22. Mr. Harden as a Critic A reckoning

The critic has a royal office; he should exercise it like a king. All the greats fall to him. He judges the poets and thinkers, the kings and warriors; he is to justify the judgment of the world and posterity about them. To do this, he himself must be rich in manifold knowledge, firm, faithful and truthful, loving and broad-minded. He who is endowed with these qualities should judge royally what happens and what is created; no cannibal and no slave, neither slave to public opinion nor to the king, neither slave to the state nor to the church, nor to any clique, he should exercise his sacred office.

This is how a true critic should be. And how should he not be? - No one says this better than the classical critic Lessing in the 57th antiquarian letter: "As soon as the art judge reveals that he knows more about his author than his writings can tell him, as soon as he uses this closer knowledge to make the slightest - supposed or real - disadvantageous move against him: his censure immediately becomes a personal insult. He ceases to be a judge of art, and becomes - the most contemptible thing that a rational creature can become - a complainer, a denigrator, a pasquillant! "

Anyone who has observed Maximilian Harden's activities for around eight years will be reminded in some respects of Lessing's statement above.

In Harden's opinion, a well-pointed phrase is more important to him than a dedicated approach to a subject. It often seems that his critical wisdom consists of one sentence: everything that comes into being is worthy of being reviled! - In this way, the skillful feuilletonist becomes an insulting attacker. Mr. Harden is a pamphleteer. Almost all of Harden's earlier essays in his weekly magazine "Zukunft" offer overwhelming material against him. Recall his essay on the assassination of Justice Levy, and his essay on the Zola trial will be read either with indignation or with a pitying smile. One must perhaps feel pity when one sees how a man behaves who, despite all reason, wants to say something different from all other people. The embarrassment, which is witty, gives a peculiar nuance of comedy.

Now we have experienced Sudermann's "Johannes".

How does Mr. Harden proceed? Twelve and a half pages of the fifteen-page essay are a kind of epilogue to Sudermann's work. - This means that Mr. Harden sat in his box on 15 January and witnessed the first performance in Berlin's Deutsches Theater. The powerful impressions that assailed him there resonate in the former actor and provide him with material and thoughts for an extremely subtle reflection of Sudermann's world of thought in "Johannes". Mr. Harden perhaps persuades himself that what he writes on pages 218 to 230 is his very own work. It is taken step by step from Sudermann's circle of ideas in "Johannes", apart from a few modifications; expressed with stylistic mastery in Harden's manner and form, but - what irony: a brilliant, in part ravishing acknowledgement of Sudermann!

But Harden, the spirit that always denies, does not want to admit this to himself. After all, the work he is so fond of is neither by Ibsen nor by Yvette Guilbert, but by Hermann Sudermann. Mr. Harden has been fighting him bitterly for years.

So it doesn't help: a scurrilous conclusion is quickly added on two pages, and we are once again presented with the familiar grimace of Harden's criticism.

Let's take a closer look at it.

"We see," writes Harden, "in Sudermann a poor devil of a Baptist - that is an amusing image that makes for merciless mockery; the drama to which an error gives the content is more correctly called a comedy." But this "poor devil", Mr. Pamphletist, dominates a whole mass of people, defeats the raging Pharisee at the well, who is no ordinary opponent (Act I, scenes 9 and 10), closes the way to glory and honour for himself through his manliness of character; he goes through life as a hero and goes to his death as a hero. To stand opposite Salome and not budge an inch from this predator even in the face of her ignominious end, to hurl her shame in the face of Herodias and disarm this beast in her own palace, to stand up to Herod as a prisoner in the dungeon court and assert the proud height of the lonely man on the mountain top, who assigns the cheap glory of the market to the little weakling in purple - would to God, Mr. Harden, that you were such a "poor devil"! Then your life would not be a "comedy", as it is becoming more and more now, but a heart-rending, spirit-liberating spectacle.

But so - "it is an empty, pathetic play"; for - Mr. Harden is a pamphleteer! It is unforgivable, he teaches us, how Sudermann treats the Baptist: not only has he used Flaubert's story (Flaubert and Sudermann both lay the same lion's skin on a chaise longue in the palace salon. Q.e.d.), but the Baptist's nature has remained alien to the poet, even though the reviewer has just presented it to him with his own thoughts, namely the poet's own thoughts. Sudermann's "weak inventive power" (!) has made a "confused being, driven astray by bad or badly read books (-?-)" out of Johannes; what does a Harden (perhaps also: a Harden should understand more -) understand of the conflict that rages through and tears apart this heroic soul, but through which it finally wrestles its way victoriously to the clear light of inner harmony, as Sudermann shows us? Law and goodness: the former dominates the old covenant, the latter the new; the latter represents the Baptist, the latter his Messiah. They form an irreconcilable contrast! The harsh demand for justice is the Baptist's shibboleth! This is not, as Harden blathers, "the spell of rabbinical dullness", to which John knows himself to be in sharp contradiction, but the genuine, pure air of Mosaic and prophetic tradition, as every Israelite breathed it from childhood. "As if he had never heard anything new", announces Harden, "John listens up when the word love strikes his ear for the first time" - did this not correspond completely to his situation, both internal and external? The prophetic sayings that Harden seems to be thinking of here are, even in their most far-reaching form, dealt with in the Summa: "Do not be deprived of your flesh", i.e.: The Jew helps the Jew - no one else! - But from Galilee comes the message that the new Master calls for love of the enemy! So no longer, as God's commandment stated: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"? How do God's holy law and the forgiving goodness towards the sinner unite? - Did this collision not cause the Baptist the most difficult struggle of his soul, doubly tragic, because it was not just any rabbi who represented the unheard-of new teaching, but his Messiah, whose forerunner and pioneer he knew himself to be, who carried salvation for Israel in his hand, who eternally determined everyone's fate? John expresses this movingly to Herod (Act IV, Scene 5): "Thou hast put no chains on me, neither canst thou loosen them for me: another cast thee in my way, and there I broke thee." The poet has masterfully posed this inner, religious problem to the hero within the framework of the external events with their colorful alternation up to the brutal outcome, something that the vast majority of critics have not yet understood. From act to act - the attentive will also note the highly instructive act endings - the solution is approached: the law-abiding preacher of repentance, who harshly rejects the children of Jehoshaphat together with Jael and the tender Miriam, only learns to love his disciples in the difficult struggle that breaks up his outer life and also shows him the limits of his prophetic work (end of Act IV), after he has already actually been able to love them. Act IV), after he has actually, albeit still half reluctantly, handed over the judgment of the desecrator of the temple to God (end of Act III), and finally, at the inner climax of the drama (Act V, Scene 8), learns to love the two so exclusive greats: Law and Goodness, to find the unifying formula: "Only from the mouth of the lover may the name guilt sound!" Mercy administers the judgment.

This settles two more of Harden's inanities: firstly, that Sudermann has Jesus preach a "liberal love", while he was "also" a scorching flame that consumed that which was doomed.

The lover administers judgment, says Sudermann deeply and gloriously, while Harden juxtaposes two Johannesses, the second of whom happens to be called Jesus. John wants to and should judge, Jesus has come to save people's souls. The orientation of the two men is fundamentally different. Then: Sudermann has the Baptist "search for Jesus as if he were a business traveler roaming the country with valuable samples". That is Harden's brashness! Consider: both men were working in the same country, at times only a few miles apart; it must be obvious to any normal mind that this cannot be a matter of "purely spiritual searching and finding", but at that time of messengers being sent out with a message and an answer.

But it gets even worse! Sudermann "does not live in his work; he has dragged building blocks from all regions, borrowed decorative objects from all art chambers, so that he can no longer find his way around his own building" - that is a schoolboy's achievement that fully deserves a striking proof a posteriori! - Sudermann, so we must continue to hear, has "committed a crime when he entangled Johannes in a ludicrous wooer's intrigue (the poet had looked for the models in the "Protzenburgen> and the "pimped truffle paradise of Tiergartenstraße -), the thin web of which the rough one would have torn apart with one grip": is this not what Johannes actually does through his heroic impeccable behavior? Why does Harden deny this? Doesn't that mean falsifying the clear truth and criticizing without conscience? -! "John was a man among men, and Herodias and Salome had no decisive influence on his growth and downfall" -: does that exclude the possibility that these two terrible women contributed to his downfall? Has the truth of "cherchez la femme" not been a sinister force throughout the course of world history? Is it necessary to illustrate this to a Harden? Political considerations and domestic intrigues combined to grind the axe for the Anabaptist.

The coloring of Sudermann's drama is unparalleled; the spiritual and political state of the people and the entire "milieu" are so exquisitely captured - even very disapproving critics have declared this aloud - that even a penetrating scholarly examination can only pay tribute with admiration. Mr. Harden, of course, knows better: "all contours blur and the viewer stares distractedly at a confused foggy picture". Were you so distracted - or even "foggy" - that everything "blurred" for you? As a result, you probably only have dim memories of the premiere evening, Mr. Harden? - That's why we advise you: Visit the performance again with confidence; but only if you are able to "stare" in a collected way instead of "distractedly"! - The "cheeky tragedian", you cheeky reviewer, does not "confuse" "Pharisees and Sadducees" either, which would of course be easier to excuse in your case. Just kindly read the passage in Act I (Scene 3) where the two Sadducean priests offer their blessing to Eliakim and the palace maid, the latter followers of the Pharisee sect; when they abruptly refuse (both parties hated each other mortally), the one priest angrily remarks: "They are also from the school of the Pharisees." Do you admit, Mr. Harden, that you were asleep? Or were you "staring" "absentmindedly" again?

One more thing: the sources on the political situation in Palestine at the time of the Baptist flow sparsely and murkily, to the chagrin of every Orientalist. One cannot go beyond more or less probable conjectures. Sudermann has done well to stick to the biblical account of the evangelists as a whole - preferring the synoptics to the fourth gospel, of course - without missing the notes in Josephus. Not only Maximilian Harden, but hopefully every schoolchild knows that it was not Herod Antipas but Pontius Pilate who ruled Jerusalem at the time. But Sudermann has Herod Antipas visit Jerusalem for the Passover as the "tetrarch of Galilee". Do you have any objections to that? But the entry of Jesus - not in Jerusalem, but in or near Machaerus (in the drama's so effective final image) is such an understandable poetic liberty that we can only speak of a "disdainful theatrical trick" in the scolding jargon of Mr. Harden.

Summa: Hermann Sudermann is neither "intellectually poor" nor a "dazzling theatrical force" who has "tragicomically overestimated himself in his delusions of grandeur", but rather: the great poet has gifted us with a highly significant work of strict dramatic structure, splendid organization and design and delightful language, for the tragedy "Johannes" is an enduringly valuable masterpiece of German poetry. Mr. Harden, however, deserves the words of his and our friend Friedrich Nietzsche, which are intended to tell the famous editor of the "Zukunft" what he means more and more to our people:

"The obstacle of all the strong and creative, the labyrinth of all the doubting and lost, the quagmire of all the weary, the shackle of all those running after high goals, the poisonous fog of all fresh sprouts, the parching sandy desert of the searching German spirit yearning for new life! "