THE BREAKING OF THE STORM.'
THERE is in German fiction one peculiarity which, as far as we are aware, is wholly confined to the works of that school,—we mean a plain directness of statement and simplicity of expression, which, in comparison to the emotional and intellectual subtleties of other nations, seems almost childlike. Here, if ever, we see plainly the re- flection of the daily life and social characteristics of the people ; we notice the strange union of simple habits, deep thought, and untiring energy, which help to make Germans more akin to some of the ancient races, than to those of modern Europe. The ennui of the French, the boredom of the English, find no counterpart in the life of these people ; the subtle Wient vibe which is over- spreading our island, threatening to blight all our endeavours and to dim our hopes, is unknown in the Fatherland, whose very pessimism takes the form of active, combatant life, and is used more as a sword than a shield. In reading a German novel of the higher class, we find ourselves plunged into an atmosphere of eager actions and profound convictions, which acts on our wearied and somewhat effete intellectual system very much as strong mountain air is apt to act on us physically, first invigorating us, but soon productive of lassitude and exhaustion. We cannot keep up with the action, the multiplicity of details and charac- ters wearies us, we demand a fuller and more minute treatment of a smaller subject-matter ; these broad outlines give us little satis- faction, we are accustomed to cabinet pictures, and we have a panorama a hundred miles long.
A work like the one we are here noticing combines within a three-volume limit a variety of subject-matter which we think we are justified in saying is totally unparalleled in English literature of a similar kind ; for instance, there are nearly forty leading characters, and eight distinct love-stories, besides minor compli- cations, which cross one another in all directions. But this is by no means all, or even half, the subject-matter of the book ; there is, in addition, the feature which gives a name to the work, the Breaking of the Storm, an incident with which the third volume opens, and which is only concluded with the end of the fiction. And in close connection with this physical storm, which ravages the coast and destroys three of the principal characters, is the breaking of the moral and financial storm, of which we have had frequent threatenings in the course of the book :—" A reaction, a storm which, to preserve the image which so strikingly applies to the matter, will, like the other, come upon us, destroying, over- whelming everything, and with its troubled and barren waters cover the ground upon which men believed their riches and power to be for ever established."
If any one thing may be said to be the key-note of this com- plicated book, it is that hinted at in the above quotation. The social and financial condition of Germany in the years imme- diately following the Franco-German war was, according to Spiel- hagen, one of thorough moral rottenness and corruption, and so the title given to the book has a double significance. But in the same way that the myriad personages of this story confuse somewhat our sense of their identity, in the same way that the eight love-stories work in and out into a maze of complicated passions, where we are sometimes unable to follow or even to clearly distinguish them, so does this main purpose of Spielhagen's work grow blurred and indistinct in the general imbroglio ; and we are left with only a confused impres- sion of Germany being in a very bad way, morally, politically, and financially. Probably this book resembles Bulwer Lytton'a Parisians more than any other work of fiction, only its modes operand; is a wholly different one, the point of view of the Eng- lish work being mainly subjective ; but the crowd of characters, the intricacies of their relations, the general vagueness of aim, the somewhat dreary length, relieved as it frequently is in both works with brilliant passages of dialogue, and thought, and above all, • The Breaking of the &arm. By Bpiolhagen. Loudoi : Bentley and Ben. the literary ability which has been enabled to weave such variety of character, incident, and meaning into one composite whole,— in all these matters are the works alike. We have, we think, said enough of the plan of this book to show our readers the impossi- bility of our giving them more than the slightest possible hint of its plot. As we have said, the work is nearly all plot, and our description would be, like a full index to a dictionary, useless, and of corresponding length. We will, however, pick out such passages here and there as will, we think, give the best idea of the author's style and ability ; and in deference to the fair sex generally, our first quotation shall be one of love. The hero, Captain Schmidt, is taking leave of the heroine, Elsa von Werben, whom he has known for less than twenty-four hours, but with whom he has already fallen deeply in love :— "He had turned to Elsa. Something like a shadow dimmed his blue eyes, and they did not look at her, but beyond her, perhaps towards the ship.—' Good-bye, Captain Schmidt:—At the sound of her voice the shadow vanished, the blue eyes, that now turned towards her, shone brightly and joyfully as the sun, only that she had no need or desire now to close her eyes, but answered the deep, earnest look frankly and earnestly, as her heart prompted her. And then he dis- appeared. Only as, at a turn of the path, the forest suddenly opened out, and the sea, his beloved sea, appeared in the bright morning sun- shine between the trees that sloped down to the shore, he spread out his arms and cried, I will always be true to you,—always !"
And so in the first hundred pages out of twelve hundred, the hero and heroine are frankly and earnestly in love with each other, and continue so throughout the book ; nor are they married when we finally lose sight of them, though in a fair way to become so. It will be evident to our readers that this love-affair is conducted in quite an unaccustomed manner, with a sort of mutual reliance on each other's good-faith and an absence of proper inquiry as to settlements, which would utterly destroy our social framework, if they were to become common in England. Happily we are as far removed as possible at present from such a catastrophe. We turn to another side of our author's genius,—and here we must premise that our quotation will suffer greatly because we are unable to give the passage in which it occurs entire. The scene is at a ball in General Von Werben's house, and the conversation has just turned upon the merits of Richard 'Wagner as a composer and dramatist. Ottoman von Werben has rashly pronounced the master's music to be nonsense, and Captain Schonau (a brother-officer) undertakes to explain his meaning, so that it will harmonise with that of half a score of Wagner disciples who are gathered round :—
" What, however, are the salient points of our age ? Ask our philo- sophers, Schopenhaner, Hartmann.'-6 This will please you, Carla,' exclaimed the Baroness.—' They will answer, the deep conviction of the insufficiency, wretchedness, misery—let me say the word—worth- lessness, of this our earthly life; and combined with this, the conscious- unconscious longing after the Nirvana, the sweet nothing, the begin- ning and foundation of things, which appears to our troubled nature as the only deliverance and last haven of refuge from tho desolation and error of this life, and to which we should undoubtedly fly, were it not for our will—our gigantic, invincible, indestructible will—that cares for nothing more than to live, to enjoy, to drink down the foaming cup of life, of love, to its last, bitter drops. Renunciation there, enjoyment here, both to overflowing because each is aware of the other, each hates the other like the hostile brothers. And in this constantly renewed contest between irreconcilable contradictions; in this sensation of being torn backwards and forwards in the wildest confusion, the maddest tumult, the most entangled whirl ; in this Witches' Sabbath, this Will- o'-the-wisp dance, and this halo of falling stars of modern humanity, hurrying from hell to heaven, from heaven to hell,raging and vanishing into mist ; and in this everything and something more, turned into end- less sing-song and eternal clang, the most horrible Past painted into a rosy-red caricature of the Present, while the eyes of a spectral Future stare from the empty sockets,—the flute-notes of soft enjoyment, the violin-tones of fading bliss, drowned by the crashing cymbals and the shrill sound of the trumpets,—here you have the Venusberg and the Penitent, the Wedding Night, and Monsalvat, the chronic sorrows of love and the magic drink from a prescription ; here you have, taking it all in all, him whose like has never been seen, and never will be seen,— here you have Richard Wagner !"
Taken, as it is here given, as the speech of a clever soldier, spoken without preparation or forethought, we could hardly ask for a finer piece of burlesque description than this. The hurry- ing rush of the language, in accordance with the spirit of the de- scription, is apparent even in the translation, and the way in which Schonau's sarcasm blends with reality of description is clever in the extreme. It is a proof of the many-sidedness of Spielhagen's powers, that this is the only piece of a like nature in the book. No less admirable is Sehonau's real opinion of Wagner's theories (to be found at p. 96 of the second volume), in which he explains how the mingling of arts "always accompanies their downfall ;" but we cannot spare more space for quotation on this subject, and must refer our readers to the book itself. First-rate, too, is the whole description of an artist, of which we give only the first
few lines, from the speech of Justus Anders, the sculptor, in reply to a remark made by Captain Schmidt upon his industry :—
" It is all one," answered Justus; "an idle artist is a contradiction in terms, at the best he is only a clever amateur. For what is the dif- ference between artists and amateurs ? That the amateur has the will, and not the power,—the will to do what he cannot accomplish ; and the artist can accomplish what he will, and wills nothing but what he can accomplish. But to this point, to comparatively perfect mastery over the technicalities of his art and knowledge of its limits, he attains only through unremitting industry, which is no special virtue in him, but rather his very self, his very art,—or to put it differently, his art is not merely his greatest delight, it is everything to him ; he rises with his work, as he went to bed with it, and if possible dreams of it, too, in the night. The world vanishes for him in his work, and it is just, there- fore, that he creates a new world in his work."
We might go on in this way picking out portions of this work of various kinds, and each good of their kind, but we have quoted sufficient to give our readers an idea of the variety to be here found. Looking at the work as a whole, the following is our opinion :—If the main purpose of the book be, as we believe, to give a description of the social corruption of Germany, and to explain its cause, that purpose has failed ; and it has failed for two reasons,—first, that it has so mixed up the personal and the general elements of the story, that they are practically undis- tinguishable ; and secondly, that the plot is so tremendously complicated, that all the energy of the reader is taken up with remembering the relations of the actors to one another, and he has none left for the consideration of the socio-political portion of the book. And if the book be considered as a story, it is a failure, for reasons which will be easily deduced from the above ; it is confused, overloaded with accident and character, and a great deal of wholly irrelevant matter. But taken as a modern novel, which contains brilliant character-sketches, much picturesque writing, and deep thought, it is far and away beyond the average of our modern English novels,—and there is enough stuff in it to make a circulating library of the washy fiction with which Messrs. Mudie and Co. supply their readers. If it fails, it fails chiefly because the German conception of a work of fiction is, as we said in our introduction, different from that of England.
Previous page
