Isolde White-hand, whom Tristan had
married after being banished from Cornwall, blinds Isolde Blond-hair
into refusing to recognize him when he returns and pleads his case
before her in the disguise of Tristram the Jester. Cavilling critics
were quick to discover and to expatiate upon this weakness of the play.
But the fine lines upon which it is built and the plastic figures
standing out against the medieval background, the glowing color,
radiant lights and brooding shadows of its atmosphere, and lastly, the
language, the verse-form admirably adapted to the subject,--all this
together makes of the drama a work coming very near that perfect
balance of contents and form which is the ideal of art.

It is a rather circuitous path which German drama has traveled since
the memorable performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play _Before Sunrise_
in 1889. It has outgrown the one-sided naturalism which had seemed the
only medium of translating life directly into literature. It has turned
aside from the orphic symbolism and verbal artistry rooted only in
literature and having nothing in common with life. Men like Karl
Schoenherr, Carl Hauptmann, and others have found in the native soil and
its people and in the problems that confront that people at all times
as rich a source of thematic material as previous generations of poets
had found in the historic past. Men like Ernst Hardt and others have
infused new life into the old legends of racial lore. As German drama
is completing this cycle of its development it gives hopeful evidence
of returning to the safe middle course of normal growth toward a new
type, indigenous to the soil and the soul of the country.

MAX HALBE

* * * * * *

MOTHER EARTH

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

PAUL WARKENTIN, publisher of a feminist journal

HELLA WARKENTIN-BERNHARDY, his wife

DR. VON GLYSZINSKI

HELIODOR VON LASKOWSKI, owner of the estate Klonowken

ANTOINETTE, his wife

AUNT CLARA

VON TIEDEMANN, estate owner

MRS. VON TIEDEMANN

RAABE, SENIOR, estate owner

SCHNAASE, estate owner

MRS. SCHNAASE

RAABE, JUNIOR, student

DR. BODENSTEIN, physician

MERTENS, manager of a factory

JOSUPEIT, rentier

MRS. BOROWSKI, widow of a teacher

KUNZE, organist

SCHROCK, licentiate

ZINDEL, inspector

LENE, chambermaid

FRITZ, coachman

Time: The present. Place: Estate Ellernhof.

MOTHER EARTH (1897)

A Drama in Five Acts

TRANSLATED BY PAUL H. GRUMMANN, A.M.
P