his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next
day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel
Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from
Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself.
His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the
Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond
of delineating. He would save the world from itself, rescue it from
the morass of materialism, but he relapses into a pathological
mysticism which ends in a sanitarium for nervous troubles. The marquis
is a Mephisto; he is not without a trace of idealism; altogether a
baffling nature, Faust-like, and as chock-full of humour as an egg is
full of meat. He goes to smash. His plans are checkmated. His beloved
deserts him for the enemy. His wife commits suicide. His life
threatened, and his liberty precarious, he takes ten thousand marks
from Consul Casimir, whose name he has forged in a telegram, and with
a grin starts for pastures new. Will he shoot himself? No! After all,
life is very much like shooting the chutes. The curtain falls. This
stirring and technically excellent comedy has never been a favourite
in Germany. Perhaps its cynicism is too crass. It achieved only a few
performances in Berlin to the accompaniment of catcalls, hisses, and
derisive laughter. I wonder why? It is entertaining, with all its
revelation of a rascally mean soul and its shady episodes.

Space, I am sorry to say, forbids me from further exposition of such
strong little pieces as Musik, a heart-breaking drama of a betrayed
girl studying singing who goes to jail while the real offender, the
man, remains at liberty (1907), or of Die Zensur, with its discussion
of art and religion--the poet intrudes--and its terrible cry at the
close: "Oh, God! why art thou so unfathomable?" Or of the so-called
Lulu tragedy (Erdgeist and The Box of Pandora) of which I like the
first act of the former and the second act of the latter--you are
reminded at this point of the gambling scene in Sardou's Fernande--but
as I do not care to sup on such unmitigated horrors, I prefer to let
my readers judge for themselves from the printed plays.

Karl Hetman is an absorbing play in which a man loses the world but
remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than
exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist
Hetman--who is a sort o