Gerhart Hauptmann

“ In Lonely Lives the two questions apparently treated in Rosmersholm are answered, not in the terms of effective dramaturgy, but of life itself. Johannes Vockerat lives in the midst of the world that must undo him—subtly irritated by all to which his heart clings. Out of that world he has grown and he cannot liberate himself from it. His good wife and his admirable parents are bound to the conventional in no base or fanatical sense. He dare scarcely tell them that their preoccupations, that their very love, slay the ideal in his soul. ”

“ PEASANT [Roughly.] You weavers here make such an awful outcry. As if we hadn't all to put up with what Heaven sends us. An' if you are badly off just now, whose fault is it but your own? What did you do when trade was good? Drank an' squandered all you made. If you had saved a bit then, you'd have it to fall back on now when times is bad, and not need to be goin' stealin' yarn and wood.
FIRST YOUNG WEAVER [Standing with several comrades in the lobby or outer room, calls in at the door.] What's a peasant but a peasant, though he lies in bed till nine? ”

“ THE CURTAIN FALLS THE SECOND ACT It is about four o'clock in the morning. The windows in the inn are still lit. Through the gateway comes in the twilight of a pallid dawn which, in the course of the action, develops into a ruddy glow, and this, in its turn, gradually melts into bright daylight. Under the gateway, on the ground, sits BEIPST and sharpens his scythe. As the curtain rises, little more is visible than his dark outline which is defined against the morning sky, but one hears the monotonous, uninterrupted and regular beat of the scythe hammer on the anvil. ”

“ For the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy. Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement. But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern—everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the intuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with which one rubs elbows!" ”

“ Hauptmann's career began in the years when the natural sciences, not content with their proper triumphs, threatened to engulf art, philosophy and religion; in the years when a keen and tender social consciousness, brooding over the temporal welfare of man, lost sight of his eternal good. And so Hauptmann begins by illustrating the laws of heredity and pleading, through a creative medium, for social justice. The tacit assumptions of these early plays are stringently positivistic: body and soul are the obverse and reverse of a single substance; earth is the boundary of man's hopes. ”

“ Into the tense atmosphere of this literary battle Hauptmann was cast when he took up his residence at Erkner. The house he occupied was the last in the village, half buried in woods and with far prospects over the heaths and deep green, melancholy waters of Brandenburg. Hither came, among many others, the brothers Hart, the novelist Kretzer, Wilhelm Bölsche, the inexhaustible prophet of the new science and the new art, and finally, the founder of German naturalism as distinguished from that of France—Arno Holz, The efforts of all these men harmonised with Hauptmann's mood. ”

“ John (The Rats) ; the massive greatness of old Hilse's rock-like patience and the sudden impassioned protest of Luise (The Weavers) ; the deep trouble of Henschel's simple soul and the hunted purity of Rose Bernd—these qualities and these characters transcend the convincingness of mere art. Like the rain drenched mould, the black trees against the sky, the noise of the earth's waters, they are among the abiding elements of a native and familiar world. ”

“ Dreissiger there may play the lady as proud as she likes, but for all that she's no better than us. Many a hundred times she's served my father with a halfpenny-worth of schnapps. Left wheel—march!
[Exit laughing.
DREISSIGER [ After a pause, with apparent calmness.] Well, Mr. Kittelhaus, shall we have our game now? I think there will be no further Interruption. [He lights a cigar, giving short laughs as he does so; when it is lighted, bursts into a regular fit of laughing.] ”

“ Thus, by the precision of his directions both for the scenery and the persons of each play, and by unmistakable indications of gesture and expression at all decisive moments of dramatic action, Hauptmann has placed within narrow limits the activity of both stage manager and actor. He alone is the creator of his drama, and no alien factitiousness is allowed to obscure its final aim—the creation of living men. ”

“ WEHRHAHN Why don't you lay that clock down?
FIELITZ I'm a peaceable man, your honour. I—I—I—I—Oh, Lordy, Lordy! I can't tell you nothin', how that there thing happened.—I'm on good terms with people; I don't quarrel with nobody ... I has made mistakes in my life. That happens when a man ain't got no good companions. ”

“ An' what's more—if there's a rush on Dittrich's, you'll see me in the forefront of it—an' pity the man as tries to prevent me—I've stood it long enough, so now you know it.
OLD HILSE You're a lost soul—there's no help for you.
LUISE [Frenzied.] It's you that there's no help for! Tatter-breeched scarecrows—that's what you are—an' not men at all. Whey-faced gutter-scrapers that take to your heels at the sound of a child's rattle. Fellows that says "thank you" to the man as gives you a hidin'. They've not left that much blood in you as that you can turn red in the face. ”

“ Hauptmann's creative power culminates, however, as he approaches the common folk. These are of two kinds: the Berlin populace and the Silesian peasants. The world of the former in all its shrewdness, impudence and varied lusts he has set down with quiet and cruel exactness in The Beaver Coat and The Conflagration. Mrs. Wolff, the protagonist of both plays, rises into a figure of epic breadth—a sordid and finally almost tragic embodiment of worldliness and cunning. When he approaches the peasants of his own countryside his touch is less hard, his method not quite so remorseless. ”

“ I grant you, certainly, that among our professional brethren individuals are to be found, who, at a fairly advanced age, still play youthful pranks. One preaches against the drink evil and founds temperance societies, another publishes appeals which undoubtedly read most effectively. But what good do they do? The distress among the weavers, where it does exist, is in no way lessened—but the peace of society is undermined. No, no; one feels inclined in such cases to say: Cobbler, stick to your last; don't take to caring for the belly, you who have the care of souls. ”

“ The author has not merged the sharp outlines of humanity into the background of his own idiosyncrasy. Ibsen's characters speak and act as though they had suddenly stepped from another world and were still haunted by a breath of their strange doom; the people of Shaw are often eloquent exponents of a theory of character and society which would never have entered their minds. Hauptmann's men and women are themselves. No trick of speech, no lurking similarity of thought unites them. ”

“ Under the creative energy of Hauptmann, however, the form at once grew into drama, but a drama which sought to rely as little as possible upon the traditional devices of dramaturgic technique. There was to be no implication of plot, no culmination of the resulting struggle in effective scenes, no superior articulateness on the part of the characters. A succession of simple scenes was to present a section of life without rearrangement or heightening. There could be no artistic beginning, for life comes shadowy from life ”

“ In The Reconciliation an unnatural marriage has brought discord and depravity upon earth; in Lonely Lives a seeker after truth is throttled by a murky world; in The Weavers the whole organization of society drives men to tragic despair; in Colleague Crampton a cold blooded woman all but destroys the gentle-hearted painter; in The Beaver Coat the motive is ironically inverted and a base shrewdness triumphs over the stupid social machine; in Rose Bernd traditional righteousness hounds a pure spirit out of life ”

“ They flatter the weaver, and give the manufacturer nothing but abuse—he's a cruel man, with a heart like a stone, a dangerous fellow, at whose calves every cur of a journalist may take a bite. He lives on the fat of the land, and pays the poor weavers starvation wages. In the flow of his eloquence the writer forgets to mention that such a man has his cares too and his sleepless nights; that he runs risks of which the workman never dreams; that he is often driven distracted by all the calculations he has to make, and all the different things he has to take into account ”

“ There'll be a bad end to it. No man in his wits would do that. I'll keep clear of such goings on.
JAEGER, BECKER, WITTIG carrying a wooden pail, BAUMERT, and a number of other old and young weavers, rush in as if in pursuit of something, shouting hoarsely.
JAEGER Where has he gone?
BECKER Where's the cruel brute?
BAUMERT If we can eat grass he may eat sawdust.
WITTIG We'll hang him when we catch him.
FIRST YOUNG WEAVER We'll take him by the legs and fling him out at the window, on to the stones. He'll never get up again.
SECOND YOUNG WEAVER [Enters.] He's off! ”

“ KRUEGER I naturally bought the wood from the department of forestry.
WEHRHAHN Why naturally? I don't see that at all. There are, for instance, private wood yards. Personally I buy my wood from Sandberg. Why shouldn't you buy yours from a dealer? One really almost gets a better bargain.
KRUEGER [Impatiently.] I haven't any more time, your honour. ”

“ Not to try her patience, not to edify womankind, does the count rob Griselda of her child. His burning and exclusive love is jealous of the pangs and triumphs of her motherhood in which he has no share. It is passion desiring the utter absorption of its object that gives rise to the tragic element of the story. ”

“ A crowd of dirty, dusty rioters rush in, their faces scarlet with brandy, and excitement; tattered, untidy-looking, as if they had been up all night. With the shout: "Weavers, come out!" they disperse themselves through the house. ”

“ The clock is on the stroke of twelve. Most of the waiting work-people have the air of standing before the bar of justice, in torturing expectation of a decision that means life or death to them. They are marked too by the anxious timidity characteristic of the receiver of charity, who has suffered many humiliations, and, conscious that he is barely tolerated, has acquired the habit of self-effacement. ”

“ The warm glow falls on the old woman's face, neck, and breast—a face worn away to a skeleton, with shrivelled skin and sunken eyes, red and watery with smoke, dust, and working by lamplight—a long goître neck, wrinkled and sinewy—a hollow breast covered with faded, ragged shawls. ”

“ Your mother must have gone dancing once too often with Satan to have got such a devil for a son.
DREISSIGER [Now in a violent passion, roars.] Hold your tongue this moment, sir, or ...
[He trembles and takes a fere steps forward.
BECKER [Holding his ground steadily.] I'm not deaf. My hearing's quite good yet.
DREISSIGER [Controls himself, asks in an apparently cool business tone.] Was this fellow not one of the pack...?
PFEIFER He's a Bielau weaver. When there's any mischief going, they're sure to be in it. ”