Like Ibsen and Zola, Sudermann does not hesitate to set the truth before us even when it is terrible or brutal or revolting. But he differs from them in having a less gloomy outlook, in firmly believing that, at the same time as human nature is coarse and brutal, stupid and violent, it is loving, capable of sacrifice and of deep feeling. He sees the strange not to say the inexplicable mixture of good and evil in all things human, and knows man to be neither all gold nor all alloy. This we take it is the true realism. To make Sudermann's point of view clear to English readers there is perhaps no better nor more direct way than to give a brief account of his works. They are three novels, _Frau Sorge_ (Dame Care), published in 1886, _Der Katzensteg_ (the name of a small wooden bridge over a waterfall that plays a prominent part in the story), 1888, _Es war_ (It Was), 1893; three volumes of short tales, _Geschwister_ (Brothers and Sisters), first published in the _Berliner Tageblatt_ in 1884 and 1886 respectively (one of the stories, _Der Wunsch_, appears in the present volume), _Im Zwielicht_ (In the Twilight), novelettes written in various newspapers, and _Iolanthe's Hochzeit_ (Iolanthe's Wedding), 1892; and three dramas, _Die Ehre_ (Honour), _Sodom's Ende_ (The Destruction of Sodom), and _Heimat_ (_The Paternal Hearth_). The most perfectly artistic of his longer novels, and that most deeply impregnated with the peculiar characteristics of East Prussian landscape is _Frau Sorge_. Paul, the hero, is born just at the moment when his father's difficulties make it necessary for him to sell his house and land: this gloomy circumstance overshadows the whole of Paul's life. While his brothers and sisters in spite of the family poverty are, in their careless, unthinking way, happy and even prosperous, wilfully blind to the fact that they owe all to the industry and continual self-sacrifice of Paul, his life is one long toil and struggle, one long fidelity to duty as he conceives it, one long effacement and suppression of self. For this he receives no thanks, no acknowledgment. His spirit becomes crushed, almost extinguished. After long years of toiling, struggling, and suffering, he is redeemed through the love of a woman, but only when he has sacrificed to "Dame Care" all he held most precious, and when the capacity in him for joy and hope has been well-nigh destroyed. The character portrayed with perfect art is, at the same time, faithful to nature: such men are rare, perhaps, but it is well that the novelist should remind us of their existence, and thus help us to recognise the potency for good that dwells in mankind.