eared and been produced by the Free Stage in
Berlin; and had operated like an explosive. It was followed by a flood
of vicious and vile criticism. The literary clique little imagined that
the future held great success for such "stuff" both in book form and on
the stage.

This lamentable lack of judgment misled the various pot-boiler writers
to attack the new tendency with the most repulsive arguments. One
leading paper of those days wrote of Hauptmann as an individual of a
pronounced criminal physiognomy, of whom one could expect nothing else
but dirty, appalling things.

Such literary highway assaults made one feel doubly happy over the fact,
that together with Hauptmann were a few splendidly armed fighters, like
the aged Fontane, with his great poise and fine exactness.

The first impression of Hauptmann was that he was not a man of easy
social carriage, rather discreet, almost shy, and uncommunicative. An
absorbed, deep dreamer, yet a keen observer of the human all too human,
not easily led astray, not Goethe, rather Hoelderlin.

The guest room of the "Preussischen Hof" contained many empty benches.
The keeper thereof had ample time to meditate over the mission of the
strange gentleman, in the weaving districts. I learned the next morning
that he had quite decided that Hauptmann was some government emissary,
intrusted with examining the prevailing distress of the weavers. One
thing, however, appeared suspicious, the man associated with the "Reds,"
who, according to the government newspaper, only exaggerated the need
and poverty to incite the people for their own political ends.

Whether or not the misery of the weavers that winter had reached such a
point as to warrant an official investigation, had been the topic of
discussion for weeks. The State Attorney, too, had taken an active part
in the matter. The criticism in the labor paper, "The Proletarian," of
which I was the editor, that the exorbitant profit-making methods of the
manufacturers, which left the workers nothing to live on, were met with
a number of indictments against the paper on the following grounds: "It
was indictable to incite the public at the moment when the prevailing
poverty was in itself sufficient to arouse the people and cause danger;
that this was criminal, and therefore punishable. The distress was
thereby officially acknowledged; was that not sufficient? Why then hold
the conditions up before the special attention of the people?"

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