Schilling's Flight_ (1912), close, for the present, the tale of
Hauptmann's dramatic works.



VIII

These works, viewed in their totality, take on a higher significance than
resides in the literary power of any one of them. Hauptmann's career
began in the years when the natural sciences, not content with their
proper triumphs, threatened to engulf art, philosophy and religion; in
the years when a keen and tender social consciousness, brooding over the
temporal welfare of man, lost sight of his eternal good. And so Hauptmann
begins by illustrating the laws of heredity and pleading, through a
creative medium, for social justice. The tacit assumptions of these early
plays are stringently positivistic: body and soul are the obverse and
reverse of a single substance; earth is the boundary of man's hopes.

With _The Assumption of Hannele_ a change comes over the spirit of his
work. A thin, faint voice vibrates in that play--the voice of a soul
yearning for a warmer ideal. But the rigorous teachers of Hauptmann's
youth had graven their influence upon him, and the new faith announced by
Heinrich in _The Sunken Bell_ is still a kind of scientific paganism. In
_Michael Kramer_ (1900), however, he has definitely conquered the
positivistic denial of the overwhelming reality of the ultimate problems.
For it is after some solution of these that the great heart of Kramer
cries out. In _Henry of Aue_ the universe, no longer a harsh and
monstrous mechanism, irradiates the human soul with the spirit of its own
divinity. These utterances are, to be sure, dramatic and objective. But
the author chooses his subject, determines the spirit of its treatment