IN SEARCH OF THE KEY

IT is very good to know that contemporary to oneself, in the midst of all that may seem mediocre and so much but mere dross, there is at least one great spirit, living and suffering, pondering and creating. In Jacob Wassermann there can be seen a great master in the very process of development. Each new book discovers him with a firmer grasp of the technique of his craft, with clearer vision of moral truth. Paradoxically, although it is not as great a book, "Wedlock" is a distinct improvement upon the "World's Illusion."

As ever Wassermann is concerned with the problems of good an evil. With a slight tendency to run off into mystic symbolism, his books are all highly and openly philosophic; only his Viennese delicacy and finesse have saved him from the bogs and fogs which beset most German writers. He pictures a group of people, the life of whom is calm and ordered; but somewhere in this group there is the ferment of evil. In the path of each little insignificant wrong, punishment subtly folows sin. Nemesis pursues Man--Oedipus, Christian Wahnschaffe--, Man, who must act and yet knows not how, lost in a world in which ignorance is no excuse for criminality. Destruction is swift cutting down even the most innocent; the entire group is brought to the abyss of ruin, into which Wassermann has formerly not disdained to hurl them.

This is the story of Friedrich Laudin, a divorce lawyer of the highest honour and repute, into whose soul in the course of twenty years has been poured the scum of life, lies and sensuality and greed and vanity and frivolity and, worst of all, the terrible self-righteousness of thousands of ruined marriages and lost lives. "He could not indicate the precise point in time at which there was born in his soul the yearning to be another than himself. The tangible experience was this: utter satiety of his own character."

And in the midst of this unspeakable nausea for himself, a violent tragedy causes to be brought forth from his rage and his despair the question. "why?"--"This 'why' remained standing before him like a pillar, cleaving the distant fog, and toward that pillar he would have to wander involuntarily and almost unconsciously." Laudin comes into contact with Louise Dercum, a famous actres, in whose personality seems to be mirrored all life; through her he attempts to grasp an answer to this "Why," but in the end finds only unconsciousness and nothingness. He goes home. On the other side of a door is his wife Pia, who had become absorbed in her duties, in things and whom he had somewhere lost upon the way. "Perhaps he would have felt her waiting. . . --he might have felt it, if . . . Yes, if he had not only by chance stained the white jacket of that book."

The failure of marriage has been brought about by self-intoxication: self-consciousness has paralyzed all activity. The social unit of the future must be the pair, man and woman forming a complementary personality. It is unfortunate that the author, after posing the question so carefully, in a beautifully written book of such symmetrical structure, has offered his solution in too great a hurry with too much enthusiasm, with a too easy utopianism. This fault, which ran all through the "Goose Man," is a mark of immaturity, not of the author, but of his generation.

For it must be kept in mind that Wassermann is a sort of first child of the Twentieth Century, strong and vigourous and mercilessly sure in his judgment of the world into which he was born, that of Huysmans and Wilde and Anatole France, a world in which avarice and hatred have been more obvious than usual, a world tired and emasculated, "decadent." Against this he has struggled, like a "Titan," as the jacket puts it. Probably he felt much freer in writing "Mein Weg als Deutcher und Jude." This propagandizing and sociologizing mars all his work except the "World's Illusion," for in the three years to come the critical stage will no longer be the same critical stage.

Wassermann has a peculiarly contemporary appeal; yet Christian Wahnsschaffe and Eva Sorel, Friedrich and Pia Laudin are universal; Christian Wahnschaffe will always be lost in the wilderness of evil, searching with blind eyes for a remote Justice. Jacob Wassermann will not die with his enemy and victim, "fin de siecle."