From the half-Swiss author Hermann Hesse to the full-blooded Swiss novelists is but a short step. Among these, Ernst Zahn is the most widely read and the most fruitful. A succession of voluminous novels (Erni Beheim, 1898, God's Puppets [Herrgottsfäden], 1901, Albin Indergand, 1901, Claire Marie, 1904, Luke Hochstrasser's House, 1907, Solitude, 1909, The Women of Tannò, 1911, The Apothecary of Little Worldville, 1913) and an equal number of collections of short stories (Heart Struggles, 1893, Echo, 1895, New Tales of the Mountains, 1898, Men and Women, 1900, The Shady Side, 1903, Heroes of Every Day, 1905, Those Who Come and Go, 1908, What Life Destroys, 1912) have come thick and fast; and since they all deal with the everyday fortunes of the simple Alpine villagers, it was inevitable that in course of time a certain satiety dulled admiration of the sheer inexhaustible store of motifs--for nobody can say that Zahn ever exactly repeats himself. In particular, his fellow-countrymen are no longer quite willing to regard him as the Swiss novelist par excellence. And yet Zahn is himself the very incarnation of a fundamental trait of Swiss character; namely, the peculiar blending of practical common sense and esthetic culture. Where else than in this veritable democracy could one and the same man day in and day out serve soup to thousands of travelers, sit down at his desk after the day's work was done and gather about him the children of his imagination, and then on the morrow as president of the diet guide the deliberations of representatives of his canton of Uri? His three professions of public man, innkeeper, and author, Zahn upholds with undiscriminating pride.
Ernst Zahn was born at Zurich in 1867 in the Café Littéraire, of which his father was lessee, and among whose habitués Gottfried Keller was reckoned. He took up the paternal business, beginning at the bottom of the ladder as a waiter in Geneva, Genoa, and Hastings, and in 1883 joined his father, who had meanwhile taken a lease of the railroad restaurant at Göschenen. At the last stop before entrance into the darkness of the Gotthard tunnel many a traveler to Italy has doubtless been struck by the classic features and the proud bearing of the restaurateur, without knowing that he saw before him the most widely read story-writer in the German language. As to his private life Zahn published a few years ago in the magazine The Literary Echo a few details from which we quote the following:
Little room with the writing table, the tall book-cases, the few pictures on the wall, and the immovable, grand, curious mountain always peering in at thy window--little room with the great hubbub all about thee, of thee I am to speak, and of him who sits within thy coziness! It is not difficult to speak of thee: thou art a home, peaceful and lost to the world, although the life of the world surges around thee like the sea around an island. Behind thou hast the rumble of carts going hither and thither all summer long over three mountain passes, and before, the daily rattle and roar of the great railway trains of the Gotthard. And yet thou art peaceful and hast taught me that it is better to dwell in thee than in the bustling world, and hast taught me that I do not need many men to make me happy in thee.... From the writing table there is every few minutes a call to the dining rooms on the ground floor, where the author is metamorphosed into a victualler. Many persons shake their heads at this transformation. To me the profession of my father is an object of affection; I owe it an assured livelihood. Who knows but that the author in me also owes it much of the spontaneity and joy of working?
But a fertile source of the author's joy of working is situated in a little dwelling of which I mean to speak last in this account of my houses. It stands in the valley of Göschenen, at the edge of the village, in the midst of a meadow. Round about tower the mountains; the gleaming glacier of Damma throws its light in through the window panes. The valley is filled with a great stillness. In the house five children, my children, live their untroubled lives, and my wife guards them well, with her gentle and skilful hand to lead, and her affectionate patience to understand her husband. In this, my mountain home, my life has found its haven. I hope to dwell there until I must move into the last resting place of my career; I hope to work, and I hope to attain to high and beautiful things; for I hear the bells of poetry mightily reverberating from my mountains, marvelous, richly harmonious voices; and perhaps I shall one day succeed in catching these tones in their clearest purity. Perhaps! There is hope; and hope is life!
The strenuous effort alluded to in these words, the great all-conquering achievement, the master chime which peals from the heights, has indeed not yet attained fulfillment. One might say of the work of Zahn as of the bell of Gerhart Hauptmann's bell-founder, "In the valley it vibrates, not on the heights." We find neither great problems of humanity and civilization nor real men of the heights. On the contrary, these "heroes of every day" are dwellers in the valley, harsh and hard as the walls of granite which narrow their horizon; and if the author puts into these rude vessels something of his own delicacy of feeling, as he attributes to Stephen the Smith appreciation of the little Roman bronze figures which the trader has brought up from Italy, such ennobling ingredients can sometimes enter only at the expense of consistency of characterization.
A more primitive power is manifest in the other Swiss, Jakob Schaffner, who in still higher degree than Zahn deserves to be called a self-made man. Schaffner, who was born in 1875 at Basel, belongs with Hans Sachs and Jakob Böhme among the poetic shoemakers. His immature first novel, Wanderings (1905), has its best scenes in the workshop, and his later masterpiece, Konrad Pilater (1910), is another story of a fantastic journeyman shoemaker. As the author himself worked his way up with iron energy to culture and independence, so all of his creations are endowed with something of a vaulting ambition, which is not depreciated by being treated with a slight measure of irony. His Jack Heaven-High (1909) is a philosophizing journeyman who from every capital of Europe pours forth his lyrico-cosmic effusions, and the hero of his historical novel The Messenger of God (1911) is a Swiss dominic who at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War collects a motley rabble about him for new works of peace and single-handed makes of himself the restorer of a devastated community. But with all the scope of the theme there is a lack of genuine historical color; and compared with the great historical novel of Ricarda Huch, this anachronistic picture of the past seems like the story of another Robinson Crusoe. Schaffner's forte is after all the ground upon which he stood at the beginning; it is seen in the little idylls from the life of the laboring classes which make up the contents of his two collections, The Lantern (1905) and The Golden Oddity (1912). In the first collection, the story of The Blacksmiths is a gem of narration; and so is the story here reproduced, The Iron Idol, which also serves to illustrate the pedagogical tendency of all of Schaffner's work. The huge machine is a symbol for cooperative activity, to which the individual may not put himself in opposition; and the restless spirit that essays opposition is transformed against his will from a disturber of the peace into the founder of a happy wedlock.
The final couple of our choice are two authors who have departed from the ways of Heimatkunst. Jakob Wassermann, born in 1873 at Fürth, begins at least as a delineator of the things of his home; for his first product, The Jews of Zirndorf (1897) is in its first part a legendary picture taken from the history of the Fürth ghetto, and in its second part there comes into the foreground the figure of Agathon Geyer, a Jewish messiah of the present, whose deep-seated longing to see God conquers the narrow spirit of the law, of slavery and asceticism. A pendant to this work is Wassermann's second novel, The Story of Young Renate Fuchs (1900). The development of the new woman is intended to be represented in this book, the woman who through all confusion and filthiness keeps her adamantine soul unscathed, to the moment when she attains her destiny, namely, to spend a night of love with the dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, The Art of Narrative. Ernst von Wolzogen, the discoverer of Wassermann, and a critic who has perhaps contributed to an over-estimate of him, declares that this author, who stood, especially at first, under the influence of the most Asiatic of all the Russian novelists, Dostojewski, is the sole Oriental among the present generation of literary Jews. "A fancy which in its luxurious revelling in blood, splendor, and magnificence seems to us as Oriental as his meditative dreaminess and the subtle satisfaction with which he traces the subterranean, labyrinthine paths of the life of the soul"--these are the salient features which Wolzogen finds in the work of Wassermann.
One side of this characterization is confirmed by the next two works, the novels Moloch (1903) and Alexander in Babylon (1904). In the former, a rustic of uncorrupted feeling and fanatical sense of justice loses his honesty and goes to ruin in the mendacity of urban ways of doing business; and in the latter, the Grecian hero and man of action is dragged into the intoxication of Oriental luxury, voluptous cruelty, and dazzling magnificence.
The other side expresses itself in the attempted psychological solution of the riddles of criminality. It is characteristic of Wassermann's predilection for these matters that in his novel Kasper Hauser or Sluggishness of Heart (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who came to light in Nuremberg in 1828 and who was supposed to be a cast-off prince of Baden. Moreover, of the three narratives in the volume entitled The Sisters (1906), two are fantastically constructed criminal cases which endeavor suggestively to explain the unusual and the baffling by reference to mysterious undercurrents in the soul. One of these two stories is the Clarissa Mirabel here translated, and no word need be said of the technical virtuosity with which the most exquisite climax is attained through the utmost economy of means.
Many critics regard Wassermann as the pioneer of a new epic style. Even those who do not share this opinion cannot deny him tenacity of purpose and a clear conception of what it is that he aims to accomplish. Wassermann has selected the Oriental softness of the air of Vienna for his place of abode; it is possible that his quasi elective affinity with it will save him from the danger of falling a victim to the Moloch of the metropolis. In the year 1911 he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.