y recognized as no mere theoretical programme. The novel
of urban life, such as flourished in Berlin, Vienna, and Munich at the
close of the last century, is today antiquated and has lost its savor.
And it is significant that the Berlin novel of the last few years, for
example Georg Hermann's _Jettchen Gebert_ (1906) or the two most recent
works of Clara Viebig, prefers for its scene of action the Berlin of
the seventies, which, as yet free from the modern German "South Sea
Bubble," preserved for the inordinately growing city its old
established local character.

An account of German narrative writing of the present time is
a kind of ethnography of the German stocks and regions. The names
above-mentioned, selected without prejudice and also without
arbitrariness, ought to be represented here each with a specimen. In
part, these authors have been represented in the preceding volumes. The
necessary limits of this volume permit consideration of only a dozen.
The varieties of language and style which distinguish them one from
another cannot fail to be somewhat obscured in a translation;
nevertheless, the six pairs which we have arrayed according to racial
affiliation and age are well adapted to give an impression of the
manifoldness of German narrative prose at the beginning of the
twentieth century.

In the first place we mention two women, Helene Boehlau and
Clara Viebig. Both have passed through the naturalistic
school--for the former, indeed, naturalism marked only a period of
transition; for the latter it meant conversion to a creed to which she
has remained faithful.

The cradle of Helene Boehlau stood on classic ground. Exactly one
hundred years after Schiller, in November, 1859, she was born in
Weimar, the daughter of a publisher whose name has become known chiefly
in connection with the great Weimar edition of Goethe's complete works.
Her grandmother, "Grammie" as the children called the old lady, took to
her heart the shy and timid girl and revealed to her from the
recollections of her own youth the glory that once was and that still
gleamed as a memory within the dim and narrow confines of the
Thuringian capital city. Out of the anecdotes that the grandmother
told, the book grew which first made the name of the authoress famous,
_Tales of the Councillor's Girls_ (_Ratsmaedelgeschichten_, 1888). "In
the midst of the great German Empire," the book begins, "lies a little
city famed far and wide, Weimar in Thurin