en into an energetically aggressive, almost brutal man of action.
The sentimental stories of the heart are followed by works of keen
intuition, in which with compelling suggestiveness strange human
communities are comprehended and presented in the characteristic
atmosphere of their milieu. What we find in the insane asylum of _God's
Beloved_ we find also in the lives of Breton fisherfolk in the novel
_The Sea_ (1910); it is unadulterated primitive nature, which blends
the roar of billows and the instinctive ingenuousness of the islanders
into a mighty harmony.

If Kellermann's development should be taken as pointing the way for the
German novel of the future, we should have to conclude that
_Heimatkunst_ has been supplanted by exotic art. Specialties are being
cultivated, like that of the promising Willy Seidel (_The Garden of
Shuhan, Sakije's Song_) in Oriental themes. Interest is growing in the
literature of travel, and the great publishers are already paying the
traveling expenses of their authors, in order that they may see
something of the world and write about it. This is the manner in which
Hermann Hesse's _Trip to India_ came into existence, and Kellermann has
similarly published two books on Japan (_A Promenade in Japan_, 1911,
_Sassayo Yassal_, 1913). The danger of this tendency lies in the
confusion of poetic invention and journalistic report. Kellermann's
most recent novel _The Tunnel_ (1913), which sold inside of a few
months to the number of a hundred thousand copies, cannot be regarded
as a genuine work of art. It is not "the epic of iron and electricity,
the Odyssey of modern engineering and capitalism" which it was perhaps
intended to be, but a fantastic special article spun out into a
moving-picture series of impressions of America and the possibilities
of technical accomplishment. As such it is a great proof of talent.
This we perhaps see most clearly if we compare it with Hauptmann's
_Atlantis_; for we then perceive how much sharper are Kellermann's eyes
and how much more takingly he knows how to reproduce the bustling
confusion of the modern mart. But it is rather a caricature of the
present than a Utopia of the future, and the idea of the novel is lost
in the abundance of individual motifs. It is to be hoped that this
alienation is not symptomatic in the development either of the gifted
author or of German literature as a whole. National questions will in
the coming years summon Germany from fantas