"Thick and heavy as if you could grasp them with your hands, the clouds spread over the flat land. Here and there the trunk of a willow stretched forth its rugged knots to the air, heavily laden with moisture. The tree was soaked with damp, and glistened with the drops that had hung in rows on the bare boughs. The wheels sank deep into the boggy road that ran between withered reeds and sedge.
* * * * *
"The moon stood high in the heavens and shed her calm, bluish light far over the sleeping heath. The clumps of alders on the moor bore wreaths of lights and from the slender silvery trunks of the birches which bordered the broad straight road in endless rows, came a sparkle and brightness that made the road seem as if lost far below in the silvery distance.
"Silence all around. The birds had long ceased singing. A stillness of the late summer time, the complacent stillness of departing life lay over the broad plain. You scarcely heard the sound of a cricket in the ditches, or a field-mouse disturbed in its slumbers, gliding through the tall grass with its low chipping whistle."
Such pictures constantly meet us in the pages of Sudermann's books; taken in connection with their setting, they are often of great force and beauty. Nothing, however, is obtruded; there is no searching after a dramatic background, or undue word-painting; everything is in keeping with and subordinate to the main interest of the tale.
With such surroundings, Sudermann cleverly assimilates his characters. They are mostly the victims of circumstances which they are more or less unable to overcome. In some cases the fault, as with Leo Sellenthin in Es war, Sudermann's latest novel, lies in the weakness or sinfulness of the man; in others, in surroundings and events for which the man is not himself directly responsible. Sometimes the noble unselfish love and devotion of a woman make a happier state of things possible; Sudermann is a firm believer in the power and influence of good women in human life. His women are not so sharply outlined as Ibsen's, but he recognises in the sex, though much more vaguely, like possibilities. For example, Leonore in Die Ehre sees the folly and emptiness of fashionable life and has the courage to give her hand where she loves, to a man who, by her set, would be considered far beneath her. Magda, in Heimat, refuses to desert her child. And his young girls are even more charming, more natural than those of Ibsen. Eager-hearted Dina Dorf, with her desire for a larger life in the world; hard-working Petra Stockman with her delight in her work and her unflinching truth and honesty; Bolette Wangel with her desire for knowledge, "to know something about everything" are, as everybody knows, among Ibsen's most delightful creations. In Es War Sudermann gives us as perfect and natural a study of a young girl as we have met with in fiction or the drama for a very long while. Hertha cherishes a secret love for a man much older than herself but has reason to fear that his affections are set on a married woman, the wife of his best friend. To Hertha's innocent and unworldly mind this is a great puzzle; to her the sacredness of love between husband and wife seems a matter of course.
"Certainly the beautiful woman was a thousand times lovelier than poor Hertha--and she was, moreover, much cleverer.... But could she--and therein lay the great puzzle, the invincible contradiction that knocked all suspicion on the head--could she as a married woman possibly be an object of love to a man other than her husband? Wives were loved by their husbands--that is why they are married and by no one else in the world."
But Hertha determines to take such means as are within her power of discovering if suck things are possible, if such things exist. She first consults her books--books, of course, suited to a young girl's library. She goes through her novels, but nothing in them points to the enormity. Then she turns to the classics, to Schiller!
"Amalie was a young girl--so was Luise--but then there was the queen of Spain! However, in that case it was clear as noonday how little poets deserved to be trusted, for that a man should fall in love with his stepmother could only take place in the world of imagination where genius, drawn away from the earth, intoxicated with inspiration, soars aloft. Not in vain had she, a year and a half before, written a school composition on 'Genius and Reality,' in which she had treated the question in a most exhaustive manner."
She next tries her friend Elly, a girl of her own age, but much more experienced in the ways of the world.