How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself. An interpenetration of problem and content:
“Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”
Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:
“Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”
He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals. Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke. Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:47
“Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”
Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other. To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s. The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed. When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation. Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words:
“Why are you looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”
And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:
“Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less! He made an even stupider face than you. I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange! (aside) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared. A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul. (Shaking his hand) You shall know everything.”—(In inquisitive suspense) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”
Such values are lost and forgotten. As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.48 Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,49 the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule de tri to the Nordic integral equation.50 No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem. And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time. All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.51 In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade. Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.52 The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.53 Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch. You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German. Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this. But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and Home54 onstage, would be a joke that humorlessness should not permit itself with impunity. There are words on every page of Nestroy that burst open the tomb into which estrangement from art has thrown him, and that go for the throats of the gravediggers. Full of datedness, an ongoing protest against the people who are up to date. A Forty-Eighter’s55 word-barricades against the reign of banality; trains of thought whose action wordplay renders inoffensive to the seriousness of life, the better to outwit it. A lowly genre, as far beneath a historian’s dignity as an earthquake. But what if the joke sensed that it’s intolerable to dignity—that it so fooled dignity in advance that dignity is right to feel insulted. Can you imagine that the professionals of the Ideal would let a phenomenon like Nestroy pass without leaving behind a visible expression of their terror? The self-advertisements of Theodor Vischer, Laube, Kuh, and those other concerned dignitaries56 who came out for Nestroy’s hundredth birthday are as understandable as the judgmental politics of Hebbel, who rejects Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit has grabbed him by his tragic roots, extols Herr Saphir, from whom less painful attacks were to be expected, and also, of course, hates Jean Paul and loves Heine.57 Speidel’s courageous insights interrupt the parade of those who, by inclination or for decency’s sake, had to misread Nestroy. What could be more natural than the resistance of the keepers of the sacred fire to a spirit who kindles it everywhere? A spirit like this couldn’t help having every wind and every worthy of the times against him. He ran into refinement above and banality below. An author who in highly political times busies himself with human lowlinesses, a Carltheater actor whose reflections rule out attending the Concordia Ball.58 He orchestrated the horseplay of the sexes with perceptions and gestures that the warehouse managers of life had to cast, in revenge, as obscenities, and in social matters he never revealed loyalties, only personality. Yes, he took up the profession of politics—the way a constable takes up a pickpocket. And it wasn’t the absurdities within politics that attracted his attention, it was the absurdity of politics. He was a thinker, and so he could think neither liberally nor anti-liberally.59 And the suspicion of anti-liberal convictions may well be more likely to arise where thought transcends the region in which spiritual salvation depends on this kind of evaluation, and where thought turns into joke because it had to get past it. How bewilderingly unprincipled art is: the satirist revealed it in his ability to set off words that exploded the seeming tendency of his plots, leaving the historian uncertain about what to take more seriously, the praised revolution or the ridiculed yokel, the mockery of someone’s fear of the Devil or a fanatical confession of faith. But even the historian can sense that the satirist opposed the affliction of humanity by intellectual sham values, and has no better defense than to explain that Nestroy was afraid of the police. Liberals are forever calling in the police to accuse artists