Although he was of the same generation as the naturalistic dramatists who everywhere came to the fore in the 1890’s--Hauptmann, Chekov, Brieux, etc.--Frank Wedekind was not of them, but far ahead of them. They are now all but out-moded; his influence has barely begun. He did not fit his time: the first twenty years of his active life, in fact, were spent in continuous friction with the contemporary world. He experienced the rancor and contempt, the smart of injustice and the hopeless hatred, of most outcasts from society. Hostility toward bourgeois civilization is the keynote of many of his works. He is--against, I think, his natural tendency--a pessimist--all the blacker for the flame of strange, Utopian ideals still flaring up in his most savage scenes. The wrestle of contradictory wills within him is what gives his writing its abnormal tensity, what drives him often to overstrain each dramatic idea till its analogy to life is so distorted most people find it morbid. He yearns to annihilate the crude, the coarse, the ugly and the weak. He has declared, “The reunion of holiness and beauty as the divine object of pious devotion is the purpose to which I offer my life: toward which, indeed, I have striven since earliest childhood.” Physical beauty, he means: a sort of Pagan worship of the body--its lowest impulses and its highest development.... But in every direction he found that reunion obstructed by his all-too-well regulated German civilization. Like his own Marquis of Keith he feverishly pursued the joy of life and could never enjoy his life: when about to strike a splendid blow for his Promised Land he would see a spike-helmeted angel with a police-club sentinel at Eden’s gate. Only in the present century--only, indeed, after the Great War had determined, for the Continent, what the outstanding characteristics of the twentieth century were to be--did Wedekind, the Expressionist, who despised literature and thrust raw life upon the stage, arrive at his present commanding position and win the admiration and discipleship of many of his countrymen. Though he died in March, 1918, he had incorporated in many a play before then both the sensational content and the free, direct, spasmodic form which German literature, especially German drama, was to show in the post-War turmoil and distress. Georg Kaiser and the other Expressionists so prized to-day can make no secret of their debt to him, and the wild rush they represent and play to--to contemplate man’s lowest impulses, the roots of will and feeling, the instincts, not the ideals that actuate confused and drifting peoples, and having studied them in crude, disordered life to set them down in baldest, swiftest speech, in rank but penetrating truth--this rush that is observed in all the Continental countries but most among the Germans did there alone possess a guide and prophet in the dead author, analyzer, wry and bitter thinker, Wedekind.