humor, but also with an equally apparent understanding and pity of the oppressed and unsuccessful. In addition to their theatrical effectiveness they were in complete harmony with the public spirit of an age, in which a Tory Minister had said "We are all Socialists now", which devoured the food put before it by Zola and Tolstoy and whose prevailing art-theory he had substantially developed in practice. But, no less clearly than these things, some of Herr Hauptmann's friends must have realized that he was deficient in a quality, which certainly has not the first importance in the theories of the "Naturalists”, but the lack of which must impose limitations on any artist-the quality, namely, of true creative power. The young playwright's plots were feeble, his personages depended too absolutely on the living model, and the situations in which he placed them owed too much either to his literary precursors or to undigested experience.

No reason, however, existed why Herr Hauptmann should not have continued to practise his uncommon talents to the great advantage of himself and a large, international public: the field susceptible to cultivation by the methods he had adopted is almost coterminous with human activity, and, as his historical play of Florian Geyer (1895) was to prove, there was still scope for a stimulating extension and improvement of those methods within their own limits. But, most unhappily, a twofold disturbance threw him out of the track on which he was progressing.

The victory of Naturalism in North Germany had been too spectacular to be complete, and it had not had time to win over to its allegiance many other writers of talent. A reaction set in Austria, where the new authors like Herr Hermann Bahr were taking their bearings just as the tide of cosmopolitan taste had begun to flow in favor of Verlaine and M. Maeterlinck: it swept over Germany and overwhelmed the unstable, pseudo-literary, theatre-going public whose young favorite Herr Hauptmann had become. At the same time as the surge of public opinion seemed to seethe so threateningly about him, he saw his anchorage give way. After Der Biberpelz―to pass rapidly over a painful subject -his marriage to his first wife, associated with all his early ambitions and triumphs, came to disaster, and a dozen years or so of legal delays and wretched ambiguities ensued before her successor,

the living model for Rautendelein, Pippa and Lucie Heil, could rightfully call herself the second Frau Hauptmann. Small wonder then, the circumstances considered, that the works which Herr Hauptmann produced during what should have been his most fruitful and determinative years, his thirties and early forties, should have written all over them-as they have-and should bequeath to their posterity the character of hesitation, bafflement and futility.

According to the late Paul Schlenther, the dramatist's devoted biographer, the catastrophe in his family is already foreshadowed in the queer dedication to the first Frau Hauptmann of Hanneles Himmelfahrt (Hannele's Ascension into Heaven, 1893) and the suggestion comes as no surprise: so obviously does this strange and moving piece stand with one leg in the old, solid life and one in the inchoate and problematical. It is the dramatic representation of a village poorhouse in the Silesian mountains, to which Hannele Mattern, aged fourteen, is brought to die of ill treatment, and of the visions which she dreams in the delirium that ends with her death. The endeavor is patent, by virtue of the delirium, to keep the whole action within the four corners of Naturalistic theory, but the pathetic splendor of the dying child's dreams and, more especially, the poetic language which she hears (that is, if the theory be accepted, dreams) defeat any such attempt. Hannele's ascent into heaven at the hand of her schoolmaster, who is also Christ, is a piece of sheer Romanticism, and it was as such that the Berlin audiences acclaimed it and academic Austria rewarded it with the Grillparzer Prize of 1896.

The success with which, at a time of upset and doubt, he had hit the veering taste of a large public proved, in the long run, disastrous to him. The suggestibility which had served the Harts' turn became the object of more ambitious whisperings: the words "Dichter" (poet) and “Künstler” (artist), which account for so much of the sterility of modern German art and letters, were increasingly often bestowed on the Grillparzer prizeman: Great Expectations were cherished of him and to Great Things accordingly did this second Pip, who had never wanted a high self-seriousness, apply himself. And the nature of these Great Things-that the public vision, which had shown such discern

ment since 1889 in singling him out for applause, should continue to decide. In the years following 1895, therefore, we find Herr Hauptmann exercising less and less the few but genuine talents which he has at command and correspondingly often wooing, with gestures often grotesque, those which his admirers believe it would be so decorative and gratifying for him to own.

IV

Indeed, it would be hard to find a more reliable index to the fluctuations of literary taste in Germany during the last generation than the chronological list of Herr Hauptmann's works. The cult of M. Maeterlinck evoked the amazing fragment Helios (1896); of Russian literature Gabriel Schillings Flucht (The Flight of Gabriel Schilling, 1912) and the author's first finished novel Der Narr in Christo, Emanuel Quint (The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint, 1910); the cult of brutality and perversion, such as the late Frank Wedekind indulged in, Kaiser Karls Geisel (Charlemagne's Hostage, 1908) and Griselda (1909); of ecstasy for its own sake Der Bogen des Odysseus (Odysseus's Bow, 1914) and Indipohdi (1920); of the kinema (so cynics aver) Atlantis (1912); of Sir Rabindranath Tagore and desert islands Die Insel der Grossen Mutter (The Island of the Great Mother, 1924). When, immediately after the late war, all the world writes poetry, Herr Hauptmann bids a (revocable) farewell to the theatre, publishes his bucolic elegy of Anna (1921), and starts on the much heralded "masterpiece of masterpieces" Till Eulenspiegel; and now that for many people a book represents just a pretext for a series of smudgy woodcuts he has most obligingly turned out his short story of Fasching (Shrovetide, 1925), which fulfils its raison d'être to perfection.

The readiness with which Herr Hauptmann has fitted public taste often approaches the uncanny. A contemporary of Eschylus would have shuddered at the bounty of the gods in dispatching Tolstoy while Der Narr in Christo was appearing and in sinking the Titanic just when the novel of Atlantis was ready-Atlantis that centres in the sinking with almost all hands of a floating palace of its day. The Greek might also have been moved to further reflections on the manner in which the gods destroy men

by witnessing the immoderate furore enjoyed by the "fairy play" of Die Versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell, 1896).

Here we have full work of art foreshadowed in the laudable aspirations of Alfred Loth, when he called upon literature to give him men not as they were but as they should be. It tells of the bell-founder Heinrich, who, forsaking wife and children, took to paramour one of the same elfish spirits that had pitched his masterpiece into a lake, who then with the help of these same spirits started to build, high up in the mountains of Silesia, a lofty fane. He did not however complete it: for his helpers withdrew and he himself underwent another revulsion when his truebegotten sons came to him with a pitcher full of their dead mother's tears and he heard the dead woman herself toll the Sunken Bell, down in the depths of the waters where it lay. Completely forsaken and frustrated, he lies down to die, reconciled at the very end to his elf Rautendelein, who construes into favorable omens his last mutterings as the curtain falls amid the rosy beams of daybreak.

This elegiac play owed a great part of its success to the fact that it fulfilled the promise of Hanneles Himmelfahrt: the ablest of the newer German writers had accepted the best traditions of German drama, which is serious, poetic and romantic, concerned with matters of morality and religion and given to symbolism; he had ranged himself with Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer and Richard Wagner. Even an acute critic like the late Heinrich Bulthaupt lauded Die Versunkene Glocke simply because it squared with the conventional formula and declared that by the mere adoption of verse for his vehicle the author had stamped himself an artist! He did not so much as entertain the argument that here (as elsewhere) Herr Hauptmann's verse is harsh and less fitted for imparting emotion and ideas than his prose.

The discrepancy between aspiration and achievement is more painfully apparent in what the author probably had nearer at heart than his language: to wit, the "philosophy" and "message" of his play. For, after the second act, Heinrich ceases to be a superior artisan cohabiting with a fairy and becomes a kind of Part II Faust striving on a number of planes for the spiritual regeneration of mankind, with a bee in his bonnet from the same

hive as Master-Builder Solness's. Unhappily, however, the public never learns the exact means by which Heinrich is to consummate his self-imposed mission. Disaster whelms the reformer and he sinks in the stage electrician's roseate flood, leaving the final impression, not of a counterpart to Goethe's Faust or Wagner's Ring, but of whimsical fantasy, quite innocent of "inner meaning' something like A Kiss for Cinderella or The Romantic Age.

Yet one factor in Herr Hauptmann's philosophy emerges definitely. That is his acute sense of antinomy between the views of life commonly associated on the one hand with Christianity and on the other with the pagan religions, coupled with his attraction to each. It assumes prime importance in Herr Hauptmann's most ambitious work, Der Narr in Christo, and indeed determines its failure. Der Narr in Christo (1910) is, at long last, nothing else than that "Life of Christ" of which as a youth he had dreamed, but it is a Life of Christ" in modern dress", rather like Herr Gustav Frenssen's Hilligenlei (1905) or Mr. Timmermans's Kindeken Jezus in Vlaanderen. It gives the lifehistory of a mentally defective bastard whom, towards the end of last century, his religious zeal thrusts into circumstances nearly paralleled in the Gospels, until finally he comes to identify himself with his Saviour and also to submit half fatalistically to a trend of events which would culminate in a martyr's death.

Such a story might easily have been invested with immense emotional power or with supreme interest as biographical or social criticism or as a study in religious fanaticism. But for this the author must assume some definite and reasonably consistent attitude towards his material. Unfortunately, Herr Hauptmann either could not light on a fixed viewpoint, or else, from motives more clear than laudable, saw fit to disguise it. In other words, he shilly-shallies, in some places treating Quint with irony, reminiscent of Fielding in everything but its suitability, and in others dropping it in order to champion him and confound his enemies. When his hero becomes uncertain in his poor clouded wits whether he is a Silesian yokel or Christ himself, his creator, though trying most of the time to describe him from without, exhibits the same uncertainty, and he burks the issue by letting a tragic close peter out into sentimental nebulosities.