The German Cla.s.sics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries.
Volume 12.
by Various.
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 a.s.sign 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 n.o.ble monument to his own nation and that, alone, would have made him famous.
As a novelist Freytag is often compared with Charles d.i.c.kens, 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, ent.i.tled _Soll und Haben_ (the technical commercial terms for "debit" and "credit"), appeared in 1856. _Dombey and Son_ by d.i.c.kens 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 repet.i.tion 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 d.i.c.kens. 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.
d.i.c.kens reaches heights of pa.s.sion 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. Schroter 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 Schroter. 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 s.p.a.ce 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s. 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 const.i.tutional liberties of which men had so long dreamed and for which they had so long struggled.
Incidentally he holds the decadent n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ent.i.tled _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 inst.i.tutions, 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 apt.i.tudes 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociated 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._.KaMPE, _on the staff_. } of the newspaper_The Union_.
KoRNER, _on the staff_.PRINTER HENNING, _owner_.MILLER, _factotum_. _
_ BLUMENBERG, _editor_.} of the newspaper SCHMOCK, _on the staff_. __Coriola.n.u.s_.
PIEPENBRINK, _wine merchant and voter_.
LOTTIE, _his wife_.
BERTHA, _their daughter_.
KLEINMICHEL _citizen and voter_.
FRITZ, _his son_.
JUDGE SCHWARZ.