Extravagances and overemphasis, unmotivated, violent decisions and spasmodic super-vitality in his characters, all these his vividest traits, are explicable on this score of his own clashing disharmony within. But he himself explains them as an artistic revolt, merely, against the repressed and colorless dramaturgy which conquered Germany in the wake of Ibsen. These bookish plays that stood in the way of his own starkly abundant theatric art both angered him to protest and augmented his own trend toward free unnaturalness. He has in his time, he says (in _Schauspielkunst_, a collection of critical notes published in 1910), played many parts by Sudermann, Hauptmann, Max Halbe, etc., and he is sure that actors trained in their literary technique are unequal to his fierce, full-blooded characters. He demands acting that shall be like hurdle-racing--bold, bounding creativeness--but the lesser actors blue-pencil their hurdles out of the way, while the greater ones make long “dramatic pauses” before them and deprive them so of conviction. Certainly, Wedekind’s jerky stage-style requires a rushing performance to give even the semblance of smooth truth to the preposterous, but, when rightly played, thrilling theatric stories he often tells. Short-of-breath, dry and uninspired, with voice untrained for emotional seizures and outbursts, the ordinary cup-and-saucer actor must of course mar Wedekind’s plays. In the field of ethics, however, lay his sharpest cleavage from his own generation, and his most dangerous pitfall. The mighty influence of Ibsen had perverted, when Wedekind began to write, not merely stagecraft, but all German drama, and turned it to the contemplation not of life and action, but of principles: guilt, duty, and atonement. Underrunning all the enthusiasm for exact representation and thorough character-delineation that reigned in 1890 was an anæmic current of literary preconceptions, second-hand ideals, and prime attention to externals, either mere incidental questions of technique or moral, philosophic conclusions (most often suicidal) to problems of responsibility and conduct prearranged for meek and docile characters. In the Prologue to _Earth-Spirit_, Wedekind specifically mocks the pale and will-less heroes of Hauptmann’s _Lonely Lives_ and _Before Sunrise_, and by implication all the conscientious weakness of the then new Naturalism. He for his part had a sharp hunger for life, irrespective of its moral aims and effects,--life boisterous, physical and energizing. It is reflected in Melchior in _Spring’s Awakening_, with keenest sympathy. He had also a theory, expressed by Alva, his self-portrait in _Pandora’s Box_, that the place to find compelling drama was in the changeful lives of people who never read a book, who lived by instinct and expressed themselves, words and deeds, in total ignorance of cultured ethics. The Paris and the London scenes of _Pandora’s Box_ may indicate that in those cities the young dramatist