especially
the latter; love to be love must be free, preaches Wedekind; love is
still in the swaddling clothes of Oriental prejudice. George Meredith
once said the same in Diana of the Crossways, although he said it more
epigrammatically. For Wedekind religion is a symbol of our love of
ourselves; nevertheless, outside of his two engrossing themes, love
and death, he is chiefly concerned with religion, not alone as
material for artistic treatment, but as a serious problem of our
existence. A Lucifer in pride, he tells us that he has never made of
good evil, or vice versa; he, unlike Baudelaire, has never
deliberately said: Evil, be thou my good! That he has emptied upon the
boards from his Pandora-box imagination the greatest gang of
scoundrels, shady ladies, master swindlers, social degenerates, circus
people, servants, convicts, professional strong men, half-crazy
idealists, irritable rainbow-eaters--the demi-monde of a subterranean
world--that ever an astonished world saw perform their antics in front
of the footlights is not to be denied, but it must be confessed that
his criminal supermen and superwomen usually get their deserts. Like
Octave Mirbeau, he faces the music of facts, and there are none too
abhorrent that he doesn't transform into something significant.

On the technical side Strindberg has taught him much; he prefers the
one-act form, or a series of loosely joined episodes. Formally he is
not a master, nor despite his versatility is he objective. With
Strindberg he has been called "Shakespearian"--fatal word--but he is
not; that in the vast domain of Shakespeare there is room for them
both I do not doubt; room in the vicinity of the morbid swamps and
dark forests, or hard by the house of them that are melancholy mad.

The oftener I see or read Wedekind the more I admire his fund of
humour. But I feel the tug of his theories. The dramatist in him is
hampered by the theorist who would "reform" all life--he is neither a
socialist nor an upholder of female suffrage--and when some of his
admiring critics talk of his "ideals of beauty and power," then I know
the game is up--the prophet, the dogmatist, the pedant, not the poet,
artist, and witty observer of life, are thrust in the foreground.

There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of
Wedekind--Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre,
the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or
liquid you desire