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Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's Die Weber and Gorky's Nachtasyl are perhaps the best examples of the type. The drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully.
These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind.
Hauptmann's Weavers certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic architecture, like Rosmersholm or Iris; but that does not mean that it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the principle of unity in that brilliant comedy The Madras House; but we nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so much the worse for the play and its author.
Besides this, we had met at real musical evenings at the conductor Hauptmann's as well as at Mendelssohn's, on which occasion I heard the master take the violin in one of his own quartettes. It was precisely in these circles that I was impressed by the touching and venerable dignity of his absolutely calm demeanour.
Its nocturnal beginning with the carillon- like bass a bass that ever recalls to me the faint, buried tones of Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell," the sweetly grave close of the section, the faint hoof-beats of an approaching cavalcade, with the swelling thunders of its passage, surely suggests a narrative, a programme.
In no other way but in the drama could he deliver such forcible, historic truths. And therefore it is only through the drama that Mr. Shaw is a revolutionary factor in the dissemination of radical ideas. After Hauptmann's DIE WEBER, STRIFE, by Galsworthy, is the most important labor drama.
And Hauptmann's theory, which got him the degree of Ph.D., maxima cum laude, was that Lombard is an East Germanic tongue. This he simple intuited, needing the degree, for the fifty mangled Lombard words displayed none of those consonants which tending to double or of those vowels which still vexing us as umlauts, mark a language as belonging to the great Eastern or Western group.
The well-known accentuation of contrasting elements does not interfere with the balance, because it is mutual. A balanced unity is also created by contrasts of character, as in Goethe's Tasso, or by a conflict between social classes or parties, as in Hauptmann's Die Weber.
Oberst von Lindenfelt having dismissed the troops the three Germans adjourned to the hauptmann's quarters, where over the remains of the bottle of spirits conversation was resumed. "Tell me how you gave the Englishman the slip, Ulrich," asked von Argerlich. "It was quite a simple matter," replied the spy.
The personifications were all right, he said, but the poets and painters did not know how they really looked. By the way," Wanhope broke off, "did you happen to see Hauptmann's 'Hannele' when it was here?" None of us had, and we waited rather restively for the passing of the musing fit which he fell into.
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