the skill of many greater poets than he, to compress into artistic shape, with due regard for line, color, movement, and atmosphere of the original, the material of his observation.  Yet we still have to explain the fact that he wrote novels and dramas pulsating with the life of his own contemporaries—­works that claimed the attention and touched the heart of thousands of readers and theatre-goers and inspired many better artists than he to treat themes drawn from the public and private life of the day.

It would take us too far afield to trace in detail the nature and sources of Gutzkow’s writings, by which he accomplished this important result.  A few suggestions, together with a reminder of his great indebtedness to the simultaneous efforts of other Young Germans, notably those of Laube and Wienbarg, must suffice.  Practically all of his earlier writings, like the short story, The Sadducee of Amsterdam (1833), as well as the essays entitled Public Characters (1835), On the Philosophy of History (1836), and Contemporaries (1837), are evidence of the intense interest of the author in the social, philosophical, and political leaders of the time.  They are preliminary studies, to be used by him presently in his work as a dramatist.

In his two powerful novels, Spiritual Knighthood (1850-51) and The Magician of Rome (1858-61), he states and discusses with great boldness and skill those problems of the relation between Church and State—­between religion and citizenship—­that confronted the thoughtful men of the day.

The backbone of each of his numerous serious plays is some conflict, reflecting directly or indirectly the prejudices, antagonisms, shortcomings, and struggles of modern German social, religious, and civic life. King Saul (1839) embodies, for instance, the conflict between ecclesiastical and temporal authority—­between the authority of the church and the claims of the thinker and the poet; Richard Savage (1839) that between the pride of noble birth and the promptings of the mother’s heart; Werner (1840), A White Leaf (1842), and Ottfried (1848), variations of the conflict between a man’s duty and his vacillating, simultaneous love of two women; Patkul (1840), the conflict between the hero’s championship of truth and justice and the triumphant inertia of authority in the hands of a weak prince; Uriel Acosta (1846), the best of the author’s serious plays, embodies the tragic conflict between the hero’s conviction of truth and his love for his mother and for his intended wife.