CHAPTER V.

THE THEATRICAL MANAGER.

IT will be briefer, and help to convey a more accurate notion of Goethe's efforts in the direction of the Theatre, if, instead of scattering through this biography a number of isolated details, recording small events in chronological order, I endeavour to present some general view of Goethe's managerial efforts.

We have already seen how, on his first arrival at Weimar, the Court was passionately fond of theatrical entertainments, and how eagerly he entered into them. The Theatre was a ruin, from the fire of the previous year. Theatres were improvised in the Ettersburg woods and Tiefurt valley, whereon the gay courtiers "strutted their brief hour" by torchlight, to the accompaniment of horns. Actors were improvised from the Court circle. Plays were improvised, and sometimes written with elaborate care. The public was the public of private theatricals. All this has been narrated in Book IV. What we have here to do with it is to call attention to the contrast thus presented by the Weimar stage with other German stages, and, above all, with the essential conditions of a stage which shall be anything more than the amusement of a dilettante circle. The drama is essentially a natural outgrowth. In Weimar, instead of growing out of a popular tendency, and appealing to the people, it grew out of the idleness of a court, and appealed to dilettantism. The actors, LEWES, VOL. II.

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instead of being recruited from runaway clerks, ambitious apprentices, romantic barbers, and scapegrace students, were princes, noblemen, poets, musicians. Instead of playing to a Public, that heterogeneous, but in dramatic matters indispensable, jury, whose verdicts are in the main always right,— they played to courtiers, whose judgment, even when unfettered, would not have had much value; and it never was unfettered. The consequence may be foreseen. As a Court amusement, the theatre was a pleasant and not profitless recreation; as an influence, it was pernicious. The starting point was false. Not so can dramatic art flourish; not so are Molières and Shakspeares allowed to manifest their strength. The national co-operation is indispensable. Academies may compile Dictionaries, they cannot create Literature; priesthoods may produce libraries, they cannot create Philosophy; and Courts may patronize Theatres, they cannot create a Drama. The reason lies deep in the nature of things. Germany has never had a Drama, because she has never had a Stage which could be, or would be, national. Lessing knew what was needed, but he had not the power to create it. Schiller early mistook the path, and all his noble strivings were frustrated.

Goethe and Schiller, profoundly in earnest, and profoundly convinced of the great influences to be exercised by the stage, endeavoured to create a German Drama which should stand high above the miserable productions then vitiating public taste. They aspired to create an Ideal Drama, in which the loftiest forms of Art should be presented. But they made a false step at the outset. Disgusted with the rude productions of the day, and distrusting the instincts of the public, they appealed to the cultivated few. Culture was set above Passion and Humour. The stage was to be literary; which is saying, in other words, that it was not to be popular. Nor did experience enlighten them. During the whole period of their reform, the principal performances were of the old style. At first a wandering troupe, with a wandering repertory, performed opera, drama, and farce, as best it could, with more real success than High Art could boast. Even when Schiller

had illustrated the stage with his masterpieces, the everpressing necessity of amusing the public forced the manager to give the vulgar appetite its vulgar food.* The dramatic problem is: How to unite the demands of an audience insisting on amusement, with the demands of Art, loking beyond amusement? There are many writers who can amuse, but who reach no higher aim; and there are writers who have lofty aims, but cannot amuse. In the drama the first class is nearer the mark than the second; but the true dramatist is he who can unite the two. Shakspeare and Molière-to take the greatest examples-are as amusing as they are profound; and they live only because they continue to amuse. Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Tartufe, L'École des Femmes, and the Malade Imaginaire, may be enjoyed by the veriest clown, and by the most cultivated critic. Goethe and Schiller fell into the error which in England, a few years ago, was preached as a gospel by a band of clever writers, who gloried in the title of "Unacted Dramatists"; the error of supposing a magnificent dome could be erected without a vulgar basis; the error of supposing that the Drama could be more successful as Literature, than as the reflection of national life in amusing mirrors.

It was in 1790 that the Weimar Theatre was rebuilt and reopened. Goethe undertook the direction with powers more absolute than any director ever had; for he was independent even of success. The Court paid all expenses, and the stage was left free for him to make experiments upon. He made them, and they all failed. He superintended rehearsals with great care. Shakspeare's King John and Henry IV., his own Grosskophta, Bürgergeneral, Clavigo, Die Geschwister, were produced, but without any great effect; for the actors were mediocre and ill paid, and there was no audience to create actors by enthusiasm and criticism. The audience was chilled by the presence of the Court, and could rarely be emboldened into rapture, which is the life, the pulse, the stimulus of acting. The pit was cowed by the Court, and the Court was cowed by

Goethe confesses so much. See Eckermann, vol. 1, p. 305; Oxenford's

translation.

Goethe. His contempt of public opinion was undisguised. "The direction," he wrote to his second in command, "acts according to its own views, and not in the least according to the demands of the public. Once for all, understand that the public must be controlled-will determinirt sein." To Schiller, who was quite of this opinion, he said: "No one can serve two masters, and of all masters the last that I would select is the public which sits in a German theatre." It is all very well for a poet or a philosopher to scorn the fleeting fashions of the day, and to rely on the verdict of posterity; but the Drama appeals to the public of the day, and while the manager keeps his eye on posterity, the theatre is empty.

"Wer machte denn der Mitwelt Spass?"

"Who is to amuse the present?" asks sensible Merry Andrew, in the Theatre-Prologue to Faust. A dramatist appealing to posterity is like an orator speaking not to convince the audience before him, but the audience of a century to come.

The Weimar audiences might be treated despotically, but they could not be forced into enthusiasm for that which wearied them. They submitted in silence. The riotous gallery and dogged pit of France and England only tolerate the absurdities which delight them; they admit no arbiter but their own amusement. An infusion of this rebellious element would have aided Goethe and Schiller in their efforts, by warning them from many a mistake. The Jena students might have supplied this element, had they been more constant visitors, and less controlled. The student is by nature and profession a rebel; and the Jena student had this tendency cultivated into a system. To be a roaring swashbuckler, with profound contempt for all Philisters, and a vast capacity for beer, was not enough indeed to constitute a pure judge of art; but to be young, full of life and impulse, and above all to be independent, were primary qualities in a dramatic audience, and these students brought such qualities into the pit. "Without them," says the worthy Klebe in his description of Weimar, "the house would often be empty. They generally come in the afternoon,

and ride or drive back after the play." If they enlivened the Theatre, they scandalized the town. Imagination pictures them arriving covered with dust, in garbs of varied and eccentric device, ambitious of appearing as different from "humdrum" citizens as might be adorned with tower-shaped caps, with motley ornaments of tassel, lace, &c., from under which escape flowing locks quite innocent of comb, which mingle with beard and moustache. Their short jackets are lined with stuffs of different colour. Their legs are cased in riding trousers, the inner sides of which are of leather. In their hands is the famous long whip, which they crack as they pour from the Webicht over the bridge into the town, startling its provincial dulness with an uproar by them called “singing”—a musical entertainment which they vary by insulting the not imposing soldiers, whom they christen “ tree-frogs," on account of the green and yellow uniform. They push to the utmost the licence and pride of the "Renomist," namely, to be ill-mannered.

When these students poured into the theatre, they carried there something like enthusiasm; but they were controlled by one who had a very mediocre admiration of their wild ways-the Geheimrath Goethe, who was not only Geheimrath and Manager but their idol.* Of him Edward Devrient, in his excellent history of the German stage, ** says: "He sat in the centre of the pit; his powerful glance governed and directed the circle around him, and bridled the dissatisfied or neutral. On one occasion, when the Jena students, whose arbitrary judgment was very unseasonable to him, expressed their opinion too tumultuously, he rose, commanded silence, and threatened to have the disturbers turned out by the hussars on guard. A similar scene took place in 1802 on the representation of Fr. Schlegel's Alarcos, which appeared to the public too daring an attempt, and the approbation given by the loyal party provoked a loud laugh of opposition. Goethe rose

* Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst.

** See the account given by H. Schmidt of the enthusiasm with which De Wette and his friends read Goethe's poems and wrote poems to their idol. Erinnerungen eines weimarischen Veteranen. p. 46.