II

At the end of the Franco-Prussian war, united Germany looked forward to a
literary movement commensurate with her new greatness. That movement did
not appear. It was forgotten that men in the maturity of their years and
powers could not suddenly change character and method and that the rise
of a new generation was needed. So soon, however, as the first members of
that generation became articulate, a bitter and almost merciless warfare
arose in literature and in the drama. The brothers Heinrich and Julius
Hart, vigorous in both critical and creative activity, asserted as early
as 1882 that German literature was then, at its best, the faint imitation
of an outworn classicism, and the German drama a transference of the
basest French models. It is easy to see to-day that their view was
partisan and narrow. Neither Wilbrandt and Heyse, on the one hand, nor
Lindau and L'Arronge, on the other, represented the whole literary
activity of the empire. It is equally easy, however, to understand their
impatience with a literature which, upon the whole, lacked any breath of
greatness, and handled the stuff of human life with so little freshness,
incisiveness and truth.

What direction was the new literature to take? The decisive influence
was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. For
the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in
science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy.
Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement.
But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with
him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French
naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The
modern--everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the