One of the authors whom Heyse had censured for his naturalism and depressing dramas had been Gerhart Hauptmann. When the announcement was made that the prize of 1912 was again given to a German novelist and playwright, racial pride ran high but critics of other countries asked, “How could idealism be perverted in meaning so that it would apply to the author of _Before Dawn_, _Lonely Lives_, _The Weavers_ and _Michael Kramer_?” Unfairly, the name of Hauptmann was linked constantly with that of Sudermann by the most bitter malcontents with this award. Such an attitude was biassed and unjust. That Hauptmann has written some of the most photographic, haunting dramas of industrial strife and social vices is true; but it is as true that he has produced two, possibly three, of the really poetic, symbolic plays in modern German literature--_The Assumption of Hannele_, _The Sunken Bell_, and _Parsival_. [Illustration: _From an original etching by Hermann Struck. Reproduced by permission of the artist and courtesy of the New York Public Library_ GERHART HAUPTMANN] There are two distinctive, but not wholly contradictory, personalities in Hauptmann as he reveals himself to his readers. It was as author of _The Sunken Bell_, especially, that he was chosen for the Nobel prize; it had certain autobiographical suggestions of this conflict between the material and the spiritual in the nature of its author. Recognizing that he is often associated with Sudermann, the brilliant, relentless novelist and dramatist, it is interesting to find these two writers well differentiated by Otto Heller in _Studies in Modern German Literature_ (Boston, 1905). He compares the nervous, sensitive mind of Hauptmann, “possessed of a reproductive, feminine talent,” in contrast with the masculine personality of Sudermann, less subtle, more virile and coarse, with broader knowledge of life but lacking the intuitive perceptions of Hauptmann. One may question some of these adjectives used by Mr. Heller, but the general contrast is well phrased, especially as applied to the poetic dramas by Hauptmann, like _The Sunken Bell_, _And Pippa Dances_, and _Parsival_.