THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19482, 1 December 1928, Page 13

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF-HOURS IN A LIBRARY.

(SPECIALLY WEITOX JOE PBES3.) By A. EL Grehixg. CCXC.—OX HERMANN SUDERMANN. Twenty yehrs ago I made acquaintance with "The Song of Songs," in an American translation; it was the first story of Sudermann's that I had read; it gained unmerited notoriety by being prohibited in the United States. JCt is curious how "Comstockerie" of fhis kind always defeats its own ends. In this instance the suppression of the American edition gave the book a gratuitous advertisement, bringing it under the notice of a large public who would probably otherwise have remained in ignorance of its existence. And an English translation was promptly published. To cite another instance; when "Jurgen" was placed under the ban, the stories of James Branch Cabell were caviare to the multitude; as an outcome of tho "Jurgen" prosecution he has blossomed into a popular author with a host of enthusiastic admirers. The latest illustration of misdirected righteousness is the case of "The Well of Loneliness," the effect of which has been to enhance the price of an already highly priced book by one hundred per cent.

Admittedly the censorship of books is a difficult question, but in most cases the reading public is its own best censor. Pornography . always has and always will have its disciples and such is the contradictoriness of human nature, it sometimes breaks out in unexpected places. In which connexion Mr Julian Hawthorne—son of Nathaniel of that ilk —in a lecent took of reminiscences —tells a good story of Richard Monckson Milnes, efterwards Lord Houghton:

He bad a library, not large, but choice, tempting to any lover of books, which he had read himself as well as collected. Among them was a little alcove restricted to volumes of the kind that men discuss only in the privacy of their hobnobbings. Henry James told me that once, when he ■was spending a week-end with Milnes (then Lord Houghton), and chatting with him in the library one afternoon, Houghton was called away, saying as he went out, "I may be detained an hour _or you'll find some amusing things in there, pointing to the alcove. So James innocently sauntered in there and took out a small volumo. Houghton intended no mischief, and James suspected none. But the book turned out to be a translation from/ the Persian, and a few paragraphs 'convinced James that a misX take must have been made; he hurriedly • replaced the book and tried an ° th ® r : James was a Puritan—not by descent, for his grandfather had been an Irish emigrant—but by training and preference, and what he now read blasted his eyeballs. Still unable to understand what had hap pened, and confident that Houghton must himself be unaware of those scandalous invasions of his learned shelves, lie made one effort mora. Benflath the lowest deeps a lower deep, and too plainly every one of these prettily bound volumes was an unholy product inspired by the god of gardens, and the muse of unehaßtity. When Houghton came back, ho found his guest pallid and stammering, nor uhl HQ ever ascertain what ailed him. There are many men of many minds.

SudemidTiii is most widely known as the author of "Heimat" (Home), a phu' published in 1893 in which all the most famous actresses of the day Bernhardt, T>use. Rejane, Modjeska, and Mrs Patrick Campbell—appeared in the role of Magda. In his' Dramatic Opinions and Essays," Mr Bernard Shaw draw? a comparison between Duse and Bernhardt, written in. June, 1895, a time when-the two great actresses were playing "La Dame aux Camellias," and Sudermann's Die Heimat/' against one another at Daly a Theatre, and at Drury Lane. Shaw, who sums up strongly in favour of Eleanora Duse says:—

Magda is a daughter who has been turned out of doors for defying her father, one of those outrageous persons who mis take their desire to have everything their own way for a sacred principle of home life. She has a hard time of it, bulf at last makes a success as an opera singer, though not until her lonely struggles have i thrown her for sympathy upon a *eUow * student, who in due time goes his way, and leaves her to face motherhood as best she can. In the fulness of her fame she returns tq her native town, a nd , ln "" a '" tack of home-sickness - makes advances to her father, who consents to receive her again. No sooner is she installed m the house than she finds that one intimate friends of the family is the father of her child. In the third act of the play she is on the stage when he is announced as a visitor.

Mr Bernard Shaw makes a clever comparison of the different conceptions of

Magda's character on the part of the two great actresses. "It must be admitted," he writes, "that Sarah Bernhardt played this scene very lightly and pleasantly; there was genuine good fellowship in the way in which she reassured the embarrassed gallant, and made him understand that she was not going to play off the sorrows of Gretchen on him after all these years, and that she felt that she owed him the priceless experience ,of maternity, even if she did not particularly respect him for it. Her self-possession at this point was immense; the peach bloom never altered by a shade. Xot so with' Duse. The moment she read the card handed her by the servant, you realised what it was to have to face a meeting with the man. It was interesting to watch how she got through it when he came in, and how, on the whole, she got through it pretty well. Ho paid his compliments and offered his flowers, they sat down, and she evidently felt that she had got it safely over, and might allow herself to think at her ease, and to look at him to see how much he had altered. Then a terrible thing happened to her. She began to blush; and in another moment she was conscious of it, and the blush was slowly spreading and deepening until, after a few vain efforts to avert her face or to obstruct his view without seeming to do so, she gave up and hid the blush in her hands. After that feat of acting I did not need to be told why Duse does not paint an inch thick. I could detect no trick in it; it seemed to me a perfectly genuine effect of the dramatic imagination."

Hermann Sudermann, news of whose death has recently been cabled, was born at Matziken, near Hydeking, East Prussia, on September 30th, 1857; his father being a descendant of Dutch Mennonites, and an innkeeper by trade. He attended the Realschule at Elbing, the Realgymnasium at Tilsit, and the University at Konigsberg, where he specialised in philology and history. His family bein" in moderate circumstances, he worked part of his time in an apothecary shop to defray his expenses, it was while tutoring in various Berlin families that he studied at close range the nouveaux riches so vividly portrayed in "Sodom's Ende" (The Destruction of Sodom), written in 1890. Leaving the University in 1877 he became coeditor of the "Deutsche? Reichblat in 1881-2 and thus entered the neld ot writing with the influence of Young Germany, so recently nationalised, strongly marked in what he did. The American critic, Mr Montrose J. Moses, says:—

Hauptmann and Sudermann- represent mileposts in the development of drama. Like Pinero and Joned, they find themselves dated, the moral problems for which they fought no longer .mmmeßt, the technique they made distinctive no longer novel. Without them, the realistic movement would not have advanced, as it did at the time, though the influence of Ibsen, which touched both England and Germanv, opened many avenues of U£e so long elo'sed to scrutiny by the false standards of romanticism. Sudermann s moral interest was often overlooked by the critics who accused him of melodramatic concession to the box office in his plays, and to the reading public in his novels. Siica books as M Frau Sorge" (Dame Care), P u "" lished in 1887,, attained its one hundred and twenty-fifth edition in 1912. Because of such financial success, the younger generation suspected Sudermann of trimming his sails, of placing royalties above problems. So they turned rather to Hauptmann than to him as the master.

In her study of "Modern Drama in Europe,' Miss Storm Jameson classes Sudermann among the camp followers of Ibsen and his school, "ready to cry Realism and Art, because it held promise of commercial success or easy fame. These produce a form of realist draAa that joins a superficial appearance of the thought to theatrical sensation, and pleases both parties, old and new, the pitiful army of the advanced} and the vast crowd who like a good pilot, a striking and a not too abstruse problem." Miss Jameson labels these the opportunists of the theatre, following the dominant drama because it is dominant, or because imitation is the limit of their power; and she continues:

The cleverest of these is undoubtedly Hermann Sudermann. The first to use the catch phrases of revolt, he was not long in learning how far popular toleration would follow him in an attack on convention In "Sodom's Ende" his attack was too brutal, the play failed. Sudermann has never so Binned again. He became one of the finest of dramatic craftsmen,' his plays masterpieces of constructive art. They proceed from effect to effect with unfailing skill, and an illusion of advanced ideas or of intellectual depth flatters his public into supposing itsolf cultured and appreciators of art,and high thinking. In his later playS the appearance of intellect is abandoned in favour of an appearance of audacitv; the use of adultery as a subject was ever a cheap way to such a reputation.

Miss Jameson proceeds.to a detailed examination of Sudermann's achievements as a dramatist in revolt against shams, moral, and social, and she complains that while he rails against the convention of honour, h@ has no noblsr ideal to offer in its place. She cites "Magda" and "The Joy of Living" the two of Sudermann's plays best known to English audi.er.ces —and says: "There is marvellous 'technique, but not a moment of insight, of truth, of humanity Beyond this external effect there is nothing." In pursuance of her criticism she adds:

So much for Sudermann s modernity of thought. What of his artistic truth, the nower of the dramatist to make the. life he treats significant for the human spirit? There is force, there is the art of leading up to an effect, of contriving the claßh of s Amotions But sense of true reality disST AS fS, «335? .SC ! his disciples and followers aB Herod nasses the Temple steps; his interview with Herodias; above all, Salome s dance and'last hysterical madness. But the characters in the play! On the whole they are as unconvincing as any in Sudermann s drama. They are not people, they are miasms of rage, monsters of ambition, mnuthers of passion. In the atmosphere ff adultery and foul desire the Bible words are an accusing contrast. John himself is little more than a pawn in the time. The doubt, the half-vision of a newer faith, that lead to his failure, the ambition-of Heroes, the attraction of Salome are so many threads in the intrigufe, an intrigue carefully twisted, carefully brought to the culminating excitement —Salome's wild dance, and as a last magnificent contrast, the entry of the Christ. That is all. a theatrical achieved at the cost of dramatic and artistic degradation.