It cannot be denied that as Freytag proceeds with The Ancestors the tendency to instruct and inform becomes too marked.  He had begun his career in the world by lecturing on literature at the University of Breslau, but had severed his connection with that institution because he was not allowed to branch out into history.  Possibly those who opposed him were right and the two subjects are incapable of amalgamation.  Freytag in this, his last great work, revels in the fulness of his knowledge of facts, but shows more of the thoroughness of the scholar than of the imagination of the poet.  The novels become epitomes of the history of the time.  No type of character may be omitted.  So popes and emperors, monks and missionaries, German warriors and Roman warriors, minstrels and students, knights, crusaders, colonists, landskechts, and mercenaries are dragged in and made to do their part with all too evident fidelity to truth.

We owe much of our knowledge of Freytag’s life to a charming autobiography which served as a prefatory volume to his collected works.  Freytag lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1895 at the age of seventy-nine.  Both as a newspaper editor and as a member of parliament (the former from 1848 to 1860, the latter for the four years from 1867 to 1871) he had shown his patriotism and his interest in public affairs.  Many of his numerous essays, written for the Grenzboten, are little masterpieces and are to be found among his collected works published in 1888.  As a member of parliament, indeed, he showed no marked ability and his name is associated with no important measure.

Not to conceal his shortcoming it must be said that Freytag, at the time of the accession to the throne of the present head of the German Empire, laid himself open to much censure by attacking the memory of the dead Emperor Frederick who had always been his friend and patron.

In conclusion it may be said that no one claims for Freytag a place in the front rank of literary geniuses.  He is no Goethe, no Schiller, no Dante, no Milton, no Shakespeare.  He is not a pioneer, has not changed the course of human thought.  But yet he is an artist of whom his country may well be proud, who has added to the happiness of hundreds of thousands of Germans, and who only needs to be better understood to be thoroughly enjoyed by foreigners.

England and America have much to learn from him—­the value of long, careful, and unremitting study; the advantage of being thoroughly familiar with the scenes and types of character depicted; the charm of an almost unequaled simplicity and directness.  He possessed the rare gift of being able to envelop every topic that he touched with an atmosphere of elegance and distinction.  His productions are not ephemeral, but are of the kind that will endure.

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GUSTAV FREYTAG

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