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), 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. 1895. 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. The 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,1 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 of German intellectual evolution. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 3 was born at Röcken near F. W. Nietzsche, Lützen, on October 15, 1844, and educated at Schulpforta. 1844-1900 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. der Tra gödie, 1873 Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1873-76. At the universities of Bonn and Leipzig he studied classics, and so distinguished himself that he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at Basle in 1869, before he had taken a degree. In 1879, illness, combined with mental overstrain, obliged him to resign his chair, and for the next ten years he led an unsettled life at Swiss health resorts and in Italy; in 1889, his mind gave way, and he died at Weimar, on August 25, 1900. Like every pioneer of a new period in thought or art, Nietzsche himself passed through the transition which lay between him and his predecessors: he began his career as a disciple of Schopenhauer and a warm friend and admirer of Die Geburt Richard Wagner. His first work, Die Geburt der Tragödie Jaus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), was not merely a revolt against uninspired and uninspiring philological methods and an attempt to solve, by philosophic intuition, the problem of dramatic origins; it was, at the same time, an apology for Wagner's art. In the four Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen which followed (1873-76), Nietzsche appears as the declared antagonist of his time; he attacks the self-satisfied feelings with which the German people regarded themselves after the war, singling out David Friedrich Strauss as the representative of that complacency; he opposes with reformatory zeal the Hegelianism which still lay heavy on German philosophy, and, in the two final Unseitgemässen Betrachtungen, points to Schopenhauer and Wagner, the men who had had the chief influence on his development, as the saviours of the age from "Bildungsphilistertum." Before, however, the last Betrachtung appeared, a gulf opened between himself and and Wag- Wagner; Nietzsche's sensitive nature recoiled from the practical imperfections of the Bayreuth Festspiele and the vulgarity of their supporters. This was on the surface, but the origin of the schism lay deeper than either then realised; the two men held irreconcilable "Weltanschauungen "-Wagner, that pessimism which, for the greater part of the century, had dominated German culture, Nietzsche, a new individualistic, joyous optimism; and the admiration Nietzsche had felt for the triumphant heroism of a Siegfried, ceased before the resigned Christian mysticism of Parsifal. His antagonism to Wagner found its final, virulent and embittered expression in Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner, two pamphlets written in 1888, on the eve of the philosopher's last illness. Nietzsche ner. Having broken away from both Wagner and Schopenhauer, Other Nietzsche entered upon what has been called his second writings. period, a stage of positivism to which belongs Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: ein Buch für freie Geister (1878-80), while Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (1881) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) lead up to his chief book, Also sprach Zarathustra: ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (1883-91). Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral eine Streitschrift (1887), and Götzen-Dämmerung, oder wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (1888), may be regarded as supplements to Also sprach Zarathustra. Ill-health prevented Nietzsche from finishing Der. Wille zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe, a work in which he proposed to gather up the threads of his philosophy and set forth his system. Only the first part, Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums, reached completion (1888, published 1895). thustra, Also sprach Zarathustra the book by which Nietzsche Also sprach has especial claim to a place in literary history is the Zara most original prose work of its time. The Persian prophet, 1883-91. Zoroaster or Zarathustra, serves as a mouthpiece for the thinker's own philosophy, and this Zarathustra seeks refuge from the eternal recurrence of things-"Die Wiederkunft des Gleichen "in the doctrine of a higher manhood than the world has yet known. Also sprach Zarathustra stands on the boundary between philosophy and poetry; it may or may not be what its author once proclaimed it, the "deepest" work of its time, but, from an artistic point of view, it is a wonderfully beautiful book; the fulness of its thought and its grandiose Biblical language make it one of the master-works of modern literature. No reader can be insensible to the beauty of passages like those on the "grosse Sehnsucht," or the following lines from "Von den sieben Siegeln" :— "Wenn ich dem Meere hold bin und allem, was Meeres-Art ist, und am holdesten noch, wenn es mir zornig widerspricht: Wenn jene suchende Lust in mir ist, die nach Unentdecktem die Segel treibt, wenn eine Seefahrer-Lust in meiner Lust ist : Wenn je mein Frohlocken rief: 'die Küste schwand-nun fiel mir die letzte Kette ab Das Grenzenlose braust um mich, weit hinaus glänzt mir Raum und Zeit, wohlan! wohlauf! altes Herz !' |