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The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 by Various

V >> Various >> The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12



VOLUME XII



GUSTAV FREYTAG
THEODOR FONTANE



[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT PLAYING THE FLUTE
_From the Painting by Adolph von Menzel_]




THE GERMAN CLASSICS
OF
THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURY


Masterpieces of German Literature
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH



EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
KUNO FRANCKE, PH.D., LL.D., LITT.D.
Professor of the History of German Culture,
Emeritus, and Honorary Curator of the Germanic Museum,
Harvard University


ASSISTANT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.
Professor of German, Harvard University


In Twenty Volumes Illustrated



ALBANY, N.Y.
J.B. LYON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1914






CONTRIBUTORS AND TRANSLATORS



VOLUME XII


Special Writers


ERNEST F. HENDERSON, Ph.D., L.H.D., Author of _The History of Germany
in the Middle Ages; Short History of Germany_, etc.: The Life of
Gustav Freytag.


WILLIAM A. COOPER, A.M., Associate Professor of German, Leland
Stanford Junior University: The Life of Theodor Fontane.


Translators

ERNEST F. HENDERSON, Ph.D., L.H.D., Author of _The History of Germany
in the Middle Ages; Short History of Germany_, etc.: The Journalists.

WILLIAM A. COOPER, A.M., Associate Professor of German, Leland
Stanford Junior University: Effi Briest; Extracts from "My Childhood
Days."

E.H. BABBITT, A.B., Assistant Professor of German, Tufts College:
Doctor Luther; Frederick the Great.

MARGARETE MUeNSTERBERG:

Sir Ribbeck of Ribbeck; The Bridge by the Tay.





CONTENTS OF VOLUME XII


GUSTAV FREYTAG

The Life of Gustav Freytag. By Ernest F. Henderson

The Journalists. Translated by Ernest F. Henderson

Doctor Luther. Translated by E.H. Babbitt

Frederick the Great. Translated by E.H. Babbitt


THEODOR FONTANE

The Life of Theodor Fontane. By William A. Cooper

Effi Briest. Translated by William A. Cooper

Extracts from "My Childhood Days." Translated by William A. Cooper

Sir Ribbeck of Ribbeck. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg

The Bridge by the Tay. Translated by Margarete Muensterberg




ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME XII

Frederick the Great Playing the Flute.
By Adolph von Menzel. _Frontispiece_

Gustav Freytag. By Stauffer-Bern

At the Concert. By Adolph von Menzel

Nature Enthusiasts. By Adolph von Menzel

On the Terrace. By Adolph von Menzel

In the Beergarden. By Adolph von Menzel

Lunch Buffet at Kissingen. By Adolph von Menzel

Luther Monument at Worms. By Ernst Rietschel

Frederick William I Inspecting a School. By Adolph von Menzel

Court Ball at Rheinsberg. By Adolph von Menzel

Frederick the Great and His Round Table. By Adolph von Menzel

Frederick the Great on a Pleasure Trip. By Adolph von Menzel

Theodor Fontane. By Hanns Fechner

Fontane Monument at Neu-Ruppin

A Sunday in the Garden of the Tuileries. By Adolph von Menzel

Divine Service in the Woods at Koesen. By Adolph von Menzel

A Street Scene at Paris. By Adolph von Menzel

Procession at Gastein. By Adolph von Menzel

High Altar at Salzburg. By Adolph von Menzel

Bathing Boys. By Adolph von Menzel

Frau von Schleinitz "At Home." By Adolph von Menzel

Supper at a Court Ball. By Adolph von Menzel





EDITOR'S NOTE

This volume, containing representative works by two of the foremost
realists of midcentury German literature, Freytag and Fontane, brings,
as an artistic parallel, selections from the work of the greatest
realist of midcentury German painting: Adolph von Menzel.

KUNO FRANCKE.





THE LIFE OF GUSTAV FREYTAG


By ERNEST F. HENDERSON, PH.D., L.H.D.

Author of _A History of Germany in the Middle Ages; A Short History of
Germany, etc._


It is difficult to assign to Gustav Freytag his exact niche in the
hall of fame, because of his many-sidedness. He wrote one novel of
which the statement has been made by an eminent French critic that no
book in the German language, with the exception of the Bible, has
enjoyed in its day so wide a circulation; he wrote one comedy which
for years was more frequently played than any other on the German
stage; he wrote a series of historical sketches--_Pictures of the
German Past_ he calls them--which hold a unique place in German
literature, being as charming in style as they are sound in
scholarship. Add to these a work on the principles of dramatic
criticism that is referred to with respect by the very latest writers
on the subject, an important biography, a second very successful
novel, and a series of six historical romances that vary in interest,
indeed, but that are a noble monument to his own nation and that,
alone, would have made him famous.

As a novelist Freytag is often compared with Charles Dickens, largely
on account of the humor that so frequently breaks forth from his
pages. It is a different kind of humor, not so obstreperous, not so
exaggerated, but it helps to lighten the whole in much the same way.
One moment it is an incongruous simile, at another a bit of sly
satire; now infinitely small things are spoken of as though they were
great, and again we have the reverse.

It is in his famous comedy, _The Journalists_, which appeared in 1853,
that Freytag displays his humor to its best advantage. Some of the
situations themselves, without being farcical, are exceedingly
amusing, as when the Colonel, five minutes after declaiming against
the ambition of journalists and politicians, and enumerating the
different forms under which it is concealed, lets his own ambition run
away with him and is won by the very same arts he has just been
denouncing. Again, Bolz's capture of the wine-merchant Piepenbrink at
the ball given under the auspices of the rival party is very cleverly
described indeed. There is a difference of opinion as to whether or
not Bolz was inventing the whole dramatic story of his rescue by
Oldendorf, but there can be no difference of opinion as to the
comicality of the scene that follows, where, under the very eyes of
his rivals and with the consent of the husband, Bolz prepares to kiss
Mrs. Piepenbrink. The play abounds with curious little bits of satire,
quaint similes and unexpected exaggerations. "There is so much that
happens," says Bolz in his editorial capacity, "and so tremendously
much that does not happen, that an honest reporter should never be at
a loss for novelties." Playing dominoes with polar bears, teaching
seals the rudiments of journalism, waking up as an owl with tufts of
feathers for ears and a mouse in one's beak, are essentially
Freytagian conceptions; and no one else could so well have expressed
Bolz's indifference to further surprises--they may tell him if they
will that some one has left a hundred millions for the purpose of
painting all negroes white, or of making Africa four-cornered; but he,
Bolz, has reached a state of mind where he will accept as truth
anything and everything.

Freytag's greatest novel, entitled _Soll und Haben_ (the technical
commercial terms for "debit" and "credit"), appeared in 1856. _Dombey
and Son_ by Dickens had been published a few years before and is worth
our attention for a moment because of a similarity of theme in the two
works. In both, the hero is born of the people, but comes in contact
with the aristocracy not altogether to his own advantage; in both,
looming in the background of the story, is the great mercantile house
with its vast and mysterious transactions. The writer of this short
article does not hesitate to place _Debit and Credit_ far ahead of
_Dombey and Son_. That does not mean that there are not single
episodes, and occasionally a character, in _Dombey and Son_ that the
German author could never have achieved. But, considered as an
artistic whole, the English novel is so disjointed and uneven that the
interest often flags and almost dies, while many of the characters are
as grotesque and wooden as so many jumping-jacks. In Freytag's work,
on the other hand, the different parts are firmly knitted together; an
ethical purpose runs through the whole, and there is a careful
subordination of the individual characters to the general plan of the
whole structure. It is much the same contrast as that between an
old-fashioned Italian opera and a modern German tone-drama. In the one
case the effects are made through senseless repetition and through
_tours de force_ of the voice; in the other there is a steady
progression in dramatic intensity, link joining link without a gap.

But to say that _Debit and Credit_ is a finer book than _Dombey and
Son_ is not to claim that Freytag, all in all, is a greater novelist
than Dickens. The man of a single fine book would have to be
superlatively great to equal one who could show such fertility in
creation of characters or produce such masterpieces of description.
Dickens reaches heights of passion to which Freytag could never
aspire; in fact the latter's temperament strikes one as rather a cool
one. Even Spielhagen, far inferior to him in many regards, could
thrill where Freytag merely interests.

Freytag's _forte_ lay in fidelity of depiction, in the power to
ascertain and utilize essential facts. It would not be fair to say
that he had little imagination, for in the parts of _The Ancestors_
that have to do with remote times, times of which our whole knowledge
is gained from a few paragraphs in old chronicles and where the
scenes and incidents have to be invented, he is at his best. But one
of his great merits lies in his evident familiarity with the
localities mentioned in the pages as well as with the social
environment of his personages. The house of T.D. Schroeter in _Debit
and Credit_ had its prototype in the house of Molinari in Breslau, and
at the Molinaris Freytag was a frequent visitor. Indeed in the company
of the head of the firm he even undertook just such a journey to the
Polish provinces in troubled times as he makes Anton take with
Schroeter. Again, the life in the newspaper office, so amusingly
depicted in _The Journalists_, was out of the fulness of his own
experience as editor of a political sheet. A hundred little natural
touches thus add to the realism of the whole and make the figures, as
a German critic says, "stand out like marble statues against a hedge
of yew." The reproach has been made that many of Freytag's characters
are too much alike. He has distinct types which repeat themselves both
in the novels and in the plays. George Saalfeld in _Valentine_, for
instance, is strikingly like Bolz in _The Journalists_ or Fink in
_Debit and Credit_. Freytag's answer to such objections was that an
author, like any other artist, must work from models, which he is not
obliged constantly to change. The feeling for the solidarity of the
arts was very strong with him. He practically abandoned writing for
the stage just after achieving his most noted success and merely for
the reason that in poetic narration, as he called it, he saw the
possibility of being still more dramatic. He felt hampered by the
restrictions which the necessarily limited length of an evening's
performance placed upon him, and wished more time and space for the
explanation of motives and the development of his plot. In his novel,
then, he clung to exactly the same arrangement of his theme as in his
drama--its initial presentation, the intensification of the interest,
the climax, the revulsion, the catastrophe. Again, in the matter of
contrast he deliberately followed the lead of the painter who knows
which colors are complementary and also which ones will clash.

[Illustration: GUSTAV FREYTAG. STAUFFER-BERN]

What, now, are some of the special qualities that have made
Freytag's literary work so enduring, so dear to the Teuton heart, so
successful in every sense of the word? For one thing, there are a
clearness, conciseness and elegance of style, joined to a sort of
musical rhythm, that hold one captive from the beginning. So evident
is his meaning in every sentence that his pages suffer less by
translation than is the case with almost any other author.

Freytag's highly polished sentences seem perfectly spontaneous, though
we know that he went through a long period of rigid training before
achieving success. "For five years," he himself writes, "I had pursued
the secret of dramatic style; like the child in the fairy-tale I had
sought it from the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. At length I had found
it: my soul could create securely and comfortably after the manner
which the stage itself demanded." He had found it, we are given to
understand, in part through the study of the French dramatists of his
own day of whom Scribe was one just then in vogue. From them, says a
critic, he learned "lightness of touch, brevity, conciseness,
directness, the use of little traits as a means of giving insight into
character, different ways of keeping the interest at the proper point
of tension, and a thousand little devices for clearing the stage of
superfluous figures or making needed ones appear at the crucial
moment." Among his tricks of style, if we may call them so, are
inversion and elision; by the one he puts the emphasis just where he
wishes, by the other he hastens the action without sacrificing the
meaning. Another of his weapons is contrast--grave and gay, high and
low succeed each other rapidly, while vice and virtue follow suit.

No writer ever trained himself for his work more consciously and
consistently. He experimented with each play, watched its effect on
his audiences, asked himself seriously whether their apparent want of
interest in this or that portion was due to some defect in his work or
to their own obtuseness. He had failures, but remarkably few, and they
did not discourage him; nor did momentary success in one field
prevent him from abandoning it for another in which he hoped to
accomplish greater things. He is his own severest critic, and in his
autobiography speaks of certain productions as worthless which are
only relatively wanting in merit.

Freytag's orderly treatment of his themes affords constant pleasure to
the reader. He proceeds as steadily toward his climax as the builder
does toward the highest point of his roof. He had learned much about
climaxes, so he tells us himself, from Walter Scott, who was the first
to see the importance of a great final or concluding effect.

We have touched as yet merely on externals. Elegance of style,
orderliness of arrangement, consecutiveness of thought alone would
never have given Freytag his place in German literature. All these had
first to be consecrated to the service of a great idea. That idea as
expressed in _Debit and Credit_ is that the hope of the German nation
rests in its steady commercial or working class. He shows the dignity,
yes, the poetry of labor. The nation had failed to secure the needed
political reforms, to the bitter disappointment of numerous patriots;
Freytag's mission was to teach that there were other things worth
while besides these constitutional liberties of which men had so long
dreamed and for which they had so long struggled.

Incidentally he holds the decadent noble up to scorn, and shows how he
still clings to his old pretensions while their very basis is
crumbling under him. It is a new and active life that Freytag
advocates, one of toil and of routine, but one that in the end will
give the highest satisfaction. Such ideas were products of the
revolution of 1848, and they found the ground prepared for them by
that upheaval. Freytag, as Fichte had done in 1807 and 1808,
inaugurated a campaign of education which was to prove enormously
successful. A French critic writes of _Debit and Credit_ that it was
"the breviary in which a whole generation of Germans learned to read
and to think," while an English translator (three translations of the
book appeared in England in the same year) calls it the _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ of the German workingman. A German critic is furious that a
work of such real literary merit should be compared to one so flat and
insipid as Mrs. Stowe's production; but he altogether misses the
point, which is the effect on the people of a spirited defense of
those who had hitherto had no advocate.

Freytag has been called an opportunist, but the term should not be
considered one of reproach. It certainly was opportune that his great
work appeared at the moment when it was most needed, a moment of
discouragement, of disgust at everything high and low. It brought its
smiling message and remained to cheer and comfort. _The Journalists_,
too, was opportune, for it called attention to a class of men whose
work was as important as it was unappreciated. Up to 1848, the year of
the revolution, the press had been under such strict censorship that
any frank discussion of public matters had been out of the question.
But since then distinguished writers, like Freytag himself, had taken
the helm. Even when not radical, they were dreaded by the
reactionaries, and even Freytag escaped arrest in Prussia only by
hastily becoming a court official of his friend the Duke of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha--within whose domains he already owned an estate
and was in the habit of residing for a portion of each year--and thus
renouncing his Prussian citizenship. Even Freytag's _Pictures from the
German Past_ may be said to have been opportune. Already, for a
generation, the new school of scientific historians--the Rankes, the
Wattenbachs, the Waitzs, the Giesebrechts--had been piling up their
discoveries, and collating and publishing manuscripts describing the
results of their labors. They lived on too high a plane for the
ordinary reader. Freytag did not attempt to "popularize" them by cheap
methods. He served as an interpreter between the two extremes. He
chose a type of facts that would have seemed trivial to the great
pathfinders, worked them up with care from the sources, and by his
literary art made them more than acceptable to the world at large. In
these _Pictures from the German Past_, as in the six volumes of the
series of historical romances entitled _The Ancestors_, a patriotic
purpose was not wanting. Freytag wished to show his Germans that they
had a history to be proud of, a history whose continuity was unbroken;
the nation had been through great vicissitudes, but everything had
tended to prove that the German has an inexhaustible fund of reserve
force. Certain national traits, certain legal institutions, could be
followed back almost to the dawn of history, and it would be found
that the Germans of the first centuries of our era were not nearly so
barbarous as had been supposed.

And so with a wonderful talent for selecting typical and essential
facts and not overburdening his narrative with detail he leads us down
the ages. The hero of his introductory romance in _The Ancestors_ is a
Vandal chieftain who settles among the Thuringians at the time of the
great wandering of the nations--the hero of the last of the series is
a journalist of the nineteenth century. All are descendants of the one
family, and Freytag has a chance to develop some of his theories of
heredity. Not only can bodily aptitudes and mental peculiarities be
transmitted, but also the tendency to act in a given case much as the
ancestor would have done.

It cannot be denied that as Freytag proceeds with _The Ancestors_ the
tendency to instruct and inform becomes too marked. He had begun his
career in the world by lecturing on literature at the University of
Breslau, but had severed his connection with that institution because
he was not allowed to branch out into history. Possibly those who
opposed him were right and the two subjects are incapable of
amalgamation. Freytag in this, his last great work, revels in the
fulness of his knowledge of facts, but shows more of the thoroughness
of the scholar than of the imagination of the poet. The novels become
epitomes of the history of the time. No type of character may be
omitted. So popes and emperors, monks and missionaries, German
warriors and Roman warriors, minstrels and students, knights,
crusaders, colonists, landskechts, and mercenaries are dragged in and
made to do their part with all too evident fidelity to truth.

We owe much of our knowledge of Freytag's life to a charming
autobiography which served as a prefatory volume to his collected
works. Freytag lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1895 at the age of
seventy-nine. Both as a newspaper editor and as a member of parliament
(the former from 1848 to 1860, the latter for the four years from 1867
to 1871) he had shown his patriotism and his interest in public
affairs. Many of his numerous essays, written for the _Grenzboten_,
are little masterpieces and are to be found among his collected works
published in 1888. As a member of parliament, indeed, he showed no
marked ability and his name is associated with no important measure.

Not to conceal his shortcoming it must be said that Freytag, at the
time of the accession to the throne of the present head of the German
Empire, laid himself open to much censure by attacking the memory of
the dead Emperor Frederick who had always been his friend and patron.

In conclusion it may be said that no one claims for Freytag a place in
the front rank of literary geniuses. He is no Goethe, no Schiller, no
Dante, no Milton, no Shakespeare. He is not a pioneer, has not changed
the course of human thought. But yet he is an artist of whom his
country may well be proud, who has added to the happiness of hundreds
of thousands of Germans, and who only needs to be better understood to
be thoroughly enjoyed by foreigners.

England and America have much to learn from him--the value of long,
careful, and unremitting study; the advantage of being thoroughly
familiar with the scenes and types of character depicted; the charm of
an almost unequaled simplicity and directness. He possessed the rare
gift of being able to envelop every topic that he touched with an
atmosphere of elegance and distinction. His productions are not
ephemeral, but are of the kind that will endure.

* * * * *




_GUSTAV FREYTAG_




* * * * *

#THE JOURNALISTS#



DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BERG, _retired Colonel_.

IDA, _his daughter_.

ADELAIDE RUNECK.

SENDEN, _landed proprietor_.
_
PROFESSOR OLDENDORF, _editor-in-chief_. |
|
CONRAD BOLZ, _editor_. |
|
BELLMAUS, _on the staff._. |
|
KAeMPE, _on the staff_. } of the newspaper
| _The Union_.
KOeRNER, _on the staff_. |
|
PRINTER HENNING, _owner_. |
|
MILLER, _factotum_. _|

_
BLUMENBERG, _editor_. |
} of the newspaper
SCHMOCK, _on the staff_. _| _Coriolanus_.



PIEPENBRINK, _wine merchant and voter_.

LOTTIE, _his wife_.

BERTHA, _their daughter_.

KLEINMICHEL _citizen and voter_.

FRITZ, _his son_.

JUDGE SCHWARZ.

_A foreign ballet-dancer._

KORB, _secretary for Adelaide's estate_.

CARL, _the Colonel's man-servant._

_A waiter._

_Club-guests._ _Deputations of citizens_.



_Place of action: A provincial capital._


THE JOURNALISTS[1] (1853)

TRANSLATED BY ERNEST F. HENDERSON, PH.D., L.H.D.




ACT I


SCENE I


_A summer parlor in the_ COLONEL'S _house. Handsome furnishings. In
the centre of rear wall an open door, behind it a verandah and garden;
on the sides of rear wall large windows. Right and left, doors; on the
right, well in front, a window. Tables, chairs, a small sofa_.

IDA _is sitting in front on the right reading a book. The_ COLONEL
_enters through centre door with an open box in his hand in which are
dahlias_.

COLONEL.

Here, Ida, are the new varieties of dahlias our gardener has grown.
You'll have to rack your brains to find names for them. Day after
tomorrow is the Horticultural Society meeting, when I am to exhibit
and christen them.

IDA.

This light-colored one here should be called the "Adelaide."

COLONEL.

Adelaide Buneck, of course. Your own name is out of the running, for
as a little dahlia you have long been known to the flower-trade.

IDA.

One shall be called after your favorite writer, "Boz."

COLONEL.

Splendid! And it must be a really fine one, this yellow one here with
violet points. And the third one--how shall we christen that?

IDA (_stretching out her hand entreatingly to her father_).

"Edward Oldendorf."

COLONEL.

What! The professor? The editor? Oh no, that will not do! It was bad
enough for him to take over the paper; but that he now has allowed
himself to be led by his party into running for Parliament--that I can
never forgive him.

IDA.

Here he comes himself.

COLONEL (_aside_).

It used to be a pleasure to me to hear his footstep; now I can hardly
keep from being rude when I see him.

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Along the journey they manage to cure each other, and "none of them ever knew or suspected that the Fountain's waters carried no enchantment at all".

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