race, this representation of his inward experience - which to all the truth of a biography, so far as biography in this instance can go, adds all the fascination of a romance, so far as romance is allowed within the limits of probability - will not fail to be of service in dissipating many prejudices, and in opening the way to a wider recognition of the truth he taught, as also of the errors with which that truth may have been accompanied. For, as one of the ablest of living English writers has recently said, "Spinoza shocks those who regard him from an antagonistic standing-point. No sooner is the mind disengaged from the trammels of old prejudice than we learn to look on his arguments as on those of Parmenides or Algazel: we ask whether they are true or false; whether they can be taken up into our philosophy, or rejected from it. the attitude of Germany. To some extent it is the of France. It will become the attitude of England. self, I cannot accept Spinoza's system; but I see how it was perfectly compatible with his own pure morality, and do not fear lest it should disturb the morality of any one who could conscientiously adopt it." This is attitude For my Auerbach's second Jewish romance dealt with the same general subject of the struggles of a thoughtful mind against the limitations of an inherited faith. This contradiction of the Jewish traditions with modern life was no greater, indeed, than that of some of the creeds of Christian sects with the intellectual and scientific development of the age; but the interest of Spinoza was due in great part to the subject: the ascent of this great thinker from the low level of Jewish life, or any other life, was a striking spectacle to all men. But the wrestling of an humbler mind with the problems it could not master, and with the currents of thought that swept it away from its ancient faith, required greater skill in the handling, to give it a universal interest. The sketches of Rousseau and Lessing and Mendelssohn and the rest impart, indeed, a certain vivacity to its otherwise somewhat ponderous didacticism, and the various portraits of the Jewish fam * Mr. Lewes Fortnightly Review, No. XXII., for April 1, 1866, p. 399. ilies with whom it is concerned are well done: but it is more fragmentary than Spinoza, and suffers more from the want of that absorbing unity which carries the reader on fresh to the end. Kuh was a liberal thinker, the friend of Mendelssohn, and acquainted with Lessing and Gleim and Nicolai and Lavater; and it was doubtless for the reason that he thus obtained an opportunity for a series of clever studies, that Auerbach selected him. Taken by themselves, these studies are all interesting; that entitled "An Evening at Moses Mendelssohn's" is an excellent picture, quite in the tone of the last century, the work of an artist and a thinker. But to unite these separate sketches in that harmonious whole which the rules of art require in a romance, either a greater personage was needed for the subject, or a more dramatic plot for the evolution of his character. His subsequent brilliant career carried Auerbach away from the higher regions of metaphysical discussion, and from all the dust and din of the schools, back to the sweet fields and the silent forests, and the hamlets, so peaceful and so simple, that he had loved and lived in when a boy. But, true to his democratic convictions, he endeavored at various periods to diffuse among the people, by portraits of the distinguished men of his faith, by illustrations of the principles that should control a nation's literature, and by those Volkskalenders, peculiar to Germany, which, after the manner of Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac," treated the events of the day in a colloquial way, attractive to all capacities, he endeavored to diffuse, we say, clearer notions of the tendency in the thought of the age to greater freedom; and, at the same time, to awaken a more general perception of the fundamental unity of all human relations, in Jew and Gentile alike, in those bound in the spirit as in those who, like Spinoza, had attained a final emancipation from earthly limitations. In a couple of stories, which he afterwards inserted in his Deutsche Abende ("German Evenings "), he attempted to blend philosophy with poetry, after the manner of the Dialogues of Plato; and it was from the same general desire to make the highest truths in philosophy intelligible to com mon minds, that he wrote Der gebildete Bürger, Buch für den denkenden Mittelstand (“The Educated Citizen, a Book for the Thinking Middle Classes "). His Volkskalender, entitled the Gevattersmann ("Godfather "), had a circulation in its very first year of eighty thousand copies, and maintained itself for four years in the public favor, until the crisis of 1848 put an end to it. It was revived again, however, in 1858 and 1859. In Spinoza, and in Dichter und Kaufmann, Auerbach had addressed himself more directly to persons of a certain refinement and learning; to those who were attracted to the delicacy and subtilty of truth, rather than to the representation of the coarser passions and the grosser life, so common in the literature of the day. But his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten ("Peasant Tales of the Black Forest"), first published in 1843, lifted him at once into the front rank of popular European writers, and made for him a more than European reputation. Peasant tales of a similar character were not, indeed, new in German literature. In the last century, Stilling's autobiography, so familiar to us in the English translation, was but a picture, simple and graceful, of rural life and its quiet joys. It differs, however, from the representations of the same life that are made to-day, in that it was wholly an unconscious creation, springing, not from a disgust at civilization, but from an unaffected love of the changing beauties and the mystic repose of nature. Again: the idyls of the Palatinate, by Maler Müller, and Voss's touching pictures, had done something to take the German mind out of the dark byways of feverish and busy cities into the sunlight of green hillsides and the soft air of fruitful valleys. The immediate predecessor of Auerbach, however, but in a narrow way, was Zimmermann, in the episode of the Hofschulze in his brilliant and ingenious romance of Münchhausen. In contrast with the world (so full of falsehood and corruption) about him, Zimmermann felt the need of a character, limited to be sure in its sphere, but grounded in that moral principle, the want of which made those about him the mocking phantoms they were. And, for the creation of this character, so rare, yet so true, he had many advantages. He had passed some of his earlier years among the peasants of Lower Saxony, the most original perhaps in all that diversity of peasant life in Germany; and, in the discharge of his official duties, he had become familiar with them in their daily pursuits. He was thus preserved from that false sentimentalism which tends to exaggerate one side of this sort of life, and so not merely to put the whole in a false light, but, if one may say so, in an impossible light. But Zimmermann died before he could follow up the vein he had so successfully opened. For the finer perceptions and the ideal purity of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea and Voss's Luise had given place to a more direct study and an exacter appreciation of this peasant life, so naïve in its ignorance, and so gloomy withal in its simplicity. There was also another writer, to a certain extent Auerbach's predecessor, but in great part his contemporary, and with whom he can only be compared in entire misapprehension of the fundamental diversity in the structure of the minds of the two men,- we mean, of course, Jeremias Gotthelf, or, as his real name was, Albert Bitzius, for many years the busy, faithful pastor of the little village of Lützelflüh, in the valley of the Emme, amidst the Bernese landscapes, where he died in 1857. His writings were little known, till Auerbach had developed the taste for this sort of literature; and, though one cannot but admire his wonderful vigor and frequent humor, there is such a lack of artistic finish in his pictures, that for this reason, if for no other, they would always rank below Auerbach's, who, in this respect, is without a master in this kind of fiction. Gotthelf was an earnest worker among an humble class of people afflicted with a good many ills of their own producing, and a good many for which the State alone was responsible. To expose these evils to the people themselves on the one hand, and to the Government on the other, was the object he had in view when he took up his pen; and he did not lay down his pen, till, restless philanthropist that he was, he had written twenty-four solid volumes, many of them indeed quite open to the charge of being but literary manufacture, if one does not bear in mind that, like the sermons he spoke in public, and the incessant sermons he extemporized in private, they all had an immediate purpose and a definite audience in view. The Bernese peasants pass before us in painful reality, with all their virtues and vices in their faces, and with their torn and muddy garb, rank with the smell of the farmyard,—just as they passed before Gotthelf's eyes daily to be catechized and reproved, to be taught a new way of preparing fodder for the cattle or cheese for the market, and to be indoctrinated with a proper abhorrence of radicalism; not less fatal, in his opinion, to religious belief than to all dutiful subordination to civil authority. Gotthelf had a healthy, vigorous faith: life to him was posi tive, a sphere for work, not for speculation. Auerbach began his career in an anxious seeking after the unknowable: from being a Jew he had become a Pantheist, and, as a Pantheist, it was upon him to explain life to himself and to others; and the mighty unrest of that task is visible in all his writings. As a Jew, indeed, by birth he was well fitted to lead the way in the endeavor, apparent in a good deal of the literature of the day, to show how the conscience of man can recognize sin, and how his will may be trained, and must in the necessity of things be trained, to wrestle with it upon grounds independent of those presented by Christian doctrine. But, as a mere thinker, Auerbach is not original: the philosophy which he has adopted as the explanation and the rule of life is not of his own discovery. He follows substantially in the footsteps of Spinoza, and shows the practical working of that thinker's doctrine in life, helping us to judge for ourselves of its worth by the success with which he unfolds it in action; as is especially the case with his last quite remarkable romance, entitled Auf der Höhe, of which we shall speak in a moment. We have merely to remark now, that it was this very philosophical freedom which helped him more than any thing, perhaps, to the peculiar success he obtained in his peasant tales; for there he not only had full scope for his faculty of acute observation, but a basis of human nature, so VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I. 3 |