Less than a twelvemonth after his decease, a desperate, revolutionary era found suddenly in this perverse and pessimistic man, in his harsh world of whores and swindlers, ruthless materialists and broken poets, its own true shape and pressure. At the same time the former standards of good taste, and theatre-censorships, were swept away; the ban which had lain heavily on Wedekind throughout his stormy life, the legal ban and the far more significant disfavor of the “good citizens,” arbiters of general opinion, whom he had outraged so in their smug goodness, their virtuous ideals, their bourgeois self-esteem,--these now were lifted from his works: _Pandora’s Box_ became--imagine it--a popular attraction; from him who had so foreseen the breakdown of conventional formulæ and unreal modes of thought all men now feverishly sought some intimation of what society, dazzled with commotion, must yet look forward to. For us in America, confirmed, not shattered, in our previous illusions and conceit by the war’s outcome, there is less reason to embrace this scornful soothsayer, this emissary (one is tempted to believe) from Mephistopheles himself,--now cold and condescending, and again intent with hectic hate. For all the foolish outcry over the freer manners, perhaps the looser morals, of our youth, we are still certain in America of our subjective health, of some objective verities at least, of “progress,” of “ideals,” of many metaphysical abstractions which Wedekind distrusts, shows up, derides. Ambassador Gerard, innately, sensibly, was most American. In his _Four Years in Germany_ he mentions shudderingly our author’s name, points to the fact that Berlin still was going, over and over, to performances of _Earth-Spirit_ as but one more indictment of a degenerate, odious nation, and plainly shows us what must be the straight American’s reaction to this volume--if such “straight,” normal readers should ever take it up. But none the less it is important for America to question and to try, to root, if need be, hog-like, to the bottom of our civilization’s pile, and recognize the gross and primitive, the basely human, that underlies each separate soul of us and all our deeds. Naturalism of one type or another--nineteenth-century literalness or twentieth-century explosiveness--is for us the necessary form our Art must take; for only through the pitiless representing of home truth can the easy sentimentalism, so hostile to real literature, be combated, and America given self-knowledge and real grounds for spiritual leaps in after-years. O’Neil in drama, Masters in poetry, Anderson, Lewis, Frank and many more in fiction, these undeflected observers of our seamier sides, prepare the way for the full appreciation due to Wedekind. They are more literary, more artfully self-conscious than he in his best work. Technique concerns them more. But it is not merely for the light his drama throws on dominant European interests of the