Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 18.djvu/408

 336 which, like her poems, show her art fully. Her first printed novel was Recollections of Ludolf Ursleu the Younger, published in 1892. Ludolf Ursleu, the last scion of a North German patrician family, in the cell of a Swiss monastery where he has fled from the world, writes down the fateful history of his house. But the book is more than a mere family chronicle; it is the story of his sister Galeide's and his cousin Ezard's unhappy love. And the author takes great pains in tracing the psychological influence of their unlawful and secret passion on the different members of the Ursleu family. To highten the situation, fate lurks behind the scene; a horrible epidemic of cholera gives the story a gloomy background. We hear the author's constant cry: Let us obey nature, not the world, for nature is good and beautiful and brings happiness. But her characters who obey the call of nature rush to predestined ruin.

A slight variation of the same theme, that is a man of patrician family wavering between his wife and the woman he really loves, is found in another novel Vita somnium breve (Life a Short Dream), which was published ten years later. Here also, the leading motive is, "Oh life, oh beauty!" And the end of the story, like that of Ursleu, is chaos instead of beauty. In both of these novels resignation is the last note.

These books may be contrasted with two other novels: From the Triumphgasse (1902), the best known of Ricarda Huch's works, and Of the Kings and the Crown (1902), which is the author's most symbolic novel. In the Triumphgasse we are led into a totally different atmosphere of life: the slums of a large Italian town. The owner of a crowded tenement in the poorest part of the city describes the fates and frailties of his tenants. The most interesting group of figures is formed around the old woman Farfalla and her sons and daughters—all of them children of physical and moral wretchedness. Only the crippled Ricardo knows of a better life, where his soul dreamingly wanders about in blossoming gardens of eternal beauty. But he,