from his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas,
or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the
marionettes of the fashionable world! Frank Wedekind is less of the
stage prestidigitator and more sincere. We must, perforce, listen to
his creatures as they parade their agony before us, and we admire his
clever rogues--the never-to-be-forgotten Marquis of Keith heads the
list--and smile at their rough humour and wisdom. For me, the real
Frank Wedekind is not the prophet, but the dramatist. As there is much
of his stark personality in his plays, it would not be amiss to glance
at his career.

He has "a long foreground," as Emerson said of Walt Whitman. He was
born at Hanover, July 24, 1864, and consequently was only twenty-seven
years old when, in 1891, he wrote his most original, if not most
finished, drama, Spring's Awakening. He studied law four terms at
Munich, two at Zurich: but for this lawless soul jurisprudence was not
to be; it was to fulfil a wish of his father's that he consented to
the drudgery. A little poem which has been reproduced in leaflet form,
Felix and Galathea, is practically his earliest offering to the muse.
Like most beginnings of fanatics and realists, it fairly swims and
shimmers with idealism. His father dead, a roving existence and a
precarious one began for the youthful Frank. He lived by his wits in
Paris and London, learned two languages, met that underworld which
later was to figure in his vital dramatic pictures, wrote
advertisements for a canned soup--in Hauptmann's early play,
Friedensfest, Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a reclame
agent--was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an
actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side,
whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences
produced their inevitable reaction--disillusionment. Finally in 1905
Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress
Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father
of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the
least changed, to judge from his play, Franziska, a Modern Mystery.

Personally, Wedekind was never an extravagant, exaggerated man. A
sorrowful face in repose is his, and when he appeared on Hans von
Wolzogen's Ueberbrettl, or sang at the Munich cabaret called the
Eleven Hangmen, his songs--he composes at times--Ilse, Goldstueck,
Brigitte B, Mein Liebch