Meister von Palmyra_, Wildenbruch's _Konig Heinrich_, Sudermann's
_Heimat_, Hauptmann's _Die Weber_ and _Der arme Heinrich_,
Hofmannsthal's _Elektra_, and, in addition to all these, the great
musical dramas of Richard Wagner--this is a century's record of
dramatic achievement of which any nation might be proud. I doubt
whether either the French or the Russian or the Scandinavian stage of
the nineteenth century, as a whole, comes up to this standard.
Certainly, the English stage has nothing which could in any way be
compared with it.

That German lyric verse of the last hundred years should have been
distinguished by beauty of structure, depth of feeling, and wealth of
melody, is not to be wondered at if we remember that this was the
century of the revival of folk-song, and that it produced such
song-composers as Schubert and Schumann and Robert Franz and Hugo Wolf
and Richard Strauss. But it seems strange that, apart from Heine, even
the greatest of German lyric poets, such as Platen, Lenau, Mörike,
Annette von Droste, Geibel, Liliencron, Dehmel, Münchhausen, Rilke,
should be so little known beyond the borders of the Fatherland.

The German novel of the past century was, for a long time,
unquestionably inferior to both the English and the French novel of
the same epoch. But in the midst of much that is tiresome and involved
and artificial, there stand out, even in the middle of the century,
such masterpieces of characterization as Otto Ludwig's _Zwischen
Himmel und Erde_ or Wilhelm Raabe's _Der Hungerpastor_, such
delightful revelations of genuine humor as Fritz Reuter's _Ut mine
Stromtid_, such penetrating studies of social conditions as Gustav
Freytag's _Soll und Haben_. And during the last third of the century
there has clearly developed a new, forcible, original style of German