In _Mother Earth_, published in 1897, Max Halbe shows himself at his best both in spirit and in manner. The hero of that play is estranged from his paternal hearth, with its ancestral traditions and from the simple rural life and the innocent tender love of his youth. For he has gone to Berlin, has drifted into the circles of the intellectuals, married the brilliant and advanced daughter of a professor and become actively interested in feminist propaganda. Subconsciously, however, this life does not satisfy him, and when on the death of his father he returns to the old home and feels once more its charm, he realizes that he has forfeited real happiness for a vague and alien ideal. In this work with its firmly knit and logically evolved action Max Halbe reached a climax in his development. Since its production his star has been steadily declining and the thirteen or more works that have since come from his pen have not added to his reputation. Embittered by his failures, he chose some years ago to attack his rivals and critics in a satirical comedy. _The Isle of the Blessed_, but he had miscalculated the effect of the poorly disguised personal animosities upon an audience not sufficiently interested in the author's friendships and enmities. He has, however, not become sadly resigned to his fate, like Hirschfeld, but continues to court the favor of the stage with the tenacity of a man disappointed in his hopes but unwilling to admit his defeat. An important aspect of the social and esthetic programme of the new school was the unflinching frankness with which it faced a problem belonging to intimate life and barring public discussion, yet closely connected with the economic conditions of society: the problem of sex. The curious revival of pagan eroticism in lyric poetry and the growing tendency toward a scientific cynicism in fiction were supplemented by attempts to handle sex from the standpoint of modern psychology and social ethics in drama. With works of that class has the name of Frank Wedekind become inseparably associated. He is the most positive intellect among the writers of Young Germany and their most radical innovator in regard to form. He is a fanatic of truth and deals only with facts; discarding the mitigating accessories of the _milieu_, he places those facts before us in absolute nudity. This would make him the most consistent naturalist; but when facts are presented bald and bare, they do not make the impression of reality, but rather of grotesque caricature. Hence Wedekind has sometimes been compared with early English dramatists and classed with romanticists like Lenz, Grabbe and Heine. He himself has no esthetic theories whatever that could facilitate his being enrolled under some fetching label. Nor has he any ethical principles, some critics allege, if they do not curtly call him immoral. Yet his work, from the appearance of _Spring's Awakening_ (1891) to his _Stone of Wisdom_, (1909) and his most recent