ete_ (1909), is also the
fruit of exotic experiences. This account of a love in imagination
has the same motif as one of the most original narratives of the
Swiss Spitteler, _Imago_, with the only difference that in _Mara_
over-excitation of the brain is motivated by tropical heat. Strauss
is in all of his narratives an extremely acute psychologist, who
everywhere concentrates his attention upon the development of
character, and whose work, as appears in _Mine Host of the Angel_, is
inclined toward a mild didacticism. This is especially noticeable in
the work that first made his name famous, the novel _Death the
Comforter_ (_Freund Hein_, 1902), the story of a boy of musical
disposition who is worried to death in school. Compared with English
and American literature, German literature has been said to be poor in
stories of childhood. This criticism hardly applies to the new century,
which has been called the century of the child. The fate of little
Henry Lindner who is to be transformed by hook or by crook from a
dreamy musician into a circumspect efficient man, and who suffers
shipwreck on the reefs of mathematics, reminds us in many ways of the
tragedy of the last Buddenbrook, Hanno, whose delicate sensibility is
crushed out by the discipline of the school. A few years later there,
appeared in Hermann Hesse's _On the Rack_ (1906) another story of
schoolboy martyrdom, and between these two pessimistic works lay two
sunshiny novels of childhood, _Asmus Semper's Childhood Land_ (1904),
by Otto Ernst, and _Gottfried Kaempfer_ (1904), by Hermann Anders
Krueger. These were the most successful novels of those years; Strauss'
_Death the Comforter_ is, next to the conclusion of _Buddenbrooks_, the
poetically most significant of these stories of childhood. The writer,
rich in comprehension of the vitality of the problems and in the
delicacy of his treatment of them, has not had to repeat himself: his
novel _Friction_ (1904) is a fine psychological study in the form of a
love story, in which life undertakes the education of two recalcitrant
lovers; and his latest work, _The Naked Man_ (1912), is a powerful
historical novel.

Hermann Hesse, who is often grouped with Strauss, is, in spite of his
belonging to the same stock, a different nature; he is more of a
lyricist, and his lyrical poems, though less well known, take perhaps a
higher rank than his novels. Even in these the lyrical mood outweighs
the human action; he ponders th