ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the century a reversion from both the naturalistic and the neo-romantic drama to the clear-cut outlines of classical form was championed in theory and practice by Paul Ernst, Wilhelm von Scholz, and Samuel Lublinski. The theoretical writings concerned are Paul Ernst’s Der Weg zur Form (1906), Wilhelm von Scholz’s Gedanken zum Drama (1905), and Samuel Lublinski’s Die Bilanz der Moderne (1904) and Ausgang der Moderne (1908). These writers demand a return to blank verse, the three unities, inevitability of the action; and, while they deny the relativity of morality which the naturalists had proclaimed, they define meticulously their own conception of the tragic hero. Restitution of the hero is common to both impressionism and neo-classicism; but whereas to the impressionists the hero is for the most part interesting by reason of his pathological and mental ‘otherness’ (Anderssein) to the neo-classicists he is the Aristotelian superman impelled to destruction by some fault which is an inevitable part of his own towering greatness. The neo-classicists for this reason find their themes mostly in history or legend; and each dramatist interprets his theme in the light of his own particular system of ethics. Hebbel, not Schiller, is the model; and therefore these neo-classic dramas have three main characteristic features: (1) the more closely the dramatists can apply the Aristotelian technique by contriving the strictest unity of action and the most drastic simplification of the plot, the more perfect they consider their tragedies to be; (2) their characters are philosophically aware of their doom and expound their Weltanschauung, probably in monologues, in uncompromising philosophic jargon; nor does it matter if the expression of this interpretation of life be grotesquely anachronistic, as, for instance, when in Paul Ernst’s Brunhild and Chriemhild the protagonists and even the wakeman on the wall and even the serfs of the king discourse sententiously on the nature of man and existence, and on whether life is or is not a dream; (3) the photographic reality of present-day life is replaced by what is considered to be the logical reality of a theme in which all that happens is developed inevitably from what precedes. From Hebbel the neo-classicists take over the problem of the conflict of the individual (as the representative of ‘higher being’ the hero) and the universe (or the community). For the critic watching the outcome of these theories the trouble is that, whereas in Hebbel’s plays there is consistent interpretation of the metaphysical idea which informs the dramatist’s whole work, in the neo-classic tragedies – in Paul Ernst’s particularly – there is neither consistency nor clarity, although the protagonists monotonously and undramatically express whatever metaphysical idea they may possibly represent in a given play.
