Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/94

88 the brutal background of poverty in "The Weavers," Hauptmann is never aloof as the iconoclast Ibsen, never as bitter as the soul director Strindberg, nor yet as set as the crusader Tolstoy. And that because of his humanity, his boundless love, his oneness with the disinherited of the earth, and his sympathy with the struggles and the travail, the hope and the despair of every human soul. That accounts for the bitter opposition which met Gerhart Hauptmann when he made his first appearance as a dramatist; but it also accounts for the love and devotion of those to whom he was a battle cry, a clarion call against all iniquity, injustice and wrong.

In "Lonely Lives" we see the wonderful sympathy, the tenderness of Hauptmann permeating every figure of the drama.

Dr. Vockerat is not a fighter, not a propagandist or a soap-box orator; he is a dreamer, a poet, and above all a searcher for truth; a scientist, a man who lives in the realm of thought and ideas, and is out of touch with reality and his immediate surroundings.

His parents are simple folk, religious and devoted. To them the world is a book with seven seals. Having lived all their life on a farm, everything with them is regulated and classified into simple ideas—good or bad, great or small, strong or weak. How can they know the infinite