His foreign experiences seem to have taken place between the writing of this play and that of _Earth-Spirit_. The author is quite out of sight in _Earth-Spirit_; he is the animal-tamer of the Prologue, the showman putting his performers through their acts. There is a grim objectiveness about this study of clashing wills and fatal weaknesses. No moral is in sight, and if the technique is consciously more conventional and studied (note Alva’s soliloquy in Act III), the matter is far removed from the Ibsen-Hauptmann fashion of its day. The dialogue is so idiomatic, so carefully fitted to each speaker’s character, that this play is by far the hardest of the four to put in English. Wedekind has dramatized the attractions and repulsions of sex among mature people very variously endowed with strength and courage. He has created Lulu, the embodiment of primitive, natural, instinctive femininity, and watched her drive men mad. He offers no judgments, he indulges in no retrospects or explanations: this is the fundamental stuff of life as he has lived it and observed it. It takes a naturally theatric shape: it is violently dramatic just because it is real and living. To these powerful, objective ’90’s of Wedekind belong also the one-act play _Der Kammersänger_ or _The Tenor_, acted in New York in 1916 and published in _Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_; and _The Marquis of Keith_, in which the struggle for success and money is as turbulently dramatized as the sex-conflict was in _Earth-Spirit_. But there is a moralizing character in _The Marquis_, a foil for the conscienceless hero and also a mouthpiece for Wedekind. As he found himself and his message disregarded, bitterness overcame him, and more and more he scolds or preaches directly at his public. He worked over _Pandora’s Box_, off and on, throughout this decade, and the impulse to expound himself ever and again peeps through its three distorted pictures of low life. Here and there it is deliberately disgusting. When it was published, in 1901 or ’02, most of Act II was in bad French, much of Act III in worse English: author or publisher or both were self-conscious about it: and promptly it was banned. There ensued appeals through various courts, and finally the ban was lifted, an all-German text prepared, and occasional productions ventured. My translation, published in New York in 1914, has never roused objection; why should it?--the bare speeches without the accompanying action which I have heard vividly described by friends lately in Germany, can scarcely be shocking to readers in 1923. Later, Wedekind published the two _Lulu_ plays together under her name, omitting _Earth-Spirit_, Act III (which seems to me indispensable, none the less), and _Pandora’s Box_, Act I--a commendable compression, because the whole cholera episode is morbid and nearly incredible, and a swift flight to France after Schön’s murder is quite thinkable without the long,