artistically working apparatus, such as Ibsen very nearly became; not,
however, without deploring the fact at the close of his life. The
German poet in particular has too strong a lyrical inheritance not to
reëcho the impressions _directly_ received by his heart. The struggle
between the demands of a purely artistic presentation of reality,
i. e., one governed exclusively by esthetic rules, and its sympathetic
rendering, constitutes the poetic tragedy of most of our "naturalistic
writers," and especially of the most important one among them, Gerhart
Hauptmann. But from this general ideal of the poet, who only through
his own experience will give to reality a true existence and the
possibility of permanence, there follows a straining after technical
requirements such as was formerly almost unknown. This results in an
effort in Germany all the more strenuous in proportion to the former
slackness regarding questions of artistic form. The peculiarities of
the different literary _genres_ are heeded with a severity such as has
been practised before only in antiquity or perhaps by the French.
Poets like Detlev von Liliencron, who formerly had appeared as
advocates of poetical frivolity, now chafed over banal aids for
rhyming, as once Alfred de Musset had done. Friedrich Spielhagen, the
brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Jacob Wassermann are seen to
busy themselves with the technical questions pertaining to the
prose-epic, no longer in a merely esthetical and easy-going fashion,
but as though they were working out questions vital to existence; and
truly it is bitter earnest with them where their art is concerned.
Often, as in painting, technique becomes the principal object, and the
young naturalism of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf has in all
seriousness raised technique to a dogma, without, however, in the long
run being able to get the upper hand of the German need of
establishing intimate relations with the subject of the art.