Hauptmann wears all the earmarks of a genius. He is child of his age to a dangerous degree, and his tremulous, vibrating sensibility mirrored the hysterical agitation, the pessimism, the sad strivings, the individualism, the fret-fire fomentings and unbelief of a dying century. He knows Goethe, and after the last act of The Sunken Bell one feels constrained to cry, "The third part of Faust!" But it is not Faust, neither is it Tannhäuser, though there are analogies; it is realism, it is idealism, it is pantheism, it is Wagnerism. Above all Friedrich Nietzsche towers in the background, and there is poesy, exquisite poesy. The Sunken Bell is a compound of antagonistic elements. The unities seem askew, yet the result is artistic and illusory. Hauptmann has a clairvoyant quality; he imposes upon his audience his dream of his own fantastic world, and you find yourself five minutes after the rise of the curtain devoutly believing in this queer No-man's land of mischievous water goblins, satyrs, wonderful white nymphs, and sorrowful mortals. It is all a masque--a profound masque of the spirit in labour. Viewed as a symbol, we see in Heinrich the bell-founder, the type of the struggling, the aspiring artist, who, cast down by defeat, is led to more remote and loftier heights by a new ideal, there to live the life of the Uebermensch, the Super-man, of Nietzsche. The fall is inevitable. Dare as dared Faust and Ibsen's Brand to desert the valleys and scale the slopes of Parnassus, and man's fate is assured. Hauptmann's hero is a bell-founder who, crazed by grief at the loss of his bell in the lake, mounts the peak and lies dying at the door of a witch. It is at a period so charmingly pictured by Heine. The twilight of the gods has begun and the scared peasant caught flashes of faun-like creatures flitting in woodland glade and grove, still saw shining the breasts of the nymph in the brake, and piously crossed himself when toad, snake, and worm crossed his path. Heinrich is found by Rautendelein, an elfish being, an exquisite creation of fire, of flame, something of Ariel, Miranda, Puck, naïve Gretchen, a new Undine, a symbol of the freedom of nature, a creature touched with the vaguer surmise of adolescence, the most poetically conceived since Goethe's, and yet evocative of Hans Christian Andersen. She, like the mermaid of Andersen, loves the unconscious mortal, and despite the jaundiced warnings of an old spirit of the well, she follows the sick man back to his abode. The first act is ably contrived. There is atmosphere, and the well-nigh impossible parts of the faun and the frog man--the latter indulges in the familiar _Brek-ke-ke-keks_ of Aristophanes--become real for the moment. It is the Hauptmann spell that weighs upon our senses. Andersen-like, too, is the discovery by this child fairy that love means pain. She finds a tear in her eye and thinks it is dew. The mystery of womanhood encompasses her.