PICTURES OF GERMAN SOCIETY.*
A WHITER who should propose to give a sketch of English history by describing a battle in the Wars of the Roses, the escape of Mary Stuart from Loehleven, the spiritual history of John Bunyan, and Path under Beau Nash, with passages from the diary of Henry Machyn, and a chapter from Sir Roger de Coverley, would be doing for England, a comparatively small country, pretty much what Herr Freitag has attempted for the infinitely vaster and more varied regions which make up Germany proper, Bohemia, Hungary, and Switzerland. It is true, his two volumes cover a little more ground than the imaginary book we have indicated, but when all is summed up the materials remain ludicrously inadequate to the task the author has set before himself. Fragments of German history and biography would be a truer title. We insist the more strongly upon this be- cause the author professes to let the times speak for themselves, and only to add comments of his own " where the old records fail to give a complete picture." In other words, he wishes to give an anti- quarian patchwork from his common-place book instead of a clear outline of history, thought out after careful reading, and with illus- trations from contemporary sources. We believe this theory of history writing to be radically wrong. It is not scientific, for it takes events without regard to their causes and inter-dependence, and it is not artistic, for it substitutes a phantasmagoria of fleeting forms for an orderly picture. Its temptation to uncritical minds lies in the apparent authenticity of its materials ; and Herr Freytag no doubt thinks that his position as a mere transcriber is unimpeachable, while he is yet claiming to have produced history by letting the scissors do duty for the pen. The ultimate value of pictures of German life, which omit all mention of the Humanist reaction from Thomas a Kempis down to Reuchlin, of the peasants' war and of the Auabaptists, of the great elector, and of the resurrection of German thought with Leibnitz, may be estimated by the most casual reader. But taking the author on his own ground, he is evidently not learned in German literature. He writes about German students, and is apparently ignorant of the Epistolic Obscuroruin V irorum ; his chapter on Luther height almost have been compiled from M. Merle d'Aubigne ; and in the long discussion of German society and watering-places Herr Freytag seems to be unaware that Montaigne visited the country and left a journal. We are far from denying his book a certain merit. Many of the passages selected are very interesting, and the chapters on the Thirty Years' War supply many little details of curious value. But those who wish to understand German history as a whole must still resort to solid works like Ranke's, or to works professedly of fiction, such as Riehl's excellent " Cultur-Geschichtliche Novellen." It is with a feeling of sincere disappointment that we reject Herr Freytag's hook as inadequate. German history is so great a problem, and there lies so much interest in its solution, that we could find it in our hearts to be grateful to any man who would throw light upon it. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the population of the empire was nearly double that of France and seven times that of Ragland. The Hanse Towns alone had lately disputed the dominion of the English seas, and had almost taken a King of England prisoner. The Fuggers and Perkheimers were the Rothschilds and Barings of the time. German art was represented by Albrecht Diirer, Lucas Cranach, and the Ilolbeins' German science had revolutionized the world with gunpowder and the printing press, and Copernicus, half a German, was about to make new heavens and a new earth. The battle of learning against superstition was headed by the German Reuehlin, and the battle of free faith against ecclesiasticisms by Luther. The Slays of Prussia and Bohemia were conquered; the Slaves of Silesia absorbed by the dominant race ; and the German Lanz-Kuechts were soon to storm Rome, the capital of the rival civilization. Gradually all changes. From 1540 to 1740 there is scarcely a sign of national vitality to record, except the shaking off of Spanish supre- macy and the recovery of Hungary from the Turks. The empire is stripped of Holland, Switzerland, Alsace, and Lorraine : it is helpless as a federation, and weak individually. During the whole two cen- turies it has had no single artist or poet whom men care to remember, and only one thinker. The terrible Thirty Years' War, on which all its strength has been spent, is among the most meaningless in history; its one actual result, the political equipoise of religions, having been ascertained by the time, at. least, when Gustavus Adolphus fell. We want to know the causes of this decadence. To compare the actual facts with Herr Freytag's assertion, that there were everywhere marks of progress at the beginning' of the century ; that the con- temporaries of Ferdinand the Catholic had "a certain independent individuality," which the associates of Luther lacked ; and that men generally had become nobler by .acting and suffering for an idea, and in the clash of rival faiths, is only to complicate perhaps in- soluble difficulties with an incredible philosophy. Is the feeble Latinity of the divines who inherited Lutheranism more individual than the style in which Mitten pounded the monks? Is Gellert better or more German than Hans Sachs ? Is the doctrine of the Treaty of Munster, " cujus regio ejus religio," an advance on Luther's battle-cry against Rome ? Were the men who built Nurem- berg less free to follow fancy than the architects of Berlin ? The faith in a blind progress making men better than their fore- fathers was surely never more hopelessly out of place than in this attempt to trace the principle of individuality in a trium- phant line of ascent from the Hanse Towns, and Gots von Ber- lichingen to modern German bureaucracy. The common theory of German decadence, be it false or true, is at least easier to understand. By this the country perished in the disruption of modern thought from • Pictures of German Life in the lath, 16th, and 17th Centuries. By Gustarinus. tag. Translated by Mrs. Malcolm. ChapmamanctlialL a medieval constitution. On the one hand was the Bund, with its Emperor, claiming from the Ciesars, and linked to the fortunes of the Popes, with its independent princes and free towns, a mass of sepa- rate franchises and rights, without any principle of unity. On the other hand was Protestantism, with its fierce hatred of Italy and the Popes, with secret leanings to democracy, and splitting up the Confe- deration with opposite interests and irreconcilable claims. There were wars of religion in every country north of the Alps, but in Germany the chances of bloodshed were multiplied by the claims of every petty prince to be absolute. A German Calvin might have shattered the clumsy imperial fabric to pieces in an iconoclastic war. A. great statesman in Austria might have shaken loose from the old order, and contented himself with uniting the Southern States in a single Catholic kingdom. But Luther was a conservative at heart, and had no successor. Ferdinand the Catholic was a vulgar bigot, who would not exchange the shadow for the reality of power. The country, petrified by eighty years of mere material prosperity, was at the mercy of its kings, and the Jesuit organization. Its new birth begins when Frederic IL of Prussia broke up the Empire, and its late stagnation dates from the Holy Alliance. There are countries in which the people may be great in spite of an inquisition or a minutely terrible police, but wherever the German tongue is spoken freedom of thought is a condition of national life. Besides the power to discern the general laws of history, a designer of pictures ought to know what is special to one country, and what features are general to humanity. Much in the volumes before us has no particular connexion with German life. The first chapter, from a pardonable misapprehension of Bohemian history, fails entirely to give the real questions at issue between Germans and Bohemians in the Hussite wars. It is only a bloody phantasmagoria; a priest burned alive, and a city scaled. The second chapter only tells us how a German lady assisted to steal the holy- crown of St. Stephen from Hungary. These, it is true, are the most faulty parts of the book, but we miss everywhere the real insight of a man who should treat his country as part of Europe. Probably the chapter about " the travelling student," in which Thomas Platter relates how he was sent by his senior to beg, how he stole a, and was pursued by the peasants armed with spears, and howt6 burned an image of St. John for fuel, will be found among the most attractive by the general reader. The license of rascality, which seems to have been conceded all over Europe to schoolboys, had some excuse when the chances against learning were all but overwhelming. It is a pity that Herr Freytag did not complete his sketch by showing us the inner life of a German university—the touts lying in wait to attract new comers to particular boarding-houses, the doctor followed to the lecture-room by his train of scholars—each with Petrus Hispanus under his arm, the budding Humanist punished for his stolen glances at Ovid with repetitions of the penitential psalms, and the different nations fighting fiercely in the streets on some party cry. The his- tory of Prague alone during the rise of Hussite opinions is a romance_ Comparedwith this the citizen life of Germany can never be very interesting. There is a taint of " philisterei," or common-place, about all the little communities that built so well and legislated on the whole so wisely while they were yet unabsorbed into police sys- tems. One thinks of Pericles as part of Athens, and of Weimar only as an appendage to Goethe. The notices of the position of women which Herr Freytag has accumulated lack individuality. The letters, the conversations reported, might generally belong to any names in any time. Perhaps this is all the more a German feature. Why the race which has produced Maria Theresa and Catherine of Russia should owe so little to its women below royalty. would be difficult to say. But throughout German history we look in vain for a counter- part to Joan of Arc or the women of the Fronde or of the Revolution_ Perhaps, if a heroine had appeared east of the Rhine, she would have had no honour among her countrymen. The typical burgher's daughter, whose letters Herr Freytag cites, particularly begs her betrothed to believe that she makes a request, not " with the idea that it must be, but that it may be done or left undone by the Junker at his pleasure ;" and the typical princess is boxed at a public dinner by her husband till her nose bleeds. We suspect such language in the woman and such conduct in the man are absolutely without parallel in France.
Not having been able to obtain a sight of the German edition of this book, we cannot speak to Mrs. Malcolm's excellence as a trans- lator, except as regards her style, which is abundantly good. We hope her next versions from her favourite author may be more in the style of her first, "Debit and Credit." Herr Freytag is a despi- cable playwright and a third-rate historian, but he has real power as a novelist.
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