The Wish.

by Hermann Sudermann.

INTRODUCTION.

Since the beginning of time men have been accustomed to regard the end of a century as a period of decadence. The waning nineteenth century is no more fortunate than its predecessors. We are continually being invited to speculate on the signs around us of decay in politics, in religion, in art, in the whole social fabric. It is not for us to inquire here concerning the truth or the ethics of that belief. But, as far as literature is concerned, it is very certain that the last years of the present century will be remembered for the extraordinary talent shown by a few young novelists and dramatists in most of the countries of Europe. In England, we can point to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. J.

M. Barrie; in France, to M. Paul Margueritte and M. Marcel Prevost; in Belgium, to M. Maurice Maeterlinck; in Germany, to Gerhard Hauptmann, Ludwig Fulda, and Hermann Sudermann.

The events of Sudermann's life are few; and he has the good sense to prefer to be known through his works rather than through the medium of the professional interviewer. The facts here set down, however, we owe to the courtesy of Sudermann himself a circ.u.mstance that lends them an additional interest.

Hermann Sudermann was born September 30, 1857, in Matzicken, a poor village in Heydekrug, a district of East Prussia, situated on the Russian frontier. It is not unlikely that the following pa.s.sage taken from one of his novels bears some resemblance to the place:--

"The estate that my father farmed was situated on a high hill close to the Prussian frontier; an uncultivated, wild park sloping gently towards the open fields formed one side of the hill, while the other sank steeply down to a little river. On the farther side of the stream you could see a dirty little Polish frontier village.

"Standing at the edge of the precipice you looked down on the ruinous shingle roofs; the smoke came up through the rifts in them. You looked right into the midst of the miserable life of the dirty streets where half naked children wallowed in the filthy where the women squatted idly on the threshold, and where the men in torn smocks, with spade on shoulder, betook themselves to the alehouses.

"There was nothing attractive about the town, and the rabble of frontier Cossacks, who galloped here and there on their catlike, drowsy nags, did not increase the charm."

Sudermann began his education at the school of Elbing. But his parents were in poor circ.u.mstances, and at the age of fourteen he found it necessary to think about earning a living, and was apprenticed to a chemist. He continued his studies in his leisure time with such good results that he returned to school, this time at Tilsit. In 1875 he went to the university of Konigsberg, and in 1877 to that of Berlin.

His first intention was to become a teacher, and while still pursuing his studies undertook for a few months the duties of tutor in the house of the poet Hans Hopfen. But in 1881, after six years spent in studying history, philosophy, literature, and modern languages (Sudermann understands English perfectly), he turned to journalism, and edited the _Deutsches Reichsblatt_, a political weekly. He soon threw aside newspaper work for true literature, for what the Germans call _belletristik_, and he has become famous through his novels, short stories, and plays. He is good-looking, with a dark melancholy face that lights up with a most remarkable and expressive smile when he speaks; nothing could be more unaffected than his manner, nor more charming than his whole personality. As yet there is no Sudermann Society for the discussion of the author's works, but in Berlin, where he has many admiring friends, Sudermann occasionally reads to them his productions while they are yet unpublished. The little story called _Iolanthe's Hochzeit_ was first heard in that way.

Although Sudermann's work is in all its aspects essentially modern, indeed all the conditions and problems of modern life have the highest interest for him, he belongs to no cla.s.s, ranges himself with neither realists nor idealists, and bows to the yoke of no literary fashion. In common with all great artists, Sudermann paints his own age, but while portraying men and women as he knows them, in the nineteenth century, he gives them, at least in his novels and tales, the human nature that is the same through all time. He has lived in Berlin, and his dramas give us life in that city both among the proletariat and the rich middle cla.s.s. He has lived in East Prussia, and there is laid the scene of his longer novels. He is familiar with other parts of Germany, with Italy, and with Paris, and everywhere he has used his gift of keen observation to good purpose. A certain melancholy, a feeling of the "inevitableness" of things, if we may be allowed the expression, runs through all his writings, and may perhaps be traced to the effect on his sensitive and high-strung nature of the East Prussian landscape, amid which he spent his boyhood. The meadow-flats and corn-lands, the meagre pine-woods, and dark, lonely pools of his native district, form the background of most of his tales. Numerous pa.s.sages might be quoted which would serve to show the melancholy and loneliness of the landscape. As an example we may take:--

"Thick and heavy as if you could grasp them with your hands, the clouds spread over the flat land. Here and there the trunk of a willow stretched forth its rugged knots to the air, heavily laden with moisture.

The tree was soaked with damp, and glistened with the drops that had hung in rows on the bare boughs. The wheels sank deep into the boggy road that ran between withered reeds and sedge.

"The moon stood high in the heavens and shed her calm, bluish light far over the sleeping heath. The clumps of alders on the moor bore wreaths of lights and from the slender silvery trunks of the birches which bordered the broad straight road in endless rows, came a sparkle and brightness that made the road seem as if lost far below in the silvery distance.

"Silence all around. The birds had long ceased singing. A stillness of the late summer time, the complacent stillness of departing life lay over the broad plain. You scarcely heard the sound of a cricket in the ditches, or a field-mouse disturbed in its slumbers, gliding through the tall gra.s.s with its low chipping whistle."

Such pictures constantly meet us in the pages of Sudermann's books; taken in connection with their setting, they are often of great force and beauty. Nothing, however, is obtruded; there is no searching after a dramatic background, or undue word-painting; everything is in keeping with and subordinate to the main interest of the tale.

With such surroundings, Sudermann cleverly a.s.similates his characters.

They are mostly the victims of circ.u.mstances which they are more or less unable to overcome. In some cases the fault, as with Leo Sellenthin in _Es war_, Sudermann's latest novel, lies in the weakness or sinfulness of the man; in others, in surroundings and events for which the man is not himself directly responsible. Sometimes the n.o.ble unselfish love and devotion of a woman make a happier state of things possible; Sudermann is a firm believer in the power and influence of good women in human life. His women are not so sharply outlined as Ibsen's, but he recognises in the s.e.x, though much more vaguely, like possibilities. For example, Leonore in _Die Ehre_ sees the folly and emptiness of fashionable life and has the courage to give her hand where she loves, to a man who, by her set, would be considered far beneath her. Magda, in _Heimat_, refuses to desert her child. And his young girls are even more charming, more natural than those of Ibsen.

Eager-hearted Dina Dorf, with her desire for a larger life in the world; hard-working Petra Stockman with her delight in her work and her unflinching truth and honesty; Bolette w.a.n.gel with her desire for knowledge, "to know something about everything" are, as everybody knows, among Ibsen's most delightful creations. In _Es War_ Sudermann gives us as perfect and natural a study of a young girl as we have met with in fiction or the drama for a very long while. Hertha cherishes a secret love for a man much older than herself but has reason to fear that his affections are set on a married woman, the wife of his best friend. To Hertha's innocent and unworldly mind this is a great puzzle; to her the sacredness of love between husband and wife seems a matter of course.

"Certainly the beautiful woman was a thousand times lovelier than poor Hertha--and she was, moreover, much cleverer.... But could she--and therein lay the great puzzle, the invincible contradiction that knocked all suspicion on the head--could she as a married woman possibly be an object of love to a man other than her husband? Wives were loved by their husbands--that is why they are married and by no one else in the world."

But Hertha determines to take such means as are within her power of discovering if suck things are possible, if such things exist. She first consults her books--books, of course, suited to a young girl's library. She goes through her novels, but nothing in them points to the enormity. Then she turns to the cla.s.sics, to Schiller!

"Amalie was a young girl--so was Luise--but then there was the queen of Spain! However, in that case it was clear as noonday how little poets deserved to be trusted, for that a man should fall in love with his stepmother could only take place in the world of imagination where genius, drawn away from the earth, intoxicated with inspiration, soars aloft. Not in vain had she, a year and a half before, written a school composition on 'Genius and Reality,' in which she had treated the question in a most exhaustive manner."

She next tries her friend Elly, a girl of her own age, but much more experienced in the ways of the world.

"'Listen, dear, I want to ask you a very important question. You're in love, aren't you?'

"'Yes'; replied Elly.

"'And you're sure the man's in love with you?'

"'Why do you say "man"?' asked Elly. 'Curt is my ideal. A little time ago it was Bruno--and before that it was Alfred--but now it's Curt, Yet he's not a man.'

"'What is he, then?'

"'He's a _young_ man.'

"'Oh! that's it, is it? No, he's certainly not a man.' And Hertha's eyes shone: she knew what a 'man' looked like. 'Well, darling,' she went on, 'do you think that a "man," or a _young_ man--it's all the same--could possibly love a married woman?'

"'Of course--naturally he would,' replied Elly, with perfect calmness.

"Hertha smiled indulgently at such want of intelligence.

"'No, no, little one,' she said. 'I don't mean his own wife, but a woman who is the wife of another?'

"'So do I! replied Elly.

"'And that seems to you quite a matter of course?'

"'My dear child, I didn't think you were so innocent! said Elly; 'everybody knows as much as that. And formerly it was even worse. A true knight always loved another man's wife: it was a great crime to love his own wife. He would cut off his right hand for the stranger's sake, and would die for her, pressing her blue favour to his lips; for you see at that time they always wore her blue favour. You'll find it in every history of literature.'

"Hertha became very thoughtful. 'Ah! in those days!' she said, with the ghost of a smile; 'in those days men went to tournaments and stabbed each other in sport with their lances.'

"'And to-day,' whispered Elly, 'men shoot each other dead with pistols.'

"Hertha felt as if she had been stabbed to the heart, and the little pink and white daughter of Eve continued, 'I think it must be quite delightful when one is married to know that some one is hopelessly in love with you. It's quite certain that most unhappy love affairs arise in that way.'

"The next day Hertha questioned her grandmother.

"'Grandmother, I'm grown up now, aren't I?'

"'Yes--so, so,' answered the old lady.

"'And probably I shall soon be married.'

"'You!' shouted her grandmother, in deadly terror. Doubtless the wretched child had come to confide in her the addresses of some b.o.o.by of a neighbour.

"'Yes.' continued Hertha, inarticulately and with great hesitation; 'with my big fortune I am not likely to be an old maid.'

"'Child!' exclaimed the old lady, 'of whom are you thinking?'

"Hertha blushed to her neck. 'I?' she stammered, trying to preserve an indifferent tone of voice, 'of n.o.body.'