oa ~~ nes, Ae eh F ore oe OS ee Ss Pee Tea a RSS, - « S r _ = ee ON lan era eT ‘ NOV 26 1930 i Nae Bia girs ae egy : eae. 4 ; = 2 _ + | i By ey ; ; hi 7 Be? ep i ) 5 Ae ‘ ry’. f 4 i 7 p wet) 4 } a ; ,On r {gee > 7 : A 4 ; } : M ve 7 * ~ Lee 3 be aie ~ “at - ya, ~ eee *" : las . > « * > The Fool in Christ The Fool in Christ: \ Emanuel Quint By GERHART HAUPTMANN TRANSLATED BY THOMAS SELTZER PREFACE BY ERNEST BOYD COPYRIGHT, 19260, BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC. Copyright, 1910, by S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin Copyright, 1911, by B. W. Huebsch PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE WHeEn a writer turns from the work through which he has established his fame, in order to demonstrate his mastery in another field of literature, he usually proves only his versatility. The novelist who becomes a poet invariably remains a great novelist ; the poet who writes a novel convinces us that poetry is his métier, and the critic who forsakes his last is triumphantly reminded of the Latin warning: ne sutor. . . . There attaches always a certain interest and an intrinsic merit to these exceptional performances, but, on the whole, their suc- cess is one of esteem. The under-rated plays of Henry James do not establish him as a dramatist, nor does the over-rated poetry of Thomas Hardy convince us of error when we persist in thinking of him as the first of the modern English novelists. Bernard Shaw is a playwright, despite the fact that The Irrational Knot, Love Among the Artists, An Unsocial Socialist, and Cashel Byron’s Profession possess claims upon the in- telligent reader of fiction which are not shared by many contemporary novels of greater pretensions. 7 Gerhart Hauptmann is an interesting exception to this rule. Der Narr in Christo: Emanuel Quint was his first novel, and it not only captured public favor both at home and abroad, but it also established his position in the front rank of German novelists. When the book first appeared, in 1910, Hauptmann’s fame as the greatest living dramatist was secure, and he had long since been accepted as a writer whose medium was v vl PREFACE primarily the theatre, although his verse was by no means negligible. Narrative prose, however, seemed to be the remotest of his preoccupations. Ever since 1889, when he made his début at the Freie Biihne with Vor Sonnenaufgang, he had steadily advanced as a dramatist, and by the time this first novel was published he had produced the vast majority of the plays upon which his fame rests. His attempts at fiction, on the other hand, were meagre, and they belonged to the years of his appren- ticeship. In 1892 he had issued in book form two novelettes, Bahnwdrter Thiel and Der Apostel, and his only other works of fiction were two fragments from two novels which were never continued and were not in- cluded by him in the canon of his writings, although published elsewhere. For all practical purposes, there- fore, The Fool In Christ may be regarded as having no predecessor save that volume of two short stories writ- ten more than twenty years earlier. In that long in- terval of incessant dramatic productivity, when it must have seemed as if all his creative energy were centred upon the theatre, Hauptmann was preparing this masterpiece in a genre so different from the strict economy of the drama form. Yet those two decades of play-writing were the two decades during which the Naturalistic school of fiction in Europe, under Zola’s egis, invaded the field of the novel, and Hauptmann was a Naturalist or nothing in that phase of his career. By 1910, however, he had moved on from the crude Naturalism of the Freie Biihne dramas, and that tech- nique, which was present in the early novelettes, is here abandoned. One of those stories, The Apostle, reads like a preliminary sketch for The Fool in Christ. It is an objective study of a pathological case of religious PREFACH vil mania, set down with the scrupulousness of a case his- tory, in so far as every element is excluded which does not bear directly upon the problem. Hauptmann had equipped himself for this task by studying at Ziirich under Forel, and his subsequent interest in religious problems is attested by the plays which preceded The Fool in Christ, such as Hannele, The Sunken Bell, and Michael Kramer. In his youth he had planned a Christ epic which afterwards developed into a diary of Judas Iscariot, and in The Apostle he transported his subject to the field of psychiatry. It was not until twenty years after that he succeeded in shaping his theme to its final form. Since then he has not recurred to a question which had obtruded itself in various guises throughout most of his writings. Too often we have learnt by dreadful experience what happens to the Anglo-evangelical mind when it conceives the idea of re-creating the character of Christ. In the theatre we have had The Passing of the Third Floor Back and that more recent and more formidable confection The Fool. I cannot recall a single novel, even of the second or third class, written by an Ameri- can or an English novelist on this theme. Wallace’s Ben Hur need not detain us, nor the late Miss Marie Corelli’s Barabbas, nor the estimable Christian of Mr. Hall Caine. The name of Olive Schreiner alone stands out above the list of sticky “juveniles” and mediocre shockers like When it was Dark. Yet, who would care to say that the author of The Story of an African Farm did more than imperil her reputation when she brought Christ to Mashonaland in Trooper Peter Hal- ket? Evidently, the English-speaking world takes its religion too seriously to create from it imaginatively. The heathen of Continental Europe have this advan- vill PREFACE tage, at least, over us—that their writers have essayed the subject, rather than their manufacturers of trade goods for the booksellers and circulating libraries. Even the wicked Balzac wrote Jesus Christ in Flanders, and in Portugal Ega de Queiroz produced The Sweet Miracle, while Hauptmann was forestalled by Peter Rosegger’s I.N.R.I., and by Gustav Frenssen’s Holy- land,—all of which were duly rendered into English for our benefit. Frankly, however, none of these can com- pare with The Fool in Christ, which has only one anal- ogy, The Idiot, by Dostoevsky, and here, of course, the parallel is not very close. Whether the treatment of the theme be avowedly antiquarian in setting, as in Rosegger, or modern, as in Frenssen, Hauptman has more completely and more artistically achieved his life of Christ than any other novelist. His method is apparently simple. Emanuel Quint’s story follows in almost every detail that of Christ, but instead of the stage dummy which our popular writers try to galvanize into life, Hauptmann sets before us the illegitimate son of a priest and a carpenter’s wife, establishes an heredity explaining his religious leanings, and then allows him to tread the path that leads to calvary. Characters corresponding to those in’ the Gospel narratives are also described: Hedwig and Marie Krause, Joseph, the disciple who betrays Eman- uel, and the various disciples: the Schubert family, the brothers Scharf, the Hassenpflugs, Schwabe, the tailor, and Ruth Heidebrand. All these types, this swarming world through which Emanuel passes, has its own real- ity: they are not lay figures dragged in to illustrate a thesis, nor are they abstractions set up to personify the problems which this saviour has to face. Hauptmann tells the vivid story of a religious mystic who sets his PREFACE 1X whole world against him, and the narrative is at once realistic and symbolical, symbolical in its correspond- ence to the life of Christ. Hauptmann’s biographers have identified most of the leading figures with men and women well known in the author’s life, and there is reason for believing that Tol- stoy, who died the year the book was published, sug- gested the character of Emanuel. In an address to Tolstoy after his death Hauptmann uses words which have often been quoted as indicating a definite associ- ation in his own mind: ‘Many people thought that Tolstoy was a fool. Jesus the Saviour, was also re- garded as a fool. He was a man. He was our brother. The consuming fire of love, of humanity burned in him. The Holy Synod mistook that fire for the flames of hell.” And so we get this study of the religious mystic, who is a man consumed by the fire of love. Emanuel Quint is a simple creature, who is re- garded at first as harmless. His predilection is for the poor and the unhappy, but he has nothing to offer them but his humanity. Socialists use him, but he has no bond with them, for he has no intellectual panacea, and is unconcerned about the fate of society in the material sense. He is torn all his life between his consciousness of his own human weakness and the conviction of his mission. In the end he is defeated and disappears. Think of In His Steps, or What would Jesus do?, that treasured morsel of modern evangelical art, and then observe the way in which a superior man and a su- perior artist can actually set before us the same ques- tion, yet leave us with our admiration increased and our self-respect intact. Hauptmann takes no sides in the conflict which he describes. He calls Emanuel Quint a “fool,” but we know what shades of meaning he x PREFACE saw in that term. He does not, however, browbeat the reader into believing that Quint is right. He leaves the facts to speak for themselves, and stands aside, the sympathetic, sceptical chronicler, too sure an artist to permit himself to become a proselytizer, tract in hand. Since The Fool in Christ Gerhart Hauptmann has in- creasingly found in narrative fiction an instrument of expression which he had neglected until he was nearly fifty years of age. That novel was followed by At- lantis; then came The Heretic of Soana, a short novel, which ranks with The Fool in Christ as his best prose work. Phantom and The Island of the Great Mother conclude the list of this curiously belated novelist’s con- tributions to a field in which he achieved and has held his supremacy by his first novel. The Fool in Christ thal yh fh eel ian THE FOOL IN CHRIST CHAPTER I On a Sunday morning in the month of May, Emanuel Quint arose from his bed on the floor of his father’s lit- tle hut. He washed himself outside at the stone trough in clear water from a mountain spring, holding his hol- lowed hands under the crystal jet that flowed from a de- cayed, moss-grown wooden spout. During the night he had scarcely slept, and now, without waking the fam- ily or taking anything to eat, he started off in the di- rection of Reichenbach. An old woman coming toward him on a path through the fields stopped short when she caught sight of him from afar. For the swinging stride with which Emanuel walked and his remarkably dignified bearing contrasted strangely with his bare feet, bare head, and the poverty of his garments. The greater part of the morning Emanuel kept to the fields aloof from people. At eleven o’clock he crossed the small wooden bridge spanning the brook and made straight for the market-place of the little vil- lage, then very lively because services at the Protestant church were just over, and the people were streaming out. The poor man mounted a stone block and steadied himself by holding to a lamp-post with his left hand. This attracted some of the crowd, he drew others by a 2 THE FOOL IN CHRIST signs. ‘They approached, astonished, amused, or curi- ous, or looked on from a distance, and he began to speak in a loud voice: “Ye men, dear brethren; ye women, dear sisters! Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” These words instantly showed that the man was a fool or half-fool, a very strange sort of fool, a sort of fool that had not appeared in that extended valley district for many long years. The good folk were filled with amazement. And when the simple, tattered fellow kept on speaking, and his voice resounded louder and louder in the market-place, many became horrified at the un- heard-of sacrilege. The tramp, as it were, dragged what was holiest in the mud of the streets. So off they ran and notified the town officials. When the sheriff appeared at the market-place with a gendarme, he found it in a state of incredible excite- ment. The hostlers stood before the inns, the cab-driv- ers shouted to one another and pointed with the butt end of their whips to a knot of men over whom Quint, preaching, towered. With each second the throng about Quint increased. Boys signalled to one another with shrill whistles, and at times wild bellowing and laughter rose above the voice of the strange preacher. But he kept on speaking, eagerly, insistently. He had just mentioned the prophet Isaiah and had thundered against the rich and the rulers who “ turn aside the needy from judgment, and take away the right from the poor,” he had prophesied that God would break the sceptre of the rulers, and then in mov- ing words he was winding up by again exhorting the whole world to repent, when he was firmly seized by his collar and held in the inescapable grasp of the six-footer Krautvetter, the gendarme, who, amid the gibes and THE FOOL IN CHRIST 3 jeers of the bystanders, hauled him down from his ex- alted post. Emanuel was now led by Krautvetter diagonally across the market-place, followed by the sneers of the crowd. The sheriff was a nobleman by birth and an unsuc- cessful lawyer. A Protestant minister of the neigh- bourhood was dining with him, and when he told him at table of the scandalous occurrence, the minister ex- pressed the wish to see the crazy fellow. The divine was the very type of his kind, a man of herculean build and Luther face, the Lutherlike character of which was detracted from only by his pitch-black, oily hair and cunning black eyes. He had no liking for extra-Evan- gelical enthusiasts. “ What are sects good for?” he would say. ‘* They produce division, disloyalty, dis- content.” About an hour after Emanuel was placed in the lock- up, he was fetched out and led into the presence of the pastor. Nobody was in the room beside the gendarme, the pastor, and the sheriff. Emanuel stood there, his arms hanging at his sides, an immobile expression on his colourless face, which was neither challenging nor intim- idated. ‘The fine line of his mouth could be seen through the thin, reddish, crisply curling beard on his upper lip and chin. His mouth drooped at the corners, and for a man of his youth, the furrows running from his nostrils to each side of his mouth were strongly ac- centuated. His eyelids were inflamed. His somewhat prominent eyes, though wide open, seemed not to ob- serve the things about him. But his inner emotions played on the freckled skin of his face from his fair forehead to his chin, like invisible winds on a calm lake reflecting the yellow heavens at eventide. 4: THE FOOL IN CHRIST “What is your name? ” asked the pastor. Quint looked at the pastor and told his name in a high-pitched, resonant voice. “What is your trade, my son?” Quint remained silent an instant. .Then he began, quietly enunciating sentence after sentence, divided by short pauses for reflection. “Tam atool. It is my trade to lead men to repent — TI am a worker in the vineyard of the Lord! I ama minister of the word! I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness!