The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the first February issue of "Kunstwart", the Berlin theater critic Julius Hart publishes a sharp attack on the theater. A man who writes several times a week about theater performances and whose reviews are a pleasure to read because they bear witness to a not insignificant judgment of art, makes the following statement: "So in the first rush of impressions, I easily fall back into sweet youthful idylls and take the theater seriously - terribly seriously and fantasize about all the high and beautiful things to which it should be called. But why should it? With the same right with which I demand of this general showplace that it be a temple of art, I can also demand of a Berlin ballroom and dance hall that it educate the female and male youth to morality and church attendance. But it doesn't. It laughs at me." If the excesses of the theater were spoken of in this way, one could bear it. But Julius Hart, the theater critic, goes on to say that dramatic art and theater must have absolutely nothing to do with each other, because theater, by its very nature, can never serve a real artistic need. "Aesthetic education will always be as low as it is today if we do not fully understand that the stage and art have nothing at all to do with each other, that a play and a drama are two very different things."

It seems almost unbelievable, but there are sentences like the following in the essay: "Unfortunately, our entire dramaturgy is based on the fact that it simply demands from dramatic poetry the very external factors that are decisive in the theater and can lead to laws for the play, but which, like every true work of art, wants to be conceived as an organism, as a living thing flowing out of inner necessities."

Two things are possible, I thought as I read Hart's essay. Either Hart expresses himself sharply in a fit of exasperation at the damage done to the theater and only condemns the theater when it degenerates to such an extent that everything depends on the effect, that the poet who wants to write for the theater is no longer forced to look at the shape of the inner processes, but must ask himself how this or that works? Or does he really mean - which is indeed what it says - "I can approve, recognize and accept the theater as long as I don't regard it as an art institution ... What does stage effect writing have to do with poetry? Theater! Let's finally stop talking about it like an art institution."

On closer consideration, however, I must disregard the first case. Julius Hart is too clever a man to say things that would be on a par with the assertion: Because novelistic poetry can descend to shallow colportage literature, it has nothing to do with art.

But if Julius Hart is really of the opinion that the theater in its essence has nothing to do with art, because the demands of the stage contradict the demands of dramatic poetry, I must say that such a judgment seems to me to betray a complete lack of understanding not only of the nature of the theater, but of the nature of all art.

I must utter trivialities if I am to refute this grotesque judgment. Whoever speaks of a contradiction between the demands of the stage and the inner dramatic necessity could just as well say: the architect should not build houses, but only draw them as they arise as an organism from within himself, because the demands that must be fulfilled when building a house have nothing to do with the inner artistic necessity of his inner sense of form. An architectural work of art is only perfect if the artist already imagines it in such a way that there is harmony between the formations of his sense of form and between the demands that must be made on a real building. A drama will only be perfect if all the elements which make a representation on the stage possible are included in the structure which the poet lets flow out of his personality as a living thing through inner necessity. Embodiment by real people and with the help of stage props must be a contributing factor in the playwright's creative imagination. He must shape his drama in such a way that he sees it in front of him in an ideal performance. Not only the inner necessity of the dramatic development, but also the stage set foreseen in the imagination belongs to the playwright's conception. The stage is simply one of the means with which the playwright works. And a drama that is not suitable for the stage is like a picture that is not painted but merely described.

I was only speaking in commonplaces. I feel like a schoolmaster who digs out the sentences of an elementary book. But when assertions such as those in Hart's essay are put into the world, one is unfortunately forced to do something like that.

Mr. Th. Vischer also understood something of the nature of the arts; and in his lectures on "Beauty and Art" I read the sentence: "You have a beautiful complete combination of arts in the theater. There the architect provides the space, the painter the decoration. The poet writes the text of the drama. The actors bring the characters and scenes he has invented to life." Vischer also knows: "The poet must be at the head of this alliance; his art must prevail." But it is a long way from the assertion that poetry must prevail to Hart's statement: "But what does this stage effect writing have to do with poetry? Theater! Let's finally stop talking about it like an art institution." No one who understands the nature of the arts and their means can take this path.

And now that I have written all this down, I would like to consider a third explanation for Hart's failure against the 'theater. I simply do not believe that Julius Hart can misunderstand the nature of the theater in the way his essay seems to. I hold him in much too high esteem to believe that. That's why I assume that the whole essay is not meant seriously. It is meant ironically. The author actually wants to show how important the theater is for dramatic art and therefore explains how nonsensical the views of those who claim the opposite are. As if someone were to say: canvas, paint and brushes have nothing to do with painting; they only distort and corrupt the pure work of art that flows from the painter's soul with inner necessity. "But what does all this colorfulness have to do with the art of painting? Pictures! Let's finally stop talking about them like works of art."

In these papers, the value of the theater as an art institution was repeatedly mentioned. I would never have agreed to found the "Dramaturgische Blätter" if I had not been convinced of the high mission of the theater. Today, however, we no longer regard the "Schaubühne" as a "moral institution", as Schiller did in his younger years. But all the more as an artistic institution. I am of the opinion that no art can pursue moral goals. That's why I don't demand this of the theater. But I consider the performances of the theater to be the ones that can most easily gain a hearing and interest. A sense of art and taste can be awakened in the widest circles from the stage. What we do to elevate the theater is done to elevate art. What we say against the theater harms art. I will accommodate any reasonable plan to improve our theater conditions.

I don't even want to join in the voices against the calculation of the "effect". It is often necessary to be ungentlemanly. Even Shakespeare did not disdain to take the practical demands of the stage into consideration.

Shakespeare demonstrably arranged the first scenes of his plays in such a way that those who arrive late can understand the course of events. And quite sensible people have maintained that the dramatist in this playwright was so great because he was a great actor.

It will always remain true that a drama that is not suitable for the stage is incomplete. The poet who can only create book dramas is like the painter without hands.

Instead of thundering against the theater, one should rather make suggestions on how to elevate this artistic medium. The lively, sensual embodiment on stage is something quite different from the solitary reading of a book. This is ignored by those who think little of the theater. I don't have a good opinion of those playwrights who can't write plays that are suitable for the stage. A drama must be performable. And the one that is not is bad. A symphony that cannot be heard is also bad. Book dramas are not things.

I know that the best poets have defended the book drama. But that is not the point. The poet may once feel the need to express himself through the means of drama, even if he does not have the talent to present himself in scenic images. Hamerling was a poet of whom I would like to say this. His dramas cannot be performed. That does not detract from his importance. But you have to consider him a bad playwright for that reason.

A good drama will always cry out for the stage.

Disdain for the stage always seems to me to be the sign of a spiritualization of art. But the spiritualization of art is its death. The more sensual art appears, the more it corresponds to its essence. Only periods of artistic decline will place the main emphasis on the nonsensical.

A few years ago, Hermann Bahr asked a number of actors about their art. They told him many interesting things about the old and the new stage style, they spoke about their position as poets and about the rehearsal of their roles. All this can be read in Bahr's book "Studien zur Kritik der Moderne". The most significant are the words spoken by Flavio Andò, Duse's brilliant partner: "First of all, I don't pay any attention to the text and I don't pay any particular attention to my role. First I have to explain the whole work to myself. First I have to feel the poetry - that is, in what stratum of society, among what people, in what mood the whole thing is set. Then the individual characters slowly emerge, as each one is from his parents, from his upbringing, from his destiny. When I finally have him, quite clearly, so that I can see every gesture and hear every sound, then I try to transform myself into him, to put aside my own nature and take on his. Tireless observation must help me to do this. I am always observing. I observe my colleagues, I observe you, I observe the waiter there. This is how I gather the means of expression. The text is then the least of it. It comes very last, often only at the rehearsal."

It would hardly be wrong to believe that these sentences characterize not only Andò's own style, but also that of Duse. The creation of a role out of the whole of a play must be asserted as a decisive requirement of the art of acting. It stands in contradiction to the usual task that actors seem to set themselves. They only play the individual role that they have in mind in some way, without regard to the whole poem.

An excellent example of this latter kind of acting is Zacconi. One need only convert Andò's sentences into their opposite, and one will characterize Zacconi. Anyone who can accept the fact that an actor, without regard to the content of the whole poem, plays a role to the highest technical perfection, as he made it up, but as the poet never imagined it, may admire Zacconi.

Andò said to Bahr in the aforementioned conversation: "Nature is our only law. That distinguishes us from the French, who always work with a traditional mechanism. As far as I could see, they have extraordinary artists, but it is always tradition, the beautiful line, the mechanism. Sometimes nature breaks through for a moment, but then the sought-after beauty and the artificial arrangement come right back."

This mechanism does not ask for the individual character of a personality in a piece, but has certain templates into which it forces everything. These templates more or less approximate the individual characters that the poets draw. There is a person with a hundred special qualities who commits an intrigue. The actor simply lets the hundred special qualities fall by the wayside and plays the conventional schemer. There are traditional rules for how to play the schemer.

This kind of acting according to the template is unfortunately much more common than you might think. Naturalism transferred to the stage has done a great deal to overcome it. Under its influence it has been recognized that there are no two identical human individuals, and that it is therefore impossible to reduce all the characters to be portrayed on stage to five or six typical figures. Naturalism has made it so that people enjoy going to the theater again because they don't see the same general schemes, the villain, the bon vivant, the comic old woman and so on in different plays every time, but because individual characters are embodied again.

But the actors who play in this way are not yet very numerous. A lot of the actors seem boring when we see them for the fifth or sixth time. We know exactly how they are going to do something, because we know the whole inventory of their postures, gestures and so on. They know nothing about the fact that one makes a declaration of love in this way and the other in that. They make the declaration of love - the theatrical declaration of love - in all cases.

The thing can go so far that you can't tell the difference between two actors who speak the same scene one after the other behind a curtain. At most, one does it quantitatively a little better, the other a little worse; qualitatively there is often not the slightest noticeable difference. The people change, the template remains.

All this has been discussed several times in recent years. The need to point out the existing shortcomings arose from changing tastes in the dramatic field. The time is not far behind us when stage plays dominated the theater, in which the characters were not characterized according to life, but according to the traditional acting templates. In the plays, too, one naïve girl looked desperately like the other. It was not a naïve girl who was portrayed, but "the naïve". Today we are happy to have reached the point where we disregard those who make plays in this way as playwrights. Even among theatergoers, who are still only looking for a few hours of comfortable, trivial entertainment, there are enough people who share this disdain. Today, poets are expected to base their creations on life, to deliver a piece of real life in each of them. Behind these demands on playwrights, the other demands for actors who do not want to play according to tradition, according to mechanism, could not be left behind. Today we have enough stage works that cannot be performed according to the old theatrical rules. If they are forced to be, then their best is lost.

I don't believe that the eternal principles of beautiful lines that transcend the everyday have to be lost by playing individualities.

Andò also said the right thing about this to Hermann Bahr: "I am asking a lot about beauty. But not for a conventional beauty that comes from the school - but for my individual beauty, which I carry within myself, as my own aesthetics give it to me. But this does not contradict the truth. Just as little as the self-evident concessions to the 'optique du théâtre'."

We no longer want to buy beauty on stage by faking life. We know that beauty does not lie outside, but within the realm of reality.

What does Andò call his individual beauty? What does he mean by the conventional beauty that comes from school? There is a way of presenting the qualities of the human personality in such a way that its essence is more externalized than is the case in everyday life. In the realm of everyday life, the essence is not completely absorbed in the qualities. There always remains a residue which we have to guess at, to discover. This residue must disappear if the personality is to reveal its beauty. It must, as it were, turn its essence outwards. But it is precisely its essence that it turns outwards. That is why the beauty is its own. The situation is different with conventional beauty. Here the personality does not externalize anything that it has within itself, but denies this essence and modifies its qualities in such a way that they are similar to the qualities of an imaginary being. The personality gives itself up in order to conform to a general norm.

Beauty cannot be imprinted on the personality from the outside; it must be developed from within. If there are not enough germs in a personality to produce the desirable effect of beauty, it will be deficient. However, if a person puts on an outward cloak of beauty, he or she will not usually appear flawed - if the thing is otherwise well done - but will not be able to rightly reject the label "caricature".

An excellent contribution to the history of German dramaturgy was recently made by Heinrich Bischoff. (Ludwig Tieck als Dramaturg. Bruxelles, Office de publicite). Tieck's relationship to dramatic literature and the theater requires an objective appraisal. Bischoff has summarized the reasons for this well in his introductory chapter. "I do not know," wrote Loebell to Tieck's biographer R. Köpke in 1854, "whether there is a second example in the whole of literature of a hatred against an author that so dominates the criticism than against L. Tieck. - For example, the Low German word "Schrullen", which otherwise hardly occurs in the written language, has been found for Tieck's critical opinions. The Bremen-Lower Saxon dictionary explains Schrulle as "an attack of nonsense, evil, foolish mood. And G.Schlesier accuses Tieck in the "Allgemeine Theater-Revue, (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1st year, S.3 f.), he has broken the German theater, blocked its path and its development, misled the poets and actors and cheated them of a happy development of their talent". Tieck's critical masterpiece, the "Dramaturgische Blätter, would like to banish Schlesier for a few hundred years; there is poison on every page of it."

Bischoff cites a variety of reasons for this unprecedented underestimation of Tieck. Tieck was regarded as the head of the Romantic school. This is why opponents of this literary movement hated him from the outset. Personal envy was also a factor among his contemporaries. "We know for certain that Tieck fought a hard battle in Dresden, where he developed his main dramaturgical activity, against a small-minded, ill-intentioned party that envied his intellectual superiority. The Young Germans, Heine, Laube, Gutzkow, to whom Tieck was opposed in a series of his novellas: Reise ins Blaue, Wassermensch, Eigensinn und Laune, Vogelscheuche, Liebeswerben, were also ill-disposed towards him."

In more recent times, finally, little effort has been made to study Tieck's dramaturgical writings. The judgment of his contemporaries and immediate successors is taken without much scrutiny. "A striking example is provided by the recently published work by E. Wolff, "Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in der Gegenwarv. In his overview of the history of German dramaturgy, Wolff not only makes no mention of Tieck, but also ascribes to O. Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" the merit that is due to Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter". The "clarifying reckoning with Schiller was carried out by Tieck almost half a century before O. Ludwig. The conclusion reached by O. Ludwig that true historical tragedy must return from Schiller to Shakespeare is, so to speak, the pivotal point of Tieck's dramaturgical writings. Just as Lessing settled accounts with the French, Tieck settled accounts with Schiller, with full recognition of his talent and merits, and, like Lessing, pointed to Shakespeare. This is why it is not Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" but Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter" that stand out as a landmark in the history of German dramaturgy."

The fact that he did not present his views in a closed system, but rather occasionally, has also contributed greatly to Tieck's misunderstanding. They can be found scattered throughout his various writings. Bischoff gives an overview of the writings that come into consideration: (a) the preliminary reports to his poetic works, (b) the conversations about art and literature in "Phantasus", (c) the satirical outbursts in the fairy tale comedies and Schwänken, especially in "Zerbino" and "Puss in Boots", d) the "Unterhaltungen mit Tieck" contained in the second volume of Köpke's biography, e) as the main source the "Kritische Schriften", which Tieck published in four volumes with Brockhaus in Leipzig from 1848-1852, f) the "Nachgelassene Schriften" published by Köpke can be considered as an appendix.

Ludwig Tieck was not fond of aesthetic studies. He was of the opinion that theory could never be used to make the fine distinctions that come into consideration in art. One must theoretically exaggerate the truth in some direction in order to arrive at a precise definition. That is why such theories remain stuck in half-truth, if they do not have to resort to the completely untrue.

Bischoff proves himself to be a good psychologist by establishing the difference between Tieck the dramatist and Tieck the dramatist. Anyone who overlooks this must underestimate Tieck. In Tieck's dramas an unclear fantasy prevails; nowhere does the poet know how to restrain the creations of the imagination by critical reason; there is little to be found of orderly composition, and yet Tieck, the dramaturge, demands artistic deception from the drama first and foremost. This can never be achieved with such an overgrowth of fantasy as prevails in his own dramas. Tieck the dramatist demands an image of life; Tieck the playwright gives a fantastic play. Furthermore, Tieck, the dramatist, seeks his material in the Middle Ages; at the same time, as a dramatist, he demands the immediate presence of the action. As a critic, Tieck frowned upon mood-painting in drama; as a poet, he inserted ottavas, tercinas, stanzas and canzonas into his dramas, which serve nothing but to lyrically paint the mood.

In his "Karl von Berneck", Tieck drew the true archetype of a gruesome tragedy of fate; yet as a critic he condemns this dramatic genre in the harshest terms.

Bischoff explains this dichotomy in Tieck's personality in a plausible way. One must distinguish between two periods in his work: a Romantic period, which lasts until around 1820, and a period which is characterized by a turning away from all Romanticism and a return to a more realistic view of the world. The dramas belong to the first period, the dramaturgical studies fall into the time after the change in his basic aesthetic convictions. "Tieck concludes his Romantic production with "Fortunat" before turning to modern life in his novellas, a long series of which he began in 1820, and depicting it in a predominantly realistic manner." "The sharp contrast between his dramatic and dramaturgical production is thus explained by a complete change in his aesthetic views; his dramaturgical activity only began when his dramatic work was finished."

Tieck's "Letters on Shakespeare" were published in 1810. At this time, the views of the Romantics were also his own. But over time, he turned away from these views completely. He expressed this clearly to Köpke: "They wanted to make me the head of a so-called Romantic school. Nothing has been further from my mind than that, just as everything in my entire life has been party-oriented. Nevertheless, people never stopped writing and speaking against me in this way, but only because they didn't know me. If I were asked to give a definition of the romantic, I would not be able to do so. I don't know how to make a distinction between poetic and romantic." "The word romantic, which one hears used so often, and often in such a wrong way, has done a lot of harm. It has always annoyed me when I have heard people talk about romantic poetry as a special genre. People want to contrast it with classical poetry and use it to describe a contrast. But poetry is and remains first and foremost poetry, it will always and everywhere have to be the same, whether you call it classical or romantic." - For Tieck, the greatest, the typical dramatist is Shakespeare. At first, this enthusiasm for Shakespeare may well have been of romantic origin. But in his mature years he reproaches Romantic Shakespeare criticism for detaching Shakespeare from the general course of development of his time and presenting him as a miracle that had fallen from the sky. Nevertheless, there is no great difference between Tieck's view of Shakespeare and that of Schlegel. It is not his opposition to Romanticism that is particularly clear. Rather, this is the case with his judgment of Calderon. Tieck sees Calderon's powerful influence on German drama as a pernicious one: "Soon Calderon had become our nation's favorite poet without further criticism. The accidental, the strange, the conventional, which his time imposed on him, or which he elevated to artificiality, was not only equated with the essential, the great dramatic in his works, but often preferred to the truly poetic. People forgot for a long time what they had recently admired in both Germans and Englishmen, and, however unequal the two poets might be, Calderon and Shakespeare were probably regarded as twin brothers; and others, still more enthusiastic, thought that Calderon began to speak where Shakespeare left off, or performed those difficult tasks in a grand manner which the colder Northerner did not feel equal to; even Goethe and even Schiller took a back seat to the drunks at that time, those intoxicated people who truly and seriously believed that true salvation for poetry could only come from the Spaniards and especially from Calderon. "

The critic Tieck detested most was the German tragedy of fate. He turned against the blind, demonic fear of fate, which played such a large role in the world view of Romanticism, in the sharpest way and with biting derision, although the same power plays a terrible role in his youthful dramas. "Karl von Berneck" is, as far as I know, the first time an attempt has been made to introduce fate in this way. A ghost who is to be redeemed by the fulfillment of a strange oracle, an old guilt of the house that must be purged by a new crime, which appears at the end of the play as love and innocence, a virgin whose tender heart forgives even the murderer, the ghost of an unforgiving mother, everything in love and hate, except for a sword itself that has already been used for a crime, must serve a higher purpose without it being able to be changed, without the characters knowing it. I realized even then how different this fate was from that of Greek tragedy, but I deliberately wanted to substitute the ghostly for the spiritual". He later condemned such dramatization: "Instead of debts and financial hardship, a crime, kidnapping, adultery, murder, blood; instead of the uncle, stern father, strange old man or general, heaven itself, which is even more stubborn than those family characters and cruel to boot, because it knows no other development than fear of death and burial."

The contrast between Tieck, the dramatist, and Tieck, the playwright, becomes clear in Tieck's harsh condemnation of the dramas of the mature Schiller. It seems like a mockery of his own production when Tieck bitterly rebukes the workings of fate in the "Bride of Messina". For Schiller attempted to give the dark rule of fate a semblance of necessity; while Tieck himself, in his "Abschied" and "Karl von Berneck", grants it a desolate reign in the form of chance.

Tieck's rejection of the Romantic as opposed to the natural, the human, is expressed most harshly in his criticism of Schiller's and Goethe's anticizing tendencies. He is generally an enemy of humanism, which carries ancient education and views into modern life. He believed that art could only flourish if it drew its content from the soil of the national. In "Goethe and his time" he speaks out against humanism: "It would be desirable that a mind as brilliant as Rousseau's or Fichte's should show, with the same sharp, perhaps even sharper one-sidedness than they wrote about the closed commercial state and the harm of the sciences, what a disadvantage knowledge of the ancients has brought us. How everything that was still remembered has sunk into contempt, how all new, good and correct endeavors have been inhibited, how the peculiar, patriotic has often been destroyed by a wrong worship and half-understanding of the ancients." And in his dramatic fairy tale "The Life and Deeds of Little Thomas, Called Thumbelina", he mocks by ironically depicting objects borrowed from folk tales, for example the seven-league boots, in an antique light: "Believe me, I can see from these boots that they have come down to us from ancient Greece; no, no, no modern artist does such work, so secure, simple, noble in cut, such engravings! Oh, this is a work by Phidias, I won't let that be taken away from me. Just look at it, when I place one of them like this, how completely sublime, sculptural, in quiet grandeur, no excess, no flourish, no Gothic addition, nothing of that romantic mixture of our days, where sole, leather, flaps, folds, tufts, jizz, everything must contribute to produce variety, splendor, a dazzling being that has nothing ideal; the leather should shine, the sole should creak, miserable rhyming being, this consonance in appearance; . .I have modeled myself after the ancients, they will not let us fall in any of our endeavors." Tieck has the court cobbler Zahn say this.

The modern world and modern life are fundamentally different from those of the Greeks, Tieck believes. This is why he condemns the dragging of ancient ways into modern drama, as demanded by Goethe, Schiller and the two Schlegels. Tieck also valued above all that which approached the modern in its presentation and conception, such as the dramas of Euripides, while the Graecomans were more attracted to Sophocles and Aeschylus, in which the specifically Greek is expressed more purely. The praise that Goethe and Schiller bestowed on Aristotle was thoroughly repugnant to Tieck. He sees a fundamental difference between the living conditions of Greek and German drama. For the Greeks, it was the shaping of the fable, the plots that mattered; for the moderns, the main thing is the development of the characters. "The newer drama is obviously essentially different from the old; it has lowered the tone, motives, character sketches, the contingencies of life are more prominent, the emotional forces and moods develop more clearly, the composition is richer and more varied, and the relationship to public life, the constitution, religion and the people is either silenced or stands in a completely different relationship to the work itself. The meaning of life, its aberrations, the individual, the strange, have been given more prominence; and those authors who have sometimes tried to strike the round, full tone of the old tragedy have almost always lapsed into bombast and the tone of Seneca."

Tieck contrasts the modern character drama with the old situation drama. At the center of his dramaturgical explanations is the idea that modern drama has the task of cultivating characterization and realism. He therefore turns against Schiller's idealism and never tires of opposing it with Shakespearean realism.

Consistent with these statements are Tieck's following comments on Goethe: "I admired Goethe immensely in his youthful poems and still admire him; I have spoken and written so much in his praise that, when I now hear so many uncalled-for panegyrists, I could still be tempted in my old age to write a book against Goethe for a change. For there can be no mistake about the fact that he, too, has his weaknesses, which posterity will certainly recognize." "We must never concede," is another statement, "that Goethe later stood higher in his enthusiasm, poetic power and opinion than in his youth... His striving for the many-sided has fragmented his powers, his consciously looking around has caused him doubt and at times removed his enthusiasm."

In contrast, Tieck emphasizes the stamp of the German spirit and the truly modern character in the dramas of the Sturm und Dränger. His judgment of Heinrich von Kleist gives us a good insight into Tieck's view. His deep penetration into the characters portrayed and his truthful realism cannot be emphasized often enough. His comments on the "Prince of Homburg" are particularly characteristic. He rebuked the public, who had become accustomed to seeing all heroes drawn according to a certain template. The general concept of a hero has clouded the view that an individual heroic figure can also be like the Prince of Homburg. According to this general concept, a hero should above all despise death and hold life in low esteem. But Kleist once drew a hero whose fear of death is understandable from the nature of his soul.

Bischoff correctly describes Tieck's relationship with Lessing. This relationship also illustrates Tieck's attitude towards naturalism. Lessing, according to Tieck, had turned with zeal against the eccentricity and silliness of conventional idealism. But he fell into the error of wanting to depict nature as such. In this way, he became the inventor and creator of domestic, natural, sensitive, petty and thoroughly untheatrical theater. For Tieck, despite his realistic creed, never wanted to see mere naturalness on the stage, but rather a deepened naturalness recognized in its essence. This is why Kleist's characters, who reveal their souls, seemed more dramatic to him than Lessing's characters, who are assembled from individual observations.

One result of Tieck's views on drama is his comments on the art of acting. In the great battle between the Hamburg and Weimar schools, he took the side of those who defended and practised the former. He did not want declamation, but character portrayal, not the beautiful, but the meaningful. He is said to have spoken harshly against Goethe's view of the art of acting. He probably made derisive remarks about the rules as defended by the Weimar poet and theater director: that everything should be beautifully portrayed, that the spectator's eye should be stimulated by graceful groupings and attitudes, or that the actor should first consider not working out the natural, but presenting it ideally. In this respect Tieck is much closer to modern views than Goethe. He had no understanding of the fact that the actor must always turn three quarters of his face towards the audience, never play in profile, nor turn his back to the spectators. Tieck called such acting artificial declamation and false emphasis. In contrast, he praises Schröder: "It is simplicity and truth that characterized Schröder, that he did not adopt a captivating manner, never rose and fell in tones in declamation without necessity, never pursued the effect merely to excite it, never struck up that singing lament in pain or emotion, but always led the natural speech through correct nuances and never abandoned it."

Tieck is said to have been a captivating reader. He proved precisely how highly he valued a stylistically perfect form of speech despite his demand for naturalness.

In general, Tieck's aspirations should not be confused with demands for a complete stripping away of everything that the stage demands by its very nature. He had a keen sense of the possibilities of the theater. Characteristic is what he says about the decorations: "Why should the stage not be decorated where it suits, amuse with dress and dance? Why should a thunderstorm not be represented naturally? There is only talk of this not becoming the main thing and displacing the poet and actor." The ideal that Tieck had in mind for the stage was a middle ground between the old English stage with its lack of ornamentation and the modern development of all kinds of refined means, which only blunt the receptivity for the actual poetry. In 1843, he staged Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the help of the three-storey Mystery Stage, because this arrangement avoids the countless transformations that destroy all coherence and destroy a sensation that was just in the making.

Devrient, the author of the "History of German Dramatic Art", was the most enthusiastic in his recognition of Tieck's services to German dramaturgy. While working on this work, on March 24, 1847, Devrient wrote to Tieck: "The History of German Dramatic Art, which I have undertaken to edit, brings everything I have ever heard from you about the nature of our art back to my mind, the further and deeper I research, and makes so much that I otherwise doubted become a complete conviction. I feel more and more in agreement with what you have said here and there in your works about the development of the German stage - unfortunately it is far too little for my needs - so that I have come to recognize your views as the most infallible."

As much as the art of acting, the art of the reciter is also in a bad way. We perceive essentially the same deficiencies in both. Here, as there, it is mostly the effort of the reproducer to "make something" out of the work of art, i.e. to subordinate the poet to himself and the pursuit of success. In the case of the actor this deficiency is understandable to us, for we must admit that even where a drama can dispense with the sharp accentuation by the actor, the coarse-minded audience likes to give a strong success to the actor who puts on the lights. That we encounter the same deficiency in the art of performance is less understandable to us and also seems less excusable. Less excusable because here the pitfalls do not exist which make the task of the reproducer more difficult in drama and in its scenic representation. Less understandable because we are inclined to assume that this art, which is more shameful in all its reproaches and in its task, only attracts disciples to its path who are sufficiently capable of renunciation and have an excellent understanding of its simplicity and delicacy. But practical experience shows us that very few performers have understood that mastery is bound up with artistic modesty. They are mostly still professionally bound to the art of acting with its completely different tasks, they are not always its most subtle representatives and drag their ways of expression and even their shortcomings into the new art as a crime. It is embarrassing and horrifying how they often present us with works that are outstanding in their simplicity and delicate mood, dramatically pointed and materialized or even supported by strong gestures. If a work of art was once really granted the opportunity to appear in this lively manner, to reveal itself to a wider circle, which could perhaps be brought into a relationship with art at this moment, its soul was now strangled with rough hands, beaten to death with knuckles. This manner of performance does not contribute to the establishment of lively, fruitful relations between art and the people, for which both parts are crying out eagerly. Experience tells us that the actor who cannot detach himself sufficiently from the stage devices is the worst interpreter for poems that do not set mimic tasks. I was blessed with indelible impressions through their performance by people who did not pursue this interpretation professionally, subtle imitators or self-creative natures, who sometimes possessed only modest vocal means, insufficient modulation ability and no trained technique, of whom one could well say that they were not "above their task". One sensed that they were still gripped by the mood of the work of art in the lamplight. With a simple, noble, natural and human tone, they performed the parts which thus found their only proper expression, but to which others gave an emphatic characterization. How completely different were the smaller movements that stood out against this calm background, how moving a gentle allusion could be, and what an unheard-of, upwardly swirling intensification this handling of the pathos allowed! Ah, here it was also proved with such infallible certainty that it was not false pain that poet and rhapsode put into their language. The rhapsodist must have been able to laugh heartily and weep bitterly in life, he must have saved his naivety into manhood, he must not have had to arouse too much professional laughter and weeping; the work of art must be his experience, he must be able to weep, tremble and thunder without whining or rumbling, then we willingly follow him to the most unfamiliar places, to the islands of the blissful or to the horrors of the Orcus. Such participation can hardly be expected from a professional interpreter; hurled from one sensation to another, they finally blunt him; it would also take overly strong natures not to be consumed by such unmitigated participation. Only brilliant actors, whose universal spirit makes it easy for them to leave the specific sphere of their profession, simple, amiable mimes, who have their core of humanity together in such a way that a professional marasmus cannot penetrate: these also show themselves suitable to bring a work of art to bear. Every rhapsodist can learn an infinite amount from them. For there are brittle works of art that let our senses pass by unheated, and where it takes an experienced penetrator into the depths to reveal a significant life to us. A single such opportunity has perhaps helped us to be able to face every work of art we encounter with a broader receptivity. There have been poets who first needed such an 'apostle' to gain recognition and thus the conditions for further creation.

Lyric poetry and the finer prose poetry lead an unnoticed existence, and so their creators lack a flashing, higher alluring goal. It is not true that the poet does not need recognition. The talk of "art as an end in itself" is a nonsensical nonsense that should be discarded with the penny-ante, and in general the assertion that poetry can dispense with the more lively mode of expression given by the performance is a nonsensical one. There are few among the people whose imagination would be hurt by the recital; with most people, on the other hand, a sensual devotion to the work of art is made possible in the first place, and form and content come to life for them. Above all, at least on this ground there is a chance for the poet to unite with the people. Every such contact helps the poet from his poverty of blood. For the inbreeding among the intellectually and emotionally creative is pitiful and cannot be attributed in all cases to disgust at our cultural conditions. Every contact will also have a life-giving effect on their future artistic expressions.

Art demands opportunities to express itself vividly through mediating organs. It seems to me that the work for art must become more widespread. Cenralization absorbs forces without bringing them to bear on the outside; the work of the individual in his circle will create a more sensitive audience. We need more rhapsodists, but we also need better rhapsodists than we generally have today. The opportunities to work and to work nobly in the sense of my demands will increase in the way I have indicated. It will provide us with rhapsodes who have the power to captivate a festively assembled people. This path will bring good things for the receiving people, for the artists and for the arts. Healthier interactions will be established.

I myself feel clearly enough that my last sentences are on the field of "ifs and buts". There is no need to pin me down on this. But I think I did my bit when I spoke openly about the misery we all feel. We want a rhapsodic art, a great one if it can be, for the festive needs of our souls, but at any hour we also like a more modest one, if only it is noble and simple. Whether grand or modest: out with the antics!

Some readers may not want to accept the question addressed in the above essay as a dramaturgical one. Nevertheless, I believe that the matter is raised here in the right place. As things stand today, the art of performance can only be dealt with in connection with the art of acting. The orientation about this art, which is so neglected today, requires above all else the solution of the task: How does the art of performance relate to the art of acting? The latter has countless means at its disposal which the performer must do without. One must realize that a full artistic effect can only be achieved in mere performance if the mimic is replaced by something else.

Our time seems little inclined to count the art of performance among the arts at all. This is understandable when one considers that the current trend is not to restrict artistic means, but to expand them. Wagnerian art wants to create a total work of art using all artistic means. Is it not a sign of the artistic poverty of the time that one tries to gather everything together in order to say what one wants to say? It seems much more artistic to increase the expressive capacity of a small range of means in such a way that one can reveal with them what nature has required a great effort to do. What nature has at its disposal to place a human being before us! How little the sculptor has. He must put into the little what nature achieves with its many.

In the same way, the speaker must be able to put into his speech what in natural speech only comes to life in combination with other things. The soul, which in natural speech is held back inside the chest, must flow out into the word. We must hear sensations when we have a performer before us. This is related to what we have to say about the style of speaking during a lecture. A speaker who speaks "naturally" is not an artist. The enhancement of linguistic expressiveness must be studied. In this area there will be things that are no less varied than the lessons of the art of singing. Today it is not even possible to distinguish the dilettante from the artist. Under such circumstances, it is only natural that the public "does not want to have anything recited to them", but believes that "it is more convenient to read things oneself". One must first learn to understand that this is just as accurate as saying: why do I need to see a painted landscape? I prefer to look at real nature. What interests us in a picture is not the landscape depicted, but the way in which lines and colors can be used to represent what nature achieves with infinite forces. The feeling for the how of the presentation should be awakened.

We will only have a proper receptivity for this how when we are familiar with the content of what is being presented. The material interest in the content has nothing to do with the interest in the lecture. The means of the performer lie in the organs of speech. And for the sake of the pleasure that speaking gives us, we must listen to such an artist.

When we are ready, the recitalist will relate to the stage artist as the concert singer relates to the opera singer. You only have to look at our aesthetics to know how far we are from a desirable goal in this area. That is why I believe that the above essay raises a burning question.

One of my essays also deals with Ludwig Tieck's art of recitation. I would like to say a few words about this subject, following on from the previous essay. There, the importance and artistic value of the lecture was emphasized. Tieck's example provides striking proof of this value. I would venture the assertion that Tieck was such an excellent theater director mainly because he was such an outstanding master of performance. Thus, as a performing artist, he was close to the theater in a field that is closely related to the art of acting. As has already been emphasized in these papers, the theater director should be a man of letters, either a dramatic poet or a critic. Only in this way is he able to bring the theater into the right relationship with literature. An actor or director as stage manager will always have the inclination to look at the plays from the point of view of how they work through the actor's art. Their literary value will be less important to him than the question of whether they contain good roles, whether they are theatrically effective and the like. As a writer or poet, however, the stage manager will find it very difficult to gain authority over practical theater people. The latter will be made considerably easier for him by the fact that he is able to exert an effect as a master of performance. This is proven by Tieck.

At the time when Tieck worked at the Dresden theater, his lectures were among the things that were considered artistic in the city. Just as visitors to Dresden went to the picture gallery, they also tried to gain access to such a lecture. As a result, the stage manager had a tremendously stimulating effect on the actors.

We know that Tieck was a master of characterization in his lectures. It is a pity that he did not leave us any remarks on this art. They would certainly be just as instructive as his statements on dramaturgy and acting. For we are almost entirely lacking a theory of the art of performance. In this, more than in any other field, the learner is left entirely to himself and to chance.

Not only for the actor, but for the widest circles of educated people, such a theory would be useful today. With the shape that our public life has taken, almost everyone is now in the position of having to speak in public more often. One would be inclined to do something for the training of the art of speech if one is forced to speak in public. But if you want to develop in this area, you have to go to a stage performer or a master speaker who only practises the art of public speaking with the stage in mind. However, the speaker should not be an actor. The elevation of the ordinary speech to a work of art is a rarity. We Germans are incredibly casual about it. For the most part, we completely lack a feeling for the beauty of speech and even more for characteristic speech. Our most eminent orators are not artists of speech. Do not believe that a speech delivered without any art can have the same effect as one that has been refined into a work of art.

Of course, all this has little to do with stagecraft. But it is also important for the latter. Anyone who has received some training in the art of speaking will be able to make a much more accurate judgment of an actor's performance than someone who knows nothing about this art. By far the majority of writers and journalists who write about the theater today are incapable of passing judgment on the art of speaking. This gives their judgments a dilettante quality. No one would have the right to write about a singer who has no knowledge of the art of singing. As far as acting is concerned, far lower demands are made. One is satisfied with general amateurish talk about artistic achievements in this field. People who understand whether a verse is spoken correctly or not are becoming increasingly rare.

Artistic speaking is often regarded today as misguided idealism. This could never have happened if people were more aware of the artistic training potential of language.

Our schools also place far too little emphasis on the cultivation of artistic speech. It is overlooked that careless, inartistic speech is just as repulsive to those who have the right sensibility for it as tasteless clothing. We are about to devote more attention to the arts and crafts than has hitherto been the case. We want to furnish homes not only in a functional way, but also in an artistic way. Speech is also a kind of handicraft. Here, too, nature must be elevated to culture.

We want to furnish homes in such a way that they are not only functional but also beautiful. Everything should point to the purpose of the home. But it should not be abstract and functional, it should not be sober. The purpose should appear in such a way that it points to the purpose in a beautiful way.

We would like to demand something similar from speech. First of all, it has the task of conveying the meaning of what is to be communicated. It should be made as suitable as possible for this purpose. 'But this task can be achieved in various ways. It can happen in such a way that no importance is attached to beauty and grace of expression. Then, however important the subject, the speech will appear sober, perhaps even tasteless. But it can also happen that the purposeful is achieved in a beautiful, graceful way.

Here the personal touch is expected to do an enormous amount. A speaker who expresses content in such a way that the intention to speak beautifully is noticeable will make little impression as a "beautiful speaker". But there is a degree of euphemism that corresponds exactly to the subject matter. If the speaker achieves this degree, the harmony between expression and content will be perceived in his speech - and will be perceived sympathetically.

However, only those who have a feeling for the beauty and style of speaking in general can develop this rhythm. This feeling must become an unconscious part of the speaker's personality. As soon as one notices the search in the speech, the sympathy of the listener is gone.

But in order to achieve this unconsciousness of feeling in relation to beautiful, stylized speech, an education in rhetoric must be sought. One must speak for a while for the sake of beautiful speech, then later one will also speak stylized if one does not consciously strive for it.

The German has the peculiarity of regarding such things as stylized speech as a trivial external matter. He is very wrong to do so. Here, more than in any other area, the saying applies: clothes make the man. We will never be converted to the view held by French orators that it doesn't matter what we say if we have only found out how we should speak. But we should attach more importance to this how than we are used to doing.

A speaker who knows how to speak, the words run after him. He draws the listener in. That is a sentence of experience. Why shouldn't we act according to this principle? We serve the content more if we help it through rhetoric than if we just say our little slogan to the exclusion of all rhetoric.

It is precisely because we want to give the content its validity that we should give it a sympathetic form. But we will only speak sympathetically if we have undergone training in the art of speaking.

The critic has a royal office; he should exercise it like a king. All the greats fall to him. He judges the poets and thinkers, the kings and warriors; he is to justify the judgment of the world and posterity about them. To do this, he himself must be rich in manifold knowledge, firm, faithful and truthful, loving and broad-minded. He who is endowed with these qualities should judge royally what happens and what is created; no cannibal and no slave, neither slave to public opinion nor to the king, neither slave to the state nor to the church, nor to any clique, he should exercise his sacred office.

This is how a true critic should be. And how should he not be? - No one says this better than the classical critic Lessing in the 57th antiquarian letter: "As soon as the art judge reveals that he knows more about his author than his writings can tell him, as soon as he uses this closer knowledge to make the slightest - supposed or real - disadvantageous move against him: his censure immediately becomes a personal insult. He ceases to be a judge of art, and becomes - the most contemptible thing that a rational creature can become - a complainer, a denigrator, a pasquillant! "

Anyone who has observed Maximilian Harden's activities for around eight years will be reminded in some respects of Lessing's statement above.

In Harden's opinion, a well-pointed phrase is more important to him than a dedicated approach to a subject. It often seems that his critical wisdom consists of one sentence: everything that comes into being is worthy of being reviled! - In this way, the skillful feuilletonist becomes an insulting attacker. Mr. Harden is a pamphleteer. Almost all of Harden's earlier essays in his weekly magazine "Zukunft" offer overwhelming material against him. Recall his essay on the assassination of Justice Levy, and his essay on the Zola trial will be read either with indignation or with a pitying smile. One must perhaps feel pity when one sees how a man behaves who, despite all reason, wants to say something different from all other people. The embarrassment, which is witty, gives a peculiar nuance of comedy.

Now we have experienced Sudermann's "Johannes".

How does Mr. Harden proceed? Twelve and a half pages of the fifteen-page essay are a kind of epilogue to Sudermann's work. - This means that Mr. Harden sat in his box on 15 January and witnessed the first performance in Berlin's Deutsches Theater. The powerful impressions that assailed him there resonate in the former actor and provide him with material and thoughts for an extremely subtle reflection of Sudermann's world of thought in "Johannes". Mr. Harden perhaps persuades himself that what he writes on pages 218 to 230 is his very own work. It is taken step by step from Sudermann's circle of ideas in "Johannes", apart from a few modifications; expressed with stylistic mastery in Harden's manner and form, but - what irony: a brilliant, in part ravishing acknowledgement of Sudermann!

But Harden, the spirit that always denies, does not want to admit this to himself. After all, the work he is so fond of is neither by Ibsen nor by Yvette Guilbert, but by Hermann Sudermann. Mr. Harden has been fighting him bitterly for years.

So it doesn't help: a scurrilous conclusion is quickly added on two pages, and we are once again presented with the familiar grimace of Harden's criticism.

Let's take a closer look at it.

"We see," writes Harden, "in Sudermann a poor devil of a Baptist - that is an amusing image that makes for merciless mockery; the drama to which an error gives the content is more correctly called a comedy." But this "poor devil", Mr. Pamphletist, dominates a whole mass of people, defeats the raging Pharisee at the well, who is no ordinary opponent (Act I, scenes 9 and 10), closes the way to glory and honour for himself through his manliness of character; he goes through life as a hero and goes to his death as a hero. To stand opposite Salome and not budge an inch from this predator even in the face of her ignominious end, to hurl her shame in the face of Herodias and disarm this beast in her own palace, to stand up to Herod as a prisoner in the dungeon court and assert the proud height of the lonely man on the mountain top, who assigns the cheap glory of the market to the little weakling in purple - would to God, Mr. Harden, that you were such a "poor devil"! Then your life would not be a "comedy", as it is becoming more and more now, but a heart-rending, spirit-liberating spectacle.

But so - "it is an empty, pathetic play"; for - Mr. Harden is a pamphleteer! It is unforgivable, he teaches us, how Sudermann treats the Baptist: not only has he used Flaubert's story (Flaubert and Sudermann both lay the same lion's skin on a chaise longue in the palace salon. Q.e.d.), but the Baptist's nature has remained alien to the poet, even though the reviewer has just presented it to him with his own thoughts, namely the poet's own thoughts. Sudermann's "weak inventive power" (!) has made a "confused being, driven astray by bad or badly read books (-?-)" out of Johannes; what does a Harden (perhaps also: a Harden should understand more -) understand of the conflict that rages through and tears apart this heroic soul, but through which it finally wrestles its way victoriously to the clear light of inner harmony, as Sudermann shows us? Law and goodness: the former dominates the old covenant, the latter the new; the latter represents the Baptist, the latter his Messiah. They form an irreconcilable contrast! The harsh demand for justice is the Baptist's shibboleth! This is not, as Harden blathers, "the spell of rabbinical dullness", to which John knows himself to be in sharp contradiction, but the genuine, pure air of Mosaic and prophetic tradition, as every Israelite breathed it from childhood. "As if he had never heard anything new", announces Harden, "John listens up when the word love strikes his ear for the first time" - did this not correspond completely to his situation, both internal and external? The prophetic sayings that Harden seems to be thinking of here are, even in their most far-reaching form, dealt with in the Summa: "Do not be deprived of your flesh", i.e.: The Jew helps the Jew - no one else! - But from Galilee comes the message that the new Master calls for love of the enemy! So no longer, as God's commandment stated: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"? How do God's holy law and the forgiving goodness towards the sinner unite? - Did this collision not cause the Baptist the most difficult struggle of his soul, doubly tragic, because it was not just any rabbi who represented the unheard-of new teaching, but his Messiah, whose forerunner and pioneer he knew himself to be, who carried salvation for Israel in his hand, who eternally determined everyone's fate? John expresses this movingly to Herod (Act IV, Scene 5): "Thou hast put no chains on me, neither canst thou loosen them for me: another cast thee in my way, and there I broke thee." The poet has masterfully posed this inner, religious problem to the hero within the framework of the external events with their colorful alternation up to the brutal outcome, something that the vast majority of critics have not yet understood. From act to act - the attentive will also note the highly instructive act endings - the solution is approached: the law-abiding preacher of repentance, who harshly rejects the children of Jehoshaphat together with Jael and the tender Miriam, only learns to love his disciples in the difficult struggle that breaks up his outer life and also shows him the limits of his prophetic work (end of Act IV), after he has already actually been able to love them. Act IV), after he has actually, albeit still half reluctantly, handed over the judgment of the desecrator of the temple to God (end of Act III), and finally, at the inner climax of the drama (Act V, Scene 8), learns to love the two so exclusive greats: Law and Goodness, to find the unifying formula: "Only from the mouth of the lover may the name guilt sound!" Mercy administers the judgment.

This settles two more of Harden's inanities: firstly, that Sudermann has Jesus preach a "liberal love", while he was "also" a scorching flame that consumed that which was doomed.

The lover administers judgment, says Sudermann deeply and gloriously, while Harden juxtaposes two Johannesses, the second of whom happens to be called Jesus. John wants to and should judge, Jesus has come to save people's souls. The orientation of the two men is fundamentally different. Then: Sudermann has the Baptist "search for Jesus as if he were a business traveler roaming the country with valuable samples". That is Harden's brashness! Consider: both men were working in the same country, at times only a few miles apart; it must be obvious to any normal mind that this cannot be a matter of "purely spiritual searching and finding", but at that time of messengers being sent out with a message and an answer.

But it gets even worse! Sudermann "does not live in his work; he has dragged building blocks from all regions, borrowed decorative objects from all art chambers, so that he can no longer find his way around his own building" - that is a schoolboy's achievement that fully deserves a striking proof a posteriori! - Sudermann, so we must continue to hear, has "committed a crime when he entangled Johannes in a ludicrous wooer's intrigue (the poet had looked for the models in the "Protzenburgen> and the "pimped truffle paradise of Tiergartenstraße -), the thin web of which the rough one would have torn apart with one grip": is this not what Johannes actually does through his heroic impeccable behavior? Why does Harden deny this? Doesn't that mean falsifying the clear truth and criticizing without conscience? -! "John was a man among men, and Herodias and Salome had no decisive influence on his growth and downfall" -: does that exclude the possibility that these two terrible women contributed to his downfall? Has the truth of "cherchez la femme" not been a sinister force throughout the course of world history? Is it necessary to illustrate this to a Harden? Political considerations and domestic intrigues combined to grind the axe for the Anabaptist.

The coloring of Sudermann's drama is unparalleled; the spiritual and political state of the people and the entire "milieu" are so exquisitely captured - even very disapproving critics have declared this aloud - that even a penetrating scholarly examination can only pay tribute with admiration. Mr. Harden, of course, knows better: "all contours blur and the viewer stares distractedly at a confused foggy picture". Were you so distracted - or even "foggy" - that everything "blurred" for you? As a result, you probably only have dim memories of the premiere evening, Mr. Harden? - That's why we advise you: Visit the performance again with confidence; but only if you are able to "stare" in a collected way instead of "distractedly"! - The "cheeky tragedian", you cheeky reviewer, does not "confuse" "Pharisees and Sadducees" either, which would of course be easier to excuse in your case. Just kindly read the passage in Act I (Scene 3) where the two Sadducean priests offer their blessing to Eliakim and the palace maid, the latter followers of the Pharisee sect; when they abruptly refuse (both parties hated each other mortally), the one priest angrily remarks: "They are also from the school of the Pharisees." Do you admit, Mr. Harden, that you were asleep? Or were you "staring" "absentmindedly" again?

One more thing: the sources on the political situation in Palestine at the time of the Baptist flow sparsely and murkily, to the chagrin of every Orientalist. One cannot go beyond more or less probable conjectures. Sudermann has done well to stick to the biblical account of the evangelists as a whole - preferring the synoptics to the fourth gospel, of course - without missing the notes in Josephus. Not only Maximilian Harden, but hopefully every schoolchild knows that it was not Herod Antipas but Pontius Pilate who ruled Jerusalem at the time. But Sudermann has Herod Antipas visit Jerusalem for the Passover as the "tetrarch of Galilee". Do you have any objections to that? But the entry of Jesus - not in Jerusalem, but in or near Machaerus (in the drama's so effective final image) is such an understandable poetic liberty that we can only speak of a "disdainful theatrical trick" in the scolding jargon of Mr. Harden.

Summa: Hermann Sudermann is neither "intellectually poor" nor a "dazzling theatrical force" who has "tragicomically overestimated himself in his delusions of grandeur", but rather: the great poet has gifted us with a highly significant work of strict dramatic structure, splendid organization and design and delightful language, for the tragedy "Johannes" is an enduringly valuable masterpiece of German poetry. Mr. Harden, however, deserves the words of his and our friend Friedrich Nietzsche, which are intended to tell the famous editor of the "Zukunft" what he means more and more to our people:

"The obstacle of all the strong and creative, the labyrinth of all the doubting and lost, the quagmire of all the weary, the shackle of all those running after high goals, the poisonous fog of all fresh sprouts, the parching sandy desert of the searching German spirit yearning for new life! "

The modernity of Henrik Ibsen's spirit can be observed in his dramatic technique no less than in the problems he deals with. One need only compare the dramatic structure of Hamlet or Wallenstein with that of Ghosts to see what modern drama is. Edgar Steiger has described this spirit of the new drama in his book "Das Werden des neuen Dramas" (Berlin, 1898. F. Fontane & Co.) in a way that will find little favor with scholars, which is by no means flawless, but nevertheless appealing and full of light.

He rightly points out that Ibsen's technique is in some respects similar to that of the old Greek tragedians. Just think of "Oedipus the King". All the events here take place before the poet begins his drama. Only the immense torments of the soul and the sublimely gruesome moods that develop from these events come before our eyes. It has therefore been said that the Greeks did not produce complete dramas, but only fifth acts. And is it not the same with the "Ghosts", for example? Isn't everything decisive and objective here also before the beginning of the drama?

Steiger aptly points out the differences in the sources from which such similarities in technique between the ancients and Ibsen emerge. For the Greeks, drama developed from musical-religious cults, from the worship of Dionysus. They were not interested in the depiction of external events, but in the expression of the devotion which the counsels of the gods, who brought about those events, instilled in them. They wanted to express their devotion, their religious mood in their poetry; not to embody what they had observed.

And Steiger explains just as clearly how, under the influence of a different world view, Shakespeare had to develop a different dramatic technique. "Shakespearean tragedy has no such distinguished past as ancient Greek tragedy. The medieval mysteries and carnival plays, in which we have to see the ancestors of the newer theater, both paid homage to the brave principles of Goethe's theater director in "Faust": above all, they wanted to entertain the people. The mysteries were intended to compensate the devout for the boredom of the sermon, and in the carnival plays the worthy fellow citizens were allowed to laugh at the stupidity and meanness of their dear neighbors." The aim of the play was not the solemn elevation to the gods, but the amusement of worldly things. "The main thing, then, was to give the people plenty to look at; for if only the eye had its constant occupation, the poets and players need not fear for success. The more sad and funny adventures, sublime speeches and mean jokes alternated with each other, the better! ... Shakespeare thus found a real play, from which the audience demanded that the great deeds of history, the adventures of the heroes and the follies of their dear neighbors be presented to them in the flesh. Thus, unlike the Greek poets, he did not have to sensualize musical sentiments and lyrical thoughts, but to internalize external events and adventures, murderous deeds and pranks."

The way Shakespeare went about it shows that he was a child of his time. He lived in an era in which attention was focused on the great, on the external. It was the great main and state actions, the actions visible from afar, that people's eyes were focused on at the time. "Kings and heroes walk across the stage on a gigantic scale, and the fools become like kings. Everything grows immense. Only the times and the historical distances shrink according to an arbitrary perspective. We clearly sense that we are living in the age of the telescope."

Natural science was also inspired by this spirit at the time. What was visible to the naked eye was studied. Nothing was known of the microscopic small things from which modern science seeks to investigate the laws of the great. If Shakespeare had wanted to show from the stage the subtle vibrations of the soul into which people were transported by the outside world, no one would have understood him. No one would have visualized the external causes, the actions themselves, from the effect on people's inner selves. That has changed today. The modern poet has adopted the microscopic view of the modern naturalist. "We see too much: that's why we have to narrow our field of vision. To exhaust a single human soul with our gaze seems to us a Danaid's labor. That's why we don't need kings and heroes in poetry; the poorest devil of a worker can be more interesting to us under certain circumstances. After all, we don't want to paint crowns and purple cloaks, but only souls, living human souls - and who knows whether we would find one under the purple - at least the kind we need, a soul in which the great, torn century is reflected? "

Henrik Ibsen therefore cuts out a microscopic specimen of human life and lets us guess everything else from it. This is the basis of his dramatic technique. He gradually works his way towards this technique. In the "Bund der Jugend", in the "Stützen der Gesellschaft", in the "Volksfeind" he still seeks to present a macroscopic picture, as complete a plot painting as possible; later he only describes the interior of the souls who have experienced this painting, and opens up the retrospective view of the painting to us. How little happens in the "Ghosts"! In the morning, a pastor visits a widow; on the following day, he is to dedicate an asylum to the memory of her deceased husband. The asylum burns down; the pastor leaves without having achieved anything; and after his departure, the widow's son goes mad. - But what is going on in the souls of those involved during this meagre plot? A look back into a rich past, into a rich drama opens up before us.

Now Ibsen has a special secret of dramatic technique. In the limited slice of reality that he presents to us, he suggests everything we need in order to draw our attention to the entire plot that is under consideration but not depicted.

Steiger draws attention to individual such suggestive features. "For the time being, through the inner tension of the dramatic process and the vivid power of the skilfully stylized sounds of nature, he brings the trembling soul of his people so close to us that we feel their memory images as if they were real." But once this has happened, he needs a second means. He lets us experience an external event on stage, which we only need to move backstage so that dramatic reality is transformed into fantasy, "and we have actually experienced both past and present in the same way. The objectification of the image of memory and the internalization of stage reality thus work into each other's hands in order to achieve sensual effects just as strong as the appearance of the earlier theater. We find a classic example of this in the first act of "Ghosts. In Mrs. Alving's animated narrative, the entire past of the house comes before our eyes as vividly as if we were seeing and hearing the deceased chamberlain himself bantering with his maid in the flower room. Suddenly we really do hear the whispering voices of Oswald and Regina from the flower room and see Mrs. Alving, pale as death, slowly rising from her chair and, as if petrified, pointing to the door, slurring the half-stitched words: "Ghosts! The couple in the flower room is dead!" Here we have a past dramatically embodied before us in an immediately present action.

The art of directing must take up this peculiarity of Ibsen's technique when presenting his works. From this point of view, the question of dramatic technique becomes a dramaturgical one. What one is entitled to call Ibsen style on stage must begin at this point. For the art of acting has the task of embodying. It must present with external stage means, visible to the senses, what the poet has in mind in his imagination. The parallel processes - one of reality, the other as an image of memory - must be worked out by dramatic art. How this is to be done in each individual case must be left to the stage practitioner. The only certainty is that we will only experience satisfying performances of Ibsen's dramas when the stage style is developed in this direction. As long as this is not the case, these stage works will always seem like dramatized novellas to the audience. We must realize that even in these dramas it is not the what that matters, but the how. To express the what, Ibsen could also choose any other form of poetry. He needs the stage because he uses artistic means that go beyond mere narration, which must be embodied if they are to be effective in all their power.

Steiger again aptly remarks: "The dramatic double images, the second of which brings the first to mind in a flash, are not an invention of Ibsen's, but this poet must make excellent use of them in his modern technique. Perhaps all it takes is a gentle nudge and one or other of our directors will become a treasure digger, dragging hidden glories from the depths of Shakespeare's poetry onto the stage. In Ibsen's work, no one passes by these double images carelessly. Because here they must immediately catch the eye of anyone who is not blind."

In his stimulating book "Neue Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik der Epik und Dramatik" (Leipzig. 1898), Friedrich Spielhagen discusses, among other things, the dominance that drama exercises in the present. Anyone interested in aesthetic questions will always enjoy reading a theoretical work by Spielhagen. An artist of rich experience, fine thinking and refined taste speaks to us from such a book. A mature, clarified judgment, gained through many years of personal artistic practice, must also be listened to with rapt attention by those who have a different view from the person making the judgment. In general, Friedrich Spielhagen does not speak well of modern dramatic production; in individual cases, he will always be the first to show understanding and appreciation for real talent.

Much of what he says should find unreserved approval even among the most obedient adherents of newer trends. For it is true that today's literary supremacy is based on manifold errors: on errors on the part of the poets, on errors on the part of the public.

One basic error is that one believes one can say everything one wants to say with the means of drama. A deeper aesthetic education, however, will always lead to the recognition of the truth that certain material can only tolerate a novelistic and not a dramatic treatment. Drama cannot tolerate material that is only suitable for novellistic treatment. That is why some modern dramas are only dramatized novellas. Such shortcomings in the material, or in the treatment of a material, result in dramatic structures that leave us unsatisfied because important things are missing that are necessary if we are to fully understand what happens in the course of the dramatic action. And when the playwright endeavors to bring such things, we see on the stage what we cannot tolerate on it. Spielhagen rightly remarks: "The confusion of dramatic with epic art ... occurs ... sometimes comes to light in the most delightful way. Thus in the pettiness of the stage directions in usum of the directors and actors. No small piece of furniture, no coffee cup saucer is given to us. The position of the sun, the atmospheric mood, the scent of flowers wafting through the room - these are all things of immense importance. Each person is given a meticulous description: whether they are long or short, fat or thin; whether their skull is broad or oval, what expression their physiognomy shows when they are at rest or in motion, and that they have this or that habit when walking, standing, speaking or smiling. One would always like to shout to the gentlemen: if these things are so dear to you, why don't you just write novels and novellas where you can indulge in such epic details!"

But for all its addiction to indulging in detail, drama cannot offer the development of characters and actions that epic representation rightly claims for itself. The drama must depict prominent, characteristic moments that coalesce into an artistic whole with a beginning, middle and end. All talk about the unnaturalness of such a whole cannot be convincing. Spielhagen replies to such talk: "I am always reminded of the anecdote of the Jewish butcher who thought he had sharpened his knife without a blade, as required by the ritual, and to whom the wise rabbi showed it under a magnifying glass, where the blade without a blade then appeared like a saw. Engaging in a race with nature is always unfortunate - it has too much staying power. And the matter becomes absurd when the competition is as futile as it is futile. The purposes of nature and art do not coincide now and nowhere. Nature has always done very well without art; and when art is absorbed in imitation of nature, it is nothing more than second-hand and dead-hand nature, of which every panopticon provides gruesome evidence."

There are thus two errors on which much of modern drama is based: the misjudgment of the boundaries between epic and dramatic art and the superstition that nature can really be imitated. These errors are present on the part of the authors.

The public's attitude towards the theater shows no less significant damage. People no longer want to follow the in-depth epic portrayal that lays bare all the links in the development of an event. They want to deal with a problem in a few hours, to be superficially excited by it. One does not seek all-round artistic enjoyment, but a fleeting reference. The tendency towards intensive immersion is decreasing more and more. And the circles that have such an inclination are almost completely excluded from attending the theater by the high theater prices. The fate of a dramatic work of art today depends on factors that cannot decide whether it is of artistic value or not. The following sentences by Spielhagen are only too true: "That intimate relationship that once existed between the audience and the producer (poets and actors), that penetrating understanding that results from constant, heartfelt participation - they are no longer possible, at least in the big cities of today. How could they be, in a constantly changing audience made up of a small number of real lovers and an overwhelmingly large contingent of cool to the core, meditating idlers, coquettish idlers and passing strangers! The most alarming thing is that it is precisely this audience's more than suspicious vote that is decisive for the entire dramatic market. What it approves will make the rounds through all provincial towns, what it rejects will not have a full course anywhere. There are exceptions - I know it well, but it's the rule."

The professional criticism does not have a clarifying and ameliorating effect on these conditions. Today, individual critics are too much under the spell of some aesthetic direction. Only a few are capable of an unbiased dedication to artistic qualities. Most ask whether a work fits in with the ideas they have formed about art. Once again, Spielhagen's characteristic is apt: "For entire critical circles, a state arises like when the table is moved, where the manipulators believe the table to be pushed by a higher power, while they themselves are the pushers under the influence of a quiet pressure that they do not actually perceive, which emanates from the neighbor to the right (or left), who is again influenced by his neighbor to the right (or left) and so on all the way around."

The fact is that all younger poets are pushing towards the stage. The fact that a theater performance is much more readily understood by today's audience than a multi-volume novel is a decisive factor in this push. But there is something else to consider. Art today, like many other branches of life, has taken on a social character. Our dramatists do not want to create merely for aesthetic enjoyment; they want to contribute to the reorganization of social relations. Art should be an element of social development. But since drama has a far stronger effect than the novel, the young choose it. They then see the effect, so to speak, grow up from today to tomorrow. And our time wants to be fast-moving. We want to see what we are contributing to. Hence the favoring of dramatic art by journalism, the state and society, of which Spielhagen speaks: "the favoring that theatrical art receives as a decorative art (just like the fine arts) from above, how many thousands are spent annually on its richer equipment, which then indirectly benefits dramatic production again. How the latter itself is again protected, also from above, as soon as it proves to be compliant with the tendencies popular there, which may not always be beneficial to its salvation, but at least increases its worldly reputation and attracts flocks of people who aspire to higher regions or are obedient to an impulse. How one tries to honor and cheer up production by periodically distributing prizes. How much space it is given in the feature pages of the daily papers. How considerable the number of revues and monthlies devoted entirely to its service. How much the higher classes of the grammar schools are already doing for its understanding by commenting on our classics, by presenting themes on dramatic matters and so on. What eloquent and enthusiastic eulogists and interpreters the dramatic art finds on the cathedrals of the universities."

All this support is given to dramatic art for the reason that it is an important link in social development.

Now things are suddenly supposed to be different. For a decade and a half, the preachers of "modernism" have never tired of telling us that we can no longer continue along the paths that Schiller and Goethe took. The classical forms, the monumental on stage, the stylization must stop. Pure, unadulterated nature must be given its due. But that was five years ago. Since then, these "modernists" have discovered that there are nerves. Then they said: Nerves, they are modern. Modern dramas must have an effect on the "nerves". We listened quietly to these modernists. Because they said: we want to discover the new art, we have to let off steam first. We might do stupid things for the time being, but good things will come. Yes, but it didn't come. Now all of a sudden these "moderns" are starting to tell us that Goethe was right after all. That's going too far. We won't allow ourselves to be treated like this. We have remained silent until now. We have gladly listened to people preach naturalism to us. After all, we have also put up with symbolism. But the fact that now the people who sang us the song with the chest tone of their conviction: Goethe's art is over, that these people are now coming to teach us what Goethe wanted, wrote and thought - we won't put up with that. We have always known what Goethean art is. We have also known that there can be something else that is different. And finally, we have even known that Goethe lived at the end of the last century, and that at the end of this century mankind has other needs than Goethe's contemporaries. But when our contemporaries come and want to teach us what real art is in Goethe's sense, and that we should convert to this art, then let us have a serious word.

Some of our younger writers discovered Goethe a few days ago. Several are now even copying Goethe's rules of art and having them printed in modern reviews. They are starting to write something really clever. And teach us what real art is in Goethe's sense. I want to let these gentlemen in on a secret. We don't really care what they tell us. It tells us only the most banal things. But these gentlemen are gifted. They will go even further in their understanding of Goethe. That's why we shouldn't judge them too harshly. Today they tell us things that we can do without, because we have them in our blood; they are trivialities for us. Tomorrow they will glean things from Goethe that are strange and new to us. One of these gifted people recently wrote a magazine article entitled "Back to Goethe". He said that it is good to remember Goethe's artistic maxims after all. He cited individual contemporaries who share his sentiments. He was wrong about some of them. For if today a truly artistic nature goes back to Goethe, it is for the truly easy-to-understand reason that Goethe wrote many a good thing after all. Points of view do not even come into consideration in relation to Goethe.

We have been watching for a long time. But we cannot tolerate someone taking the liberty of saying the same things we have always said.

I am writing all this without naming names. Because names are out of the question. Anyone who has followed the criticism of recent days knows that the champions of "modernism" suddenly want to teach us what Goethean, what classical art is. Perhaps now is precisely the time to tell these "modernists" that they have finally arrived at what we have long known. Up to now we have watched because we thought: now it's coming. But at last we no longer want to clench our fists in our pockets. At last we want to say openly that we believe in every new genius, but not in abstruse idioms. The theorists of "modernity" have already led enough talented people astray. This must not continue.

As little as the botanist influences the plant in its development, so little should the art theorist, who speaks of new directions, influence the creative people, who should follow themselves and not the theories.

I hope that is clearly spoken. I am not speaking as a conservative or reactionary. But I'm saying it because I'm finally getting tired of hearing people talk about things that are supposed to be new and yet are only new because their standard-bearers don't know the old.

If someone discovered the Pythagorean theorem today, they would be laughed at. If someone today discovers art forms and art values that are no less indicative of a certain venerable age, they are referred to as "modern views".

It is necessary to have learned something! And only those who know what its opposite is should speak of "modernity". Incidentally, I love everything contemporary.