Fontane’s lyric poetry in the narrower sense is not of a high order; in fact almost none of his writings show the true lyric quality.  There is also a striking lack of the dramatic element in his works, and he seems to have felt this limitation of his genius, for he studiously avoided the portrayal of scenes that might prove intensely dramatic.  As a writer of ballads he excelled and ranks among the foremost of Germany.  The British subjects he treated were impressed upon him during his travels in England and his study of English history.  His German themes were taken largely from Prussian history, particularly the period of Frederick the Great.  His permanent place in the history of German literature is due, however, not so much to his verse as to his prose writings.  He is best known as a novelist, and in the field of the modern novel he is one of the most conspicuous figures.

German novels of the older school were usually too long for a single volume.  Fontane’s first important work of fiction, Before the Storm, filled four volumes; but he had so much trouble in finding a publisher for it that he began to write one-volume novels, introducing a practice which has since become the common tradition.  He employed in them a typical feature of the technique of the ballad, which leaps from one situation to another, leaving gaps to be filled by the fancy of the reader.  He says himself, in Before the Storm:  “I have always observed that the leaping action of the ballad is one of the chief characteristics and beauties of this branch of poetry.  All that is necessary is that fancy be given the right kind of a stimulus.  When that end is attained, one may boldly assert, the less told the better.”

At the beginning of Fontane’s career the Berlin novelists were disciples of Scott, but the only one to survive was Alexis, who adapted Scott’s method to the Mark of Brandenburg.  Fontane imitated him in Before the Storm (1878), which deals with conditions in the Mark before the wars of liberation. Schach von Wuthenow (1883), a sort of prelude to Before the Storm, was far superior as a novel and helped to establish Fontane’s supremacy among his contemporaries, for he had become the leader of the younger generation after the publication of two stories of crimes, Grete Minde (1880) and Ellernklipp (1881), and the creation of the modern Berlin novel, in L’Adultera (1882). L’Adultera unfolds the history of a marriage of reason between a young wife and a considerably older husband, a situation which Fontane later treated, with important variations and ever increasing skill, in Count Petoefi (1884), Cecile (1887), and Effi Briest (1895).  With his inexhaustible fund of observation to draw upon he could make the action of his novels a minor consideration and concentrate his rare psychological powers upon realistic conversations in which characters reveal themselves and incidentally