52

THE MODERN GERMAN NOVEL.
HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT.

Of all the forms of literature the novel is surely the most representative of the present day in Germany as in this country and all other parts of the civilised world. Yet it is the one form of literature not boycotted by the German reviews, for they devote plenty of space to fiction, but the topic of all others which is least discussed in their pages. In the June number of the Deutsche Revue, however, Berthold Litzmann has an interesting article on the development of the modern German novel.

BEGINNINGS.

The beginnings of the German novel, he says, date back scarcely beyond the sixteenth century, and the modern types not beyond the eighteenth century. It was Gellert who in 1747 first made the novel a form of self-expression in Germany in his "Life of the Swedish Countess of G.," but it was left to Goethe to introduce fiction as an art into German literature. No other form of composition has undergone so many changes in so short a period, and in no other is the impression so strong that innumerable germs still lie hidden and only await creative genius to develop them.

THE NOVELIST'S STANDPOINT.

To write a Technique of the drama is a comparatively easy task; to attempt anything of the kind with the novel of to-day is practically an impossibility. The novelist has such perfect liberty to choose his standpoint. He may be an impartial observer of the events he depicts, or he may identify himself with the hero of his story and write it in the first person. Goethe's "Elective Affinities" and Zola's novels are good examples of the first; Goethe's 'Werther," Keller's "Der Grüne Heinrich," Dickens's "David Copperfield," are conspicuous instances of the autobiographical novel.

But there are many standpoints between these two. In the letter-form the novelist may describe several heroes all in the first person. This was the favourite form of the eighteenth century. Again, he may introduce a sort of subjective intermezzo in the shape of letters or journals, eg., Ottilie's diary in "Elective Affinities.” Sometimes he will view the characters and the situations as though he were among them and acting with them; and another time in the same story he will depict the same persons and their actions as they appear to him looking on through the window. What striking and unique effects may thus be produced are evident in Sudermann's "Es war." And lastly he may play a middle part between the objective report which keeps to a silhouette representation of persons and events, and actual identification with the hero. In this way he will sometimes be found acting as friend and confidant to the heroes, and will let his personal and human interest in what he is depicting appear in the manner of his description, and the things which he makes his figures say. This style is very peculiar to Dickens, Freytag in "Soll und Haben," etc.

WHY THE NOVEL FASCINATES.

All these and numerous other variations are at the disposal of the writer of fiction, and it is probably in this wealth of form, this inexhaustible variety of technical aids, this elasticity of artistic articulation, that we may explain the fascination which the novel has over all other forms of modern composition. It is, it is true, the form selected by those writers whose only aim is to amuse, but

it is also the form of literary art which, side by side with the development of modern life, exercises the deepest and widest influence on taste.

THE REALISM OF TO-DAY.

Concerning realism, Herr Litzmann observes that in the eighteenth century there was a loud cry for a return to nature, but it was a philosophical age, and the realism or naturalism took a philosophical phase. At the end of the nineteenth century the realistic cry is scientific, in accordance with the scientific spirit of the age. The results of scientific research leave the literary creators no rest. We have, in fact, the experimental novel. It is unnecessary to endow such heroes as Zola's with qualities which would make them interesting for themselves. The parts which Zola's characters play resemble those of animals on which experiments have been performed. We are to be interested in observing how certain charms, influences, or attacks react on the persons before us. drunkard, or any other creature with little else than animal instincts, makes a suitable hero for the experimental novel.

A

When Zola began his work, the effect of his appearance resembled the explosion of a bomb. On the one side there arose a cry of horror; on the other it was mute astonishment. People who professed no literary tastes thought the result repulsive; those who called themselves literary greeted his work as uncommon, and rejoiced. Since then much talent and energy have no doubt been wasted on pedantic trifling with realism, which has exposed the movement to unmerited ridicule; but the strong individual personalities, ripe and thoughtful enough to examine, and yet young enough to receive and work out new impressions without sacrificing themselves, have found and developed their best powers in the realistic movement. Such names as Fontane, Sudermann, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Ilse Frapan, at once rise before the mind as typical examples, and what would their works be without the leaven of realism? It would be well if the young German novelists would make their technical studies under Fontane and not under Zola.

HERMANN SUDERMANN.

From Sudermann much may be expected. In his dramas and novels he has fallen between two fires. For the young ones he does not go far enough; for the old he goes too far. He possesses great technical skill-a quality comparatively rare for a German writer, and for him, at any rate, fraught with danger. He who can get on so smoothly with externals is expected to achieve something. This power is seen in his dramas. He has been reproached with always using the same motives, and in a certain sense this must betray limits to his talent; but he seems to be the writer who will open up the way for the German novel of the future.

WANTED, A COMPANION PUPIL!-An English lady whose daughter, aged 15, is educated at home by a thoroughly competent governess, would be glad to hear of a French young lady of the same age as her daughter whose parents desire her to learn English in England. She would board with the governess, but the two girls would be educated together as companion pupils. Terms £75 per annum, including board, education, etc. The object with which this is sought is to obtain reciprocal advantage in the way of learning the languages, and to give a solitary pupil the stimulus of a fellow student. Address,-"Mother," REVIEW OF REVIEWS Office, Temple,

London.

WHERE SHALL WE GO FOR HOLIDAYS?

TRY CHINA.

THOSE who are discussing where to spend the next long holiday will read with interest Mr. Julian Ralph's paper in Harper's Magazine for June on "Houseboating in China." According to Mr. Ralph, China is one of the most charming places in the world to spend summer in; i.e., if you have a friend who owns a houseboat which he will place at your disposal. That was Mr. Ralph's position, and he enjoyed himself extremely. His picture of life in China is very interesting, and somewhat novel from the pleasantness of his description of the land and its people. He went there recently, travelled about two of its eighteen provinces, and thus reports his experiences:

By choosing the best part of the empire, by carrying a large stock of that good nature which works the greatest magic with the Chinese, and by being properly counselled, I enjoyed the most delightful of all my journeys-one so completely delightful that I do not hesitate to recommend it to the great army of globe-trotters, even to the most fastidious ladies and the tenderest children among them.

This tour had also the advantage of cheapness:

I made my longest journey in the Swallow houseboat, with every European comfort, eating as if I were a very rich man in London or in Paris, waited on by cleven servants, at an average daily cost of about five dollars each for two of us, enjoying as rich, as fertile, and as beautiful a country as the sun is able to visit in his rounds, and being amused and informed by a constant succession of the liveliest, the funniest, the strangest, and the most interesting experiences that I am able to imagine with my Occidental intellect.

Most English travellers come back from China giving such miserable accounts of the filth of the people and the cities, that it is a welcome change to read Mr. Ralph; that it is a charming sight of Nature at her happiest that met his eyes when he had his first view of the interior of China. Japan, he says, is Tiny-land—a veritable land of Lilliput, full of whimsical prettypretties; whereas China is logical and proper. As for the people, he says, they will live in his mind for ever, here and in heaven, as the jolliest, kindliest, most sympathetic, generous souls he ever found in such profusion anywhere in his own roving.

Mr. Ralph's conception of the Chinese men is very different from that which I have ever seen elsewhere. So far from the Chinese being preternaturally a grave people, he found them full of fun and good humour. He says the men were for ever playing tricks, making fun, exchanging wit, chasing one another, and shoving and pushing and wrestling like schoolboys at home. Almost the only characteristic of the Chinaman which Mr. Ralph mentions that others have discovered is his determination to cheat if he can, and of this Mr. Ralph gives very many curious instances. If you over-pay a Chinaman as much as one red cent, he considers it as a challenge to extract more. If you would pay him exactly what you promised him, he is contented. You pay him a penny more: you are such a fool you may as well be made to pay a shilling, and he absolutely pursues you with abuse for not paying him as much as he chooses to think you should, although if you dock him of the extra sum he would be quite content.

Mr. Ralph gives a very vivid picture also of the innumerable craft of all kinds which fill the waterway. He says:

Since there are neither waggon roads nor any wheeled vehicles except hand-barrows, all travel and traffic are by water. And since the waterways are led to the doors of all

the people, except the millions whose homes are floating craft, the number of boats in China is beyond anything that the world knows or that the world sees elsewhere. In all my life rolled together I had never seen so many water-craft as I saw at Shanghai, and yet I saw more when I travelled inland. At Shanghai they anchor in such myriads that the beholder realises for the first time what a farce it is to speak of the "forests of masts" at New York or Liverpool. They lie together in all but solid masses for miles and miles on each side of the harbour, and the channel between the lines is no more clear of them than Broadway or Charing Cross is free of vehicles at noonday.

Altogether it is a very bright little paper, and all those who have time to spare might do worse than spend their holidays in China.

In the July Harper's, Mr. Ralph continues his pleasant description of "Real Life in China." He says:—

My China has its gentry, its merchants, its working-men, and its farmers-not to speak of beggars, actors, priests, conjurers, and sailors. We found its merchant class polite, patient, extremely shrewd, well-dressed, pattern shopkeepers. We found its gentlemen graceful, polished, generous, and amiable. But the peasantry constantly reminded us of the country folk of continental Europe outside of Russia. Theirs was the same simplicity of costume, intelligence, and manners. They lived in very much the same little villages of thatched cottages. Theirs was the same awkwardness, shyness, cunning in trade, the same distrust of strangers and of strange things. The sharpest feature of the comparison was scen in the Chinese farms; for, where we were, every handful of earth was almost literally passed through the hands of its cultivators, every leaf was inspected, every inch was watered, manured, watched, and cared for as a retired Englishman looks after his back garden. The result was a fertility beyond compare, a glory of vegetation, a universality of cultivation that permitted no waste places. It was a system that always included the preparation of a second growth to be transplanted into the place of the main growth when the first reached its harvest. As compared with Japan, one feature of every view was strikingly in favour of the larger country. The dress and behaviour of the Chinese will not offend Europeans. The women of Central China are most modest. I look back on China as if it were a vast imperial Wall Street or Charing Cross; for there is almost no spot along its highways, or time of any day, when the beholder does not rest his eyes upon crowds of people. The cities, towns, and villages are thronged; the highways are all alive; the fields are peopled-and if the eye rests upon a place deserted by men, it is almost certain to be crowded with the dead, still on the earth's surface, still breaking the line of the horizon as when they travelled their brief span. Oh, but it was a beautiful country that confronted us on that first morning out. The land led for ever away in great reaches of brilliant verdure, raised neck-high above the criss-crossed waterways. The tasselled, whispering rice stood knee-high and brilliant in uncountable fields, only broken by other multitudinous fields of cotton, dark green and brown, already plucked and wilting, but specked with white tatters of the garnered cotton-bolls. "It's all Holland magnified "so they say who know Holland-the long low vistas of luxuriant green, the ever-lengthening, unbroken, flat view, the silvery water routes, and the great sails in every distance, seeming to glide over the land.

IN the Cornhill Magazine, Mr. Crockett begins a new story "Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City; His Progress and Adventures." Cleg Kelly is an old acquaintance, for he was first introduced by Mr. Crockett to the attention of the public in a Scotch paper, and some of these chapters have appeared before in his last published collection of stories. Mrs. Humphry Ward finishes her story of "Bessie Costrell," but "The Sowers" still its weary way along.

s, uh call ut s." [Yes, I call it so.]

"Wah thins genl?" [How are things in general?]

66

Web, weh don alil, tmuch thuh; sar kee thiz tirn these tie." [Well, we're doing a little-not much, though; it's hard to keep things stirring these times.]

"Suh. Bout rye. Fine suh." [That's so. You're about right. I find it so.]

The utterance of both men is clouded and clogged by most of the defects that I have named as masculine, and, in particular, is forced through mouth-apertures diminished to a minimum by jaw rigidity. The American man is typically "nervous," and in nerve-strain I find the cause of much that is unpleasant in his voice. Nerve-strain tends to the prevalence of the high vocal pitch and to the American fault-the "throat-clutch." It tends, too, to develop enunciatory rigidity precisely as it tends to develop rigidity of limb and body.

The voices of American men are quite as generally defective as the voices of our women. The concern of too many of them is to make money-voice or no voice.

The chief part of the paper is devoted to setting forth what is disagreeable in the speech of American women. He says:

The speech of the middle-class American woman or girl is hardly more stridulous, or husky, or funereal, or flaccid, or silly, or constricted, or defective in any way indeed, than is the average speech in our women's colleges or in American "society." Unfortunately an indictment must be drawn against the vocal qualities of girls and women of all social grades. First, the majority of our women's voices are weak. Again, our women's voices are, on the whole, ungentle; that is to say, they are pitched unpleasantly high and hardened by throat contractions into an habitual "quacky" or metallic quality. This ungentleness is the one attribute of our women's voices that seems to have attracted most attention abroad. It is the most striking American defect. Nasality has held that place in popular estimation, but true nasality is not very common to-day in America; it seems to be dying out. "Quackiness" and shrillness prevail less in the southern States than in the northern and western, but even southern women are not free from it. Again, there is in our feminine manner of utterance in its more active moods a prevailing flippancy or silliness. Over-emphasis through the misused intonational "twist," technically noted as the circumflex inflection is the immediate physiologic source of this distemper.

There is also another evil habit which American women indulge in, which is to speak in a tone of despondency which is often without any justification whatever in the nature of their remarks. He says:

I fear that most of us have become so used to this tone of despair among the girls and women of our households that we do not, as a rule, recognise an ordinarily despondent intonation when we hear it. That scarcely one American girl or woman in a hundred breathes wholesomely.

Discussing the cause of the lamentable effects of the American voice, he says:

Climate, undoubtedly, is one of the causes of these defects, but not, I think, the chief cause. Those elements, too, in American life which have hitherto kept our general culture

HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH AND ENJOY IT. "WRITE as you speak," which he takes to be now the generally admitted first principle of rhetoric, is the text of a very sensible and practical article by Mr. L. A. Sherman in the Educational Review for June. He starts with the conviction that, speaking being the model of writing, the teacher must begin with the speaking. "The first school-work in English should be oral." Assign the pupils a topic on which they can tell the teacher something. Let each rise in his place and say his say. Correct his grammar as need occurs. After sufficient practice in speaking, let him write out as nearly as Set he can what he has said, improving it where he can. him to consult the classic English writers on points in style where he requires guidance.

Mr. Sherman tells of a student whom he knew "drop half his sentence weight in two months."

A graduate of a certain college some five years back, writing English neither better nor worse than average bachelors of arts, but ambitious to acquire more readiness and facility of expression, applied to the writer of this article for suggestions to that end. He declared he would gladly give five years of the hardest work, if in the end he might write clearly, strongly and rapidly. He was advised simply to investigate the decline in the average of verbs per sentence, and in sentence weight, since Chaucer. By the time the investigation had been carried down to modern authors, the investigator's style had altered conformably to the improvement whose evolution he had traced, all by the operation of unconscious impulses. He soon remarked about it after this fashion : "What has come over me? I can write now. But I haven't been practising at all!"

On the need of cultivating the sensibility as well as the intellect in the study of English, Mr. Sherman gives some excellent advice. He estimates that out of a hundred boys who read "Ivanhoe" and " Waverley " with delight, not so many as five could be induced to read "The Lady of the Lake "or" Marinion." He commends the Hoj Skoler (High Schools), started some sixty years ago in Jutland by the poet Grundtvig, for the development of the emotional side of the mind, chiefly by the study of famous men. Pupils must read emotional literature to help them feel what has feeling in it, just as they read thought-literature to help them interpret thought-meanings. Taste is of the feelings, he insists; we have been trying to make it a thing of the intellect, the reason.

Mrs. Humphry Ward Moralises.

IN the Cornhill Magazine, Mrs. Humphry Ward's short new story of "Bessie Costrell" is finished. Poor Bessie commits suicide as the only way out, and her husband Isaac survives her to suffer from recurrent attacks of melancholia, occasionally deriving much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasement of religion.

No human life would be possible if there were not forces in and round man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches that he himself makes. Misery provokes pity; despair throws itself on a Divine tenderness. And for those who have the "grace" of faith, in the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this various world-in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the tremulous yet undying hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them in these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be "the falls of princes" or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie Costrell to her end.