But with ‘Auf der Hoehe’ (On the Heights), a philosophic romance of court life in the capital and the royal country seat of a considerable German kingdom (by no means merely imaginary), inwoven with a minute study of peasant life and character, Auerbach’s popular reputation was established.  His plan of making ethics the chief end of a novel was here exhibited at its best; he never again showed the same force of conception which got his imperfect literary art forgiven.  Another long novel, not less doctrinaire in scope, but dealing with quite different materials and problems, ‘Das Landhaus am Rhein’ (The Villa on the Rhine), was issued in 1868; and was followed by ‘Waldfried,’ a long, patriotic, and on the whole inert, study of a German family from 1848 until the close of the Franco-Prussian War.

In spite of his untiring industry, Auerbach produced little more of consequence, though he wrote a new series of Black Forest sketches:  ‘Nach Dreissig Jahren’ (After Thirty Years:  1876); ‘Der Forstmeister’ (The Head Forester:  1879); and ‘Brigitta’ (1880).  The close of his life was much embittered by the growth of the anti-Semitic sentiment; and his residence in Germany was merely nominal.  He died at Cannes, France, in 1882.

‘On the Heights’ is doubtless Auerbach’s best representative.  ’The Villa on the Rhine’ is in a lower key, with less appealing types, and less attractive local color.  Moreover, it is weighted with more philosophizing, and its movement is slower.  In ‘On the Heights’ the emotional situations are strong.  In spite of sentimentality, a true feeling animates its technique.  The atmosphere of a German royal residence, as he reveals it, appears almost as heavy as the real thing.  Auerbach’s humor is leaden; he finds it necessary to explain his own attempts at it.  But the peasant-nurse Walpurga, her husband Hansei, and the aged grandmother in the family, are admirable delineations.  The heroine, Irma von Wildenort, is genuinely human.  The story of her abrupt atonement for a lapse from her better self, the gradual process of her fantastic expiation and of her self-redemption,—­through the deliberate sacrifice of all that belongs to her treacherous past,—­her successful struggle into a high ethical life and knowledge of herself (the element which gives the book its force), offer much that is consistent, and appealing and elevating to the conscience.

Auerbach crowds material into the book, tangles up too many different skeins of plot, offers too many types to study and interests to follow, and betrays a want of perspective in its construction.  But in spite of all its defects it is a novel that should not be forgotten.  For reflective readers it will always hold a charm, and its latent strength is proved by its triumph over its own faults.

THE FIRST MASS

From “Ivo the Gentleman,” in “Black Forest Village Stories”

One Saturday afternoon the busy sound of hammer and adze was heard on the green hill-top which served the good folks of Nordstetten as their open-air gathering-place.  Valentine the carpenter, with his two sons, was making a scaffolding, designed to serve no less a purpose than that of an altar and a pulpit.  Gregory, the son of Christian the tailor, was to officiate at his first mass and preach his first sermon.