Debit and Credit / Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag

by Gustav Freytag

Every romance is intended, or ought to be, a new Iliad or Odyssey; in other words, a poetic representation of a course of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero. If we pass in review the romances of the last three centuries, we shall find that those only have arrested the attention of more than one or two generations which have satisfied this requirement. Every other romance, let it moralize ever so loudly, is still immoral; let it offer ever so much of so-called wisdom, is still irrational. The excellence of a romance, like that of an epic or a drama, lies in the apprehension and truthful exhibition of the course of human things.

Candide, which may appear to be an exception, owes its prolonged existence to the charm of style and language; and, after all, how much less it is now read than Robinson Crusoe, the work of the talented De Foe; or than the Vicar of Wakefield, that simple narrative by Voltaire's English contemporary. Whether or not the cause can be clearly defined is here of little consequence; but an unskillfully developed romance is like a musical composition that concludes with discord unresolved—without perhaps inquiring wherefore, it leaves an unpleasant impression on the mind.

If we carry our investigation deeper, we shall find that any such defect violates our sense of artistic propriety, because it offends against our healthy human instinct of the fundamental natural laws; and the artistic merit, as well of a romance as of an epic, rises in proportion as the plot is naturally developed, instead of being conducted to its solution by a series of violent leaps and make-shifts, or even by a pretentious sham. We shall take occasion hereafter to illustrate these views by suitable examples.

That the work we are now considering fulfills, in a high degree, this requirement of refined artistic feeling and artistic treatment, will be at once apparent to all discriminating readers, though it can not be denied that there are many of the higher and more delicate chords which Soll und Haben never strikes. The characters to whom we are introduced appear to breathe a certain prosaic atmosphere, and the humorous and comic scenes occasionally interwoven with the narrative bear no comparison, in poetic delicacy of touch, with the creations of Cervantes, nor yet with the plastic power of those of Fielding.

The author has given most evidence of poetic power in the delineation of those dark characters who intrude like ghosts and demons upon the fair and healthy current of the book, and vanish anon into the caverns and cellars whence they came.

The great importance of the work, and the key to the almost unexampled favor it has won, must be sought in a quite different direction—in the close relation to the real and actual in our present social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of all alike is the same—to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the shattered Spanish people, among whom he moves with gipsies and smugglers for companions, treading with all the freshness of imperishable youth upon the buried ruins of political and spiritual life, rejoicing in the geniality of the climate and the tranquillity of the country, reposing proudly on his ancestral dignity. This conception—and not alone the pure and lofty nature of the crazy besieger of wind-mills, who, in spite of all, stands forth as at once the worthiest, and fundamentally the wisest character in the book—constitutes the poetic background, and the twilight glimmer amid the prevailing darkness in the life of the higher classes. We feel that there is assuredly something deeply human and of living power in these elements, and this reality will one day obtain the victory over all opponents.

By what an entirely different atmosphere do we feel ourselves to be surrounded in Gil Blas, where the highest poetry, the cunning dexterity of the modern Spanish Figaro, is manifested in the midst of a depraved nobility, and a priesthood alive only to their own material interests. It is only the most perfect art that could have retained for this novel readers in every quarter of the world. The dénouement is as perfect as with such materials it can be; and we feel that, instead of Voltaire's withering and satiric contempt of all humanity, an element of unfeigned good-humor lies in the background of the picture. How far inferior is Swift! and how utterly horrible is the abandoned humor of a despair that leaves all in flames behind it, which breathes upon us from the pages of the unhappy Rabelais!

Fielding's novels, Tom Jones in particular, bear the same resemblance to the composition of Cervantes that the paintings of Murillo bear to those of Rembrandt. The peculiarity of Wilhelm Meister as a novel is more difficult of apprehension, if one does not seek the novel where in truth it lies—in the story of Mignon and the Harper, and only sees in the remainder the certainly somewhat diffuse but deeply-thought and classically-delineated picture of the earnest striving after culture of a German in the end of the eighteenth century. It would argue, however, as it appears to me, much prejudice, and an utterly unreasonable temper, not to recognize a perfect novel in the Wahlverwandschaften, however absolutely one may deny the propriety of thus tampering with and endangering the holiest family relationships, or thus making them the subjects of a work of fiction. Goethe, however, has here placed before us, and that with the most noble seriousness and the most artistic skill, a reality which lies deep in human nature and the period he represents. The tragical complications and consequences resulting even from errors which never took shape in evil deeds could not in the highest tragedy be represented more purely and strikingly than here. The stain of impurity rests upon the soul of him who thinks that he detects it, not in the book itself. Ottilie is as pure and immortal a creation of genius as Mignon.

As novel-literature has developed itself in Europe, an attempt has been made to employ it as a mirror of the past, into which mankind shall love to look, and thereby ascertain whether civilization has advanced or retrograded with the lapse of time. This is a reaction against the eighteenth century, and it appears under two forms—the idealistic-sentimental and the strongly realistic-social. The earliest instance in Germany of the romantic school, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is the apotheosis of the art and literature of the Middle Ages. The writings of Walter Scott put an end to this sentimentalism, and this is indeed their highest merit. Those of his works will continue to maintain the most prominent place, standing forth as true and living representations of character, which deal with the events of Scottish history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Still more the work of genius, however, and of deeper worth, Hope's Anastasius must be admitted to be—that marvelous picture of life in the Levant, and in the whole Turkish Empire, as far as Arabia, as it was about the end of the last and the beginning of the present century. In this work truth and fiction are most happily blended; the episodes, especially that of Euphrosyne, may be placed, without disparagement, beside the novels of Cervantes, and strike far deeper chords in the human heart than the creations of Walter Scott. Kingsley's Hypatia, alone of modern works, is worthy to be named along with it. That, indeed, is a marvelous and daring composition, with a still higher aim and still deeper soul-pictures. Both of them will live forever as examples of union of the idealistic and the realistic schools, poetic evocations of a by-gone reality, with all the truth and poetry of new creations. In reading either of them we forget that the work is as instructive as it is imaginative.

The most vehement longing of our times, however, is manifestly after a faithful mirror of the present; that is to say, after a life-picture of the social relations and the struggles to which the evils of the present day have given rise. We feel that great events are being enacted; that greater still are in preparation; and we long for an epic, a world-moulding epic, to imbody and depict them. The undertaking is a dangerous one—many a lance is shivered in the first encounter. A mere tendency-novel is in itself a monster. A picture of the age must be, in the highest acceptation of the word, a poem. It must not represent real persons or places—it must create such. It must not ingraft itself upon the passing and the accidental, but be pervaded by a poetic intuition of the real. He that attempts it must look with a poet's eye at the real and enduring elements in the confusing contradictions of the time, and place the result before us as an actual existence. It has been the high privilege of the English realistic school, which we may call without hesitation the school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike the key-note with a firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand out with undimmed lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the French school of Victor Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of despair," as Goethe calls it. Here again, in this new English school, has the genius of Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it. And, besides himself and Dickens, there stand forth as its most brilliant members the distinguished authoress of Mary Barton, and the sorely-tried Charlotte Brontë, the gifted writer of Jane Eyre—too soon, alas! removed from us. This school has portrayed, in colors doubtless somewhat strong, the sufferings and the virtues, the dangers and the hopes of the working-classes, especially in towns and factories. But, instead of enjoining hatred of the higher classes, and despair of all improvement in the future for humanity, a healthy tone pervades their writings throughout, and an unwavering and cheering hope of better things to come shines through the gloomy clouds that surround the dreary present. There are throes of anguish—but they tell of coming deliverance; there are discords—but they resolve into harmony. The spirit finds, pervading the entire composition, that satisfaction of the desires of our higher nature which constitutes true artistic success.