Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 19.djvu/19

Rh depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourish- ment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a material- istic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a specifically German malady as the naturalism imported from Prance and Russia was a genuine form of German art. Liberation from paralj'zing lethargy was possible only through a realization of the fact that the real sources of national power were to be sought elsewhere. The soul of the German people, which in former centuries gave birth to mysticism and romanticism, is filled with a yearning for the infinite that cannot in the long run be contented with a materialistic philosophy; and the home of the German people, broad and fertile Germany, presents other pictures than a view of coal mines and swarming streets seen through the narrow space between factory chimneys. As a reaction against naturalism there arose therefore a neo-romanticism, and as its national modifica- tion, an art of the native heath (Heimatkunst).

There is no contradiction between romanticism and Heimatkunst; for it was romanticism that in its time aroused the Germans to a real sense of what their native heath meant for them; neither is Heimatkunst opposed to naturalism. In both Heimatkunst and naturalism nature is the watchword, but with the difference that what for the one is the principle is for the other the subject of poetic repre- sentation. Naturalism aimed to give the impression of inexorable fidelity to nature in the reproduction of the unhealthful and of that which strictly speaking was con- trary to nature; Heimatkunst, on the other hand, had recourse to free and open nature as the unfailing fountain of health. When naturalism came to the fore it was cus- tomary to designate the opposing tendencies as idealism