Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/104

 the most difficult period for the individual as well as for a people.

THE WEAVERS

WHEN " The Weavers " first saw the light, pandemonium broke out in the " land of thinkers and poets." "What!" cried Philistia, "workingmen, dirty, emaciated and starved, to be placed on the stage! Poverty, in all its ugliness, to be presented as an after-dinner amusement? That is too much! " Indeed it is too much for the self-satisfied bourgeoisie to be brought face to face with the horrors of the weaver's existence. It is too much, because of the truth and reality that thunders in the placid ears of society a terrific J'accuse!

Gerhart Hauptmann is a child of the people; his grandfather was a weaver, and the only way his father could escape the fate of his parents was by leaving his trade and opening an inn. Little Gerhart&iacute;s vivid and impressionable mind must have received many pictures from the stories told about the life of the weavers. Who knows but that the social panorama which Hauptmann subsequently gave to the world, had not slumbered in the soul of the child, gaining form and substance as he grew to manhood. At any rate &igrave;The