at its melodramatic atrocities.
Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers,
for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his
spiritual depravity--forgetting that the two qualities cannot be
blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of
the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits
like Goethe's Mephisto, who perpetually deny. On the contrary, he is
one of the most affirmative voices in the new German literature.

He is always asserting. If he bowls away at some rickety ninepin of a
social lie, he does it with a gusto that is exhilarating. To be sure,
whatever the government is, he is against it; which only means he is a
rebel born, hating constraint and believing with Stendhal that one's
first enemies are one's own parents. No doubt, after bitter
experience, Wedekind discovered that his bitterest foe was himself.
That he is a tricky, Puck-like nature is evident. He loves to shock, a
trait common to all romanticists from Gautier down. He sometimes says
things he doesn't mean. He contradicts himself as do most men of
genius, and, despite his poetic temperament, there is in him much of
the lay preacher. I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and
Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom,
for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is
thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one's soul into a spiritual
bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his
shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism. In Germany every one sports
his Weltanschauung, his personal interpretation of life and its
meanings. In a word, a working philosophy--and a fearsome thing it is
to see young students with fresh sabre cuts on their honest
countenances demolishing Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche only to set
up some other system.

Always a system, always this compartmentising of the facts of
existence. Scratch the sentimentalism and aestheticism of a German, and
you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this
national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for
youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His
admirers speak of him as a unicum, a man so original as to be without
forerunners, without followers. A monster? For no one can escape the
common law of descent, whether physical or spiritual. Wedekind has had
plenty of teachers