in Kaiser's refusal to individuate the clerk beyond the mere lusting for self-expression, and the characters that surround him beyond that of colorless types and projections; in choosing as a title Mückentanz, as Eulenberg does, and offering a gnat-like swarm of characters, individualized somewhat in their pettiness, but all alike seeking in their twisting, ineffectual ways an escape from the commonplaceness of their lives. The most significant and revolutionary point about this new type-tragedy is its turning to types of power that go far beyond the lives, struggles, and happiness-values of individuals cosmological forces and irruptions, as in The Emperor Jones and Spiegelmensch; monstrous subhuman forms, as in Bocksgesang; great social and industrial complications and upheavals, as in Toller's Maschinenstürmer and Kaiser's Gas! Individual character drawing all but disappears in the process. A MERGING OF THE OBJECTIVE AND THE SUBJECTIVE: -Examples are the churchgoers scene in The Hairy Ape; the scene in Heaven in Liliom; the galley of slaves in The Emperor Jones; the dinner and the cyclodrome scenes in From Morn Till Midnight; also Rice's The Adding Machine, and Lawston's Ralph Bloomer, and Lenormand's Failures. Everything is shown in objective, tangible form; and yet as reflected and distorted by its life within a perceiving and reacting consciousness. There is something suggestive of dream-technique in this—a dream-technique shown at its fullest and wildest in Beggar on Horseback. LOOSENESS AND INSTABILITY OF CONSTRUCTION:-Scenes are often short and not rounded off; and they are not built up to a terse economical structure. They begin and end abruptly; and have a random quality about them. There are violent changes answering the flashes and shifts 4 Eulenberg's Mückentanz offers illustrations of this. of consciousness. This again calls dreams to mind, but it also suggests the technique of the cinematograph. AN ENERGISTIC QUALITY:-The cyclodrome scene in From Morn Till Midnight may be used to illustrate the energism and the worship of great power which characterize the expressionistic drama. The clerk with the stolen money in his pocket attends a cyclodrome race. The scene is written as monodrama-racers and spectators have no independent interest; we are to see them as he sees them. He sees in the racers nothing but strain and speed and in the spectators nothing but excitement and a lustfully tensed hunger of "sensations." He flings money about, offers special prizes in order to whip up to the utmost the efforts of the riders and the excitement of the others; and thus gets for himself the taste of power, and a drunken straining and stretching. The royal family enter the cyclodrome; the wild mob turns from shouting to bowing; the clerk leaves in disgust. Force that can be controlled, energy that collapses into good manners, have no appeal for him; they cannot give him what he craves above all else dynamic selfexpression with neither admixture nor restraint. The energism of this new type of drama is reflected in the choice of materials and in the use of language. Mass movements, as they are revealed in wars, strikes, crowds, and mobs, are a favorite theme; and they are handled with great vigor. Of this the scenes in Gas!, the war of the ants in The World We Live In, and the last act of R. U. R. are good examples. The language of Gas! moves away from dialogue toward self-expression by means of short phrases, which might be called force-units of speech. There is an attempt to make speech more powerful by ungrammatical condensation, by inversion, and a distorted order of words. MYSTICISM: Here may be found in its most striking form the mysticism which is at the heart of expressionism; a mysticism which breaks through the opposition between humanity and the Cosmos, between the subjective and the objective; and which sinks individualities and separate forms in a stream of consciousness and a self-expressive nature. There are many instances of it in the work of Werfel, Toller, and Kaiser. In Eulenberg's Mückentanz, a play written in prose, there are a few lines of poetry that illustrate this mysticism. Eulenberg, Mückentanz, APPARITION Boat after boat passes, Sending on From eternity to eternity The living to-day, the dead to-morrow. I have thrown you a wave From the ocean of humanity -Sea-urchins and shells and foam, And animalculae Caught in the froth, Gone with its going. You who are standing on the beach, Awaiting the sound of the unknown, And only too gladly fanned by the uncertain, Even as I kneel (he sinks down) Before humanity The Imperfect, The Too Be Pitied, And yet Alone Worthy of Worship. To this might be added the lines spoken by the Voice of Light earlier in the play : Voice of Light Saved is he who when he looks upon creation believes in man in spite of what men are and what men do! Other examples of mysticism are Lenormand's Failures and O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Such then are some of the peculiarities and innovations of the new expressionistic drama. What is the value of expressionism as a movement in modern art? Such a question must be asked in view of the energy displayed in the creation of an expressionistic art and the equally energetic protests by conservatives. Like all transitional movements expressionism has its weak points. It assumes too readily that all expression is valuable; that all distortion has aesthetic and psychic value; and that all contents are acceptable. It tends to overlook the quieter forms of energy; is too neglectful of formal beauty as one of the sources of aesthetic pleasure; and often lacks discipline and measure. But it has great value in (a) giving freshness, vigor, and range to art; (b) helping art beyond a purely imitative, representational ideal and practice; (c) in clearing away the conventional and the stereotyped, and in recovering, as far as may be, a type of artistic innocence; and (d) in rescuing art from a superficial naturalism and a narrow, academic idealism. Above all, expressionism is a significant and promising development in art because it reflects a force and spirit which, whether we like it or not must be admitted to be the force and spirit that stir in modern life; and because that life, unmannerly and undisciplined as it may be in some of its expressions, holds within itself the promise of new hopes and achievements; of new cosmic readings; and of new moral and aesthetic values. SOME 'ISMS Certain words ending in ism have come to be used with cliché-like regularity and thoughtlessness. They appear in (a) the manifestos of radical schools, where they serve as watchwords or rallying points; (b) popular debates on art, where they are incantations or a club to silence an opponent; (c) serious aesthetic discussion, where they conveniently mark certain special movements and phases of art. movements seem little more than fads and fashions of technique, but there is honest experimentation in most of them -and points of view and aims that ought not to be neglected. These FUTURISM According to Marinetti's pronunciamento, futurism is a revolt against the worship of form as such, the choice of certain subjects the nude and others—and a traditional overemphasis on representation. It is a young man's art, setting itself the task of divining and grasping the world as force. Painting is to give the "sensation dynamic." Here are three bits of futurist theory quoted by Cheney in his Primer of Modern Art. How often it happens that upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking we see the horse that passes far away at the end of the street! Our bodies become parts of the seat upon which we rest and the seat becomes part of us. The omnibus merges in the house that it passes, and the houses mix with the bus and become part of it. |