this strain wrote Gustav Falke in his witty Festlied at a banquet given to Liliencron in 1904: Also brach der edle Ritter Feurig wie ein Lenzgewitter Prose and verse, all Liliencron's work has a grip, 'Ich habe mir die Stoffe gewählt Die mir gefallen, ich schrieb vom Herzen Yet a single terrible line, 'Das Leben, äh was, macht uns alle brutal,' dropped casually, as it were, into one of his lyrics of light love, takes us far indeed from the Béranger mood and reveals for a moment the grim northern veracity, the heart-sickness and the gloom which dwelt immovably beneath the changing surface. In his magnificent war-stories, in his tales of the mediæval fights and forays of his own forbears, the hard-featured, iron-fisted lords of the northern marches, he showed an unerring eye for the dramatic features in every scene, and for those that make it real and human, scarcely any for its ethical or historical significance. To read his war-lyrics is like following a flying gleam of light across the smoky turmoil of a battlefield. And the style this close, masterly sword-play, ever making for the heart of the subject! In the prolix and languid literature of the 'eighties it was indeed a revelation. As a scratch by which we may divine the lion's claw, almost any quotation will suffice. Let us take this stanza from one of his sketches of the Franco-Prussian war: 'Weit der Schwadron war ich voraus geritten, And as an example of another mood let us take a poem which he himself regarded with special affection : 'In der Dämmerung Um Glock zwei, Glock dreie, Klanglos liegt der Weg Schläft noch in den Zweigen. Hör' ich hinter mir Sacht ein Fenster schliessen. Sieht mein Sehnen nur Blond und blaue Farben ? Ihrer Augen Blau Was die Nacht mir gab, Fangen Lust und Leben. Eine Drossel weckt The same year, 1884, which saw the publication of Liliencron's first volume saw also the first appearance of another notable originator in German literature, This was Arno Holz. Born in East Prussia in 1863, he settled as a young writer in Berlin and, before he was twentyone, had given decisive evidence of his powers in his Buch der Zeit.' He was, and is, almost entirely disregarded by the German public. Even literary friends look blank when you mention his name; booksellers retire to remote recesses of their ware-rooms when you ask for a volume, and generally come back empty-handed; great libraries find no place for him on their shelves. Yet, like a dark sun, Arno Holz, for a time at least, swung the whole system of German literature, more especially the dramatic side of it, into a new orbit. Of him, when his play Die Familie Selicke' was performed by the Freie Bühne in 1890, Theodor Fontane wrote in the 'Vossische Zeitung': 'This performance has so far exceeded in interest all that has gone before that here we can truly say that we have discovered new land. This is the parting of the ways; here is the division between old and new.' It may be noted that Gerhart Hauptmann's' Vor Sonnenaufgang' and Tolstoi's 'Macht der Finsterniss' had already appeared on the stage in question. And when Hauptmann, in 1889, printed the former play, he dedicated it to Arno Holz and his collaborator, Johannes Schlaf, 'in joyful recognition of the decisive influence' which their work had exercised upon his art. Holz, unlike Liliencron, felt himself possessed of a message and a mission. In the Buch der Zeit' this message was concerned rather with a social than a literary reform. He had himself known bitter penury, and he felt for those to whom the bare necessities of life appeared 'erhab'ner als der ganze Faust.' He cried 'to the upper ten-thousand': 'Ein neu Geschlecht, schon wetzt es seine Schwerter, Und glaubt: Es wird kein veilchenblauer Werther, His pictures of the misery of slum life have a poignant note of reality: 'Ihr Dach stiess fast bis an die Sterne, Vom Hof her stampfte die Fabrik, Parterre gab 's Branntwein, Grogk und Bier, Das Vorstadtelend sein Quartier. Die Nacht liegt in den letzten Zügen, Der Regen tropft, der Nebel spinnt . . O Sonnenschein! O Sonnenschein !' But all this lyrical work, so far at least as its outward form goes, was in later days rejected and despised by its author. He became absorbed in a new theory of literary art, illustrated in practice by himself and Schlaf (under the pseudonym of Bjarne P. Holmsen) in the plays 'Papa Hamlet' and 'Die Familie Selicke' (1889), and critically explained by Holz in Die Kunst' (1891-93). One of his critics, Erdmann, had spoken of 'die höhere Wirkung der Kunst der Wirklichkeit gegenüber.' In this phrase, an echo of course of Aristotle, was concentrated, according to Holz, all the falsity of the old æsthetic, and in the flat contradiction of it all the truth of the new. The thesis which he flung in the face of the worshippers of 'art' may be thus rendered: 'Art tends to return to being Nature. Art becomes Nature according to the measure of the existing conditions of reproduction and of their employment.' Or, as he put it with mathematical brevity, whereas the former critics had declared that Art Nature+x,' x being contributed by the 'idealism' of the artist, the true formula is · Art = Nature -x,' x being a variable magnitude determined by the conditions of reproduction.' The critics, where they noticed this heresy at all, did so with wrath and contempt, but the poets exulted, and Liliencron telegraphed his enthusiasm from Munich, Hurrah = from here to Berlin!' A discussion ensued, in the course of which the position first taken up seems to have been shifted. It was objected that music and architecture never in the least tended to become Nature' and could not do so without disaster. One suspects that Holz had overlooked this point. He had indeed an answer--music and architecture did not aim at the representation of external realities but of human moods and emotions, Empfindungen. These Empfindungen are as much 'Nature' as anything else, but the conditions of reproduction in the given materials forbid any attempt at imitation. All very sound and true, no doubt, but the reference to Empfindungen certainly makes the original thesis look much less drastic and significant. Arno Holz seemed to have flown a signal for battle, and it turned out that he had only issued invitations to an æsthetic tea-party. Later, he attempted to right himself by denying that the term 'art' could cover two such different things as a lyric and a temple. But the root of the matter lies more in what he did than in what he thought about it. His artistic method is called in Germany that of the Momentaufnahme, the snapshot method. Of course it is not really that-no art can be; but it does give an extraordinary sense of reality. Die Familie Selicke,' a bitter but not ignoble tragedy of common life, is his most important drama, for his Cenci' play, 'Sonnenfinsterniss,' is too remote from the range of human sympathies. But the wonderful story called Ein Tod,' which appeared in the volume entitled 'Papa Hamlet,' is the finest triumph of his style. A young student has been mortally wounded in a duel. Two comrades watch by his bedside during the night, awaiting the arrival of his mother and sister; as the grey morning light steals in at the dusty window-panes, the wounded lad dies. The short, broken whispers of the two as they tend their comrade, the creaking old sofa, the disorderly room, the atmosphere of anxiety and distress in which the commonplace life of the quarter goes on its indifferent way, make up a picture as poignantly true and real as it is devoid of all ad captandum appeals to the sense of horror and disgust in which the meaner kind of realist would have revelled. In lyrical poetry Holz eventually declared for a new |