"Of the heights of
humanity you know nothing," Hassenrenter hotly declares. "You asserted
the other day that in certain circumstances a barber or a scrubwoman
could as fitly be the subject of tragedy as Lady Macbeth or King Lear."
And Spitta reaffirms his heresy in the sentence: "Before art as before
the law all men are equal." From this doctrine Hauptmann has never
departed, although his interpretation of it has not been fanatical.
Throughout his work, however, there is a careful disregard of several
classes of his countrymen: the nobility, the bureaucracy (with the
notable exception of Wehrhahn in _The Beaver Coat_), the capitalists. He
has devoted himself in his prose plays to the life of the common people,
of the middle classes, and of creative thinkers.
The delineation of all these characters has two constant qualities:
objectivity and justice. The author has not merged the sharp outlines of
humanity into the background of his own idiosyncrasy. Ibsen's characters
speak and act as though they had suddenly stepped from another world and
were still haunted by a breath of their strange doom; the people of Shaw
are often eloquent exponents of a theory of character and society which
would never have entered their minds.
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