Let us now jump a few pages. On page 19 we come to the old joke about the talkative barber; on page 22 to the joke about the book agent; on the same page to the joke about the fashionableness of appendicitis; on page 23 to the joke about the clumsy carver who projects the turkey’s gizzard into the visiting pastor’s eye; on page 28 to a restatement of the barber joke; on page 31 to another statement—is it the fifth or sixth?—of the dentist’s office joke; on page 37 to the katzenjammer joke; on page 39 to the old joke about doctors burying their mistakes.... And so on. And so on and so on. And so on and so on and so on. On pages 48 and 49 there is a perfect riot of old jokes, including the nth variation of the whiskers joke and a fearful and wonderful pun about Belgian hares and heirs....
On second thoughts I go no further.... This, remember, is the book that Cobb’s publishers, apparently with his own _Nihil Obstat_, choose as his best. This is the official masterpiece of the “new Mark Twain.” Nevertheless, even so laboriously flabby a farceur has his moments. I turn to Frank J. Wilstach’s Dictionary of Similes and find this credited to him: “No more privacy than a goldfish.” Here, at last, is something genuinely humorous. Here, moreover, is something apparently new.
The fact that Sudermann is the author of the most successful play that has come out of Germany since the collapse of the romantic movement is the most eloquent of all proofs, perhaps, of his lack of force and originality as a dramatist. “Heimat,” Englished, Frenched and Italianized as “Magda,” gave a new and gaudy leading rôle to all the middle-aged chewers of scenery; they fell upon it as upon a new Marguerite Gautier, and with it they coaxed the tears of all nations. That was in the middle nineties. To-day the piece seems almost as old-fashioned as “The Princess Bonnie,” and even in Germany it has gone under the counter. If it is brought out at all, it is to adorn the death agonies of some doddering star of the last generation.
Sudermann was one of the first deer flushed by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, the founders of German naturalism. He had written a couple of successful novels, “Frau Sorge” and “Der Katzensteg,” before the _Uberbrettl’_ got on its legs, and so he was a recruit worth snaring. The initial fruit of his enlistment was “Die Ehre,” a _reductio ad absurdum_ of Prussian notions of honor, as incomprehensible outside of Germany as Franz Adam Beyerlein’s “Zapfenstreich” or Carl Bleibtreu’s “Die Edelsten der Nation.” Then followed “Sodoms Ende,” and after it, “Heimat.” Already the emptiness of naturalism was beginning to oppress Sudermann, as it was also oppressing Hauptmann. The latter, in 1892, rebounded from it to the unblushing romanticism of “Hanneles Himmelfahrt.” As for Sudermann, he chose to temper the rigors of the Schlaf-Holz formula (by Ibsen out of Zola) with sardoodledum. The result was this “Heimat,” in which naturalism was wedded to a mellow sentimentality, caressing to audiences bred upon the drama of perfumed adultery. The whole last scene of the play, indeed, was no more than an echo of Augier’s “Le Mariage d’ Olympe.” It is no wonder that even Sarah Bernhardt pronounced it a great work.