No writer ever trained himself for his work more consciously and consistently.  He experimented with each play, watched its effect on his audiences, asked himself seriously whether their apparent want of interest in this or that portion was due to some defect in his work or to their own obtuseness.  He had failures, but remarkably few, and they did not discourage him; nor did momentary success in one field prevent him from abandoning it for another in which he hoped to accomplish greater things.  He is his own severest critic, and in his autobiography speaks of certain productions as worthless which are only relatively wanting in merit.

Freytag’s orderly treatment of his themes affords constant pleasure to the reader.  He proceeds as steadily toward his climax as the builder does toward the highest point of his roof.  He had learned much about climaxes, so he tells us himself, from Walter Scott, who was the first to see the importance of a great final or concluding effect.

We have touched as yet merely on externals.  Elegance of style, orderliness of arrangement, consecutiveness of thought alone would never have given Freytag his place in German literature.  All these had first to be consecrated to the service of a great idea.  That idea as expressed in Debit and Credit is that the hope of the German nation rests in its steady commercial or working class.  He shows the dignity, yes, the poetry of labor.  The nation had failed to secure the needed political reforms, to the bitter disappointment of numerous patriots; Freytag’s mission was to teach that there were other things worth while besides these constitutional liberties of which men had so long dreamed and for which they had so long struggled.

Incidentally he holds the decadent noble up to scorn, and shows how he still clings to his old pretensions while their very basis is crumbling under him.  It is a new and active life that Freytag advocates, one of toil and of routine, but one that in the end will give the highest satisfaction.  Such ideas were products of the revolution of 1848, and they found the ground prepared for them by that upheaval.  Freytag, as Fichte had done in 1807 and 1808, inaugurated a campaign of education which was to prove enormously successful.  A French critic writes of Debit and Credit that it was “the breviary in which a whole generation of Germans learned to read and to think,” while an English translator (three translations of the book appeared in England in the same year) calls it the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the German workingman.  A German critic is furious that a work of such real literary merit should be compared to one so flat and insipid as Mrs. Stowe’s production; but he altogether misses the point, which is the effect on the people of a spirited defense of those who had hitherto had no advocate.