Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 8

XI

NEW PLAYS BY HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN, AND SCHNITZLER

I

In the present volume I have examined, more out of curiosity than interest, the figures of Zola's book sales. To my astonishment, not to say chagrin, I noted that Nana and The Downfall had bigger sales than the other novels; Nana probably because of its unpleasant coa.r.s.eness, and The Downfall because of its national character. Now, neither of these books gives Zola at his best. Huysmans had not only preceded Nana by two years, but beat his master, with Marthe--the Paris edition was quickly suppressed--as it is a better-written and truer book than the story of the big blonde girl, who was later so wonderfully painted by Edouard Manet as she stood in her dressing-room at the theatre.

How far we are away from the powerful but cra.s.s realism of 1880 I thought as I sat in the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, and waited for the curtain to rise on Gerhart Hauptmann's latest play, The Flight of Gabriel Schilling (Gabriel Schilling's Flucht). And yet how much this poet and mystic owes to the French naturalistic movement of thirty odd years ago. It was Arno Holz and the young Hauptmann who stood the brunt of the battle in Germany for the new realism. Sudermann, too, joined in the fight, though later. 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. (Eleven years later (1891) he gave us his most pregnant drama, young as he was, Spring's Awakening.) It is only fair, then, to accord to the recent winner of the n.o.bel Prize, Gerhart Hauptmann, the credit due him as a path breaker in German literature, for if Arno Holz showed the way, Hauptmann filled the road with works of artistic value; even at his lowest ebb of inspiration he is significant and attractive.

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. There were published a short time ago the complete works of Gerhart Hauptmann--poems, social plays, novels, and tales in six stately volumes. In glancing at the figures of his sales I could not help thinking of Zola. Whereas Nana stands high on the list, The Sunken Bell (Die Versunkene Glocke, translated by Charles Henry Meltzer, and played in English by Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern), has reached its eightieth edition, and remember that the German editions are sometimes two thousand or three thousand an edition. What the translation figures are I have no idea. The next in number to The Sunken Bell is The Weavers, forty-three editions. Its strong note of pity, its picture of poignant misery, and its eloquent cry for social justice, had much to do with the large sales. Hannele is number three in the order of sales, twenty-three editions being a.s.signed to it. The same number stands for Der Arme Heinrich, not the best Hauptmann, and for that most moving human play, Rose Bernd--so marvellously enacted by Else Lehmann at the Lessing Theatre--there are eighteen editions.

(These are 1913 figures.)

You can't help contrasting Parisian and Berlin taste, though the German capital is in the grip of p.o.r.nographic literature and art. But it does indicate that a nation has not lost its idealism when it reads such a beautiful work, a work of such imagination as The Sunken Bell, does it not? I wish I could admire other of Hauptmann's work, such as Michael Kramer, Der Biberpalz, or the depressing Fuhrmann Henschel.

And I also wish that I could include among his big works his latest, The Flight of Gabriel Schilling (written in 1906).

It is a drama, the story of slender interest, because the characters do not particularly interest--the misunderstood humbug of a woman--but in an original setting, a little island on the east coast of Germany, called Fischmeisters Oye, the scenic side is very effective. The piece plays in five acts, one act too many, and is slow in action, and unusually wordy, even for the German stage, where the public likes dialogues a half-hour at a stretch. I shall not bore you with more than a glance at the chief situations. Gabriel Schilling is a young Berlin painter who is too fond of the Friedrichstra.s.se cafe life, which means wine, wenches, and an occasional song. His friend the sculptor, Professor Maurer, has persuaded Gabriel to leave Berlin during the dog-days, leave what the text calls the "hot, stinking asphalt," and join him at the seaside. Gabriel has a wife, to whom he is not exactly nice, being fond of a Vienna lady, who bears the name of Hanna Elias. This Hanna Elias has played, still plays, the chief role in his miserable existence. He has promised to give her up, she has promised to go back to her husband and child (the latter supposed to be the offspring of Gabriel). So his flight to the east coast is a genuine attempt to gain his liberty; besides, his health is bad, he suffers from heart trouble. The play opens with the sculptor talking of Schilling in the ears of a young violinist, a dear friend, who is summering with him. Unconventional folk, all of them. Hauptmann gets his character relief by setting off the town visitors with a background of natives, fishermen, working people. I wish there had been more of them, for with their uncouth accent, salt speech, and unconscious humour they are more refres.h.i.+ng than the city folk.

Gabriel arrives. He looks sadly in need of sea air. I suppose Theodore Loos, who played the part, was coached by the dramatist, so I dare not criticise the validity of his interpretation. I only know that he did not make the character sympathetic; perhaps that were an impossibility. In a word, with his mixture of vapid idealism and old-fas.h.i.+oned fatalism, he proved monotonous to me. The sculptor is a formidable bore, the antique raisonneur of French drama, preaching at every pore every chance he has. The actor who played him, Hans Marr, made up as a mixture of Lenbach the painter--when he was about forty-five--and the painter, etcher, and sculptor, Max Klinger. The violinist was Lina Lossen, and excellent in the part.

Act II is a capitally arranged interior of the inn, with the wooden shoes of the servant maid clopping around, where the inevitable happens. Hanna Elias, accompanied by a young Russian girl--whose German accent furnishes mild humour--promptly swoops down on the anaemic painter. There is brief resistance on his part. She tells him she can't, can't live without him--oh, thrice-familiar feminine music!--and with a double sob that shakes you in your seat the pair embrace. Curtain. The next act is frittered away in talk, the princ.i.p.al object seemingly to show how much the sculptor hates Hanna.

In Act IV Gabriel is ill. He has had a fall, but it is really a heart attack. A doctor, an old friend, is summoned from a neighbouring island. Unfortunately Mrs. Schilling, the neglected wife is informed by the not very tactful doctor that her husband is ill. She rushes up from Berlin, and the best, indeed the only, dramatic scene then ensues. She is not permitted to see the sick man. She demands the reason. She is naturally not told, for Hanna is nursing him. She can't understand, and it is the difficult task of Lucie Heil, the violinist, to get her away before the fat is in the fire. Unfortunately, at that critical moment, Hanna Elias walks calmly from Gabriel's sleeping chamber. The row is soon on. Hanna was enacted by an emotional actress, Tilla Durieux, whose personality is forthright, whose methods are natural. (Her Hedda Gabler is strong.) She dressed the character after the approved Friedrichstra.s.se style. You must know that the artistic Bohemienne wears her hair plastered at the sides of her head a la Merode. The eyes are always "done up," the general expression suggested, if the lady is dark, being that of Franz von Stuck's picture, Sin. To look mysterious, sinister, exotic, ah! that appeals to the stout, sentimental German beer heroes of the opera, theatre, and studio. Fraulein Durieux is entirely successful in her a.s.sumption of a woman who is "emanc.i.p.ated," who has thrown off the "shackles" of matrimony, who drinks beer in the morning, tea in the afternoon, coffee at night, and smokes cigarettes all the time. It is a p.r.o.nounced type in Berlin. She talks art, philosophy, literature, and she daubs or plays or models. She is the best portrait in the play, though a thrice-familiar one. The poet showed this "misunderstood woman" in one of his early works, Before Sunrise.

Hanna Elias stands the reproaches and berating of Evelin Schilling until her patience fades. Then the two women, despite the warning of the doctor that his patient must not be disturbed, as it might prove fatal, go for each other like a pair of fishwives. It is exciting, though hardly edifying. If you have ever seen two chickens, two hens, fight over the possession of a s.h.i.+ning slug in a barnyard, then you will know what kind of a quarrel this is between the outraged wife, a feeble creature, and the bold, strong-willed Hanna. And the disputed booty is about as worthless as the slug. Gabriel appears. He is half dead from the excitement. A plague on both the women, he cries, and the scene closes with his whispered request to the doctor for poison to end his life. You remember Oswald Alving and his cry: "The sun, mother, give me the sun!" Act last shows the first scene, the beach, and a figurehead from a brig which had stranded during a storm some years before. This carved head and bust of a woman with streaming hair serves as a symbol. Gabriel is attracted by the wooden image, as is Lucie. The painter is fascinated by the tale of the s.h.i.+pwreck. He has escaped the nurse and is out on the dunes watching the figure as it is intermittently illuminated by the gleam of a revolving lighthouse further up the coast. He is in an exalted mood. There is some comic relief in the grave-digger manner between him and a joiner, who is also the undertaker of the island, a well-conceived character. A storm is rising. Gabriel, after many wild and whirling words, leaves a message for his friends. He is bathing. And so he makes by suicide his last flight, his escape from the horns of the dilemma, too weak to decide one way or the other. The ending is ineffective, and the sudden repentance of the middle-aged sculptor (fat men with forty-five-inch waists never do seem wicked), who promises to marry his Lucie, the fiddle player, is very flat. Nor does the storm strike terror as it should. What the moral? I don't know, except that it is dangerous to keep late hours on the Friedrichstra.s.se. A clock can't always strike twelve, and The Flight of Gabriel Schilling, notwithstanding some striking episodes and at moments poetic atmosphere, is not a masterpiece of Hauptmann.

II

Ever since I heard and saw Agnes Sorma in Liebele, I have admired the dramatic writings of Arthur Schnitzler, and, remember, that charming, withal sad, little play was written in 1895. I haven't seen all his works, but I have read many. The latest adapted into English for the American stage is the Anatol one-act cyclus (1893), and his new play I witnessed at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin. It bears the singularly unpromising t.i.tle Professor Bernhardi, and is a five-act comedy. Its performance was interdicted in Vienna. The reason given by the Austrian authorities seems a simple one, though it is specious: for fear of stirring up religious animosities Professor Bernhardi was placed on the black books of the censor. The Jewish question, it appears, is still a live one in Austria, and this new play of Schnitzler's, himself of Semitic descent, is the very frank discussion of a certain incident which occurred in Vienna in which a Roman Catholic clergyman and a Jewish doctor were embroiled. The dramatist is fair, he holds the scales evenly. At the end of the piece both priest and surgeon stand alike in your regard. That the incident hardly suggests dramatic treatment is beside the mark; Schnitzler, with his invariable deftness of touch, has painted a dozen vital portraits; the priest is superb, the character values of exquisite balance. The hero, if hero he be, Professor Bernhardi, is carved out of a single block and the minor personalities are each and every one salient. I can't altogether believe in the thesis. Any one who has lived in Vienna must know that, except in certain restricted circles, there is no Judenhetz, no social ostracism for Hebrews. At the eleven-o'clock high ma.s.s in St. Stefan's Cathedral, the numbers of Oriental faces that one sees would be surprising if we did not hear of so many conversions. It is considered rather fas.h.i.+onable in Vienna to join the Christian fold. And on the score of business certainly the Austrian Hebrews have little to complain of, as they are said to be the leading factors in commerce. However, Henry James has warned us not to question too closely the theme of an artist; that is his own affair; his treatment should concern us. Has Schnitzler succeeded in making a play of heterogeneous material? I don't think he has altogether, yet I enjoyed several acts and enjoyed still more the reading of it in book form.

Professor Bernhardi is the professor of a medical inst.i.tute in Vienna known as the Elizabethinum. A patient, a young woman, is dying in one of the wards, the victim of malpractice. But her pa.s.sing away will be painless. She is happy because she believes that she is on the road to recovery, that she will live to marry her beloved young man. Euphoria, the doctor calls her condition. To tell her the truth would be in his eyes criminal. She would die in anguish. Why not let her go out of the world in bliss? But a female nurse, a conscientious Roman Catholic, thinks differently. With the aid of a budding student she sends for Father Franz Reder in the near-by Church of the Holy Florian. The priest obeys the summons, anxious to shrive a sinning soul, and to send her out of the world if not to Paradise, at least to Purgatory.

In the office he encounters Professor Bernhardi, who tells him politely but firmly that he won't allow his patient to be disturbed.

The priest, without excitement but painfully impressed, argues that, even if there are a few moments of sorrow, the saving of the girl's immortal soul is of paramount importance. The physician shrugs his shoulders. His business is with the body, not the soul, and he continues to bar the way. The priest makes one last appeal, uselessly; but, unperceived, the nurse has slipped out, and going to the bedside of the dying woman announces the advent of the holy man. The patient screams in agony: "I am dying!" and she does die, from fright.

Bernhardi is enraged, though he never loses his air of sardonic politeness. The act ends. The result of the incident, magnified by a partisan press, is serious. A great lady, an archd.u.c.h.ess, refuses to head the list of the Elizabethinum annual charity ball. She also snubs the wife of an aristocratic doctor. The politicians make fuel for their furnace, and presently the inst.i.tution finds itself facing a grave deficit, perhaps ruin, for the minister of instruction does not favour further subventions, though he is a school friend of Bernhardi; worse follows, the board of directors is split, some of its Jewish members going so far as to say that Bernhardi should not have refused the consolations of religion to the dying. Wasn't the Elizabethinum Roman Catholic, after all?

There can be no doubt that the reason Arthur Schnitzler enjoyed handling the difficulties of such a theme is because his father was a well-known laryngologist of the University of Vienna, and he himself studied medicine and was an a.s.sistant doctor from 1886 to 1888 in the princ.i.p.al hospital of Vienna. With his father he helped to write a book ent.i.tled: The Clinical Atlas of Laryngology (1895). Hence his opportunity of studying the various types of Viennese professors in a little world must have been excellent. The veracity of his characters seems unimpeachable. There are all kinds of Jews--in Europe there is no such false sensitiveness if a Jewish type is portrayed on the boards, so long as it is not offensive; for example, there is the Jew who believes himself the victim of anti-Semitism, and, while the dramatist makes him "sympathetic," nevertheless he is funny with his mania of persecution. Then there is Doctor Goldberg, the lawyer, the counsel for Professor Bernhardi, in the prosecution case for insulting religion. He sends his boy to a Catholic college, his wife has Christian friends, and in his zeal not to seem friendly to Bernhardi, he loses the case. There are several others, all carefully sketched and with a certain wit that proves Schnitzler is as fair to his coreligionists as to the Gentiles. Let me hasten to add that there is nothing that would cause offence to either race throughout the piece.

Its banning in Austria is therefore a mystery to me, as it must have been to the author.

What is more serious is the absence of marked dramatic movement in the play. It reads much like a short story made long in its dramatic garb.

Fancy a play all men, chiefly bewhiskered; one woman in Act I, and only for ten minutes; fairly long-winded arguments for and against the ethics of the case. Not for more than one act would this capitally written work be tolerated on the English or American stage. Until Act IV there is hardly one genuine dramatic episode, though Bernhardi at a directors' meeting is forced to resign and is eventually sent to prison for two months. But in the penultimate act the priest calls on him, and for fifteen minutes the situation is strong and splendidly conceived. The conscience of the ecclesiastic brings him to Bernhardi, not to confess, but to explain.

At the trial he positively insisted that he did not believe Bernhardi had wished to insult religion, but that he followed the dictates of his conscience; he believed that he was doing his duty in sparing the girl the pain of discovery. But this statement was of no avail, for the nurse swore that the professor had employed physical violence to prevent the priest from entering the hospital ward. Later she confesses her perjury. Bernhardi is pardoned, is convoyed home in triumph by enthusiastic medical students, but is so disgusted by the perfidy of some of his friends and a.s.sociates that he returns to his private practice. His argument with the priest throws light on his obstinate character; in reality neither man retreats a jot from his original position. I must add that the priest, because of his honest att.i.tude, although pressure had been put upon him, was relieved of his duties at St. Florian's and sent to a little village on the Polish border. He had displeased the powers that be. Again I must admire this portrait of a sincere man, obsessed by his sense of duty, a fanatic, if you will, but upheld by his supreme faith.

The acting throughout was artistic, Professor Bernhardi impersonated by Bruno Decarli, and Father Reder by Alfred Abel, the latter a subtle characterisation. The "team play" of the Kleines Theatre company was seen at its best in the third act, where the directors hold a stormy meeting. It was the perfection of ensemble work. The creator of Das Susse Madel type of Vienna has painted a large canvas and revealed a grip on the essentials of characterisation. To Ibsen's An Enemy of the People he is evidently under certain obligations; Professor Bernhardi is a variation of Doctor Stockmann, plus not a little irony and self-complacency. But the thesis of Ibsen is less academic, sounder, of more universal interest than Schnitzler's. There is no metaphysical hair-splitting in An Enemy of the People, nor sentimental talk about euphoria and going happily to death. Grim old Daddy Ibsen told us that people were being poisoned by impure spring water, and, as Alan Dale said, was the first man to write a drama around a drain-pipe.

Arthur Schnitzler, shedding for the nonce his accustomed Viennese charm and nonchalance, has written a comedy about a very grave subject, and has not uttered a single word that can be construed as disrespectful to either religion, Jewish or Roman Catholic. He is a genre painter almost to the point of perfection.

III

Once upon a time I called Hermann Sudermann the Klingsor of the German stage, meaning thereby that he was a master of black magic. Of course, like most comparisons, this was a far-fetched one. Yet Sudermann is a master of theatrical machinery. With a pressure of his little finger he can set the wheels whirring and make their noise attractive if not precisely significant. This is the case with his latest offering, Der gute Ruf (Good Reputation), which captured Berlin at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus on the Friedrichstra.s.se. The play, in four acts, is a variation on its author's early theme, Honour. It is also a variant of his Joy of Life (Es lebe das Leben), translated by Edith Wharton, but with the difference that the motive of Honour was more malleable for the purpose of dramatic treatment, and also truer to life, while in Reputation (as I suppose it will be called when translated) the thesis is too incredible for belief; hence the magician, wily as he is, scrambles about aimlessly in the last two acts, sparring for wind, and seemingly anxious to escape from a blind alley of situations. That he does it so well is a tribute to his technical prowess.

He knows how to write a play. This play would succeed in foreign countries where the Hauptmann and Schnitzler plays would fall down.

The reason is because of the strong theatrical quality of the piece, and the grateful role for the heroine, a role that might have been written in Paris; indeed, the entire work, despite its local flavour, recalls the modern Parisian theatre of Bernstein & Co., because of its cynical satire, its mysterious intrigue, its doors and bells, its numerous exits and entrances.

A woman, rather a superwoman, the Baroness von Tanna, sacrifices her name--not of the best because she flirts--to save the good, nay, spotless reputation of her dearest friend, a millionaire's wife--who, in a "mad moment" (Aha!) becomes the beloved of a certain fascinating Max, a young and handsome ne'er-do-well. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the baroness, a beautiful woman, and not, like her friend, the mother of children, is entangled in the same net; she, too, adores Max the heart crusher, though she will not cross the Rubicon for his silly sake. The usual "triangle" becomes star-shaped, for a new feminine presence appears, a girl who is matched to marry the fatal Max. That makes five live wires; two husbands, two wives, a nave virgin, with Max as inaccessible as a star. But after a capital exposition, Sudermann gets us in a terrible state of mind by making the lady with the good reputation go off in a hysterical crisis, and almost confess to her stiff, severe husband--who is a maniac on the subject of his house being above suspicion. The charming, reckless baroness intervenes at the crucial point, becomes a lightning-rod that draws the electric current, and pretends to be the real culprit. Her husband, a sinister baron and ex-lieutenant in the Hussars, is present. A duel with Max is the result. In the last act, after she has been subjected to all kinds of ignominy, Baroness Dorrit von Tanna, without confessing, is socially rehabilitated. Skim-milk in this instance has pa.s.sed for cream, the prudish millionaire's wife, her honour saved for the world at large, is now revealed as a hypocrite to her astounded and sn.o.bbish husband. The curtain falls on a maze of improbabilities, with the baroness in the centre.

For people who don't take their theatre seriously, _i. e._, neither as a fencing ground for propagandists nor for puling poets, this new Sudermann piece will please. It has triumphed in Berlin and Munich.

Its people are portraits taken from fas.h.i.+onable West End Berlin, while the dialogue, witty, incisive, and also characteristic, is one of the consolations of a play that does not for a moment produce any illusion. There are plenty of striking episodes, but logic is lacking, not only the logic of life, but the logic of the theatre. No living playwright knows better how to arouse suspense than Sudermann, and he can't make us believe in his false theme, consequently his motivation in the last two acts is false and disappointing. But there is the old Sudermann pyrotechnical virtuosity, the fireworks dazzle with their brilliancy, and you think of Paris, and also that some drama may be divorced from life and literature and yet be interesting. Insincere as is the denouement, the note of insincerity was absent in the acting of the cast. The honours were easily borne away by a pretty Viennese actress from the Volks Theatre there, Elsa Galafres by name, whose methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer. His puppets are all agreeable, and, in one instance, vital: the father of the baroness, a financier, who could be easily turned into a "heavy"

conventional father, but, as played by Hermann Nissen, is a positively original characterisation. Max the b.u.t.terfly (Ernst Dumcke) was wholly admirable. I shall be very much surprised if Der gute Ruf does not soon appear on the stage of other lands. Its picture of manners, its mundane environment, its epigrams and dramatic bravoura will make it welcome everywhere. Sudermann is still Klingsor, the evoker of artificial figures, not the poet who creates living men and women.

XII

KUBIN, MUNCH, AND GAUGUIN: MASTERS OF HALLUCINATION

I

Because it is a simpler matter to tell the truth than casuists admit I shall preface this little sermon on three hallucinated painters by a declaration of my artistic faith.

I believe in Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; the greatest harmonist, the greatest painter of daylight, and the profoundest interpreter of the human soul--Rembrandt as pyschologist is as profound as Beethoven.

The selection of this triune group of genius, one Spaniard and two Dutchmen, doesn't mean that I'm insensible to the purity of Raphael, the rich colouring of t.i.tian, or the giant power of Michael Angelo.

Botticelli is probably, so Mr. Berenson thinks, the most marvellous draughtsman thus far produced by European art (we can still go to old China and j.a.pan for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin, on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter, Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci--what of that incomparable genius?

After Haarlem and Frans Hals you may realise that Manet and Sargent had predecessors; after a visit to The Hague the View of Delft may teach you that Vermeer was an Impressionist long before the French Impressionists; also that he painted clear light as it never before was painted, nor since. As for Rembrandt, the last word will never be said. He is the eternal Sphinx of art, whether as portraitist, landscape painter, etcher, or revealer of the night side of life, of its b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, madness, cruelty, and terrific visions. But Velasquez and Vermeer are more sane.

Anything I may write of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid mora.s.s at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may suffer from its presence; but he calls it the blues and resorts to alcohol, while the artist, ever conscious of the "values" of such a psychic state of soul, resorts to ink or colour or tone (not always despising wine).

This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous.

His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted such gifts of irony. Kubin is a Bohemian, born in 1877, the son of an Austrian Army officer. His boyhood was given over to caprice, and he appears to have pa.s.sed through the various stages familiar in the career of romantic pathological temperaments. Disillusionment succeeded disillusionment; he even contemplated Werther's end.

He found himself in Munich at the beginning of this century with a slender baggage of ideals, much scorn of life, and a determination to express his tortured and complicated personality in art. No matter what comical old women professors (in trousers) tell you of "objective art" and the superior advantage of drawing from plaster casts, that is the ultimate aim of an artist (naturally I don't refer to fas.h.i.+onable face painters, who make a lucrative trade of their slippery paint).

Nevertheless, a more rigid discipline might have smoothed the way for Kubin, who has not yet mastered the tools of his art. He has always practised his scales in public.

A man's reading proclaims the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years were Schopenhauer and Mainlander, the latter a disciple of the mighty Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he attained Nirvana by his own hand.

Now, a little Schopenhauer is an excellent thing to still restless, egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a surfeit of lobster--mental indigestion follows and the victim blames the lobster (_i. e._, life) instead of his own inordinate appet.i.te.

Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of spleen, hatred of life, delight in hideous cruelty, a predisposition to obscurity and a too-exclusive preoccupation with s.e.x; indeed, s.e.x looms largest in the consciousness of the new art.

To burlesque the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation.

Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo, but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar.

However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone Age, as it is to-day, as it always will be. Some of Rembrandt's etched plates are unmentionable, and Goya even went to further lengths.

Now, Kubin is a lineal descendant of this Spaniard, minus his genius, for our young man is not a genius, despite his cleverness. He burlesques the themes of Goya at times, and in him there is more than a streak of the cruelty which causes such a painful impression when viewing the Proverbs or the Disasters of War.