Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have you read _Der Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_? He wrote them—this enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf. Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean, virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing. If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or secretly or not at all. It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a young woman’s mind. He called it _Spring’s Awakening_. It was chiefly instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush? Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally, and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.