any other artist, must work from models, which he is not obliged constantly to change.  The feeling for the solidarity of the arts was very strong with him.  He practically abandoned writing for the stage just after achieving his most noted success and merely for the reason that in poetic narration, as he called it, he saw the possibility of being still more dramatic.  He felt hampered by the restrictions which the necessarily limited length of an evening’s performance placed upon him, and wished more time and space for the explanation of motives and the development of his plot.  In his novel, then, he clung to exactly the same arrangement of his theme as in his drama—­its initial presentation, the intensification of the interest, the climax, the revulsion, the catastrophe.  Again, in the matter of contrast he deliberately followed the lead of the painter who knows which colors are complementary and also which ones will clash.

[Illustration:  GUSTAV FREYTAG.  STAUFFER-BERN]

What, now, are some of the special qualities that have made Freytag’s literary work so enduring, so dear to the Teuton heart, so successful in every sense of the word?  For one thing, there are a clearness, conciseness and elegance of style, joined to a sort of musical rhythm, that hold one captive from the beginning.  So evident is his meaning in every sentence that his pages suffer less by translation than is the case with almost any other author.

Freytag’s highly polished sentences seem perfectly spontaneous, though we know that he went through a long period of rigid training before achieving success.  “For five years,” he himself writes, “I had pursued the secret of dramatic style; like the child in the fairy-tale I had sought it from the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.  At length I had found it:  my soul could create securely and comfortably after the manner which the stage itself demanded.”  He had found it, we are given to understand, in part through the study of the French dramatists of his own day of whom Scribe was one just then in vogue.  From them, says a critic, he learned “lightness of touch, brevity, conciseness, directness, the use of little traits as a means of giving insight into character, different ways of keeping the interest at the proper point of tension, and a thousand little devices for clearing the stage of superfluous figures or making needed ones appear at the crucial moment.”  Among his tricks of style, if we may call them so, are inversion and elision; by the one he puts the emphasis just where he wishes, by the other he hastens the action without sacrificing the meaning.  Another of his weapons is contrast—­grave and gay, high and low succeed each other rapidly, while vice and virtue follow suit.