Essays on Modern Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

VII

HERMANN SUDERMANN

Walking along Michigan Avenue in Chicago one fine day, I stopped in front of the recently completed hall devoted to music. On the façade of this building had been placed five names, supposed to represent the five greatest composers that the world has thus far seen. It was worth while to pause a moment and to reflect that those five men were all Germans. Germany's contribution to music is not only greater than that of any other nation, it is probably greater than that of all the other countries of the earth put together, and multiplied several times. In many forms of literary art,—especially perhaps in drama and in lyrical poetry,—Germany has been eminent; and she has produced the greatest literary genius since Shakespeare. To-day the Fatherland remains the intellectual workshop of the world; men and women flock thither to study subjects as varied as Theology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Music. All this splendid achievement in science and in culture makes poverty in the field of prose fiction all the more remarkable. For the fact is, that the total number of truly great world-novels written in the German language, throughout its entire history, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In the making of fiction, from the point of view solely of quality, Germany cannot stand an instant's comparison with Russia, whose four great novelists have immensely enriched the world; nor with Great Britain, where masterpieces have been produced for nearly two hundred years; nor with France, where the names of notable novels crowd into the memory; and even America, so poor in literature and in genuine culture, can show at least one romance that stands higher than anything which has come from beyond the Rhine. Germany has no reason to feel ashamed of her barrenness in fiction, so pre-eminent is she in many other and perhaps nobler forms of art. But it is interesting to enquire for a moment into possible causes of this phenomenon, and to see if we can discover why Teutonic fiction is, relatively speaking, so bad.

One dominant fault in most German novels is a lack of true proportion. The principle of selection, which differentiates a painting from a photograph, and makes the artist an Interpreter instead of a Recorder, has been forgotten or overlooked. The high and holy virtue of Omission should be cultivated more sedulously. The art of leaving out is the art that produces the real illusion—where, by the omission of unessential details, things that are salient can be properly emphasised. And what German novels lack is emphasis. This cannot be obtained by merely spacing the letters in descriptions and in conversations; it can be reached only by remembering that prose fiction is as truly an art form as a Sonata. Instead of novels, the weary reader gets long and tiresome biographies of rather unimportant persons; people whom we should not in the least care to know in real life. We follow them dejectedly from the cradle to the grave. Matters of no earthly consequence either to the reader, to the hero, or to the course of the plot, are given as much prominence as great events. In Jörn Uhl, to take a recent illustration, the novel is positively choked by trivial detail. Despite the enormous vogue of this story, it does not seem destined to live. It will fall by its own weight.

Another great fault is an excess of sentimentality. For the Germans, who delight in destroying old faiths of humanity, and who remorselessly hammer away at the shrines where we worship in history and religion, are, notwithstanding their iconoclasm, the most sentimental people in the world. Many second-and third-rate German novels are ruined for an Anglo-Saxon reader by a lush streak of sentimental gush, a curious blemish in so intellectual and sceptical a race. This excess of soft material appears in a variety of forms; but to take one common manifestation of it, I should say that the one single object that has done more than anything else to weaken and to destroy German fiction, is the Moon. The Germans are, by nature and by training, scientific; and what their novels need is not the examination of literary critics, but the thoughtful attention of astronomers. The Moon is overworked, and needs a long rest. An immense number of pages are illumined by its chaste beams, for this satellite is both active and ubiquitous. It behaves, it must be confessed, in a dramatic manner, but in a way hopelessly at variance with its methodical and orderly self. In other words, the Moon, in German fiction, is not astronomical, but decorative. I have read some stories where it seems to rise on almost every page, and is invariably full. When Stevenson came to grief on the Moon in Prince Otto, he declared that the next time he wrote a novel, he should use an almanac. He unwittingly laid his finger on a weak spot in German fiction. The almanac is, after all, what is most sorely needed. Even Herr Sudermann, for whom we entertain the highest respect, places in Es War a young crescent Moon in the eastern sky! But it is in his story, Der Katzensteg, that the lunar orb plays its heaviest rôle. It rises so constantly that after a time the very words "der Mond" get on one's nerves. At the climax, when the lover looks down on the stream, he there beholds the dead body of his sweetheart. By some scientific process, "unknown to me and which 'twere well to know," she is floating on her back in the water, while the Moon illumines her face, leaving the rest of her remains in darkness. This constitutes a striking picture; and is also of material assistance to the man in locating the whereabouts of the girl. He descends, rescues her from the flood, and digs a grave in which to bury her. The Moon actively and dramatically takes part in this labour. Finally, he has lowered the corpse into the bottom of the cavity. The Moon now shines into the grave in such a manner that the dead woman's face is bright with its rays, whereas the rest of her body and the walls of the tomb are in obscurity. This phenomenon naturally makes a powerful impression on the mourner's mind.

If such things can happen in the works of a writer like Sudermann, one can easily imagine the reckless behaviour of the Moon in the common run of German fiction. The Moon, in fact, is in German novels what the calcium light is in American melodrama. If one "assists" at a performance of, let us say, No Wedding Bells for Her, and can take his eye a moment from the stage, he may observe up in the back gallery a person working the calcium light, and directing its powerful beams in such a fashion that no matter where the heroine moves, they dwell exclusively on her face, so that we may contemplate her features convulsed with emotion. Now in Der Katzensteg, the patient Moon follows the heroine about with much the same assiduity, and accuracy of aim. Possibly Herr Sudermann, since the composition of that work, has really consulted an almanac; for in Das hohe Lied, the Moon is practically ignored, and never gets a fair start. Toward the end, I felt sure that it would appear, and finally, when I came to the words, "The weary disk of the full moon (matte Vollmondscheibe) hung somewhere in the dark sky," I exclaimed, "Art thou there, truepenny?"—but the next sentence showed that the author was playing fast and loose with his old friend. "It was the illuminated clock of a railway-station." Can Sudermann have purposely set a trap for his moon-struck constituency?

From the astronomical point of view, I have seldom read a novel that contained so much moonlight as Der Katzensteg, and I have never read one that contained so little as Das hohe Lied. Perhaps Sudermann is now quietly protesting against what he himself may regard as a national calamity, for it is little less than that. Be this as it may, the lack of proportion and the excess of sentimentality are two great evils that have militated against the final success of German fiction.

Hermann Sudermann was born at a little village in East Prussia, near the Russian frontier. The natal landscape is dull, depressing, gloomy, and the skies are low and threatening. The clouds return after the rain. Dame Care has spread her grey wings over the flat earth, and neither the scenery nor the quality of the air are such as to inspire hope and vigour. The boy's parents were desperately poor, and the bitter struggles with poverty so frequently described in his novels are reminiscent of early experiences. In the beautiful and affectionate verses, which constitute the dedication to his father and mother, and which are placed at the beginning of Frau Sorge, these privations of the Sudermann household are dwelt on with loving tenderness. At the age of fourteen, the child was forced to leave school, and was apprenticed to a chemist—something that recalls chapters in the lives of Keats and of Ibsen. But, like most boys who really long for a good education, Sudermann obtained it; he continued his studies in private, and later returned to school at Tilsit. In 1875 he attended the University at Königsberg, and in 1877 migrated to the University of Berlin. His first impulse was to become a teacher, and he spent several years in a wide range of studies in philosophy and literature. Then he turned to journalism, and edited a political weekly. He finally forsook journalism for literature, and for the last twenty years he has been known in every part of the intellectual world.