y astonishment, not to
say chagrin, I noted that Nana and The Downfall had bigger sales than
the other novels; Nana probably because of its unpleasant coarseness,
and The Downfall because of its national character. Now, neither of
these books gives Zola at his best. Huysmans had not only preceded
Nana by two years, but beat his master, with Marthe--the Paris edition
was quickly suppressed--as it is a better-written and truer book than
the story of the big blonde girl, who was later so wonderfully painted
by Edouard Manet as she stood in her dressing-room at the theatre.

How far we are away from the powerful but crass realism of 1880 I
thought as I sat in the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, and waited for the
curtain to rise on Gerhart Hauptmann's latest play, The Flight of
Gabriel Schilling (Gabriel Schilling's Flucht). And yet how much this
poet and mystic owes to the French naturalistic movement of thirty odd
years ago. It was Arno Holz and the young Hauptmann who stood the
brunt of the battle in Germany for the new realism. Sudermann, too,
joined in the fight, though later. Arthur Schnitzler was then a
medical student in Vienna, and it was not till 1888 that he modestly
delivered himself in a volume of verse, while Frank Wedekind, was just
beginning to stretch his poetical limbs and savour life in Paris and
London. (Eleven years later (1891) he gave us his most pregnant drama,
young as he was, Spring's Awakening.) It is only fair, then, to accord
to the recent winner of the Nobel Prize, Gerhart Hauptmann, the credit
due him as a path breaker in German literature, for if Arno Holz
showed the way, Hauptmann filled the road with works of artistic
value; even at his lowest ebb of inspiration he is significant and
attractive.

But Hauptmann is something more than a realist; if he were only that I
should not have begun my story with a reference to the Zola book
sales. There were published a short time ago the complete works of
Gerhart Hauptmann--poems, social plays, novels, and tales in six
stately volumes. In glancing at the figures of his sales I could not
help thinking of Zola. Whereas Nana stands high on the list, The
Sunken Bell (Die Versunkene Glocke, translated by Charles Henry
Meltzer, and played in English by Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern),
has reached its eightieth edition, and remember that the German
editions are sometimes two thousand or three thousand an edition. What
the translation figures are I have no idea