No plays of Hauptmann produce more surely the impression of having been dipped from the fullness of life. One does not feel that these men and women--Hanne Schael and Siebenhaar, old Bernd and the Flamms--are called into a brief existence as foils or props of the protagonists. They led their lives before the plays began: they continue to live in the imagination long after Henschel and Rose have succumbed. How does Christopher Flamm, that excellent fellow and most breathing picture of the average man, adjust his affairs? He is fine enough to be permanently stirred by the tragedy he has earned, yet coarse enough to fall back into a merely sensuous life of meaningless pleasures. But at his side sits that exquisite monitor--his wife. The stream of their lives must flow on. And one asks how and whither? To apply such almost inevitable questions to Hauptmann's characters is to be struck at once by the exactness and largeness of his vision of men. Few other dramatists impress one with an equal sense of life's fullness and continuity, "The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world." The last play in this volume, _The Rats_, appeared in 1911, thirteen years after _Drayman Henschel_, nine years after _Rose Bernd_. A first reading of the book is apt to provoke disappointment and confusion. Upon a closer view, however, the play is seen to be both powerful in itself and important as a document in criticism and _Kulturgeschichte_. It stands alone among Hauptmann's works in its inclusion of two separate actions or plots--the tragedy of Mrs. John and the comedy of the Hassenreuter group. Nor can the actions be said to be firmly interwoven: they appear, at first sight, merely juxtaposed. Hauptmann would undoubtedly assert that, in modern society, the various social classes live in just such juxtaposition and have contacts of just the kind here chronicled. His real purpose in combining the two fables is more significant. Following the great example, though not the precise method, of Moliere, who produced _La Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes_ on the boards of his theater five months after the hostile reception of _L'Ecole des Femmes_, Hauptmann gives us a naturalistic tragedy and, at the same time, its criticism and defense. His tenacity to the ideals of his youth is impressively illustrated here. In his own work he has created a new idealism. But let it not be thought that his understanding of tragedy and his sense of human values have changed. The charwoman may, in very truth, be a Muse of tragedy, all grief is of an equal sacredness, and even the incomparable Hassenreuter--wind-bag, chauvinist and consistent _Goetheaner_--is forced by the essential soundness of his heart to blurt out an admission of the basic principle of naturalistic dramaturgy.