o this
theme by an elective affinity; for he is inspired in equal measure by
love of music and love for Old Vienna, and he is capable of entering
with entire sympathy into the spirit of former times. To this capacity
his short stories entitled _The Last Days of Rococo_ (1909) bear
eloquent testimony, conjuring up as they do with charming winsomeness
the spirit of the epoch that preceded the French Revolution. The second
collection of narratives, _Bitter-Sweet Love Stories_ (1910), brings us
back to Austrian territory. To this collection belongs _The Styrian
Wine Carrier_, in which the ancient carefree joyfulness of the highway
falls a victim to the modern rush of business. Is not the fate of the
amiable, easy-going, reveling Styrian symbolical of the fate of the
whole country of Austria, which is organized on the outgrown plan of a
former generation, and is now placed in opposition to the iron
necessity of modern progress? Bartsch has deeply felt the
incompatibilities rooted in the Austrian character: there are two
souls, one desperately clinging to the Austria of the good old times,
to the long-lost lovely Vienna of the coach and post-horn, the other
the soul of turbulent young Austria, with its eye on the knotty
problems of the future. But the enervating atmosphere of literary
Vienna, which Grillparzer once characterized as a "Capua in the
world of spirits," is the natural element of Old Austria, and we
suspect that Bartsch, whose rapid productivity defies stern artistic
self-discipline, has not altogether escaped its dangers.

The Alemannic races on the Upper German territories reveal a greater
toughness of fibre and more power of resistance. They are blunt
individualists, whose love of country utters itself with less
enthusiasm and attains to perfect certainty perhaps only after a
longing for adventures abroad has been stilled.

Emil Strauss, the older of the two Swabian writers here represented (he
was born at Pforzheim in 1866), lived for a while in Brazil; from his
experiences there he derived material for some of his stories in _The
Ways of Men_ (1898), for his drama, unsuccessful from the point of view
of technique, _Don Pedro_ (1899), and for his first novel _Mine Host of
the Angel_ (1900), the tragi-comical history of a man who learns by
experience, who deserts his wife and after a long series of
disappointments returns humbled to his home. The later narrative
_Mara_, in the collection entitled _Hans and Gr