SOURCE: "The Psychological Novelle: Conrad Ferdinand Meyer." In A History of the German Novelle: From Goethe to Thomas Mann, Cambridge University Press, 1934, pp. 215-30.

In the following essay, Bennett discusses the defining characteristics of Meyer's short fiction.

If [Paul] Heyse may be described as the aesthete and mass-producer of the Novelle, the Swiss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is the aesthete and virtuoso. Meyer, like Heyse, lacks that rootedness in the bürgerliche life of his time—though in a different way. He is an observer of life rather than a partaker in it. This attitude to life in both poets gives to their work something of the exotic, something which is remarkable by its variance from the normal type—in the scientific sense the quality of a freak product. Both poets, standing outside the Bürgertum, within the limits of which [Gottfried] Keller, [Theodor] Storm and [Adalbert] Stifter...