Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 18.djvu/407

 Rh over Northern Italy which is pictured in this novel-like work, a period which Elizabeth Barrett Browning, too, described in Casa Guidi Windows. And like the English woman, Ricarda Huch is intensely interested in the struggle of the Italians to free themselves from the Austrian yoke, and to become a unified nation. Perhaps her best tribute to the Italy of her thoughts and dreams was paid in the History of Garibaldi, comprising two parts, The Defense of Rome (1906) and The Fight for Rome (1907).

But not Italy only was "a face full of remembrances" to our author. She also undertook to revive a tragic episode of the German past, in her remarkable book, The Great War, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1912-13. It gives the story of the Thirty Years' War in the form of a prose epic.

There are very interesting chapters and passages in these and kindred books, clever studies of human nature, wonderful accounts of epoch-making events, interspersed with lyric effusions and romantic ballads, but, on the whole, we must say that the author has wasted in these works her poetic strength on political themes too big for her grasp — reminding us again of Elizabeth Browning in her Italian period. Nevertheless, Ricarda Huch here as in all her work proves herself a prose writer of fine skill and of an austere beauty of language. To a certain degree, she is to German literature what Walter Pater is to the English art of writing.

Although it is not seldom that the critic in her runs away with the novelist, Ricarda Huch is no scholarly poet in the disagreeable sense of the word. In the main, the solid burden of her thought is steadied by her good taste and her mastery of words. Her poet's heart lives in history. To her, instinct for poetry must needs be instinct for history. And from the very first of her career as an author she showed a keen sense for historic retrospection.

It remains for us to consider Ricarda Huch's novels