gesture—a blow of the theatre, a breaking through of the will primitive spirit of comedy, and at the same time a new step in modernity, an irresistibly charming mixture of intellectualism and exaggeration, sensuality and wit. In short, the most interesting theatre which had ever existed; a theatre which one might say was executed on the basis of sheer virtuosity; and a theatre which benefited by appealing to the sense of criticism, since one could not help considering as an asset the intellectual pleasure derived from the exercise of the critical faculties. It has been fifteen or sixteen years since Reinhardt was a guest director for two or three summer seasons at the Munich Ausstellungspark. Corruption and decay, the degeneration into the sensational, developed rapidly under the scourge of Wilhelm’s turbulent metropolis with its vulgar hunger for excitement. When, some years ago, Reinhardt handed over to his managers and dramaturgists the theatres which he had united under his authority, and withdrew into a private life interspersed with guest plays given abroad, he certainly did not do this through personal weariness, but because he had felt that his contribution to German culture had already been fulfilled.
What one sees to-day in the Berlin Deutsches Theater and the Grosses Schauspielhaus shows occasional remains of the old charm, but it lacks true intellectual scope. For in addition there is the fact that the theatre, in accordance with its adaptive, sympathetic nature, indicates most clearly the lowering of level which our public taste has undergone through war, revolution, and the emerging of new social classes. In the Grosses Schauspielhaus, where the audience sits in a space resembling an enormous cave of stalactites, and where there are accommodations for five thousand people, I recently saw a performance of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew which was worth thinking about in this connexion. I confess that I got but slight enjoyment. The talent and the personal appeal of some of the actors was estimable, but the spirit of the organization was thoroughly brutal. Their principal joke consisted in Petrucchio's continually taking his wild little wife over his knee in front of the footlights, pulling up her skirts, and spanking her black and blue. This amused a public which is filling the seats now that our educated middle class is hungering or has become proletarian. Indeed, after fifty years in Germany, one can no longer feel quite at home there. It has become a country to excite the curiosity, but very foreign.
