And Wolfe? Wolfe at the time of his death was not yet thirty-three. He was spoken of, by those who knew him well, as a young man of remarkable promise; he cannot be spoken of, by the historian, as a man of great performance. His one command in chief was in the siege of Quebec, and in this he had the singular advantage of being associated with an admiral of a very high degree of merit, a man trained in the difficulties and dangers of Anson's voyage, a man of unfailing courage, patience, and resource. Mr. Doughty, as most other historians, tells of Wolfe being sent with a diminishing force of 8,000 men to besiege a fortress garrisoned by double the number. In reality the besieging force numbered about 24,000, to say nothing of the great guns and the inherent mobility of the ships. Of the glories which a future might have brought to Wolfe it is impossible to judge by what he did. He showed persistence, endurance, and courage; for genius there was little scope. The landing at the Anse du Foulon may have indicated-probably did indicate acuteness of perception and quickness to act on it, though it may have been merely a piece of singularly good luck. For the rest, his death embalmed the memory of his heroism, and has enormously exaggerated his fame; but to speak of him, as Mr. Doughty does frequently, of him, the victor in one petty skirmish, as of one who can only be fittingly compared with Nelson, the man of a hundred fights and of the battles of giants, is carrying hero-worship into the region of the grotesque.

ART. VII.-Vor Sonnenaufgang: Soziales Drama (1889)Das Friedensfest: ein Familienkatastrophe (1890)-Einsame Menschen: Drama (1891)-College Crampton: Komödie (1892)-Die Weber: Schauspiel (1892-3)-Bahnwärter Thiel: Der Apostel: Novelistische Studien (1893) Hanneles Himmelfahrt: eine Traumdichtung (1893)Florian Geyer (1896)—Die versunkene Glocke: Märchendrama (1897)-Schluck und Jau: Spiel zu Scherz und Schimpf (1900)-Michael Kramer: Drama (1900)-Der rote Hahn: Tragikomödie (1901)-Der arme Heinrich eine deutsche Saga (1902). By GERHART HAUPTMANN. Berlin: S. Fischer.

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WHATEVER may be said for contemporary literature much

of it is sad; one cause of this characteristic is the commonplace one of fashion. Ibsen and the French realists between them have set the mode; a sort of new Byronism is the outcome. Nor could anything speak more strongly of the potency of this cause than the likeness which exists between the Young Norse' and the Young German' writers, both of which schools have grown out of Ibsen and an infusion of French literature. But neither Young Norway nor Young Germany is influenced more by Ibsen's power than by the French naturalists; so that as regards the Fatherland the familiar quotation about Græcia capta' has been exemplified once more. The Freie Bühne of Berlin, like our Independent Theatre and our Stage Society, owes its existence to the French Théâtre Libre, and should offer sacrifices to the genius of M. Antoine. And it is impossible to read either the novels or the plays which have sprung from the bosom of young Germany without noting their tribute to Zolaismus. On us the tradition of Émile Zola has descended somewhat mildly, chiefly in the shape of a tedious documentation and exactness to facts in which the dull wits delight.

'Æmilium circa ludum faber imus et ungues

Exprimet, et molles imitabitur ære capillos'

(which accords with one reading of the passage). But the true Zolagame,' as Horace expresses it, is not this. It is a special attitude towards Fate and the gods and human nature, more particularly towards feminine human nature. This attitude the Young Norse and the Young German writers at the outset for the most part adopted likewise.

On

It sat rather awkwardly on the Teutonic character. the crest of this wave of tendency in Germany comes the one man perhaps who will gain for it permanent consideration in literature, Gerhart Hauptmann. There is, of course, his contemporary Sudermann, who has been even fortunate than his brother dramatist in winning the applause of the theatre. 'Heimat' (which we know as Magda') is probably, taking the suffrages of Europe as a whole, the best-known play on the boards. To Hauptmann, Sudermann stands in a relation not dissimilar to that which Björnson has held beside Ibsen. Naturally, in each case the antitype is inferior to the prototype. Sudermann, like Björnson, owns a very keen sensitiveness to currents of thought and feeling, quickness in seizing them, and, so to say, photographing them in art. Björnson has more than once anticipated in some production, good but inferior, one of Ibsen's masterpieces. On Sudermann-conspicuously in 'Magda '-one may see blowing the same Ibsenish breeze which at first fanned Hauptmann's sails. But the younger of the two Germans has much more in him than has his colleague; he carries. a heavier cargo, and the superiority of his talent will in the end surely be recognised.

Gerhart Hauptmann is scarcely past the forties; and was not over thirty-five when he had been acclaimed by the enthusiastic as Germany's greatest poet since Goethe. He has already found his Boswell, the excellent Herr Paul Schlenther, one quite of the school,' a diligent contributor to the 'Neue Rundschau,' who sagely writes: The 'reader who passes from the "socialist" drama "Before "Sunrise" "Vor Sonnenaufgang") to this "Family"Catastrophe " (" Einsame Menschen "-" Lonely Lives") has the sense of passing from field, farm, and garden, to 'the inside of a house.'

Certainly it is as much as is good for any man to have found at thirty-five a complacent Boswell of this type. And if Hauptmann fails to satisfy the hopes he has raised, it will be chiefly because of the rather extravagant applause with which his greatest work 'The Sunken Bell' has been received.

Of Hauptmann's life it is unnecessary to say much. He is a Silesian, the son of an innkeeper, and there are one or two points of curious similarity between his life and Shakespeare's. Both, sprung from the well-to-do middle class and enjoying sufficient means in the days of their schooling, saw their fathers grow poorer to the point of bankruptcy (for

John Shakespeare was in effect a bankrupt) before they grew old enough to earn their own living; and each of the two, despite the warning which such experience might afford, contracted an early marriage. It was only after his marriage that Hauptmann made any stay in the capital, leaving, it would seem, his wife to the care of his parents-Shakespeare did precisely the same; and it was then that the German like the English poet came into contact with the intellectual life, especially with the dramatic surroundings which determined his walk in literature. But Hauptmann's marriage, it would seem, was not an imprudent one in any worldly sense; certainly no period of horse-holding fell to his lot; nor was he ever an actor himself. It appears to have been partly through the kindness of an uncle that he was freed from any thought of earning his bread by trade or handicraft; he always contemplated an artistic career. Only at first it was to sculpture that he turned. The winter of 1883-4 he passed in a studio in Rome. In 1885 he married. Then in 1889 he went to Berlin and made friends with "Young Germany' in the person of Arno Holz and others, and in the same year produced the first work which the public knew, the play Vor Sonnenaufgang' (Before Sunrise ').

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Not the least remarkable feature of this piece is its technical accomplishment. There are one or two slightly awkward moments, visible hitches in the swing of the action. But on the whole the personages move across the scene with a precision and intention which are remarkable; for the characters are numerous, and the action of the piece is tolerably complicated. On the other hand there is not much conviction' in 'Before Sunrise,' and at first blush it is conviction combined with technical inefficiency which one is disposed to look for in a first attempt. But then it may be urged there is not much conviction in Titus Andronicus.' The ground idea of Hauptmann's maiden play is excellent. In Silesia you have, or had, a race of peasant proprietors, no more cultivated nor fit for the possession of wealth than peasant proprietors in most countries, in Zola's La Beauce' for example. But, by the fortunate discovery of coal under their freeholds, many had risen to be capitalists of a kind. Everybody who has travelled in Silesia knows how tall chimneys, shafts, and smoke alternate with the charming valleys and natural beauties of this country. One of those suddenly enriched families is that of the Krauses it consists of the father, two daughters (Martha and Helene), and

their stepmother. Into it has married Hoffmann, Martha's husband, a wide-awake engineer, who knows how to make the best of the property. And to the same place comes, to inquire into the labour question, Alfred Loth, the Socialist, who, as it happens, is an old college friend of Hoffmann.

The feebleness of the piece lies in the fact that the Krause household (all except Helene) have come straight out of La Terre.' It would needlessly offend the sense of the reader were we even to suggest all the intrigues which are revealed in the short space of these five acts. They are enough to furnish matter for Zola's habitual three or four hundred pages. And they are dragged in, as it were, by the heels. They are not necessary to the plot of the play, which depends not on the immorality, but on the alcoholism of the Krauses. At best they serve only to show how miserable and utterly impossible was Helene's life. She had been educated at Herrnhut, and had only of late come home to find herself placed rather in the position of Imogen: her father utterly besotted, her stepmother without conduct, ready to marry Helene to a Cloten of a young peasant, Kahl by name, who is Frau Krause's nephew and lover at once. Of course, Helene falls in love with the high-minded Loth. But it belongs neither to his character nor to her up-bringing that she should have given herself to him so readily and completely as she does. The great scene of the play is that wherein Loth is persuaded by Dr. Schimmelpfennig (he is the doctor of modern fiction, almost the only one, the same who figures continually in Zola's pages, as in Lucas Malet's Sir Richard Calmady,' and in how many other novels formed on the 'problem' pattern) that it is absolute madness to marry into a family so steeped in alcoholism as is this: Hoffmann's wife, Martha, is a confirmed drunkard. Loth therefore goes away, leaving a letter for Helene; and she, all hope departed, stabs herself, in the Greek fashion, off the stage. The final scene, the servant discovering the body and running screaming through the house, even if it does suggest melodrama, is yet natural and fine, and one cannot wonder that the play made a great impression in Berlin. Yet without doubt part of its celebrity was gained by illegitimate means, through its unnecessary and exaggerated 'naturalism.'

The two plays of Hauptmann which followed 'Before 'Sunrise,' and touching which Herr Schlenther makes the interesting remark quoted above, are Das Friedensfest'