The last of these plays is the most characteristic and important. It takes up the old story of patient Grizzel which the Clerk of Oxford told Chaucer's pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. But a new motive animates the fable. Not to try her patience, not to edify womankind, does the count rob Griselda of her child. His burning and exclusive love is jealous of the pangs and triumphs of her motherhood in which he has no share. It is passion desiring the utter absorption of its object that gives rise to the tragic element of the story. But over the whole drama there plays a blithe and living air in which, once more, authentic human beings are seen with their smiling or earnest faces. A stern and militant naturalistic drama, _The Rats_ (1911), and yet another play of the undoing of the artist through the woman, _Gabriel Schilling's Flight_ (1912), close, for the present, the tale of Hauptmann's dramatic works. VIII These works, viewed in their totality, take on a higher significance than resides in the literary power of any one of them. Hauptmann's career began in the years when the natural sciences, not content with their proper triumphs, threatened to engulf art, philosophy and religion; in the years when a keen and tender social consciousness, brooding over the temporal welfare of man, lost sight of his eternal good. And so Hauptmann begins by illustrating the laws of heredity and pleading, through a creative medium, for social justice. The tacit assumptions of these early plays are stringently positivistic: body and soul are the obverse and reverse of a single substance; earth is the boundary of man's hopes. With _The Assumption of Hannele_ a change comes over the spirit of his work. A thin, faint voice vibrates in that play--the voice of a soul yearning for a warmer ideal. But the rigorous teachers of Hauptmann's youth had graven their influence upon him, and the new faith announced by Heinrich in _The Sunken Bell_ is still a kind of scientific paganism. In _Michael Kramer_ (1900), however, he has definitely conquered the positivistic denial of the overwhelming reality of the ultimate problems. For it is after some solution of these that the great heart of Kramer cries out. In _Henry of Aue_ the universe, no longer a harsh and monstrous mechanism, irradiates the human soul with the spirit of its own divinity. These utterances are, to be sure, dramatic and objective. But the author chooses his subject, determines the spirit of its treatment and thus speaks unmistakably.