CHILDREN OF THE WORLD (Kinder der Welt). This novel (1873), by Paul Heyse, is the literary echo of the discontent and rebel lion against the existing order—political, reli gious, social and economic — which, beginning in the universities of Germany, spread through the land in the period between the Revolution of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War. It is a perfect example of the °Tendenz-Roman" which such eras of unsettled thought and altered human values engender. Except in its treatment of women which, although erotic, is romantic in the extreme, the book is the philosophy of Schopenhauer and David Strauss reduced to novel type. Every problem of the age is set forth in the person of one of the characters. There is the ascetic-erotic-intellectual hero, without honor in the university because of his freedom of thought; the unawakened but erotic heroine, natural daughter of a landed aristo crat without morals; the ugly but talented feminist musician; the highly spiritual, ill-nour ished carpenter brother of the hero; the hounded young socialist-atheist ; the kindly old artist with no vision beyond the nearest fence; the over-fed, material, unspiritual, vengeful teacher of the gospel; and a dozen more of their fellows. 'Children of the World) has
been called the °romance of pessimism" and °the apotheosis of atheism." The very name, in which 'Children of the World' is contrasted with 'Children of God,' i.e., the clergy, is argu mentative. The wonder is that in spite of its faults, its lack of spontaneity, its persistent preaching, and its iconoclastic tendency, the book remains good fiction. The characters all say too much and do too little, but so they would in real life; they are all exaggerated types, but the exaggeration is not that of un reality but of that violation of the norm which accompanies social rebellion.