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Shaw on the subject of children and their education, plays, pamphlets, even legislation have dealt with the theme. A reaction was bound to follow, and we do not hear so much now about "sex initiation" and coeducation. Suffice it to say that Frank Wedekind was the first man to put the question plumply before us in dramatic shape.
Arthur Schnitzler was then a medical student in Vienna, and it was not till 1888 that he modestly delivered himself in a volume of verse, while Frank Wedekind, was just beginning to stretch his poetical limbs and savour life in Paris and London. But Hauptmann is something more than a realist; if he were only that I should not have begun my story with a reference to the Zola book sales.
Translated Wedekind would lose his native wood-note wild, and doubtless much of his dynamic force for on the English stage he would be emasculated. And I wonder who would have the courage to produce his works. Musik, for example, if played in its entirety might create a profound impression.
Even Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity," which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the planet Jupiter."
And in all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being is better than a half-god. Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to recognition in New York is his Spring's Awakening, produced at the Irving Place Theatre seasons ago.
Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers, for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his spiritual depravity forgetting that the two qualities cannot be blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits like Goethe's Mephisto, who perpetually deny.
A society, the members of which preached the doctrines of liberty and equality, and at whose head stood the professors Blau, Wedekind, Metternich, Hoffmann, Forster, the eminent navigator, the doctors Boehmer and Stamm, Dorsch of Strasburg, etc., chiefly men who had formerly been Illuminati, was formed in imitation of the revolutionary Jacobin club at Paris.
There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of Wedekind Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre, the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or liquid you desire from his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas, or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the marionettes of the fashionable world!
Scratch the sentimentalism and æstheticism of a German, and you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His admirers speak of him as a unicum, a man so original as to be without forerunners, without followers. A monster?
I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom, for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one's soul into a spiritual bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism.
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