No writer ever trained himself for his work more consciously and consistently. He experimented with each play, watched its effect on his audiences, asked himself seriously whether their apparent want of interest in this or that portion was due to some defect in his work or to their own obtuseness. He had failures, but remarkably few, and they did not discourage him; nor did momentary success in one field prevent him from abandoning it for another in which he hoped to accomplish greater things. He is his own severest critic, and in his autobiography speaks of certain productions as worthless which are only relatively wanting in merit.

Freytag's orderly treatment of his themes affords constant pleasure to the reader. He proceeds as steadily toward his climax as the builder does toward the highest point of his roof. He had learned much about climaxes, so he tells us himself, from Walter Scott, who was the first to see the importance of a great final or concluding effect.

We have touched as yet merely on externals. Elegance of style, orderliness of arrangement, consecutiveness of thought alone would never have given Freytag his place in German literature. All these had first to be consecrated to the service of a great idea. That idea as expressed in Debit and Credit is that the hope of the German nation rests in its steady commercial or working class. He shows the dignity, yes, the poetry of labor. The nation had failed to secure the needed political reforms, to the bitter disappointment of numerous patriots; Freytag's mission was to teach that there were other things worth while besides these constitutional liberties of which men had so long dreamed and for which they had so long struggled.

Incidentally he holds the decadent noble up to scorn, and shows how he still clings to his old pretensions while their very basis is crumbling under him. It is a new and active life that Freytag advocates, one of toil and of routine, but one that in the end will give the highest satisfaction. Such ideas were products of the revolution of 1848, and they found the ground prepared for them by that upheaval. Freytag, as Fichte had done in 1807 and 1808, inaugurated a campaign of education which was to prove enormously successful. A French critic writes of Debit and Credit that it was "the breviary in which a whole generation of Germans learned to read and to think," while an English translator (three translations of the book appeared in England in the same year) calls it the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the German workingman. A German critic is furious that a work of such real literary merit should be compared to one so flat and insipid as Mrs. Stowe's production; but he altogether misses the point, which is the effect on the people of a spirited defense of those who had hitherto had no advocate.

Freytag has been called an opportunist, but the term should not be considered one of reproach. It certainly was opportune that his great work appeared at the moment when it was most needed, a moment of discouragement, of disgust at everything high and low. It brought its smiling message and remained to cheer and comfort. The Journalists, too, was opportune, for it called attention to a class of men whose work was as important as it was unappreciated. Up to 1848, the year of the revolution, the press had been under such strict censorship that any frank discussion of public matters had been out of the question. But since then distinguished writers, like Freytag himself, had taken the helm. Even when not radical, they were dreaded by the reactionaries, and even Freytag escaped arrest in Prussia only by hastily becoming a court official of his friend the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha—within whose domains he already owned an estate and was in the habit of residing for a portion of each year—and thus renouncing his Prussian citizenship. Even Freytag's Pictures from the German Past may be said to have been opportune. Already, for a generation, the new school of scientific historians—the Rankes, the Wattenbachs, the Waitzs, the Giesebrechts—had been piling up their discoveries, and collating and publishing manuscripts describing the results of their labors. They lived on too high a plane for the ordinary reader. Freytag did not attempt to "popularize" them by cheap methods. He served as an interpreter between the two extremes. He chose a type of facts that would have seemed trivial to the great pathfinders, worked them up with care from the sources, and by his literary art made them more than acceptable to the world at large. In these Pictures from the German Past, as in the six volumes of the series of historical romances entitled The Ancestors, a patriotic purpose was not wanting. Freytag wished to show his Germans that they had a history to be proud of, a history whose continuity was unbroken; the nation had been through great vicissitudes, but everything had tended to prove that the German has an inexhaustible fund of reserve force. Certain national traits, certain legal institutions, could be followed back almost to the dawn of history, and it would be found that the Germans of the first centuries of our era were not nearly so barbarous as had been supposed.

And so with a wonderful talent for selecting typical and essential facts and not overburdening his narrative with detail he leads us down the ages. The hero of his introductory romance in The Ancestors is a Vandal chieftain who settles among the Thuringians at the time of the great wandering of the nations—the hero of the last of the series is a journalist of the nineteenth century. All are descendants of the one family, and Freytag has a chance to develop some of his theories of heredity. Not only can bodily aptitudes and mental peculiarities be transmitted, but also the tendency to act in a given case much as the ancestor would have done.

It cannot be denied that as Freytag proceeds with The Ancestors the tendency to instruct and inform becomes too marked. He had begun his career in the world by lecturing on literature at the University of Breslau, but had severed his connection with that institution because he was not allowed to branch out into history. Possibly those who opposed him were right and the two subjects are incapable of amalgamation. Freytag in this, his last great work, revels in the fulness of his knowledge of facts, but shows more of the thoroughness of the scholar than of the imagination of the poet. The novels become epitomes of the history of the time. No type of character may be omitted. So popes and emperors, monks and missionaries, German warriors and Roman warriors, minstrels and students, knights, crusaders, colonists, landskechts, and mercenaries are dragged in and made to do their part with all too evident fidelity to truth.

We owe much of our knowledge of Freytag's life to a charming autobiography which served as a prefatory volume to his collected works. Freytag lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1895 at the age of seventy-nine. Both as a newspaper editor and as a member of parliament (the former from 1848 to 1860, the latter for the four years from 1867 to 1871) he had shown his patriotism and his interest in public affairs. Many of his numerous essays, written for the Grenzboten, are little masterpieces and are to be found among his collected works published in 1888. As a member of parliament, indeed, he showed no marked ability and his name is associated with no important measure.

Not to conceal his shortcoming it must be said that Freytag, at the time of the accession to the throne of the present head of the German Empire, laid himself open to much censure by attacking the memory of the dead Emperor Frederick who had always been his friend and patron.

In conclusion it may be said that no one claims for Freytag a place in the front rank of literary geniuses. He is no Goethe, no Schiller, no Dante, no Milton, no