Two German scholars had been winners of the Nobel prize in literature in 1904 and 1908--Theodor Mommsen and Rudolf Eucken. Two more distinguished authors with international reputations were added in 1910 and 1912, making four awards to German literature within eight years. Paul Heyse, the versatile author of the year 1910 has been difficult to classify, because he is dramatist, poet, novelist, and writer of a form of short story known as the _Novelle_. More than one hundred and fifty of these tales are accredited to him, in addition to prodigious industry in other literary forms. The _Novelle_ bears some resemblance to the short stories of Hoffmann, Tieck, Alfred de Musset, and the American masters of this type, Poe, Hawthorne, and O. Henry. In more definite method than some of these _conteurs_, Heyse developed a principle which he applied and explained, in part, in his Introduction to his _Deutscher Novellenschatz_; he stresses the fact that the essential foundation of this form is “what children call the story” but he adds, “A strong silhouette should not be lacking.” The “silhouette will be a brief summary of conditions which underlie the focal scene or incident.” Thus Heyse became creator, or developer, of this form of fiction, with a wide range of incidents and characters, in which keen observation of life and faithful recital were blended with idealism of a distinctive motive--that of “glorifying nature,” human and inanimate. Johann Ludwig Paul Heyse was born in Berlin, March 15, 1830; he was eighty years old when the Nobel honor was received. His father, Karl Ludwig Heyse, with a firm, Teutonic nature, was a famous philologist and professor at the University of Berlin. His mother came from a Jewish family of wealth and social rank. In his _Memoirs_, her son recalls her as “passionate and imaginative”; from her he inherited his bent toward story-telling and delight in the sensuous which mingled with the rationalistic trend of mind, bequeathed by his father. In the home of the Heyses gathered scholars, authors, and artists. The atmosphere fostered the natural precocity of the boy, Paul. One of his older friends was Kugler, the historian of art, who had an inspirational influence upon the youth; in manhood, Heyse married the gifted daughter of this friend.