ility of permanence, there follows a straining after technical
requirements such as was formerly almost unknown. This results in an
effort in Germany all the more strenuous in proportion to the former
slackness regarding questions of artistic form. The peculiarities of
the different literary _genres_ are heeded with a severity such as has
been practised before only in antiquity or perhaps by the French.
Poets like Detlev von Liliencron, who formerly had appeared as
advocates of poetical frivolity, now chafed over banal aids for
rhyming, as once Alfred de Musset had done. Friedrich Spielhagen, the
brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Jacob Wassermann are seen to
busy themselves with the technical questions pertaining to the
prose-epic, no longer in a merely esthetical and easy-going fashion,
but as though they were working out questions vital to existence; and
truly it is bitter earnest with them where their art is concerned.
Often, as in painting, technique becomes the principal object, and the
young naturalism of Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf has in all
seriousness raised technique to a dogma, without, however, in the long
run being able to get the upper hand of the German need of
establishing intimate relations with the subject of the art.

We must, however, at this point again remind ourselves that the
question is not one of abstract "poets" but one of a large number of
living _men_ who, happily, differ widely from one another. Above all,
when considering them we must think of the typical development of the
generations. Those for whom patriotic interests, at least in a direct
sense, seemed to have little meaning, were always followed by
generations patriotically inspired. The Germany of to-day hides, under
the self-deluding appearance of a confinement to purely esthetic
problems, a predominating and lively joy in the growth of the
Fatherland, and naturally also in its mental broadening. To have given
the strongest expression to this joy constitutes the historical
significance of Gustav Frenssen, just as solicitude for its future
inspired the muse of Wilhelm von Polenz.

The preference shown to individual literary _genres_ changes in an
almost regular order of sequence--the Swiss Bovet has even tried
recently to lay down a regular law of alternation. Especially is the
theatre from time to time abused for being a destructive negation of
art, in just as lively a fashion as it is declared at other times to
be the sol