The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man who assumes to write for the public, i.e., for the educated people of his own nation, is evidently that he should be master of his own language. Now, Heinz Tovote has no idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest errors every moment—solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of the value of words—which make one’s hair stand on end. Some few of these abominable faults of language are tolerably widespread, others belong to the jargon of the roughest class of the people; but there are some that Tovote could never have heard. They are the result of his personal ignorance of German grammar.
Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in order to determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses, on principle, the adjective naturally contained in that substantive. Here are some examples of this intolerable tautology: ‘An icy January storm.’ ‘In the Friedrichstrasse light elegant equipages were crowded.’ ‘Incarnation of the most lovable grace.’ ‘A slowly creeping fever’ ‘A lazy somnolence.’ ‘They glowed fiery in the last light.’ ‘She suffered cruel torments,’ etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect for himself, his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers, would put such words together. There is no necessity, in hunting for the ‘rare and precious epithet,’ to go so far as the French stylists, but such a sweeping together of the stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive adjectives is not literature; it is properly, to echo the French critic, the work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Düren was ‘keenly interested, from its first appearance,’ in Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. ‘Now that it had cast off its English garb, it seemed to him still more indigenous.’ Thus he seriously declares that an English operetta has seemed to a German more indigenous in the German language than in English. ‘Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury against this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he, who was habitually politeness itself to everyone, did not return the salute, and turned away.’ Not to respond to a salute by way of expressing his ‘senseless fury’ is truly not very ferocious on the part of an old officer. ‘The horses were hanging their heads sadly, and sleeping.’ That it is possible to sleep sadly or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ‘Like walls, the colossi of houses stood crowding against each other.’ Like walls? One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly as if Tovote had said: ‘Like men, the people stood crowding against each other.’
When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful style, the result we get is as follows: ‘Yet there lay in the slender perfectly levelled lines a slumbering strength.’ (What can the lines be which are ‘slender,’ i.e., not thick and ‘perfectly levelled’?) ‘She was already smiling through her tears, and her face resembled a summer landscape which, while the rain still falls on the corn, is bathed again in the bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.’ Thus, what we are first to think of when contemplating a face is a summer landscape. ‘He felt how her lips clung [sich klammerten!] to his.’ ‘It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has the incontestable genius of a lively conception,’ etc.
Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the French naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness, and vigour of which the following quotations will enable us to admire. (End of a theatrical representation:) ‘In the stalls the seats clapped back with a muffled sound.... The audience rose, doors were opened, curtains were drawn back, and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few isolated spectators alone remained in their places.’ ‘Unceasingly, the whole night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lay on the bare branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped in a thick mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the standard roses, the snow clung, and formed strange figures; it lay a foot high on the walls, and delicately veiled the points of the iron railings. All tracks were effaced. The wind, which drove the flakes before it, threw them into all the hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses disappeared.’ ‘They stood high above the sea, which spread around them like an infinite plain.’ ‘The sun had set.... The clouds, heavily encamped on the horizon, still glowed with flaming crimson purple; then they passed into violet, which changed into a colourless gray [so there is a coloured gray also?] until night descended, and all colours gradually died out.’ (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit ‘impressionism’ with the French models quoted in the preceding chapter.) ‘The night had completely closed in—a dark, profoundly black night.’ (Consider the juxtaposition of these two adjectives.) ‘The moon alone hung mournfully above the waters [the moon in a night both ‘dark’ and ‘profoundly black!’], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light into the distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar in the spite of a thousand years[!], and licked the creviced rocks.’ A ‘raving spite’ which ‘licks’ does not appear to be a very dangerous spite. ‘She retained the deep wound over her eye as a little scar all her life long.’ If she had a ‘little scar,’ she did not therefore keep a deep wound ‘all her life long.’ ‘Above them, in the blue sky, a vulture wheeled in circles with outspread wings, lost like a black point in this sea of light.’ In a vulture which is only seen as ‘a black point,’ it is not possible to distinguish the ‘outspread wings.’ Here is the description of a face: ‘Two full fresh lips, chaste[!], bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly tilted, but parting in a narrow straight line from the forehead.’ We will leave the reader the trouble of imagining for himself this ‘little nose imperceptibly tilted’ in ‘the narrow straight line.’ ‘The engine of the express train panted across the level plain which stretched all round like a burning desert. Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards and verdant meadows.’ Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a ‘burning[?] desert’? ‘The half-closed eyes, with their white membranes, look at him so steadily.’ This does not mean, as one might suppose, the eyes of a bird, but those of a human being, in which our novelist professes to have discovered these incomprehensible ‘white membranes.’
We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive tic of naturalism have become in the hands of Tovote. I will now show how this ‘realist’ can observe and reproduce reality in the smallest as in the greatest things. Herbert, the first evening of his acquaintance with Lucy, takes her to a restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of burgundy. ‘The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the table, in a flourishing curve.’ Burgundy in ‘pot-bellied’ bottles! They eat soup, served in ‘silver bowls’(!), green peas and a capon, the excellence of which forms the subject of their incredible conversation at table, and when this repast is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette, she asks for oysters, which are brought and eaten by her ‘served according to the rules of art.’ I should certainly not reproach anyone for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which stage of a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up amongst oysters and burgundy, but it would be more honest not to speak of these good things till one knows something of them. Let us give a passing notice to the unconscious respect, mingled with envy, for the difficult and distinguished occupation of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in this admiring declaration, that Lucy has oysters ‘served’(?) ‘according to the rules of art,’ and the backwoodsman’s ignorance of the most elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in making a man of the world talk incessantly at table about the food. To continue. Lucy’s lover has travelled, viâ Brussels, ‘from Havre to Egypt.’ In that case he must have chartered a steamer on his own account, as there is no regular line of steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manuscripts. ‘He rummaged through this heap of yellow manuscripts.’ Under shelter the worst ligneous fibre paper itself would certainly not turn yellow in the space of a few months. The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible care by Herbert for his Lucy, has ‘blue silk curtains,’ and ‘pale pink satin’ seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided by the better second-hand dealers even in their shop windows.
I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insignificant. They must not be passed over, however, when committed by a ‘realist,’ who boasts of ‘observation’ and ‘truth.’ Graver still are the impossible actions and characters of the men. In a moment of grief Lucy lets ‘fall her arms on the table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly before her, biting her under lip.’ Has anyone ever seen or done such a thing in this state of mind? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses thus: ‘“Kiss me,” she implored, and her whole being seemed to wish to lose itself in him—“kiss me!”’ Herbert had made her acquaintance in Heligoland, where she lived with an Englishman named Ward, and had taken her to be Ward’s betrothed. A German officer of good family, being considerably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as his betrothed! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of the working class, learnt English with Ward in less than a year so perfectly that she was everywhere mistaken for an Englishwoman, and played the piano so well that she could execute pieces from operettas, etc.
I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French words, confounds tourniquet with moulinet, and speaks of cabinets séparés instead of cabinets particuliers. A German does not require to know French. It would be a good thing indeed if he knew German. Good taste, however, would prevent his making a display of scraps of a language of which he knows absolutely nothing.
The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incomparably weaker than in analogous passages by Zola, but they are peculiarly repulsive because, in spite of the absolute incapacity of Tovote to rise above the coarseness of commercial travellers relating their love adventures in hotels, they, nevertheless, betray his determination to be violently sensational and subtly sensual.
If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work, so far below the level of literature, it is because of its being thoroughly typical of German realism. The language transgresses the simplest rules of grammar. Not one expression is accurately chosen, and really characterizes the object or the concept that is brought before the reader. That an author should speak not only accurately, but expressively, that he should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas in an original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the value and delicate sense of words; of this Tovote has not the slightest idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to raise a blush on the cheek of the police reporter of a low class paper. Nothing is seen, nothing is felt; the whole is but a droning echo of reading of the worst sort. ‘Modernism’ consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is partly located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded, very justly, that the German novel should rest on a solid basis, that it should be worked out in some well-known period, amid real surroundings, in the German capital of our day. This demand has produced the ‘Berlinese’ novel of the plagiarists. The especial and characteristic Berlinism of this novel consists in this, that the author whenever he has to mention a street, displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at the ‘Panoptikum’ (the Grévin Museum in Berlin), because he finds the street full of people, carriages, and shops, and seeks opportunities to quote the names of the streets in this capital. This method is within the reach of every hotel porter. In order to introduce such Berlinism into a bad novel, the author need only possess a plan of the town, and perhaps a guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are represented by passages such as this: ‘On both sides of the pavement [he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the street] a dense crowd of people surged, and in the middle of the avenue, under the trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered multitude, resembling the irregular [?] waves of a flood, pushed on to get out of the town.’ Or: ‘On all the pavements people walking and pushing against each other in confusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge from the deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy omnibuses, with their roofs fully occupied,’ etc. Thus, the only thing Tovote sees in Berlin is what a peasant from Buxtehude would remark, who has left his village for the first time, and cannot recover from his astonishment in finding more people and carriages than in his own village street. This is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices, and which need not be specially described, because it is implied in the concept of a ‘town,’ and, above all, of a ‘large town,’ and is, notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, etc., present exactly the same sight.
Socialism enters into the ‘modern’ novel like Pilate into the Creed. Tovote relates, e.g., how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who has disappeared; he arrives at last at the workman’s quarter in Berlin, which supplies the author with this fine picture: ‘Everywhere the blue and gray-red blouse of the workman, which is never seen Unter den Linden, who stands, day after day, near the panting machine, at the work-table, where he carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the same manual labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard as iron.’ Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has thought of the callosities of the workmen!