In the figure of Gerhart Hauptmann we encounter a man of genius, a man of European significance, and more than the standard-bearer of Young Germany. True, Hauptmann did graduate from the seminary of the realists,--the heads of which were Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf,--writing, under the name of Bjarne P. Holmsen, that delectable, ironic fantasy, Papa Hamlet But the dramatic poetic instincts of the Silesian youth--he was born at Salzbrunn, 1862, the son of a hotel-keeper--were not long to be penned behind the bars of a formula. As in Goethe's Faust, two spirits travailed furiously within him. Ultra-idealist in his boyhood, he suffered from the green-sickness of Byronism, and wrote poems in imitation of Byron, Hebbel, Schiller. He studied sculpture at Rome for a time and set up an atelier there. His epic, Promethidenlos (1885), was as subjective as a restless, unhappy young man of twenty-three could make it. Yet there is no mistaking the chord set clanging by its immature music--the chord of sympathy with human suffering, the true Hauptmann leit-motiv that may be equally heard in his first drama, Before Sunrise, and in his latest, Rose Bernd. The critical allotment of Hauptmann to the Ibsen domain is easy, too easy; he has been greatly influenced by the "red star of the north," though it has not been a baleful one. He owes as much to Zola as to Ibsen, as Zola owes in his turn much to Victor Hugo and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Young Germany itself, Karl Bleibtreu, Conrad Alberti, Sudermann, Halbe, Conradi, Kretzer, and the rest were in the fashioning of the _Freie Bühne_ heavily indebted to Antoine and his revolutionary Théâtre Libre. Under the spell of the mystic and lyric prose of Friedrich Nietzsche--surely among the most musical that issued from German lips--individualism became an all-absorbing element in the production of art works. It was the old leaven of Max Stirner and his Der Einzige. John Henry Mackay, the Scotch-German, hymned in almost delirious verse the rights of the Ego; even the cool-headed East Prussian Sudermann felt the impact of this lyric anarchism when he published his Three Heron Feathers. As to Hauptmann, whose lyre was ever more sensitive to the mobility of the moral atmosphere, this wind of individualism swept him along and he wrote Before Sunrise. It was produced in 1889, and at once its author was recognized as a force.