Anyone finding aught to admire in him, then or now, at once revealed himself the unspeakable Philistine. 'Sodoms Ende' (1891), they declared, was the plain end of Sudermann. The provinces might prove recalcitrant against the verdict, but in Berlin a Hauptmann-cult was dominant, and spread precisely because it claimed to be exclusive. If Hauptmann, the master, seemed to fall behind himself in any new piece, it was by way of a happy interlude; if Sudermann, it was an ever lower depth of failure. They did not care to consider that, in Sudermann's dramas of social criticism, he was the satirist, desirous of strength in colour and line; that he was wholly the dramatist, and unable to conceive a play that should not be 'effective.' If, under the stress of objection, he laboured to eschew effect, as in 'Schmetterlingsschlacht' and 'Glück im Winkel,' they still were not to be appeased. He was mitigating realism to please the sentimental. He was serving up the 'happy ending,' well aware of what really must follow after the fall of the curtain. Hauptmann, indeed, might leave the question open at the end of Das Friedensfest'; but Hauptmann, they were sure, authorised one to be as rigorously pessimistic as one should be. And that 'Magda' should be dragged over the two hemispheres by the most illustrious ladies of the stage, that it should grip and thrill its audiences, overriding all such hesitation as may come in the afterreflection, according to the wont of dramatic dramasthat was a mere proof of its worthlessness.

Must the drama, in order to be natural, be undramatic? At all events, the general technique and principles of uncompromising' realism may readily be deduced from the practice of Holz and Schlaf, of Hauptmann and the disciples who, in their beginnings, paid homage to him. The drama should not endeavour to prove anything. It is not to proceed from, or embody, any abstract idea, or express the opinions of its author. It is to be objective, much like natural science when it is content to describe phenomena and exhibit the chain of cause and effect. From the life presented on the stage, as from life itself, it is allowable to draw such conclusions as you will; but you must not necessarily suppose that these are the conclusions which the dramatist requires you to draw, or that they are his own. It is upon the individual features

of the personage set before you that stress is laid, and not upon those features which he shares with other members of the class to which he belongs. In the older drama, it had been sought to make action flow, as it were, from character; man was the architect of his own fortunes. But natural science has now called strict attention to the supreme power of environment. This reference to man's surroundings, indeed, is no new thing, even in the drama. But now it is incumbent to exhibit man as the result and product of his ancestry, of his soil and food and education, of the social and economical conditions amid which he is born and developes. And, this being so, drama is no longer to be presented as a victory or defeat of the will, or as the outcome of faults that procure their own expiation. Man is subject to the universal determinism, the interdependent play of natural forces. To observe him truthfully, and to set him upon the stage as he is observed, is to recognise the absurdity of that dramatic action in which a beginning and an end are sharply severed from the unceasing and onward flow of things, and forthwith to dismiss the complication of unlikely events in which the elder dramatists entangled him. Thus it is advisable, or even peremptory, if the truth of life is to be mirrored, that action should be of the simplest, or barely action at all in the sense which has usually been given it. In a couple of hours, the group of individuals selected will sufficiently display themselves in contrast and conflict. And it follows that they shall converse with each other as at home and abroad, not in the concentrated style deemed necessary for the purposes of the stage; while monologue, and the heightened imagery and musical rhythm by which dramatists have sought to reveal the inward working of their heroes, and express for them that which they lacked eloquence to express for themselves, must for obvious reasons be wholly discarded.

In answer to all or much of which, it must suffice to point out that realism defeats itself if pushed to an excess. He is the best realist who best produces upon his audience an illusion of life; and it must be left to him to select the means by which he is to produce this illusion. Rules stiffen into conventions. Philosophical and scientific conceptions of life are exposed to vicissitude. And 'Youngest

Germany' was to discover this with an almost amazing promptness. The dramatists found themselves ready to modify their deepest convictions, and to maintain or discard the particularities of their technique according as best suited their still newer aims. Thus, choice of method is now entirely open; with the exception, perhaps, of the stage'aside,' that which was banned is employed equally with that which was prescribed.

Meanwhile, the victory of the naturalistic drama was apparently complete. The men of the older generation seemed prepared to forget their late opposition, and overlook the contumely with which they had been treated. Success, indeed, lay in the application of the new dramatic canon. The public must be served according to its wish. The accustomed providers of theatrical wares, Lindau and Lubline, for example, could surely suit themselves to the passing fashion, and be 'literary.' Fulda, who, in his 'Sinngedichten,' had shaped epigrams against the 'Moderns,' deserted for a while the eclectic school of Munich. Paul Heyse, indeed, the head of the school, remained embittered in criticism. On the other hand, Wildenbruch honestly laboured in Haubenlerche' and 'Meister Balze' to approach naturalism. But, so doing, he overstepped the sphere of his own strongly-marked personality. The victory seemed complete, and the ideal of the naturalists carried into effect. But, as Ibsen and Renan would say, it is highly dangerous for an ideal to become materialised. It outlives itself; the moment of victory is the prelude of the fall. The enthusiasm which went to produce it turns away, and towards still another ideal to be embodied. In 1893, Hauptmann wrote 'Hannele,' a dream-poem for the stage. A poor Silesian girl-child is driven by cruelty to her death, and comforted in her latest hours by a vision of heaven. It was still the naturalistic drama of misery. Biology, the psychology that is physiological, met with acknowledgment. stages of delirium were carefully marked, and the transitions from the waking to the dreamy state deftly modulated. The naturalistic critics laid stress on this, and maintained that the vision was wholly determined and moulded by the antecedents of the girl's parentage and environment; while their opponents pointed out

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that the whirl of delirium admits no portraiture, and that the figures of the dream were such as no villagechild could fashion for itself. It was the poet using his privilege of shaping forth that which is dimly felt by his characters. And it was the poet passing from naturalism to honeyed verse at last.

However that may be, the aim and direction of the German drama were suddenly changed. Far from urging his victory, it was as if the leader had bidden his troops make instant retreat. To be precise, already in this same year of 1893 Fulda had won success by his 'Talisman,' presenting in smooth verse and oriental garb the legend of the conflict between Being and Appearance, known to childhood in the form given to it by Andersen in 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' And Pohl's Indian drama, Vasantasena,' wrought after the play attributed to King Sûdraka, had not failed of its welcome. But these Märchen, and 'Hannele' itself, were symptoms rather than causes of the change that was to befall the stage, this development, as it were, by contraries. Hauptmann, indeed, followed the bent of his nature, not only in continuing his dramas of painful truth-Führmann Henschel' being in many respects the masterpiece of the naturalistic movement-but also when he sought such poetical consolation and hope as he might allow himself. As for 'Die Versunkene Glocke' or 'Und Pippa tanzt,' perchance some later and fairer race of humanity might live out the joy, while eschewing the woe, of these symbolical and romantic visions.

The naturalistic drama was dominant for at least two years longer. But the call for romance was sounding from all sides; or if not for romance, then for something, or anything, that was not naturalism. Hermann Bahr, ever in the forefront of the literary movement, had drawn attention to the French School of Symbolists, who had occupied the place of a naturalism grown wearied and wearisome. For an interval his tidings fell on dull ears. But the wider horizon was being sought. Dramatists were no longer to be satisfied with the originality which results from voluntary ignorance, or concentration upon a single point. They awoke to the comprehension that Ibsen the naturalist was also a symbolist, a mystic. Despairing of the present, he

counselled the optimism of the forward view. His demand for individuality was, in its essence, a claim for the rights of subjectivity. And, thus, they raised no objection when Schlaf, in 'Der Bann,' turned impressionist, and in 'Gertrud' expressed the romantic longing for escape from sordid circumstances. They

now admired Hauptmann, not for his impartiality and absence of purpose, but because he pleaded and arraigned, posed problems, lyrically sighed and hoped for a world apart from the sphere of our sorrow,' in each and all of his dramas from the first. It was no longer enough to be the clear mirror of whatever lay around them. They were ready to ask what, after all, was this 'reality' by which they had sworn. Even in the name of natural science, could they claim to talk of the world as it really is? Thoughts and feelings alone were real. Things were as they seemed. To each they seemed different; and each differed from himself according to his mood. The beauty or ugliness of things without was fashioned by human vision, was mystery interpreted by the seer. Knowledge of the macrocosm should be sought in the microcosm. Personality was creative, and man the measure of all things.

And so the whilom naturalists sought a return to idealism. They would pay homage again to beauty, and labour to restore the classical. They were eager to recant their detestation of Schiller, and revere for master the Goethe whom, of late, they had barely saluted in passing. Only, as there is no restoration of past conditions, as the present and the future are moulded by the immediate past, it was a neo-idealism, a neoromanticism, that they craved and demanded. And whatever form it might take, it was at least agreed they must renounce that pessimism into which, after banning Schopenhauer, they had fallen once more as naturalists. To that end, it was well to disregard the hypothetical teachings of biology, which cast man from his high estate, and bound him, a pitiful slave, in the iron bonds of universal determinism. They would be in themselves, and present upon the stage, heroic figures, men of might and light and joy. Politics, the social democracy, the hungry masses and their desires for a sordid materialism, were no longer a matter of concern