_--once more dropped out of
sight.

A far more robust figure came to the fore in Max Halbe, a West Prussian
and an individuality deeply rooted in the soil of his forefathers. That
soil and his close kinship with nature gave Halbe a firmer foundation
than the shifting quicksands of metropolitan life offered. These were
the premises upon which he set out to build. But he would not have been
a child of his time had he not seen life through the temperament of his
generation. With all his sturdy mental and moral fibre he could not
withstand the torrential current of skepticism and revaluation that
swept through the intellectual world and uprooted its spiritual
mainstays. Though the action of his plays was based upon eternal
conflicts of the human tragi-comedy--the irreconcilable contrast
between two generations, between two orders of life, between love and
duty--his characters are of the new type, his unheroic heroes are like
the men he saw about him, reeds swayed by the breath of the Zeitgeist,
and true to the naturalistic creed of his generation they were
represented by him without any attempt at idealization.

Halbe made his debut in 1889 with the tragedy of a peasant parvenu. The
play was fashioned according to old formulas, but of charming local
color and with more than a touch of the new type in one of the
characters. This was followed in 1890 by _Free Love_, the hero of which
is one of those individuals unable to reconcile their convictions with
their actions--a conflict which becomes a source of torture to
themselves and those about them. The _Ice-Floe_ (1892) was a powerful
drama, in which the sudden thaw, destroying what has been, but bringing
with it a breath of the spring and the new life to come, admirably
symbolized the passing of the old order. But it was not until the
following year, which saw the publication of his _Youth_, that Halbe
attracted serious attention outside of the circles of that Young
Germany which has become identified with the literary revolution.
_Youth_ was of a human significance and of an artistic calibre which
could not well be ignored. This work presented the old theme of youth,
love and sin in the provincial setting that he knew so well; the
characters were taken from real life and portrayed with striking
truthfulness. But over it all was the atmosphere of spring, of sunshine
and blossoms and thundershowers that quicken the germs in the womb of
the earth. This was suggested with a de