Authors: Karl Kraus
Where, though, is the German comedy writer who could borrow from him the power to create a character with three words and a milieu with three sentences?
He’s all the more creative when he lifts foreign material into his own work.
He goes about it differently than the better-known contemporary recaster Hofmannsthal, who strips the hides off honorable cadavers to inter questionable remains in them, and who would no doubt defend his serious professional work against comparison with an author of farces.
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Like all superior readers, Herr von Hofmannsthal reduces the work to its material.
Nestroy takes his material from where it was barely more than material, invents what he has found, and his achievement would be considerable even if it consisted only in the reconstruction of plots and in the whirl of newly created situations—that is, only in the welcome opportunity to entertain the world and not in the voluntary compulsion to observe the world as well.
But the higher Nestroy, the one who owes nothing to any foreign idea, is somebody who has only head and no figure, for whom a role is only a pretext for his text,
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and in whom every word attains a fullness that surpasses character, even the one who stands there in the breadth of Scholzian
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humor as the model of a basic type in the satellite theaters of Vienna.
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It wasn’t Nestroy the actor but the costumed advocate of his satirical prerogative, the executor of his attacks, the spokesman for his own eloquence, who might have exerted that mysterious effect which, while its artistic origins have certainly never been understood, has come down to us as the center of a heroic age of theater.
The theatrical form of Nestroy’s mind was bound to die out with his body, and the routine of its nimbleness, which we still here and there see popping up with virtuoso poise, is a costume borrowed illegitimately.
In his farces, the lead role remains unfilled unless the expert in his greasepaint also happens to come by his satirical spirit.
Only the fruitful comedy of his fuller secondary roles has found original successors, such as the actor Oskar Sachs,
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whose style seems, in its vital composure, to descend from the classical Carltheater.
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But as the origin and perfection of a popular type, an actorly creator such as Girardi, who stands on the margins of the empty scene offered by the stagecraft of the past decade, might be allowed to surpass the theatrical value of Nestroy’s art, which had only to clothe its own fullness of thought.
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This is why even a layman of the stage such as Herr Reinhardt could propose a Nestroy cycle to a Girardi.
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In Girardi, the character thrives on the poverty of its textual support; with Nestroy it shrivels up on the wealth of the words.
There’s so much literature in Nestroy that the theater balks, and he has to step in for the actor.
He can do it because it’s a written art of acting.
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In this proxyship for the actor, in this embodiment of what easily eludes the actual demands of theater, there lives today a spirit whose affinity with him can now and then be recognized in the very outlines of his personality: Frank Wedekind.
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Here, too, there’s something overproductive, in which what’s organically lacking in the character is made up for with identification, and which mediates personally between confession and credibility.
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The actor wrote for a poet a role with which the poet wouldn’t trust an actor.
In Wedekind—leaving aside an example of linguistic-satirical lineage that means more to me personally—we’re presented with a monologuist for whom a seeming conventionality and casualness of scenic form likewise suffices for speaking past us, and singing past us, things that are truly new and essential.
The kinship in the cadences of aperçus was pointed out once by the late critic Wilheim.
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Cadence is that superficiality on which thoughts most rely, and there must somewhere be a common standpoint for observing the world when sentences are spoken that could just as well be Nestroy’s as Wedekind’s:
“She’s in her twentieth year now, was married three times, satisfied a colossal lot of lovers—sooner or later, the needs of her heart were bound to register.”
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A biographical comment like this would also be made, just as it is, by a Nestroyan bringer of thought if, with the same vault of antitheses, he could get himself over his beloved’s past.
And in
Earth Spirit
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somebody could again come close to speaking the wonderful line that occurs in Nestroy:
“I seen an old gray horse once pullin’ a brick wagon.
The future’s been weighin’ on my mind ever since.”
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But here, perhaps, the absolute Shakespearean quality of such a lightning illumination of a mental landscape is sublime beyond any modern comparison.
It’s a line by which you’d like to reintroduce to the contemporary reader’s muddled eye what poetry is: a within fetched from a without, a perfect unity.
Observed reality taken up in feeling, not massaged until it fits the feeling.
It could be used to reveal the method of all poetastery, all feuilleton poetry, which looks around for a handy piece of the external world in order to dispose of a stock mood.
The case of Heine breaks open and collapses on a sentence like this, for it offers the dead certainty that an old gray horse would start to muse: How good was my life before / This wagon must I pull today / O happy neighs of yore / You’ve gone, you’ve gone away!
/ But the wagon said, Don’t frown / It is an old refrain / Once the road starts going down / It never goes up again … And we’d be fully informed about the author’s mood, including the ironic resignation.
With Nestroy, who wrote only rough couplet stanzas, you can detect passages in every farce where his purely poetic piloting of thought through the densest of materials—where more than the mind: the mind’s process of assimilation—becomes visible.
It’s the advantage over beauty possessed by a face that’s changeable to the point of beauty.
The coarser the material, the more penetrating the process.
In satire, the linguistic demands are less easily questioned, and fraudulence more difficult, than in the kind of poetry that doesn’t bother earning the stars and for which distance isn’t a road but a rhyme.
Satire is thus rightly the poetry of impediment, richly compensated for being the impediment of poetry.
And how it has both together: of the ideal, the entire ideal, and distance as well!
It is never polemical,
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always creative, while counterfeit poetry is mere yea-saying, a contemptible appeal to the already available world.
How satire is true symbolism, inferring a lost beauty from a found ugliness and setting up little images of meaning in place of global concepts!
Counterfeit poetry, which takes weighty matters for granted, and counterfeit irony, which rejects weighty matters, have one and the same face, and a single wrinkle separates Heine’s lonely tear from Herr Shaw’s common laughter.
But the joke is nasty to the smokestack because the joke affirms the sun.
And acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only corrosive.
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Satire can perpetrate a disruption of religion to arrive at reverence.
It inclines toward high emotion.
Even in places where a given emotion is deployed like just another object from the outside world, so that satire’s contradiction can shimmer through.
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Yes and No mix and multiply, and thought springs forth.
A game, as unprincipled as love.
The result of this perfect penetration, preservation, and intensification of polar tendencies: a Nestroyan tirade, a melody by Offenbach.
Here someone’s rapture at a pastoral play is underscored by the very joke deriding it; there the caricature of someone’s pining moonlight love runs riot over parody and into transcendence.
This is true high-spiritedness, for which nothing is profane.
“A real practical fanatic once told me that the dandiest thing is when there’s two lovers and one of them dies first and comes back to the other one as a ghost.
I can just see it, when she’s sitting there at her garden window some flowery night, with moonlight playing all over her pearly tears, and it would be getting whiter and whiter behind the bushes, and that whiteness would be yours truly—completely spirit, not one speck of body, but with the bedsheet of eternity over my head all the same, on account of decency—I stretches out my arms to her, I points to a star in the sky, ‘there shall we be united,’ so to speak—she gets the itch for a heavenly rendezvous, and would you believe it, she casts off her earthly shackles and we go amalgamating and waffeting and pendulating into the azure-blue night sky…”
Applied emotion presupposes emotion, and Nestroy’s wit always has the gravity that knew emotion in its better days.
Like the wit of every true satirist, it rolls down the long alley toward where the Muses stand, to strike all nine of them.
Nestroy the disputer is the disputatious catalogue of every feeling in the world.
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The buffoon who was banished from the stage, but went on cracking jokes behind the tragic hero as he was leaving, seems fused with the hero for an epoch, amusing himself in a style that reaches into his own heart and, in a strangely suspended tone, almost like Jean Paul’s, sustains the joke that’s being perpetrated here with horror.
FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG
: Is one’s father a hunter, too?—
TITUS
: No, he runs a quiet, solitary business in which resting is his only work; he lies fettered by a higher power, and yet he’s free and independent because he’s disposing of himself;—he’s
dead
.—
FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG
(
aside
): How profligately he uses twenty lofty words to say what can be said with one syllable.
The man obviously has the makings of an author.
And it is the loftiest yet tersest paraphrasing of a monosyllabic condition, the way the words here play around death.
This blurred emotionality, which Nestroy breathes into the most modest of his characters’ asides, has led literary historians to think that his wit is aimed at their noble impulses.
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In truth, it’s aimed only at their phrases.
Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom language forms thoughts about things.
He liberates language from its lockjaw, and for every cliché it turns him a profit in thought.
Indicative are such expressions as:
“Good thing I drownded my sorrows, or despair woulda driven me straightaway to drink.”
Or:
“The apples go over here!
People got no idea how to organdize.
They go mixin’ up apples and oranges like apples and oranges.”
Language is making fun of itself here.
The cliché is driven back into the hypocritical convention that created it:
“All right, out with your decision, my sweet”—“But Herr von Lips, I really must first…”—“I understand, there can be no talk of refusing, but to say yes, you think some deliberation is in order.”
The cliché inverts itself into truth:
“I’ve shared adversity with you; it’s now my most sacred duty to stick with you in good times, too!”
Or, debased to neologism, the language of the upper classes is caricatured by language from the mouths of the unrefined:
“All of a sudden, here comes a first-magnitude starlet and makes her societal splash at the pinnacle of the ambulatory
entreprise
…”
How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself.
An interpenetration of problem and content:
“Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”
Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:
“Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”
He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals.
Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke.
Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:
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“Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”
Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other.
To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s.
The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed.
When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation.
Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words: