Hammer and Anvil
A NOVEL. BY FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN. From the German. By . New York : Leypoldt and Holt.
IT is an open question whether this book has established in all its excessive length a raison a'être, at least in its English form. It will hardly hold its own in point of interest with the average three-volume novel of Great Britain, and the lesson it would teach is not brought out with the directness and clearness even of the better class of American didactic fiction. We already have abundance of both these styles of imaginative literature, and therefore we may have honest doubts as to the measure of hospitality we ought to extend in this instance to the foreigner who comes to us, not as a guest, but as a naturalized citizen of the same literary republic. If his claims to honorable consideration have no better ground than is to be found in his performance in the “ Hammer and Anvil,” Spielhagen will, it strikes us, have to make his way through a formidable burden of proof, in showing cause why he should be here at all.
This ponderous work, the “ Hammer and Anvil,” as nearly as we can understand it, designs to teach the duty of mutual helpfulness. The lesson, however, is not taught by the action of the story, but is dragged in, rather, in distinct paragraphs of reflection and whole pages of dreary monologue. Whether in the mouth of his characters, or in the author’s proper person, his preaching lias that vague body, without head or legs, which one discovers to be a predominant family peculiarity in a great deal of the political talk and writing of the Germans. If these pages of endless moral labels could be cut out bodily, the reader might in the first and perhaps in the second part enjoy the pleasant but delusive impression that he had met that rara avis of the present literary period, a novel without a purpose. Still, the three parts of the story taken in connection and read thus, without the aid of the author’s too frequent scholia, would seem to convey a moral exactly opposite to the one professed, namely, the one taught in many very ordinary works of fiction in all modern languages, — that it is the duty of a healthy young man, with no money, but with great personal independence, to marry a rich wife. In spite of his virtuous lemmas and postulates, it does not become at all clear why George Hartwig, the autobiographical hero of this work, at a time when he is worth but a beggarly fifty thalers in the world, refused the good old Dr. Snellius’s proffered loan of fifty thousand, to marry Hermine and a million. Now Herr Hartwig is, in some respects, a tolerably natural human being, notwithstanding his shadowy theories about the hammer and anvil, and we incline to the opinion that in allowing himself to he persuaded into this first marriage, while lie was confessedly in love with her who was to be his second wife, he acted, as much as he does at any other time, in conformity to the dictates of our fallen nature. From a worldly point of view, at least, it was the most successful and practical stroke of business of the many he has to record of himself.
There are some dramatic scenes in the book, and some good characterization ; but the former are by no means great, and the latter is never quite natural and consistent throughout. There is to be observed, too, the fatality which seems so generally to attend imaginative works overburdened with high precept, that the bad characters are the best drawn and act much more like human beings than the model heroes and heroines. If the story were not told in the first person singular, it would be difficult to see how the most patient reader could ever get through it. The autobiographical form and a personal narrative have a stronghold in human curiosity which, in this instance, six hundred and ninety-one large pages cannot wholly break down. The unity and the natural touches which this form of telling his story have forced upon Spielhagen are, we confess, the only things which have lent interest enough to the " Hammer and Anvil ” to get us through its interminable length.