The years of his residence here are memorable and have already become the subject of study and investigation. And rightly so; for during this time there took place that impact of the many obscure tendencies of the age upon the most sensitive and gifted of German minds from which sprang the naturalistic movement. That movement dominated literature for a few years. Then, in Hauptmann's own temper and in his own work, arose a vigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe technique and incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far toward producing--for a second time--a new vision and a new art. The conditions amid which this development originated are essential to a full understanding of Hauptmann's work. II At the end of the Franco-Prussian war, united Germany looked forward to a literary movement commensurate with her new greatness. That movement did not appear. It was forgotten that men in the maturity of their years and powers could not suddenly change character and method and that the rise of a new generation was needed. So soon, however, as the first members of that generation became articulate, a bitter and almost merciless warfare arose in literature and in the drama. The brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, vigorous in both critical and creative activity, asserted as early as 1882 that German literature was then, at its best, the faint imitation of an outworn classicism, and the German drama a transference of the basest French models. It is easy to see to-day that their view was partisan and narrow. Neither Wilbrandt and Heyse, on the one hand, nor Lindau and L'Arronge, on the other, represented the whole literary activity of the empire. It is equally easy, however, to understand their impatience with a literature which, upon the whole, lacked any breath of greatness, and handled the stuff of human life with so little freshness, incisiveness and truth. What direction was the new literature to take? The decisive influence was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. For the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy. Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement. But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern--everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the intuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with which one rubs elbows!" Such, with whatever later developments, was the central doctrine of young Germany in the eighties; such the belief that gradually expressed itself in a number of definite organisations and publications.