Hannele: A Dream Poem/Introduction

Gerhart Hauptmann was born on November 15, 1862,^[1] at Ober Salzbrunn in Silesia. In dedicating De Waber (The Weavers) to his father, he wrote: "The germ of this drama lay in what you have told me of the life of my grandfather, who in his young days sat at the loom, a poor weaver, like those here depicted." How the family rose in the world, I do not know. In another of his plays, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), Hauptmann has drawn a dismal picture of the raw barbarism of the peasant proprietors in a certain Silesian district, who have been suddenly enriched by the discovery of coal-seams in their land; but the weavers would probably have little enough share in the treasure-trove. Be this as it may, Hauptmann's father, at the time of his birth, was a hotelkeeper in a small watering-place. Gerhart is said to have been a dreamy and delicate child, taking little ​interest in the coming and going of his father's guests, but a constant attendant at the theatrical performances which took place every season in a little wooden theatre. In due course he was sent to school at Breslau, but the stern and perhaps somewhat mechanical discipline was so repellent to him that he learned nothing, and presently prevailed upon his parents to remove him. He was now placed with an uncle, a farmer, who was to teach him farming; and to this the youth is said really to have applied himself. He remained, however, a phantast, a dreamer, and about this time plunged deep into Biblical studies and passed through a period of mysticism. At last he thought he had found his vocation, when, in the spring of 1879, he obtained permission to enter the Art School at Breslau, in order to study sculpture. But "die Kraft war schwach, allein die Lust war gross." One of his teachers. Professor Härtel, saw that there was more of the dramatist than of the sculptor in him, and advised and assisted him to become a student at the University of Jena, on the classic ground of German literature. He had written at Breslau a Hermannslied—no doubt a more or less epic poem—and we may safely trace to his reminiscences of the Art School the local colour of his comedy, College Crampton. At Jena he found a guide, philosopher, and friend in Professor Böhtlingk, wrote a drama, Römer und Germanen (probably a dramatic version of his Her​mannslied), and conceived the plan of a romance to be entitled Perikles. In order to work up the local colour, he felt that he must see Athens, and actually set forth in the spring of 1883. Happening to visit Capri on his way, however, he was so fascinated by the loveliness of the island and its surroundings that he went no further. A study of the history of "Capreae" made very real to his imagination the gloomy despot whose ghost may be said to haunt the island, and a vast tragedy, Tiberius, was the inevitable result. The manuscript was duly despatched to Professor Böhtlingk, whose judgment of it was so unfavourable that the poet, utterly discouraged, determined to return to his first love, and once more try his hand at sculpture. To that end, he betook himself to Rome, and set to work, but was presently disabled by a severe attack of typhus fever. On his convalescence, he returned to Germany and after passing a short time in Hamburg and Dresden, settled in Berlin, and devoted himself to philosophical and historical studies. Here he married, in 1885; and the dedication of Hannele to his wife denotes that his choice has proved a happy one. It is said, too, that the lady was by no means a "tocherless lass,"—a detail which it may not be impertinent to mention, since criticism may reasonably inquire whether a poet writes under the spur of material necessity, or is free to await and obey the promptings of his creative instinct.

​About the time of his marriage, he published an epic poem, Promethidenlos, which attracted little attention. It was not till 1890 that his name became generally known. On the 20th of October in that year, the Society of the Freie Bühne (the Théâtre Libre or Independent Theatre of Berlin) produced at the Lessing-Theater his five-act drama Vor Sonnenaufgang, a study of the corruption ensuing upon the sudden enrichment of the Silesian peasants aforesaid. Its reception was of the stormiest, and the controversy which raged around it stimulated the poet to further efforts. In a few months, he produced (at the same theatre) Das Friedensfest (The Feast of Peace, or Christmastide) which he describes as "a family catastrophe." In both these plays the principle of heredity is somewhat violently insisted on, the leading motive of the former being hereditary alcoholism, of the latter, hereditary madness. Next, in 1891, came Einsame Menschen, which may perhaps be best translated Lonely Souls. It suggests a transcript of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, with the poetry omitted, and with Beata's hysteria transferred to Rebecca and Rosmer. It, too, was first performed by the Free Stage Society, but was afterwards produced at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Vienna Burgtheater, and many other leading German theatres. College Crampton (Colleague Crampton), a five-act comedy, or rather character-study, produced in 1892, was ​Hauptmann's first financial success. It was first performed at the Deutsches Theater, and has become part of the standing repertory of this and other theatres. The same year witnessed the production, by the Free Stage Society, of what is probably, as yet, Hauptmann's most important work, the five-act drama, De Waber (Silesian for Die Weber or The Weavers) written throughout in dialect. It is called "A Drama of the 'Forties," and consists of vividly realised scenes from the mid-century labour troubles in Silesia, brought home to the poet, as we have seen, by the reminiscences of his father and grandfather. Its production on the regular stage was forbidden by the Berlin police; but, by taking legal action, the management of the Deutsches Theater succeeded in quashing this prohibition, and the drama is to be produced in the course of the coming autumn (1894). Under the title of Les Tisserands, it was acted with great success at the Théâtre Libre in Paris. In 1893 Hauptmann produced at the Deutsches Theater, Der Biberfelz (The Beaver Cloak), "A Thieves' Comedy," in Berlin dialect; and the same season witnessed the first performance of Hannele.

The history of Hannele, though brief, has been sufficiently eventful. It has made the round of the State Theatres of Germany and Austria, has everywhere been ​popular, and has everywhere met with vehement opposition from a certain section of the critics and the public. In Vienna, a learned critic named Wengraf, in the Neue Revüe, upbraided Hauptmann for his remissness in neglecting "the gigantic mass of documentary evidence" upon juvenile psychology to be found in the English Blue Books! Had he referred to the evidence taken before some Parliamentary Committee in the early part of this century (the exact date is not stated, but the report is quoted in a German publication of 1848) he would have found that the minds of children are not full of odds and ends of Biblical knowledge. One girl of eleven had never heard of heaven or hell; another had heard the name of Jesus Christ, but did not know who he was; and so forth. What sort of a "naturalist" is this, the critic asks triumphantly, who neglects to study human nature in the English Blue Books? As though the ignorance of a London street-arab of (say) 1840 could afford even the vagest presumption as to the mental furniture of a Silesian village-girl of to-day! and as though it were not plainly stated in the text that Hannele had received religious instruction from the Sisters of Mercy! Among the monumental ineptitudes of criticism, this effort of Herr Wengraf's seems to me to take a high place. The German Emperor (of course a devout Protestant) is said to have "hailed in Hannele the beginning of a school of Christian ​drama"; while his Catholic Majesty of Austria lent his countenance to the production of the play at the Burgtheater. At Munich, the authorities of the Hoftheater condescended to mount it, for the sake of the certain Kassa-Erfolg, money success; but the Court, and even the Director of the theatre, Herr Possart, marked their contempt for the thing by being conspicuously absent from the first performance. The King of Würtemburg, on the other hand, was so charmed with the piece, that he invited Hauptmann to a private audience. The two veterans of German romance and drama, Freytag and Spielhagen, have both written appreciatively of the play; while on the other hand its supposed pietistic tendency has given offence to many worthy people. It has been ridiculed for its childishness, praised for its profundity, denounced for its realism, applauded for its idealism, expounded as an allegory, refuted as a pamphlet—in short it has set all playgoing Germany by the ears.

In Paris, where it was produced at the Théâtre Libre early in the present year, it excited as eager, though not as protracted, discussion. Mounted for one or two performances only, it can scarcely have had justice done it from the scenic point of view, though Jules Lemaître praises the ingenuity of the stage-mechanism. It is evident, at any rate, that the text was imperfectly heard, for on this point we have two witnesses who cannot ​be suspected of collusion—Francisque Sarcey and Émile Zola. Sarcey, for instance, avers that he did not hear a "traître mot" of the speeches of Mattern, and that many other passages were equally inaudible. Under these circumstances, he could scarcely be expected to take great pleasure in the performance—and he did not. He made it the occasion of one of his bitterest tirades against the exotism which, he declares, is swamping the French stage. He declined to believe that such a piece of sheer puerility could possibly have been successful even in Germany. "Call this art!" he cried; "it is a wretched piece of mechanical trickery. It shows no observation, no imagination, no talent of any sort. It is beneath contempt."^[2] Jules Lemaître was more sym​pathetic. While declaring that it was not "du théâtre," but rather a work of magic-lantern art, he admitted that it gave him considerable pleasure. "It is a very plausible dream," he said, "governed by a very clear and simple logic. Yes, it is doubtless such a dream as this that passes through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen ​or fourteen, very pious and very unhappy. It must be something like this, in her eyes, the drama of death that ushers her into Paradise—a series of visions, naïve as monkish illuminations." "Et, ma foi," he concluded in a paragraph which would lose its point in translation, "cette imagerie mystique a réveillé, du moins chez quelques spectateurs, la 'jeune communiante' que nous portons en nous. J'ai cru cependant comprendre, à certains propos d'entr'acte, que cette jeune communiante dormait ferme chez mon bon maître Sarcey." Henri Céard of the Événement took as his text a line of Sully Prudhomme's to the effect that sleep is the last consolation of the wretched, and saw in the play an illustration of the yearning towards ideal rest and heavenly compensation for the cruelties of life which inspires the fever-dreams of the suffering poor. Louis de Gramont, one of the ablest of the Théâtre Libre school of playwrights, averred in L'Éclair that the production was one of the most moving he had ever witnessed; Jean Jullien, author of Le Théâtre Vivant, confessed that he felt the physical horror of the spectacle too much to appreciate its spiritual beauties; and Catulle Mendès "wept hot tears." Finally, Émile Zola, while admitting that he saw many beauties in Hauptmann's work, relegated it to a comparatively low artistic plane on account of the large part played by mere mechanism in the production of the effect. He never ​felt (so he declared) "le petit frisson" which the poet designed to produce.

In New York, Hannele was announced for production at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, with a young lady named Alice Pierce, about fifteen years of age, in the title-part. Miss Pierce had had long experience of the stage in the character of Little Lord Fauntleroy; but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children felt outraged at the idea of her representing Hannele. Its spokesman, Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, addressed to the Mayor of New York a letter from which the following is an extract: "This revolting and horrible travesty of a resurrection, as a theatrical exhibition in a public theatre, is not only perfectly shocking and at variance with public decency, but is well calculated, in the mind of a nervous child, to create a mental impression of a lasting and most injurious character, to say nothing of the awful blasphemy in which she is thus compelled to take part." Thus it appears that what is sickly piety in Berlin is "awful blasphemy" in New York; but in that, of course, there is nothing surprising. Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry carried his point, and Miss Pierce was forbidden to act. The part was played by an adult actress, and the production had only a brief run.

So much for the conflict of opinion which has raged ​around Hannele, It is not for me to attempt anything like a summing up—that must be left to "old Justice Time." But, as I have naturally studied the poem pretty closely in the act of translating it, I may perhaps, without impertinence, state how it impresses me.

Hauptmann describes his work as a "Traum-Dichtung," and one cannot do better than translate this: "Dream-Poem." But there is a shade of meaning in "Dichtung" which "Poem" does not express. Perhaps it would not be entirely misleading to call the play the idealisation of a dying child's dream. It is clearly "Dichtung" in opposition to "Wahrheit." It is "such stuff as dreams are made of," but moulded into a poetic form and consistency such as no real dream ever possessed. The verses which bring each of the two parts to a close were at first a stumbling-block to me; but I now see in them the key to the particular convention which the poet has chosen to adopt. Which of us has not in his sleep composed reams of poetry which seemed at the time at least as good as "Kubla Khan"? On waking, we have in vain sought to recapture a single line of it, and the probability is that it was pure gibberish, like Alice's ballad of the Jabberwock; yet the illusion of its magnificence remains with us for a short time even after we have realised that we have been dreaming. Well, Hauptmann has sought to produce on our waking minds the effect ​which this dream-poetry produces on the dream-intellect. Hannele has been accustomed to sing hymns with the Sisters of Mercy, and to associate metrical utterance with sanctity and solemnity. What more likely, then, than that the "brownies of her brain," as Mr. Stevenson puts it, should fall to versifying when they begin to play the parts of angels and ministers of grace? It is, of course, improbable in the last degree that the very words of these verses, or even of Hannele's prose dialogue with her Mother, or of the scene between the Stranger and Mattern, should take shape in the dying child's fancy; but the poet's effort has not been to represent a dream as it actually is, but a dream as it impresses itself on the dreamer's mind. It is only our waking intelligence that recognises the incoherence and absurdity of such fragments of our dreams as remain in our memory. To our sleeping intelligence (if I may put it so) they seem rational and coherent enough. And as the poet asks us, in this case, to put our waking intelligence in the place of Hannele's sleeping intelligence, he is justified, not only by necessity but by logic, in making the fantasies of the dreamer as consistent to us as they would appear to her.

It is certainly a complex task that Hauptmann has set himself. He essays a problem within a problem, as it were—a study in child-psychology, expressed in terms of dream-psychology. Through the fever-fancies oi the ​dying girl we are to divine her character and habit of mind. And we are enabled to do so, as it seems to me, with astonishing clearness. We see through and through her poor shallow little soul. We see how she takes refuge from the cruelties of her stepfather and the other hardships of her life in the promised land of religion, borrowing its local colour in great measure from the few fairy-tales she has heard. She is pious; she believes that the Lord Jesus will put her persecutors to shame, and will receive her into a heaven teeming with all the delights denied her on earth. Her little vanities come out pathetically. She is such a good girl in her own estimation; she is an example to all the other children; she is accustomed to enact in fancy the heroine's part in her fairy-tales, and hers is the foot which the glass slipper is found to fit. At the same time she has been troubled now and then (like how many thousands of better-instructed children) by that dark and dismal text about "sin against the Holy Ghost."^[3] Furthermore, we can see in her the awakening of sentiment, the first innocent unconscious stirrings of sex. She adores her schoolmaster; his name is a delight to her, his hair and beard are lovely in her eyes. She has woven little romances with him for their hero, and when she dreams ​of the Lord Jesus she naturally sees him with the lineaments of her dear Herr Gottwald. These emotions, with her love for her mother and her dread of her stepfather, constitute her whole mental experience. We see both the material which her imagination has to work upon, and the impulses or instincts which direct its workings. Her mother's death has removed the last mitigation of her lot. Ill-usage and starvation have fevered her mind, and her thoughts are all with her mother in heaven. It is already under the influence of a hallucination that she throws herself into the pond; and from the moment she is carried into the pauper-refuge until death softly drops the curtain upon the tremulous fever-drama, the progress and fluctuations of her delirium are marked and motived with the nicest art.

The realistic passages, if I may call them so, such as the ravings of Mattern, and the speeches of Pleschke and Hanke in the second part, are as true to dream-psychology as the ideal episodes. We are the sternest realists in our sleep as well as the loftiest idealists; at least we seem so to ourselves. Who has not wondered, on waking from a dream, at the masterly mimicry with which the brownies of his brain have, or seem to have, reproduced the tones, gestures, antics and mannerisms, nay, even the character, of this person or that who has figured in the vision? If it is natural, as it surely is, that the child's mother and ​the Sister of Mercy—the two women who had been kind to her—should melt into one without exciting more than a momentary surprise, it is no less natural that old Pleschke's stammerings and every little cough of the hump-backed village tailor should reproduce themselves in the dreamer's mind. It would be idle to pretend that every detail is beyond criticism, and that the poet's invention has always been unerringly inspired. But the more closely one studies his "Dream-Poem," the more clearly does one recognise that it is no lawless and facile fantasy, but a deliberate and carefully thought-out work of art, founded on delicate observation and consistently obeying a logic of its own.

I say nothing of the social or spiritual lessons which may—or may not—be deduced from Hannele. The author, it is clear, points no moral whatever, but simply presents a character, a soul history, to make what appeal it may to the heart and conscience of each individual reader. Nor do I speculate upon the theatrical qualities of the "Dream-Poem"; they can be ascertained only by experiment. We know that the play has been very successful on the German stage; yet one cannot but feel that it presents almost insuperable difficulties to the stage-manager, and that only the rarest tact and ingenuity could save the poetry of the conception from being obscured and vulgarised by the element of ​mechanical illusion and scenic trickery. The experiment is certainly worth trying; and it seems almost inconceivable that any legal impediment should be offered to the theatrical presentation of so innocent, humane and reverent a work of art.

October 1894.