Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 7.djvu/191

 Rh trying many valuable and idealistic experiments. He died August 25, 1840.

The most important of his works are Das Trauerspiel in Tirol, 1826, treating of the tragic story of Andreas Hofer; Kaiser Friedrich II., 1827, a drama of the Hohenstaufen; the comic heroic epic, Tulifaentchen, 1830, a satiric version of an heroic Tom Thumb; Alexis, 1832, a trilogy setting forth the destruction of the reforms begun by Peter the Great; Merlin, 1832; and his two novels, Die Epigonen, 1836, and Münchhausen, 1838-9.

In Die Epigonen, one of the long list of representatives of the species of novels which began with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Immermann tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the principal social forces of his period. But he was too imitative in following his great model, and too much confused by subjective preoccupations, to comprehend and to state clearly the substance of the matter.

Only two of his works have enduring value, his mystical tragedy Merlin, and the part of Münchhausen called "Der Oberhof" (The Upper Farm), which deals with the lives and types of the small freehold farmers. Immermann, following Baron von Stein, believed that the health and future of society, endangered by the corrupt and dissipated nobility, rested on the sturdy, self-reliant, individualistic yet severely moral and patriotic, small peasant. In the main character of the story, the rugged, proud, inflexibly honorable old farmer, who has inherited the sword of Charles the Great, he has drawn one of the most living characters in early modern German fiction. The other figures, too, are full of life and reality. The story has, aside from its importance in the history of the German novel, an enduring value of its own.

Immermann, in spite of his unremitting endeavor, failed to attain literary or moral greatness. He lacked the fundamental and organic unity of great natures. He had more qualities of mind than most of his important contempora-