symbolism complete the circle, just as the cycle of German literature
finishes with Nietzsche, Stefan George, Spitteler and Hofmannsthal. At
the same time new forces are starting to form the new cycle, or, to
speak like Goethe, the newest spiral: Hauptmann, Frenssen, Ricarda
Huch, Enrica von Handel, to name only these. And how many others have
we not previously left unnamed!

But all this has not been merely to exercise our ingenuity. By drawing
this parallel, which is naturally only to be taken approximately, we
have intended to make clear the comforting probability that, in spite
of all the exaggerating, narrowing down, and forcing to which it has
been obliged to submit, our modern and most recent German literature
is essentially a healthy literature. That, in spite of all deviation
caused by influential theorists--of the Storm and Stress, of the
Romantic School, of the period of Goethe's old age, of the epigonean
or naturalistic criticism, or by the dazzling phenomena of foreign
countries,--nevertheless in the essentials it obeys its own inner
laws. That in spite of all which in the present stage of our
literature may create a painful or confusing impression, _we have no
cause to doubt that a new and powerful upward development will take
place, and no cause either to underrate the literature of our own
day_! It is richer in great, and what is perhaps more important, in
serious talents than any other contemporary literature. No other can
show such wealth of material, no other such abundance of interesting
and, in part, entirely new productions. We do not say this in order to
disparage others who in some ways were, only a short time ago, so far
superior to us--as were the French in surety of form, the
Scandinavians in greatness of talents, the Russians in originality,
the English in cultivation of the general public; but we are inspired
to utter it by the hopeful joy which every one must feel who, in the