Early in his career, however, an older impulse stirred in Hauptmann. He
remembered that he was a poet. Pledged to naturalism by personal loyalty
and public combat he broke through its self-set limitations tentatively
and invented for that purpose the dream-technique of _The Assumption of
Hannele_(1893). Pure imagination was outlawed in those years and verse
was a pet aversion of the consistent naturalists. Hence both were
transferred to the world of dreams which has an unquestionable reality,
however subjective, but in which the will cannot govern the shaping
faculties of the soul. The letter of the naturalistic law was adhered to,
though Hannele's visions have a richness and sweetness, the verses of the
angels a winsomeness and majesty which transcend any possible dream of
the poor peasant child, The external encouragement which the attempt met
was great, for with it Hauptmann conquered the Royal Playhouse in Berlin.
Three years later he openly vindicated the possibility of the modern
poetic drama by writing _The Sunken Bell_, his most far-reaching success
both on the stage and in the study. In it appears for the first time the
disciplinary effect of naturalism upon literature in its loftiest mood.
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