Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/309

 Reviews and Notes 303 KARL GUTZKOW'S SHORT STORIES: A Study in the Technique of Narration by Daniel Frederick Pasmore, Professor of German, Southwestern College, 1918, 122 pages. The reviewer approached this little book or dissertation with kindly interest, as his early experience in learning German was intimately associated with the name of Gutzkow. In fact "Zopf und Schwert" was the first German drama he read at school. Later as a teacher of the lanugage he read it a number of times with his classes, and quite an interest sprang up for the book and its author. This drama of Gutzkow brings a king, a man of many foibles, quite near to our feeling and teaches us in spite of his glaring weaknesses to appreciate his inner worth and even to enjoy his character, full of faults but amply redeemed by its humanity. These are the fine qualities of realism that characterize Gutzkow's best dramas and novels and place him among the pioneer realists of the last century. Pro- fessor Pasmore avoids this more attractive part of Gutzkow's literary activity, feeling that it has already been sufficiently treated and turns our attention to Gutzkow's short-stories, which he deems worthy of more attention than they have as yet received. In the first chapter the author takes up the theory of the short-story. He reviews the various definitions that hav ( e been presented and gives preference to Paul Heyse's formulation which may be briefly stated as a story with a single and central theme which is told artistically and objectively with psychologi- cal penetration. The writer is wont to say to his classes that the short-story is a moving picture of an individual struggling thru a crisis in his inner life. Of course, no short definition can give its full scope. If this be even in a general way the nature of the short-story it cannot possibly be a development of the last century as the author of the dissertation inclines to believe* There was never a time in the history of the race when the struggles of an individual thru a difficulty or thru a crisis in his life was not the most thrilling of all pictures that could be presented to the mind. The oldest forms of literature, such as the Bible, teem with short-stories. Altho they often appear as episodes in a larger picture, as in Wolfram's "Parzival," they also appear as independent works. The writer does not believe that any modern author has written a more typical short-story than Hartmann von Aue's "Der arme Heinrich." Of course, Professor Pasmore is fully aware of the existence of such claims as these, but he stoutly maintains that "as a conscious type of literary product the works of such writers as Keller, Storm, C. F. Meyer, and Heyse differ essentially from the collections extant prior to the year 1800." Here as so often elsewhere