His verse is scrupulously
devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and
human. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism of
German literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis of
Hauptmann's work in its totality. Like nearly all the greater dramatists
he had his forerunners and his prophets: he proceeds from a school of art
and thought which, even in transcending, he illustrates.
The consistent naturalists, then, aimed not to found a new art but, in
any traditional sense, to abandon it. They desired to reduce the
conventions of technique to a minimum and to eliminate the writer's
personality even where Zola had admitted its necessary presence--in the
choice of subject and in form. For style, the very religion of the French
naturalistic masters, there was held to be no place, since there was to
be, in this new literature, neither direct exposition, however
impersonal, nor narrative. In other words, none of the means of
representation were to be used by which art achieves the illusion of
life; since art, in fact, was no longer to create the illusion of
reality, but to _be_ reality. The founders of the school would have
admitted that the French had done much by the elimination of intrigue and
a liberal choice of theme.
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