The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume I | Page 6

expectant audience, in the unavoidable
connection with popular forms of speech, in singing, and the very
nature of public assemblies, they have a basis that prevents them from
becoming conventional. But not quite so favorable was the condition of
the different varieties of narrative composition. Here a peculiarly
specific style, such as the French novel especially possesses, never
reached complete perfection. The style of Wieland would necessarily
appear too light as soon as the subject matter of the novel became more
intimate and personal; that of the imitators of Homer necessarily too
heavy. Perhaps here also Lessing's sense of style might have furnished
a model of permanent worth, in the same way that he furnished one for
the comedy and the didactic drama, for the polemic treatise and the
work of scientific research. For is not the tale of the three rings, which
forms the kernel of Nathan the Wise, numbered among the great
standard pieces of German elocution, in spite of all the contradictions
and obscurities which have of late been pointed out in it, but which
only the eye of the microscopist can perceive? In general it is the
"popular philosophers" who have, more than any one else, produced a
fixed prose style; as a reader of good but not exclusively classical
education once acknowledged to me that the German of J.J. Engel was
more comprehensible to him and seemed more "modern" than that of
Goethe. As a matter of fact, the narrator Goethe, in the enchanting
youthful composition of Werther, did venture very close to the lyrical,
but in his later novels his style at times dangerously approached a dry
statement of facts, or a rhetorically inflated declamation; and even in
The Elective Affinities, which stands stylistically higher than any of his
other novels, he has not always avoided a certain stiltedness that forms
a painful contrast to the warmth of his sympathy for the characters. On
the other hand, in scientific compositions he succeeded in

accomplishing what had hitherto been unattainable--just because, in
this case, the new language had first to be created by him.
Seldom are even the great writers of the following period quite free
from the danger of a lack-lustre style in their treatment of the language,
above all in narrative composition. It is only in the present day that
Thomas Mann, Jacob Wassermann, and Ricarda Huch are trying along
different lines, but with equal zeal, to form a fixed individual style for
the German prose-epic. The great exceptions of the middle period, the
writers of prose-epics Jeremias Gotthelf and Gottfried Keller, the
novelists Paul Heyse and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, the narrator of
anecdotes Ludwig Anzengruber, with his greater predecessor Johann
Peter Hebel, and his lesser contemporary Peter Rosegger, the portrayer
of still-life Adalbert Stifter and a few others, have, more by a happy
instinct than anything else, hit upon the style proper to their form of
composition, lack of which prevents us from enjoying an endless
number of prose works of the nineteenth century, which, as far as their
subject matter goes, are not unimportant. In this connection I will only
mention Karl Gutzkow's novels describing his own period, or, from an
earlier time, Clemens Brentano's fairy tales, Friedrich Hebbel's
humoresques, or even the rhetorically emotional historical
compositions of Heinrich von Treitschke, found in certain parts of his
work. But this lack of a fixed specific style spread likewise to other
forms of composition; Schiller's drama became too rhetorical; Friedrich
Rückert's lyric poetry too prosaically didactic; that of Annette von
Droste-Hülshoff often too obscure and sketchy.
If, therefore, the struggle with the language was fought out successfully
by modern German literature only on the battleground of the lyric (and
even there, as we have seen, not without exceptions), on the other hand
a second conservative force was placed at the service of the literary
development with more uniform success, namely Metrics. To be sure,
here again this applies only to verse, for the corresponding art of prose
rhythm has been as good as lost to the Germans, in contrast to the
French, and almost more so to the English. In prose also a conscious
and systematic attempt to make an artistic division into paragraphs,
chapters, and books, has only been made in recent times, above all in
and since the writings of Nietzsche. For as far as the treatment of
language in itself is concerned, German literature has hardly yet fully

developed an artistic form; writers still continue to treat it far too much
as a mere tool. But verse is felt to be an object for artistic molding,
although here too the naturalistic dogmas of the Storm and Stress
writers, of the Romanticists, Young Germans and Ultra-Moderns, have
often shaken the theories upon which the artistic perfection of our
poetry is based.
In