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, Zimmer. mann 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 positive, -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

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to speak, unoppressed by the burden of dogmas, free from the disturbing elements of speculative thought.

For this modern civilization we fancy so permeating is found after all in many countries, when carefully scrutinized, to be but a sort of superficial polish: it goes down really but a little way into the masses of the people, and the bottom stratum is very likely to be wholly untouched by it. The Christianity these peasants of Auerbach had been taught might as well have been any other code of decent behavior, accompanied by sufficient superstitions to sanctify it. The men and women he had known from boyhood, along these bubbling mountain-streams, in these crowded hamlets, in these lonely wastes of forest, were men and women as near the state of nature as you could get for Auerbach's purpose. And so he described them just as they were, but made his description poetic; and the world was charmed with the beauty and veracity of it, and overjoyed to find in these unaccustomed ways, where no flower of sentiment, no fragrant poetic blossom, was ever gathered before, such a freshness of life in the midst of what was thought such a pestilent miasma. But the world had perhaps little insight into the conditions of that success. In Gotthelf, there was a solemn repose of faith like that of the Hebrew prophets. But along every page of Auerbach's runs an undertone of that Welt-schmerz, which his philosophy cannot banish, and which he has no religion to help him master. Yet let it not be supposed, that Auerbach is wanting in faith. To him, as Taillandier says, the world is beautiful, and life is sweet: it is the mystics, the false idealists, who, under pretence of embellishing, disdain it; it is the blasés who mock at it; it is the materialists who disfigure it. Let us, on the contrary, find out life, - what it contains. There is more poetry in reality than in the inventions of fancy; for the study of reality is the basis of science, and science is the noblest poetry. Let us study reality, then, not merely physical, but moral reality; for that alone is true and durable reality, and, in the end, explanatory of the other: that is, let the artist be a moralist.

The reading world in Germany had grown weary of the

triflers, who, by concealing their want of creative power under a forced frivolity of manner, had succeeded in keeping it in the heated air of the saloons, amidst gorgeous upholsteries and resplendent mirrors; and it was weary, on the other hand, of the sensuous mysticism of the illuminati. The boudoirs of the Countess Hahn-Hahn, and the aristocratic saloons of Sternberg, were even more oppressive than the schools where young Germany preached, it was thought, the rehabilitation of matter. It was, therefore, like a fragrant breath of the blossoming springtime, like a breeze redolent of farmyards and freshly-ploughed furrows and long reaches of oaks and beaches that came up now from the Black Forest, and braced the unstrung nerves, and gave a tone to the jaded mind. For these characters, so simple and true, were not the representatives of a system: they were neither demagogues nor preachers; they were soldiers and wood-cutters and schoolmasters and schoolboys and emigrants, painted with a loving hand, with all their caustic bonhommie and all their vulgar vices. Living pictures, as it were, on the canvas, they answered the general craving for greater reality and a more earnest purpose. Political lyrics were stirring the people again, the national drama was reviving, the whole poetic tendency of Germany was taking a more vigorous and a more reflective turn.

And what these peasant-tales were to literature in general as the re-action from an over-refinement of culture, they were to Auerbach himself as the re-action from merely speculative, unfruitful thought. He had been knocked about for years amongst all the doctrines of the schools; he had sat at the feet of Rabbies, and been overborne with the scholasticism of the Talmud; he had listened to the lectures of famous professors, and tasted of the ripest fruits of philosophy and science: but in all these labyrinths of speculation, amidst these dust-heaps of dead learning, he had sought in vain for the lost peace of his soul. After all this intellectual exile, this spiritual vaga. bondage, he returned like the prodigal son to his old home among the forests and the hills, and, writing his peasant tales, began a new epoch in the history of German fiction.