Aside from the posthumous Studies just spoken of, Ludwig’s fame as a writer rests entirely on the two dramas, the Hereditary Forester and The Maccabaeans, and on the two long novel-like stories, the Heiterethei and Between Heaven and Earth.  They represent practically everything that he ever published during his lifetime.  The few insignificant lyrics, the additional dramas and stories, partly completed and partly fragmentary, which have become known after his death, have added no new traits to the picture of Ludwig as it will remain in the history of German literature, and they can well be omitted from consideration in this brief appreciation.  It must be admitted that it is a rare phenomenon to see lasting fame and influence built on such a slender amount of work and on so brief a period of productivity.  But within this limited range Ludwig must be recognized as a writer of unusual powers of observation and sympathy, of imagination and embodying execution.  Truthful to himself and to the ideals of his art, uninfluenced by the popular demands of the day or by any desire for gain or fame, free from everything that smacks of sham or artifice, he succeeded in creating works that speak to us with the robustness and authority of life itself and yet are ennobled by the graces of a selective and restraining art.

In his Hereditary Forester Ludwig produced one of the best middle-class tragedies of modern literature, combining in it, as indeed he had set out to do, highest literary merit with impelling effectiveness upon the stage.  “It is exceedingly easy,” he said, “to write a poetic drama if one does not care to keep an eye upon the stage, or one that is a successful stage play, but without poetry. * * * I shall do what I can to help create that really healthy condition of the drama which consists in the intimate union of poetry and the stage.”  Following in the footsteps of Schiller in his Intrigue and Love and of Hebbel in his Maria Magdalena, he has not attained, it is true, the massive solidity of the latter, nor has he breathed into his drama that lofty spirit of social challenge that wings the former.  On close inspection, the construction of Ludwig’s drama shows undeniable flaws of motivation.  The playwright has allowed too free a play to chance and slender probability.  The spirit of the revolutionary unrest of 1848 is in the background, especially in the tavern scene of the third act, but it does not in any way organically connect the family tragedy which we witness with the broad movements of contemporary public life.  But the play is indeed, as Ludwig desired it to be, “a declaration of war against the unnaturalness and conventionalities of our latter-day stage literature.”  The life-like characters which it portrays, the convincing language which they speak, the carefully drawn milieu in which they move, the intense struggle of passions in which they are engaged-these are all handled with a skill as rare as it is artistically true to life.  And even though the atmosphere enveloping it all seems to combine the realism of Ludwig’s maturity with the romantic pre-disposition of his earlier works, it remains in fine keeping with that shadowy forest-world which forms the setting of the play.