Debit and Credit | Page 2

sir, yours truly, BUNSEN.
TO THOMAS CONSTABLE, ESQ.

PREFACE BY CHEVALIER BUNSEN.
THE HISTORY AND SPIRIT OF THE BOOK.
Since our German literature attained maturity, no novel has achieved a
reputation so immediate, or 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 dénouement. 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