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It was the success of his novels that drew readers back to the essays, just as it was the vogue of Sudermann's plays that made his earlier novels popular. One has only to read such essays, however, as those printed in this volume to realise not only their spirit and charm, but to feel instinctively that one is reading English Literature.
A stand-up fight between will and will such a fight as occurs in, say, the Hippolytus of Euripides, or Racine's Andromaque, or Molière's Tartufe, or Ibsen's Pretenders, or Dumas's Françillon, or Sudermann's Heimat, or Sir Arthur Pinero's Gay Lord Quex, or Mr. Shaw's Candida, or Mr. Galsworthy's Strife such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest forms of drama.
It is to be hoped there is a tear beneath the sneers of Sudermann's comedy, "Die Schmetterlingschlacht," for the sorrows of moneyless mothers with unmarriageable girls. Doaen't thou marry for munny, but goae wheer munny is, said Tennyson's Northern Farmer a sentiment which was anticipated or plagiarised by Wendell Holmes as "Don't marry for money, but take care the girl you love has money."
Sometimes, when I am with Sarah's girls at a play like Sudermann's "John the Baptist," as the curtain rises and falls upon the great scenes I sit and think of him and what it would have meant to him if in all those poverty-stricken years of his ministry he could have had such a vision of his dear Bible people at home in Judaea.
Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses. Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every advantage."
Not that FAMILIE SELICKE represented anything that had not been written about for years without any seeming result. But the dramatic genius of Holz, together with the powerful interpretation of the play, necessarily made inroads into the widest circles, and forced people to think about the terrible inequalities around them. Sudermann's EHRE and HEIMAT deal with vital subjects.
Several of Ibsen's plays were on the repertory for the winter; Sudermann's Die Ehre was then a new play, and on its production in the quiet university town caused the greatest excitement; it was extravagantly praised and bitterly attacked; other dramatists followed with plays written under the modern influence, and Philip witnessed a series of works in which the vileness of mankind was displayed before him.
At one of the larger industrial towns in Germany, during a Sunday of my visit, there were three performances; one at 11 A. M., of a patriotic melodrama, "Glaube und Heimat"; another, at 3.30 P. M., of "Der Freischütz"; and another, at 7.30 P. M., of Sudermann's play, "Die Ehre."
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