TIVO ALSA TIAN NO VELISTS.
33°
forlorn rustic finds /zzlr solace in the gratuitous but joyous spectacle of a fine morning. So much for their management of the romantic and picturesque: equally ar tistic is their management of the myste rious and fantastic. However wild their supernaturalism, it always seems to the reader (if I may be allowed the apparent
bull) perfectly natural.
He has nothing
of the 1'11:/'edulz¢s 0111' feeling after read ing it. There is none of the absurdity and unreality which blotches every other page of Sue’s Wandering _7ew, and makes the catastrophe of Bulwer’s Slrange 5/01)! a burlesque. Let us take as a specimen Hans Wieland t/re Cabal irl. In these days of spiritualism there may be some, nay, many, who believe that the soul of a mortal can wander away from his live body, as did that of old Hermotimus, so sweetly sung by Aytoun. But that the wandering soul should bring back with it a material pestilence is what the boldest charlatan would hesitate to assert, the wildest en
thusiast shrink from believing. Yet so adroitly and with such Defoe-ish truth fulness of detail are we led on to the catastrophe that, when Wieland re awakes to life in that dreary desert of a
garden (the very brother of which I have seen in the outskirts of more than one city of both hemispheres), calling to his friend, “ Fly! I bring the cholera!” it seems perfectly reasonable that the narrator should go on to tell you quietly how “ he took the stage for Germany at once,” just as he might have done if he had learned from the mouth of ahos pital surgeon that the epidemic was in Paris. In admiring and praising Erckmann Chatrian_and their possible praises are far from exhausted: we have said no thing of their great skill in allegory, as exhibited by such works as Daniel Ro£k_we must not be blind to their
faults.
They have certain tricks of
[M1uzcu,
manner-/iceller, as the French call them, referring to the rank which work pup pets and scenery. “I can see it now,” “I think I see him now as if it were but yesterday,” are frequently-recurring phrases of theirs, effective at first, but wearisome from repetition. In their grand picture of village revelry, they too
often stop to tell us how ~" the glasses clinked and the bottles gurgled.” Occa sionally there is a little too much insist ing on the grotesque, especially in com paring men to brutes; a dwarf clothed
in fur is like a big cat, a lean old woman like the skeleton of a goose, etc., etc. In their style, clear and brilliant as it is,
one grave fault obtrudes itself_the ex treme length to which their sentences frequently run. You may have noticed that the extract in this article consists almost entirely of a single sentence; in the original it occupies more than a page. This mania for interminable pe riods is a notorious fault of German writers. Just at this point, the cross, to use our sporting idiom again, has not nicked. One word in conclusion. I cannot recommend Erckmann-Chatrian to the votaries of water, the enemies of liquor and lager. They are lusty lovers of good living: their feasting, especially
their drinking, is hyperbolical, colossal, gigantic, Gargantuan. It recalls the lzfre-/rfrer of Rabelais. It actually be comes sublime. A drinking-match as sumes the proportions of a heroic com bat, and the soul of the defunct artist, if it does not hover around the bowl like that of the Irish bard, more nation
ally and characteristically animates the cuckoo-clock, and rejoices in the discom fiture of its former conqueror. All through the works of Erckmann-Cha trian but one Aquarian appears. He is a doctor, bearing the significant name of Donkeyhead (Ere/kojlf), who nearly kills his patient by putting him on a
vegetarian regimen.
