German Literature and the American Temper

[The writer of this article wishes to state that it was written last spring, and is printed here without changes, although in the present condition of European affairs, the opening paragraph sounds grimly irrelevant.]

I

IN this age of exchange professorships, peace dinners, and other means of cementing friendships between great nations, it is a somewhat ungrateful, if not dangerous, undertaking to emphasize differences of national temper. If, then, I make bold to venture a few remarks upon the essential dissimilarity of the American and the German temper, and upon the effect of this dissimilarity on the standing of German literature in America, I had better preface them by saying that nothing is further removed from my mind than the desire to sow seeds of international discord, even if it were in my power to do so. Indeed, having entertained for some thirty years relations to both Germany and the United States which might be described as a sort of intellectual bigamy, I have come to be as peaceable a person as it behooves a man in such a delicate marital situation to be. But while I have honestly tried in these thirty years to make the two divinities presiding over my intellectual household understand and appreciate each other, I have again and again been forced to the conclusion that such a mutual understanding of my two loves was for the most part a matter of conscious and conscientious effort, and hardly ever the result of instinctive give-and-take.

Perhaps the most fundamental, or shall I say elementary, difference between the German temper and the American may be expressed by the word ‘slowness.' Is there any possible point of view from which slowness might appear to an American as something desirable? I think not. Indeed, to call a thing or a person slow seems to spread about them an atmosphere of complete and irredeemable hopelessness. Compare with this the reverently sturdy feelings likely to be aroused in a German breast by the words ‘langsam und feierlich’ inscribed over a religious or patriotic hymn, and imagine a German Männerchor singing such a hymn, with all the facial and tonal symptoms of joyful and devout slowness of cerebral activity — and you have in brief compass a specimen-demonstration of the difference in tempo in which the two national minds habitually move.

It has been said that the ‘langsamer Schritt’ of the German military drill was in the last resort responsible for the astounding victories which in 1870 shook the foundations of Imperial France. Similarly, it might be said that slowness of movement and careful deliberateness are at the bottom of most things in which Germans have excelled. To be sure, the most recent development of Germany, particularly in trade and industry, has been most rapid, and the whole of German life of to-day is thoroughly American in its desire for getting ahead and for working under High pressure. But this is a condition forced upon Germany from without through international competition and the exigencies of the worldmarket rather than springing from the inner tendency of German character itself. And it should not be forgotten that it was the greatest German of modern times, Goethe, who, anticipating the present era of speed, uttered this warning: ‘Railways, express posts, steamships, and all possible facilities for swift communication, — these are the things in which the civilized world is now chiefly concerned, and by which it will over-civilize itself and arrive at mediocrity.’

As to German literary and artistic achievements, is it not true that — for better or worse — their peculiarly German stamp consists to a large extent in a certain slowness of rhythm and massiveness of momentum? Goethe himself is a conspicuous example. Even in his most youthful and lively drama, Goetz von Berlichingen, what a broad foundation of detail, how deliberately winding a course of action, how little of dramatic intensity, how much of intimate revelation of character! His Iphigenie and Tasso consist, almost exclusively of the gentle and steady swaying to and fro of contrasting emotions; they carry us back and forth in the ebb and flow of passion, but they never hurl us against the rocks or plunge us into the whirlpool of mere excitement. No wonder the American college boy finds them slow. And what shall we say of Wilhelm Meister? Not only American college boys, I fear, will sympathize with Marianne’s falling soundly asleep when Wilhelm entertains her through six substantial chapters with the account of his youthful puppet-plays and other theatrical enterprises. And yet, what thoughtful reader can fail to see that it is just this halting method of the narrative, this lingering over individual incidents and individual states of mind, this careful balancing of light and shade, this deliberate arrangement of situations and conscious grouping of characters, this constant effort to see the particular in the light of the universal, to extract wisdom out of the seemingly insignificant, and to strike the water of life out of the hard and stony fact — that it is this which makes Wilhelm Meister not only a piece of extraordinary artistic workmanship, but also a revelation of the moving powers of human existence.

Schiller’s being was keyed to a much higher pitch than Goethe’s, and vibrated much more rapidly. But even his work, and above all his greatest dramatic productions, from Wallenstein to Wilhelm Tell, are marked by stately solemnity rather than by swiftness of movement; he too loves to pause, as it were, ever and anon, to look at his own creations, to make them speak to him and unbosom themselves to him about their innermost motives. No other dramatist has used the monologue more successfully than he as a means of affording moments of rest from the ceaseless flow of action.

As to the German Romanticists, — who has decried more persistently than they the restlessness and hasty-shallowness of human endeavor? Who has sung more rapturously the praises of the deep, impenetrable, calm, unruffled working of nature, the abyss of silent, immovable forces in whose brooding there is contained the best and holiest of existence? And must it not be admitted that, in the best of their own productions, such as parts of Novalis’s rhythmical prose, some Romantic lyrics, some Romantic paintings, above all in the work of Beethoven and his peers, we receive the impression of a grand, benign, heavenly, all-comprehensive being, slowly and majestically breathing, slowly and majestically irradiating calm and joy and awe and all the blessings of life.

Something of this same slowness of movement we find throughout the nineteenth century in many of the most characteristically German literary achievements. We find it in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, with its seemingly imperturbable, objective, cold, and circumstantial account of events which make one’s blood boil and one’s fist clench. We find it in Otto Ludwig’s Between Heaven and Earth, with its constant reiteration of the fundamental contrast between the two leading figures, and with its constant insistence on the relentlessness of Fate, which gradually, imperceptibly, but inevitably drives them to the deadly clash with each other. We find it in the diffuse, lingering, essentially epic style of most of Gerhart Hauptmann’s dramas. We find it even in a man of such extraordinary nervous excitability and sensitiveness as Richard Wagner. Nothing perhaps is more German in Richard Wagner than the broad, steady, sustained onward march of his musical themes, — notably so in Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and Die Walküre. Surely there is no haste here; the question of time seems entirely eliminated; these masses of sound move on regardless, one might say, of the limitations of the human ear; they expand and contract, gather volume and disperse, in endless repetition, yet in always new combinations; they advance and recede, surge on, ebb away and rise again to a mighty flood, with something like rhythmical fatality, so that the hearer finally has no other choice than to surrender to them as to a mighty and overwhelming pressing on of natural forces. To be sure, I have known people — and not only Americans—who would have preferred that the death-agonies of Tristan in the last act should be somewhat accelerated by a stricter adherence of Isolde’s boat to schedule time.

A striking consequence of this difference of tempo in which the American mind and the German naturally move, and perhaps the most conspicuous example of the practical effect of this difference upon national habits, is the German regard for authority and the American dislike of it. For the slower circulation in the brain of the German makes him more passive and more easily inclined to accept the decisions of others for him, while the self-reliant and agile American is instinctively distrustful of any decision which he has not made himself.

Here, then, is another sharp distinction between the two national tempers, another serious obstacle to the just appreciation of the German spirit by the American.

I verily believe that it is impossible for an American to understand the feelings which a loyal German subject, particularly of the conservative sort, entertains toward the State and its authority. That the State should be anything more than an institution for the protection and safeguarding of the happiness of individuals; that it might be considered as a spiritual, collective personality, leading a life of its own, beyond and above the life of individuals; that service for the State, therefore, or the position of a state official, should be considered as something essentially different from any other kind of useful employment, — these are thoughts utterly foreign to the American mind, and very near and dear to the heart of a German. The American is apt to receive an order or a communication from a public official with feelings of suspicion and with a silent protest; the German is apt to feel honored by such a communication and fancy himself elevated thereby to a position of some public importance.

The American is so used to thinking of the police as the servant, and mostly a very poor servant, of his private affairs, that on placards forbidding trespassing upon his grounds he frequently adds an order, ‘Police take notice’; the German, especially if he does not look particularly impressive himself, will think long before he makes up his mind to approach one of the impressive-looking Schutzleute to be found at every street corner, and deferentially ask him the time of day. The American dislikes the uniform as an embodiment of irksome discipline and subordination, he values it only as a sort of holiday outfit and for parading purposes; to the German the ‘King’s Coat’ is something sacrosanct and inviolable, an embodiment. of highest national service and highest national honor.

With such fundamental antagonism in the American to the German view of state and official authority, is it surprising that a large part of German literature, that part which is based on questions touching the relations of the individual to state and country, should have found very little sympathy with the average American reader? It has taken more than a hundred years for that fine apotheosis of Prussian discipline, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz von Hamburg, to find its way into American literature through the equally fine translation by Hermann Hagedorn; and I doubt whether this translation would have been undertaken but for its author’s having German blood in his veins.

As for other representative men of nineteenth-century German literature who stood for the subordination of the individual to monarchical authority,— men like Hebbel, W. H. Riehl, Gustav Freytag, Ernst von Wildenbruch, — they have remained practically without influence, and certainly without following, in America.

II

Closely allied with this German sense of authority, and again in sharp contrast with American feeling, is the German distrust of the average man. In order to realize the fundamental polarity of the two national tempers in this respect also, one need only think of the two great representatives of American and German political life in the nineteenth century: Lincoln and Bismarck. Lincoln in every fibre of his being a son of the people, an advocate of the common man, an ideal type of the best instincts of the masses, a man who could express with the simplicity of a child his ineradicable belief in the essential right-mindedness of the plain folk. Bismarck with every pulse-beat of his heart the chivalric vassal of his imperial master; the invincible champion of the monarchical principle; the caustic scorner of the crowd; the man who, whenever he notices symptoms in the crowd that he is gaming popularity with it, becomes suspicious of himself and feels inclined to distrust the justice of his own cause; the merciless cynic who characterizes the futile oratorical efforts of a silver-tongued political opponent by the crushing words, ‘He took me for a mass meeting.’

But not only the political life of the two countries presents this difference of attitude toward the average man. The great German poets and thinkers of the last century were all of them aristocrats by temper. Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, the Romanticists, Heine, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche — is there a man among them who would not have begged off from being classed with the advocates of common sense or being called a spokesman of the masses? What a difference from two of the most characteristically American men of letters, Walt Whitman and Emerson: the one consciously and purposely a man of the street, glorying, one might say boastfully, in his comradeship with the crudest and roughest of tramps and dockhands; the other a philosopher of the field, a modern St. Francis, a prophet of the homespun, an inspired interpreter of the ordinary, — perhaps the most enlightened apostle of democracy that ever lived. Is it not natural that a people which, although with varying degrees of confidence, acknowledges such men as Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Emerson as the spokesmen of its convictions on the value of the ordinary intellect, should on the whole have no instinctive sympathy with a people whose intellectual leaders are men like Bismarck, Goethe, and Richard Wagner?

To be sure, there is another, a democratic side to German life, and this side naturally appeals to Americans. But German democracy is still in the making, it has not yet achieved truly great things, it has not yet found a truly great exponent either in politics or in literature. In literature its influence has exhausted itself largely, on the one hand, in biting satire of the ruling classes, such as is practiced to-day most successfully by the contributors to Simplizissimus and similar papers, sympathizing with Socialism; on the other hand, in idyllic representations of the healthy primitiveness of peasant life and the humble contentedness and respectability of the artisan class, the small tradespeople and subaltern officials—I am thinking, of course, of such sturdy and charming stories of provincial Germany as have been written by Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Reuter, Peter Rosegger, and Heinrich Seidel. It may be that all these men have been paving the way for a great epoch of German democracy; it may be that some time there will arise truly constructive minds that will unite the whole of the German people in an irresistible movement for popular rights, which would give the average man the same dominating position which he enjoys in this country. But clearly this time has not yet come. In Germany, expert training still overrules common sense and dilettanteism.

The German distrust of the average intellect has for its logical counterpart another national trait which it is hard for Americans to appreciate — the German bent for vague intuitions of the infinite. It seems strange in this age of cold observation of facts, when the German scientist and the German captain of industry appear as the most striking embodiments of national greatness, to speak of vague intuitions of the infinite as a German characteristic. Yet throughout the centuries this longing for the infinite has been the source of much of the best and much of the poorest in German intellectual achievements. From this longing for the infinite sprang the deep inwardness and spiritual fervor which impart such a unique charm to the contemplative thought of the German Mystics of the fourteenth century. In this longing for the infinite lay Luther’s greatest inspiration and strength. It was the longing for the infinite which Goethe felt when he made his Faust say, —

This longing for the infinite was the very soul of German Romanticism; and all its finest, conceptions, the Blue Flower of Novalis, Fichte’s Salvation by the Will, Hegel’s Self-revelation of the Idea, Schopenhauer’s Redemption from the Will, Nietzsche’s Revaluation of all Values, are nothing but ever new attempts to find a body for this soul.

But while there has thus come a great wealth of inspiration and moral idealism from this German bent for reveling in the infinite, there has also come from it one of the greatest national defects: German vagueness, German lack of form, the lack of sense for the shape and proportion of finite things. Here, then, we meet with another discrepancy between the American and the German character. For nothing is more foreign to the American than the mystic and the vague, nothing appeals more to him than what is clear-cut, easy to grasp, and well proportioned; he cultivates ‘good form’ for its own sake, not only in his social conduct, but also in his literary and artistic pursuits, and he usually attains it easily and instinctively, often at the expense of the deeper substance. To the German, on the contrary, form is a problem. He is principally absorbed in the subjectmatter, the idea, the inner meaning; he struggles to give this subject-matter, this inner meaning, an adequate outer form; and he often fails. To comfort himself, he has invented a technical term designed to cover up his failure: he falls back on the ‘ inner form ’ of his productions.

German literature and art afford numerous examples of this continuous and often fruitless struggle with the problem of form. Even in the greatest of German painters and sculptors, — Dürer, Peter Vischer, Adolph Menzel, Arnold Böcklin, — there are visible the furrows and the scars imprinted upon them by the struggle; rarely did they achieve a complete and undisputed triumph. Does the literature of any other people possess an author so crowded with facts and observations, so full of feeling, so replete with vague intimations of the infinite, and so thoroughly unreadable as Jean Paul? Is there a parallel anywhere to the formlessness and utter lack of style displayed in Gutzkow’s ambitious nine-volumed Kulturromane? Did any writer ever consume himself in a more tragic and more hopeless striving for a new artistic form than did Kleist and Hebbel? Among the greatest of living European writers is there one so uneven in his work, so uncertain of his form, so inclined to constant experiment and to constant change from extreme naturalism to extreme mysticism, and from extreme mysticism to extreme naturalism, as Gerhart Hauptmann? And who but a German could have written the Second Part of Faust, that tantalizing and irresistible pot-pourri of metres and styles and ideas, of symbolism and satire, of metaphysics and passion, of dryness and sublimity, of the dim mythical past, up-to-date modernity, and prophetic visions of the future — all held together by the colossal striving of an individual reaching out into the infinite?

III

I have reserved for the last place in this review of differences of German and American temper another trait intimately connected with the German craving for the infinite; I give the last place to the consideration of this trait, because it seems to me the most unAmerican of all. I mean the passion for self-surrender.

I think I need not fear any serious opposition if I designate self-possession as the cardinal American virtue, and consequently as the cardinal American defect also. It is impossible to imagine that so unmanly a proverb as the German —

should have originated in New England or Ohio. But it is impossible also to conceive that the author of Werthers Leiden should have obtained his youthful impressions and inspirations in New York City. ‘Conatus sese conservandi unicum virtutis fundamentum’ — this Spinozean motto may be said to contain the essence of the American decalogue of conduct. Always be master of yourself; never betray any irritation, or disappointment, or any other weakness; never slop over; never give yourself away; never make yourself ridiculous — what American would not admit that these are foremost among the rules by which he would like to regulate his conduct?

It can hardly be denied that this habitual self-mastery, this habitual control over one’s emotions, is one of the chief reasons why so much of American life is so uninteresting and so monotonous. It reduces the number of opportunities for intellectual friction, it suppresses the manifestation of strong individuality, often it impoverishes the inner life itself. But, on the other hand, it has given the American that sureness of motive, that healthiness of appetite, that boyish frolicsomeness, that purity of sex-instincts, that quickness and litheness of manners, which distinguish him from most Europeans; it has given to him all those qualities which insure success and make their possessor a welcome member of any kind of society.

If, in contradistinction to this fundamental American trait of self-possession, I designate the passion for self-surrender as perhaps the most significant expression of national German character, I am well aware that here again, I have touched upon the gravest defects as well as the highest virtues of German national life.

The deepest seriousness and the noblest loyalty of German character is rooted in this passion.

that is German sentiment of the most unquestionable sort. Not only do the great, names in German history — as Luther, Lessing, Schiller, Bismarck, and so many others — stand in a conspicuous manner for this thoroughly German devotion, this absorption of the individual in some great cause or principle, but countless unnamed men and women are equally typical representatives of this German virtue of selfsurrender: the housewife whose only thought is for her family; the craftsman who devotes a lifetime of contented obscurity to his daily work; the scholar who foregoes official and social distinction in unremitting pursuit of his chosen inquiry; the official and the soldier, who sink their personality in unquestioning service to the State.

But a German loves not only to surrender himself to a great cause or a sacred task, he equally loves to surrender himself to whims. He loves to surrender to feelings, to hysterias of all sorts; he loves to merge himself in vague and formless imaginings, in extravagant and reckless experience, in what he likes to call ‘ living himself out.’ And thus this same passion for self-surrender which has produced the greatest and noblest types of German earnestness and devotion, has also led to a number of paradoxical excrescences and grotesque distortions of German character. Nobody is more prone to forget his better self in this so-called ‘living himself out’ than the German. Nobody can be a cruder materialist than the German who has persuaded himself that it is his duty to unmask the ‘lie of idealism.’ Nobody can be a more relentless destroyer of all that makes life beautiful and lovely, nobody can be a more savage hater of religious beliefs, of popular tradition, of patriotic instincts, than the German who has convinced himself that by the uprooting of all these things he performs the sacred task of saving society.

In literature this whimsical fanaticism of the German temper has made an even development of artistic tradition, such as is found most conspicuously in France, impossible. Again and again the course of literary development has been interrupted by some bold iconoclast, some unruly rebel against established standards, some impassioned denouncer of what thus far had been considered fine and praiseworthy; so that practically every German writer has had to begin at the beginning, by creating his own standards and canons of style.

No other literature contains so much defamation of its own achievements as German literature; no writers of any other nation have spoken so contemptuously of their own countrymen as German writers of the last hundred years have spoken of theirs, from Hölderlin’s characterization of the Germans as ‘barbarians, made more barbarous by industry, learning, and religion,’to some such sayings by Nietzsche as, ‘Wherever Germany spreads she ruins culture’; or, ‘Wagner is the counter-poison to everything essentially German; the fact that he is a poison too I do not deny’; or, ‘The Germans have not the faintest idea how vulgar they are, they are not even ashamed of being merely Germans’; or, ‘Words fail me, I have only a look, for those who dare to utter the name of Goethe’s Faust in the presence of Byron’s Manfred; the Germans are incapable of conceiving anything sublime.'

Is there cause for wonder, when Germans themselves indulge in such fanatically scurrilous vagaries about their own people and its greatest men, that foreigners are inclined to take their cue from them and come to the conclusion that German literature is after all ‘ merely German ’?

IV

We have considered a number of peculiarly German traits: slowness of temper, regard for authority, distrust of the average intellect, bent for vague intuitions of the infinite, defective sense of form, passion for self-surrender, whimsical fanaticism; and we have seen how every one of these German traits is diametrically opposed to American ways of thinking and feeling. We cannot therefore be surprised that the literature in which these peculiarly German traits find expression should not be particularly popular in America.

As a matter of fact, there has been only one period, and a brief one at that, when German literature exercised a marked influence upon this country, when it even held something like a dominant position. That was about the middle of the nineteenth century, the time of Emerson, Longfellow, Hedge, and Bayard Taylor. That was the time when the creations of classic German literature of the days of Weimar and Jena were welcomed and exalted by the leaders of spiritual America as revelations of a higher life, of a new and hopeful and ennobling view of the world.

At that time there did not exist in America, as to-day, millions of citizens of German birth, the great majority of whom have little in common with the ideals of Goethe and Schiller. At that time the age of industrialism and imperialism had not dawned for Germany. Germany appeared then to the intellectual élite of America as the home of choicest spirits, as the land of true freedom of thought. Wilhelm Meister and Faust, Jean Paul’s Titan and Flegeljahre, Fichte’s Destiny of Man, Schleiermacher’s Addresses on Religion, were then read and reread with something like sacred ardor by small but influential and highly cultivated circles in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. And the few Germans who at that time came to America, most of them as political refugees and martyrs of the Liberal cause, appeared as living embodiments of the gospel of humanity contained in German literature, and were therefore given a cordial and respectful reception.

Things are very different to-day. To be sure, the noble bronze figures of Goethe and Schiller by Rietschel, which stand in front of the Ducal theatre at Weimar, also look down, in the shape of excellent reproductions, upon multitudes of Americans at San Francisco, Cleveland, and Syracuse; and one of the finest monuments to the genius of Goethe ever conceived has recently been dedicated in Chicago. But are these monuments in reality expressions of a wide sway exercised by these two greatest German writers upon the American people? Are they not appeals rather than signs of victory — appeals above all to the Germans in this country to be loyal to the message of classic German literature, to be loyal to the best traditions which bind them to the land of their ancestors, to be loyal to the ideals in which Germany’s true greatness is rooted?

The most encouraging aspect of the present situation is to be found in the study of German literature in American colleges and universities; for there is not a university or a college in the land where there are not well-trained teachers and ardent admirers of what is truly fine and great in German letters. And in spite of all that has been said to-day, there is plenty in the German literary production of the last hundred years which is, or at least should be, of intense interest to Americans, —plenty of wholesome thought, plenty of deep feeling, plenty of soaring imagination, plenty of spiritual treasures which are not for one nation alone, but for all humanity.

For it is a grave mistake to assume, as has been assumed only too often, that, after the great epoch of Classicism and Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Germany produced but little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. True, there is no German Tolstoi, no German Ibsen, no German Zola, but then, is there a Russian Nietzsche, or a Norwegian Wagner, or a French Bismarck? Men like these— men of revolutionary genius, men who start new movements and mark new epochs — are necessarily rare, and stand isolated among any people and at all times.

The three names mentioned indicate that Germany, during the last fifty years, has contributed a goodly share of even such men. Quite apart, however, from such men of overshadowing genius and all-controlling power, can it be truly said that Germany, since Goethe’s time, has been lacking in writers of high aim and notable attainment?

It can be stated without reservation that, taken as a whole, the German drama of the nineteenth century has maintained a level of excellence superior to that reached by the drama of almost any other nation during the same period. Schiller’s Wallenstein and Tell, Goethe’s Iphigenie and Faust, Kleist’s Prinz von Homburg, Grillparzer’s Medea, Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena and Die Nibelungen, Otto Ludwig’s Der Erbförster, Freytag’s Die Journalisten, Anzengruber’s Der Meineidbauer, Wilbrandt’s Der Meister von Palmyra, Wildenbruch’s König Heinrich, Sudermann’s Heimat, Hauptmann’s Die Weber and Der arme Heinrich, Hofmannthal’s Elektra, and, in addition to all these, the great musical dramas of Richard Wagner — this is a century’s record of dramatic achievement of which any nation might be proud. I doubt whether either the French or the Russian or the Scandinavian stage of the nineteenth century, as a whole, comes up to this standard. Certainly, the English stage has nothing which can in any way be compared with it.

That German lyric verse of the last hundred years should have been distinguished by beauty of structure, depth of feeling, and wealth of melody, is not to be wondered at if we remember that this was the century of the revival of folk-song, and that it produced such song-composers as Schubert and Schumann and Robert Franz and Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss. But it seems strange that, apart from Heine, even the greatest of German lyric poets, such as Platen, Lenau, Mörike, Annette von Droste, Geibel, Liliencron, Dehmel, Münchhausen, Rilke, should be so little known beyond the borders of the Fatherland.

The German novel of the past century was, for a long time, unquestionably inferior to both the English and the French novel of the same epoch. But in the midst of much that is tiresome and involved and artificial, there stand out, even in the middle of the century, such masterpieces of characterization as Otto Ludwig’s Zwischen Himmel und Erde and Wilhelm Raabe’s Der Hunger Pastor; such delightful revelations of genuine humor as Fritz Reuter’s Ut mine Stromtid; such penetrating studies of social conditions as Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben. And during the last third of the century there has clearly developed a new, forcible, original style of German novelwriting.

Seldom has the short story been handled more skillfully and felicitously than by such men as Paul Heyse, Gottfried Keller, C. F. Meyer, Theodor Storm. Seldom has the novel of tragic import and passion been treated with greater refinement and delicacy than in such works as Fontane’s Effi Briest, Ricarda Huch’s Ludolf Ursleu, Wilhelm von Polenz’s Der Büttnerbauer, and Ludwig Thoma’s Andreas Vöst. And it may be doubted whether, at the present moment, there is any country where the novel is represented by so many gifted writers or exhibits such exuberant vitality, such sturdy truthfulness, such seriousness of purpose, or such a wide range of imagination, as in contemporary Germany.

It is for the teachers of German literature in the universities and colleges throughout the country to open the eyes of Americans to the vast and solid treasures contained in this storehouse of German literary production of the last hundred years. They are doing this work of enlightenment now, with conspicuous popular success at the universities of the Middle West. And I look confidently forward to a time when, as a result of this academic instruction and propaganda, German literature will have ceased to be unpopular in America.