I should gladly have added to these great figures (one a Frenchman, one an Englishman, and one a Russian) the study of a representative German novelist, worthy of the name in the sense I have just explained. But I regret to say I have found none, either in our own time or in the past, who is entitled to take his place beside the present trio. Do I presume too much in the hope that Three M aster: may help to evoke a fourth from the womb of the coming time — a German master novelist whose birth I thus greet from afar?