And with this realisation she goes wearily back to a rich lover she had definitely forsaken, knowing that in saving her life she has now lost it for ever. This is the last page of the story, but unfortunately it does not end here. Herr Sudermann has chosen to add one paragraph after the word "_Schluss_." By this we learn that in the spring of the following year the aforesaid rich lover _marries_ Lilly, and takes her on a bridal trip to Italy, which all her life had been in her dreams the celestial country. She is thus saved from the awful fate of the streets, which during the whole book had loomed threatening in the distance. But this ending leaves us completely bewildered and depressed. It seems to imply that, after all, these successive steps in moral decline do not make much difference, one way or the other; for at the very beginning of her career she could not possibly have hoped for any better material fate than this. The reader not only feels cheated; he feels that the moral element in the story, which through all the scenes of vice has been made clear, is now laughed at by the author. This is why I call the book the most pessimistic of all Sudermann's writings. A novel may take us through woe and sin, and yet not produce any impression of cynicism; but one that makes a careful, serious study of subtle moral decay through over six hundred pages, and then implies at the end that the distinction between vice and virtue is, after all, a matter of no consequence, leaves an impression for which the proverbial "bad taste in the mouth" is utterly inadequate to describe. Some years ago, Professor Heller, in an admirable book on Modern German Literature, remarked, in a comparison between Hauptmann and Sudermann, that the former has no working theory of life, which the latter possessed. That Hauptmann's dramas offer no solution, merely giving sordid wretchedness; while Sudermann shows the conquest of environment by character. Or, as Mr. Heller puts it, there is the contrast between the "driving and the drifting." I think this distinction in the main will justify itself to anyone who makes a thoughtful comparison of the work of these two remarkable men. Despite the depreciation of Sudermann and the idolatry of Hauptmann, an attitude so fashionable among German critics at present, I believe that the works of the former have shown a stronger grasp of life. But the final paragraph of _Das hohe Lied_ is a staggering blow to those of us who have felt that Sudermann had some kind of a _Weltanschauung_. It is like Chopin's final movement in his great Sonata; mocking laughter follows the solemn tones of the Funeral March.