Sorma gave a delicious, naïve, and plastic version of the nymph at the Irving Place Theatre in 1897. She possesses an exquisite sensibility. She painted with a light hand the caprice, elfish cunning, and wiles of Rautendelein, and at the close the tragic note was delicately sounded. It was a great, a notable achievement. Sorma has been called the German Duse. She is really a Silesian by birth, and she is not a Duse. But she has unusual adroitness in the expression of the conventional dramatic symbolism, and an agility in technic and a variety of vocal and facial expression that enable her to assume a wide range of character. A certain briskness and imperious piquancy make her work unlike that of the German stage. She is more Gallic, in reality more Slavic than Gallic. Her person is finely fashioned, her features good, her eyes particularly expressive, and her mask mobile and expressive easily of a mob of elusive emotions. She reaches her climax by a rational crescendo, and never fails to thrill. Altogether a creature of real fire and with an air of distinction. Of the occasional sentimentality of the German stage she is never guilty. Mr. Meltzer in the preface of his admirable translation tells us "to view the play from the standpoint of the reformer, and you may interpret it as the tale of a dreamer, who, hampered by inevitable conditions, strives to remodel human society. For my part I incline to regard Heinrich the bell-founder as a symbol of Humanity struggling painfully toward the realization of its dream of the ideal truth and joy and light and justice. Rautendelein in this reading stands for Nature, or rather for the freedom and sincerity of Nature, missing a reunion with which Humanity can never hope to reach the supreme truth, and the supreme bliss of which the Sun is the emblem." The artist _sans_ moral obligations is bound to be a failure, no matter the height or depth of his genius. This has Tennyson sung; and Goethe, in his imperial manner, has set it forth. Symbolic and allegoric The Sunken Bell may signify the conflict of Pagan and Christian, Jew and Greek, Heinrich standing midway between the opposing forces as did Walter Pater's Denys in the mad days at Auxerrois. Miraculously has the poet fixed his wild people of wood and waves. They with their coarse, elemental gestures and foolery might have stepped out of a canvas by Arnold Böcklin. The blank verse is admirable, and while the Faust metre is largely used there are no such lyrics as we find strewn through Goethe's immortal pages. And yet--yet is not Hauptmann Germany's most distinguished dramatist since that master? The admirers of Robert Hamerling and Von Wildenbruch will not have it so--possibly because of the pessimism and the socialistic views of the new man. Nevertheless, Hauptmann has the ear of all Germany to-day.