BOOKS.

SACHER-MASOCH'S NOVELS.*

ARE we wrong in assuming that the name of Sacher-Masoch, this novelist who proudly boasts that he forms with Wagner and Bismarck the best abused trio in Germany, is one wholly new to English readers ? We fancy not. And yet Leopold von Sacher- Masoch is a remarkable writer on many accounts, especially for the originality and strange picturesqueness of the surroundings into which he transports us. Although by birth and sympathies a Gallician Pole, Sacher-Masoch writes in German, and hence may be properly classed as a German author. But except in the matter of language, he has little in common with a people whom it is his delight to denounce. Indeed, a special interest attaches to him, as a German novelist devoid of German feeling. All his most notable stories treat of Slavonic peoples, to which his sym- pathies are exclusively confined, and whom he regards as the coming race. It is his endeavour to demonstrate how the future rulers of Europe regard life and the world generally, and whatever we may think of Sacher-Masoch's political prophecies, we cannot deny his graphic force. Notwithstanding all that has been written by newspaper correspondents, our real knowledge of the life of those who people these extreme Eastern corners of Europe is very scanty, and has generally been furnished by per- sons ignorant of their language, politically biassed, and lacking the opportunities to penetrate into the home-life which alone can furnish the proper index to the motor power of a nation's thoughts and actions. All these qualifications are united in Sacher-Masoch ; he is yet another of those ethnographical novelists, who, like Tourgdnieff, assist us in justly comprehending their countrymen. A comparison between the two writers naturally suggests itself, and in some respects the analogy is close. Like the Russian novelist, so, too, has the Gallician brought before us a semi-civilised people, with primitive manners, Sather-lfasoeles Werke, Berne: Georg Frobeen and Co. London: Nutt. Dk Lithe. Der Neue Hiob. Stuttgart : Colts. London: Nutt. and both have handled their original material with original power. The characters of both possess a strange, impressive individuality,—a living reality, that stamps them indelibly upon the memory, while the local colours employed give to their works a curious savour of barbarism and unfamiliarity that attracts as powerfully as it occasionally repels the reader. What has been named "the perfume of the Steppes" pervades the writings of both authors, and both combine the capacity for keen, analytic observation, with a leaning towards the melancholy which is characteristic of the Slay. But while throughout Tourgenieff's novels there breathes a spirit of sad resignation to inevitable conditions, Sacher-Masoch does not regard these conditions as inevitable, and desires to stir up a spirit of revolt against bureaucratic oppression.. Tourg(!nieff is more objective, Sacher-Masoch more subjective, in his mode of regarding life, and while the former is certainly the truer artist be- cause he never offends against good-taste, the genius of the latter is less touched by Aryan refinement, and bears upon it a hall- mark of savagery that has a special interest of its own ; the more so, since Sacher-Masoch claims to be a disciple of the very latest leaders of our modern thought. In Darwin, as the delineator of the struggle for existence, and in Schopenhauer, as the prophet of human woe, he sees his masters, whose views it is his endeavour to expound in fiction. Thus, while dealing with a wild people and wild conditions, Sacher-Masoch has by no means shaken off the fetters that bind him to our over-cultured present, and hence arise at times strange paradoxes and incongruities of conclusion that rather enhance than diminish the vivid interest of his works. It is this perhaps which makes him at times a little impetuous in his judgment of social problems. Certainly the pictures he unrolls before our view come upon us as strangely as if we were biolo- gists, and had suddenly lighted upon some new species. Like Bret Harte, whom he fervently admires, Sacher-Masoch is the delineator of an uncultivated nature, and of a race that does not yet suffer from the evils incident to long ages of civilisation.

This has, however, not always been the case. Sacher-Masoch began his literary career by writing plays and stories that dealt with the monotonous and pallid life of Germany. These failed, however, to furnish to his palette those gorgeous Eastern colours and characteristic piquant settings that have since distinguished his work, and which strike us as so strange, because such individual developments as are here presented to our view have become rare in Western Europe. He then wrote historical romances, suggested by the atrocities he had witnessed in his youth during the bloody oppression of Poland in 1846 and the insurrections that occurred in 1848, and from these, over which we have not space to linger, though they are replete with power, he was led by an accident to his opus magnum, Das Vermachtniss Kains, of which, as yet, only two portions have been issued. Sacher-Masoch intends this great work to be a prose epic of modern society, dealing with the great problems that agitate it. He himself has accepted the definition of a romantic theodicy, a Divina Cornmedia in prose, accorded to it by an enthusiastic German critic.

"The Legacy of Cain" (Das Vermachtniss Kains) is to adumbrate the whole of mankind in the chief moments of human endeavour that have to be wrestled with by each individual in the struggle for existence. These moments Sacher-Masoch defines as six, and classifies them thus,—Love, Property, the State, War, Work, Death. To each of these momentous themes he proposes to devote two volumes. The first two sections alone being as yet given to the world, it is too early to judge of the conclusions to be deduced from the whole, but we are promised by the author that the epilogue, to be entitled "Peace on Earth," will form a harmonious conclusion. This is greatly to be desired, for so far the work is anything but reconciliatory. It opens with a prologue. The scene is a forest, the author, armed with a rifle and followed by his dog, is pursuing his favourite recreation, when at the moment that he shoots down a splendid eagle a voice from the thicket calls out "Cain, Cain !" and a weird, dishevelled figure comes to view, bolding the dead bird in his hand. "Cain, Cain," says the mysterious personage, "what have you gained by this ? Is your love of murder satisfied, are you sated by the blood of your brother ?" "The eagle is a robber, and it is a good work to kill him," stammers out the disconcerted sportsman. "Yes, he sheds blood, like all who live, but must we therefore do so?" is the reply. The huntsman then inquires who his monitor may be. The answer is, "A Wanderer," and he then recognises in this stranger an adherent of one of those fantastic Russian sects who look upon the whole world as abandoned to the dominion of the Evil One. Hence they fly into the forests, and wandering life. A colloquy now takes place between the two. The wanderer urges the sportsman to abandon his prac- tices of shedding blood, and to hunt the truth instead. He narrates the story of his life,—how he, too, had been a true son of Cain, but perception had come to him ; he grew to see life as it really is, an evil, a perpetual persecution and destruction. He then proceeds to propound his sombre philosophy with earnest eloquence,—how life is full of woe, how each being only exists at the cost of another, and reviewing the before-named six features in human life, which he holds to constitute the legacy of Cain, he ends impressively by proclaiming work as the only good, quite-in the spirit of Faust :—

" Nur der verdient sick Freiheit wie des Leben, Per taglich sie erobern muss.'

He then disappears as suddenly as he appeared, leaving our author sunk in contemplation, and pondering how the best may be ex- tracted out of this heavy curse. Such is the Prologue to Sacher- Masoch's tragedy of human existence, the various acts of which now follow in succession.

Love, as the instinct common to all mankind, and indeed as

the machinery employed by Nature to accomplish her ends, forms the theme of the first instalment of Das Verndichtniss Kains. Sacher-Masoch proceeds to work out his views with regard to the relations of the sexes as a true disciple of Schopenhauer, viewing the poetry of love as mainly an illusion, designed to mantle a stern reality. He does so by means of short stories, each of which conceals an abstract idea which it is the mission of his personages to develope ; but although this is the case, the dangers that attend stories written with a purpose are, with few exceptions, happily avoided. The first five novelettes of this cycle may be summed up in Dr. Johnson's dictum, when asked if marriage were natural to inen,—" Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints that society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together." Enmity between the sexes is, according to Sacher-Masoch, a natural state of things. Don Juan of Kolomea deals with the discord which our author regards as a necessary concomitant of monogamy. This tale may be considered his masterpiece. With a vigorous grasp he exposes forcibly his views of the truth concerning the relations of men and women in the matter of love. The hero, who loves and deceives all women, cannot succeed in forgetting his own legiti- mate spouse ; he sighs after the conjugal happiness that is closed to him for ever, and in which he yet cannot and never could rest content. In the other stories we are introduced to various forms of voluptuousness, and meet with the type of woman often exhibited by our author,—a magnificent female despot, who treads her lover under foot, whips him like a dog, and then again abandons herself to her appetites. Here un- questionably Sacher-Masoch offends frequently against tact and esthetic requirements, and it is these stories that have drawn down on him the stigma of immorality. Whoever will give him a fair reading will see, nevertheless, that though he often needlessly so offends, he is never designedly immoral. He holds himself to be delivering the truth, and we may believe him when he affirms that an ugly truth is more agreeable to him than the most seductive lie. His endeavour is,- " With or without offence to friends or foes, To sketch the world exactly as it goes ;" and this is how he sees it go in Gallicia. But viewing the popu- lation thus depicted as steeped in sensuality, morally brutalised, _ and physically inert, we may have our own opinion regarding the great future promised to the Slays. The last novelette—Marzella, or, a Fairy-tale of Happiness—closes the dissonant series with an ideal harmony. Yet Sacher-Masoch takes care to tell us that the picture of matrimonial felicity he has here unfolded is but a fairy- tale, rarely realised. Here woman, whom he regards as the savage element in our society, has been tamed by man, who has raised her to his intellectual level. She no longer worships him blindly, or subjects him to indignities ; she stands beside him his equal, his companion, and together they subjugate Nature, while serving her. Two fundamental ideas pervade these stories, as they do those of the following volumes. These are, firstly, that the world in which we live is not, as Leibnitz sought to prove, the best of all possible worlds, but rather the worst possible ; and secondly, that man need not remain rooted in the animal dispositions natural to him, but can rise above them and nature, and become master of himself, and by so doing ennoble himself physically and intellectually. In Das away from the reign of anarchy, and there lead an ascetic Eigenthum (" Property "), we meet with an incisive sketch of the

eternal feud existing between the capitalist and the poor, as well as the curse that so often attaches to wealth, and causes it to wreck love and happiness. We are shown bow work is our only good on this earth, and death our- happiest moment. The ethno- graphical pictures in these volumes are even richer than in the preceding. We see the Slav in his superstitious ignorance, his Oriental passivity, which Sacher-Masoch regards as an indication of his leanings towards Buddhistic contemplation, in his capacity for silent suffering, and in his unconscious adoption of Schopen- hauer's theories with regard to ownership, namely, that the labour expended upon an object constitutes the right of possession.

This is carried out by the Gallician peasant in a form more naive than pleasant, and engenders a form of communistic ideas difficult for a Western intelligence to grasp. Thus the peasant will not, as a rule, steal your money or your clothes—this he would hold wrong—but he will not hesitate to cut down trees in your wood, and pasture his cow in your field. On the other hand, there are also in each village recognised thieves, with whom, however, a compact can be made. By pay- ing them an annual tithe, the immunity of personal possessions can be insured, or missing property, at all events, returned for a con- sideration. They also draw a subtle distinction between thieving and helping themselves in cases of necessity, with results more agreeable to themselves than to the proprietors. The Jews, as the only traders in these regions, come prominently forward.

They are portrayed with an exact knowledge of their customs, their semi-Hebrew form of speech, their subterfuges and their cunning, which exceeds that of the Slav, such as we have never met with before in a writer who was not a Jew by race. Sacher- Masoch's knowledge of Talmudic lore is also astonishing.

" Hasara and Caba," the story of a married couple whose bicker- ings consist in pitting the sayings of the Talmud and the Penta- teuch against each other, is inimitable in its quiet humour and penetration. Another powerful study is the " Hajdatnak," whom we might ignorantly mistake for a robber, but who holds himself far above such vagabonds. He is in truth the Slav philosopher, who, having found life in communities intolerable, on account of the iniquities and injustices there practised, has retired into the forests, and lives there, burning with hatred against the oppressors of mankind, filled with love for his fellow- men, and rectifying with rude justice, as far as in him

lies, the inequalities of wealth, by depriving the rich for the sake of the poor, and issuing from his fastnesses to shield the latter in all encounters with their masters. As in Die Liebe, so here again Sacher-Masoch closes his cycle with a story that is de- signed to illustrate the only harmonious solution which occurs to him. In Das Paradies am Dniester we learn that political freedom is a mere taunt, as long as it is accompanied with material slavery, socialism is a noble error, communism a brutal lie. The true solution lies in making property common, but wages individual, so that in this wise men are not depressed, as in communism, to a low standard. As property is not to be inherited, inequalities

will only exist until death, when accumulations are to be returned into the common fund, and devoted to great public works, such as flooding the Sahara and making the Suez Canal. The State is held responsible for the education of its children, and districts are to be divided into communities, after the pattern of the Rus- sian "Mir." It is only the Slavonic peoples, however, who, according to our author, are capable of realising this ideal ; it is only they who can regenerate the world, for the Teutonic peoples are too steeped in egoism and aristocratic notions even to grasp the public spirit, the feeling for equality and democracy, that is innate in the Slay.

So much for this remarkable work, to which it is impossible to do justice in a limited space. Since its issue Sacher-Masoch has published two other disconnected works, on which we can but lightly touch. The one, published immediately after the Franco- German war, was inspired by his hatred of the Prussian rule. Die Meals Unserer Zeit is a veritable denunciation of the political,

literary, and social morals of Berlin. Its closing words are sufficient to betray its purpose :—

"The sacred fire is extinguished in thee, 0 Germany ! and the saddest of all is that thou bast extinguished it thyself. It burnt a long time, like a star that shows the road, but thou haat no longer a star. Thou hast no longer an ideal. Thou haat shed blood, thou hest amassed gold, thou canst boast of thy conquests in thy milliards; what matters to thee the hatred of people ? What to thee thy virtues, thy past glories? Truth ? It is the shield of misfortune, but thy prosperity crowned itself with lies. The beautiful ? Thou haat preferred the bloody glory of Rome to the immortal glory of Athens, and thou wilt now never possess either Homer or Phidias. Liberty! What dost thou with that? Like the Cohorts or the ancient Plebs, thou recogniscst no God but Caner." Less prejudiced and more powerful is a short story, published a few weeks ago, entitled, Der 2\'eue Hiob (" The New Job").. This modem Job is a Gallician peasant, a stern, splendid char- acter, who supplies by mether-wit what he lacks in education. Born at the close of last century, his youth was passed under the terrible oppression of the Polish noblemen, and other misfortunes. combining with the inhuman treatment experienced in those days by all peasants at the hands of their masters, rendered the name of Job, given to him by his fellow-villagers, too painfully literal. The story, as a picture of the atrocities perpetrated in those days by the nobles, who treated their serfs worse than they treated their cattle, is terrible to read,—Sacher-Masoch is scru- pulous in giving exact data for the horrors he depicts with such vivid power. In view of recent events, it is impossible to hope that these fearful scenes may be exaggerated, even if the author's. accuracy were not, as it is, above suspicion.

Such, briefly, is the novelist who is founding in the Slavonic- East a school of realism that, based upon pessimism, Darwinism, and an attempt to extract the best out of the worst of all possible worlds, may yet present to our tired Western minds many novel points of contact and of dissimilarity, which cannot fail to enlarge both our sympathy and comprehension, not only for the social struggles that have been, but for those that have inevitably yet to come.