Freytag has been called an opportunist, but the term should not be considered one of reproach.  It certainly was opportune that his great work appeared at the moment when it was most needed, a moment of discouragement, of disgust at everything high and low.  It brought its smiling message and remained to cheer and comfort. The Journalists, too, was opportune, for it called attention to a class of men whose work was as important as it was unappreciated.  Up to 1848, the year of the revolution, the press had been under such strict censorship that any frank discussion of public matters had been out of the question.  But since then distinguished writers, like Freytag himself, had taken the helm.  Even when not radical, they were dreaded by the reactionaries, and even Freytag escaped arrest in Prussia only by hastily becoming a court official of his friend the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha—­within whose domains he already owned an estate and was in the habit of residing for a portion of each year—­and thus renouncing his Prussian citizenship.  Even Freytag’s Pictures from the German Past may be said to have been opportune.  Already, for a generation, the new school of scientific historians—­the Rankes, the Wattenbachs, the Waitzs, the Giesebrechts—­had been piling up their discoveries, and collating and publishing manuscripts describing the results of their labors.  They lived on too high a plane for the ordinary reader.  Freytag did not attempt to “popularize” them by cheap methods.  He served as an interpreter between the two extremes.  He chose a type of facts that would have seemed trivial to the great pathfinders, worked them up with care from the sources, and by his literary art made them more than acceptable to the world at large.  In these Pictures from the German Past, as in the six volumes of the series of historical romances entitled The Ancestors, a patriotic purpose was not wanting.  Freytag wished to show his Germans that they had a history to be proud of, a history whose continuity was unbroken; the nation had been through great vicissitudes, but everything had tended to prove that the German has an inexhaustible fund of reserve force.  Certain national traits, certain legal institutions, could be followed back almost to the dawn of history, and it would be found that the Germans of the first centuries of our era were not nearly so barbarous as had been supposed.

And so with a wonderful talent for selecting typical and essential facts and not overburdening his narrative with detail he leads us down the ages.  The hero of his introductory romance in The Ancestors is a Vandal chieftain who settles among the Thuringians at the time of the great wandering of the nations—­the hero of the last of the series is a journalist of the nineteenth century.  All are descendants of the one family, and Freytag has a chance to develop some of his theories of heredity.  Not only can bodily aptitudes and mental peculiarities be transmitted, but also the tendency to act in a given case much as the ancestor would have done.