The tacit assumptions of these early
plays are stringently positivistic: body and soul are the obverse and
reverse of a single substance; earth is the boundary of man's hopes.
With _The Assumption of Hannele_ a change comes over the spirit of his
work. A thin, faint voice vibrates in that play--the voice of a soul
yearning for a warmer ideal. But the rigorous teachers of Hauptmann's
youth had graven their influence upon him, and the new faith announced by
Heinrich in _The Sunken Bell_ is still a kind of scientific paganism. In
_Michael Kramer_ (1900), however, he has definitely conquered the
positivistic denial of the overwhelming reality of the ultimate problems.
For it is after some solution of these that the great heart of Kramer
cries out. In _Henry of Aue_ the universe, no longer a harsh and
monstrous mechanism, irradiates the human soul with the spirit of its own
divinity. These utterances are, to be sure, dramatic and objective. But
the author chooses his subject, determines the spirit of its treatment
and thus speaks unmistakably.
Nor is directer utterance lacking, "The Green Gleam," Hauptmann writes in
the delicately modelled prose of his _Griechischer Fruehling_, "the Green
Gleam, which mariners assert to have witnessed at times, appears at the
last moment before the sun dips below the horizon.
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