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one so likely to increase and to endure, as Soll und Haben, by Gustav Freytag. In the present, apparently apathetic tone and temper of our nation, a book must be of rare excellence which, in spite of its relatively high price (15s.), has passed through six editions within two years; and which, notwithstanding the carping criticism of a certain party in Church and State, has won most honorable recognition on every hand. To form a just conception of the hold the work has taken of the hearts of men in the educated middle rank, it needs but to be told that hundreds of fathers belonging to the higher industrious classes have presented this novel to their sons at the outset of their career, not less as a work of national interest than as a testimony to the dignity and high importance they attribute to the social position they are called to occupy, and to their faith in the future that awaits it.
The author, a man about fifty years of age, and by birth a Silesian, is editor of the Grenz-bote (Border Messenger), a highly-esteemed political and literary journal, published in Leipsic. His residence alternates between that city and a small estate near Gotha. Growing up amid the influences of a highly cultivated family circle, and having become an accomplished philologist under Lachmann, of Berlin, he early acquired valuable life-experience, and formed distinguished social connections. He also gained reputation as an author by skillfully arranged and carefully elaborated dramatic compositions--the weak point in the modern German school.
The enthusiastic reception of his novel can not, however, be attributed to these earlier labors, nor to the personal influence of its author. The favor of the public has certainly been obtained in great measure by the rare intrinsic merit of the composition, in which we find aptly chosen and melodious language, thoroughly artistic conception, life-like portraiture, and highly cultivated literary taste. We see before us a national and classic writer, not one of those mere journalists who count nowadays in Germany for men of letters.
The story, very unpretending in its opening, soon expands and becomes more exciting, always increasing in significance as it proceeds. The pattern of the web is soon disclosed after the various threads have been arranged upon the loom; and yet the reader is occasionally surprised, now by the appearance on the stage of a clever Americanized German, now by the unexpected introduction of threatening complications, and even of important political events. Though confined within a seemingly narrow circle, every incident, and especially the Polish struggle, is depicted grandly and to the life. In all this the author proves himself to be a perfect artist and a true poet, not only in the treatment of separate events, but in the far more rare and higher art of leading his conception to a satisfactory development and d��nouement. As this requirement does not seem to be generally apprehended either by the writers or the critics of our modern novels, I shall take the liberty of somewhat more earnestly attempting its vindication.
The romance of modern times, if at all deserving of the name it inherits from its predecessors in the romantic Middle Ages, represents the latest stadium of the epic.
Every romance is intended, or ought to be, a new Iliad or Odyssey; in other words, a poetic representation of a course of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero. If we pass in review the romances of the last three centuries, we shall find that those only have arrested the attention of more than one or two generations which have satisfied this requirement. Every other romance, let it moralize ever so loudly, is still immoral; let it offer ever so much of so-called wisdom, is still irrational. The excellence of a romance, like that of an epic or a drama, lies in the apprehension and truthful exhibition of the course of human things.
Candide, which may appear to be an exception, owes its prolonged existence to the charm of style and language; and, after all, how much less it is now read than Robinson Crusoe, the work of the talented De Foe; or than the Vicar of Wakefield, that simple narrative by Voltaire's English contemporary. Whether or not the cause can be clearly defined is here of little consequence; but an unskillfully developed romance is like a musical composition that concludes with discord unresolved--without perhaps inquiring wherefore, it leaves an unpleasant impression on the mind.
If we carry our investigation deeper, we shall find that any such defect violates our sense of artistic propriety, because it offends against our healthy human instinct of the fundamental natural laws; and the artistic merit, as well of a romance as