part of the life he reproduces. The excellence of his art lies in his realism, in his power of endowing the life of the peasant with a tragic destiny, of raising petty joys and sorrows to the realm of high comedy or tragedy. Anzengruber is. the most striking dramatic talent that modern Austria has produced, and the continued vitality of the Austrian theatre is due to him and not to poets like Franz Nissel (1831-93), who were F. Nissel, content to imitate Grillparzer. Nissel, whose masterly tragedy, 1831-93. Agnes von Meran, won the Schiller Prize in 1878, spent an even more unhappy life than Anzengruber; his work brought with it no inward satisfaction to compensate for the want of popular success. 1825-98. Between 1870 and 1885, the short story, or "Novelle," The short was the most healthy form of German literature; it showed story. much more promise than the novel, which still remained in the hands of writers whose reputations had been made previous to the war. The master of the German Novelle in this age, as in the preceding one, was a Swiss. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-98) was a native of Zurich, and C. F. turned to literature comparatively late in life; before 1870, he had published only one small volume of Gedichte (1864). Meyer was long uncertain whether to write in French or German, but, his sympathies being with Germany, he ultimately decided for the latter tongue. In 1871, he wrote a fine epic, Huttens letzte Tage, and, in 1872, followed it up by Engelberg, a poetic idyll. The first of his novels, Jürg Jenatsch (1876), the hero of which played an important role in Graubünden during the Thirty Years' War, is a masterpiece of historical fiction; and Der Heilige (1880), a novel on Thomas à Becket, is not inferior to it. The range of historical subjects congenial to Meyer's taste was, however, restricted; he was only at his ease when describing an age of great personalities like that of the Renaissance. His aristocratic mind was in close sympathy with the commanding geniuses of such an epoch, and his own nature responded to the polish and scholarly wit of the humanists. The same perfect workmanship characterises all the novels that followed Der Heilige, namely, Das Amulet, Der Schuss von der Kanzel, Plautus im Nonnenkloster, Gustav Adolfs Page (all published together in 1883), Das Leiden eines Knaben (1883), 1 Cp. A. Frey, C. F. Meyer, Stuttgart, 1900. F. von Saar, born 1833. M. von bach, born Die Hochzeit des Mönchs (1884), Die Richterin (1885), Die Versuchung des Pescara (1887), and Angela Borgia (1890). Meyer is pre-eminently the artist among modern German novelists; his style is polished and finely balanced; his scenes are delineated with infinite care, and his subjects always have a certain inner harmony with the spirit of the author's own time. Of the essentially "naïve" genius of his countryman, Keller, he had nothing, nor had he the latter's purely German humour; the qualities in which he excels are, as in the case of Heyse, those peculiar to Romance literatures-beauty of style and form. Like Keller and Heyse, Meyer was also a lyric poet, but, as may be inferred from his prose, he turned with preference to the ballad; his verse is dramatic rather than lyric; the inner warmth and the power of giving himself up to moods and feelings are denied him. While Meyer is not, and never will be, a popular novelist, like Storm or Keller, his contemporary, Ferdinand von Saar,1 who was born at Vienna in 1833, has a still smaller circle of admirers. Saar has written poetic tragedies-Heinrich IV. (two parts, 1865-67)—but without success; he was not a dramatist who could adapt himself to the requirements of the stage. As a lyric poet, Saar is one of the most delicately organised of living German writers; a singer, whose favourite note is renunciation, no one expresses better than he the resigned mood of modern Austria (Wiener Elegien, 1893). As a novelist, his art is, even in comparison with Meyer's, narrow, his best work being contained in two small volumes of Novellen aus Österreich (1877-97). While Meyer rejoiced in strong, optimistic characters, Saar chooses to write of those who have been worsted in life; and the shadowy figures of his stories are invariably set in a sombre framework. A more widely known writer of short stories in Austria is Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (born 1830),2 who, like Saar, also began her career with ambitious dramas. These, however, attracted little attention, and it was 1875, before a story, Ein Spätgeborener, revealed the marked originality of Frau Ebner's talent. This book was followed, in 1876, by Bozena, a novel of some length, to which the Moravian scenery gave a special interest. A collection of Erzählungen, published in 1875, was 1 Cp. J. Minor, Ferdinand von Saar, Vienna, 1898. 2 Gesammelte Werke (6 vols. have appeared), Berlin, 1893 ff. succeeded by a second in 1881; two volumes of Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten appeared in 1883 and 1886, and since then Frau von Ebner-Eschenbach has written many books, including longer novels, such as Das Gemeindekind (1887) and Unsühnbar (1890). Although not without understanding for recent tendencies in literature, she is more deeply indebted to her predecessors than to her contemporaries; she has learned from Heyse and even from Auerbach. Her talents are seen to best advantage in her witty and satirical sketches of Austrian aristocratic life, as, for example, in Zwei Comtessen (1885) and Die Freiherren von Gemperlein (1881). All her writings are characterised by an essentially Austrian lightness of touch, and that ability to express ideas epigrammatically, which lends piquancy to her collection of Aphorismen (1880). Austrian novelists. The novel of provincial life was, at this period, cultivated Minor to a larger extent in Austria than in Germany. Despite a preference for morbid psychological problems, Leopold von Sacher - Masoch (1835-95) wrote some powerful Galizische Geschichten (1876-81) and Judengeschichten (1878-81), and K. E. Franzos (born 1848) described a similar life in Aus Halbasien (1876) and Die Juden von Barnow (1877). Peter Rosegger, who was born in 1843, as the son of a Styrian peasant, is a disciple of Anzengruber. But without either his master's genius, or that discipline which disheartening failure brought to bear on Anzengruber's work, Rosegger has become a voluminous writer, whose natural talent has lost itself in didactic sentimentality. Among his most noteworthy books are Die Schriften des Waldschulmeisters (1875) and Das ewige Licht (1897). 98. The pioneer of the modern German novel was a North German, Theodor Fontane (1819-98),1 who has already been T. Fonmentioned as a follower of Willibald Alexis. A native of tane, 1819Neuruppin, Fontane identified himself with the Mark of Brandenburg, in the same way as Storm and Reuter identified themselves with Schleswig and Mecklenburg. Between his historical romances, Vor dem Sturm (1878) and Schach von Wuthenow (1883), Fontane wrote a number of Novellen (Grete Minde, 1880; L'Adultera, 1882), in which he gradually felt his way towards a realistic form of fiction. In 1887, Irrungen, Wirrungen, appeared and had an immediate and 1 Gesammelte Romane und Novellen, 12 vols., Berlin, 1890-91. marked influence on the methods of the German novel: for this work and Stine (1890), Fontane's models were Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Zola. Two stories, Unwiederbringlich (1891) and Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), which followed Irrungen, Wirrungen, did not mark much advance; but in Effi Briest, 1895, Fontane published his masterpiece, Effi Briest. 1895. poet who, in his old age, had learned a new style from the French realists, here employed it in describing the milieu of his North German home; the figures of his story, apart from their surroundings, are often shadowy and indistinct, and the plot is meagre, but the fine poetic spirit in which the whole is conceived, gives the novel a unique position in the fiction of the time. After Effi Briest appeared Die Poggenpuhls (1896) and Der Stechlin (1898), in which the charm of the author's style atones for the almost complete absence of incident. Fontane's personality-as reflected in the volumes of autobiography, Meine Kinderjahre (1893) and Von Zwanzig bis Dreissig (1898)—is the most interesting in recent German literature he may be regarded as the typical example of the Berlin man of letters in the last quarter of the century. 611 CHAPTER XVI. THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. THE literary movement of which the work of the Munich school was a characteristic expression, culminated, as we have seen, in the opening of the "Festspielhaus" at Bayreuth, and the general acceptance of the Wagnerian drama. The passive resignation which inspired this literature was not, however, to the taste of the younger generation of writers, who had grown up in an era of national optimism; they demanded a more positive, self-assertive faith than was to be learned from Schopenhauer. The conflict against the collective spirit of Hegelianism, which had virtually been begun, before the middle of the century, by the Danish individualist, Sören Kierkegaard, and carried over into social fields, as early as 1845, by Max Stirner (pseudonym for Kaspar Schmidt, 1806-56), in his remarkable work, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, came into the foreground of German intellectual life as the influence of Schopenhauer waned. This optimistic and individualistic reaction is first definitely and clearly set forth in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the most original thinker in the last period 2 of German intellectual evolution. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 3 was born at Röcken near F. W. Lützen, on October 15, 1844, and educated at Schulpforta. 1844-1900' Nietzsche, 1 Reprinted in Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, No. 3057-60, Leipzig, 1893. 2 For this period, cp., besides R. M. Meyer, Die deutsche Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1900; A. Bartels, Die deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1901; and A. von Hanstein, Das Jüngste Deutschland, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1901. 3 Werke, 8 vols., Leipzig, 1899; three volumes of Nachgelassene Werke have also appeared in this edition, Leipzig, 1901. Cp. E. Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, 1, 2, Leipzig, 1895-97; H. Lichtenberger, La philosophie de Nietzsche, Paris, 1898 (German translation, with an introduction by E. FörsterNietzsche, Dresden, 1899), and T. Ziegler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Berlin, 1900. |