THE WISH

A NOVEL

BY

HERMANN SUDERMANN

TRANSLATED BY

LILY HENKEL

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY

ELIZABETH LEE

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1895

Authorized Edition.

INTRODUCTION.

Since the beginning of time men have been accustomed to regard the end of a century as a period of decadence. The waning nineteenth century is no more fortunate than its predecessors. We are continually being invited to speculate on the signs around us of decay in politics, in religion, in art, in the whole social fabric. It is not for us to inquire here concerning the truth or the ethics of that belief. But, as far as literature is concerned, it is very certain that the last years of the present century will be remembered for the extraordinary talent shown by a few young novelists and dramatists in most of the countries of Europe. In England, we can point to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. J. M. Barrie; in France, to M. Paul Margueritte and M. Marcel Prévost; in Belgium, to M. Maurice Maeterlinck; in Germany, to Gerhard Hauptmann, Ludwig Fulda, and Hermann Sudermann.

The events of Sudermann's life are few; and he has the good sense to prefer to be known through his works rather than through the medium of the professional interviewer. The facts here set down, however, we owe to the courtesy of Sudermann himself a circumstance that lends them an additional interest.

Hermann Sudermann was born September 30, 1857, in Matzicken, a poor village in Heydekrug, a district of East Prussia, situated on the Russian frontier. It is not unlikely that the following passage taken from one of his novels bears some resemblance to the place:--

"The estate that my father farmed was situated on a high hill close to the Prussian frontier; an uncultivated, wild park sloping gently towards the open fields formed one side of the hill, while the other sank steeply down to a little river. On the farther side of the stream you could see a dirty little Polish frontier village.

"Standing at the edge of the precipice you looked down on the ruinous shingle roofs; the smoke came up through the rifts in them. You looked right into the midst of the miserable life of the dirty streets where half naked children wallowed in the filthy where the women squatted idly on the threshold, and where the men in torn smocks, with spade on shoulder, betook themselves to the alehouses.

"There was nothing attractive about the town, and the rabble of frontier Cossacks, who galloped here and there on their catlike, drowsy nags, did not increase the charm."

Sudermann began his education at the school of Elbing. But his parents were in poor circumstances, and at the age of fourteen he found it necessary to think about earning a living, and was apprenticed to a chemist. He continued his studies in his leisure time with such good results that he returned to school, this time at Tilsit. In 1875 he went to the university of Königsberg, and in 1877 to that of Berlin. His first intention was to become a teacher, and while still pursuing his studies undertook for a few months the duties of tutor in the house of the poet Hans Hopfen. But in 1881, after six years spent in studying history, philosophy, literature, and modern languages (Sudermann understands English perfectly), he turned to journalism, and edited the Deutsches Reichsblatt, a political weekly. He soon threw aside newspaper work for true literature, for what the Germans call belletristik, and he has become famous through his novels, short stories, and plays. He is good-looking, with a dark melancholy face that lights up with a most remarkable and expressive smile when he speaks; nothing could be more unaffected than his manner, nor more charming than his whole personality. As yet there is no Sudermann Society for the discussion of the author's works, but in Berlin, where he has many admiring friends, Sudermann occasionally reads to them his productions while they are yet unpublished. The little story called Iolanthe's Hochzeit was first heard in that way.

Although Sudermann's work is in all its aspects essentially modern, indeed all the conditions and problems of modern life have the highest interest for him, he belongs to no class, ranges himself with neither realists nor idealists, and bows to the yoke of no literary fashion. In common with all great artists, Sudermann paints his own age, but while portraying men and women as he knows them, in the nineteenth century, he gives them, at least in his novels and tales, the human nature that is the same through all time. He has lived in Berlin, and his dramas give us life in that city both among the proletariat and the rich middle class. He has lived in East Prussia, and there is laid the scene of his longer novels. He is familiar with other parts of Germany, with Italy, and with Paris, and everywhere he has used his gift of keen observation to good purpose. A certain melancholy, a feeling of the "inevitableness" of things, if we may be allowed the expression, runs through all his writings, and may perhaps be traced to the effect on his sensitive and high-strung nature of the East Prussian landscape, amid which he spent his boyhood. The meadow-flats and corn-lands, the meagre pine-woods, and dark, lonely pools of his native district, form the background of most of his tales. Numerous passages might be quoted which would serve to show the melancholy and loneliness of the landscape. As an example we may take:--

"Thick and heavy as if you could grasp them with your hands, the clouds spread over the flat land. Here and there the trunk of a willow stretched forth its rugged knots to the air, heavily laden with moisture. The tree was soaked with damp, and glistened with the drops that had hung in rows on the bare boughs. The wheels sank deep into the boggy road that ran between withered reeds and sedge.

* * * * *

"The moon stood high in the heavens and shed her calm, bluish light far over the sleeping heath. The clumps of alders on the moor bore wreaths of lights and from the slender silvery trunks of the birches which bordered the broad straight road in endless rows, came a sparkle and brightness that made the road seem as if lost far below in the silvery distance.

"Silence all around. The birds had long ceased singing. A stillness of the late summer time, the complacent stillness of departing life lay over the broad plain. You scarcely heard the sound of a cricket in the ditches, or a field-mouse disturbed in its slumbers, gliding through the tall grass with its low chipping whistle."

Such pictures constantly meet us in the pages of Sudermann's books; taken in connection with their setting, they are often of great force and beauty. Nothing, however, is obtruded; there is no searching after a dramatic background, or undue word-painting; everything is in keeping with and subordinate to the main interest of the tale.

With such surroundings, Sudermann cleverly assimilates his characters. They are mostly the victims of circumstances which they are more or less unable to overcome. In some cases the fault, as with Leo Sellenthin in Es war, Sudermann's latest novel, lies in the weakness or sinfulness of the man; in others, in surroundings and events for which the man is not himself directly responsible. Sometimes the noble