class="normal">"'Good gracious,' said Hertha, shocked, 'If anyone behaved like that to me, I should box his ears.' But in great anxiety she continued, 'Do you think it likely that there are women who have a different opinion?'

"'Oh, yes!' said Meta.

"'Who--in the end--return the bold mans love?'

"'Even so.'"

Then Meta repeats certain gossip that confirms Hertha's worst fears. The whole chapter should be read in order to appreciate rightly the charm and pathos and naturalness of the delightful piece of character drawing.

Like Ibsen and Zola, Sudermann does not hesitate to set the truth before us even when it is terrible or brutal or revolting. But he differs from them in having a less gloomy outlook, in firmly believing that, at the same time as human nature is coarse and brutal, stupid and violent, it is loving, capable of sacrifice and of deep feeling. He sees the strange not to say the inexplicable mixture of good and evil in all things human, and knows man to be neither all gold nor all alloy. This we take it is the true realism.

To make Sudermann's point of view clear to English readers there is perhaps no better nor more direct way than to give a brief account of his works. They are three novels, Frau Sorge (Dame Care), published in 1886, Der Katzensteg (the name of a small wooden bridge over a waterfall that plays a prominent part in the story), 1888, Es war (It Was), 1893; three volumes of short tales, Geschwister (Brothers and Sisters), first published in the Berliner Tageblatt in 1884 and 1886 respectively (one of the stories, Der Wunsch, appears in the present volume), Im Zwielicht (In the Twilight), novelettes written in various newspapers, and Iolanthe's Hochzeit (Iolanthe's Wedding), 1892; and three dramas, Die Ehre (Honour), Sodom's Ende (The Destruction of Sodom), and Heimat (The Paternal Hearth).

The most perfectly artistic of his longer novels, and that most deeply impregnated with the peculiar characteristics of East Prussian landscape is Frau Sorge. Paul, the hero, is born just at the moment when his father's difficulties make it necessary for him to sell his house and land: this gloomy circumstance overshadows the whole of Paul's life. While his brothers and sisters in spite of the family poverty are, in their careless, unthinking way, happy and even prosperous, wilfully blind to the fact that they owe all to the industry and continual self-sacrifice of Paul, his life is one long toil and struggle, one long fidelity to duty as he conceives it, one long effacement and suppression of self. For this he receives no thanks, no acknowledgment. His spirit becomes crushed, almost extinguished. After long years of toiling, struggling, and suffering, he is redeemed through the love of a woman, but only when he has sacrificed to "Dame Care" all he held most precious, and when the capacity in him for joy and hope has been well-nigh destroyed. The character portrayed with perfect art is, at the same time, faithful to nature: such men are rare, perhaps, but it is well that the novelist should remind us of their existence, and thus help us to recognise the potency for good that dwells in mankind.

Der Katzensteg is more powerful but less artistic than Frau Sorge. The German critics, however, consider it to be not only the most important of Sudermann's writings, but the finest novel produced in Germany during this century. The character of the heroine, Regine, a veritable child of nature, in whom savagery and lack of intelligence and education exist side by side with the nobility and power of sacrifice, of which nature in the rough is often capable, forms the main interest of the tale, and is a marvellous and original conception. There is one scene that for realism, intensity, and horror has scarcely been surpassed in any novel of modern times.

Before turning to the short tales in which we find some of Sudermann's best and most characteristic work, it would be well to point out one of his chief titles to genius. He has the gift of being able to describe terrible and heart-stirring scenes, joyful or pathetic or humorous scenes, with the utmost simplicity of style. In a few words of the simplest sort he brings before our eyes living pictures. Each sentence palpitates with life. As we read, we seem to live with the men and women of his creation through their agony; we suffer as they do, and rejoice with them when they are glad: at times we are breathless as they are with suspense and excitement. And this is done without any of the analytical introspection with which we have become only too familiar in recent novels. The characters, at least in the novels and tales, are not mere nervous organisms, but livings loving, erring, feeling, human beings. The gift of terse narration joined to great simplicity of language is found in French writers like Flaubert and Maupassant, but it is new to Germany. It is, then, perhaps, Sudermann's highest praise that we can say of him that he possesses the strength without the unpleasantness of the great French writers of our day, and combines their artistic feeling, their power and their fine wit with all that is soundest and best in the Teutonic mind and character.

Many of the short tales are of a less specially German cast, and possess an interest that is universal. Der Wunsch (The Wish), for instance, is a powerful psychological study, set forth with wonderful directness and simplicity. Although the tale deals with the old theme of a woman who falls in love with her sister's husband, it is instinct with passion and original in treatment. Olga loved her sister Martha dearly, and had, indeed, brought about Martha's marriage with Robert Hellinger almost by her own efforts, but in so doing had herself, though unconsciously, fallen in love with Robert. Martha, always frail and delicate, after the birth of her child, falls dangerously ill. Olga goes to her to nurse her, and love for her sick sister and passion for Robert struggle for mastery in her soul. Thus, into a character entirely good, noble, and self-sacrificing, steals the wish, "if only she were to die!" In the event Martha does die. Then Robert's eyes are opened; he knows that he loves--has all along loved Olga, and he asks her to be his wife. At first she refuses, then consents; but the same night, having felt all the while that the wish for Martha's death, though never expressed by sign or word, makes her in a sense her sister's murderer, she puts an end to her life. She herself relates all the circumstances in a document written to explain her act to her old friend the physician. A couple of quotations will give a better idea of Sudermann's style than pages of criticism. In a few marvellous strokes he paints the effect on Robert of his first sight of Olga's corpse:--

"When the elder Hellinger entered the room he saw a picture that froze the blood in his veins.

"His son's body lay stretched on the floor. In falling he must have clung to the posts of the bier on which they had placed the dead woman, thus bringing down the whole erection with him, for on top of him--among the broken boards--lay the corpse in its long white shroud, the stiffened face on his face, the bare arms thrown over his head."

The scenes in Martha's sick room are portrayed with an art that makes them live in our memory. Here is one of them, Martha lies in bed sick unto death. Olga and Robert, wearied out with sleepless nights and with their terrible anxiety, are watching her.

"There was absolute silence in the half-darkened room; only the wind with gentle rustling, swept past the window, and the mice scratched among the rafters of the ceiling.

"Robert buried his face in his hands and listened to Martha's dismal ravings. Gradually he seemed to