Paul Heyse, author of novellas, novels, poetry, and dramas, editor, translator, and essayist, was revered by the German middle class throughout much of his life as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's successor. He was such a prominent and prolific author that some of his contemporaries maintained that the second half of the nineteenth century would be remembered as the "Age of Heyse." Others accused him of endangering morality through the glorification of the nonconformist in his works, although twentieth-century critics tend to regard his novellas as compromising tributes to the very social order they seem to attack. The naturalists criticized his novels and novellas for their lack of realism, and his works were quickly forgotten after his death. Although his accomplishments as a translator and editor and his theory of the novella have endured, his stories, novels, plays, and poems are of interest today primarily as a reflection of...