Novelistic Pleiad
THE GERMAN NOVEL : STUDIES. By Roy Pascal. (Manchester University Press, 30s.)
EXCEPT for Werther, with its seedy sentiment and brilliant self- pity, and Wilhelm Meister, that consummate exercise in what Horace Walpole calls serendipity, the German novel before Mann and Kafka hardly enters into our general literary consciousness. We might not agree though with Mr. Pascal that these two moderns are 'better writers' than other German novelists; we might more exactly say they are better novelists.
With Werther Goethe gave Europe a chronic attack of introspective plague, and he spent a lifetime trying to cure it. Faust was one attempt, Meister another. The 'Bildungsroman,' 'le roman de la jeune intelligence,' the story of the moral and spiritual development of an individual man, of which genre Meister is the exemplar, is almost necessarily cumbersome and involved. It is recognised to be the specifically German species of the novel. It must have, or else adopt a pose of, artlessness, must somehow come to grips with the childishness in man, and it often shows little practical—though much theoretical— reverence for the integral creating mind.
Mr. Pascal says it is remarkable that Goethe's two direct heirs in the 'Bildungsroman' (this word awaits an adequate English equivalent) were a Swiss and an Austrian. Yet, in a way, it would have been still more remarkable had this not been so. Once Waterloo had been fought and won, the metropolitan German State, whether Bund or Reich, could find little use for imaginative intelligence in literature. It chased away its poets when it could, or drove them mad; unless by chance, like Morike, they did not need very much love or fame to keep them going. Mr. Pascal holds that the most valuable German novels are the work of Stifter and Kafka, from Bohemia, Albrecht Bitzius and Gottfried Keller, from Switzerland, Thomas Mann, whose life, at its start and its finish, had certain American affinities, and, of the Reich alone, no one but Raabe and Fontane—and Raabe is a prose Morike, if you like. We think of the valuations and revaluations made of some of these seven by Barker Fairley and by Georg Lukacs, and indeed Mr. Pascal mentions both these critics with approval.
A quick moral for the compilers of syllabuses and the like: remove some of the lesser writers, Gustav Freytag for instance, from academic courses. Life is short, and there are fine things to be read. Here, then, is our novelistic Pleiad. Mr. Pascal musters his chosen men. He is happy and at ease with Bitzius, the repel- lently attractive parson who wrote under the sonorously significant name Jeremias Gotthelf, as lovable and precious a character as any of his own creations; and one feels Mr. Pascal likes him better than Stifter. (The printing of the book, in this Age of Inaccuracy, is mostly good, and it conies as something of a shock to find Mr. Blackall's study of Stifter predated by forty years.) In a welcome chapter on the general characteristics of the German
novel Mr. Pascal notes how rare it is for English and French writers on the novel to show any acquaintance with German novels—making, in fact, the point that he who ignores what is provincial is himself a provincial.
Mr. Pascal is a grand guide, if we will really allow him to lead us on to read `011ilie Matte diesel? Nachtnitiag einen Spaziergang an den See genzacht .' and whatever other glories he may
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