injustice and inhumanity of the social order.

Hauptmann, however, has very little of the narrow and acrid temper of the
special pleader. He is content to show humanity. It is quite conceivable
that the future, forgetful of the special social problems and the
humanitarian cult of to-day, may view these plays as simply bodying forth
the passions and events that are timeless and constant in the inevitable
march of human life. The tragedies of _Drayman Henschel_ and of _Rose
Bernd_, at all events, stand in no need of the label of any decade. They
move us by their breadth and energy and fundamental tenderness.

No plays of Hauptmann produce more surely the impression of having been
dipped from the fullness of life. One does not feel that these men and
women--Hanne Schael and Siebenhaar, old Bernd and the Flamms--are called
into a brief existence as foils or props of the protagonists. They led
their lives before the plays began: they continue to live in the
imagination long after Henschel and Rose have succumbed. How does
Christopher Flamm, that excellent fellow and most breathing picture of
the average man, adjust his affairs? He is fine enough to be permanently
stirred by the tragedy he has earned, yet coarse enough to fall back into
a merely sensuous life of meaningless pleasures. But at his side sits
that exquisite monitor--his wife. The stream of their lives must flow on.
And one asks how and whither? To apply such almost inevitable questions
to Hauptmann's characters is to be struck at once by the exactness and
largeness of his vision of men. Few other dramatists impress one with an
equal sense of life's fullness and continuity,

"The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world."

The last play in this volume, _The Rats_, appeared in 1911, thirteen