Chapter 7
The Awakening of Spring by Sarah Barnwell Elliott From The Drama Magazine, a quarterly review. Issue number five, February 1912. Reading by Bologna Times. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. The Awakening of Spring. This play, if that can be called a play, which does not know the Unities, which has neither plot nor climax, which is simply a series of accidental catastrophes. This bit of writing, then, which might better be called a Conjuries of Calamities.
The subtitle of which is A Tragedy of Childhood is translated from the German of Frank Wiedekin by Francis J. Ziegler, who prepares one more or less for the play with twelve pages written by himself and called A Proem for Prudes. This proem is very necessary and very enlightening, for besides deprecating in almost every sentence the criticism of said prudes, this proem gives an appreciation, so to speak, of Mr. Wiedekin
and his work. Mr. Ziegler says of Wiedekin, His name is just beginning to be heard in America. In Germany he has been recognized for some time as one of the leaders in the new art of the theater.
Naturally enough his plays are too outspoken in their realism to appeal to all his fellow countrymen. But if certain Germans reject this mental pablum, others become intoxicated by it and waxing enthusiastic with a flow of language almost Bacchic, hail Wiedekin as the forerunner of a new drama as a power destined to infuse fresh strength into the German stage.
With this drink in its body, writes one admirer, the public will never more endure lyrical lemonade nor the dregs of dramatic penury. Mr. Ziegler goes on. Wiedekin, it is true, has a habit of using the news of the day as material for his plays, just as the old English dramatists did when they wrote domestic tragedies.
He has a fondness, moreover, for gruesome situations. But of the childlike simplicity which marks much of the Elizabethan drama, there is not a particle. Mr. Ziegler says further that his author has no trace of the gentle romanticism of Hoppmann or of even the iconoclast Strenberg.
But when Wiedekin departs from pure realism, his fancy creates a Gothic nightmare of horrors. We are then introduced to a synopsis of the work of this author, after which one does not feel, so to say, eager to pursue the study of Mr. Wiedekin, save perhaps as a part of the business of keeping up with the procession. Mr. Ziegler admits that the playwright has attacked his theme with European frankness,
which is quite true. Mr. Ziegler admits also that Wiedekin has been accused of depicting his adults as too ignorant and too indifferent to the needs of the younger generation. Mr. Ziegler might have added that these adults were depicted also as being singularly stupid and the younger generation as being singularly degenerate.
Far more so, let us hope, than is usual with physically healthy children, as the children in this play seem to be. Of course, all understand that the playwright, in order to drive home the lesson he seems to think necessary, has focused not only all the ills of early youth, but all the possible ills, and such a method will make an awful picture of any season of life or state of
being. For humanity, all the ills seldom accumulate on one person or group of persons, at one and the same time. One is a trifle saddened, however, when a little further on Mr. Ziegler reports that this play has, in Berlin, become part of the regular stock of plays acted at Das Nüth
Theater, where it is said to be certain of drawing a crowded audience. Later Mr. Ziegler comforts us a little as to German taste and thought by explaining that, in order to estimate the relationship of this play toward modern thought in Germany, it must be understood that Wiedken's tragedy is merely one of the documents in a paper war which has resulted at last in having the physiology of sex taught in many German schools.
War measures, we find in history, are usually to be apologized for, but not repeated in times of peace. However all this may be, if it be deemed necessary to tell all to children, why should not the fathers and mothers undertake this more or less disagreeable task? Why need the public be dragged in to assist at this function?
Do not fathers remember enough of their boyhood and mothers enough of their girlhood to guard their children either by explanation or by watching? If a man or woman has married a degenerate, is not he or she capable of watching for the same in the children and training it out of said children? In short, is there no private method of doing these things?
Not making them private because of any innate wickedness in things natural of any prudery in audience or reader, but simply on the ground of the unpleasantness of the subject. Many physical things are unpleasant, and so are kept decently in the background. Why not the subject discussed so very frankly in The Awakening of Spring? Are we not sufficiently afflicted with nauseating horrors in the pages of the daily press, the
source, we are told, of Mr. Weedkin's inspiration? Are not the medical advertisements with the attached pictures of the dreadful-looking people who have been cured of various unspeakable diseases, people so very ugly that on aesthetic grounds they should have been let die at once? Are not these things a sufficient punishment?
Has not humanity to endure many of these physical, mental, and moral horrors in their own persons, and is not this enough without having in addition to meet them in literature on the stage, and consequently in everyday talk? Has Mr. Ziegler done anything toward the uplift of the country, or toward the gaiety of nations by this translation?
Does he think that already America has become what it bids fair to become, a people so mongrel that degeneracy will be the common inheritance? One more word of comfort we find in the pro-M2 prudes. Mr. Ziegler says, As a play, The Awakening of Spring stands unique in the annals of dramatic art.
As the old darkies say, Glory be! End of The Awakening of Spring by Sarah Barnwell Elliott
