Before Hauptmann conceived any of this work that entitles him to rank among the idealists, he had written grim tragedies, similar in trend to those by Ibsen, Zola, Tolstoy, Max Nordau, and Arno Holz. As realist he has been censured as weak in plots and sometimes strained in his social tenets: there are such defects in _The Beaver Coat_, _Rose Bernd_, and _The Conflagration_. That he had a poetic instinct, a true lyric quality, was acknowledged from occasional lines in such gloomy plays as _Lonely Lives_, _Colleague Crampton_, and _The Weavers_. Among the plays of industrial upheaval and suffering, _The Weavers_ has tense feeling, with lines of irony and suppressed aspirations. It was dedicated to Robert Hauptmann, father of the author, in affectionate words that express the source of its inspiration and the allegiance of Gerhart Hauptmann to his forefathers: “You, dear father, know what feelings lead me to dedicate this work to you, and I am not called upon to analyze them here. Your stories of my grandfather, who in his young days sat at the loom, a poor weaver like those here depicted, contained the germ of my drama. Whether it possesses the vigor of life or is rotten at the core, it is the best ‘so poor a man as Hamlet is,’ can offer.” While this grandfather had been a poor weaver, he met with better fortunes in later life, and the father of Gerhart Hauptmann was owner of three hotels. The boy was born at Salzbrunn, a seaside town in Silesia, in 1862; thus he was thirty-two years younger than Heyse--a full generation in time and standards of literature. His mother was “one of the people.” The boy was inclined to study sculpture and he was sent to art schools in Breslau, Jena, and in Italy. He was a slow pupil; his brother, Carl, seemed almost the only person who expressed faith in his gifts or future success. With his art studies he combined agriculture and history. After a brief apprenticeship as modeler, he decided that he would be an actor; he had a lisp that interfered with the continuance of this histrionic hope. He married a woman of wealth and moved to Berlin, in 1885, where he became identified with “The Free Stage” movement and began to write plays. Byron had been one of his earlier literary heroes; in _The Fate of the Children of Prometheus_, he recorded some impressions of travel along the same route as _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_.