American Characters in German Novels

I.

HAVE national types of men and women found adequate exposition in fiction ? And what has been the influence of national embodiments of home characters upon descriptions of the same by foreign writers ? Or, to subdivide the subject, and to draw our illustrations from one of the oldest and one of the youngest of modern literatures, how has American fiction affected contemporary German novelists ?

American fiction falls into two large classes, the old romantic school and the modern realistic school, with a few individual authors whose place belongs in neither class absolutely. Of the romanticists, Hawthorne followed a provincial vein when he undertook to vivify the characteristics of the New England Puritan and his descendants. Each of his several larger works contains an exquisitely defined variety of characters. Although they must be sought for amidst surroundings that are illuminated by the ever fitful lights of the author’s fantasy, they are more consistent than the plots in which they appear. Thus The Blithedale Romance, after beginning with a project of social reform, dissolves into the melancholy twilight of an ill-assorted marriage and a lackadaisical confession ; yet in its course it depicts, like a resplendent bubble on its own sluggish Brook Farm river, Zenobia, the most exuberant and glowing figure in our whole literature.

But before all it is Hepzibah who rises to our thoughts when we consider the Yankeeism of the Hawthorne gallery of poetic portraits. Perhaps the very eccentricity of her contour fixes this masterpiece of American genre upon the memory. Hester, in The Scarlet Letter, is a cast of a simpler and more classic mould : she retains something strange and foreign as compared with Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables ; and this despite the fact that Hester’s sufferings are due to specifically local and New England conditions, whereas Hepzibah’s misery is owing to the stress of poverty, common everywhere.

The truth is, the nationalism, or rather the provincialism, of these tales is diffused interchangeably between the characters and the landscape that composes the background of the story. Not all of the characters are equally new, nor are all of them equally American in type. Hepzibah’s niece, with her cheerful, helpful, housewifely habits and her eventempered acquiescence in things as they are, is the sister of Goethe’s Ottilie, a favorite figure in German novels of old and new date. Priscilla, in The Blithedale Romance, with her childlike, almost sylphlike unquestioning and ineradicable love and worship for beings that awe her by their imposing presence, is a spiritual relation of Käthechen, and even of Undine. Like these, she is devoid of the capacity of judgment. She does not think or reflect. Her attachment is involuntary, silent, passive; but it has the force of a mania. She does not regard herself as her lover’s equal. It occurs as little to her to compare her own qualities with his as to measure him by a comparison with others. She takes it for granted that he is superior and unique, and that the world values him as she herself does. She is a being, in a word, of the simplest order, without elements active among themselves or at war with one another ; without will, without resentment, without force of habit, and almost without memory. She obeys as a sapling bends before the wind, without any other opposition than the fact which her being in the way presents. After the first recoil caused by Zenobia’s death she is the same being as before that event: unbroken, unscared, possessed of the same susceptible elasticity.

Hilda, in The Marble Faun, is more nearly a character. But this late work of the author suffers in comparison with his American novels. Its heroine has a value chiefly of an historical kind, as furnishing the first germ of the American girl abroad. She must be placed, with the two just named, among the types whose similitudes are found in Continental romanticism ; while Hester and Zenobia might take their places among figures familiar to French fiction of a period preceding and partly contemporary with Hawthorne’s time. This period is called in France “ the period of the woman of thirty.” It began with the appearance of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and was developed by Balzac. Nor, although the type has been modified in both directions by caricature since then, as in Ohnet’s Dames de Croix Saint Luc, where the heroine appears as a woman nigh forty, and in Zola’s Renate, where her age is under the usual score and a half of years, has it ceased, up to the present, to appear on the Continent; in England Thackeray depicted “the woman of thirty ” in Henry Esmond and The Virginians.

“ The modern Drama calls, ' Who is knocking?’” Jules Janin once complained humorously, “ and Romance cries, ' Who is there ? ’

“ ' It is I,’ answers Sweet Sixteen tremblingly, with her teeth of pearls, her snowy bosom, her melting contours, her fresh laugh, her soft look. ‘It is I. I am of the age of Racine’s Janic, of Shakespeare’s Desdemona, Molière’s Agnes, Voltaire’s Zaïre, Prévost’s Marion Lescaut, Saint-Pierre’s Virginie. ... It is I. I am youth. I am full of hope. I am innocent. I throw looks beautiful as heaven and without fear into the future. My age is that of all pure instincts, of all noble impulses, of pride and of chastity. Take me in, dear sir! '

“ Thus speaks Sweet Sixteen to our dramatists and novel-writers; but our novelists and dramatic poets answer promptly, ‘ We are busy with your mother now, child; come again in twenty years.’ ”

The New England women of thirty in Hawthorne’s pages are voluptuously ripe and pagan. It is the author who lets the outbursts of their paganism occur outside the frame of his books instead of within it. He captures the defiant, statuesque figure of Hester and the imposing Zenobia after the attainment of the zenith of their internal life and their revolt against social morality ; for nearly all these romance heroines of thirty are rebels against conventional order. They pass before our eyes with different gait after their fall, — Hester self-contained, Zenobia quivering with a revival of emotion. The background before which they move is a landscape of fields and woods, in place of salons and country seats; but “ when we see them we know they are gods.” Their Puritan New England garments are but a transparent vesture under which are seen the full forms of universal passion. These are no products of a special culture, nor results of national peculiarities.

Hawthorne’s true provincial characters, beside Hepzibah and certain other accessory female figures, must be looked for in his men, as in Arthur Dimmesdale, who is a descendant in literature, it may perhaps be granted, of Werther and of Werther’s successors, but is no direct descendant. It is characteristic, however, of Hawthorne’s subtle, desultory fancy that many of his heroes remain incompletely sketched, while his pen lingers over the elfin queries of little Pearl, the flower in Zenobia’s hair, and the faltering gait of the frail Priscilla.

A fresh assortment of personages was offered by Cooper in his Indian and war novels, where the knights and lairds of Sir Walter Scott appear in homespun or buckskins and moccasins. They hardly attain, perhaps, the consistency of characters, for circumstances make them, whereas your true dramatic character moulds or creates events. There is a lack of inner conformity or likeness to practical life traceable in both the chief and the accessory personages of the tales ; while the portion of their existence which the author chooses to depict is generally occupied by a series of dangers which they overcome or from which they escape.

Harvey Birch is a simple countryman, who assumes the character of a peddler and British spy, whereas he is in the secret employment of Washington. He cannot spell correctly ; yet on one occasion he converses in the discreet language of diplomacy, and on another curses to perfection in the Irish brogue and in a female voice. He is sensible enough to resent the attempt of a purchaser to force him into accepting an inadequate sum of money for his house, yet he lacks the naturalness to show the billet testifying to his true character, on being condemned to death by a colonial officer. The secret of Washington would have been safe with a major of Washington’s army, and Harvey’s death could secure nothing save one dangerous enemy less to the common foe. It was a duty as well as a rational instinct of human nature, therefore, to wish to live. The novelist, however, with the romantic unreality of the fiction of his time, makes his hero invite death, and, to cap the climax of the fantastic heroism, actually try to prevent his own escape. For Harvey is not content to let the billet remain concealed on his person ; he swallows it.

Cooper’s heroes ¹ are of the old type of romantic ideals : men of action, of stout hearts, and of penetration, who nevertheless, in the absence of a substantial reason for sacrificing their lives, offer their lives up for any or no reason. Latin juvenes do not “ pour wine upon the ground ” with more frequency and restlessness than Cooper’s heroes risk their honest and thrifty blood.

It is questionable whether there is any nationalism in Cooper’s works which is not contained in their subject matter, — in their landscape with its aboriginal Indians, and in the inspiring tone of self-reliance that speaks in all his stories. Colonel Sellers and many a Western “ prospector ” as sketched by Bret Harte answer more completely to our idea of the American; at least, of the American as he is at present. Cooper’s conscious or unconscious endeavors to represent his countryman amounted to little more than the portrayal of his own ideal of a man. He was far from being a scientific or objective recorder, but had a conservative bias of idealism. His American, whatever else he might be, must wear the stamp of heroism.

Now this point of view, the point of view from which Cooper wrote, is the oldest one in fiction. It is the view in which the chief personage of a story is native born, yet is so endowed with superior traits as to be raised to a place among the demigods. Fancy the early potency of the idea which first gave birth and currency to the term “hero” for the main person of a tale!

The next stage of representation, logically, is that in which a contrast is drawn between two nations with their particular national ideals. But this stage is almost wanting in our literature. The blunt, raw differences between conflicting orders of civilization have never been depicted by any considerable school of American novelists, however surprising the fact must appear, when one considers the history and conglomerate population of America. Our fiction contains partisan and prejudiced writings, it is true, but it shows no consistent aversion toward any people. Thus the Indian hero is distinguishable in little from the white hero ; the Irish and the German immigrants, strangely enough, have been left as good as undescribed; while the negro and Chinaman are relegated for the most part to short tales, and are not made the objects of exhaustive contrasts.

We have no counterpart, in other words, of the Frenchman who plays so ridiculous a rôle in English novels, or of the Jew who is the cheap villain of German and Russian literatures; no analogues to Debit and Credit and the historical novels of Gutzkow; no duplicates of Anton, whose transparent honesty is made plain against the dark career of Itzel Veitig ; no weighty masterpiece, in short, whose marrow consists in the dramatic differences of race. Our novelists have undertaken nothing further than differences in national breeding, and this chiefly, as we shall see, in respect of heroines, the American girl being contrasted with the European maiden. European, mark you ! Even here no special nationality is picked out, as Poles and Jews have been in Germany and the French in England, to serve as a foil to native traits.

But although American romanticists have rejected the means of accentuating the contours of their personages with the strong, divergent traits which nationality affords, they have employed at least the second easiest way that exists for obtaining piquant effects. They have set forth past periods of time in one and the same country. There are exceptions, it is true, but the fact remains that the bulk of the literature which has been referred to uses the early or colonial period in America for its subject. This period, naturally, cannot be in the mind of the reader without his contrasting it with his own time; so that the chosen period of time serves as a similar foil to that found in the opposition of one nationality to another.

II.

The school that follows is the first to take up contemporary life. It casts off boldly even the aid of historical perspective ; and under the ægis of realism it paints what it sees and knows. No wonder that the fullest number of representative American types may be looked for in its works. With this method of portraiture, the latest studies of Americans must necessarily be the most complete. For our national existence is more complete now than it was in colonial times ; and a personage is apt to be markedly national the longer is the period of uninterrupted history behind him.

The Colonel Sellers of Mark Twain is a “ modern ” through and through, as he would describe himself, and “ no mistake ; ” a character of the sharpest and most distinct individuality, in no wise to be confounded with the money-getting men of other lands. For the “ colonel ” is a materialist without being mean, brutal, or sensual, and ambitious without being ruthless either by disposition or in practice. Money is a god ; but his worship of it has a quixotic quality, for it is a god of his imagination. There is nothing in it of fetichism, which, when disappointed, beats the object of its former groveling adulation. He loves a scheme, when looked at closely, in great part because of its daring and originality ; and he can glow over it whether it fills his own pocket or another’s. He begrudges no man his luck. The “hits” of other men inflame him with the creative wish of making a success of his own hobby. He spends his time as little in complaint as in gloating over dreams of luxury. He eats his dinner on a pine table, and glorifies the low room and the thin face of his drudging wife, flushed from cooking, with the golden shimmer of great and growing expectations. For the rest, he is a good husband, a chaste man, temperate, kind — even weak — to children, freehanded, trustful, and looks the world in the face, experiencing only gratification when the world, on its side, looks Colonel Sellers in the face. The trunk of his nature is a healthy selfishness that sends out runners into nearly every field of virtue.

He does not fulfill the national idea in one respect : he is not successful.

But success is like the fall of a curtain and the end of a play. The engaging part of life is the struggle that precedes and leads up to this conclusion.

I incline to think that the instinct which demands it for the typical American character is just, and is warranted by the actual comparative statistics of life. But in its absence, the fact which is of the most importance to us is the general impression which the description of the colonel leaves upon the mind. This is one of buoyancy to the end, and so responds to an American ideal. Indeed, it is hard to measure how much this distinctive feature of irrepressibleness has had to do with the popularity of Sellers. Certain it is that the character meets with more concurrence of opinion as representative than any other which American fiction has produced.

In comparison with the colonel Silas Lapham is less successful, although Mr. Howells has drawn the character with uncommon literary skill. Lapham is a back-country man, who discovers mineral paint on his farm, uses the discovery, and develops a good deal of practical shrewdness. In the moment of his highest selfsatisfaction he dines for the first time at the house of a refined Boston gentleman. Here he gets drunk, and begins to boast.

Now Colonel Sellers boasts, too ; but Sellers’s boasting is a sort of magnified business scheming. Silas Lapham’s boasting is personal twaddle. He tells his host and the deprecating company of his former readiness to call anybody a liar who should have predicted his ever sitting at the same table on an equality with such fine gentlemen. The incident fixes itself upon the memory through the unparalleled strength of the author’s delineation of it, and it is one which is accepted as very likely to have occurred in life, although we have not been prepared for a display of drunkenness by the description of Lapham’s habits. Drunkenness, however, is a universal solvent of brutality and vulgarity, as potent in Calcutta as in Boston, in Africa as in the United States. The scene in the novel which has the effect of climax is, therefore, hardly specifically American. Nor indeed has common judgment accorded the character of this hero more than an approximation to the typical truth.

This is the case, perhaps, with another of Mr. Howells’s personages, Lemuel Barker, in The Minister’s Charge, a book which is considered one of the author’s chief creations ; it is well to remark, because it takes the rise of an American lad for its theme. Colonel Sellers and Silas Lapham are already middle-aged men when we first know them. Lemuel, who is growing up on an ill-kept farm in the hands of his widowed, gaunt New England mother, has taken the notion, through a city clergyman’s good-humored praise of his verses, to go to the metropolis. His mother tells him “ to associate only with the best; ” and his own unsophisticated views quite tally, it may be supposed, with her undefined and simple notions of their being as good as anybody, and superior to many. In town he is brought into personal contact, by means of the minister, with rich and well-bred people, and sees their homes. His innate faculty for discriminating makes him gradually aware of the actual differences and grades of differences between his homely, clumsy manners and the light, conventional forms of fashionable society, as well as the deeperlying disparity between the expression of his sentiments and views and theirs. His literary ambition is quickly crushed. He becomes a servant in a private house, then a book-keeper and caterer of an obscure hotel, and later the hired companion of an invalid gentleman. His final occupation is that of a country schoolteacher.

Success here also is partial only. The level to which Lemuel rises is respectable, but not brilliant. However, the dissatisfaction which the character excites— for it excites dissatisfaction — is hardly owing to this circumstance. I attribute the popular depreciation rather to Mr. Howells’s setting “society ” over against the struggle of Barker to get on in the world. For the same dissatisfaction exists in respect of other novels by the same author. Too strong an emphasis is kept up in them all on social distinctions, or on just that in ignoring which the American recognizes a distinctive originality in his countrymen. The favorites of our fiction, among whom are Colonel Sellers and Daisy Miller, go through life quite unincumbered by a sense of social inferiority; and the national theory leaves to the folk of monarchical states the practice of taking etiquette and social rank or degree seriously. The generality of Americans, out of the midst of whom the typical American must spring, who overcome every other disadvantage of life, are thought of as adapting themselves to fashionable usages, as far as they discern them, without much ado or heartache. Social self-consciousness not only lasts a shorter time, but plays also a minor rôle than that given it in the lives of this author’s rising Americans. Such susceptibility to fashionable culture and such preoccupation with shades of social niceties as he attributes to his hero popular opinion attributes to scheming old American women ; and, what is more, the public believes that American men relegate these matters to the women.

As for the heroines of Mr. Howells, they are for the most part young, and agree in this particular with old traditional models (not with the oldest, for Helen, Penelope, and Dido were “ women of thirty,” as Jules Janin must be reminded). For the rest, however, they exhibit exquisitely novel traits. Alice dresses charmingly and goes to entertainments and fashionable resorts, yet is austere and wanting in coquetry. She is wanting almost in high spirits, while her maidenly purity is such that to mention the word " chaste ” shocks the reader as a jarring superfluity. Her prejudices are prompt, and possess the cruel unqualifiedness of extreme youth and inexperience. Love absorbs her, not like a passion to be given way to, or a sentiment to be enjoyed, as is the case with the Gretchens of romance, but as a sanctifying possession. Far from being the charter of a surrender of herself to her lover, love is received as the ultimatum of a high power over both, demanding a common castigation and chastening. Her maiden fancies have not been filled habitually, as it comes to light, with the future man of her choice, for she is unprepared to accept the slightest divergence or obliquity of her lover; nor does she possess a fund of tender compliance or blandishments. She is awkward instead, and has the curtness of restrained and coy vehemence. Separation makes her ill and self-interrogatory. In every circumstance, indeed, the character is consistently scrupulous, self-conscious, and intense, with a mind more set on holding fast to truth as she sees it than on holding fast to men.

The divergence here from the romantic and from the Continental type of the maiden character is very considerable. German romance lets the girl sacrifice herself to the man, French women of fiction and Russian heroines fall sacrifices to passion, and English Dinah Morrises sacrifice themselves to Christian charity. The girl is new in literature who retains herself, or starts out, at least, with retaining herself.

The question arises. Should the novelty be recognized as American ?

I think it has been so recognized. Common opinion may not say that Alice is the American girl par excellence, but it certainly sees in her an American girl.

American, too, are Mr. Howells’s portraits of middle-aged and elderly women. He may be said, indeed, to have been the creator of the American mother, for it was in his writings that she appeared as a constant quantity for the first time ; and although there has not been much ado made over her, the guild of writers show their appreciation of the character by adopting her —usually in the rôle of invalid— as a conventional figure among minor characters.

But the personage after Colonel Sellers with whom the nation has concerned itself most, and whom it has accepted as most typical, is Daisy Miller. This study by Henry James has little intrinsic attraction at first sight ; so little, indeed, at the very last that the verdict of success which it received proceeded from an instinctive perception of its accuracy more than from enthusiasm over its brilliancy. Her genre is that of the American girl abroad. Daisy, in company with her mother and a young brother, travels desultorily over Europe, coming at last to Rome. The mother is still on the level of underbreeding where persons describe themselves often and with unction as “ ladies ” or “ gentlemen.” The young brother, on his part, views the Old World with unmitigated contempt. His disgust reaches even to the European heavens. He declares that in America the moon always shines. Daisy does as she likes, and she likes doing abroad what she did at home, namely, to dress herself daintily and talk with " gentlemen.” She meets with a cynical youngish American who has lived on the Continent for a long time. He has the flattering consciousness of seeing through the social grade of the Miller family, while Daisy is disturbed at perceiving that something in her is not right to his eyes. She is pleased as a child when her propositions to go out with “ gentlemen ” succeed, and flatters herself that she must be awakening the jealousy of the man who discomposes her. Unconsciously she refers to him in laying out her daily little schemes of conquest. There is an Italian who believes the family to be rich, and pays his court accordingly to Daisy, who treats him with her habitual little tyrannous self-confidence. Without being a princess, or ever in her life having studied one, she acts continually on the line of absolute sovereignty where men are concerned.

Her associations with the foreign-bred man become more frequent under the discouraging sense that the American is in town and watching her ; for her unsophisticated brain has caught at the notion that he must approve of her more if he sees that somebody pays her " devoted attentions.” She wants to visit the Coliseum by the light of the moon, and easily induces the Italian to take her. The American, on seeing the two at midnight alone in the desolate place, and knowing that others may see them, is indignant and enraged at the mother. But Mrs. Miller has no idea that she is criticised, or indeed that there is anything unusual in Daisy’s doings. She meets her censor with tears when he calls, and with the news of Daisy’s death from fever, caught at the Coliseum, tells him her daughter wished her to say “she was not engaged to the Italian, after all,” or to naïvely reject the sole conventional pretense left to rescue Daisy’s reputation !

The language of the author is unadorned and realistic. But Americans welcomed the disagreeable photographic truths of the study the readier, perhaps, because an open-hearted concession on the points of breeding left them the freer to claim the heroine’s maiden purity as a national radical trait. Daisy’s innocence, in other words, gives much more satisfaction than the peculiarities of her bringing-up can possibly cause mortification. The worse for the Europeans who criticise her ways as peculiar ! At bottom Daisy is a true Una among the beasts, and she triumphs as such ; for the cynical American no less than the Italian is "set about thinking ” considerably. The latter, in fact, does not refrain from giving expression to the result of his prolonged wonderment and ultimate conviction. It is in his testimony to Daisy’s purity that the final element of success is presented, — success which, as we have seen, the nation confidently looks for in the fate of its typical personages.

No like universality and persistency of judgment have been passed upon Elsie Venner and the heroines of books which exhibit modern forms of social activity ; as indeed it lies in the nature of the subject of activity to be transient in respect of the poetic interest that can be got out of it, besides being exposed in every case to the suspicion of partisanship. Such a matter as the advocacy or the rejection of woman’s rights, even if national to-day, may be international tomorrow. That cannot be called a trait, moreover, which is still in the process of formation. A national trait, on the contrary, is something already formed, the result of manifold preëxistent conditions. The work of fiction that selects its personages from among the advocates of the movements of the day may have every quality save the one of typical nationalism, which is just that quality which at present concerns us.

Similarly the charming characters of Mr. Cable must also be passed by. The provincialism which he depicts is quite unlike that of Hawthorne or of Bret Harte in being a provincialism which is doomed to decay. New England asceticism and Western enterprise and daring are ingredients which have leavened the character of the whole American people. Not so with French and Creole qualities. These have only a poetic and historic worth, and a narrowing local existence. Briefly, we find that American writers have embodied the characteristics which distinguish Americans, but as yet have produced few characters that are universally accepted as typically American. Among these accepted characters is the sanguine materialist, who is rooted in selfishness, but sends out runners into the fields of public and private virtue, and the American girl, who is a favorite subject and a new creation in literature. The aged American is a figure totally unknown to our fiction; but the elderly woman, aged by nervous illness before her time, is a very familiar personage.

III.

Upon contrasting our view of American literature with the view which Germans have taken of it, the first fact that strikes us is the persistence of Germans in clinging to our novels of romantic adventure as furnishing the type of the American. Cooper and Bret Harte are the favorites in Germany, and the works of these writers circulate in excellent translations, while our contemporary society fiction, as represented by the works of James and Howells, is read less, and often only in the original; perhaps I should be correct in adding, only after the first-named authors, — a fact which deserves attention, inasmuch as Americans by no means select for their reading the productions of the German romanticists in preference to the realistic novels of Auerbach and Freytag.

Scenes of adventure, however, of wild night landscapes, of powerful heroes, and of license in passion were long familiar to the German reading world. Their incorporation in the novels of Cooper and the tales of Bret Harte possessed, therefore, no outlandish strangeness save the one last stirring element of reality. America was a land of license to the unsophisticated burgher, and stories that had for heroes men of primeval recklessness and supreme magnanimity met with spontaneous popularity.

“ In truth, our interest in America is of a romantic sort still,” Julian Schmidt observes. “ There is a preference for the primitiveness of the aboriginal mixed with the old enthusiasm for the champions of the American war for independence, which set the revolutionary movement going in Europe. . . . At first we saw the Indians with Châteaubriand’s eyes ; then came the series of Cooper’s novels.” ²

In Cooper’s style, accordingly, are the novels of Sealsfield and Gerstaecker. From Ruppius, indeed, down to the German Pioneers of Spielhagen, published in 1872, the main feature of all German productions that have American life for their theme has been adventure. Imminent danger and escape make up their bulk, and heroic virtue, embodied in youthful healthy men and women, stamps all their leading characters. In Max Reichardt, of Ruppius’s novel A German, the heroic takes even a Joseph turn, so that chastity is added to the older stereotyped list of superhuman qualities.

We are in a field here with romantic shades for personages, — too unsubstantial, in spite of their would-be-force, for analysis. All nuances fail. All likelihood is wanting. We are given mere contours of heroes, as empty as a coat of mail set up in a museum ; and just as anybody can don a coat of mail, so might a citizen of any state in the world be fitted into these romantic cases. As a matter of fact, the outlines of Cooper’s heroes are filled out by Gerstaecker, Ruppius, Möllhausen, Spielhagen, and Schücking with German occupants. Native Prussians, Bavarians, or Würtembergers supplant the early Yankee colonists as masters over Indians, enemies, and fate. Indeed, often the tables are turned wholly against the original Yankee. His shrewdness becomes unscrupulousness, while his pure virtues are shown up in the German hero of the story. From the beginning to the end of the tale American license is set in contrast with Teutonic civil order and conscientiousness.

Even Debit and Credit, which is the best novel, perhaps, that Germany has produced, discloses a survival of this romantic tendency. The evil portions of Von Fink’s life are the years spent in New York. Freytag makes his hero relate what corruptions he fell into there as a young lad; and it is behind the desk of a German grocery store that the hero’s manly sense of discipline and right is so far restored that he urges the American land speculators, who are his partners, to exercise humanity toward the immigrants on their land. When persuasion fails, he bribes the American press to expose the speculators and himself ! — thus showing that your true German is as clever at Yankee dodges as the Yankee, besides being as virtuous on a large scale as the original Cooperite.

The truth is, the greater portion of the romantic literature under discussion, both American and German, depends for its characterization upon the field over which its personages move, upon the background of the plot. For this reason it was easy to replace Yankees by Germans ; for where peculiarities of landscape and race are depicted with equal skill—and some of the pages of Möllhausen are unsurpassed — the result conveys the same impression. It matters very little what nationality is ascribed to personages so long as these are the old ideals of literature, the old “ heroes ” dubbed with new names and titles.

Nationality after all is more political than geographical. But with Ruppius, Möllhausen, and Sealsfield the geographical and ethnological idea was predominant. Nor was it in their times that Americanism was seen to consist in many-sided social peculiarities, in character and habits, in opinions and views. Thus one fails to find such characterization in their books, where the passive nature of the American hero is dwelt on more than the deeds which he accomplishes ; where his surroundings are commonplace and dull (for in America as well as in the Old World most surroundings are commonplace and dull) ; where indeed the surroundings may be those of the European without in the least detracting from the subtle distinctness of his separate nationalism. An insight into the true nature of a people might have been expected of a literary nation like the German earlier than of the Americans themselves, whose time was engrossed with practical problems. But we seek in vain for evidences of such insight from German writers. On the contrary, they have borrowed from American literature what they possess of insight, and borrowed tardily. Möllhausen is still writing his American novels of adventure, and he has both readers and disciples. The era is a very recent one, in fact, in which “ American ” has come to mean something besides fighting with red Indians and squabbling with ruffianly gold diggers.

The change in attitude toward American subjects is very slow in making itself felt. The novels of Cooper obtained a vogue rapidly, but a generation of writers has had time to flourish and decline since his day ; yet the obscure levels of German fiction still swarm with Indians and adventurers whenever America is concerned.

Nearly all writers, meanwhile, introduced an American into their fiction, just as they still introduce if not an American, at least an Americanized German. Gutzkow treated the character in Ackermann, one of the personages of his famous Ritter vom Geist; Gustav Freytag, in his novels Soll und Haben and Die Verlorene Handschrift, and in Saalfeld, a character in his drama Die Valentine; while Spielhagen’s hero, Leo, in the novels In Reih und Glied and Durch Nacht zum Licht, is also exposed to American influences. Gutzkow, Spielhagen, and Von Moser have immortalized the Yankee spirit of enterprise in a manner that contrasts strongly with the rôle which the German, on his side, is made to play in our humorous fiction, and more in accordance with George Eliot’s forceful personification Herr Klesmer, who is presented in a large and catholic way.

Yet while the recent writing about Americans is realistic, sharper, better, and more discriminating, it is curious to note that fewer of the new men who occupy themselves with American characteristics have seen the United States than was the case with the old school. Ruppius, Gerstaecker, Sealsfield, and Möllhausen all lived in America for a time, at least. Of the moderns, or realists, perhaps Paul Lindau is the only one who has ever set foot upon the new continent. The material for the portrayal of American traits is gathered, therefore, by the later school, from American contemporary literature, and from Yankee tourists and residents in the fatherland.

The theory that one must see a country if he would write accurately of its people may seem to be disturbed by this fact; but the truth is, this whole subject of national fiction has yet to be worked out. It is easy to perceive that European writers possess certain advantages in separating a few individuals from the vast, confusing, loosely knit American life, and setting them against the compact, familiar background of home characters and manners. These characters stand out in relief, as it were, and can be studied in finest nuances of shade and light. The attention is concentrated. The feelings — and this is not a minor point— remain undisturbed. Political and social prepossessions, the elements that unfit the mind most, in our day, for artistic international study, are forgotten before the spectacle of a solitary figure in his pilgrimage amidst a landscape full of strange scenes ; he is like the lion of the tale, that

The German in America may have remained the indistinct literary personage we find him because of this lack of isolation. For the two cases are not interchangeable. Germany sends thousands of emigrants to America, while America sends at once but a few lonely students and a mass of restless tourists. The American author, therefore, has not, like the German, a single person or two for the subject of his studies, but a colony. Can any one predict an early change in the present condition ? Is not an additional hindrance to an adequate delineation of the German in our literature to be detected in the continued absorption of the German in American life, — an absorption that is likely to arouse the political prepossessions of German writers, and so give rise to a bitter partisan literature on their side, while the absorption confuses the German outline for our own writers ?

The second source from which German novelists draw material for the portrayal of American characters, namely, contemporary American fiction, was opened by German authors who were driven from their country by the severity of its military and press laws, and found refuge in America.

Hence has arisen a literature similar to that of the émigrées from France at the beginning of the century ; except that for one Madame de Staël who penetrates a foreign society and its literary life our newspaper age scatters the criticisms of innumerable refugees ; and in place of long books, Germans write of us in letters, short journalistic notices, and monthly reviews. There is greater variety in the means, however, than is to be found in the results. For just as the French came to understand the social peculiarities of the Germans through the writings of their exiles, so did the adherents of Scott and Cooper in Germany come to understand through the “ men of '48 ” the traditional nature of the view which they were holding of Americans; they began to substitute Bret Harte for the author of The Last of the Mohicans, while German writers relinquished adventures in the West and began depicting Yankees in the fatherland ; and the latest novel of a high order in which Americans play a rôle concerns itself solely with the American character; the American background is left out.

In The American Girl, by Sophie Junghans, the heroine is of German descent, and appears alone in Germany as a boarder in the family of the widow of a German medical man. Her wardrobe fills several trunks, and is so rich in quality and variety as to excite of itself a good deal of envious respect. The widow’s daughters, who have been neglected hitherto, are patronized by the society of the town, and a lieutenant of the regiment of horse stationed in the place condescends also to their circle, in order to pay court to their wealthy boarder.

Miss Webster displays an uncommon frankness and force of will from the start. She is eager for distracting entertainment ; she takes painting lessons, sings with an actress who has retired from the stage, gets up picnics, rides with the lieutenant, and undertakes to dispose of the leisure time of a young assessor. She flirts with the latter, and lets the lieutenant kiss her in a garden bower where they halt during a ride. Later, on the road home, she announces her expectation of an offer of marriage; whereupon the astonished young officer declares that he finds her grit and candor superb. He had been shocked and distressed at her emancipated American manners, more out of regard for what others would think than from personal feeling. So in his enthusiasm at having proved that the girl is really strict, — for she repulsed his warmer advances, — and has the courage to demand the conventional contract that vindicates confessions of passion, he prays her to allow him to present her to his mother. She can tell his mother of her past.

Miss Webster reflects. She answers him in monosyllables. The mention of her past brings up pictures of drinkingsaloons in the West, where her father was the landlord or bar-tender. As her horse starts and rears before a drunken tramp in the road, she shudders. The face of the man is disfigured by vice, but she has recognized it as that of her father, who is wont to follow her thus from one place to another, that he may expose her or obtain fresh supplies of money. She considers it quite probable that he may at any moment knock at the door of the widow’s house ; yet while the young assessor, that evening, is put out of sorts by a trifle and cannot follow the moves of his chessmen, she masters her imminent dread, and concentrates her mind upon the game, with final success.

The plot of the novel is complicated, but the character of Miss Webster is clear enough. While she does not hold it to be incumbent on her to speak of the humbleness of her origin and connections, she will not disavow them should they become known. Her nature is self-reliant and independent; she is quite free from servile social hypocrisy. She allows herself a certain license in large interests, such as the attainment of worldly position ; but she balances her excess in this direction by drawing a line for her own conduct well inside the conventional allowance of flattery. The servility and eavesdropping inquisitiveness of the widow and her daughters disgust her. Nor does she condescend to fabricate explanations for them, even when she notices that some of her directions, such as her order to have all her letters put at once into her private box, excite suspicion. Her aims are of importance enough to justify the utmost bravery in their pursuit. When they shall prove impracticable, she is ready to grasp other plans with new and full energy, without spending overmuch time in regret and mortification.

Miss Webster, in short, is one of the personages that have been evolved in German literature at the same time that native American literature has been forming its Daisy Millers and Alices; she is an embodiment of the practical, active type of the American girl, as these are of the passive, sentimental, retiring type. Her appearance is quite common ; indeed, there is scarcely an American heroine in German fiction who has not more or less of Miss Webster’s forwardness. Even the refined Otillie in Lindau’s Mayo, it may be remembered, makes advances to her admirer. She is frank, courageous, and sterling, the German “ American girl; ” but she lacks the soft immaturity of youth. Her character is mature ; her will is determined ; her life is concentrated upon a single aim. She does not wish to be merely like some heroines of the American variety; she is a female duplicate of the self - made man.

IV.

A greater variety of character is found among the delineations of American men, although even here the types may be reduced to two. Gutzkow, Freytag, and their followers make their Americans or Americanized Germans single men, unincumbered by a wife or family. This, too, is the case in Spielhagen’s early romances ; for Leo goes to America, and returns thence alone. In Paul Lindau’s Mayo, the hero is compelled to quit the military service because of a gambling debt, and betroths himself afterward in America. But the action of the novel plays itself out with this betrothal. Mayo threatened, therefore, but did not break the standing order of the day.

This has been done thoroughly for the first time by Spielhagen in his tale A New Pharaoh, where a group of Americans compose the centre of the novel’s action. We shall see later what their quality is. In the mean time it must be noted that Spielhagen follows the new current by representing Americans in Germany ; whereas Paul Lindau fell back into the practice of the old school of Sealsfield, Gerstaecker, and Ruppius, when he transported his hero to the United States.

The first chapter of Mayo opens with a street and bachelor-lodgings scene in Berlin; the story continues, however, with narrations of life in the wild West, and closes finally in a Kansas parlor. Miss Webster makes her début, as we have seen, in a provincial town ; Ackermann, Saalfeld, and Von Fink reside in provincial cities. Spielhagen places his Curtis family in none of these habitual literary backgrounds. He finds strong enough contrasts outside of the picturesque old haunts of the fatherland for his Americans, and boldly sets them in the middle of the new imperial capital of Berlin, and in the midst of its fashionable, ambitious society. With his surroundings Mr. Curtis offers a quite new figure per se, — new, that is in German literature. The Beautiful American Girls, by the same author, contains the germ of the character ; so also is it implied by Auerbach in A Villa on the Rhine, and by Freytag in Debit and Credit; but the full-fledged business swindler appears, massive and successful, for the first time here, and on German soil.

The romances of Gerstaecker and Ruppius swarm with American swindlers ; swindle, sham, and vulgarity were the contents, too, of Die Europa müden. But the cultivated writers of the new school, the authors who include Americans among the phenomena of social life, and treat them as observers and students treat a chance specimen that has fallen in their way, depict us generally as radicals. Republicanism, emancipation, reformation, renovation, innovation, — these are the marks they have found in the Yankee, the features that compose his type.

Something of this character inheres even in Freytag’s heroes ; for although Von Fink has probed the quicksilvery bottom of American business corruption, he has also gained an insight into New World enterprise and been infected by American boldness. His engineering scheme on his Polish estate is a result of his American experiences. Mosenthal’s hero is open in his acknowledgment of the source whence came the radical blood that he attempts to infuse into the sluggish social and agricultural veins of the fatherland. Gutzkow’s Ackermann is a foil among foils ; but his quality is meant to be typically American, and as such we have in him a practical, vigorous fellow, whose reforming theories permeate his very being, — “ have hands and feet,” as the phrase goes, —while the theories of his Catholic friends nestle in the brain, and those of his socialist friends in the heart. Leo, in Durch Nacht zum Licht, adds to his own original political revolutionism by contact with American life. He is not altered, perhaps, but he is intensified; and this essence of stimulation is the one and invariable trait which German authors of eminence assign as of one accord to the specifically American in their American or Americanized personages.

Nor has Spielhagen, one of the most eminent, left the beaten track in his latest book. Mr. Smith (Baron von Alden), a German political refugee, has found his leaning toward republicanism confirmed by his exile in the United States ; and at the close of the novel he returns by choice to New York. He is a copy, therefore, of the favorite old type, — a political reformer and enthusiast.

The familiar path is trodden by a familiar figure, but he has a new associate. And this second hero, who is a born American, turns aside from the narrow path of idealism into the broad way of financial business. We have, in a word, the types that have formed themselves in both literatures, the German and American: the type that was evolved out of the practical experiences and inner consciousness of Germans, and that which has been transposed from the pages of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, as well as from those of James and even of Howells. For Mr. Curtis is a swindling and successful Colonel Sellers; his son, the thin-blooded young man of Henry James’s books ; Anne Curtis, the frank, strong-minded American girl; and Mrs. Curtis, the invalid mother, is of a type familiar to us in the writings of Howells.

Frankness as a trait of American girls is made to figure conspicuously in foreign literatures, and is often shown in German fiction to have its source in a general physical and moral courage ; but the American girl’s purity as respects love is not conceded. American literature has stormed the fortress of Old World literary prepossessions and held up its Daisy Millers in vain ; the storming effects only a partial breach. The new image is recorded but as a momentary phantom, which is likely to " materialize ” into flesh of the traditional quality so soon as it is imbued with passion and assailed by temptation.

In the hands of German authors the American girl is not represented as clinging to the maiden period with zest and keen appreciation of its superior freedom ; while on the other hand Daisy Miller’s coquetry goes so far only because it answers to no check of inner consciousness. It is the untethered lamb that frisks in every field with silly willfulness, quite ignorant of the prevalence and the nature of lions. Miss Webster, on the contrary, and all her German sort remain undevoured only because no king of the beasts of their ambition or imagination has crossed their paths.

The heroism of the German American girl is the familiar ewig weibliche literary heroism of surrender. The American example, that substitutes a self-retention for the European self-sacrifice, is not followed out, although it might be thought to have an attraction for a nation so scientific; female self-retention being after all a logical form of the universal human instinct of self-preservation. It is exaggerated into an extreme, moreover, in respect of all other objects than lovers.

One last trait that must be mentioned because of its invariable use is the American sense of superiority. It may be introduced, as by Gustav Freytag, to be put to shame; but — it is there. The Yankee or the Americanized German feels himself better, smarter, and freer than Bismarck’s Prussians or the Reich’s Unterthanen. The coarser the personage and the more narrow-minded, especially the more material is his view of life, the more indiscriminate are his criticisms of German peculiarities. The sickly, scholarly Ralph, in A New Pharaoh, shows his appreciation of German learning by making his last pilgrimage to its seat, and deprecates only certain political and social conditions, while his coarse father has a cut-and-dried theory that Germans are born stupid, and so deserve to be gulled and swindled.

On the whole, the traits that are prominent in our portraiture of ourselves are faithfully raised into relief by German fiction. The modeling touches put upon them bring forth different individuals, but their species is the same. The hero is middle-aged and material, the elderly matron invalid, and the heroine young and independent. There are no “ heroines of thirty,” nor are there any naïve Margarets. These prevailing types are set aside once for all whenever Americans are represented.

It is true that the self-made or the self-making girl of German literature is scarcely a substitute for the native American girl. She is apt to appear rather like an exaggeration ; yet a certain resemblance cannot be denied. She is similar to our own Alices in that, if not a type of the average American maiden, she is at least a copy of an American girl. The German representation of the American character possesses indeed the merit of originality ; yet this self-made girl and the reforming energetic young hero, do they not both illustrate the effect of American examples ?

Lida von Krockow.