him to speak the kind of liberal precinct-opinion without which we can no longer conceive of a dead satirist. The phraseurs and riseurs are then happy to admit that he was a mockingbird and a cutup. And nevertheless, he was only cutting them down and blowing off their Calabrian hats.18 And nevertheless, to those who condescend to art and grant it free play between the horizons—that is, from the individual nullity to the social quantity—let it be said with considerable certainty: If art is not what they conceive and condone but instead is the stretch from something seen to something thought—the shortest link from the gutter to the Milky Way—then there has never been a runner under the German sky like Nestroy. Never, it goes without saying, among those who brought the news, with laughing faces, that life is arranged in an ugly way.19 We won’t deny credence to his message because it was a lampoon. Not even because, in his rush, he also sang something for the listener; because, in his contempt for the needs of the audience, he satisfied them, so that his thoughts could soar unhindered. Or because he swaddled his dynamite in cotton and blew up his world only after reinforcing its conviction that it was the best of all possible worlds, and because he laid on the soft soap of congeniality before he started slitting throats, and otherwise didn’t wish to inconvenience anyone. Nor, not being interested in honoring truth before spirit,20 will we think less of him because he often, with the carelessness of an original who has more important things on his mind, took his cue from stagehands. The reproof that was leveled against Nestroy is sillier than any plotline he lifted from a French flunky, sillier than the printed look of any of those quodlibets that he used to toss to the people, who, then as now, won’t give humor a free pass unless they’re also given their hardy-har-har, and who, in those days, weren’t convinced they’d got their money’s worth unless they went home with a cheer for the assembled wedding guests.21 He chose the routine, which had been born as a routine, in order to conceal his substance, which could never be a routine. That even the low theatrical effects here somehow contributed to the deeper meaning, by separating the audience from it—and that, again, there’s deeper meaning even in the fanfare with which the orchestra sends off philosophy—escapes the literary historians, who may well be capable of helping Nestroy to a political conviction, but not to the text that encompasses the immortal part of him.22 He himself hadn’t bargained for this. He wrote on the fly, but he didn’t know the flight would extend beyond the repertoire. Although every Nestroyan line attests that he was capable of it, he didn’t have to withdraw into artistic self-discipline in the face of those who considered him nothing more than a humorist, and the milder jarring of his times denied his response the consciousness of its finality—that blessed incentive to seal revenge on the material in his enjoyment of form.23 If he’d been born later, if he’d been born into these times of journalistic language fraud, he would have conscientiously repaid everything he owed to language. Times that retard the intellectual tempo of the masses incite their satirical counterpart. These times would have left him no time for as casual a prosecution of a bloody feud as the stage permits and insists on, and no orchestra would have been harmonious enough to resolve the dissonance between his nature and the world that grew up after it. His essence was the joke that runs counter to the stage effect, the flat onceness that has to be satisfied with finding a mate for the joke’s material and which, in its rhythmic salvo, hits the target before the thought.24 On the stage, where politeness toward the audience parades around in the negligee of language, Nestroy’s wit could only be coined in the currency of rhetoric, which, far removed from the actor’s tools of characterization, was something again only he could pull off.25 Fragmented times would have driven his essence to concentrate itself in aphorism and glosses, and the world’s more varied screechings would have introduced new cadences to his dialectic in its penetration to the core of the apparatus.26 In his satire, one particular rhythm above all suffices as a winding post for the threads of an observation that is truly of the spirit. But sometimes a Nestroyan climax will look as if the terminologies of class feeling, perorating in succession, had arranged themselves as the steps of a Jacob’s ladder. These lively exponents of their professional point of view are always standing with one foot in their trade and the other in philosophy, and if their face is always changing, it’s really just a mask, because they have Nestroy’s one and only tongue, which has unleashed this sage torrent of words. Whatever else they may be, they are, above all, thinkers and speakers and are always in danger, on the public stage, of shortchanging their thought to save their breath. This utterly language-infatuated humor, in which word and sense capture each other, embrace, and hold each other entwined to the point of inseparability, indeed to the point of indistinguishability, stands above anything that a stage scene can communicate and therefore falls into the prompter’s box, in a way comparable only to Shakespeare, from whom you likewise have to remove Shakespeare before you can produce a theatrical effect—unless the mission of a stage character who begins to drone and rave without regard to anything going on behind him would be assured of applause by the oddness of such behavior. Odder yet, that the verbal and oral wit that he carries into his dialogue doesn’t impede his powers of characterization, of which there’s enough left over to outfit an entire dramatis personae and, even as it’s causing us to think, to fill the theater with concrete mood, gesture, suspense, and action. He borrows foreign subject matter. Where, though, is the German comedy writer who could borrow from him the power to create a character with three words and a milieu with three sentences? He’s all the more creative when he lifts foreign material into his own work. He goes about it differently than the better-known contemporary recaster Hofmannsthal, who strips the hides off honorable cadavers to inter questionable remains in them, and who would no doubt defend his serious professional work against comparison with an author of farces.27 Like all superior readers, Herr von Hofmannsthal reduces the work to its material. Nestroy takes his material from where it was barely more than material, invents what he has found, and his achievement would be considerable even if it consisted only in the reconstruction of plots and in the whirl of reinvented situations—that is, only in the welcome opportunity to entertain the world and not in the voluntary compulsion to observe the world as well. But the higher Nestroy, the one who owes nothing to any foreign idea, is somebody who has only head and no figure, for whom a role is only a pretext for his text,28 and in whom every word attains a fullness that surpasses character, even the one who stands there in the breadth of Scholzian29 humor as the model of a basic type in the satellite theaters of Vienna.30 It wasn’t Nestroy the actor but the costumed advocate of his satirical prerogative, the executor of his attacks, the spokesman for his own eloquence, who might have exerted that mysterious effect which, while its artistic origins have certainly never been understood, has come down to us as the center of a heroic age of theater. The theatrical form of Nestroy’s mind was bound to die out with his body, and the routine of its nimbleness, which we still here and there see popping up with virtuoso poise, is a costume borrowed illegitimately. In his farces, the lead role remains unfilled unless the expert in his greasepaint also happens to come by his satirical spirit. Only the fruitful comedy of his fuller secondary roles has found original successors, such as the actor Oskar Sachs,31 whose style seems, in its vital composure, to descend from the classical Carltheater.32 But as the origin and perfection of a popular type, an actorly creator such as Girardi, who stands on the margins of the empty scene offered by the stagecraft of the past decade, could surpass the theatrical value of Nestroy’s art, which had only to clothe its own fullness of thought.33 This is why even a layman of the stage such as Herr Reinhardt could propose a Nestroy cycle to a Girardi.34 In Girardi, the character thrives on the poverty of its textual support; with Nestroy it shrivels up on the wealth of the words. There’s
