Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 7.djvu/192

158 ries, but in not one of these qualities did he attain to the degree which assures distinction. In his Merlin he treated a conflict which was fundamentally similar to that of Grillparzer's Libussa. Yet Grillparzer, much more one-sided than he, possessed the true Romantic-mystic quality, whereas Immermann had to elaborate his symbolism with the patchwork of careful, allegoric analysis. He had a richer contact with social forces than Heine, yet his realizations of them were awkward and meagre, his humor wooden, his imagery derived. He had much greater intellectual force than Platen, yet he lacked the incisive and controlled critical sense of the latter. Having no one faculty to a distinguished degree, he constantly had to substitute the strained labor of one faculty for the spontaneous production of another. Predominantly rationalistic, he labored at the symbolistic vision of Romanticism; preëminently a man of prose, he endeavored all his life to be a great poet. He mistook the responsive excitement produced by the ideas and visions of others for authentic inspiration, the vivacity of a sociable and conversational gift for the creative force of genius, and the immobility of obvious and established conventional judgments for an extraordinary soundness and incisiveness of fundamental analysis.

There was in him, as he himself once said, a certain "aftertaste of a worthy philistinism." The dominant bent of his mind was toward the immediate actualities, and this bent in the end, as in his antagonism against the radical students in Halle, always overcame his endeavor to grasp the more remote realities of a larger vision.

The purposes of his literary works, like the beginning and purpose of his intimacy with Elisa, are always large, comprehensive, and idealistic, but they always, even in his most important work, Merlin, dwindle to petty details of actuality. His significance for the present age does not so much rest on his objective achievement, as on some of his qualities which prevented achievement. He was perhaps the most considerable representative of the literary "Epi-