, that Lyric Lady, who had so perfectly 
 taught music to Otto Julius. You are aware,
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 123 
 
 I trust, that if you would acquire most fault- 
 lessly the Parisian accent, you must take a 
 French sweetheart. The Lyric Lady must have 
 loved this German singer well. 
 
 How spell the delight the first dip into his 
 verse gave me? Heine, Verlaine, Dobson and 
 Gilbert ; some touch of all was there, and some- 
 thing singularly individual, something starkly 
 Otto Julius. For a mark, for a quarter of a 
 dollar, you could buy more joy, in Bierbaum's 
 collected " Der Irrgarten der Liebe," of some 
 four hundred pages, than you could buy in our 
 English language for four times that sum. 
 Who, in England or America, would buy poetry 
 in paper binding? What book of verse in Eng- 
 lish, whether paper, cloth, or plush a la Hub- 
 bard, has ever sold to the extent of over forty 
 thousand copies in four or five years? Will 
 you pardon the digression, into figures, away 
 from poetry? It was necessary for your under- 
 standing of how cheaply the finest lyric sensa- 
 tion of recent years came to me. Otto Julius 
 was by then no mere stranger to me ; the years 
 of the Insel, of the Bunte Vogel, and of Pan 
 were still green ; so when this charming pocket- 
 piece called " Love's Maze " called to me from 
 a counter in the Potsdamerstrasse, I took the 
 vast financial risk ; I spent a quarter of a dol- 
 lar. 
 
 Millionaires, who compute profits in mere
 
 124 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 figures and paper and metal, have not the faint- 
 est conception of the profit I have had from 
 that quarter of a dollar. Hardly a mood, gay 
 or dim, but has its echo in this little volume. 
 That there was more than mere versification, 
 more than mere charm, or wit; more, indeed, 
 than mere music, was proved by the fact that 
 during the years when the Uberbrettl' movement 
 reigned in Germany, a half hundred or so of the 
 briefer of these lyrics were set to music by the 
 best of the younger composers and sung in the 
 halls, the halls that once, under the railway 
 arches ah, well, never again, never again. . . 
 
 Ah, if only about Bierbaum himself, I could 
 always let the man himself tell the story! A 
 little something autobiographic he did occa- 
 sionally give us, and with a brief of that we 
 may try to make clear our picture of him. 
 
 He was born, he told us in one whimsical rec- 
 ord, June 28, 1865, in Lower Silesia. The vice 
 of versification lured him from his earliest years. 
 To such an extent did he give way to it that, 
 spurning, as he did, pecuniary profit as the chief 
 end of man, he forfeited the esteem of all the 
 good burghers and bureaucrats who had his 
 fate at heart. His utter lack of principle was 
 still more fully shown when he forsook his poetic 
 last, and went philandering about with novels, 
 stories, librettos, ballets, travel-books, fairy- 
 tales, and goodness knows what else. The
 
 OTTO JULIUS BEEEBAUM 125 
 
 rumor of wickedly large salaries paid him for 
 editorial work threatened to ruin him; as did 
 his account of a trip to Italy in a motor-car; 
 only sworn testimony that those were stage 
 salaries, and that he went a-motoring at an- 
 other's expense, saved him. He never hoped to 
 escape the disgrace which the death of the Tria- 
 non Theatre and the birth of the Uberbrettl' 
 attached to his name in the public mind. 
 
 Of great modern men he preferred Dosto- 
 jewski, Nietzsche and Gottfried Keller. He 
 preferred T. T. Heine to Max Klinger. He 
 never missed an Offenbach operetta if he could 
 help it. Nor would he willingly miss the new- 
 est books of Liliencron, Dehmel and Wedekind. 
 Religiously, he rested upon this text of his own : 
 " Keep the mob at a distance, for it prevents 
 you getting into your own heaven ! " And the 
 finest wonder of the world for him, not only 
 because it was his wife's home, was Tuscany. . . 
 
 To that merry little chronicle of his own 
 which many passages in his books of travel and 
 criticism enlarge, and from some of the opin- 
 ions in which he appears, through his later 
 volumes, to have changed we may add some 
 few sober details. His first schooling was in 
 Dresden, and all his first youth a most wretched 
 period, on which he could never look back with- 
 out shuddering. Leipzig was the nearest ap- 
 proach to a home he knew. He studied in
 
 126 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Zurich, in Leipzig, and finally in Munich ; phi- 
 losophy and law were his courses, but he learned 
 Russian and Persian also. Then for two years 
 he studied Chinese in Berlin. Financial disaster 
 overtaking his parents, he had, at this time, 
 1891, to leave his studies, and undertake the 
 care of his parents. He went to Munich as a 
 free-lance in literature. For two years of con- 
 stant work he lived not far from the Lake of 
 Starnberg, near Munich. In 1893 he moved to 
 Berlin, where for six months he edited the Free 
 Stage. Then, with several others, he founded 
 the splendid magazine, Pan. Eighteen hundred 
 and ninety-five to 1898 he lived in Castle Eng- 
 lar in South Tirol; then again in Munich, in 
 Fiesole, and in Pasing near Munich. He died 
 February 1, 1910, in Dresden. 
 
 FOR sheer variety in craft, if for nothing 
 else, it would be hard to surpass the achieve- 
 ments of Otto Julius Bierbaum. He wrote for 
 the light stage and the serious stage ; he wrote 
 the loveliest little plays to music, pantomimes, 
 and serious tragedies; he wrote a novel that 
 started a revolution in public entertainment; 
 he edited innumerable epochal periodicals ; and, 
 above all, was always alert for what was new, 
 what was national, what was full of youth in 
 all the arts. It was he who first in German lit- 
 erature went aggressively into the arena for
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 127 
 
 such painters as Boecklin, Von Uhde and Stuck. 
 He knew that the real genius of Germany lay 
 nearly a hundred years away, with Goethe, and 
 his Goethe Calendar is another gift he gave us. 
 His prose was of an intimacy, and a spontaneity 
 all too rare in any language; his travel-vol- 
 umes are especially rich in disclosures of the 
 man, the thinker in Bierbaum ; so that he is the 
 only sort of travel-companion people of intelli- 
 gence care for; he is charmingly discursive. 
 In some of his later stories and novels he had 
 his stilted and tiresome moments, so that 
 " Prinz Kuckuk," for instance, interests some 
 people more because it is obviously a study of 
 actual personages, than because of its intrinsic 
 value. It is no secret that the poet, Alfred 
 Walter Heymel, is supposed to have been por- 
 trayed in " Prinz Kuckuk." 
 
 Bierbaum, the poet, has contact with Lilien- 
 cron surely enough, and owes him much, and 
 though even something of Hartleben may re- 
 sound faintly in his very earliest work, it is Otto 
 Julius Bierbaum who combines in his lyric style 
 the tradition of all German lyricism. You may 
 trace Matthias Claudius in him, as you can the 
 old Minnesingers. He built upon the metric 
 manner of Goethe; he showed sentimental ele- 
 gance akin to Heine's. More than any man of 
 his time, by Liliencron's grace, did he express 
 purely Teuton sentiment, utterly stripped, for
 
 128 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 perhaps the first time, of its absurdities, its sen- 
 timentality. He sang the simplicity, the might, 
 the sentiment of his nation. Essentially his 
 voice was the voice of his immediate time; 
 modern Germany is more fully and finely ex- 
 pressed in Bierbaum than anywhere else. He 
 approaches Liliencron in this: that his living 
 and his singing reach virtue through simplic- 
 ity; he departs from Liliencron in this: that 
 while the gaiety of Liliencron has mostly the 
 serious sombreness of the North behind it, Bier- 
 baum's gaiety even where it deepens towards 
 melancholy retains always the quality of grace- 
 fulness. 
 
 Grace, charm, these are wonderfully Bier- 
 baum's qualities. Let us avoid labels ; but this 
 much is pertinent: in his point of view of life, 
 Bierbaum was impressionist; in performance 
 he was stylist. And what artist of sorts is any- 
 thing else? The world is what one's individual 
 eye sees it ; after that, one writes as one has 
 to write! To pretend anything else is to be 
 either knave or fool. Bierbaum lived and loved ; 
 and then sang. He served his own hard ap- 
 prenticeships ; played plentifully the youthful 
 ape after this and that style; but what he be- 
 came, what he remains for our eternal apprecia- 
 tion, is the most typical troubadour of his coun- 
 try in his time. He expressed experiences in 
 verses so musical that reading them one felt
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 129 
 
 them to be the spontaneous loosing of pent-up 
 melodies. 
 
 From time to time certain children of the 
 dark calling themselves scientists trouble us 
 with diagrams of what constitutes, to the fog 
 they call their minds, poetry. Against their 
 criminal meddling with what they cannot under- 
 stand I would put a brief line or so from the 
 last book of Bierbaum's published before his 
 death, " The Yankeedoodletrip." They are 
 about the lyric. . . . 
 
 '* The lyric ! A matter of course for young 
 folks, since it is like breathing for them. . . . 
 Only, there are very few really young people 
 in that age when artistic firmness of hand is 
 joined to sentiment. What Goethe calls the 
 absurdity of the lyric, is the childish. The two 
 purest lyric spirits of the Germans to-day, 
 Martin Greif and Max Dauthendy, are both 
 sheer children intellectually. Rilke, on the 
 other hand, with his uncanny genius, is a 
 prodigy. . . ." 
 
 The final reference is to Rainer Maria Rilke, 
 whose verse, for sheer technical adroitness, is 
 perhaps the most remarkable in Germany to- 
 day. In material he has much the monastic 
 manner of the late Francis Thompson. 
 
 On another occasion Bierbaum learned from 
 one of the people themselves those German 
 people who read him because he sings the es-
 
 130 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 sence of themselves for them ! a nobly prim- 
 itive concept of a lyric. She was a nursegirl 
 who shared a compartment in the train with 
 him. She had confessed to him that she liked 
 to read verses better than anything else, and she 
 showed him a book into which she had copied 
 all her favorites. She had not put in the names 
 of the authors ; an inconsequent detail to her. 
 He looked at her scrapbook, and blushed to 
 himself, for he found himself represented by no 
 less than a dozen specimens. And so they went 
 on chatting; he was quite sorry when the train 
 got to Munich. For she had explained to him, 
 most politely, how verses must be in order to 
 please her. As thus: They must be just as if 
 one might have said it so oneself, only much 
 more beautiful; and they must be so that a 
 tune ought to go with them ; and they must 
 have " heart " in them, either " awfully " jolly, 
 or " awfully " sad. . . . 
 
 Well, exactly upon that nobly simple formula 
 were the lyrics of Bierbaum. If to me or to 
 you they seemed to hold a mood for every mood 
 of ours, what would they not hold for Germans ? 
 Small wonder that they bought those little 
 books, that they sang those songs! Exactly 
 so would they like to have said it themselves; 
 and no more beautiful than that could they 
 imagine it. Bierbaum was the minstrel for 
 them.
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 131 
 
 The scholars, the Brahmin wardens of the 
 world's culture, may say what they will, the 
 " great poetry " which they would have us hold 
 paramount, is not what was meant by the 
 shrewd fellow who said he'd rather write the 
 people's songs than their laws. Songs for the 
 people were exactly what Bierbaum wrote. 
 There was music in his matter and in his man- 
 ner; it was inevitably singing stuff, and the 
 people did actually sing it. The best of the 
 younger composers of the day set the lines to 
 music, and presently all Germany was humming 
 aloud the songs of this minstrel. 
 
 Here it becomes necessary to forestall two 
 obvious objections. Firstly the objection in- 
 sistently issuing from the Brahmins that if Bier- 
 baum appealed to the people, his verse must in- 
 deed have been sorry stuff; do we not know 
 what trash the people like, what atrocities of 
 " Laugh and the world laughs with you," of 
 " Ostler Joe " and all the rest? Against this 
 it is to be pointed out that the people, the aver- 
 age, in Germany is a very different aggregation 
 intellectually from what it is with us. We are, 
 of course, in no event considering an illiterate 
 mob, but the middle-class majority which, in 
 America, patronizes the best-sellers of fiction, 
 and, in England, subscribes to Mudie's. Now, 
 bitter as this truth is, the fact remains that 
 good conversation conversation on a tone of
 
 132 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 all-round culture, of education, if you like; 
 conversation disclosing the specialties of none, 
 the completely furnished intelligences of all 
 is possible to-day chiefly among Germans and 
 Russians. Americans can never talk long with- 
 out falling back on money; France runs to 
 women ; England runs to sport. 
 
 The subject is too large for this present 
 page ; yet the difference between what " the 
 people " means in the German case, and in our 
 own case, when we are considering reading- 
 matter, must be insisted on. The sneer of our 
 Brahmins falls to the ground. Were any other 
 fact needed facts, alas, still appeal to so 
 many unillumined minds ! it would be the one 
 already referred to : Bierbaum's " Irrgarten 
 der Liebe " sold its forty thousand copies in 
 four or five years. When you can show any 
 equivalent to that in English, I will pretend 
 patience with the Brahmin attitude towards 
 " the people." 
 
 Will the Brahmins, by the way, pause long 
 enough from their attitude of being blind to 
 the true virtues of proper minstrelsy, to con- 
 sider the question whether the publicity that 
 Shakespeare wrote for in his own time and 
 place was not exactly that of the music-hall? 
 Or will they let some merely readable writer 
 discover that question to the world? The stage 
 that Shakespeare wrote for was exactly such a
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 133 
 
 stage for the people as these newer German 
 balladists wished to revive. 
 
 Secondly is the objection: Oh, this was dog- 
 gerel for the music-hall, was it? Now, we all 
 recall Emerson and his " j ingle man " conde- 
 scension to Foe. The Brahmins are consistently 
 afraid of music, because they seldom possess an 
 ear. Which brings us, on the cue of the music- 
 hall, to that part of Bierbaum's career as mili- 
 tant minstrel, which was to become part of the 
 history of entertainment in Germany at the 
 turn of the nineteenth into our present century. 
 The history, in short, of the Uberbrettl', which 
 has already been briefly sketched in the begin- 
 ning of this book. 
 
 THE Uberbrettl' had its real beginning in 
 Bierbaum's novel " Stilpe." 
 
 Than " Stilpe " no more terrible picture of 
 unscrupulous journalistic genius exists in Eng- 
 lish. It owes nothing to the " Scenes de la Vie 
 de Boheme." You could not read it and ever 
 again have patience for the timid piffle with 
 which too many writers have cloaked the ** ar- 
 tistic temperament." Here, in " Stilpe," was 
 nothing less than a dissection of a soul on its 
 way to hell, by way of modern journalism. 
 
 Stilpe was not the keyhole type of journal- 
 ist, that the circulation-mad newspapers in
 
 134 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 English breed. He was always concerned with 
 the arts; it was as critic of those that he ex- 
 posed his shameless unscrupulousness. The 
 novel tells us of Stilpe's youth and formative 
 years; over which we cannot now linger. Suf- 
 fice to say they left him without honor, scru- 
 ple, sobriety, or any single decent principle of 
 life. He went in for poetry ; exploded the most 
 appalling bombs of eroticism; and appeared 
 presently as critic. He became the terror of the 
 artistic community ; his pen, steeped in vitriol, 
 was of a facility unequaled. But his excesses 
 in dishonesty became too obvious; he went just 
 once too far in blackmail and outrageous licen- 
 tiousness of malice ; and his critical star fell to 
 earth. 
 
 It depends, you see, upon surroundings ; in 
 one place, if you are too dishonest, as Stilpe, 
 you perish; in another, if you tell the truth 
 about the theatre, or literature, if, in short, 
 you are simply honest, syndicates of managers 
 and publishers see to it that you perish. Since 
 the case of the late Nym Crinkle, can one recall 
 a New York critic whom the suspicion of dis- 
 honesty has injured? 
 
 Outlawed from the critical circle, Stilpe de- 
 termined upon a new sensation. At first it was 
 to be a new periodical; to contain all the last 
 words in artistic scandalousness. But on that 
 came the tremendous suggestion that an artis-
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 135 
 
 tic Variete would be still more striking. And 
 on that page of the novel " Stilpe " begins an 
 outline sketch for what later actually became 
 the Uberbrettl' of Germany. In form of the 
 most ironic satire the whole program is un- 
 folded for us by Stilpe himself; that exagger- 
 ated fictitious program was but slightly de- 
 parted from when the scheme was really at- 
 tempted. And the tragic picture of Stilpe him- 
 self appearing in the " halls " as a serio-comic 
 is nothing less than a foreshadowing of certain 
 chapters in the actual career of the actual 
 Frank Wedekind. " Stilpe " was published in 
 1897; the so-called Biedermeier period of Ger- 
 many has no more extraordinary specimen of 
 satire and prophecy. 
 
 Let me try to give you fragments of Stilpe's 
 own notions of what the new Literary Music 
 Hall was to be. What had been first suggested 
 in the fumes of a drunken orgy, expanded 
 finely in the only slightly soberer light of day. 
 Stilpe had not, by then, been sober for years. 
 (His career makes such a book as Stephen 
 French Whitman's " Predestined " the palest of 
 palimpsests.) We find him at his desk, in the 
 reek of liquor, smoke, and perfumes of stage 
 dressing-rooms; he was in the first fury of 
 plans for the " Momus " Theatre, as it was 
 to be called. Thus he planned: 
 
 " Yes, yes : all art, and all life, to be born
 
 136 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 again, by way of the music-hall! . . . Into 
 our net we'll drag everything: painting, rhym- 
 ing, singing, and everything that has beauty 
 and the joy of life in it. What is art to-day? 
 A tiny, twinkling spider-web in a corner of life. 
 We will spread it as a golden net over the whole 
 people, over all life. For to us will come all 
 those who up to now have been avoiding the 
 theatre as anxiously as the church. And 
 though they come only for a bit of entertain- 
 ment, we shall show them that which they all 
 lack : the true gaiety that illumines life, the art 
 of the dance in words, tones, colors, lines, ges- 
 tures. The naked joy in loveliness; the wit 
 that takes the world by the ear; the fantasy 
 that juggles with the stars and rope-walks on 
 the whiskers of the Cosmos ; the philosophy of 
 harmonious laughter; the hurrah of a soul in 
 pain . . . ah, we shall work in life itself as 
 did the troubadours! We shall bring a new 
 Culture dancing into the world! We will give 
 birth to the Superman in our halls ! We will 
 stand this silly world on its head; crown the 
 indecent as the only decency ; raise nudity in 
 all its beauty on high again before all the peo- 
 ple. . . . Ah, the things we will make the 
 solid citizens (Biedermaenner) of Germania 
 do, when once we put this new spirit into 
 them . . ." 
 
 Again, Stilpe, when it became a question of
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 137 
 
 attracting an actual " angel " for his scheme, 
 came closer to earth. Thus: 
 
 " Look at the theatres ! Empty ! Look at 
 the Wintergarten (the hugest music-hall in 
 Berlin)! Full. One dying; the other bloom- 
 ing. . . . The day of the theatre is done . . . 
 Just as the theatre, once an annex of the church, 
 loosed itself and found a form suitable to its 
 period, so must the art of to-day emancipate 
 itself from the theatre and decide upon the 
 form that the taste of our time has determined: 
 the form of the music-hall! Both are ripe for 
 decline: the theatre because it is too clumsy, 
 too heavy, and too immobile for the dram- 
 drinking appetite of our latter-day art-lovers; 
 and the present music-hall, because it does not 
 know how artistically to express all the nervous 
 desires and emotions of our time. Let us found 
 a music-hall based on art in its broadest inter- 
 pretation. . . ." 
 
 The plot ripened merrily. The newspapers 
 sneered and caricatured; Stilpe had feverish 
 struggles with his poets, his dancers, his artists 
 of every mentionable and unmentionable sort. 
 Especially his poets enraged him ; they would, 
 would hand him lyrics! Who was to sing lyr- 
 ics? His hall wasn't going to be a reading- 
 circle. One of his poets sneered at Stilpe's 
 rage : " Of course, comic songs, that's what you 
 want. Well, get Stinde then " (Julius Stinde,
 
 138 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 typically a humorist of the Biedermeier period, 
 who wrote harmless pages fit for the softest 
 bosom of the most blameless families. P. P.), 
 " or that Mr. What's-his-name, that fat German 
 beersoak, Mr. yes, that's it, Hartleben, that 
 Pilsener-Goethe ; he'll be just what you want. 
 He's the chap ; the uncle of all German poetry ; 
 he's the chap for you. . . ." (Many years 
 afterwards, Bierbaum admitted that he and 
 Hartleben had been both friends and foes ; 
 though he thought, had Hartleben lived, they 
 might have stayed friends.) 
 
 The poets could rage as they would, Stilpe 
 was not to be moved from his decision to avoid 
 the too too literary. " I've been appointed," 
 he declared, " to amuse Berlin into artistic life, 
 but not to bore it with literature. The object 
 of our Hall is to do away with the last vestiges 
 of interest in all this literature of yours. We 
 want to make the people of Berlin truly aes- 
 thetic. There are still people here who read 
 books. That's got to stop. There's more of 
 the lyric in the lace drawers of my soubrettes, 
 than in all your printed works ; and when once 
 the time is come that I can let them dance with- 
 out any drawers at all, even you will realize 
 that it is superfluous to write any other verses 
 than those sung on our stage. Beautiful 
 clothes, beautiful arms, busts, legs, gestures 
 those are what count. Evolve dances for me;
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 139 
 
 create pantomimes; solve me the problem of 
 emancipation from tights those are the 
 things I need. And if you absolutely have to 
 write verses, don't forget they must be sung 
 by beautiful girls whose corsets do not embrace 
 the void. . . ." 
 
 In spite of all of which the Momus Music 
 Hall went promptly to smash. As music-hall 
 it was still too artistic; as art it was still too 
 music-hally. All the old and many new enemies 
 of Stilpe helped to turn the first-night into a 
 riot and a fiasco. The backers of the venture 
 got rid of Stilpe; the Hall was put in charge 
 of a manager of the old type ; and Stilpe took 
 the profits paid him for breach of contract, and 
 spent it in riotous living. 
 
 When next we hear of him, he is enacting an 
 amazing foreshadowing of certain scenes later 
 made actual by Wedekind; he is performing 
 at one of the cheaper popular music-halls in the 
 suburbs. He gave a most brilliant, arresting, 
 grotesquely realistic bit of music-hall art. It 
 was as if he put the whole tragi-comedy of his 
 own life before the audience; put himself out- 
 side of it, beyond it; and grinned at it, at the 
 public, and at himself. He came out as a be- 
 sotted, filthy, ragged thing of the gutter; a 
 thing that had once been a great poet. If you 
 can conceive a combination of Verlaine and 
 Whisky Bill appearing at the Grand Guignol
 
 140 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 in caricature of himself, it was something like 
 that Stilpe was doing. He maundered, as he 
 grabbed a cigar-butt out of the gutter, that he, 
 too, had been a great artist once; then he sud- 
 denly flung invectives at the mob, at the audi- 
 ence, called them blind hounds that did not 
 know genius ; cursed them, and reviled them 
 until the audience roared in applause. And 
 then, to complete the picture, this sodden ruf- 
 fian hanged himself in full view, flinging mor- 
 dant mutterings from him, as he tied the noose. 
 A ghastly show was this that Stilpe gave. . . . 
 And one night, he hanged himself in earnest. 
 
 THROUGH many curious artists and their 
 brain-children, through Villon and through 
 Wilde, Wedekind and Stilpe, you may trace the 
 thin red streams of vice and music flowing to- 
 gether. " For each man kills the thing he 
 loves." Stilpe had loved only Art and himself. 
 
 No more terrible descent into hell, by way of 
 the literary temperament, has been painted in 
 our time. If Henry Harland and W. J. Locke, 
 in English, let their ironic prose play lovingly 
 about the merely charming qualities in certain 
 immortal vagabonds of life, Otto Julius Bier- 
 baum in Stilpe once and for all revealed the 
 mordant tragedies. Nor could you call its most 
 fantastic, most grotesque pages exaggerated.
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 141 
 
 Wedekind has himself lived out many moments 
 of Stilpe's career, and in some of the pages 
 which he wrote about journalism, as, for in- 
 stance, in his play " Oaha " (1909), he was 
 even more bitter than Stilpe. 
 
 What gives the novel " Stilpe " its perma- 
 nent value, however, is its accurate prophecy 
 and program for the Uberbrettl'. As we have 
 seen, it was not many years after the flamboy- 
 ant and obviously satiric pronunciamento of 
 Stilpe that a group of the younger German ar- 
 tists did actually undertake such a scheme. 
 
 OF the many delightful lyrics which thrilled 
 through the Uberbrettl' and which, as has been 
 said, set to haunting melodies, still linger here 
 and there for our delight, Bierbaum's are the 
 ones I must try to have you appreciate. For 
 these, as I cannot too often repeat, first started 
 me upon this inquiry into the sources of the 
 new blood coursing through German art; and 
 these remain imperishably for the world's de- 
 light. 
 
 Once, I vowed that next to the man who tried 
 to explain the lyric the biggest fool was he who 
 tried to translate it. A Maxim explains in hun- 
 dreds of pages what poetry is; another dis- 
 cusses : What Is Art ; and so the limits of folly 
 fade daily. If, now, I betray this fine artist,
 
 142 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Bierbaum, who has most gracefully been the 
 minstrel of most of modernity's moods, I can 
 always fall back upon that eternal prop of all 
 immortal fools: I mean well. You who read, 
 if you do not know German, conspire to my 
 folly ; it is to illumine your opportunity to en- 
 joy Bierbaum that the coming crimes occur. 
 Perhaps my awful versions of the lovely intan- 
 gible ballads of Bierbaum will force you to 
 learn German ; then you will see the full extent 
 of my massacre, and then, indeed, I will have 
 accomplished the great thing, for you will be 
 able to enjoy him in the original, no matter 
 how much you despise his translator. 
 
 The note of sheer melody was not all that 
 Bierbaum had, or he could not so typically have 
 voiced the sentiment as well as the gaiety of his 
 countrymen. Yet artistic melody is what is so 
 rare in the world of lyric expression, and it was 
 just that note in him which simply cried aloud 
 for musical setting. Song upon song in that 
 part of his " Irrgarten der Liebe," called sim- 
 ply " Lieder," has been sung all over Germany, 
 and if I have chosen this one or that one it is 
 not because they are better than their fellows, 
 but simply because I found myself able to trans- 
 fer some tiny hint of their charm into English. 
 
 To contrast such a ballad as " Rieke im 
 Manover Singt," for instance, with Liliencron's 
 " Die Musik Kommt," is to see at once the dif-
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 143 
 
 ference between the two personalities: Bier- 
 baum never allowing melancholy to oust the 
 grace of his expression; Liliencron's eternal 
 sadness of the North flinging always something 
 of a shadow over his merriest pretensions. 
 
 Dozens of these Bierbaum songs have been 
 sung; and just the singing quality in lyrics is 
 as impossible to impart as it is to define. There 
 was hardly a mood of truly German sentiment 
 that he did not sing, and always with charm, 
 never with absurdity. If I love one ballad bet- 
 ter than another it is " Der Alte Orgelmann 
 Singt : " in which the quick grace, the sponta- 
 neous gaiety and mischief remain as intangible 
 as star-dust, yet some notion of which you may 
 still glean from this version, which I call " The 
 Old Hurdy-Gurdy Man Sings " : 
 
 Oft enough, when I was young, 
 Love and I've together sung 
 Youth's chief song: Philandering, 
 Best prerogative of Spring. 
 
 Now a boudoir heard the song, 
 Now a garret. Never long, 
 Never tiresome is Love's game 
 When your partner's ne'er the same. 
 
 So we lived our student days, 
 Gay and careless of our ways 
 So they led us to the girls. . . . 
 Wisdom hath no greater pearls. 
 
 Now, oh, Lord, I'm gray and old; 
 Youth is gone; my fires are cold; 
 Not a monk, prepared to die, 
 Is so harmless now as I.
 
 144 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 And of all those lovelorn rhymes 
 Hardly one remains that chimes 
 Mourning bells above the sod 
 Where once Youth and Beauty trod. 
 
 Sadly now this crank I turn, 
 While my tears, hot, bitter, burn; 
 And the airs all seem to say: 
 See this sinner, once so gay! 
 
 And when I'm too tired to churn, 
 Then it's yon old wench's turn: 
 Laura, once the toast of town, 
 Now a hag in ragged gown. 
 
 She, too, played the very deuce, 
 Living fast and loving loose; 
 Now she plays the piper fair, 
 Strumming ditties over there. 
 
 Young folks, take advice from me: 
 Sane and safe your loves must be; 
 Health and strength should be your dower 
 Intact to the marriage hour. 
 
 Marriage-beds alone should be 
 Ante-rooms to infancy; 
 Youthful license costs one dear: 
 See me, wheezing chestnuts here! 
 
 For no marriage hurts as hard 
 As to be a gutter-bard; 
 Hurdy-gurdies and their wage 
 Are no port for one's old age. 
 
 Now, however, one tries to give you hint of 
 the singing spirit in this stuff, contemplation of 
 the result makes for despair. From the very 
 opening lines, 
 
 "Einst in meinen Jugendjahren 
 Hab ich Liebe viel erfahren . . ."
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 145 
 
 to those peculiarly individual stanzas equivalent 
 to the fifth in my version : 
 
 "Von dem ganzen Lie-la-lieben 
 1st kaum ein Gedicht geblieben 
 Das erbarmlich klagt und klingt 
 Und Erinnerungen singt." 
 
 and to the eighth: 
 
 " Sie auch hat es toll getrieben 
 Mit dem gottverfluchten Lieben, 
 Darum, hor es, Publikum, 
 Dreht sie das Harmonium." 
 
 one might as well attempt to weigh the romance 
 of a summer moon. 
 
 Again there is the " Lied des verlassenen 
 Lehmann's " with its delicious humor and its 
 inevitable melody, which even to the ear unac- 
 quainted with German must be apparent from 
 such stanzas as: 
 
 " Ich hab ein schones Madchen 
 Gehabt; 
 
 Das hat mich mit viel Liebe 
 Gelabt. 
 
 Ach Gott, wie war sie niedlich, 
 Oh, Gott, wie war sie nett! 
 Ich kaufte ihr aus Rosenholz 
 Ein Himmelbett. 
 
 " Ich kaufte ihr auch Kleider 
 Und Schuh; 
 
 Die UnterrSckchen machten 
 Frou-frou. 
 
 Sie war, beim Himmel, sauber 
 Und reizend anzusehn, 
 Es konnte mit ihr jeder Prinz 
 Zum Tanze gehn. . . ."
 
 146 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 This, like half a hundred others, was sung all 
 over Germany, to a most catchy air. The 
 humor, the melody and the charm all fade in 
 adaptation; yet must you be given a hint of 
 the whimsies in it. Suppose we call it " The 
 Forsaken One's Song." 
 
 A most delightful damsel 
 
 Was mine; 
 
 She taught me love was more than 
 
 Divine. 
 
 Good Lord, she was so lovely! 
 
 Oh, Lord, and such a queen! 
 
 I bought for her a mission bed, 
 
 And stained it green. 
 
 I bought her many dresses 
 
 And shoes. 
 
 Her skirts all made most charming 
 
 Frou-frous. 
 
 There was, by heav'n, no neater. 
 
 Young person near or far; 
 
 She could have danced with any King 
 
 Of Kandahar. 
 
 And then love turned me crazy, 
 
 For soon 
 
 I took her to the parson's, 
 
 I loon ! 
 
 She never did forgive me 
 
 That I misjudged her so: 
 
 She left me for the first best man 
 
 That asked her to. 
 
 That was the very devil, 
 
 I swear! 
 
 I tore in rage my whiskers 
 
 And hair. 
 
 That scoundrel now has those frou-frous 
 
 I bought that faithless queen; 
 
 He even has the mission bed 
 
 That I stained green.
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 147 
 
 You think I ought to curse her? 
 Oh, no! 
 
 Why curse a rose for be- 
 ing so? 
 
 She simply was for marriage 
 Not talented at all; 
 Love's variet^ just chanced to be 
 Her little all. 
 
 So may she to the devil 
 
 Go spin, 
 
 I do not give a farthing 
 
 Of tin; 
 
 I'm watching from the stalls here 
 
 Who all the others are: 
 
 No less than five she's had so far 
 
 Hallelujah! 
 
 The note of regret enters often enough, of 
 course, as in the " Musterknaben Klaglich 
 Lied," with which the first edition of the " Irr- 
 garten " opened : 
 
 " Manchen Wein hab ich getrunken, 
 Manchem schonem Kinde bin 
 Ich verliebt ans Herz gesunken; 
 Jetzt geht alles niichtern hin, 
 Abgezirkelt, abgemessen, 
 Und das ist des Liedes Sinn: 
 Ach, vergossen, ach vergessen ! " 
 
 The sense of which we may attempt thus, as 
 " The Good Young Man's Lament " : 
 
 Of wine I've had my fill and more, 
 
 And many a lovely maid has lain 
 
 With my heart knocking at her own heart's 
 
 door 
 
 But now all's sober, safe, and sane, 
 Measured by rule like so much cotton, 
 And here's the wherefore of this song's 
 
 refrain : 
 Wasted! Gone, forgotten!
 
 148 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Goblets brimmed with purple wine, 
 Bosoms bared to shame the snow, 
 Lovelorn, liquor-laden, mine 
 All of pleasure's fiercest glow; 
 Mine the right to ride upon 
 Rapture's highway here below. . . . 
 All forgotten, wasted, gone! 
 
 Solitude's now mine o' nights; 
 Emptily my cellars gape; 
 Never to the old delights 
 Can my spirit find escape; 
 Virtue's signboard has been pasted 
 On my door. Behold the crepe: 
 Gone, forgotten, wasted! 
 
 Shall I never more know rapture? 
 
 Never more find dreams in drink? 
 
 Out upon you, Virtue! You have wrapt 
 
 your 
 
 Thongs so tightly that I shrink 
 From the halo that's my lot. 
 Saints are sour old chaps, I think! 
 Wasted! Gone! Forgot! 
 
 You can, I think, out of even this feeble echo- 
 ing, catch something of that in Bierbaum's 
 singing which made his period come to realiza- 
 tion that in him the spirit of the old German 
 Minnesingers had come again. If in the main 
 it was the voice of his nation that sang in him, 
 now and then we come upon airs that belong to 
 this or that peculiar province of it; as, for 
 instance, in the " Jeannette " songs from the 
 charming " Washermaiden's History," where 
 the robust romance of student days in Munich 
 is more charmingly set forth than anywhere 
 else in German writing. Indeed, those scenes
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 149 
 
 may well be set beside the similar beauty-pages 
 in Hewlett's " Little Novels " where the Italian 
 girls make so much color and music as they 
 wash the clothes in the river. For your serious 
 moods there was stuff in plenty in this little 
 volume ; whether you were, with the author, an 
 admirer of " Rosen, Goethe, Mozart," or cared 
 to express this or that philosophy, this or that 
 sophistication, this or that naivete. For me, 
 always, the utterest delight will lie in the un- 
 rhymed " Hoher Besuch," though I realize 
 clearly that it appears to go against my belief 
 that melodious lyric singing is the only excuse 
 for poetry. But those lines, addressed " To the 
 fair Unknown " are as graceful as anything of 
 Dobson's, and the picture of the Unknown that 
 Von Recnicek drew when the poem first ap- 
 peared in Simplicissimus completes for me 
 many memories and emotions that do not 
 fade. 
 
 Before we turn away from this man's sing- 
 ing, which most adequately expressed the Ger- 
 many of to-day, we must mention with some- 
 thing of a smile, in which Bierbaum would be 
 the first to join, the lines called " Der Lustige 
 Ehemann." 
 
 " Ringelringel rosenkranz, 
 Ich tanz mit tneiner Frau, 
 Wir tanzen um den Rosenbusch, 
 Klingklanggloribusch, 
 Ich dreh mich wie ein Pfau."
 
 150 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Which, mere happy nonsense as it is, can be 
 given in equally absurd terms: 
 
 Ring around a rosebush, 
 
 I dance me with my wife; 
 
 We dance around the rosebush; 
 
 Klingklangglorybush ; 
 
 We spin like tops through life. 
 
 The world that's somewhere round about 
 
 May stand upon its head; 
 
 We do not give a tinker's curse! 
 
 No, if the world would disappear, 
 
 We would not care a red ! 
 
 It was this song which came, later, to haunt 
 Bierbaum like a bad dream. It had been set to 
 music, and a special dance arranged for it ; and 
 Germany took it to its lowliest heart. There 
 is an amusing passage in the " Yankeedoodle- 
 trip," published just before Bierbaum died, 
 telling of how in the train a man fixed Bier- 
 baum with his gaze and then began to whistle 
 the " Lustige Ehemann " incessantly. He had 
 seen the author's portrait somewhere, and he 
 was determined to let him know that he knew 
 him. And the conversation that resulted, in 
 which the stranger complimented Bierbaum by 
 comparing him to a certain music-hall favorite 
 of the day, was nothing less than delicious for 
 the reader, though it drove Bierbaum to change 
 his compartment. " You have just such a 
 funny face as Otto Reutter," allowed the stran- 
 ger, and Bierbaum said he ought to wait until
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 151 
 
 he, Bierbaum, was really doing his best. And 
 he got out, wishing he had never written those 
 lines. 
 
 Even out of that little incident, we may 
 draw a comparison; where is the balladist in 
 English whom a casual stranger in a train 
 would recognize? 
 
 MENTION has already been named of the 
 happy faculty Bierbaum had for artistic as well 
 as human enthusiasms. No man of letters of 
 his time did more to further all other artists in 
 Germany who, like himself, were engaged upon 
 severing old and hateful bonds. For sculpture, 
 painting and music he came, time after time, 
 into an arena filled with ancient enemies. Even 
 without considering, specifically, his many valu- 
 able Monographs on Artists, we find the variety 
 of his appreciations written into his lightest 
 ware, his verse. Dedications are to such as 
 Franz von Lenbach, Meier-Graefe, Arno Holz, 
 Von Wolzogen, Franz Blei, Peter Behrens, Max 
 Dauthendey, Hugo Salus, Hugo von Hoff- 
 mansthal, T. T. Heine, Gustave Kahn, Her- 
 mann Bahr, Paul Scheerbart, Franz Stuck, 
 Liliencron, Hartleben, Felix Mottl, Fritz von 
 Uhde, Hans Thoma, Richard Strauss and many 
 others. Producing so many songs as he did, it 
 was inevitable that some of them should be on
 
 152 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 rococo or baroque formulas; some of them 
 were merely clever versification of cosmopolitan 
 philosophy ; but in the residue there was, as we 
 have seen, so much gold that the bits of tinsel 
 may easily be forgiven. 
 
 As novelist Bierbaum latterly veered towards 
 a style, as in his stories, some of them adapted 
 from the French of Gustave Kahn, which 
 sacrificed spontaneity and most of the essential 
 charm of his personality. Out of his collected 
 tales published under the title " Sonderbare 
 Geschichten," the memorable ones are still those 
 witty fragments that he had sent forth many 
 years before, as the " Annamargreth " and, 
 particularly, the " Muthige Revierforster." 
 
 Hartleben himself never wrote a more deli- 
 cious anecdote than this. The delicacy of its 
 satire had not the faintest trace of malice in it, 
 so that even if the still living Prince Regent of 
 Bavaria had read the yarn he could not have 
 done other than laugh at it. Bierbaum's skill 
 in sheer craft is singularly discovered in this 
 story; to set down in the most graceful and 
 unobjectionable manner an incident which in 
 bald recital could never have left the smoking- 
 room was nothing less than a triumph. The 
 manner in which the courageous gamekeeper 
 solves the situation that has been embarrassing 
 the entire court and nonplussed all the courtiers, 
 is nothing less than masterly, and as long as
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 153 
 
 memory serves me, the gamekeeper's speech, 
 beginning : " Wie war's denn, meine Herr- 
 schaften . . ." and His Majesty's recognition 
 of the good man's quick and homely wit, be- 
 nignly expressed in his : " Ja, meine Herren, das 
 Volk, das Volk! . . . Es ist eine schone Sache 
 um das Volk ! . . ." will remain to keep laugh- 
 ter alive. 
 
 APART from his triumphs as a troubadour, 
 it is in his capacity as an ironist of life, an 
 observant traveler through nature and through 
 art, that Bierbaum is highest. It was under 
 him that all the green and yellow youthfulness 
 of other tongues was brought into Germany; 
 his Insel first told about Walter Pater, and 
 Ernest Dowson, and Beardsley, and Wilde, and 
 Arthur Symons, to mention only a few English 
 artists out of a larger international crew. 
 Wherever he went (and he came to renew in 
 middle-age the habitual wander-years of all 
 German students) he found the fine and indi- 
 vidual points of landscape, manners, and the 
 arts. Wherever there was fighting to be done 
 for the cause of youth and youthful art, there 
 Bierbaum led. You have only to turn the pages 
 of The Island again to see that. It was in 1899, 
 with Alfred Walter Heymel and R. A. Schroe- 
 der, that Bierbaum started that magazine, and 
 to hint the international scope of it you will
 
 154 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 find in it work by Vallotton, by Nicholson, in 
 pencil, and by Gustave Kahn, Ernest Dowson, 
 Arthur Symons, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and 
 many others in pen. A little collection from 
 The Island came eventually to be issued in 
 pocket-form as " The Island Book " (Insel- 
 Buch), and it is interesting to-day to note 
 therein work by Detlev von Liliencron and 
 practically all those other minstrels already 
 named in my pages; the prologue to Wede- 
 kind's "Earth Spirit" (Erdgeist) ; and a 
 characteristic poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. 
 That was in 1902, and to-day as you are 
 presently to find it is to Rilke that the 
 formal art of German versification is admitted 
 to have reached its deftest point to-day. Noth- 
 ing that had art in it was foreign to Bier- 
 baum. 
 
 ABOVE all, as traveler, and teller of tales of 
 travel, he told you what was best of all: him- 
 self. You went, as you read those charming 
 pages of his in the " Sentimental Journey in a 
 Motor Car " and the " Yankeedoodletrip," 
 a- journeying into his own personality, and that, 
 at last scale of all, is the greatest test, and the 
 completest failure or fullest triumph of all. 
 The great men of letters have all done that: 
 Stevenson, Lamb and Montaigne might pretend 
 to lead us into this or that region of fact or
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 155 
 
 speculation; what they really gave us was an 
 intimate excursion with Stevenson, Lamb and 
 Montaigne. Bierbaum is of that fine company. 
 In all his work there was a real personality ; it 
 showed nowhere so much as in his monographs 
 on this or that artist, and in his many pages of 
 travel. 
 
 A troubadour, singing his own country and 
 his own soul; a traveler initiating us into his 
 own vigorous personality ; that was Otto Julius 
 Bierbaum, and it is just such men, and condi- 
 tions to permit their success, that English let- 
 ters need. The country that arrogates to itself 
 a democratic title is the last to allow liberty 
 to the individual in art. Such a career as Bier- 
 baum's had been impossible in America. 
 
 While in the two paramount volumes of 
 travel by Bierbaum we are ostensibly motored 
 and guided from Germany over the Brenner 
 Pass into Italy, down it and across it, and over 
 the St. Gotthard home again; then several 
 times led from Florence to Munich and back 
 again, a-foot, a-car, and a-train ; and even- 
 tually made partakers of one of those collect- 
 ively conducted Mediterranean cruises so fa- 
 miliar to American globe-trotters ; the real ex- 
 cursion, the real joy is always the intimacy with 
 Otto Julius that the journey gives. 
 
 If travelers the world over would only read 
 those pages ! Not that they contain new
 
 156 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 truths, but that they so thoroughly emphasize 
 the old one that journeys' ends are the journeys 
 themselves; that not to arrive, but to enjoy, 
 is the object of travel. Bierbaum in his " Sen- 
 timental Journey in a Motor Car," which was 
 his first volume in that sort, never tired of hit- 
 ting that pedal. Since his mode of travel, by 
 motor car, was then (1902) still uncommon, he 
 had what might have seemed a hard task to any 
 other than a poet and a fine humorous spirit, 
 namely, to instil sentiment into the record. The 
 result remains a triumph of art to this day; 
 with Octave Mirbeau's description, " La 628," 
 of a tour into Belgium and Germany, this is 
 the only book about a journey of this sort that 
 ranks as serious art; there is nothing in Eng- 
 lish to compare with these. 
 
 If we may not go through Italy with Goethe, 
 let us do it with Bierbaum. Often enough, too, 
 the latter points reverently to the greater poet 
 and philosopher's footsteps and the illumination 
 that he gave. I cannot stop to hint the thou- 
 sand charms of this book, its delightful ironic 
 reflections upon the ways of English and Amer- 
 ican travelers, in Rome and Venice and Flor- 
 ence ; its sarcasm at the expense of the inartis- 
 tic efforts to modernize such towns as Florence 
 pages that would delight my friend, and 
 Florence's best friend, Riccardo Nobili, who so 
 vigorously has fought these abominations in his
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 157 
 
 town ! and its most romantic extraction of 
 sentiment from even the most unlikely places; 
 to do that would be to come near to trans- 
 lating the whole book. His page upon the im- 
 mortality of Rome, despite its ruins, as the 
 heart of all our modern culture, should be read 
 by all. There is a page upon the insufficiently 
 distributed talent for leisure that might serve 
 as warning to many of us now upon the verge 
 of nervous prostration. 
 
 There are illuminating allusions to the Ital- 
 ian Carducci's popularity, to Richard Dehmel, 
 to German sculpture Bierbaum declared 
 Hellmer*s Goethe in Vienna, and the Hillebrand 
 fountain in Munich to be the finest specimens 
 in the German countries and to Munich, 
 which, after many years and places, always 
 took first place in the author's heart. " With 
 all its defects, the most artistic German town," 
 he wrote, " the town of artistic youth, the free- 
 est town, the town of the freshest air, in ozone 
 and art." 
 
 Of all the many glimpses of himself and his 
 sincerities as a craftsman, I must at least take 
 this fragment (from page 79 of the 1906 Mar- 
 quardt edition ) : 
 
 " I see more than ever, all these shibboleths 
 and * tendencies ' are of no account : each of 
 us can win to his artistic heaven in his own way, 
 so only he has sincerity and force. Ancient or
 
 158 MASKS A:ND MINSTRELS 
 
 modern all that matters nothing as long 
 as the thing itself is genuine. . . ." 
 
 (Pursuit of this volume in a paper edition is 
 in itself one of my pleasantest memories. A 
 penitential period spent in lifting the heavy 
 " boards " of English and American books long 
 ago drove me to the point where I avoided that 
 type elsewhere whenever I could. But this par- 
 ticular Bierbaum book eluded me for years ; in- 
 deed, it was so popular that edition after edi- 
 tion was exhausted, after it first appeared in 
 1903. Not until last summer in Wiesbaden did 
 I find a copy of the 1906 paper edition, to which 
 much kindred matter had been added, and a new 
 title : " Mit Der Kraft, Automobilia " applied. 
 My return to the dear old Vierjahreszeiten Inn 
 with that soiled but uncut volume under my arm 
 was a triumphal procession that every true col- 
 lector of sensations will appreciate.) 
 
 EVEN more than in that first travel volume 
 do we glean from the last book published before 
 his death vivid glimpses of himself. Whether 
 he is expressing his reasons for loving Venice 
 more than any other town in the world, or tell- 
 ing a few home truths about the traveling ways 
 of his own countrymen or the voices and man- 
 ners of Americans, or exclaiming again against 
 the vandalisms committed in Florence under the 
 banner of modernity, it is always Bierbaum who
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 159 
 
 most interests us in it all. Italian towns, he 
 reminds us, are feminine: Rome is a stern ma- 
 tron ; Naples a cosmopolitan cocotte ; Venice 
 a Lorelei set over the Adriatic; and Florence 
 just a lovely, lovely lady. One or two frag- 
 ments from the vast store of riches in this vol- 
 ume, " Die Yankeedoodlef ahrt, und Andere 
 Reisegeschichten," I would extract for you. 
 
 This, on D'Annunzio : " Every sort of mega- 
 lomania is his. Without it he would be noth- 
 ing but a brilliant decorator. One may say 
 that in him megalomania takes the place of 
 genius." 
 
 This, on a new undertaking of the painter, 
 Franz Stuck, " No theme for tricksters, but for 
 a proper heavyweight of art. And as his artis- 
 tic biceps are on a par with his physical, I do 
 not doubt that it will be a work full of power, 
 and also of beauty," must inevitably recall what 
 George Moore wrote of Whistler, how his art 
 might have been otherwise had his physique been 
 more robust. 
 
 On one feature of the abominable moderniza- 
 tions in Florence, this : " Thos. Theodore Heine 
 (the caricaturist) touched the ' modern ' pal- 
 aces of Florence in his peculiar telling way 
 when he put this question to Otto Erich Hart- 
 leben, as they were passing some of those mon- 
 strosities, * Tell me, Herr Hartleben, these are 
 artificial palaces, aren't they ? ' "
 
 160 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 The ruins of Baalbek called forth this: 
 " Again and again I had to think of Nietzsche. 
 This world of ruins would be the proper temple 
 for his Zarathustra, and this air the proper at- 
 mosphere for his spirit. To read him here 
 what an experience ! " 
 
 Of Dostojewski: "As in Baalbek Nietzsche 
 appeared to me, so in Jerusalem Dostojewski. 
 And if I tried to figure to myself the Nazarene 
 himself . . . always he appeared to me in the 
 furrowed features of the great Russian; but 
 more youthful, more erect, more passion- 
 ate . . ." 
 
 Finally there are the passages that reveal the 
 author himself. He is revealed in his love for 
 Italy, his regret for the Italianization of Tyrol 
 south of Bozen, his affection for the beauties 
 that line the Brenner Pass, and his enduring 
 passion for Tuscany. There, in Fiesole, in the 
 Villa Bardi, surrounded by memories of Arnold 
 Boecklin, he spent many of the happiest of his 
 later days. Between Fiesole, over Florence, 
 and Pasing, outside Munich, he found not only 
 the artist but the humanity in him best com- 
 forted. His wife was of Tuscany, and charm- 
 ing are all the countless allusions to her scat- 
 tered through this last travel-book of his. 
 
 For years before the end, Bierbaum's health 
 had been none of the best. Full-bodied though 
 he was in build, he would seem to have suffered
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 161 
 
 from nerves as much as any American. We 
 should, to be sure, remember that there are no 
 longer any national or provincial boundaries to 
 either diseases or art. Exactly what these 
 young men of Germany have accomplished, in 
 song, and play, and pictures, is to remove old 
 parochial limitations, to make their work inter- 
 national. When I say, then, " as nervous as 
 any American," I do but repeat an old formula 
 for the comprehension of those not yet fully 
 alive to the internationalism of the physical and 
 spiritual modern world. About nerves and ar- 
 tists Bierbaum had made this admission, as 
 lately as 1907, in " Leaves from Fiesole " 
 (Blaetter aus Fiesole) : 
 
 " Of artists I have known only three who 
 are not nervous: Stuck, Gulbransson, Lilien- 
 cron." 
 
 No need to explain Stuck or Liliencron here. 
 Gulbransson is one of the most remarkable of 
 the latter-day artists who have made German 
 caricature take international rank. His por- 
 traits of his contemporaries rank with the work 
 of such men as Leandre, or La Jeunesse, or 
 Max Beerbohm. 
 
 If a chapter on neurasthenia is possible as 
 a delight, Bierbaum's is that chapter. It was 
 in that chapter he recommended several curative 
 employments, the most charming of which was: 
 " Listen to old music. Mozart will always
 
 162 MASKS AND MINSTEELS 
 
 bring reason into you. To be unhappy while 
 listening to Mozart, that would be too 
 shameful ! " 
 
 In the pages on Tyrol we get much of the 
 real O. J. B. It was in Castle Englar none 
 saw the fun of calling that old ruin a castle 
 more than our author himself ! that he spent 
 much of his later life of actual creation. He 
 wrote in " From Fiesole to Pasing " : 
 
 " Englar, the pinnacle of my poetic sins. 
 There I wrote no less than two novels, three 
 volumes of stories, a large monograph on art, 
 and two stout Annuals full of verse and prose 
 to say nothing of lesser stuff." 
 
 One presumes that " Prince Kuckuk " was 
 one of the novels, and the " Strange Tales " 
 among the stories. It was in those latter vol- 
 umes that the satire called " Schmulius Caesar " 
 occurs, of which he was to write later, in 1908, 
 a passage of which followers of arts and crafts 
 should take note: 
 
 " Venice was not itself for me that time ; the 
 Naager family was lacking. . . . Having 
 painted that good-humoredly caricatured por- 
 trait which you will find in my fantastic satire, 
 * Schmulius Csesar,' it will be only fair if pres- 
 ently I publish a serious chronicle of the Naager 
 family. That would be in form of a mono- 
 graph on Franz Naager, the strongest and 
 richest decorative talent of our time. ."
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 163 
 
 That monograph Bierbaum did not, as far 
 as we know, live to write. 
 
 Delightful are all those passages in which 
 Bierbaum makes fun of the impression of dig- 
 nity that his externals managed to create. The 
 passages on the humor of being called " Pro- 
 fessor " cannot but appeal to all Americans 
 who have heard the titles Major, Colonel, 
 Judge, etc., bestowed in return for a piece of 
 silver. His page upon the good Dame Staffler, 
 of Bozen, who insisted on calling him Professor, 
 is full of the most charming comedy. In the 
 same town of Tyrol lived a good woman who 
 gave, each year that Bierbaum stepped into her 
 shop, a new addition to the population ; it was 
 she who inquired of him: 
 
 " And has the professor any children ? " He 
 had to admit : No. " But of course," she an- 
 swered, " the professor would have no time for 
 that." And he left the shop with a realization 
 that it was possible to look too wise, even for a 
 professor. 
 
 The thousands of Americans who are by this 
 time on terms of almost impudent familiarity 
 with the Atlantic would find Bierbaum's story 
 of the journey to Egypt and the Holy Land 
 full of direct interest. It was a German-Amer- 
 ican steamer, and the opportunities for observ- 
 ing American manners were infinite. His fel- 
 low countrymen, too, engaged our author's
 
 164 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 sarcasm no little; and if I had not loved him 
 before I could do so for nothing else than his 
 condemnation of the insufferable plague of 
 brass-bands on shipboard. Wherever he went, 
 whatever he saw, he voiced the poet and the 
 masculinity in himself, and it is the amalgam 
 of all these fine things that his readers gain. 
 Whether he was with his wife in Monte Carlo, 
 gambling absurdly that page is one of the 
 happiest he wrote in his last years ! or ga- 
 zing on the tourist-ridden temples of Egypt, or 
 enjoying the Florentine sunshine, the Italian 
 peasant, or the Bavarian citizen he was al- 
 ways genial, full of humor, and full of human- 
 ity: the essential voice of what was best in his 
 German land. 
 
 Physically, also, Bierbaum notably expressed 
 the new Germany that it has taken so long for 
 other nations to realize. Words can sketch 
 external things but faintly; yet may they hint 
 the relation between idea and outline. 
 
 Detlev von Liliencron, for instance, phys- 
 ically as well as artistically, typified the para- 
 mount military character of his period. He 
 sang of battles, of love and of death and of his 
 country ; in his gayest music there was always 
 something of Northern melancholy. Bodily he 
 fulfilled that idea. Had he not been so much a 
 poet, and therefore keen of humor, he had been 
 the typical martinet in uniform. The strong
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 165 
 
 Northern countenance, the waving mustache 
 made even the short stature of him seem com- 
 manding. He was the officer in glittering uni- 
 form long after he had become a country mag- 
 istrate, and he retained many of the personal 
 mannerisms of the officer. He used those man- 
 nerisms, indeed, often enough as a mask in 
 places where the air of " literature " became 
 too wanton for his taste. He looked the sol- 
 dier. Short but erect ; fierce of visage they 
 used to paint his mustache dipping into wine- 
 cups, but that was largely a libel ! he was the 
 Prussian officer at a time when all Germany 
 worshiped at that shrine. In Hartleben, on 
 the other hand, we have the mixture of the 
 good-natured, ease-loving German citizen and 
 the bohemian. Hartleben was tall, and until 
 he was puffed up with too much food and drink, 
 good-looking in a graceless sort of way. Here 
 was the slippered ease of the average burgher; 
 but it was a burgher who had gathered from all 
 the far coasts of Bohemia the liberties, licenses, 
 and recklessnesses there in vogue. 
 
 In Bierbaum, finally, as he looked and lived, 
 you might find much of the German type of 
 to-day. From England and from France in- 
 fluences had worked subtly into the national 
 character, as well as into its art; the Prussian 
 bourgeois persisted only in the notions of in- 
 observant aliens. Something of Gallic grace,
 
 166 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 something of international tolerance had swept 
 away old parochial limitations of spirit. Bier- 
 baum's stocky, stout stature; his round good- 
 humored face; his short-sighted eyes always 
 behind pince-nez or spectacles; his carelessness 
 of externals, and triumphant charm of person- 
 ality, held many of the essentials of what to-day 
 is best in his countrymen. German to the core, 
 he had the genius, in his person as in his work, 
 of stripping the old German characteristics of 
 sentimentality and shabbiness of their absurd- 
 ity ; he was a German who was also a man of 
 the world; he had the ironic view of life that 
 the elder parochial Prussians had not; he saw 
 the faults of his own place and his own people 
 as well as those elsewhere; neither church nor 
 state awed the individual paganism of modern- 
 ity in him; he could laugh at emperors and 
 shatter idols in all the robust vigor of the bar- 
 barian ancestors of his race, but he did it with 
 the new grace and wit that was never before, 
 but is to-day, typical of Germany. Until the 
 last years Bierbaum wore a tiny stubby mus- 
 tache ; whether so, or clean-shaven, he looked 
 to the general eye the more professorial, we do 
 not know ; to the properly seeing eye he looked, 
 always, an open, frank, and humorous soul. 
 
 IN a fragment of autobiography that Bier- 
 baum wrote late in life may be found much to
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 167 
 
 supplement what we already know of him. His 
 publisher, Geo. Miiller of Munich, announced 
 this fragment, " Midway " (Mittwegs), as the 
 beginning of an exhaustive curriculum artis that 
 Bierbaum had under way and meant to publish 
 in the course of the year 1909. It remains a 
 fragment, yet from it we may complete our pic- 
 ture of the author. 
 
 HE told, therein, of the realistic poetry that 
 followed an impassioned love-affair in his thir- 
 teenth year; how he wrote verses to the sun- 
 burn on his lady's nose. If that was not real- 
 ism, what was? At any rate, the itch to express 
 himself in song seems to have been in him from 
 the earliest years. He thought lyrically. Some 
 of his friends, he vows, thought like district at- 
 torneys. That led him to reflect : " The born 
 artist has something of the adventurer: the 
 drift toward liberty, away from the fetters of 
 society, is as strong in him as the drift toward 
 a world of fancy. He who has it not in him to 
 stake his all on Zero, will hardly become artist. 
 In spite of which artists can easily enough be- 
 come philistines. . . ." The first definite influ- 
 ences on him came from the two Russians, 
 Gogol and Turgenieff, to whom he remained 
 true to the end. The diary that he kept in 
 those passionate, sensitive teens of his, was by 
 his side when he wrote " Stilpe." There, surely,
 
 168 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 is a detail as illuminating as the light later shed 
 by the whole history of the Uberbrettl', and of 
 Frank Wedekind. The nearest approach to an 
 original for Stilpe was, however, a certain fel- 
 low student of Bierbaum's in the town of Wur- 
 zen, where he went after the Leipzig period. 
 Though for fifteen years Bierbaum was to be 
 a lyric singer, it was the anti-romantic realiza- 
 tions he drew from that Stilpe model which kept 
 him from entirely drowning in the lyric wave. 
 At the age of twenty he was a republican in 
 politics ; that, he reminds us, was for the youth 
 of that period as much a matter of course as 
 for the twenty-year-old of to-day to be a disci- 
 ple of Nietzsche. The Alps and the chance to 
 study Russian called him to Zurich, for he was 
 determined to learn Russian, having just read 
 Dostojewski's " Raskolnikow." It was that 
 book which left him immune to the influence of 
 Flaubert and Zola ; and at the very last he was 
 able to say: 
 
 " To this day Dostojewski counts for me as 
 the greatest creative genius of our time next to 
 Nietzsche." 
 
 Unfortunately, he continues, among the 
 things he had learned at college was not how 
 to be studious. His effort to learn Russian was 
 at first a failure because he was more interested 
 in the personalities of his teachers, male and 
 female, than in what they taught. He was an
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIEEBAUM 169 
 
 observer and dreamer; he had no intention of 
 becoming a writer, yet he was dreaming and 
 living both imagined poetry and actual experi- 
 ence, and all this came, in later years, into his 
 work. That half-year in Zurich held the rich- 
 est of his dreaming days, and it was a reservoir 
 which he had not nearly exhausted when he 
 wrote this fragment that lies before me. In 
 that dream were mingled all manner of ghosts: 
 Madame Adele, and la belle Chinoise; Gott- 
 fried Keller and Arnold Boecklin ; nymphs seen 
 from the old hotel Bauer au Lac, and the great 
 god Pan rustling in the shadows. . . . Life 
 never again held such vivid dreams for him, 
 and never again were mere dreams and idleness 
 to come again to such rich fruition. . . . 
 
 THAT Bierbaum's career, short as it was, was 
 rich indeed, these pages have, I trust, shown. 
 As poet, story-teller, playwright, critic, and, in 
 short, as an artist interested in every phase of 
 life, he had made himself felt more than any of 
 the younger men of his generation, and he had 
 more than any other expressed Germany. 
 
 Although the very year he died there was 
 issued a brief history of German literature 
 (Heinemann's, Leipzig) in which his name does 
 not even occur, the summer after his death, 
 on the other hand, a little volume of selections 
 from his work appeared in the Reclam edition,
 
 170 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 sure haven of what the plain people of Ger- 
 many have made classic ; for ten cents, for six- 
 pence, this slight essence of O. J. B. was thus 
 put before the populace. The scholiasts of his 
 own time might be the last to admit him to high 
 place; the German people had put him there 
 long ago, when he sang for them, sang their 
 lives and their loves, sang for them their Ger- 
 many. 
 
 In him, more than any other of our time, the 
 new Germany, the Germany that the rest of the 
 world is but slowly discovering, found full ex- 
 pression. In that Germany parochialism is dis- 
 appearing before internationalism, flavors of the 
 Gallic mingle with robust and homely satire, 
 grace of manner join with forthrightness of 
 matter. His irony was of his time and his race ; 
 he was the first to show his countrymen how to 
 be ironic gracefully. 
 
 IN the last volume published before his death 
 were announcements of two forthcoming books 
 of Bierbaum's : a novel to be called " Die 
 Paepstin " (The Female Pope), and a sump- 
 tuously illustrated edition of his " Lovely 
 Maiden of Pao " (Das Schoene Maedchen von 
 Pao) for which that wonderfully interesting 
 artist, Franz von Bayros, was to do the pic- 
 tures and decorations. Whether " Die Paep- 
 stin " will ever appear it is still too soon (I
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 171 
 
 write this ten months after his death) to say. 
 To mention here the representative books has 
 been my effort, but for complete bibliography 
 I have not tried. 
 
 IT has been hard, throughout, to attempt 
 anything like judicial calm, or a sober array- 
 ing of mere facts. It was not in such way that 
 he had sung his way over all Germany, until 
 Germany had found its singing self again, and 
 it was never in such way that he had affected 
 me. He had been of those before whose spell 
 one is content to waive all the damnable herit- 
 age of sophistication and cavil that the cen- 
 turies have brought. He had given me sensa- 
 tions, stirred emotions, and voiced them for 
 me. How is one to transmit those emotions 
 to others? One had need be as lyric a magician 
 as Otto Julius himself was. How is one to ex- 
 plain to others what it was in this man's sing- 
 ing which brought one to the point where (as 
 Bliss Carman put it, before he ceased trying to 
 be for us what Bierbaum actually was) one was 
 content to 
 
 "... let my heart grow sweet again, 
 And let the Age be damned . . . "? 
 
 Whys and wherefores, fortunately, elude the 
 most prosy analyst of emotion. All that can be 
 done is to say : This man moved me.
 
 172 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 There are, in life and literature, gloriously 
 enough, moments when only passion, only whim, 
 only instinct, or perhaps even only prejudice 
 survives triumphant. So only it be uncon- 
 sciously engendered, inborn from generations 
 of fine taste, or builded on long since assimilated 
 arts and truths, the individual instinct for the 
 noble impressions of life and of literature can 
 be the only true guide. Whether it was per- 
 sonal whim, personal instinct, or sheer luck that 
 first led to the delight in Bierbaum is inessen- 
 tial; in the aftercount all was justified, and 
 from the feeling of having known a charming 
 singer came realization that the charming 
 singer was the most typical of his country's 
 living men of letters. 
 
 That we are no more able to say " living " 
 brings me to my final confession of inability 
 to transmit emotion. The feeling of loss 
 that came with news of his death is not easily 
 passed on. It was, as I have said, in this year's 
 Carnival. In Munich, most artistic of all towns, 
 that period is still full of casual and whimsical 
 fantasy, rather than of municipally " ar- 
 ranged " artificialities to lure tourists. In 
 Munich I was holding carnival; snow, song, 
 dance, merriment and masquerade whirled the 
 days away. The carnival liaison between the 
 burgher element and the art element in Munich 
 was fascinating to observe. And just then I
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 173 
 
 saw a tiny volume in a window near the Karls- 
 platz, a little pocket-edition (1904) of the two 
 carnival-plays that Bierbaum had written for 
 performance by the students and the artists of 
 the town ; the title, untranslatable : " Zwei 
 Miinchener Faschingsspiele." You may imag- 
 ine with what j oy I made the li ttle book my own, 
 and found once again (I did not know that it 
 was to be for the last time in his life) the note 
 of the renewed spirit of the Proven9al trouba- 
 dours, and of wandering students carrying 
 medieval Latin songs abroad into the world. 
 For the very first of these little plays was 
 called " German Folksongs," and its perform- 
 ance that year of 1904 may be counted as 
 something more than merely a record of how 
 Munich celebrated carnival when the twentieth 
 century was young; it remains also as proof 
 that in Bierbaum not only carnival, not only 
 Munich, but the spirit of the old Minnesingers, 
 the spirit of modern Germany, found embodi- 
 ment and voice. 
 
 Within the week that saw me pocketing the 
 little book and adding it to my fund of carnival 
 joy, I had talked of Bierbaum to his publisher, 
 Herr George Miiller, who somewhat non-com- 
 mittally had told me that Otto Julius lay ill in 
 Dresden. And again within the week, carnival 
 still gay in Munich the Munich and its car- 
 nival he had loved so well ! Otto Julius
 
 174 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Bierbaum died, February 2d, this year of 
 1910. 
 
 But we can say, as he himself had but shortly 
 before said of his friend Liliencron, that though 
 the mortal part of him is gone he lives as surely 
 as before. Mortally he may sing for us never 
 again, but the singing that he gave us lives. 
 If when the news came to me I felt that I had 
 lost a friend whose hand I had never touched, 
 though I had seen it ; that we had all lost what 
 was mortal in one of the most charming min- 
 strels of the age; I also felt that the essential 
 in him was still with us, and that I could truly 
 call : " Auf Wiedersehen ! " to his spirit. 
 
 THAT he lives, and will live even more sturdily 
 as the years pass, there will not much longer be 
 need to contend; even those who tried to put 
 him among the mere lightweights of letters 
 because, of course, he entertained you, above 
 everything; and the narrow souls who attempt 
 authority, since they can do nothing else, al- 
 ways froth fiercely against writing that is read- 
 able ! are beginning to admit that he was the 
 first of the moderns to be a real German. Even 
 this year's winner of the Nobel prize, Paul 
 Heyse, at one time in the opposition against all 
 the modernists, came to admit the talent of this 
 man. 
 
 Whether such a career as Bierbaum's will
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 175 
 
 ever be possible in our tongue is doubtful as 
 long as those who dominate the situation make 
 it almost impossible for individualism and irony 
 to exist. Bierbaum himself had to fight against 
 the stagnation and stupidity that the scholiasts 
 imposed as the literary dogmas of his day, but 
 he had, eventually, the support of a public that 
 applauded his balladmongering and came to 
 respect all his activities. Even in England such 
 men as Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, and Gil- 
 bert Chesterton have had to live down the na- 
 tional prejudice against a man of letters daring 
 to be entertaining, to be ironic, to be himself. 
 In America you may be entertaining, but you 
 must be innocuous withal; if you tell ironic 
 truths, declare your personality pagan, phi- 
 losophic, humanistic or whatever it may be that 
 is not petticoated or puritanic in this or that 
 artistic medium, you risk being disdained by the 
 merchants in control. To do in America what 
 Bierbaum did in Germany: to write ballads for 
 singing in public, to break a lance against every 
 ancient formula to be found ; that was to court 
 disaster. Some tried it; there were reckless 
 lads who scattered pamphlets abroad in the 
 land, and sang songs also in the 'nineties ; 
 is it possible that Youth has been asleep ever 
 since? and started Independent Theatres; 
 they gained by all this nothing but the lasting 
 resentment of the offended Olympians in thea-
 
 176 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 tre-land and book-land. Those who were 
 shrewd played the game, thereafter, as the mer- 
 chants in charge wanted it played; if they 
 wrote ironically, it was about people and things 
 not American ; if they introduced anarchs of 
 art into their pages, the anarchs were European 
 ones; if they appreciated individualism, it was 
 not American individualism, but that of Stirner, 
 or Strindberg, or Henri Becque, or any other 
 great egoist, or melomaniac. So these were dis- 
 tant enough, it was safe to laud them and use 
 them as buttress to one's own reputation ; but 
 to have courage for one's own personality, that 
 was nothing less than suicidal. 
 
 To attempt suicide, then, to sing as one must, 
 to fight all the stale and hateful old intoler- 
 ances that plague our letters, to declare the 
 beautiful wherever one sees it even if it be in 
 what the overgoodly decry, to assail the ugly 
 though it appear with the seal of all the ortho- 
 dox, this is what must be done if we are 
 ever to have men of letters of the stamp of 
 Bierbaum, and not mere merchantmen, mere 
 peddlers. 
 
 I know of only one book of minstrelsy in 
 America that sold, against the nearly fifty 
 thousand of the " Irrgarten der Liebe," into 
 something like three thousand copies, yet even 
 that proves every point I have made in this 
 chapter, for it was just popular singing stuff.
 
 OTTO JULIUS BIERBAUM 177 
 
 The people, to whom literature for literates has 
 no appeal at all, bought it, careless what the 
 authorities might call these songs, so only they 
 voiced their own emotions, painted their own 
 places, and made the world a little melodious 
 for them. Against this minstrel type the An- 
 drew Langs of literature fulminate; they have 
 no patience for even the reckless rhyming of 
 a Byron. It is such lack of patience, of toler- 
 ance, that narrows the scope of literature every 
 now and again, in this land and that, until it 
 has as much appeal to the populace, to the na- 
 tion outside of scholiasts and snobs, as have 
 to-day the deliberations of Venetian doges. 
 
 It was Bierbaum's genius to be artist as well 
 as balladmonger ; what he voiced for his coun- 
 try and his period he so sang that it remains 
 unblemished for posterity.
 
 VIII 
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 
 
 BEFORE passing on to those whose work has 
 put the modern German drama into a position 
 of international influence, let us consider briefly 
 some lyric craftsmen who, coming from the same 
 sources as those most typically German singers 
 we have been considering, are now in more 
 formal ways continuing along the path first 
 blazed in the 'eighties. Having done with 
 those, there are two curiously eccentric emana- 
 tions from the Variety-style that, as we have 
 seen, formed a phase of Bierbaum's career: 
 one, the most versatile and various entertainer 
 of his time : Ernst, Freiherr von Wolzogen ; the 
 other, the most bizarre expression of drama in 
 our time: Frank Wedekind. Through the lat- 
 ter, we shall pass to other dramatists with whom 
 our day must reckon. 
 
 IT has already been pointed out that con- 
 sciously or unconsciously there is not to-day a 
 lyric poet in Germany who does not trace back 
 to the line Nietzsche-Liliencron. The line 
 178
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 179 
 
 branched in many directions. It gave us those 
 spontaneous voices of Germany for the Ger- 
 mans already sufficiently emphasized in this 
 book ; and it also gave us, to mention the most 
 essential in our present contention, Richard 
 Dehmel, Stephan George, Richard Schaukal, 
 Max Dauthendey, Rainer Maria Rilke, and 
 Gustav Falke. If I find their more conscious 
 singing, in artistry, not so truly in tune with 
 the idea of Minnesingers, of troubadours, or 
 even border balladists, they none the less deserve 
 record in even the most prejudiced account of 
 modern German lyric song. 
 
 FOR the sake of the obviousness of the con- 
 trast against the spontaneity of the singer last 
 considered, Bierbaum, let us begin with Stephan 
 George. If Bierbaum was ecstatic, George is 
 static; if Bierbaum's style was the style of 
 humanity, George's is that of the cloister. 
 Since we must, in approaching this poet, deal 
 in some of those labels which never find a stick- 
 ing-place on a proper minstrel's lyre, let us say 
 that he is formalist, an artist in decorations. 
 With him it is manner more than matter, and he 
 has the effect of manner, which Bierbaum in his 
 most rococo moments seldom had. Here is the 
 antithesis of all natural and social thinking 
 and feeling ; here is the setting into the symbols 
 of poetry the aristocratic eclecticism learned
 
 180 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 from Nietzsche, without his vastness of com- 
 prehension. We have already referred to Arno 
 Holz and Johannes Schlaf. The reaction 
 against naturalism in lyric form found its leader 
 in George. 
 
 If others tried always to come as close as pos- 
 sible to expression of actual feeling and actual 
 experience, George was concerned only with the 
 form and the frame of his verse. 
 
 Even here you might find a line back to 
 Goethe in his later period, the period of Helena 
 and the West-Oestliche Divan. George's atti- 
 tude was that of being poised not only over 
 emotion itself, but also over himself under the 
 influence of an emotion. He was not concerned 
 with an actual world ; his poems are like mystic 
 gardens swaying above our solid earth. They 
 are above sex and above society. Where in 
 Bierbaum life and love of life seemed to have 
 reached melody as spontaneously as the lark 
 reaches it, George gives us outlines and pictures 
 akin to the antique legends of Boecklin, the 
 etchings of Max Klinger, the medieval fantasies 
 of Thoma or the vast winged creatures of 
 Sascha Schneider. 
 
 The eulogists of George have always, of 
 course, pointed out that he had nothing to say 
 to those who asked of a lyric that it seem to 
 express their own unschooled emotions. That 
 it was possible to do that, yet be as fine a stylist
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 181 
 
 as any, we have seen in the case of Bierbaum. 
 But we must admit that Stephan George has 
 striven always for beauty, for his interpretation 
 of the beauty of poetic art. He has never stood 
 still ; never been content with repetitions of old 
 phrases for rhyming emotions often too facile. 
 All his art has been an avoidance of that in 
 mere balladry which deprived it of the right to 
 survive. 
 
 If natural expression is a happy accident, 
 decorative art is well considered design. If 
 you would defend the decorative artist, you may 
 argue that his conscious embroidery of beauty 
 upon the outward form of life is very acceptable 
 in an age when appearances are often ugly 
 enough. Aubrey Beardsley, the English pre- 
 Raphaelites, and Stephan George are all ex- 
 pressions of revolt against the too, too natural. 
 George is eminently stylist. 
 
 Arno Holz had outlined the program. In his 
 own style he had thrown over all forms but new 
 ones of his own. His notion of free verse came 
 at a time, 1893, when French free verse was 
 already well under way and discussion. Holz 
 remains the prophet, the program-writer, per- 
 haps, but Stephan George, who was not himself 
 so much theorist as a deducer of theories from 
 his own technical achievements, became the first 
 great instance of sheer style in modern German 
 verse. Holz upset old forms; George renewed
 
 182 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 them to the highest possible point of artistic 
 technique. Smoothness of rhythm, of metre, 
 and, in a word, of all externals, is his paramount 
 quest. 
 
 We have, as result, the mood's intention, 
 rather than the mood itself. Of an actual emo- 
 tion there cannot be even a question. Unless 
 we are to suppose an audience so sophisticated 
 as to feel emotion from the spectacle of that 
 self-contained and self-consuming steady flame 
 which in George represents his all of passion. 
 
 One of his typical notes is in such a poem 
 as " The Mask," in a sufficiently representative 
 volume, " The Carpet of Life, and Songs of 
 Dream and Death " (Der Teppich des Lebens, 
 u. s. w.). The title alone tells you his decorative 
 view of life. There is even a story of Henry 
 James's that enforces the point. " The Mask " 
 reminds me of nothing so much as the art of 
 the late Ernest Dowson in England, and of 
 Wilbur Underwood in America. It is an effort 
 to paint the color and the tragedy of carnival, 
 the wrinkles under the mask ; but we get only 
 the effect of the intention. The words depict 
 the room swaying in the dance of the silken 
 puppets ; the fever that burned beneath one 
 mask, whose wearer saw amid the whirling of the 
 others that Ash Wednesday was close at hand. 
 . . . The words were there, but of a real car- 
 nival note there was nothing. Liliencron or
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 183 
 
 Bierbaum might not so carefully have cata- 
 logued and outlined the room and what it held ; 
 but they would have given us its essence. 
 
 The case of Stephan George, stylist, and lit- 
 tle else, leads to the belief that the development 
 of national and super-national German litera- 
 ture can in no way be influenced by him. He is 
 almost a reversion to the aestheticism of that 
 neuter period against which the men of the 
 'eighties rebelled ; though he is far beyond them 
 in artistic skill. His Hellenism is sexless, anae- 
 mic, so refined that it is sterile. Life is a carpet 
 of wonderful pattern and strange figures for 
 him ; but there is not, in all that conception, 
 any procreation, not even of poetry. His poems 
 about men and women might as well be about 
 marble. He stands outside of his period, and 
 his own people; his is an isolated case of rare 
 individual accomplishment; yet the fact that 
 this period, and the German people, find him 
 voicing, even in that elaborate lyric etiquette of 
 his, something of their own, has its value for us 
 who are trying to watch the fading of parochial 
 lines from national character. 
 
 Stephan George was born, 1868, in Bingen 
 on the Rhine. He traveled in England, Swit- 
 zerland, Italy, France and Spain ; studied in 
 Paris, Munich and Berlin. His own Rhineland 
 has seen most of his summers ; Munich or Ber- 
 lin his winters. His books of verse include:
 
 184 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 " The Year of the Soul " (Das Jahr der Seele), 
 1898, " The Carpet of Life," 1899, and " The 
 Seventh Ring" (Der Siebente Ring), 1907; 
 besides a number of translations and here 
 you have a key to his artistic attitude ! one 
 being a rendering (1901) of Baudelaire's 
 " Fleurs de Mai," others being versions (1905) 
 of poems by Swinburne, Rossetti, Jacobsen, 
 Verhaeren, Verlaine, Mallarme, Regnier, D'An- 
 nunzio and others. It has been pointed out that 
 George's German sometimes sounds like trans- 
 lated German, even though its purity, as 
 German, is without blemish. There we have, 
 recurring, the trend to mystification that comes 
 to every stylist. I recall Bliss Carman once 
 telling me in defense of certain opacities of 
 form then showing in his style, that if he could 
 write in a foreign tongue, he would. There we 
 have the same desire that Stephan George's 
 foreign-sounding yet impeccable German style 
 discovers. 
 
 That negation of the obvious which entered 
 the world of European sensibility with the work 
 of Schopenhauer and of Wagner, and came 
 forth again through Nietzsche and Dehmel, can 
 also be seen in Stephan George. Life, to him, 
 is a tapestry as of Gobelin, and there is as much 
 blood in it. Bloodless and sterile, this art of 
 Stephan George can have no successors. For 
 those who are conceiving the German poetry and
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 185 
 
 the poets of the future one must look elsewhere. 
 Yet it would be hard to find an artist more per- 
 fectly fulfilling all those essentials of externals 
 which the professional critics and expounders 
 of poetry demand. If poetry could be pro- 
 duced according to their formulas, Stephan 
 George would be a considerable poet. 
 
 IT is in Vienna, always keen in appreciation 
 of externals and etiquette, that Stephan George 
 stands highest. Mostly Viennese, indeed, were 
 the contributors to Art Pages (Blaetter 
 fiir die Kunst), which affords a fairly clear idea 
 of the way the Nietzsche influence exerted itself 
 upon the mere words with which the writers of 
 that time were clothing their thoughts. First 
 physical impressionism, then psychic impres- 
 sionism ; finally complete reaction from the 
 naturalists: a welter of mere phrases. It was 
 phrases which these men, Stephan George at 
 their head, put above everything else. Karl 
 August Klein was the publisher of Art 
 Pages, and among the contributors were, of 
 those whom I am to mention at all, Hugo von 
 Hoffmansthal, the dramatist, and Max Dau- 
 thendey. Art Pages appeared from 1892 
 to 1904, most sumptuously printed; it circu- 
 lated to all intents privately. There, again, you 
 have the exclusive nature of this sort of art. 
 
 To Hugo von Hoffmansthal we will come
 
 186 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 later. About Max Dauthendey's work I have 
 little to tell you. I know that he was born the 
 25th of July in Wurzburg. Tales of Asiatic 
 life in a collection called " Lingam " I have 
 read, and found notable more for style than 
 matter. A play of his dealt with the philan- 
 derings of Catherine of Russia. He has also 
 achieved some humor, notably the ballad of 
 " The Lady and the Gramophone," which is 
 such delightful nonsense as to atone for much 
 mere stylistic prose and verse. His most typ- 
 ical verse is in " Weltspuk," in which the picto- 
 rial is attempted in a richly decorative manner, 
 and invested wherever possible with a sort of 
 pantheistic spirit. The poet's intention there, 
 as in "The Winged Earth" (Die Gefliigelte 
 Erde), 1910, was to survey all earthly things 
 from the pinnacle of Parnassus and paint the 
 cosmic view; whether the intention reaches the 
 reader as an actual effect is doubtful. 
 
 IN Rainer Maria Rilke the stylistic attitude 
 of modern German poetry reaches its most per- 
 fect form. Bierbaum appreciated him, as he 
 appreciated so much that was fine; a Rilke 
 poem on " The Three Holy Kings " appeared 
 in the Island magazine, and in his " Yankee- 
 doodletrip " Bierbaum wrote this, as touching 
 the point of view from which he, O. J. B., would 
 regard the town of flowers, Florence, were he
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 187 
 
 seeing it for the first time in his life at twenty 
 years of age: 
 
 " I might see it, as some ten or twelve years 
 ago Rainer Maria Rilke saw it when he wrote 
 to me about it: in white on pale blue paper. 
 But I am afraid R. M. R. himself would no 
 longer see it like that to-day . . ." (He went 
 on to denounce the modernization of the Floren- 
 tine streets and palaces.) 
 
 Rilke sounds the monastic, mystically relig- 
 ious note as well as the aristocratic and the in- 
 tentionally obscure. You may find in him the 
 German equivalent to much in the mystic and 
 monastic tone that has appeared in many Cath- 
 olic countries, and to what Francis Thompson 
 did in England. His view of life turns always 
 into himself. The artist, he declares, is only he 
 who has within himself something deep and rare 
 that he cannot share with the world. He avoids 
 the obvious as a nun avoids the world and its 
 pleasures. There is eroticism in Rilke, but it 
 is the eroticism of a cloistered garden where 
 Parsifal walks in white silk, and where tall lilies 
 listen to the annunciation of Mary. I recall 
 single poems of his printed in Jugend in the last 
 few years, that were as if some of the most blas- 
 phemous ideas of the late Francis Saltus had 
 been treated by a monk whose asceticism had 
 the gorgeous hues of an old missal. There is 
 a prose book of his that bears the title : " Of
 
 188 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the Almighty, and others." (Vom lieben Gott, 
 und andres. ) The conclusion of his poem " Fate 
 o* Women" (Frauenschicksal) runs thus: 
 " She simply grew old and went blind, and was 
 not precious and was never rare." That prose 
 version of mine is not more removed from the 
 presumed pattern of poetry than Rilke's orig- 
 inal. In his poem " Sacrifice " (Opfer) he re- 
 fers to " the altar that your hair has lit, and 
 that your bosom gently crowns." Even these 
 lines may give you a notion of the strange re- 
 moteness of this poetry. 
 
 Rainer Maria Rilke was born, 1875, in 
 Prague, of an old and noble line. A lonely, 
 musing childhood. At ten, his parents sepa- 
 rating, he went into a military training-school 
 and for five years endured the tortures of an 
 education that applied the same level to all tem- 
 peraments. Neither there nor in the several 
 colleges that he tried after 1894 did he find 
 what he sought. In 1896 and 1897 he was 
 much in Munich; went thence to Berlin and 
 ventured a little into literary circles, but soon 
 retreated into his inborn anti-social habits of 
 life. The poet was already awake in him ; the 
 many journeys that he now began stirred him 
 still further. Florence and Fiesole and other 
 Tuscan towns were of especial revelation to 
 him. Still sharper was the impression which 
 Russia made on him. For long he lived amid
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 189 
 
 the vast loneliness of nature with a certain set 
 of artists in Worpswede; his prose volume, 
 " Worpswede," 1903, is an appreciation of that 
 period and those artists. From the Worpswede 
 band he turned to that vast solitary figure, the 
 greatest in modern sculpture, Auguste Rodin. 
 Secluded from the outer world, he lived close 
 to Rodin in Paris, and acted as a sort of secre- 
 tary to him. " He taught me everything," he 
 declares, " that I did not know before, and all 
 that I knew he revealed to me through his own 
 placid and self-contained life, his sure and im- 
 penetrable solitude, and his tremendous concen- 
 tration upon himself." Rilke wrote of the great 
 sculptor in his volume " Auguste Rodin," 1903. 
 The other great influence on Rilke was the 
 Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen. 
 
 The titles of Rilke's books tell the story of 
 the ecclesiasticism that distinguishes him as poet. 
 He has never seen life save through stained 
 glass. Note this, for instance : " The Book of 
 Hours; of monastic life, of pilgrimage, of 
 poverty and of death." In his earlier verses 
 the symbolism of Romish doctrine appears as 
 an influence; gradually comes sympathy with 
 older mysticisms, and even with such emotional- 
 ists as Chopin and Schumann; eventually he 
 reaches his individual, personal note of monis- 
 tic pantheism. In his " Book of Pictures " 
 (Buch der Bilder) the Rodin influence can be
 
 190 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 found. That book is perhaps his highest 
 achievement. 
 
 For sheer technical skill, modern German 
 verse has gone no farther than Rainer Maria 
 Rilke. His poetry remains noteworthy if we 
 would understand the various facets of the 
 modern German soul. That soul, it cannot too 
 often be pointed out, is no longer parochial. 
 The wave of religious mysticism that we may 
 trace through French and English thought and 
 feeling in our own time need one mention 
 more than the novels of Huysmans, of George 
 Moore, of John Oliver Hobbes ; the poetry of 
 Francis Thompson ? swept through Ger- 
 many also, and found welcome and acceptance 
 there. 
 
 IT is with definite purpose that emphasis is 
 here given the poetry of Rilke. There are 
 plenty of other talented Germans in this vein 
 of letters to-day, with whose names the most 
 careless study of the subject will familiarize 
 you Hugo Salus, Schaukal, Franz Blei, etc., 
 etc. but Rilke typifies for me the farthest 
 point in sheer skill which has so far been 
 reached by these men. 
 
 These perfect artificers may sway other 
 poets, they can never sway a people. Their 
 continuing experiments in new and strange de- 
 vices of form, and style ; their calm impersonal
 
 A FEW FORMALISTS 191 
 
 reaching toward new perfections in externals, 
 may interest a community of literates; they 
 can never sing for and to humanity at large 
 anything of its own passion, anything of the 
 world's ecstasy.
 
 IX 
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL 
 
 THAT we may close with a return to what 
 in living German verse most vitally carries on 
 something of the minstrel's note, let us come to 
 Richard Dehmel, who survives from the day 
 when Nietzsche first moved German literature to 
 new paths. 
 
 Returning, briefly, to that little collection of 
 " German Chansons " which Bierbaum first put 
 out in 1900, we find, besides Dehmel, several 
 lesser singers who must be mentioned here be- 
 cause the singing note distinguished them as 
 much as mere form marked those whom we 
 traced from Stephan George to Rilke. They 
 were: Gustav Falke, Ludwig Finckh, A. W. 
 Heymel, and Rudolf Schroeder. The last 
 named has already been referred to as one of 
 the founders of The Island. Finckh had the 
 manner of a charming courtier; his ballads 
 were aristocratic, rather than German. Schroe- 
 der was aesthetic even in his merriest nonsense, 
 and his grotesque ballads for the UberbrettP 
 were compared to decorations by Beardsley. 
 192
 
 RICHAUD DEHMEL 193 
 
 Heymel was the expression of youthful unre- 
 straint and impudence ; a portrait-caricature of 
 him exists in " Prince Kuckuk," as has already 
 been pointed out. He visited America a few 
 years ago; as, also, did Von Wolzogen late in 
 1910. In Gustav Falke, born, 1853, in Lue- 
 beck, we touch that combination of merry min- 
 strel and conscious expounder of a self-question- 
 ing ego most strongly typified in Dehmel. 
 
 From Liliencron to Falke you come along 
 the line of least resistance; Falke's drinking 
 song, " Twenty Marks " (Zwanzig Mark), is 
 of the true note of bibulous balladry in the 
 more wine-bibbing troubadours whose Carmina 
 have come down to us from the middle ages. 
 To contrast against that side of Falke such 
 a poem as " At the Masked Ball " (Auf dem 
 Maskenball) is to see the range of his sentiment. 
 To contrast, again, the atmosphere of his mas- 
 querade against " The Mask " of Stephan 
 George is to see how the natural note surpasses 
 always the posturings of the most precious arti- 
 ficers. 
 
 IN Richard Dehmel we find almost every color 
 in the rainbow of modern German character. 
 It is he alone, after many earlier storms and 
 stresses of thought and sentiment had found 
 lodgment in him, who was strong enough, hav- 
 ing known and felt the influence of Nietzsche,
 
 194 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 eventually to follow the latter's injunction: 
 " Be what thou art ! " and to forsake him. 
 
 Nietzsche's great poetic genius was as a fire 
 that lit, that sparked to other fires, the youth 
 of an entire period, an entire continent. You 
 will not more clearly see the difference between 
 passion and ice than if you compare Nietzsche 
 with the American Emerson. The one a great 
 Slav, full of power and passion and the ecstasy 
 of poetry, sweeping like a prairie fire over the 
 European peoples. The other an icy Puritan, 
 affecting only a small parish of disciples, a 
 narrow circle of the cultured, in a country 
 which, by the very slightness of its cultured 
 minority, needed more than any other some 
 flaming passion, some world-devouring Napo- 
 leon of emotion. The pictures are still true to- 
 day: Emerson and his kind were parochial; 
 Nietzsche was continental. 
 
 There is, just here, a vast problem that looms 
 upon us, were we not now concerned only with 
 song and story and play. All that to-day pours 
 into the United States is Slav. Is the Slav to 
 repeat, there, his history as one continent's 
 bulwark against another ? 
 
 Nietzsche, whose genius in words aside 
 from his philosophy, which was a mere emana- 
 tion of his poetry affected a continent, was 
 of Slav blood. He grew up in the Romanic, 
 humanist spirit.
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL 195 
 
 In every direction he revealed the impas- 
 sioned fanaticism, and the colorful sensuous- 
 ness of the Slav. His was the truly Romanic 
 delight in the outer emblems of enchantment, 
 in the sheer music and resonance of words. 
 German characteristics never touched him but 
 faintly; his proper nature, and the nature of 
 that all-intoxicating poetry which he gave his 
 time, was Romanic, Slav of the Slavs. 
 
 Richard Dehmel was too truly German to feel 
 more than passingly the influence of even the 
 great Nietzsche, the Slav. 
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL was the eldest son of a 
 gamekeeper. He was born in 1863 in Wen- 
 disch-Hermsdorf, near the Spreewald, within 
 easy distance of Berlin. (The Spreewalders, it 
 may be remarked, retain to this day as much 
 as is possible in a tourist-harried world in 
 their tiny space of a few square miles, all the 
 characteristics of a nation.) These "men of 
 the Mark " consider Berlin as an alien monster 
 in their borders. Dehmel had his first school- 
 ing in Kremmen, his next in Berlin. In those 
 early years he was already unorthodox, and was 
 soon in conflict with the orthodox schoolmasters 
 of Berlin. He moved, for the completion of 
 his studies, to Danzig. From the autumn of 
 1882 he studied philosophy and natural science, 
 working his way meanwhile by editing provin-
 
 196 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 cial, and even sporting, newspapers. In 1887 
 Leipzig made him Doctor on account of an es- 
 say upon Insurance. From then until 1895 he 
 was secretary of a German underwriters' asso- 
 ciation. In that bureaucratic air he learned 
 much self-control. There, too, he published his 
 first volumes of verse. After seven and a half 
 years in official harness, he determined to de- 
 vote himself entirely to his art, and freedom 
 for it. He wrote no poetry of sorts before he 
 was twenty-two, and artistic control came to 
 him, so he once admitted, only with twenty-four 
 years of age ; he was thirty-two when he finally 
 retired from his office. He went to live in Pan- 
 kow, near Berlin. In 1899 he separated, ami- 
 cably, from his wife; with her, Paula Dehmel, 
 he had published a book for children called 
 " Fitzebutze." With his second wife, he spent 
 two and a half years traveling in Italy, Greece, 
 Holland, Switzerland, and England, and even- 
 tually came to live in Blankenese near Ham- 
 burg. 
 
 DEHMEL, as artist in thought and expression, 
 passed through many periods. Just as you find 
 in him the minstrel note that, melancholy, north- 
 ern though it is, found him a prominent place 
 among the balladists of the " German Chan- 
 sons," and also find in him huge problems of 
 passion, of sex, and of society in the large ; so
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL 197 
 
 you may trace in his career as artist many 
 transformations, before the complete and indi- 
 vidual character appears. 
 
 In his first books Schiller and Heine still 
 dominate, though Conradi and Nietzsche al- 
 ready appear; the influence of Liliencron even- 
 tually triumphs. His real storm-and-stress 
 period is expressed in his volume " But Love " 
 (Aber die Liebe), 1893, which flames and 
 smoulders with passion. Here is the brooding 
 and the shame of adolescence, the tears, the 
 agony and the ecstasy of a man's awakening. 
 Love is an abyss of melancholy for him at first ; 
 out of his struggle in that abyss he comes with 
 something of recognition for its finer sides. 
 In " But Love " some have seen influences from 
 Strindberg and Przybyszewski. Dehmel at- 
 tacks the sex relations with all the fury of a 
 northerner's passion. Then came poems, plays 
 and fairy-tales, all marking Dehmel's progress, 
 his thought upon the great vital man-and- 
 woman problems of life. He worked in all 
 forms; in the strictly lyric, in the larger lyri- 
 cism of the epic, of the allegory, the novel and 
 the drama. 
 
 In 1903, at forty years of age, all of Dehmel 
 thought and art, that had so long been in fer- 
 ment, went into its final melting-pot. He even 
 took most of what he had published up to then, 
 lyric, dramatic and epic, and remade it in tune
 
 198 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 with his new self. The jagged edges that still 
 remain from that tremendous effort to make 
 uniform what had marked the whims and pas- 
 sions of young manhood have their interest as 
 proving the futility of this sort of rewriting. 
 
 Dehmel's passion, what some have declared his 
 eroticism, is saved from the merely physical by 
 its prevailing humanistic virtue. There is 
 something northern, something intellectual, 
 spiritual, always at back of it. He goes upon 
 all the ways of love that he may find at end of 
 them some new key to the great riddles of sex 
 and life. He has the passion to observe life, 
 the passion to live, and the passion to declare 
 life; he has no reservations, nothing human is 
 vile for him ; he would conceal nothing, but 
 would make noble and beautiful even the dark- 
 est places of the soul. He has the passion for 
 truth, too ; truth as he sees it ; whether he 
 always succeeds in making the reader see it as 
 truth is another matter. 
 
 Say what they would against Dehmel's in- 
 ability always to express as greatly as he felt, 
 his essential Teutonism was undeniable. He was 
 never Don Juan without being also Faust. His 
 eroticism was of the north; he put his cosmic 
 problem in the form of a love-story ; while the 
 more southern, Romanic writers, fashioned their 
 love-stories to seem cosmic problems. One 
 would rather not believe that this side of Deh-
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL 199 
 
 mel, rather than larger, finer things in him, 
 has made other countries, especially France 
 (through the Mercure de France, in the sum- 
 mer of 1910, to cite one sufficient proof), stamp 
 him the most vital German poet of our day. 
 
 He paints for us such Venus Transforma- 
 tions as surpass for erotic color and boldness 
 most of what has been done in that sort ; at the 
 very opening of his " But Love " he sketches 
 himself for us in the outlines of a " Bastard," 
 product of a female vampire and of the God 
 of Light, compelled eternally to strive upward 
 out of a slough of despond toward the fairer 
 gleam; yet we must ourselves be perverse to 
 find perversity in him. The sombre philosopher 
 is always behind his fieriest voluptuousness. 
 He fights the fight of freedom, of sex, of soci- 
 ety; he questions the old formulas, the old 
 compulsions of society, of wedlock ; all the old 
 repressions of the individual rouse him. The 
 individual, Richard Dehmel, whom, throughout, 
 he sought to free to finest expression of his own 
 self, his own character, was none the less the 
 individual of many deep ancestral tendencies, 
 many old Germanic qualities. He followed the 
 great Slav's mandate : " Be who thou art ! " and 
 he came to express more forcibly than any other 
 in his time and tongue all the vaster questions 
 of the human race: marriage, society, and the 
 rights of the individual.
 
 200 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 So powerful is the stuff in Dehmel's work, 
 that the art of its expression comes only sec- 
 ondly to consideration. Yet it is gradually be- 
 ing recognized (especially now that the French 
 have pointed in that direction) by many who 
 hitherto stressed only the thinker, that the ar- 
 tist is also considerable. It may remain true 
 that the thinker often seems to obscure the ar- 
 tist; Julius Bab (who has written the finest of 
 the German appreciations of Dehmel) recalls 
 Leo Berg's remark that Dehmel " loves like an 
 analytic philosopher, and philosophizes like a 
 lover." In other words, his passion is seldom 
 without artistic self-consciousness. 
 
 As artist it was the lyric words of Schiller, 
 the lovely outlines of sonnets by Michael An- 
 gelo that first seemed the pinnacles of poetry 
 to Dehmel. Only gradually the strong sugges- 
 tion from Liliencron led him to express himself 
 and his own thoughts, his own life. That re- 
 bellion of the 'eighties so often referred to af- 
 fected Dehmel toward the search for a natural- 
 istic, realistic symbol which eventually he at- 
 tempted in his "But Love" of 1893. That 
 book paints the crisis in his thought as in his 
 form. He moves from apparently free verse to 
 utter formlessness, from translations of foreign 
 style to the first efforts in a final expression of 
 simple and sincere personality. In his search 
 for a style of his own he transmuted the old
 
 RICHABD DEHMEL 201 
 
 Italian, Cecco ; the modern Spaniard, Zorilla ; 
 the Pole, Ujeski, and the Chinese Li-tai-po; 
 and particularly those French singers, each 
 most typical of his time, Villon and Verlaine. 
 The strongest influence of all, in that period, 
 came from Strindberg; not only poems, but 
 stories and dramas of Dehmel reeked with that 
 northern bias. 
 
 Not until 1895, in "Leaves of Life" 
 (Lebensblaetter), did the individual simple 
 style proper to his thought and his intentions 
 appear. In tracing Dehmel's style through its 
 tentative periods to its eventual discovery of the 
 poet's proper voice, Julius Bab found the case 
 typical of that trend away from the musical and 
 toward the pictorial which he declares a distin- 
 guishing feature of latter-day German writing. 
 So that what in earlier years had kept to the 
 musical idols which Schiller and his imitators 
 worshiped, now went over into the similes of 
 Max Klinger's etchings. (I mention this com- 
 parison largely to prove that this trick of con- 
 fusing and mingling the arts of literature, 
 painting and music has its devotees in Germany 
 as well as London and New York ; it is one of 
 the favorite tools with which the more shopworn 
 of the modern world's critics ply their trade.) 
 
 The keynote of Dehmel's thought and art is 
 in his line : " To laugh, bleeding with wounds, 
 that is living ! " He felt always the great
 
 202 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 deeps of woe and passion in the world; he 
 strove always to express them. He strove al- 
 ways to express the tragedy of the individual 
 seeking to justify itself relentlessly in a relent- 
 less world. He tried to force the whole agony 
 and glory of the cosmos into his work. Here, 
 for instance, is a free version of a poem of his 
 which voices his own outlook: 
 
 " And man would be happy here on earth 
 Do you know, how that may come ? " " Man, 
 it is thyself that thou must train Which most 
 will read: Man, from thyself thou must ab- 
 stain ! Beware of all such folk. There's 
 many a man has trained himself But did he 
 build a real Self? No man yet won to God 
 Who feared God's devils and their rod." " All 
 deeps of passion I would sound And drain 
 the whole world dry of it And though I died 
 for it ! " " For not above oneself And not 
 outside of self But in oneself Almighti- 
 ness awaits the man so great that he can bear 
 it. . . ." 
 
 Against the accusation of immorality in Deh- 
 mel's work it is to be pointed out that in some 
 five hundred poems perhaps ten voice brutally 
 the brutality of human sexuality. Dehmel once 
 ironically informed those who invariably judged 
 him by just those ten specimens, that he had 
 finally made matters easier for their peculiar 
 senses of taste and smell by arranging all those
 
 RICHARD DEHMEL, 203 
 
 verses into the " Transformations of Venus " so 
 that they need no longer search through all his 
 many volumes in order to find them and enjoy 
 them. 
 
 THAT a tremendous singer of the most pas- 
 sionate individualism which modern German lit- 
 erature has known should also, for his lighter 
 minstrelsy, have been counted among the bal- 
 ladists of the " German Chansons " is significant 
 of the place which that Young German period 
 must ever have in the history of that literature. 
 It nullifies at once the argument that these were 
 but light gentry. No more gigantic intentions 
 were ever in any man's work than in Dehmel's. 
 Yet Dehmel, too, wrote the charming stuff for 
 children in " Fitzebutze " ; wrote the lovely lyric 
 of the " Fruehlingskasper " ; wrote that song 
 " Toilette " which has at once the spiritual 
 grace of passion and its disregard of shame; 
 and wrote, finally, that bit of music and irony, 
 " The Twelve Moral Innkeepers " (Die Zwoelf 
 Sittsamen Gastwirte). This ballad paints for 
 us the poet Liliencron, and the man Liliencron, 
 so deliciously that it is with the memory of it 
 still warm that this effort to appreciate Dehmel 
 might best be closed. 
 
 The young Richard Dehmel owed a good deal 
 to Detlev von Liliencron ; something of that he 
 repaid in " The Twelve Moral Innkeepers " ;
 
 204 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 and in the later enlarging fame of the older, 
 larger Richard Dehmel, with his brooding, 
 moralizing, northern passion, there is still 
 something that starts memories of the Prussian 
 officer, the poet, Liliencron.
 
 MERE ENTERTAINMENT 
 
 IP Richard Dehmel passed on to a point 
 where he became the most internationally recog- 
 nized thinker and poet of his day, there remain 
 from the Young German period, or have 
 sprung up since, many pleasant artists, who, if 
 some might call them but entertainers, should 
 none the less be mentioned here. Chief of these, 
 and far more than a mere entertainer, though 
 suffering from mere entertainment's reputation, 
 is Ernst, Freiherr von Wolzogen. Before we 
 return, through him, to the UberbrettP, and 
 with him to the present day, let us briefly list 
 some of those other writers of our time. 
 
 In Germany as elsewhere you can hardly 
 throw a stone to-day without hitting a novelist. 
 On Sudermann you may find so much elsewhere 
 that I do not burthen this book with him. Carl 
 Hauptmann's novel, " Mathilde," must be men- 
 tioned. One year Gustav Frenssen's " Joern 
 Uhl " was the most discussed stofy in Germany ; 
 another it was something of Hermann Hesse's. 
 Seekers after entertainment in Germany read 
 205
 
 206 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Heinz Tovote for a superficial reflex of sophis- 
 ticated boredom (historically he has value only 
 in having appeared at the same time as Her- 
 mann Bahr) ; George, Freiherr von Ompteda, 
 for education in military and civil snobbery; 
 Von Schlicht for stories in humorous treatment 
 of army life; and Thomas Mann for careful 
 painting of genre. In " Dead Centre " (Am 
 Toten Punkt) and " Prinz " Johannes Schlaf 
 again tried to write the great novel that Ger- 
 many, with all its neighbors, annually awaits. 
 
 There are humorists in plenty. Peter Ro- 
 segger (born in 1843) painted a certain peas- 
 ant region inimitably. Such serious persons as 
 Fritz von Ostini and Ludwig Fulda have not 
 disdained sheer humor. One of the most amus- 
 ing writers in this sort, mostly in versified form, 
 is Fritz Oliven, whose pen name is " Rideamus." 
 Librettos of his for Oscar Straus' music include 
 " Die Lustigen Niebelungen " and " Hugdit- 
 rich's Brautfahrt," and over his rhymed pam- 
 phlets, " Willi's Werdegang," " Berliner 
 Baelle," " Die Erfindung der Sittlichkeit " and 
 many others, Germany has been laughing for 
 the last ten years, " Willi's Werdegang " hav- 
 ing sold to the eightieth thousand. 
 
 Paul Scheerbart, born, 1863, in Danzig; 
 Karl Henckell, born, 1864, in Hanover; Rudolf 
 Presber, 1868, in Frankfurt; Hanss Heinz 
 Ewers, 1871, in Duesseldorf, and Theodor Et-
 
 MEEE ENTERTAINMENT 207 
 
 zel must be mentioned as prominent humorists 
 to-day. Etzel and Roda Roda are issuing a 
 library of the World's Humor, the first volume 
 of which, " Laughing Germany " (Das La- 
 chende Deutschland), enables one to choose 
 what is best in the fun of the moment. Hanns 
 von Gumppenberg has parodied Heine, Bier- 
 baum, Liliencron and others. To Roda Roda I 
 mean to recur when the Viennese are reached, 
 at close of this book. 
 
 Short stories abound, but I recall little that 
 was memorable save some bizarre things by 
 Gustav Meyrink, and the curiously skilful pages 
 of erotic cynicism signed Marie Madeleine. If, 
 instead of mentioning scores of other German 
 women writers, I choose this one, I do so fully 
 aware of the general critical effort to ignore 
 her. Every country has its poetess of passion, 
 who, as often as not, is shoddy as well as 
 shameless. Germany has them in plenty; 
 Marie Madeleine is the only one I find re- 
 markable. 
 
 WE have only to recall the French verses at- 
 tempted by an American girl, Natalie Barney, 
 in 1901, to realize such phenomena as inter- 
 national. In her " Portraits-Sonnets de 
 Femmes " this girl of twenty, new-world bred, 
 contributed to the curiosities of literature a 
 volume which for precocious neuroticism, eroti-
 
 208 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 cism, or whatever you wished to call it politely 
 rather than truthfully, cannot easily be ex- 
 punged from the record. That you may see how 
 constantly, at the period we have been contem- 
 plating, namely, the last decade of the nine- 
 teenth and the first decade of the twentieth cen- 
 tury, the artistic diversions of England, France 
 and Germany conspired to a sort of trio, both 
 in serious tendencies and occasional aberrations, 
 suppose we regard momentarily the American 
 type of Marie Madeleine. 
 
 IN " Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes " we had 
 a girl of twenty confessing such worship of her 
 own sex, so passionately, as to remind equally 
 of Lesbos and the Marquis de Sade. She wrote 
 in French, because, as she declared, English had 
 been too much with her to retain aught of sen- 
 timent ; hers was abominable French, but it was 
 enough to impose upon the half -educated fash- 
 ionables whom, primarily, she wished her book 
 to startle. She cited Stuart Merrill, Viele- 
 Griffin and others of her own sex ; prattled un- 
 cannily about free verse, and asserted that she 
 sometimes fancied her soul to be the tomb of 
 some dead French poet. We are, all of us, 
 tombs of one thing or another ; some of us are 
 tombs of dead hopes; others use bromides be- 
 fore breakfast. Neither the precocity of her 
 pose nor its originality need impress us; her
 
 MEEE ENTERTAINMENT 209 
 
 French was not good enough to lead us to sup- 
 pose her English much better. Such a preco- 
 cious girl of twenty should have remembered 
 what a one-time impertinent young man had 
 confessed long before : 
 
 " With all this I did not learn French. I 
 chattered and felt intensely at home in it ; yes, 
 I could write a sonnet or a ballad almost with- 
 out a slip, but my prose required a good deal 
 of alteration, for a greater command of lan- 
 guage is required to write in prose than in 
 verse. I found this in French and also in Eng- 
 lish." (How these currents do flow parallel 
 throughout the world ! Shaw not only said, but 
 went far to prove the same thing, when he 
 dashed off a copyright version of " The Admi- 
 rable Bashville " in verse because it was so much 
 easier and quicker than decent prose.) "For 
 when I returned from Paris, my English terri- 
 bly corrupt with French ideas and forms of 
 thought, I could write acceptably English verse, 
 but even ordinary newspaper prose was beyond 
 my reach." 
 
 What should be noted is the matter of her 
 verse; this was so perverse, even if imitated 
 rather than felt by its author, as to put her, 
 if not for performance, at least for intention, 
 into the ranks of those who in English, French 
 and German so worshiped sex, passion or erot- 
 omania as to reach an unusual height, if not
 
 210 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 in art, then in abnormality. I have taken the 
 trouble, that you may the better understand 
 such feminine emanations which do not differ 
 much whether they appear in one country or 
 another, England, America, France or Ger- 
 many to turn into almost decent English 
 some of the Natalie Barney French, which is 
 often, simply as French, indecent enough. 
 
 Her sonnet to " The Lady of Slumbering 
 Desires " exposes an uncanny virgin worship in 
 this poetess of passion: 
 
 I would leave out all carnal rhymes 
 That well might wound your opal soul 
 By the thick cloud of their male passion. 
 Yea, I would love you, yet not bruise your 
 wings. 
 
 Hymns to your virgin beauty I would sing; 
 Set up a cult for you beyond the world; 
 Wrap you in lilies, incense and wax tapers. 
 
 A vestal I would be, and your fair whiteness 
 Should suffer not the troubling lips 
 Of lovers, nor of charming women. 
 
 Might we not be excused if some of these 
 suggestions left us a little sick? Next, let us 
 try the sonnet to " La Princesse Lointaine " : 
 
 Pure as a child's gaze is thy body; 
 Thy voice is sweet as an ^Eolian harp, 
 And lulls my heart t'ward ancient Greece; 
 Thy song's fine ecstasy makes Sappho live again.
 
 MEEE ENTERTAINMENT 211 
 
 Did yonder pale immortal have the accent 
 Of thy so pagan, clear and sapphire eyes, 
 The fairness of thy Lesbian skin, 
 Where thy breast's tips watch lovelorn? 
 
 Before the stirring charm of thy tired gait 
 Nature bows down, and love pleads for thy mouth 
 Thy mouth that chants thy sterile state. 
 
 Thy body is a flame wherein all priestesses 
 Must throw the flower of their pure youth 
 To keep alive thy immortality. 
 
 Only a grim holding on to the thought that 
 this girl of twenty was repeating echoes of 
 what she did not really understand saves us 
 from asking for such stuff as this a medical 
 verdict. 
 
 In a sonnet to " Salammbo " occur lines such 
 as these: 
 
 Afloat on my desire the memory lies 
 
 Of that night when your roseate pallor heard 
 
 my passion. 
 
 An essence lingers to remind my pain 
 How all is past; how empty is the altar 
 Of our so young voluptuousness, where weari- 
 ness holds sway 
 Lamenting endlessly your kisses' knell. 
 
 Upon your tired flesh, and on the golden shaft 
 That holds your head, there mingle still 
 The bitter odors of a full-blown flower. 
 
 The bitterness of motherhood obsessed this 
 girl of twenty. Even in a poem on " April " 
 is this lament:
 
 212 MASKS AND MINSTEELS 
 
 And the flower regrets that it loved so much 
 Since now she feels Summer's fire burning within. 
 
 Oh sad time when all Nature bears fruit, 
 When Love lies deformed, in obedience to Matter, 
 When, after the perfume of vanishing nights, 
 Life turns to mere prose, and the woman turns 
 mother ! 
 
 Now all this, fortunately, is nothing but imi- 
 tation. This young person had saturated her- 
 self with what the young artistic swashbucklers, 
 waving formulas and symbols, were doing in 
 France. This is what we must believe if we are 
 charitable. American art of just that period 
 (the turn of the centuries) was peculiarly rich 
 in imitation, and this volume by a girl of 
 twenty only accentuates the point such imitation 
 could reach. Considered more seriously, the in- 
 cident proves the extent of the influence ema- 
 nating from France at that time, and spreading 
 over the English- as well as the German-speak- 
 ing countries. 
 
 As an individual instance " Portraits-Sonnets 
 de Femmes " is most clearly explained by re- 
 calling a paragraph from a brief bit of auto- 
 biography Paul Verlaine once gave us. He told 
 of his reading, at fourteen, Baudelaire. " I 
 devoured the collection without understanding 
 anything ; unless it was that ' perversities ' (as 
 one says in young ladies' boarding-schools) 
 were in question ; . . . these * perversities ' and
 
 MERE ENTERTAINMENT 213 
 
 their sometime nakednesses formed an attrac- 
 tion for my young corruption." 
 
 As to my version of the Barney verses I as- 
 sert only that my English is better than her 
 French. 
 
 WHAT distinguished Marie Madeleine from 
 the general run of " poetesses of passion " that 
 marked especially the adolescent nations, Amer- 
 ica and Germany, was her very real talent for 
 the externals of her art. What there was of 
 erotic, even of perverse, in her matter, was 
 brought into the sphere of real art by the gen- 
 ius in her expression. This applies to her many 
 volumes of stories as to her verse. 
 
 Marie Madeleine, it is well known, is the pen 
 signature of the Baroness of Putkamer. 
 
 One other woman, Margarethe Boehme, 
 whose " Diary of a Lost Soul " (Tagebuch 
 einer Verlorenen) has been read in more than 
 the German language, is never included by aca- 
 demic classifiers as among the producers of 
 modern German literature. Yet that one book 
 of hers, with its faithful chronicle of a fallen 
 woman's career, should by all human, rather 
 than literary rights, take rank with the vital 
 documents in that sort, with Hogarth's " Rake's 
 Progress," and certainly with such as " Mrs. 
 Warren's Professsion." The fact that one Ger- 
 man critic asserted the impossibility of a woman
 
 214 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 herself immune from vice having written such 
 a book, is proof that besides truth of matter 
 there was compelling art in Margarethe 
 Boehme's book. 
 
 I cannot pretend to deal comprehensively 
 with either the women-writers or the main bulk 
 of the mere entertainers in the current literature 
 of Germany. Barring the exceptions noted, the 
 ladies over there have not stirred me, tho* I 
 admit Clara Viebig is quite as great a novelist 
 as Sudermann. Of the entertainers I choose 
 to single out the figure which not only towers 
 above the rest for versatility and for sheer bulk 
 of accomplishment, but also survives to this 
 present day as a giant from the ferment and 
 the flourish of those Young German days which, 
 if we must tell the truth, shine more splendidly 
 to-day than our own time does. The artists of 
 our day, in all the channels of art save the 
 drama, seem of smaller stature than the men my 
 book has been insisting on.
 
 XI 
 
 EENST VON WOLZOGEN 
 
 ERNST, FREIHERR VON WOLZOGEN, has al- 
 ready been much referred to in my pages de- 
 voted to the Uberbrettl'. He was prime mana- 
 gerial mover, as well as literary conspirator, in 
 most of the novel enterprises of that time ; and 
 it was to him that the memory of those episodes 
 clung longest. Of all the volume of caricature 
 and fun poked at the Uberbrettl' and its varia- 
 tions, the most pungent item was that cartoon 
 by Theodor Heine referred to in my second 
 chapter. 
 
 We have seen how most of the Uberbrettl' 
 poets lived to survive all such ridicule. That 
 campaign for applied art was incidental to 
 greater things in them ; just as their own great- 
 ness has by now lifted that same incident into 
 dignity and to historic significance in the de- 
 velopment of modern German literature. To 
 Von Wolzogen the brand of the Uberbrettl' 
 clung most persistently, obscuring, often, the 
 215
 
 216 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 serious and dignified work his versatility was 
 pouring forth. 
 
 For sheer versatility no artist of modern 
 times has surpassed Von Wolzogen. Stories, 
 novels, plays gay and plays tragic have poured 
 from him in an incessant stream. He has been 
 actor-manager, poet, composer, novelist, mili- 
 tant minstrel and many other things. In the 
 tiberbrettl' period it was he who literally ful- 
 filled the old troubadour simile, chanting him- 
 self, to his own music, upon his own instrument, 
 in a theatre of which he was manager, songs 
 which he had written himself. The centuries 
 had reversed the figures a little, that was all; 
 of old a ragged minstrel, a thing of shreds and 
 patches, sang in the marble halls of barons ; 
 in this Uberbrettl' day of ours was a baron 
 Von Wolzogen singing to such rag-tag and 
 bobtail as might compose a music-hall audi- 
 ence. 
 
 Catulle Mendes in France, who could write all 
 things in the world with an almost uncanny ar- 
 tistic dexterity ; who was always only an intan- 
 gible fraction below the master in whatever field 
 he essayed, yet was never master in anything; 
 if we excuse Von Wolzogen from any such 
 malicious suggestiveness as always ran under- 
 current to the subtle art of Mendes, it is to 
 Mendes we recur when seeking for an equal to 
 the diversity of Von Wolzogen's talent. He has
 
 ERNST VON WOLZOGEN 217 
 
 written stories of military life and civil life; 
 there is hardly any department of literary ac- 
 tivity in which he has not achieved considerable 
 work. There is no better picture of the Abbe 
 Liszt and the whole musical circle of that time 
 at Weimar than is in his novel " Der Kraft- 
 Mayr." That book outranks many better 
 known volumes in that sort; with the novels of 
 George Moore on music ; with Claretie's 
 " Brichanteau," and with Gertrude Atherton's 
 " Tower of Ivory " it is properly comparable. 
 The picture of Weimar is drawn from the inside, 
 and has no such abominable blemishes and care- 
 lessness as marred the Atherton book. No 
 Liszt historian will easily avoid Von Wolzogen's 
 sketch as a valuable document. As to the cen- 
 tral idea of the overpowering, compelling fas- 
 cination of the pianist hero, have we not had 
 that again, ten years later, in Hermann Bahr's 
 " Concert," a play now familiar to all of us 
 accessible to the English tongue? I ven- 
 ture to think "Der Kraft-Mayr " Von Wol- 
 zogen's most memorable artistic accomplish- 
 ment. 
 
 To pick, from such a vast volume of work as 
 this man's, any preferable items is doubtless 
 futile. Von Wolzogen's series of ballads, often 
 with his own music, can still be bought in the 
 German shops, under the " Buntes Theater " 
 label or many others which flourished in that
 
 218 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 Green German time. His " A Fescher Dom- 
 ino," " Das Laufmaedel " and " Madame 
 Adele " are among the best of the merry and 
 tuneful songs which originated in that move- 
 ment. You will admit that from such min- 
 strelsy, with all the literal, actual, impersona- 
 tion of it already mentioned, to the writing of 
 a libretto for Richard Strauss's " Feuersnot " 
 or of the faery spectacle, " Die Maibraut," or 
 of any one of the many serious works in dra- 
 matic or romantic form that Von Wolzogen has 
 signed, shows a versatility nothing less than 
 remarkable. 
 
 Von Wolzogen is a member of one of the old- 
 est families in Germany, much to the fore in 
 the history of Teutonic culture. He is baron, 
 as was Detlev von Liliencron ; and as was Von 
 Recnicek, the Austro-Hungarian genius who 
 gave color and outline (mostly through illus- 
 trations printed in the first volumes of Mu- 
 nich's Simplicissimus) to so many of the figures 
 in ballads by Bierbaum and by Von Wolzogen 
 himself. Specially memorable were the Von 
 Recnicek paintings depicting Bierbaum's 
 " Hoher Besuch " and Von Wolzogen's " Ma- 
 dame Adele." 
 
 Von Wolzogen lived in Weimar, Berlin and 
 Munich, and in the latter town the idea of the 
 UberbrettP took him. He was of the Uber- 
 brettl' leaders ; his were some of the most pop-
 
 ERNST VON WOLZOGEN 219 
 
 ular songs and tunes under that banner; but 
 he was never content to play second fiddle or 
 remain subordinately a member of even an 
 Uberbrettl' brotherhood, and he branched away 
 from it in many directions of his own. What 
 he attempted in the Darmstaedter Spiele 
 (Darmstadt Plays), for instance, was somewhat 
 different from the music-hall notion of the other 
 minstrels. Into comic opera, too, he branched ; 
 and there was hardly any form of art which he 
 did not try, as author, composer and actual 
 manager, to apply to the public entertainment 
 of the people. There was hardly ever a new 
 movement of any sort in the line of light 
 theatric fare wedded to real art without Von 
 Wolzogen being to the fore. 
 
 His undying youthfulness as entertainer was 
 shown again as lately as the summer of 1909 
 when he wrote specially for the open-air thea- 
 tre in Wiesbaden his play " Die Maibraut." 
 That, in many ways, was his triumphant point 
 of achievement in applying his art to the needs 
 of the immediate. These open-air theatres, as 
 we know, had been spreading about the world 
 for some time. At Orange, in France ; in the 
 Arena Goldoni, in Florence, and in many sylvan 
 spots in Switzerland and Germany this return 
 to nature by way of the theatre had been going 
 on. Sporadic cases had occurred often enough 
 before, it is true ; I recall a pictorially effective,
 
 220 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 if artistically negligible, performance of Hum- 
 perdinck's " Haensel and Gretel " under the 
 trees in Regent's Park, London ; and the out- 
 door versions of " As You Like It," labeled for 
 fashionable purposes " al fresco," had made 
 many an innocent pastoral scene in England 
 and America tumultuous once or twice a year 
 for decades past. But until Maude Adams, in 
 the wonderfully picturesque setting of the 
 Lawn Club's premises in" New Haven gave her 
 really artistic realizations of the open air's dra- 
 matic possibilities ; or until the Bohemian Club 
 of San Francisco gave its annual sylvan play 
 under the redwoods, America was barren in this 
 newest effort to oust the shut-in air of conven- 
 tion from the drama. Still, with the exception 
 of the plays written for those Bohemian Club 
 " Jinks," what was performed under these 
 charming and novel conditions, even in Europe, 
 was mostly antique stuff. The plays I saw, for 
 instance, in the open-air theatre at Hertenstein, 
 near Lucerne, were classics ; Grillparzer's " Des 
 Meeres und der Liebe Wellen " was probably 
 the most effective of them. 
 
 It was Von Wolzogen who first in Europe 
 adapted his art to the new conditions of the nat- 
 ural backgrounds and lights. He wrote his 
 " Die Maibraut " directly for the needs of the 
 open-air theatre in the Nerothal, a sheltered 
 park-like bit of natural rock and greenery just
 
 ERNST VON WOLZOGEN 221 
 
 outside Wiesbaden. He applied his craft di- 
 rectly to making the art of the theatre pliable 
 to the new conditions. The men who wrote the 
 pastoral plays for the Bohemian Club in San 
 Francisco hardly attempted much more than 
 mere beauty of rhetorical and pictorial effect. 
 Von Wolzogen wrote a play in which all his skill 
 as dramatist was employed, and the result was 
 not only effective in its color and its illusion, 
 but in its action. 
 
 Since Wiesbaden is a town beloved of the 
 present German Emperor, and the natural ad- 
 vantages of the Nerothal wonderful for the pur- 
 poses of such a play, the success of " Die 
 Maibraut " was considerable. 
 
 Whether Von Wolzogen's versatility, his fe- 
 cundity, endangered the lasting qualities of his 
 art, it is too soon to say, for he is still, as it is 
 pleasant to record here, among the living. It 
 is true that, despite the nothing less than tre- 
 mendous volume of serious work he has done 
 since the Uberbrettl' days, it has been hard to 
 erase in some sections of the German public the 
 memory of him, performing his own composi- 
 tions, in variety attire. Upon this detail he did 
 not hesitate to declare himself while visiting 
 America and its many German Societies at end 
 of 1910. He resented the inability of certain 
 people in Germany to forget his red silk coat 
 and his blue breeches, and their heedlessness of
 
 222 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the forty-odd serious books which held his real 
 self far more comprehensively than the passing 
 flirtation with music-hall reform. He deplored, 
 also, the sort of music-hall performer who lat- 
 terly abused the Uberbrettl' as a label, and did 
 things in its name which were as abominable as 
 what the Uberbrettl' had tried to reform. But 
 that does not taint the virtue of the fine idea 
 itself. 
 
 Certain autobiographic hints Von Wolzogen 
 gave while in America are of interest to students 
 of his career. His grandfather was teacher of 
 Schiller's children, and later their guardian, and 
 knew Goethe well. His father and grandfather 
 had part in that great classic period of Weimar 
 and Jena. As for the smaller men, those men 
 against whose dominance the rebels of the 
 'eighties rose, the Geibels, Auerbachs, Boden- 
 stedts and Heyses, Von Wolzogen as a boy saw 
 them much in his father's house, and saw 
 through their small aestheticisms. Von Wolzo- 
 gen's mother was English, and he admits in- 
 heriting from her much of that humor which 
 enabled him to see that just those puny " great 
 men " of the interim period before '85 
 (sketched in my chapter on Liliencron) were 
 not the men to voice the real, vital, vigorous 
 young German nation. 
 
 Von Wolzogen's comedy (1892) " Lum- 
 pengesindel " gave the amusing side of such
 
 ERNST VON WOLZOGEN 223 
 
 a bohemian household as the Hart brothers con- 
 ducted in Berlin in the 'eighties ; but that play 
 has been considered typical of its author's ina- 
 bility to reach the tragic heights in art, for all 
 its tragedy was futile. In one book, " The 
 Successor " (Der Thronfolger), he paints court 
 circles ; in " Ecce Ego," the landed squires ; in 
 " The Derailed " (Die Entgleisten), the officers 
 of the German army ; and so on. His enter- 
 tainment was unfailing, and for the sake of that 
 it was easy to forgive him his lack in the seri- 
 ous or tragic qualities. He never bored you, 
 not for one moment in his long life of artistic 
 activity. He had a gaiety of invention, a fresh- 
 ness of execution, that made him, whether he was 
 rhyming you a song to suit some mood of the 
 moment, or was telling a story, or writing a 
 play, or combining all these arts in a theatre 
 of his own, one of the most unfailing entertain- 
 ers our time has known. 
 
 IN this effort to sketch the evolution of Ger- 
 man literature out of the revolution of the 
 'eighties to the present time, Von Wolzogen 
 serves in his living person as a link from that 
 time to this. For earnestness of intention to 
 declare artistically his own time, his own people, 
 his own self, neither Bierbaum nor any of the 
 others surpassed Von Wolzogen ; and I think he 
 will be remembered for just that. It is safe to
 
 224 MASKS AND MINSTEELS 
 
 assert his value as one who, in opposition 
 to those sesthetic antiquaries and sexless pun- 
 dits of before '85, really accomplished some- 
 thing, really put his life into his art, and 
 came to close quarters with reality, with human- 
 
 ity. ^ 
 
 His case, again, proves another point, which 
 I have already made: the younger men now 
 coming forward seem of smaller size than the 
 men of the storm-and-stress of the Young 
 German period. Von Wolzogen, entertainer 
 rather than great artist that he is, is still more 
 valuable than these younger men who are again 
 falling into formalisms of art. History, of 
 course, repeats these recessions constantly ; and 
 the real impetus from Liliencron and Bierbaum, 
 the two men who most vitally remade German 
 literature in our time, may show itself in the 
 work of a generation beyond our own. 
 
 IN what I have so far written my main hope 
 has been to stir interest in this revival of true 
 minstrelsy in Germany. It was only through 
 those who were most truly minstrels that you 
 caught the note of new Germany ; the others, 
 perfect stylists and well intentioned artists 
 though they might be, voiced little save their 
 own devotion to formulas, and proved little save 
 that oversophistication is as futile in art as in 
 life. As minstrels I believe these Young Ger-
 
 ERNST VON WOLZOGEN 225 
 
 man singers were the purest singers in any 
 tongue during our generation. If I had to 
 point to anything like an equivalent in English 
 I might find it only in Australia. Only there 
 has English been used in the gay and careless 
 musical minstrel fashion to paint properly the 
 people and the place. The life of the bush, of 
 the larrikin, the tea-billy, the dust, the profan- 
 ity and the drink, the sundowners and the select- 
 ors; all that early life of Young Australia is 
 in the songs of the late Victor Daley and many 
 others whom we may roughly call the " Bulletin 
 school." That may not be poetry as the gen- 
 tlemen who measure it academically limit it; 
 but it was true minstrel stuff voicing its place 
 and its people. 
 
 It is nothing more than right that the Syd- 
 ney Bulletin (which also developed the late 
 Phil May) should be mentioned in this connec- 
 tion. It did for those uncouth yet typical bards 
 of the Australian back-blocks and the bush, just 
 what for the Young Germans here emphasized 
 was done by Munich Jugend and Simplicissi- 
 nws. In the earlier volumes of both you will 
 still find the first marginal notes for a his- 
 tory of modern German art and literature. The 
 late Albert Langen of SimpHcissimus and 
 Geo. Hirth of Jugend had their share in 
 this rebirth, and so deserve our recogni- 
 tion.
 
 226 MASKS AND MINSTEELS 
 
 THERE survives, from the Young German 
 period, still one other militant minstrel besides 
 Von Wolzogen, and it is through him that I 
 pass from minstrelsy proper to the domain of 
 the theatre. 
 
 That other is Frank Wedekind.
 
 XII 
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 
 
 IN the domain of the theatre the importance 
 of Germany is now generally admitted. Those 
 ambitions which the younger Germans harbored 
 in the latter years of the nineteenth century 
 came first in the lyric and comic drama to some- 
 thing of which all the world had to take note. 
 It is not my intention here to go back to Suder- 
 mann or Hauptmann, about whom much has al- 
 ready been written in English, and who are not 
 any longer, to my mind, to be counted among 
 the active, progressive forces. It is certain 
 other men, only now, at long last, coming into 
 international recognition, whom I choose to 
 consider typical of the newer German art in the 
 drama. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon world was slow enough in 
 reaching the conclusion that the European 
 drama is most alive in Berlin and the other 
 theatrical centres of Germany. A list of the 
 authors represented in a day or a week of Ber- 
 227
 
 228 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 lin's theatres, in the latter half of 1910, showed 
 these: Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Schiller, 
 Hebbel, Grillparzer, Ibsen, Bjoernson, Shaw, 
 Sudermann, Fulda, Wedekind, Maeterlinck, 
 Capus and Schnitzler. Such listing was, like 
 statistics in general, representative of but half 
 the truth. It did prove the European drama 
 alive in Germany ; but it did not prove the Ger- 
 man drama alive in Europe. With the excep- 
 tion of Wedekind and Schnitzler, the list con- 
 tained no names that really belong to the newer 
 German drama of to-day. 
 
 If we declare Sudermann greater as novelist 
 than playwright, and Hauptmann to have ex- 
 pended before now both his naturalistic bravado 
 and his youthful romanticism having, in- 
 deed, as an expression of youthful Germany 
 never gone farther than " Before Sunrise " 
 (Vor Sonnenaufgang) we may also dismiss 
 briefly a few others who, while their work still 
 recurs upon the German boards, do not seem 
 to me vital enough for our present longer con- 
 templation. Max Halbe, who seemed to be 
 making for fine heights as a dramatist, will 
 scarcely live save in his play " Youth " ( Ju- 
 gend), 1893. Halbe belonged to the circle 
 about the brothers Hart, and his play " Eis- 
 gang " (1892) was done at the Free People's 
 Theatre (Freie Volksbuehne ) . The production 
 of " Youth," refused by most of the important
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 229 
 
 managers, was so successful as to place Halbe 
 momentarily side by side with Hauptmann. 
 Ever after that Halbe was condemned to hear, 
 as each new play of his was produced, that he 
 had not fulfilled the promise in " Youth." He 
 retired from Berlin to the country, but re- 
 turned in 1895 to Munich, where he gained 
 fresh courage for new work in play and story, 
 and what brings him closest to our immediate 
 appreciation here took part in those many 
 artistic revivals which had Munich as headquar- 
 ters. In 1895 Halbe started with Josef Rue- 
 derer the Intimate Theatre (Intimes Theatre), 
 on the boards of which many of the then climb- 
 ing writers and composers appeared as public 
 performers ; and connected with which were 
 such men as Wedekind, Hartleben, and Karl 
 Hauptmann, Gerhardt's brother. 
 
 As you will find Halbe performed often 
 enough to-day in Germany, so will you find 
 Ludwig Fulda. His work has always been dis- 
 tinguished, well-bred, and attentive to form, and 
 it has never been anything greater than that. 
 It has been romantically and rhetorically cor- 
 rect, and it has tried suavely to continue, ac- 
 cording to the etiquette of the moment, the tra- 
 ditions and methods of Grillparzer. Fulda did 
 many things cleverly ; polished fine-sounding 
 epigrams, and adapted Moliere dexterously ; but 
 he is not to be counted as among those who in
 
 230 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 creating anything really national put Germany 
 into the domain of international drama. 
 
 There were, further, Ernst Hardt, born in 
 1876, whose " Tantris the Fool " (Tantris der 
 Narr), a modernization of the Tristan and 
 Isolde story, brought its author some acclaim; 
 Otto Ernst, whose " Flaxmann, Teacher " 
 (Flaxmann als Erzieher) was a sterling bit of 
 characterization from rustic originals, and 
 whose " Youth of To-day " ( Jugend von 
 Heute) contained much bitter satire aimed at 
 modern decadents and pseudo-imitators of 
 Nietzsche ; Meyer Foerster, whose " Alt Heidel- 
 berg " made a great deal of money in England 
 and America as well as in Germany ; and Franz 
 Adam Beyerlein, whose one impressive success, 
 " Zapfenstreich " (Taps), is barred from popu- 
 larity in English countries through its severe 
 faithfulness to German military conditions in 
 barracks and out. 
 
 THE playwrights whom I choose to empha- 
 size as most expressive of the modern German 
 theatre the theatre in which Sudermann and 
 Hauptmann are no longer paramount figures 
 are such men as Frank Wedekind, Ludwig 
 Thoma, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Arthur 
 Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr. Very slowly 
 have these names penetrated to English intelli- 
 gences; yet it is in their work that we may
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 231 
 
 find that which is to-day drawing the attention 
 of the rest of the world to the German theatre. 
 
 FOR several reasons, I begin with Frank 
 Wedekind. He has, for one thing, communi- 
 cated to his dramatic creations the variete 
 ideas, the music-hall style, so to say, which he 
 brought from those early days, at which we 
 have already had a glimpse, when he appeared 
 upon this or that intimate or independent stage 
 as a performer of his own work. Nextly, it is 
 he who has most practically, most brutally, put 
 upon the stage figures and ideas that were 
 profane or barbaric expressions of the lyric 
 unmoralities in Nietzsche. The line from 
 Nietzsche to Wedekind, from the music-hall ex- 
 pression of artistic personality to Wedekind, is 
 direct and not to be mistaken. 
 
 What was theoretically sublime in Nietzsche 
 became the actually bizarre if not ridiculous in 
 Wedekind. 
 
 Wedekind chiefly represents complete divorce 
 from all the old man-made moralities. He and 
 his characters are not so much above those 
 moralities, as outside of them. He treats hu- 
 manity diabolically; there is never any trace of 
 divine pity in him. The music-hall's complete 
 freedom from society's ordinary restraints ; its 
 sheerly physiologic interpretation of life; its 
 entire forgetfulness of ethical or moral reason-
 
 232 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 ableness; are all typified in Wedekind's art. 
 All life is for him a music-hall performance. 
 The effects of things move him ; causes, morals, 
 old labels like " good and evil," or " the wages 
 of sin," do not move him at all. He is the es- 
 sential modern expression, through art, of that 
 savage doctrine in nature which orders that the 
 stronger reptile devour the weaker. Doctrine, 
 however, is the wrong word to apply to Wede- 
 kind; he is as above doctrines as he is outside 
 of the old humanities. He has in him something 
 of Machiavelli, something of Casanova, and the 
 more satanic egoisms of Nietzsche; he remains 
 a strange, uncanny, isolated, abnormal figure, 
 and is yet, in his very remoteness from all nor- 
 malities and all moralities, typical of modern 
 Germany's throwing away from old, too long 
 accepted things. 
 
 It is Wedekind's " Spring's Awakening " 
 (Fruehlings Erwachen) which first brought him 
 into notice beyond the German borders. That 
 tragedy upon our youth's need for sexual il- 
 lumination was brutal and melancholy enough; 
 and will never be without its value for our time ; 
 yet it is mild compared to some of the other 
 plays from his pen. 
 
 MY own first encounter with Wedekind as 
 playwright came in the summer of 1902, much 
 of which I spent in Berlin. Following, as al-
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 233 
 
 ways in those years, the pages of The Island as 
 avidly as possible, I came, in the July number, 
 upon Wedekind's " Box of Pandora " (Buechse 
 der Pandora) printed in its entirety. Impos- 
 sible, to-day, to recall the sensations that stirred 
 in me as I read. Was this a madman, uncannily 
 gifted with a smatter of cosmopolitan tongues, 
 with the very color and gesture of cosmopolitan 
 vice? We moved in an atmosphere of cocottes, 
 confidence men, crooks, women of the streets, 
 and murderers ; the closing scene was of a bru- 
 tality, in its effort to depict a Jack the Ripper 
 at his awful business, which would sicken a 
 police reporter. It was true Wedekind's Eng- 
 lish in this play was fitter for an American bar 
 in Berlin than for those who really knew the 
 language; but the astounding thing was that 
 he used it at all. If English suited certain 
 criminal realities in his play, he gave you Eng- 
 lish; just as he gave you French; just as he 
 gave you the grossest medical allusions that no 
 other had dared put into print before him, how- 
 ever much they might occur in life. It became 
 evident, as I read this astounding production, 
 that this was a writer to whom all things human 
 were vile, and nothing was unprintable. The 
 real conversations of male and female savages 
 of whom so many persist in our times and in 
 the most modern attire were perhaps for the 
 first time set down by Wedekind. The result
 
 234 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 was, as it always has been to squeamish folk, 
 unprintable; all real conversation is unprint- 
 able. 
 
 AN abnormal, an eccentric, Wedekind has al- 
 ways been. He was an eccentric performer, in 
 the music-hall interpretations he gave ; he was 
 eccentric as dramatist. Little that was ab- 
 normal in pathology of sex, or nerves, or san- 
 ity, escaped his treatment as material for plays. 
 He was eccentric, outside of all the elder moral, 
 or critical, or artistic scruples, or even scruples 
 about the public or his own profit. He did not 
 merely satirize his public, as Shaw did ; he in- 
 sulted it, both as playwright and as performer. 
 Neither censors nor jailors lessened the fury 
 with which he imposed his eccentric ego upon 
 his time in Germany. Against the time-serving 
 of Sudermann and the dreamy complaining of 
 Hauptmann, Wedekind loomed as some vast 
 irresistible monster, some Juggernaut that 
 moved ruthlessly on over the blood and bones of 
 the playgoing public. He cared as little for 
 style or form in his plays as he cared for mor- 
 als. For him, as for Meredith, the " chaos il- 
 lumined by lightning " of Wilde applies ; his 
 dramatic work is more chaotic than any other 
 in our time, and yet has flashes, moments, of 
 genius, that irritate by their very impertinence. 
 He treats humanity as an aggregation of
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 235 
 
 atoms ; it amuses him to galvanize those atoms 
 into this or that attitude. He has no coward- 
 ices of texts and teachings, no hymns to sing to 
 humanity. We are marionettes for his amuse- 
 ment ; that is all. 
 
 WEDEKIND'S life has been as extraordinary as 
 his work. Indeed, if we would fully understand 
 the one, we must examine the other. They must 
 be taken together, as in the case of Verlaine, or 
 of Wilde. Only, as against the apparent con- 
 tradictions in those other cases, Wedekind's life 
 and his work have always had eccentricities and 
 abnormalities in common. 
 
 He was born, 1864, in Hanover. His father 
 had been a physician in the Orient, one of the 
 rebels of '48, gone to America, and been a pio- 
 neer in San Francisco, where he married. Frank 
 Wedekind's mother was of a Wurttemberg 
 family ; she had reached San Francisco in the 
 adventuring vagabondage of the stage artist. 
 Wedekind senior made money in land, and re- 
 turned to Hanover, where Frank was born. 
 The family moved to Lenzburg, where Frank's 
 first youth had its untrammeled way. The pas- 
 sion for writing was his from the first, but his 
 father made him study law in Munich. There, 
 however, he consorted only with artists and 
 players. His studies shifted to Zurich, where 
 with others of his own age he started the so-
 
 236 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 called Ulrich-Hutten circle, furthering the 
 cause of modernity in literature. To this circle 
 belonged such as Karl Henckell, John Henry 
 Mackay, Otto Erich Hartleben and the two 
 brothers Hauptmann. Wedekind here came 
 first into touch with Strindberg. In 1888, his 
 father dead, Wedekind returned to Munich with 
 his patrimony. Artistic ferment tossed him 
 hither and thither; he went to Paris, and to 
 London, flinging away his patrimony and much 
 of his physical and spiritual health. He 
 learned, then, as Maximilian Harden has 
 pointed out, all the centres of European cul- 
 ture, all the sinks of its perversity and its 
 crookedness. He squandered his money and his 
 beliefs ah'ke recklessly. In 1891 he returned 
 again to Munich, in funds, the old family home 
 in Lenzburg having been sold. 
 
 The first editor to recognize Wedekind was 
 Albert Langen, of Simplicissimus, who took him 
 on to the staff of that weekly. Karl Heine, of 
 the Leipzig Literary Society, also took up 
 Wedekind, and put on such plays of his as 
 "Earth Spirit" (Der Erdgeist), 1895, "The 
 Tenor " (Der Kammersaenger), 1899, and 
 " The Love Potion " (Der Liebestrank), 1899, 
 in which Wedekind himself played important 
 parts. These were his first successes, both as 
 writer and public performer. An action for 
 lese-majeste was brought against him about
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 237 
 
 this time ; he fled to Paris ; but eventually gave 
 himself up, and served a sentence in the fortress 
 of Koenigstein. This episode brought him 
 more notoriety than all he had accomplished in 
 art. Then came the Uberbrettl' period, in 
 which Wedekind was active as singer and per- 
 former, as has already been told on an earlier 
 page. The variety theatres of Berlin, of Mu- 
 nich, and many other towns knew him. In 1904 
 he joined the forces of Max Reinhardt at the 
 German Theatre (Deutsches Theater) in Ber- 
 lin, acting in such pieces of his own as 
 " Spring's Awakening " (Fruehlings Er- 
 wachen), written in 1891, " Earth Spirit," and 
 "Hidalla," 1904. 
 
 In 1906 Wedekind married Tillie Niemann, 
 an actress, and in 1908 left Berlin to settle 
 again in Munich. The name Wedekind is rich 
 in talents besides that of Frank. His sister 
 Erika is well-known as a brilliant singer; a 
 brother Donald aped Wedekind's career, at least 
 in literature, but lacked Frank's robust phys- 
 ical and mental equipment. Donald wandered in 
 America, retired to a monastery, wrote a weird 
 novel, drifted from editorial desk to music-hall 
 platform, and finally shot himself in Vienna in 
 1908. 
 
 ONLY in some of his first verses will you 
 find trace of an idealistic youthfulness hav-
 
 238 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 ing once dwelt in Wedekind. He began, as 
 Conradi, as Nietzsche, with some yearning for 
 the illimitable beauties that spring seems to 
 conjure in the human soul; the actualities of 
 life appear to have buffeted all those fine fancies 
 out of him at the first touch, and forever. In 
 his later work there is not one single link that 
 binds him to his human kind. Joy of life died 
 in him so young, that he has forgotten that it 
 still exists in others. 
 
 What has always been to the fore in his pre- 
 occupation with the sexual relation between the 
 sexes is the brutal, the diabolic, in them. His 
 bitter, cynic irony has played about every nor- 
 mal and abnormal gesture of human passion 
 that experience or imagination can conceive. 
 He is the great Denier of our time. He denies 
 morals, denies custom, denies the laws and scru- 
 ples of society and art. Whether the barriers 
 of nicety and decency to use words intelli- 
 gible to the polite ! which Wedekind has 
 kicked down can ever again be put up as per- 
 manently as before in art, is a fine question. He 
 denies the ideal, denies even what is. 
 
 It was about 1890 that Wedekind came to 
 the front as Denier. He denied and defied the 
 naturalism of Gerhardt Hauptmann. In his 
 first edition, in that year, of " The Young 
 World " (Die Junge Welt) not circulated pub- 
 licly, he caricatured Hauptmann under the label
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKEND 239 
 
 " Meyer," referred to naturalism as " a govern- 
 ess " and wrote such lines as this in his Pro- 
 logue: 
 
 "What's in these farces and these tragedies? 
 Tame and domestic animals, so sweet in manners, 
 They love a vegetarian diet, and forever purr 
 Just like those others, purring, in the stalls: 
 One hero cannot stand a bit of drink (College Cramp- 
 ton), 
 
 Another wonders if he truly loves (Alfred Loth), 
 The third despairs of all that's in the world, 
 For five long acts you hear him make complaint 
 
 (Poor Heinrich) 
 
 And not a soul to cut his plaint and throat at once ! 
 The real, wild and lovely animal 
 You will not see, kind friends, save only here." 
 
 Nothing, indeed, could be farther apart than 
 Hauptmann's art and Wedekind's. Wedekind 
 stopped for no realities ; his characters were as 
 chaotic as the dialogue; all was on the abnor- 
 mal and screaming note of the affiche larger 
 than life. The voice was the same in a hundred 
 of his characters, the voice of Wedekind. His 
 caricatures sketched the living, but never filled 
 them with breath. As he has no concern for 
 methods in art, so, too, he never moves you 
 more than some chaotic monstrosity might move 
 you. Yet, like chaos, like all monstrous things, 
 there is something so vast, so inhuman in him, 
 that the world must eventually take note of him. 
 
 IT is in the volume " Countess Russalka " 
 (Fflrstin Russalka), 1897, that one should look
 
 240 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 for the first signs of Wedekind's artistic temper. 
 This volume held stories, poems, and panto- 
 mimes. It gave some of his earliest, and also 
 some of his most characteristic work. 
 
 " Spring's Awakening " will probably live 
 longer than any other Wedekind play. Brutal 
 as it is, it still has a vestige of idealism, of which 
 the later Wedekind retains no trace. It was a 
 children's tragedy of the most awful, this play, 
 and no greater indictment of the folly of letting 
 hypocrisy and shamefulness keep the young of 
 both sexes blind to what sex means has ever 
 been written. In quite recent times this matter 
 of the awakening of sex, of the widespread and 
 disastrous prudery about diseases of sex, has 
 gradually been creeping into publicity in 
 Anglo-Saxon countries. Here and there a med- 
 ical man courageous enough to tell the truth 
 has brought an indictment against the way 
 adults conspire to pretend diseases of sex as 
 non-existent, and against the way children are 
 brought up in ignorance of sexual functions. 
 Wedekind was the first to bring that indictment 
 through dramatic art. 
 
 One of the stories in " Fiirstin Russalka " 
 had already outlined the subject of " Spring's 
 Awakening." That interim period of pubes- 
 cence, when youth is torn between its dread of 
 the unknown and its desires, was the theme 
 which first moved Wedekind in his story of
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 241 
 
 " Rabbi Esra " in the " Russalka " collection, 
 and later in the play. Nothing could be more 
 awful, more tragic, than the manner in which 
 his play exposes the injustice which parents do 
 their children by letting them stay in ignorance 
 concerning all the body's natural functions. 
 Almost every hypocrisy common in every mod- 
 ern country's attitude toward children is flayed 
 bitterly by Wedekind. One character in an 
 early story declares that she would never have 
 supposed " that one could bear children without 
 having been married " ; Countess Russalka her- 
 self was of the steadfast belief that God had 
 given her parents children because they had been 
 married in church, and not because early in 
 their married life they lived together. Frau 
 Bergmann in the last act of " Spring's Awaken- 
 ing " explains to the 15-year-old Wendla that 
 the latter has a child, only to have the latter 
 exclaim : " But, mother, that isn't possible. 
 Why, I'm not married ! " Whereon comes 
 her curt reproach : " Oh, mother, why didn't 
 you tell me everything? " and Frau Bergmann' s 
 reply : " I dealt with you exactly as my dear 
 mother dealt with me." In that latter fright- 
 ful confession, you have the whole bitter irony 
 of Wedekind's indictment. It is the curse of 
 Yesterday that has put its pall of ignorance 
 upon so many of these danger-spots in To-day's 
 consciousness ; in the contrast between that re-
 
 242 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 ply of Frau Bergmann's and the frightful 
 tragedy overwhelming the children in this play 
 lies the whole difference between the old hypoc- 
 risies and the enlightenment for which all our 
 modern world is still too slowly striving. All 
 the mongrel results of half-culture, all the false 
 shame and hypocrisy preventing parent and 
 child from dealing straightforwardly with the 
 truth in things physical, are castigated in this 
 play. 
 
 Now that " Spring's Awakening " has, in a 
 translation by Count Robert d'Humieres (an 
 admirer, one recalls, of Mr. Kipling), been per- 
 formed in Paris at the Theatre des Arts, and 
 rumors of its production have even been scat- 
 tered abroad in America, where, too, a printed 
 English version with the sub-title, " A Tragedy 
 of Childhood," is now to be had, one need not 
 now do more than brief the actual plot of it 
 very curtly. 
 
 The style of the play, as throughout all 
 Wedekind's plays, is largely in monologue, and 
 rapid strokes of characterization. Nothing is 
 filled in ; everything is outline ; all the charac- 
 ters, young and old, talk alike, talk sheer Wede- 
 kind. We see two boys at school, overhear their 
 frank wondering discussions about sex and its 
 impulses. We see a girl, Wendla, whose wonder 
 about a married sister's baby is put off with all 
 the old lying hypocrisies; even after she has
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 243 
 
 shared a hayloft with one of the schoolboys, 
 sheltered from a storm, she knows no more than 
 she did. It is only when Wendla dies, in giving 
 abortive birth to that schoolboy's child, that 
 she utters the wail : " Oh, mother, why didn't 
 you tell me everything? " That schoolboy is 
 eventually sent to a reformatory, where the hor- 
 rible corruption prevailing among his fellows 
 only aggravates his hideous state of mind and 
 body. As for the other schoolboy, he has shot 
 himself because he has found nobody to explain 
 to him what the impulses, the thoughts, the 
 amazements and questionings of the period be- 
 tween boyhood and maturity mean. Upon all 
 this actual hideousness torn from the life and 
 youth of our own time, Wedekind gave us a 
 grotesque, allegorical closing scene, in which 
 the boy Melchior, escaped from the reforma- 
 tory, appears, to utter over Wendlcfs grave the 
 words : " Blessed are the pure in heart." 
 Moritz, the other boy, appears, carrying his 
 head on his arm. Ensues a conversation be- 
 tween the quick and the dead, which only deep- 
 ens the horror, the intensity of bitterness in the 
 whole play. The scene, on the stage, is even 
 more terrible than the closing of Laparra's 
 opera, " La Habanera." 
 
 IF in " Spring's Awakening " our modern 
 world first came to realize Wedekind's concen-
 
 244 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 tration upon sex, that concentration was to be 
 expressed even more forcibly afterwards. There 
 was, in the children's tragedy referred to, still 
 much of the unquenched idealist in Wedekind; 
 indeed, it was what gleamed through the lines 
 suggesting the bitter way in which the great 
 world of experience had brutally upset the ideal 
 in Wedekind's own youth that gave this play 
 much of its power. The play was applicable 
 wherever old hypocrisies between parent and 
 child still linger; but the most tremendously 
 international creation of Wedekind was to come 
 later, in the character of Lulu, the heroine of 
 " Earth Spirit " and its sequel, " The Box of 
 Pandora." 
 
 Lulu is of all time, of all climes. She is the 
 Eternal Woman, in whose body the world, the 
 flesh and the devil reign supreme. In the ap- 
 parent chaos of her contradictory passions are 
 all those eternal femininities that defy the clas- 
 sifications of society or of science. She would 
 give her body to the most brutal ruffian, the 
 while her spirit soared to strange heights of 
 sensuous finesse. She is the elemental female, 
 the essence of her sex. She has the instincts 
 of the primal animal, and these have driven her 
 to cultivate all her qualities to the w'th degree 
 in order that she may most fully express, most 
 fully enjoy, her body's possibilities. Lulu is 
 the eternal Scarlet Woman of the sectarian's
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 245 
 
 nightmare. She is the lure of the flesh, made 
 doubly potent with a gleam of the most refined 
 culture that modernity can contrive. 
 
 Do you know the appalling picture by Feli- 
 cien Rops, wherein Woman and all she typified 
 to that most ironical artist is shown naked, save 
 for a bandage on her eyes, and guided by a 
 gross and vile pig? From that conception of 
 the dominantly physical in the female human 
 animal Wedekind's conception of Lulu differs 
 only in that he does not even bandage her eyes. 
 She goes open-eyed and joyously into that bat- 
 tle of the sexes which to this German dramatist 
 has ever been the paramount part of life. 
 
 Lulu was a daughter of the people, who rose 
 thence from one story of society to another 
 without ever completely feeling at home on any 
 etage. Literally she was of the people; she 
 knew neither parent ; she was of the earth, the 
 " Earth Spirit " truly ; its soil clung to her 
 always. First a flower-girl; then adventuress, 
 then a lady in society, she goes always forward 
 upon her single business, that of giving her 
 sexuality one triumph after another over the 
 opposing sex. She deceives this man, ruins 
 another, murders another. She is the eternal 
 temptress ; she embodies the everlasting strug- 
 gle between the sexes; she is untamable, merci- 
 less, and seems immortal. In the sequel to
 
 246 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 " Earth Spirit " Lulu has definitely become a 
 professional general in the bitter war against 
 the male. In " The Box of Pandora " we find 
 her released from the prison to which the mur- 
 der in the other play had brought her; though 
 free from that constraint, she is now more and 
 more the slave of her own passions and sinks 
 from one phase of courtesanship to another. 
 There is no abomination of vice or extortion to 
 which she does not come, both actively and pas- 
 sively; she exhausts every iniquitous corner of 
 every capital of the world's vice; mires lower 
 and lower, in Paris, and then London ; to end, 
 at last, as streetwalker in a London garret, mur- 
 dered by a Jack the Ripper in one of the most 
 appalling scenes ever written in our time in any 
 tongue. 
 
 BESIDES the plays already named there are 
 " Mine-Haha," first printed in The Island in 
 1901, which treats specifically of the physical 
 education of girls, castigating life and conduct 
 in the boarding-schools and colleges for young 
 women much in the " Spring's Awakening " 
 manner ; " The Marquis of Keith," wherein a 
 sort of superman, captain of huge fantastic 
 schemes of financial " promotion," stumbles 
 from his eminence over the dead body of a 
 woman who had loved him too well ; " Such Is 
 Life" (So 1st das Leben), 1902, in which a
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 247 
 
 dethroned king turns gipsy comedian, plays 
 court fool to his usurping successor, and sees 
 his own daughter in love with that successor's 
 son. About to be exiled so that the two young 
 people may marry, the court fool declares his 
 real kingship, is not believed, and dies in his 
 child's arms with the words : " I abdicate, not 
 as king, but as man." " Such Is Life " is now 
 to be read in an English version ; its interest 
 is enhanced by the obviously autobiographic 
 reflections upon Wedekind's own career as 
 artist. 
 
 In " The Marquis of Keith " occurred the 
 two aphorisms, typical of Wedekind's outlook: 
 " Life is a toboggan-slide," and " Morality is 
 the most profitable business on earth." 
 
 Then came in 1904 " Hidalla," and last Jan- 
 uary in Leipzig I bought " Oaha," which was 
 issued in 1909, and in September, 1910, the one- 
 act " Mit Allen Hunden Gehetzt " was added to 
 my collection. " Oaha " was in five acts, and 
 depicted, with that revolting brutality which 
 marks this man's work, the conduct and charac- 
 ters in the office of an illustrated satiric period- 
 ical of to-day. The gross lampooning of the 
 business of lampooning, so to put it, was as 
 monstrously inhuman as anything Wedekind 
 has ever done. Since in most cases biographical 
 or autobiographical texts have existed for the 
 Wedekind outbursts all his living and writing
 
 248 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 have had the character of seismic explosions ! 
 one can only suppose that the methods of such 
 a paper as Munich Simplicissimu$, on which 
 Wedekind himself began his artistic career, 
 gave " Oaha " its impulse. The contributors, 
 the editors, the manager, the artists, in this 
 " Oaha " concern are all of the usual grotesque 
 Wedekind inhumanity; they have as little re- 
 gard for the public as for one another. The 
 play takes its name from an awful deaf-and- 
 dumb creature who supplies the " lines " of 
 mordant wit that accompany the world-stag- 
 gering designs of the artist who has helped 
 make the paper famous. The only human 
 sound this monstrosity, that has to be wheeled 
 into the editorial rooms, can make is something 
 like : Oaha ! There, in brief, you have Wedekind 
 in his essential brutality. 
 
 As for "Mit Allen Hunden Gehetzt," the 
 title is untranslatable unless we devise some 
 similarity like " At the Last Ditch." This is a 
 hideous little episode of a man who claims from 
 another man's wife her body as bribe against his 
 making public a crime of which her husband has 
 been guilty. The woman notes in her tormentor 
 the signs of a passion so abnormal that she de- 
 termines to try it to the breaking point ; she 
 so shamelessly offers her utterly naked body to 
 him that in the abnormal excess of his passion 
 he shoots himself. There, again, you have the
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 249 
 
 sort of idea that only Wedekind is capable of 
 using as stuff for drama. 
 
 Further have appeared a satire called " Cen- 
 sorship"; poems, "The Four Seasons "; "Fire- 
 work," a few stories; a funeral pantomime in 
 three scenes called " Death and the Devil," and, 
 quite lately, a little prose dissertation upon 
 " The Art of the Theatre " (Shauspielkunst). 
 About this declaration of Wedekind's dramatic 
 theories the critic Alfred Kerr remarked that it 
 proved at least one thing definitely, namely, that 
 Wedekind's effectiveness was part deserved, and 
 partly sheer luck. It is certain that Wedekind, 
 amazing eccentric in the modern drama as he is, 
 can express himself effectively only in that 
 drama, not about it. Nothing of his brutal 
 abnormality, nothing of his isolation away from 
 all humanity, is in what he writes about dra- 
 matic construction or about criticism. He is 
 a Juggernaut who flings human puppets hither 
 and thither, but he cannot write about the Jug- 
 gernaut's wheels. 
 
 THE most individual talent of the theatre in 
 our time, perhaps, is this Frank Wedekind, and 
 yet as full of faults as of strength. All his 
 characters talk his own tongue ; all utter mono- 
 logues; there is never dialogue. Everything 
 is sacrificed for a biting cynicism, for a mordant 
 caricature; completeness or balance are never
 
 250 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 achieved; everywhere the jagged and raw 
 edges of chaotic whims and passions obtrude in 
 his work. In the moment of the deepest trag- 
 edy he grins like the most insensate clown ; and 
 into his absurdest clowning he infuses the bitter- 
 est irony. Even in those lightest moods which 
 he expressed in the ballads he wrote for the 
 Uberbrettl's uses, some of which are in the 
 " German Chansons " collection, you will find 
 these contrasts ; he is never gay without a sour 
 conclusion. 
 
 No artist in our time, or perhaps in any time, 
 has gone farther to the extreme, in revolt from 
 his embittered youth, than Wedekind. If at 
 first his bitterness was a mask to conceal the 
 hurt of his young manhood, it became even- 
 tually the man himself, an inseparable part of 
 his ego. That he has been able to make that 
 ego stream so strongly upon the outer world of 
 international art, proves him a dramatic force 
 of truly continental calibre. There are those, 
 of course, who find Wedekind simply the last 
 human word in that degeneration once put into 
 circulation as a phrase for the general abuse; 
 those who murmur of Krafft-Ebing, and of 
 Nietzsche dying in a madhouse. They declare 
 the profitlessness of putting into plays charac- 
 ters and actions which, after all, are not typical 
 but abnormal. They do not deny that such 
 people, such incidents, such life, as are in Wede-
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 251 
 
 kind's plays, exist ; but they question the value 
 of putting them into play or print. Against 
 which it is to be remarked that even if they only 
 recorded the utterest abnormalities, from the 
 most inhuman standpoint, these plays of Wede- 
 kind will have to be reckoned with by the future 
 student of to-day's civilization. In that larger 
 reckoning our abnormalities as well as our nor- 
 malities must figure. 
 
 Students of psychology, moreover, may eas- 
 ily enough illumine the case of Wedekind to suit 
 their theories. To Wedekind, as we have seen, 
 humanity has never been other than atoms under 
 a microscope. To hold humanity under the 
 microscope is exactly the method of the con- 
 scious psychologist ; he notes actions, causes 
 and effects ; he applies his observations, deduces 
 from them ; the human machine becomes obvious 
 and simple to him. Wedekind may, then, by 
 some be held consciously or unconsciously to 
 enact the psychologist in his drama ; not only to 
 let the atoms move under his microscope, but to 
 let us, the playgoers, watch the very process of 
 psychologic exposition. All this, as I said, if 
 you are able, in what seems to others only chao- 
 tic, to find psychology. 
 
 Whatever were the first influences upon Wede- 
 kind, as Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the French 
 writers, essentially it was his own life that fash- 
 ioned him to eventual individualism as artist.
 
 252 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 If in matter he occasionally tried paths that had 
 been trodden in Scandinavia or France, in man- 
 ner he was never anything but grotesquely him- 
 self; he scorned any pattern whatsoever; his 
 work was nothing but the eruption, the ebulli- 
 tion of his ego and its ideas. Even in matter he 
 surpassed in unscrupulousness and disregard for 
 old shames, old restraints, anything that others 
 had done. By comparison Strindberg's " Frau- 
 lein Julie " seems almost dainty, and the pseudo- 
 medical revelations in the novels of D'Annun- 
 zio seem packed in saccharine rhetoric. 
 
 LET me end this glimpse at Wedekind by 
 harking back to that Rops sketch which so 
 vitally gives the playwright's essential attitude 
 toward woman. That same picture outlines a 
 curious preoccupation which runs through 
 everything he ever wrote. Preoccupation, 
 namely, with the human body, especially the 
 human body's gait and gestures. 
 
 Wedekind's intense joy in the body is as 
 pagan as that of the Greeks, but expressed far 
 more in terms of literal physics. For him there 
 is no veiling the essential thing itself by phrases 
 about a " human form divine," " antique boy- 
 worship of the Greeks," or even the allusiveness 
 of a Gautier declaring that " a woman who has 
 wit enough to be beautiful has wit enough." 
 In him no tenor murmurs about " fair boys "
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 253 
 
 who are " lovely as Antinous." He goes 
 straight to the rude core of man's delight in 
 woman's body. If he himself declared once that 
 " life is a toboggan-slide," we must, as we ex- 
 amine his paramount obsession, declare that in 
 him the cult of the human body is chiefly ex- 
 pressed in intense devotion to woman's every 
 gesture, every motion of her gait. Prince 
 Escerny said of Lulu : " When she dances her 
 solo, she becomes drunk with her own beauty, 
 with which she is in love up to the ears ! " To 
 Wedekind, as to Heine, the real Song of Songs 
 in this our day is the song in a woman's 
 form. 
 
 Through the most grotesque situations that 
 occur between the extraordinary people in his 
 plays noblemen, trapeze performers, adven- 
 turers, cocottes, and school children the idea 
 that only in a perfect body can the perfect 
 spirit dwell rings out. The girl Hidaila, after 
 all the years she has spent in seclusion with 
 many other girls in that strange educational 
 institution pictured in " Mine-Haha," recalls of 
 her fellows nothing, nothing save their gait. 
 Not Felicien Rops himself has expressed the 
 sheer animality of the female form as has Wede- 
 kind ; the Belgian could not get the flowing 
 vividness of motion into his strokes that the 
 German has put into his prose. The case of 
 Hidaila is nothing but a girl's education in wor-
 
 254 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 ship of her own body. The gradual dawning 
 in her of appreciation for the suavity of her 
 limbs, of " that joy which came to her as the 
 consciousness of her own body came to her, and 
 which found vent again in every slightest ges- 
 ture," is typical of this trait in Wedekind's art. 
 Even in early verses in the " Countess Rus- 
 salka " collection was the line addressed to a 
 girl : " Your irresistibility is in your legs . . ." 
 and in the " Galathea " ballad (German Chan- 
 sons) he declared that he " Yearned to kiss your 
 knees, Spelling as they do temptation. . . ." 
 Of gait and rhythm in the body we find this in 
 " Mine-Haha " : " A person's walk is not an ac- 
 cidental thing. It depends directly on the way 
 the body is built. . . . Human gait has its 
 rhythm that is not to be expressed in words, 
 that can only be felt. From this rhythm you 
 may easily reconstruct the entire body." 
 
 This instinct for bodily rhythm Wedekind 
 put among the vital attributes of his elemental 
 female, Lulu. The rhythm of her own body 
 moves Lulu to a very passion, a need, for dan- 
 cing; if for one evening she fails to give her 
 dance, she admits : " I dream all night that I 
 am dancing, and next day every bone in me 
 aches." Her body excites not only in others but 
 in herself, " the maddest excitement." One, a 
 poet, praises her body thus : " Through this 
 gown your stature is as a symphony to me.
 
 DRAMA AND WEDEKIND 255 
 
 These fine ankles are as a Cantabile; this rav- 
 ishing curve, and this knee, are as a Capriccio ; 
 and this the mighty Andante of voluptuous- 
 ness. . . ." 
 
 As we remember the emphasis on these quali- 
 ties in body and gait that runs through all 
 Wedekind writes, those early " Pantomime 
 Dances " in the " Fiirstin Russalka " volume 
 come more and more to express Wedekind's real 
 attitude toward life. That attitude is one of 
 inhuman disdain. Before his cynically distort- 
 ing mirror he lets all lif e pass ; all are equal 
 before that ironic reflector. His relentless de- 
 termination to fling his figures about into 
 frightful and abnormal postures, detracts from 
 our ability to feel anything of his as a complete 
 work of art. Wedekind is as chaotic as Nature 
 herself; there is no notion absurder than that 
 Nature is logical or artistic in the petty sense. 
 The sheerly profane expression of Nietzsche's 
 most inhuman egoism is Wedekind. Humanity 
 has moved his pity as much as it has moved 
 Vesuvius when that volcano was in eruption. 
 
 To further his conception of all life as an 
 expression of the body, either for brutality or 
 beauty, he has sacrificed not alone casual char- 
 acters and types in ordinary human society, but 
 most of the actual men and women whom he has 
 known in the flesh. There is hardly a play of 
 his that has not some gross, hideous version of
 
 256 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 a real and well-known personage. What makes 
 all this the more frightful is that some truth is 
 in even the most brutal of Wedekind's apparent 
 distortions. Have we not heard, for many 
 years, the sententious : " In the most civilized, 
 the most sophisticated of us, dwells still the 
 primal brute, the savage. But no man dares 
 proclaim the real thoughts and words of that 
 brute part of us." That is just what Wedekind 
 has dared to do: he has laid bare all the brute 
 in normal, as well as in abnormal mankind. If 
 he has gone to the other extreme has refused 
 to see that in us human creatures there is also 
 something beside the brute he has none the 
 less perfectly fulfilled the old artistic law that 
 you must always, to bring your point home, tell 
 not only the truth but more than the truth: 
 you must exaggerate. Wedekind has exagger- 
 ated the brutal qualities in us, until he has made 
 us shudder. He is eccentric and perverse; the 
 tragic comedian of the abnormal; whether he 
 is genius of psychology or only genius of chaos, 
 he has gashed the irremediable savagery of our 
 time, surviving through centuries of so-called 
 civilization, so deeply upon the theatre and 
 upon literature that he may survive when time- 
 serving photographers, or complaining ideal- 
 ists, are forgotten.
 
 xni 
 
 LUDWIG THOMA'S " MORAL " 
 
 LUDWIG THOMA is another whose first fruits 
 were given the world through Simplicissimus. 
 As playwright Thoma comes into our reckoning 
 here through his one comedy, of the year 1909, 
 called " Moral." His reputation had chiefly 
 been that of humorist, and his stories, sometimes 
 as brief as anecdotes, sometimes of novelette 
 size, have been largely concerned with the peas- 
 ant and burgess characters of Bavaria. He was 
 born in Oberammergau in January, 1867. Some 
 of his collections of short stories, as " Laus- 
 bubengeschichten," are nothing less than fa- 
 mous in Germany, and have sold tremendously. 
 Than the humor and vivid characterization in 
 such a book as " Kleinstadtgeschichten " 
 (Tales of Small Towns) I know little finer in 
 the entire " village " province of literature. 
 
 But the three-act comedy " Moral " is what 
 gives him title to rank as a dramatist deserving 
 international appreciation. This comedy in 
 three acts goes, in the same field, as deep as 
 Shaw's " Mrs. Warren's Profession," but it is 
 267
 
 258 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 lighter, more truly stuff for laughter. No 
 country where hypocrisy or puritanism prevail 
 as factors in social and municipal conduct 
 should be spared the corrective acid of this 
 play. 
 
 The scene opens at the house of Beermann, 
 who is the president of the local Society for the 
 Prevention of Vice. All the local pillars of so- 
 ciety are gathered together in festive compan- 
 ionship; there are card play and gossip. 
 
 Out of the talk at the card-tables emerges this 
 essential bit of news: the police have just ar- 
 rested a lady whose hospitality has been some- 
 what notorious, but whose patronage has been 
 of the most distinguished sort. As one of the 
 guests at Beermann' 's puts it, " People have 
 been in the habit of relaxing their too tense 
 morals a bit in her house. I suppose the police 
 had to see that the grown-up children with bald 
 heads and whiskers were protected from 
 that." Beermann grows more nervous as the 
 conversation goes on. Some one remarks that 
 the police are likely to get into trouble over the 
 thing ; because " one mustn't shake the founda- 
 tions of the people's belief in the privileged 
 classes. That is one of our most cherished pos- 
 sessions. . . . This case is peculiarly danger- 
 ous, because this lady kept a diary, and that 
 diary has been seized." Beermann can play 
 cards no longer, he begins to pace about, and
 
 LUDWIG THOMA'S "MORAL" 259 
 
 finally asks the woman's name. " Ninon, Ninon 
 d'Hauteville " they tell him, and he, more shaken 
 than ever, asks : " And you say she kept a 
 diary ? " so that his wife wonders : " What con- 
 cern is it of yours? " and the act closes on his 
 retort : 
 
 " Am I president of the Anti-Vice Society, or 
 am I not?" 
 
 The second act takes place in police head- 
 quarters. There are scenes between various of- 
 ficials, contrasting the rigorous demands of 
 bureaucratic officialism with the demands of that 
 unwritten law protecting " those Higher Up." 
 These scenes apply in every country alike. 
 Then comes the woman d'Hauteville, protesting 
 against the infamy of her arrest. She is full 
 of darkest hints. " If you only knew who it was 
 that had to hide himself in the wardrobe when 
 they were searching my place! If you only 
 knew ! " The police think to browbeat her by 
 telling her they have her diary, so they do not 
 really need her further confession. They press 
 her to tell the name of the person who hid in 
 the wardrobe, to point it out among the other 
 names in the book. She laughs and declares 
 some of her guests were of such degree that they 
 came incognito, and even incog, their names 
 were not set down. The police accomplish 
 nothing in their interview with her. 
 
 Beerma/nn arrives in great excitement, to pro-
 
 260 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 test against having the contents of the diary 
 made public. Public morality, he declares, de- 
 mands that such disclosures be avoided; there 
 might be most estimable fathers and husbands 
 in that list; whole families might be made un- 
 happy, and so on. The police officials fancy he 
 has come to congratulate them, as president of 
 the Anti-Vice Society, on their energetic action 
 against the d'Hauteville person. They tell him 
 not to be anxious; the diary will not be made 
 public except in court, when this case comes up. 
 Beermarm protests more than ever. Ensues this 
 bit of dialogue : 
 
 Beermann: It's not the police's business to 
 provoke such a huge scandal as this. It shakes 
 the people's respect for us. 
 
 The Police Official: These are the gentlemen 
 (tapping the diary) who provoked the scandal. 
 
 Beermann: That's not a scandal if one of us 
 lets himself go a bit on the quiet. It's not a 
 scandal until you go shouting it out for Tom, 
 Dick and Harry to hear. ... I tell you, this 
 thing mustn't be done ! 
 
 The Police Official: Mr. Beermann, all honor 
 to the humane idea that evidently prompts you. 
 Still, you must admit that we are only acting on 
 behalf of those classes you have in mind. 
 
 Beermann : No. 
 
 The Police Official: I say yes. Two weeks 
 ago the best people here started a Society that
 
 LUDWIG THOMA'S "MORAL" 261 
 
 insists on the need for greater strictness toward 
 immorality. 
 
 Beermann: Toward immorality among the 
 lower classes, where the thing too easily becomes 
 license. As president, I suppose I ought to 
 know what we wanted. 
 
 .... (He returns to this in a later speech) 
 Last night, as I was thinking about what a dis- 
 aster this thing would be, I asked myself the 
 question, Which is the more important: To 
 have morals, or to have people believe in our 
 morals ? 
 
 The Police Official: And you found no an- 
 swer ? 
 
 Beermann: Oh, yes, I came to the clear con- 
 clusion that it is far more important if the peo- 
 ple believe in our morals. 
 
 The Police Official: You didn't need a Soci- 
 ety for that. 
 
 Beermann: All the more. Being moral is 
 something I can manage in my room by myself ; 
 but there's no educational value in that. The 
 important thing is to declare one's moral con- 
 victions in public. That works beneficially upon 
 the family, upon the state. 
 
 The Police Official: I must say that side of 
 it hadn't occurred to me. 
 
 Beermann: Just consider: it's the same with 
 morals as with religion. One must always give 
 the impression that there is such a thing, and
 
 262 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 each must believe that the other has it. Do you 
 suppose there would still be such a thing as 
 religion, if the church dealt with our sins in 
 public? She forgives them in silence; and the 
 state too ought to be as shrewd as that. 
 
 Beermarm eventually manages to steal the 
 diary, in which, of course, his name is with all 
 the other respectable fathers of families in the 
 place. The police president arrives to give all 
 his underlings a vigorous raking-over for lack 
 of tact in dealing with the d'Hauteville case. 
 The person who hid in the wardrobe turns out 
 to be the Highest Personage in the land, that 
 Man Higher Up to use the terms of the 
 American politically controlled police whom 
 it is everybody's business to protect at all haz- 
 ards. The police has everlastingly put its foot 
 into a most dangerous mess ; the problem even- 
 tually is how to hush up the d'Hauteville. It is 
 she who finally dominates the entire situation. 
 Upon her depends the safety and peace of the 
 whole community. She can shatter, with a 
 word, all the family happiness, and all the pop- 
 ular trust in the governing classes. The thing 
 to do is get her out of the place. For that, a 
 large sum of money will have to be paid to her 
 as indemnity. 
 
 That sum is furnished by the president of the 
 Anti-Vice Society, Beermann!
 
 LUDWIG THOMA'S "MORAL" 263 
 
 THE pertinence of Thoma's play to every 
 modern capital of hypocrisy is obvious. We 
 have only to recall such cases as the Metropol- 
 itan Opera House refusal to present Strauss 
 and Wilde's " Salome " in New York ; Mary 
 Garden's inability to play that same part in 
 Chicago, in 1910, owing to police prevention ; 
 and the many amazing exhibitions of stupidity 
 that London's County Council has given since 
 first Mrs. Ormiston Chant attempted her cru- 
 sade against the music-hall " promenades." 
 The pertinent remark of M. Dalmores, in the 
 Chicago episode just named: "This police 
 chief, he does not clean his streets, yet he thinks 
 to find filth in opera ! " deserves, for its shrewd- 
 ness and its truth, to be recorded and remem- 
 bered. Then there was the police chief in New 
 Haven who stopped " Mrs. Warren's Profes- 
 sion," yet did not some years later, 1910, have 
 wit enough to discover an attempt to play an 
 almost literal version of the essentially French 
 farce, " Vous N'Avez Rien a Declarer ? " until 
 all Yale had nearly died of joy. All such police 
 interference is so delightfully satirized in 
 " Moral " that the hearer or reader's laughter 
 is likely to oust, for a time, the realization of 
 the serious indictment the play brings. Thoma, 
 the while he entertains us so vividly, goes into 
 the problem of the " profession of Mme. 
 d'Hauteville " (as we may, for this, call it), and
 
 264 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 of the Men Behind, the Men Higher Up, so 
 deeply that no ironical critic of modern life can 
 afford to miss this document: the comedy 
 " Moral." 
 
 Since " Moral " first appeared, at end of 
 1908, it has been played constantly in Germany. 
 It surely deserves appreciation elsewhere. One 
 of the many Play Societies that make somewhat 
 timid trials of this or that bit of new drama in 
 London gave a version of it one Sunday night 
 not long ago ; from the published comment one 
 gathered that the English adaptation must have 
 been more than usually uninspired by either 
 taste or wit. Since " Moral " Thoma has re- 
 turned again to his humorous depiction of peas- 
 ant life, and before I left Wiesbaden last Sep- 
 tember people were roaring in laughter at his 
 newest farce, "First Class" (Erster Classe). 
 But it is through " Moral " that Ludwig Thoma 
 comes into the ranks of those who have swung 
 the German drama up to where it deserves the 
 world's attention.
 
 XIV 
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZ:LER 
 
 IN approaching, from the easy point of Mu- 
 nich, whose jovial, genial, artistically sophisti- 
 cated, yet rustically spontaneous spirit Ludwig 
 Thoma expresses so admirably in everything he 
 writes, some dramatists who stand for Vienna, 
 it is essential that we dwell a moment upon cer- 
 tain most illuminating conclusions to be reached 
 by studying the map of central Europe. That 
 map is full of revelation in what it tells us of 
 the effect of climate on temperament. 
 
 Temperament! Far better the curt German 
 elision of the word " artistic " from this phrase ; 
 surely few other phrases, not even those which 
 include the word " bohemian," are by now so 
 abominable to people of fine taste! The Ger- 
 man irony is simpler, briefer. When a lovely 
 damsel trips it too merrily down the primrose 
 path of dalliance the Germans shrug her case 
 away in few words : " Das Madel hat Tempera- 
 ment ! " They put, in short, these forthright 
 Germans, this quality of " temperament " into 
 265
 
 266 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 the same clause with that which brings so many 
 " actresses " into the police reports of Amer- 
 ican newspapers. How went the blithe refrain 
 of the merry jumble of melody and mockery 
 they had half a dozen years ago or so at the 
 Metropol Theater in Berlin: 
 
 " Man muss patent sein, 
 Voll Temperament sein, 
 So 'n bischen tra-la-la, la-la, la-la, la-la . . ." 
 
 That was in a piece called " The Men from 
 Maxim's," which rivalled for boldness the " re- 
 vues " which Paris applauds annually at such 
 theatres as the Marigny, and elsewhere. Those 
 same annual spectacles at the Metropol, in Ber- 
 lin, were as expressive of Germany's utter aban- 
 donment of old parochial restraints in all the 
 arts of entertainment, as were the Uberbrettl' 
 and all the literary manifestations we have been 
 considering. 
 
 Despite the abominable associations of the 
 word " temperament " we must, as before in 
 Hartleben's case, use it here in tracing, on our 
 map, the influences of climate, of soil soil in 
 the large sense implying heritage from centu- 
 ries, implying birth and breeding. Whether 
 you have observed it or not, you have, with some 
 few casual digressions, been wandering steadily 
 south with me. Liliencron, for instance, was 
 our point of departure from the north. Com- 
 ing from what was then Danish territory he re-
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 267 
 
 mained to the end, through all his fine romantic 
 lyric minstrelsy, the Prussian officer. In his 
 most jovial carol sounded the northern melan- 
 choly. Dehmel, though he seemed erotic, was 
 philosopher in his passion. Sudermann, again, 
 was at his best, was most directly expressive of 
 himself, when he was describing the lives of the 
 " Pommersche Junker," the agrarian aristocrats 
 of the most northerly and easterly provinces of 
 Germany. Relentless earnestness was the note 
 of even his most humorous pages. Sudermann 
 is never really gay. In " The Song of Songs " 
 (Das Hohe Lied) it was the tragedy of " tem- 
 perament," not its sparkle, that he stressed. It 
 was not until one came to southwestern Ger- 
 many, to Bavaria, to the Rhineland, that the 
 real care-free minstrel spirit of the newer Ger- 
 man spirit came to expression. 
 
 Here the Past obtrudes once more. From the 
 primary collection of medieval minstrelsy of 
 which we have knowledge, the " Carmina Bu- 
 rana," now in Munich, it is clear that the bulk 
 of Wandering Students' songs of love and wine 
 originated in Bavaria and the Rhineland. 
 Where they originated, then, as you have seen 
 from these pages of mine, they came in our own 
 time to their most effective revival. Almost any 
 Bierbaum ballad might, for its essential, pagan, 
 spontaneous flavor, appear, without imperti- 
 nence, in the " Carmina Burana " collection.
 
 268 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 In Bavaria, and thereabouts, the really Teuton 
 joyousness has always been at home; and in 
 our day Munich has definitely come to express 
 most clearly all that in Germany's arts is most 
 racial, most characteristic, and, therein, most 
 worthy of international regard. The same 
 racial flavor, the welding of artist with son of 
 the soil, is in Bierbaum and Thoma. 
 
 Wherever they may have been born, most of 
 these men found, at one time or another, their" 
 most stimulating atmosphere in Munich. Even 
 in the abnormal, eccentric Wedekind the genial 
 artistic air of Munich found its welcome ; it was 
 in Munich, among the " Hanging Judges " 
 (which I choose as fairly indicating the " Elf 
 Scharf richer "), that Wedekind gave the Uber- 
 brettl' public some of his most astounding and 
 insulting performances; his only moments of 
 something like merry minstrelsy were Munich 
 moments; and it is to Munich that he has al- 
 ways returned. It is this bit of German soil that 
 has most developed all the natural, spontaneous, 
 singing spirits of the past, and of to-day. 
 Those whose craft has been greater than their 
 nature have been here or there ; the real heart 
 of artistic Germany beats most freely in Mu- 
 nich. The Prinz-Regenten Theater for music; 
 the Kuenstler Theater for plays ; Germany has 
 nothing much finer to show than those. May 
 we not even suppose that the first of the world's
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 269 
 
 stage-directors, the greatest of its really crea- 
 tive theatric producers, Max Reinhardt himself 
 (only David Belasco in America approaches this 
 man in practical genius for the theatre's exter- 
 nals), may some day forsake Berlin and move to 
 Munich ? 
 
 FOE sheer craft, versatility, lightness of 
 touch and temper, we go to Vienna. For years 
 the northern Germans sneered at Viennese tal- 
 ent; they declared it was never more than 
 merely clever; it never went far or deep. They 
 refused to take it seriously. " Mere litera- 
 ture ! " they said of it, refusing to consider it 
 as properly creative, permanent, vitally reflect- 
 ive of life. Power and genius were denied the 
 Viennese. Grace, charm, style yes. The 
 northern Germans, it is true, forgot, in these 
 detractions, that grace, charm, and style 
 lightness of touch, as well as depth of feeling 
 were also in those giants from the Rhineland, 
 Goethe and Heine. (Always, you see, the great 
 German singers, have come from that region 
 near the Isar or the Rhine!) 
 
 Not Paris itself has more delicacy in treat- 
 ment of the indelicate than Vienna. That is as 
 true of life as of literature ; there are those who 
 say that it is true of love also. In all the eti- 
 quette of art Vienna knows no rival. The 
 northerners declared it manner and nothing
 
 270 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 more. They pointed out that in every expres- 
 sion of the north-German spirit (they im- 
 pressed Nietzsche, the Slav, into this argument 
 of theirs!), in Liliencron, Conradi, Hauptmann, 
 Dehmel, Stephan George or Wedekind, individ- 
 ual or even eccentric as it might seem, something 
 of a racial northern style remained, to keep 
 them sweet for posterity. In Vienna, on the 
 contrary, there were simply a number of very 
 exquisite artificers, formalists, mannerists, who 
 would be remembered no longer than last year's 
 fashion in frocks. Feminists, in short that 
 was the concluding verdict the northerners 
 passed upon the Viennese. 
 
 The man who did most, in practice and in 
 program, to develop these same stylistic nice- 
 ties of the modern Viennese writers, was also 
 the man who eventually suffered most keenly 
 just that belittling which the more solemn 
 northerners for years sent southward : Hermann 
 Bahr. The irony of fate was eventually to di- 
 rect a Bahr play into such international success 
 as had not in our time come to any other play 
 in German. " The Concert," as has already 
 been indicated in my chapter on Hartleben, has 
 emphasized more than any other modern play 
 the dominant position of the German stage. 
 With the work of Bahr, however, I prefer to 
 conclude, rather than begin this quick sketch of 
 Viennese accomplishment.
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 271 
 
 THE Austrian drama of to-day is typified in 
 the work of Arthur Schnitzler. In his work 
 were all those qualities which marked the con- 
 trast between the Viennese temper and the Ger- 
 man. Where Berlin insisted on truth, at the 
 expense of beauty, Vienna preferred beauty to 
 everything else. As in its court and its lesser 
 circles Vienna stands for all the aristocratic re- 
 finements, so the gestures and tones of the most 
 sophisticated intelligence, of the most patrician 
 outlook, are the paramount concerns in Viennese 
 art. All these gestures, tones, and points of 
 view have been simply the proper appointments 
 for the lovely women, the sensuous music, and 
 the enchanting cuisine for which Vienna has 
 long been rightly famous. All that rises out of 
 that air has had fascination, grace, insinuation 
 and intrigue. Neither tremendous passion nor 
 tremendous problems have stirred, to all ap- 
 pearances, those polite artists of Vienna. Pas- 
 sion might be there, but what was to be artis- 
 tically expressed was, rather, the witty or iron- 
 ically mournful surfaces of passion. Under the 
 almost diabolically clever flippancies in dialogue 
 there may be tragedy ; but neither in life nor art 
 is it good form, in Vienna, to let so middle-class 
 an article as tragedy appear naked. 
 
 All these essentially Austrian qualities were 
 markedly in Schnitzler. The ironies and mock- 
 eries in a sort of twilight land of love engaged
 
 272 MASKS AND MINSTEKLS 
 
 him time and again. Reading him was to real- 
 ize that not even Paris takes " sweethearts and 
 wives " more for granted than Vienna does. 
 The rest of the toast, you may remember, goes 
 " May they never meet ! " In most of Schnitz- 
 ler's plays and stories the prevailing question is 
 just how to be off with the old love, and on 
 with the new. It would be hard to imagine any 
 variation in this large problem that this writer 
 has not elaborated. I do not think either Mar- 
 cel Prevost, or Henri Becque has gone farther 
 into the finesses of the philandering mind. 
 
 My first vivid appreciation of the dramatist 
 Schnitzler came some years ago when his " Lie- 
 belei " was played at the old Irving Place Thea- 
 tre with Agnes Sorma in the leading part. How 
 many, out of all the plays seen in a lifetime, 
 contain anything at all to keep them quick 
 in one's memory ? But the sensations " Lie- 
 belei " gave me have lived through a welter of 
 other plays; there was something in the trag- 
 edy of the forsaken sweetheart, when she learns 
 her lover has fallen in a duel about another 
 woman, in her words (I quote at a venture 
 from that early memory !) : " Was bin denn Ich 
 gewesen? " there was even something so haunt- 
 ing in the absurd refrain of the barrel-organ be- 
 neath the window where she sits alone, awaiting 
 the lover who does not come that I have 
 never since had overmuch patience with those
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 273 
 
 pretending that in the sheerly intellectual bril- 
 liance of the Viennese there was no real depth, 
 no heart. " Liebelei " has been attempted in 
 English on both sides of the Atlantic. In Eng- 
 land, at end of 1909, it was called " Light-o'- 
 Love," a distinctly better title than " The Reck- 
 oning," under which label it was played in New 
 York at the Berkeley Lyceum with Katharine 
 Grey in the part Sorma had played. This New 
 York performance in English I saw, and while 
 it had merits, it failed altogether in passing to 
 the audience that twilight blend of melancholy 
 and gaiety which informs the original. Only 
 an English Schnitzler could, I am convinced, 
 adequately render the essential Schnitzler 
 charm, his power of insinuating both laughter 
 and tears. 
 
 Always, in the Schnitzler plays, we move 
 among delicate, amusing and intriguing love- 
 affairs. No grim questions of right and wrong 
 are allowed to assail us. How, most smoothly, 
 most politely, most delicately, is this lover to 
 say good-by to that sweetheart ; or how is this 
 lovely lady to inform her cavalier that she is 
 tired of him to all appearances we are never 
 witnessing problems any deeper than those. 
 We move in a realm of beauty; ugliness is 
 never allowed to obtrude. Neither He nor She 
 ever vows constancy ; as long as the romance 
 lasts, until the bloom of novelty and wit is off,
 
 274 MASKS AND MINSTBJELS 
 
 in short; there is no more in these little love- 
 affairs than that. The etiquette of the liaison, 
 in short, is nowhere more charmingly expressed 
 than in Schnitzler. 
 
 What in " Liebelei " was green, in this 
 dramatist's later plays ripened to a far surer 
 intellectual effect. In his cycle of one-act plays 
 collected under the title " Anatol " we find him, 
 I think, at his most essential. Here is crystal- 
 lized that viewpoint of the man-of-the-world 
 and the witty sentimentalist which distinguishes 
 Vienna aristocracy. Some of his one-act pieces 
 have been performed in English, as " The 
 Green Cockatoo " and " Literature." Charlotte 
 Wiehe and other actresses have given " Ab- 
 schieds Souper " as " Souper d'Adieu " in 
 French. There is no cleverer one-act piece in 
 any language than this. In spite of several 
 longer plays, novels, etc., existing from 
 Schnitzler's pen, his talent has found its fittest 
 expression in the one-act drama. For just an 
 episode, for the perfectly graceful exploitation 
 of just one mood, his talent has sufficed. There 
 are hardly any moods, whims or caprices in that 
 twilight-land between passion and philandering, 
 which he has not analyzed delicately for our 
 diversion. He is supremely the analyst of light 
 love. To read him is to understand the wit and 
 the inconstancy, the politeness and the unscru- 
 pulousness, of the Viennese soul.
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 275 
 
 If Von Wolzogen invented the label " das 
 siisse Madel " the " dear girl," who may be 
 married, or may not Schnitzler invented the 
 type. It is she who recurs in all his pages. To 
 enjoy the moment, that is all she asks. She has 
 all the qualities of a Viennese waltz : " Sentimen- 
 tal gaiety, smiling mischievous melancholy 
 peace and content stream from her to you if 
 you bring her a bunch of violets, there is a tiny 
 tear in the corner of her eye." For Schnitzler 
 the essential is always make-believe of one sort 
 or another: playing at love, playing at death, 
 playing at comedies. His materials are slight, 
 but he uses them with finesses of artistic grace 
 and charm that give them dignity and distinc- 
 tion. He voices Vienna and its refinement, as 
 well as the simpler sentiment of the Austrian 
 people. 
 
 Though Schnitzler seldom goes beyond the 
 eternal duel between Her and Him at the 
 most he lets his witty lightnings flash about the 
 eternal triangle which perpetually emphasizes 
 the imperfectly monogamous nature of our 
 kind the dialogues he supplies for that duel 
 are not easily surpassed for sheer cleverness; 
 not even the Parisians are more skilful than he 
 in the verbal scintillations of light love. 
 
 His long novel on the problem of the Sem- 
 itic element in Austrian society, " Der Weg 
 ins Freie," has been generally praised, and
 
 276 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 went into more editions even than his famous 
 " Lieutenant Gustl'," but I found it somewhat 
 tedious. If it proved that Schnitzler could keep 
 up, so to say, a strong head of steam for more 
 than a mere novelette, or one-act play, it proved 
 his essential talent still in the quicker expression 
 of a single mood. Where I have found him 
 most delightful, most vocative of all the essen- 
 tial Viennese qualities, has been in such a cycle 
 of episodes as " Anatol," or in " Comtesse 
 Mizzi." He has never gone farther than that; 
 the last-named play, indeed, of 1909, is an ex- 
 act return to the "Anatol" manner of 1893; 
 none of his divagations away from that manner 
 has been of great artistic importance. 
 
 Reading " Comtesse Mizzi " as I did, last 
 year, in one of the most delightful of those 
 older German inns which it was the fashion to 
 call The Four Seasons, namely, the one in Wies- 
 baden, where I was surrounded by princes and 
 counts and their womenkind from all the cor- 
 ners of Europe : Russians, Bulgarians, Hunga- 
 rians, Slavs, Poles and the Lord knows what 
 else ; where the " living fast and loving loose " 
 (to quote my own version of Bierbaum) atmos- 
 phere of remote aristocracies reached, eventu- 
 ally, even the most anarchic nose I realized 
 with peculiar vividness the accuracy of Schnitz- 
 ler's ironic strokes. What could be more de- 
 lightful, for instance, than the visit, to Cov/nt
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLEE 277 
 
 Arpad and his daughter, of that Lolo, the lady 
 with whom the Count has had a lifelong affair, 
 who is now about to marry a well-to-do 
 burgher in Vienna? What could be more 
 charming than the attitude toward Lolo of 
 Mizzi? What more moving than the embrace 
 the latter has for Lolo, in a sort of tender ap- 
 preciation of what, in mere comfort and solace, 
 the latter has been to her father? How, in face 
 of such magic as Schnitzler's, shall one come to 
 utter such words as " immorality " or " shatter- 
 ing the foundations of society " ? No, no ; our 
 good physician knows his Austrian society bet- 
 ter than we do; he is content to heal its body 
 and dissect its soul; he knows better than to 
 try more than that. 
 
 Yet, by his very charm Schnitzler does carry 
 danger. His eroticism is far more insidious 
 than the brutalities of Wedekind. His pictures 
 of the patrician fastidiousness in amatory eti- 
 quette which characterizes peculiarly the last 
 and staunchest stronghold of aristocracy in the 
 modern world, Vienna, are so enchanting that 
 they lure us toward licentiousness far more 
 temptingly than do the ruffianism and the grim- 
 aces of the author of the " Countess Russalka." 
 One countess against another, you have between 
 Countess Mizzi and Countess Russalka the essen- 
 tial difference between Schnitzler and Wedekind. 
 Nothing Wedekind has written is more devilishly
 
 278 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 perverting to an unrestrained imagination than 
 that other cycle of Schnitzler dialogues, 
 " Reigen," between which and " Anatol " his 
 art is bounded. 
 
 No writer of the first rank in any language 
 has surpassed the ingenuity with which in 
 " Reigen " the suggestion of the unprintable 
 is welded into most brilliant conversations. 
 " Reigen " expresses the last word in Schnitz- 
 ler's erotic cynicism; it contains his mocking 
 philosophy of life, which, as aforesaid, is all 
 the more infectious through its faultless man- 
 ner. In " Reigen " are ten dialogues ; and I 
 need do no more than tell you that the cycle 
 of what most would call illegitimate eroticism is 
 made into a perfect circle thus: the first con- 
 versation is between a wench and a soldier ; the 
 second between the soldier and a chambermaid ; 
 the next between the chambermaid and a young 
 gentleman ; the next between the young gentle- 
 man and a young married woman ; the next 
 between the young married woman and her hus- 
 band ; the next between the husband and " das 
 Siisse Madel " (Let us leave the phrase in its 
 Viennese form ! ) ; the next between the " Siisse 
 Madel " and a poet ; then between the poet and 
 an actress; then between the actress and a 
 count; and lastly between the count and the 
 wench of the first page in the book. A vicious 
 circle, literally ; each episode, you are to know,
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 279 
 
 ends in just one and the same way ; from which 
 you may gather how clever the dialogue must 
 be to make this book possible for circulation 
 even in Vienna. No lesser artist could have con- 
 trived to make this book survive the hideous 
 fleshliness under all its specious flippancy. 
 Schnitzler was never more diabolically clever 
 than in " Reigen," never more the mouthpiece 
 of the utterly unmoral viveur's philosophy. 
 Not Flaubert's Emma Bovary herself communi- 
 cated more insidiously all the subtle poisons in 
 human passion. Sheerly physical eroticism 
 could hardly be more illusively cloaked in divert- 
 ing words. 
 
 The people who have been wont to think Ger- 
 man a clumsy medium for finesse should learn 
 otherwise from Schnitzler. French has done 
 nothing subtler than he with his Viennese tem- 
 per and his quick ear for the very note of 
 Vienna, whether of the palace or of the street. 
 Appreciation of Schnitzler has come slowly for 
 English peoples, chiefly, I hold, because the 
 witty essence of his lines has evaporated, time 
 and again, in unintelligent translation. 
 
 If Schnitzler is to-day one of the keenest 
 analysts of the sophiscated modern soul, in man 
 or woman, we must remember that behind his 
 art as writer there has always been the disen- 
 chanting wisdom of the practising physician. 
 Schnitzler was born in 1862 in Vienna. His
 
 280 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 father was a doctor; he studied medicine, and 
 took his degree in 1885, seeing active hospital 
 service from 1886 to 1888. Since then he has 
 an extensive private practice in Vienna. Be- 
 sides his collection of one-act plays, " Anatol," 
 1893, "Der Grime Kakadu," 1899, " Leben- 
 dige Stunden," 1902, and " Marionetten," 
 1906, most important of his works are the 
 drama, "The Call of Life" (Der Ruf des 
 Lebens), 1905; the novels, " Frau Bertha Gar- 
 Ian " and " Der Weg ins Freie ; " such short 
 stories as " Dammerseelen " (Twilight Souls) 
 the (1909) one-act comedy, " Countess Mizzi," 
 and the huge drama (its cast of parts so large 
 as to be a mob!) "The Young Medardus," 
 1910. His monologue, " Lieutenant Gustl'," 
 which most succinctly and dramatically ex- 
 presses the implacable dominance of " the word 
 of an officer and a gentleman " in Austrian 
 affairs, has been referred to in an earlier chap- 
 ter, in its relation to " Rosenmontag " and other 
 essentially military plays. 
 
 FROM Schnitzler's vivid sketch of the Aus- 
 trian officer's philosophy in " Leutnant Gustl " 
 to another brilliant and penetrating miniaturist 
 of the same subject, the writer calling himself 
 Roda Roda, is a logical step. Although Roda 
 Roda has never pretended to be anything more 
 than a brilliant entertainer, his skill in the elab-
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 281 
 
 oration of the anecdotic is not below that of 
 Hartleben's, and in his military sketches he has 
 opened up an entirely new region. The region, 
 namely, of those more or less Slav borders of 
 the Austro-Hungarian empire where the Ger- 
 man language, if existent at all, is curiously mu- 
 tilated. Of the life of garrison, and campaign, 
 and peasant, in those provinces where for cen- 
 turies certain professedly uncivilized borderers 
 have been Europe's bulwarks against Asia, 
 Roda Roda has given us many sparkling and 
 penetrating pages. If you would understand 
 that curious amalgam of races and beliefs, 
 Turks, Mussulmans, Jews, Slavs, Bulgarians, 
 Croatians and what not, Roda Roda will at 
 least fascinate you with the richness of its 
 romance. In volume after volume of stories and 
 anecdotes he has mined for us in that field. 
 
 I recall one story especially, " Der Rittmeis- 
 ter" (The Major), in the collection happily 
 called " Rum, Tobacco and Accursed Love " 
 (Der Schnaps, Der Rauchtabak, und die Ver- 
 fluchte Liebe), which dissects human courage so 
 keenly, that it should rank with what Bernard 
 Shaw and other iconoclasts have done in that 
 direction. There is more humor in Roda Roda 
 than in Schnitzler, when it comes to army life 
 and the citizen life that surrounds it; though 
 the intentions are slighter throughout, though 
 merely anecdote or fable often hold his little
 
 282 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 bit of comedy, as entertainer he does not fall 
 far behind the Viennese master. 
 
 As playwright Roda Roda first came into 
 general notice through the episode, just 
 about a year ago, of his comedy, " Feldherrn- 
 hiigel," being stopped by the Viennese censor. 
 In this play he (in collaboration with another) 
 put much delicious satire against that obstinate 
 woodenheadedness in the mere externals of 
 routine which obtains more in the Austro-Hun- 
 garian than any other army system in the world. 
 If you would have a notion of what Feldherrn- 
 hiigel means, you must understand that in the 
 great army manoeuvres and if possible in 
 battles themselves the general and his staff 
 choose some slight eminence, some rise in the 
 ground, from which to survey and direct opera- 
 tions. Feldherr is the general commanding; 
 Hiigel is hillock. 
 
 Whether in his stories or plays Roda Roda is 
 ironically sketching the Austro-Hungarian in 
 camp, in garrison, or merely in love, he is 
 equally arresting. Besides " Feldherrnhiigel " 
 his play, " Dana Petrowitsch," deserves men- 
 tion, and from the Servian he has translated 
 Branislaw G. Nuschitsch's one-act piece, " Knez 
 od Sembrerije." 
 
 Roda Roda is another of those now promi- 
 nent talents first fostered by Simplicissimus and 
 Jugend. His name is, or was, Sandor F. L.
 
 VIENNA'S ESSENCE: SCHNITZLER 283 
 
 Roda, and he was born April 13, 1872, in 
 Pussta Zdenci. He served as officer in a regi- 
 ment of Croatian artillery, but left the army 
 to devote himself to writing. Pussta Zdenci 
 was part of a huge Slavonic estate that Roda's 
 father managed. Before he entered the army 
 he studied law a little in Vienna. Of late years 
 he has lived in Berlin, and is now of Munich. 
 His pen name of Roda Roda has been duly sanc- 
 tioned by the government. 
 
 In Roda Roda we reach, in our course down 
 the map of the German countries, the farthest 
 Oriental borderland. He alone has opened up 
 for our entertainment and enlightenment that 
 curious welter of peoples, traditions and cus- 
 toms, part Teuton, part Slav. His pen sketches 
 Ruthenians, Dalmatians, and Turks with equal 
 vividness. He gives us the Austro-Hungarian 
 aristocrat, civil or military, and he also gives us 
 the peasants, the peddlers, and the usurers, al- 
 ways to be found near great camps or great es- 
 tates. Of the semi-German, semi-Slav Orient 
 in Europe, Roda Roda is the foremost por- 
 trayer. There is not a language, not a dialect 
 of those regions that he has not mastered in 
 order to add this province to German literature.
 
 XV 
 
 HUGO VON HOFFMANSTHAL 
 
 WHAT is most exquisite in the aestheticism of 
 Vienna found its finest expression in Hugo von 
 Hoffmansthal. In Stephan George, as we have 
 seen, the Rhineland had given an artist whose 
 aim was, above all, to be artistic; in Vienna a 
 somewhat similar attitude toward nature, eleva- 
 ting the orchid, so to say, above the rose, had 
 marked Felix Dormann. These aesthetes, whom 
 the rest of the world came to consider typical 
 of Viennese art, were engaged in fusing wher- 
 ever possible all the artifices of all the arts for 
 the enrichment of their own medium. Artistic 
 art was their end and aim. To experience art, 
 rather than life, was their wish. 
 
 Sheerly as an aesthetic rhetorician Hugo von 
 Hoffmansthal is nothing less than remarkable. 
 He has succeeded in writing a German line as 
 musical as one of D'Annunzio's, with whom he 
 has inevitably to be compared. His words are 
 full of all color, all music, all line, of all, in 
 short, that may be merged from all the other 
 arts. Form, outline, words; those are his all. 
 284
 
 HUGO VON HOFFMANSTHAL 285 
 
 Neither invention nor creation are his. He 
 chose to work in the drama, and the world has 
 come to know him as dramatist, yet he has never 
 been more than an artist in rhetoric who sought 
 the form of drama. 
 
 Von Hoffmansthal was born, 1874, in Vienna, 
 of well-to-do people. At seventeen he wrote his 
 first dramatic poem; at nineteen he wrote his 
 play, " Death and the Fool " (Der Tor und der 
 Tod), which he signed " Loris." Hermann 
 Bahr first took " Loris " to be a Frenchman 
 using German; then, having been assured he 
 was an Austrian, he insisted he must be some 
 diplomat, of about fifty years of age, long resi- 
 dent in one of the foreign embassies. Upon 
 which there appeared, one day, this nineteen- 
 year-old youth, Von Hoffmansthal, proving to 
 be " Loris." He had already absorbed most of 
 the arts, domestic and foreign, of his period, 
 and all those commingled in his pure and pre- 
 cious verse. His first work, " Gestern " (Yes- 
 terday), was published in 1891, when Germany 
 was full of Independent Theatres, of influences 
 from Ibsen and others. Upon all those influ- 
 ences, all those revivals of a new nationalism 
 Von Hoffmansthal deliberately turned his back, 
 searching out, for his artifices in words, the 
 channels of ancient myth and history that had 
 engaged the antiquarians of the futile period 
 which followed Goethe's death. What distin-
 
 286 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 guishes him from those other futilities is his 
 extraordinary genius for making German verse 
 beautiful. All the world by now knows his ver- 
 sions of " Elektra " and " GEdipus." Through 
 the music of Richard Strauss the former went 
 farther than most tragedies in verse, yet 
 "(Edipus and the Sphinx" (as the full title 
 runs), 1906, is the greater piece of workman- 
 ship. 
 
 Exquisite taste and feeling for beauty mark 
 this writing. In his words is the intoxication of 
 music, and of melancholy that Viennese mel- 
 ancholy which is also in Schnitzler. Colors and 
 forms move him more than does human passion. 
 The past and its allure; strange, rare and 
 precious, alien things; these stir him. The 
 Venice of bygone ages ; medieval Florence ; the 
 Vienna of semi-Oriental Empire days ; all peri- 
 ods rococo and baroque rejoice his lyric moods. 
 His words haunt you, like music ; but you find, 
 when the melody is still, that there was, after 
 all, nothing but words, words. 
 
 Poems short and long he wrote in great num- 
 bers. Some of them he called " dramatic," but 
 they were seldom other than exercises in rhymed 
 virtuosity. Dominantly Von Hoffmansthal is 
 poet and philologist. The beauty of his lan- 
 guage sometimes threatens to intoxicate him- 
 self as well as his readers. Such patrician per- 
 fection of style has never before been reached
 
 HUGO VON HOFFMANSTHAL 287 
 
 in German as you may find in even his earliest 
 " Yesterday," and his later " Ballade des 
 Auesseren Lebens " (now to be had in his Col- 
 lected Poems, 1909). In that ballad's title the 
 poet expressed his entire attitude; the exter- 
 nals, the embroideries, of life are what have in- 
 terested him. Only once, perhaps, in " Tor und 
 Tod," did he come near to something of actual 
 inner experience, when he told the tragedy of 
 an aesthete's life, who " in j oy of art had lost the 
 joy of life, who did not use his art to enrich 
 and ennoble his life, but lived in art alone." 
 
 He voiced the pathos of his own art in these 
 lines: 
 
 " Ich hab' mich so an Kiinstliches verloren, 
 Dass ich die Sonne sah aus toten Augen, 
 Und nicht mehr horte, als durch tote Ohren: 
 Stets schleppte ich den rathselhaften Fluch, 
 Nie ganz bewusst, nie vollig unbewusst, 
 Mit kleinem Leid und schaler Lust 
 Mein Leben zu erleben wie ein Buch, . . ." 
 
 certain essentials of which may be given : " So 
 was I lost in artifice, that only with dead eyes 
 I saw the sun, and only heard with deadened 
 ears; eternally I am accursed ... to live my 
 life as if it were a book. . . ." 
 
 In sheer diction, sheer lyric form, Hoff- 
 mansthal is unsurpassed. He is Goethe's 
 Homunculus: the aesthete of complicated soul, 
 precociously a genius. A virtuoso in words, but 
 never giving you the voice of humanity. The
 
 288 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 problems of soul he chooses are age-old legend- 
 ary ones; the subjects for him are the same the 
 antique poets took, he embroiders them anew, 
 until for the clinging beauty of the newer vine- 
 leaves you can no longer see the ancient tragic 
 tree. His is a triumph of Viennese verbal con- 
 fectionery applied upon material as old as the 
 centuries. His is the absolute final point to be 
 reached in mere beauty, mere literary skill. He 
 has added nothing to the Sophocles stories he 
 modernized, save artifice. When he tried to be 
 dramatic without aid of his enchanting versifi- 
 cation, in his prose play, " Christina's Heim- 
 reise," 1910, he failed completely ; that episode 
 proved, had it been necessary, that as dramatist 
 he has never had proper inspiration, however 
 lovely he has been as poet. As to his newest 
 poetic libretto, to Strauss's " Rosencavalier " 
 it is still too soon to judge. 
 
 The loveliness of Von Hoffmansthal's Ger- 
 man defies translation. Arthur Symons' version 
 of " Elektra " gives us much, yet misses much. 
 Loveliness, fastidiousness, whimsicality these 
 essentially Viennese qualities have been most 
 beautifully expressed by Von Hoffmansthal. 
 The charm of Vienna is in its outer, not its inner 
 life. Yet it is too soon to say, though so far 
 he has shown no advance in art, his style having 
 been as perfect at nineteen as it is to-day, what 
 this poet may not yet do. He is only thirty-
 
 HUGO VON HOFFMANSTHAL 289 
 
 six now. One provincial theatre in Germany 
 has already inscribed on its proscenium arch 
 these names : " Goethe, Schiller, Hauptmann, 
 Von Hoffmansthal." This much at least is 
 sure : in a medium far less filled with inevitable 
 music, he has already equalled for sheer beauty 
 of style and diction the Italian D'Annunzio.
 
 XVI 
 
 BAHR AND FINIS 
 
 HERMANN BAHR was the leader, long ago, of 
 all those forces which were gathered together 
 as "Young Vienna" (Jung Wien) ; he most 
 suffered from the " merely clever " label applied 
 by the northerners ; and it is he who has finally 
 written the play through which Viennese drama 
 has most completely won international recogni- 
 tion to-day. 
 
 One of those pioneers of Green Germany re- 
 ferred to in an earlier chapter ventured the 
 prophecy that through drama the revival of art 
 in his country would first come to general recog- 
 nition. If we consider them as apart, it was 
 Young Vienna rather than Young Germany 
 that eventually accomplished that feat. Her- 
 mann Bahr's play, " The Concert," for human- 
 ity, for actual grip of life and character, has 
 accomplished, in immediate popular acclaim 
 abroad, more than anything of Sudermann's or 
 Hauptmann's. Among other things it has 
 brought to Vienna the curiosity and cupidity 
 of English and American managers. 
 290
 
 BAHE AND FINIS 291 
 
 For operetta, in this century or that, Vienna 
 has often enough been the lodestone of the 
 world. Franz Lehar's " Lustige Witwe " had 
 so world-wide a triumph that ever since then an 
 army of theatrical agents has been camped in 
 Vienna eager to buy everything lest even the 
 most infinitesimal chance of profit escape. To 
 the ironic observer this state of things has been 
 full of material. Nowhere are people more 
 imitative than in theatrical affairs. If A has 
 written a success, then it is better to ask A to 
 write another than to depend on one's own taste 
 to discover B ; if the town of C has produced 
 a musical triumph then the thing to do is to 
 lie in wait there for what it may next do, rather 
 than to try what may have been composed un- 
 der one's very nose! 
 
 In the first years in which I was annually 
 adding to my appreciation of these masks and 
 minstrels of New Germany, I never ceased won- 
 dering at the blindness of English and Amer- 
 ican managers in not realizing the value of this 
 or that German or French operetta or play. In 
 the years since Lehar wrote his " Merry 
 Widow " my wonder has rather been as to what 
 manner of persons those were whom our mana- 
 gers appointed to watch the German theatre. 
 Their only motto seems to be : Buy everything, 
 lest something escape! Buy, above all else, ac- 
 complished successes. To know a great play by
 
 292 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 its intrinsic merit is not the part of these gen- 
 tlemen. We may expect, presently, some fear- 
 ful and wonderful performances in our theatres 
 as a result of the sleepless activity of our thea- 
 trical agents in the various continental capitals, 
 especially Vienna. For the success of Bahr's 
 " The Concert " (furthered in America by a 
 fellow-countryman, equally skilful as actor and 
 adaptor, Leo Ditrichstein ) has now taught the 
 " box-office " intelligence that not only oper- 
 ettas, but comedies and other specimens of 
 " legitimate " drama are to be discovered in 
 Vienna. 
 
 " The Concert's " story has already been 
 adequately mentioned in the chapter on Hart- 
 leben. This play definitely gained for its au- 
 thor what all his rich and varied previous ac- 
 complishments had failed to bring him: the 
 complete and serious appreciation of his own 
 country. It broke down utterly the old sneer 
 which he had heard all his working life, to the 
 effect that, like all else of Vienna, he was su- 
 premely clever and nothing more. 
 
 If I close my book with Hermann Bahr, it is 
 also through him that we can return to the very 
 beginnings of all this youthful ferment in Ger- 
 many. Hardly any rebellion, movement or en- 
 terprise in all this period was without Bahr as 
 one of the leaders. He has been the journalistic 
 and artistic chameleon of his time. His have
 
 BAHR AND FINIS 293 
 
 been the appreciation and encouragement that 
 spurred most of the talent contemporary with 
 him. That you may feel this side of him fully, 
 let me cite this one detail, which, if you have 
 read this book with anything like care, should 
 impress you: 
 
 The dedication of Bierbaum's " Stilpe " 
 (1897) runs "To Hermann Bahr in hearti- 
 est admiration." 
 
 Bahr was born, 1863, in Linz. Versatility 
 marked him early; at school he was beginning 
 to write, and even thinking of the stage as a 
 career. He went to college in Vienna, Graz and 
 Czernowitz, finally finishing in Berlin. There 
 he joined the naturalistic art movement of Arno 
 Holz. Eighteen hundred and eighty-seven he 
 returned to Austria to serve his military period ; 
 then he fared forth into the world of art, of 
 travel, of life. Eighteen hundred and eighty- 
 eight found him in Paris; thence he journeyed 
 into Spain and Morocco ; returning to Berlin in 
 1889, an accomplished citizen of the world, ver- 
 satile in all the tricks of journalism and art. 
 There was no new note, no new undercurrent 
 of intellectual enterprise that he did not dis- 
 cover quickly and join. He became editor of 
 the Free Stage magazine, which printed his first 
 novel, " Die Gute Schule " (The Good School). 
 Eighteen hundred and ninety-one he visited St. 
 Petersburg, the next year he came to Vienna to
 
 294 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 enter upon the important business of introduc- 
 ing there all those young hopes and ferments 
 of Green Germany that he had found in Berlin. 
 He stirred up Young Vienna into enthusiasm 
 for a really national Austrian literature; he 
 made the Cafe Griensteidl, and several other 
 coffee-houses, rallying points for his flock. 
 Among his followers were " Loris " (Hugo von 
 Hoffmansthal), Arthur Schnitzler, Richard 
 Beer-Hoffmann, Felix Dormann, and Peter Al- 
 tenberg. 
 
 For years Bahr was known abroad rather as 
 critic of the theatre and kindred arts than as 
 creative artist. He was critic first of the 
 Deutsche Zeitung, then of Die Zeit, then of the 
 Neue Wiener Tageblatt. His appreciations 
 and enthusiasm spurred countless young artistic 
 energies, notably those of the Viennese actors, 
 Mitterwurzer and Kainz (who died a few 
 months ago), of the philosopher, E. Mach, the 
 painter, Klimt, the decorator, Olbrich, and the 
 poets Stifter and Stelzhamer. By visits to 
 Paris, London and Italy he kept his comprehen- 
 sion wide. Always he was in the forefront of 
 international appreciation and discovery. He 
 always knew the books, or plays, of the hour 
 before anyone else did. 
 
 In his own work he was a change-artist of 
 amazing versatility. Just as he could feel 
 everything, so could he himself express every-
 
 BAHR AND FINIS 295 
 
 thing. Change, change ! that was his constant 
 motto. As a journalist he could prove every- 
 thing, without believing anything. He was a 
 mummer in literature; there was no part he 
 could not play. His ego was fluid. It had 
 many changing faces, the faces of Zola, Taine, 
 Manet, Ibsen, Strindberg, Marx, Huysmans, 
 Maupassant, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, Puvis de 
 Chavannes, Nietzsche, Raimund, la Duse, 
 Goethe, Klimt, Sada Yacco and all her coun- 
 try's artists. Through all his changes, his en- 
 thusiasms for this or that artist or movement, 
 one passion only remained constant in him 
 though in 1906 he renounced even that! the 
 passion for Austrian nationalism in art. 
 
 Always, until he wrote " The Concert," the 
 world refused to take him seriously. They 
 called him typical of the degenerate insincerity, 
 the unstable emotions, of his country. He com- 
 plained, once, " If they hand us a compliment, 
 they never do it without also making an excuse 
 for us. One wishes they would treat us more 
 harshly, if only they would take us more seri- 
 ously." That was the world's attitude toward 
 Hermann Bahr and the Young Vienna he stood 
 for. You could not blame the world, perhaps, 
 for thinking Bahr an artist in everchanging at- 
 titudes, since he himself, in one of his most 
 cynically journalistic moods, had called himself 
 an " agent of literature." He seemed to ex-
 
 296 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 press all the neurasthenia and feminism inherent 
 in Viennese art. Yet none realized and warned 
 against those very qualities more than he. He 
 not only appreciated, but analyzed, was intro- 
 spective as well as farsighted. 
 
 The critic's desk, said the others, was Bahr's 
 place, not life itself; the sofa, and not life it- 
 self, was the place for his disciples. He typi- 
 fied not art, but only activity. In his fever to 
 be ahead of the fashion, he ran after it. 
 Through the countless changes it had to un- 
 dergo, his own ego lost its own identity. His 
 style became such fluid journalese that it be- 
 came as unindividual as it was unreadable. He 
 became resigned to the passing of what had once 
 been upon his time and his country's art a great 
 influence. He was burnt out, written out. . . . 
 And so on, and so on, Bahr's detractors had 
 been writing him down in the contemporary 
 chronicles, until it seems somewhat malicious of 
 him to have confounded them with " The Con- 
 cert," through which the whole school of Vien- 
 nese drama takes a place in international ac- 
 claim which it has not enjoyed in our time. It 
 is not too much to say that in this success re- 
 turns for the Austrian stage a reflex of the 
 golden age of Grillparzer. 
 
 While, up to this recent triumph, Bahr's 
 most serious creation had been considered his 
 novel, " The Good School," he had worked f re-
 
 BAHB, AND FINIS 297 
 
 quently in drama. His plays include " Jose- 
 fine," " Der Star," satire of theatrical life in 
 Vienna, " Die Mutter," which tried to out- 
 Wedekind Wedekind, " Der Athlet " (The Ath- 
 lete), " Wienerinnen " (Viennese Women), 
 " Der Meister " (The Master), done in Amer- 
 ica at the Irving Place Theatre in 1910, " Die 
 Andere" (The Other Woman), and "Der 
 Apostel " (The Apostle) produced with no lit- 
 tle success in Petersburg. Also there was the 
 play, " The Yellow Nightingale," in which 
 some people found an obvious travesty of the 
 character and methods of Max Reinhardt, the 
 internationally famous stage director of the 
 Deutsche Theater in Berlin. The episode of 
 the foisting upon German audiences of the 
 " yellow nightingale " an allegedly famous 
 Australian artist, actually only a Hungarian; 
 the burlesque of Berlin stage conditions; were, 
 as always, admitted to be clever and amusing, 
 but nothing more. People still continued, 
 though Bahr wrote volumes of criticism, novels 
 (his newest, 1910, being "O Mensch") and 
 short stories, to declare that as a man of letters 
 he had the gestures of a journalist, as journal- 
 ist the gestures of a man of letters that he 
 was effective, in short, only in his gestures. 
 
 The chronicle of Hermann Bahr's career as 
 it exists in most of the more solemn German 
 documents, will now have to be revised. It will
 
 298 MASKS AND MINSTRELS 
 
 have to be admitted, as graciously as possible, 
 that " The Concert " proved him more than 
 merely clever or amusing, but possessed of an 
 understanding of and sympathy for human 
 character that lift him into the front rank 
 among contemporary dramatists. 
 
 
 
 IF you have come with me so far, you have 
 seen how secessions and ferments, working up 
 through the Uberbrettl' in one place, and the 
 Young Vienna movement in another, eventually 
 produced an actual and valuable tale of achieve- 
 ment in the literature and drama of that Ger- 
 many which we may still justly call Young. If 
 personal prejudice may seem to have gone for 
 as much in my book as careful appraisal in a 
 scale of critical justice; if this be, in fact, only 
 a record of individual adventures in modern 
 German story, song and play ; yet I venture to 
 think you will, in feeling some of my own emo- 
 tions, or even in taking issue with some of my 
 opinions, gain from these pages a little enthu- 
 siasm for the subject. 
 
 That enthusiasm can be communicated, that 
 a new interest in a new subject can be stirred, 
 by any of the conventional literary formulas, 
 I have never believed. Only as we ourselves have 
 vividly felt this or that sensation in life or the 
 arts, can we pass such sensation on. What this 
 book has tried to convey is the personal impres-
 
 299 
 
 sion of one who believes in only individual taste 
 and appreciation. That personal impression 
 is to be summed up once again and for the last 
 time, thus : 
 
 German literature may in this century flower 
 in this direction or in that, it will always be in 
 the soil fructified by those I have here empha- 
 sized that you will find its roots. 
 
 Christmas, 1910.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REQ 
 
 A 001 364 763