Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 21 (US).djvu/22

 to bear this fact in mind: with regard to two of them, to Fouqué and Richter, it is especially necessary.

By a secondary arrangement, in surveying what seemed the chief names among the German Novelwriters, we have also obtained a view of the chief modes of German Novelwriting. The Mährchen (Popular Tale), a favourite, almost tritical topic among the Germans, is here twice handled; in what may be called the prosaic manner (by Musæus), and in the poetical (by Tiecke). Of the Ritterroman (Chivalry Romance) there is also a specimen (by Fouque); a short one, yet I fear, in many judgments, too long. Hoffmann's Golden Pot belongs to a strange sort (the Fantasy-piece), of which he himself was the originator, and which its sedulous cultivation, by minds more willing than able, bids fair, in no great length of time, to explode. Richter's two works correspond to our common English notion of the Novel; and Goethe's is a Kunstroman (Art-novel), a species highly prized by the Germans, and of which Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the first in date, is also in their mind greatly the first in excellence.

If the reader will impress himself with a clear view of these six kinds; and then conceive some hundreds of persons incessantly occupied in imitating, compounding, separating, distorting, exaggerating, diluting them, he may have formed as correct an idea of the actual state of German Novelwriting, as it seemed easy with such means to afford him. On the general merits and characteristics of these works, it is for the reader and not me to pass judgment. One thing it will behove him not to lose sight of: They are German Novelists, not English ones; and their Germanhood I have all along regarded as a quality, not as a fault. To expect, therefore, that the style of them shall accord in all points with our English taste, were to expect that it should be a false and hollow style. Every nation has its own form of character and life; and the mind which gathers no nourishment from the everyday circumstances of its existence, will in general be but scantily nourished. Of writers that hover on the confines of faultless