a certain kind of life in its permanent forms. The style, indeed, was so far removed from the usual belletristic flow, and yet so precise and graceful, that, in working out their great dictionary of the German language, the brothers Grimm paid special attention to Auerbach among contemporary writers. He had not that fulness of vocabulary so fatal to many; but his effort to express his thought exactly, his struggle for reality in words as well as in things, made him in many respects an authority. Critics may complain, that he made his peasants talk sometimes as no peasants ever did talk or could talk; but it was not for want of a thorough understanding of their dialect: it was from his tendency to analyze rather than create. As a psychological study, there is perhaps nothing of the kind in any literature like his Geschichte des Diethelm von Buchenberg, in the fifth volume of the Dorfgeschichten. And though he fails in following out logically or sustaining a passion to the end; though his story progresses, not organically, but by separate leaps, as it were, there is nevertheless in the various motives and situations such a wealth of fancy, and such a wonderful reality in the various moods. of mind he pictures, that the interest seldom flags; and one leaves him instructed by an inward vision of human experience he never had before.

Der Tolpatsch, Die Kriegspfeife, Befehlerles, and Ivo der Hajrle, in the first volume of the Dorfgeschichten, afford charming specimens of his genre style; while, in the second volume, Die Frau Professorin is looked upon as one of his best creations in general, and it is indeed a veritable pearl in German literature: but we cannot discover its special superiority to some of his other efforts, nor should we be inclined to rank it with the ballads of Uhland, as the chief illustration of the Swabian genius. Florian und Crescenz and Der Lautenbacher, in the same volume, may also be taken as delightful instances of his general merit. In Lucifer, in the fourth volume, he endeavors to show how rural manners and modes of thought are assailed by every forward movement of civilization, and that, although many of the charms of rural life are thus destroyed, mankind on the whole gains in the process; and in

this instance, again, he shows how far removed he is from that romanticism which, properly translated, means a preference for ignorance over culture: for he has never for a moment been faithless to the obligations his earlier training imposed upon him; his very fidelity to them, indeed, has led him into artistic errors which he would otherwise have avoided. For the unsparing severity of his representation of the internal conflicts and confusion in these stolid peasant hearts leaves on the whole a somewhat gloomy impression. The tragedies he exhibits playing about us under the surface of a life apparently so unruffled startle us by their violence; and the keener his psychological analysis, the more vividly do these passions take form, and the more unwholesome is the atmosphere we breathe, we feel as if everywhere about us were the phantoms of a disordered and darkened world, waiting to repeat their wild, degraded play of discord and of vice. Moreover, in order to be still truer to the reality, Auerbach, like Balzac, has made some of his characters re-appear in almost all his stories, while the scene of all of them is the same, namely, his birth-place of Nordstetten. His aim has been to depict a whole hamlet, just as it is, from the first house to the last; but, if these pictures are to be taken together as illustration of the morals of a single place, has he not painted a second Gomorrah?

The question, therefore, cannot but arise as to the import of such representations. Have these peasants, with all their stupidities and ignorance and naiveté, a claim to this careful study from a poetic point of view? Other novelists have introduced peasant characters; Walter Scott has many of them: but no other novelist has made them a speciality with such wonderful microscopic power as Auerbach. And therefore, if the subject, which in some aspects of it he has exhausted, yields fruits no greater than we find in these tales, may we not assume that the limits of it have been reached? As a German critic says, "There is no dialectic of passion or feeling among peasants." Like the unbroken monotony of their features, which show no trace of intellectual processes, their feelings have none of that variety and complexity which

you find in more cultivated classes; for they lack that sensitive nervous organization which is the product of culture, and is as natural to the better educated as the typical rigidity of the peasant's face is to him. Hans may be very fond of his Grethe; but his feelings at sight of her will hardly resemble those of Dante contemplating Beatrice, or of Goethe at the feet of Frau von Stein, or of Alfieri by the side of the Countess of Albany. In love, as in every other emotion of the soul and in every intellectual activity, there is a certain gradation of culture. The most highly developed minds and the best nurtured hearts are alone capable of the profoundest thought and emotion. Peasant tales, therefore, taken by themselves, are subordinate and limited in their character; for they are the picture of a dreary, poverty-stricken world, in which it is scarcely possible in an æsthetic point of view to interest the cultivated mind, which aspires ever to something beyond itself and still further developed. The moral and scientific importance of the subject, of course, we are not considering: how great that is, appears directly in every line that Auerbach has written, although he does not profess to make it his aim to indicate it.

Nevertheless, in thus leading the way back to realism, which must always be the basis of all true art, Auerbach has certainly rendered a great service to literature. Yet we fear in the end it will be, as Schmidt says, that we have tasted so much of the sweet poison of civilization that we can no more go back to the simplicity of a peasant hut in the Black Foreşt than we can live in a kraal on the banks of the Orange River; for, though we have taken down fairy tales from old women's lips as they sat spinning, and caught up curious sayings of journeymen artisans as they jogged along the highway, it has been with a view to make use of them in the saloon or opera-house or learned academies; and it will probably be the same with peasant tales: they will live on in poetry, but die out in reality.

Of Auerbach's later novels, Barfüssele, — which was translated for us several years ago by Mrs. Lee, Joseph im Schnee, and Edelweiss, we have only to say, that, although deficient in

some of the qualities which made his "Peasant Tales" SO famous, they are nevertheless somewhat livelier in tone, and more cheerful in coloring. But if Auerbach's genius slumbered a little for a time, it revived again in all its vigor and freshness and exquisite charm in the romance which he published this last year, entitled Auf der Höhe. We count it as next to the Dorfgeschichten, his leading work; and, moreover, as one of the few good novels that have, as yet, been written in Germany. The right of translation is advertised as reserved to Dr. Max Schlesinger in London, and to Bayard Taylor in America; and we hope that either the one or the other will see to it, that it is soon put into an English dress. The plot of it is simple, yet the interest of the reader, although not kept at a feverish heat as in the popular fiction of the day, never flags; for there is less of what an English reviewer calls "that fatal skill of Auerbach's in throwing a charm around separate incidents, to the detriment of the unity of the subject." In its general conception, it aims to illustrate the wrestlings of a noble mind with sin, from a pantheistic point of view; the passing out of the purified soul from the limitations of its turbid individuality into the grandeur of the universal life. Irma, the heroine and moreover the chorus, as it were, of the drama, revealing its significance is a highspirited, gifted daughter of the nobility, maid of honor to the queen, and beloved of the king. She repents of her fault, and withdraws to the solitude of a peasant's hut to work out her repentance; and, at last, when she has ascended up out of the discords of earth, to die at one with the peace of nature and the laws of her moral being. In contrast with these higher scenes are pictures of a lowlier life, in which Walpurga, the shrewd, guileless, faithful peasant-woman, who has been brought to court as a wet-nurse, is the chief character. The realism with which she is depicted is sometimes coarse, and often tedious; but, on the whole, she is one of Auerbach's best creations, wonderful for its originality and veracity, and all the more true to the reality of things in that the sphere in which she moves is represented as subordinate to a higher one. Upon the other characters — the lackey Baum, and the lonely Eberhard, and

the wise, thoughtful Gunther, to say nothing of Zenza, and the black Esther, and the brutish Thomas, and the pitiable Bruno, and the rest — we need not dwell. Irma's diary, as she wrote it out in the agony of her self-imposed expiation, marked as it is by great delicacy of thought, may be said to be the burden of Auerbach's philosophy of life. The restless reader, of course, will skip it; but one who seeks in art the profoundest revelation of life will linger over it as the mournfullest exhibition of a human soul struggling to right itself by its own unaided powers that has ever been presented to him. This Magdalene, without a religion; this contrite heart, with only the vast spaces of nature to take note of its repentant throbbing; these weary eyes, red with weeping, and no face to look upon but the great sweep of nature's processes; this haunting consciousness of evil, and no bosom to lay the burden of it in but the swelling sea of the universe,- what a picture is that of philosophy striving to allay this burning fever of sin!

With his early political tendencies, Auerbach could not fail to sympathize with the Revolution of 1848; but he had been recently married, and the illness of his wife, soon followed by her death, prevented him from taking part in it other than in opposing the Polish agitators at Breslau, who claimed all Silesia as far as watered by the Oder for their future republic. In the autumn of that year, however, he made a journey into Austria, and was a witness of the Revolution in Vienna, of which he wrote an account that was translated into English. He married again afterwards, and lived for a good while at Dresden, which, with Munich, has become one of the brilliant centres of the German imagination; the home of Ludwig Richter, so popular even in this country for his humorous. illustrations; and, for a good while, of the sculptor Rietschel, now dead. He lives now in Berlin, and is described as "a person of fine appearance and singular sweetness of disposition, with uncommon social and conversational powers."

The Revolution, however, of 1848 suggested to him a tragedy, the political violence of which he lived to outgrow. The character of the Tyrolese chief, Andree Hofer, celebrated