Whatever were the shortcomings of these young hot-spurs, there is no doubt that there were among them earnest seekers for new values of life and letters. Many were contented with pathetic seriousness and doubtful results to imitate their successful and popular model, Gerhart Hauptmann. Some made no attempt at concealing that they walked closely in the footsteps of their master. Nor did the critics of the new school esteem them any less for being followers and imitators rather than creators of independent merit. Among these youths, Georg Hirschfeld, a born Berliner, was the most promising. He was of a type abundant in every metropolis having an intense intellectual life: sensitive, impressionable, with an amazing talent for absorption and adaptation and a facile gift of language. The reception accorded to his drama. _The Mothers_ (1896), which was frankly reminiscent of Sudermann's contrast between the front and the rear house and of Hauptmann's dialogue of real life, was so generous, that it gave the author, then barely twenty-three, a position quite out of proportion to his achievement. His efforts at following up the easily won success made him a pathetic figure in the drama of that decade. He experienced failure upon failure and has now, after the publication of some stories of varying merit and the stage success of a clever comedy directed against the esthetes--_Mieze and Maria_--once more dropped out of sight. A far more robust figure came to the fore in Max Halbe, a West Prussian and an individuality deeply rooted in the soil of his forefathers. That soil and his close kinship with nature gave Halbe a firmer foundation than the shifting quicksands of metropolitan life offered. These were the premises upon which he set out to build. But he would not have been a child of his time had he not seen life through the temperament of his generation. With all his sturdy mental and moral fibre he could not withstand the torrential current of skepticism and revaluation that swept through the intellectual world and uprooted its spiritual mainstays. Though the action of his plays was based upon eternal conflicts of the human tragi-comedy--the irreconcilable contrast between two generations, between two orders of life, between love and duty--his characters are of the new type, his unheroic heroes are like the men he saw about him, reeds swayed by the breath of the Zeitgeist, and true to the naturalistic creed of his generation they were represented by him without any attempt at idealization.