in myself; therefore I desire the grandiose so intensely'. Keller neither feared 'the mediocre', nor was he aware of it within himself, and if he had been he would have been unconcerned about it. Meyer takes refuge in the past because he is afraid of reality, i.e. the present. As he himself says: 'the past gives me a feeling of peculiar calm and greatness'. In one important respect therefore his works differ from the classical Novellen much more than those of Keller do: his subject matter is never taken from contemporary life, is never gossip raised to the level of literature—as Keller's subject matter often is, and as that of the original type of Novelle usually was. It is always taken from the historical past, and places important historical characters upon the stage.

All this is so closely connected with the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer as a human being, that it becomes necessary briefly to say something of his personal history. The son of very cultivated parents, he was an example of that lack of vitality which often accompanies an over-refinement: a similar case is that of the Novellist, Eduard von Keyserling. From his boyhood Meyer revealed a timidity in the face of life which was unquestionably pathological, and developed in course of time to such an extent that he spent some time in a mental home. The whole of his poetic activity as a writer of Novellen lies between the years 1870 and 1890, after which year he succumbed again to mental disorder. Timidity in the face of life is the key to his poetic activity, as it is with [Franz] Grillparzer; as it is in a certain sense with [August] Platen. Both Meyer and Grillparzer seek refuge from life in the vicarious life of their art, but in a different way. Grillparzer disguises his weakness under the form of some superior quality; Meyer leaves it as weakness but sets up an heroic façade in front of it.

Like Platen, Meyer found his way to his own particular expression through contact with the art of Italy; but whereas Venice acted as the open sesame upon Platen's imagination and determined the form of his poetry, with Meyer it was the art of Rome. With both poets art overshadows life both as a source of inspiration—as the stimulus to write—and as the source of their subject matter. Both of them give a rarefied form of life—a stylization of it, in the sense that the life they represent is not seen at first hand but already moulded by art, preeminently by the plastic arts. Thus Meyer's Novellen are full of reminiscences of paintings or sculptures, and he frequently has recourse to the description of an imaginary picture in order to present a psychological situation, to symbolize an event.

Meyer wrote in all eleven Novellen—if Jürg Jenatsch be included as a Novelle, though it may perhaps more correctly be classed as a novel. The subject matter of all of them is taken from the historic past—they are historical in a sense in which Storm's Chroniknovellen are not historical, in so far as they deal actually with characters who are known to history, or with situations which are illuminating for Kulturgeschichte. Further the subject matter is predominantly taken from the period of the Renaissance, if the term be stretched so as to include that whole period in European history in which the individual is beginning to assert himself and rebel against the constraint imposed by church or tradition or state. Of the eleven Novellen the one which deals with the earliest historical period is Die Richterin (1885), in which the scene is laid partly in Rome, partly in the Rhaetian Alps at the time of Charlemagne, who himself appears as the deus ex machina. The latest period which Meyer presents is the eighteenth century in Der Schuss von der Kanzel (1878), the weakest of his stories, in which he presents an 'original' who is somewhat akin to Salomon Landolt in Keller's Landvogt von Greifensee. In between these two extreme dates lie Der Heilige (1880), which deals with the conflict between our English King Henry II and Thomas à Becket; four Novellen treat of the Italian Renaissance in the strictest sense: Plautus im Nonnenkloster (1882), of which the narrator is the Italian humanist Poggio; Die Hochzeit des Mönchs (1884); Die Versuchung des Pescara (1887); and Angela Borgia (1891). Das Amulett (1873) has as background the French wars of religion in the sixteenth century; Jürg Jenatsch (1876) the history of the Grisons early in the seventeenth century; whilst Gustav Adolfs Page (1882) has its action in Germany during the Thirty Years' War; and Das Leiden eines Knaben (1883) takes place at the court of Louis XIV. With the exception of Der Schuss von der Kanzel there is not a single Novelle in which one of the more famous characters of history does not appear; and there is probably no single writer who has, in so restricted a range, placed so many famous people before his readers: Charlemagne; Henry II and Becker, Dante, Can Grande della Scala; Ezzelino di Romano; Cosmo de' Medici, Poggio; Lucrezia Borgia; Vittoria Colonna; Coligny and Montaigne; Gustav Adolf and Queen Christina of Sweden; Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon—all of them characters of unusual vitality and originality and active participation in the life of their time. And immediately the doubt arises whether any poet who was not a Shakespeare could possibly have breathed life into all these gigantic figures, so various in their ways, yet all of them so bursting with energy, with vital force. It is true that many of them appear only episodically: Dante merely as the teller of the story of the faithless monk; Can Grande della Scala as the listener to it; Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon as the listeners to a story which their court physician tells them to beguile an autumn evening. Yet one feels that there is a certain arrogance on the part of a poet who undertakes to present so large a number of the world's greatest personalities in work of so small a compass.

Two things come up for discussion here in the choice of Meyer's characters. First the difference between the dramatist and the Novellen writer. It is quite true that only a superhuman poet like Shakespeare could have dramatized such varied but vital supermen; but a writer with much less creative power can use them as characters in a Novelle. The reason is that the dramatist must conceive them from within, must live them and let their actions be the outcome and expression of their inner life; but the Novellist, who is concerned in the first place with the event and not with the action, can record their gestures, their appearance, their characteristic attitude and so give an image of them seen from outside rather than from within. And if the reader ask himself in reading these Novellen whether Meyer has really penetrated into the characters of Dante and Can Grande and Louis XIV—the answer is 'No'. They are not really there as living characters at all but as theatre 'supers', going through all the gestures associated with the characters they represent, but not living inwardly. Secondly, in spite of all this parade of supermen and superwomen, of heroes and Kraftnaturen, the characters whom Meyer really presents to us from within are all weaklings and beings whose life is moving in uncertainty and doubt and the shadow of disaster: the unstable monk in Die Hochzeit des Mönchs; the feeble-minded youth in Das Leiden eines Knaben; the conscience-tortured Stemma in Die Richterin; the general suffering from a mortal disease in Die Versuchung des Pescara; Henry II and Thomas à Becket both seen from a semi-pathological point of view, both wounded in their most vulnerable feelings, in Der Heilige. The grand gesture, the historical setting, the heroic attitude is façade with Meyer; the threatened insecure building behind it is the reality, the real Meyer. And this gives to all Meyer's work that sense of conflicting elements, which prevents it from making the effect of an organic unity. It is fundamentally weakness masquerading as strength: uncertainty and insecurity disguised by the bold gesture. Form and subject matter are nearly always in conflict, except perhaps in the one Novelle, Das Leiden eines Knaben.

The duality in Meyer's personality comes out in many ways; even in spite of his weakness and timid withdrawal from life there is an element of strength in him. It is by sheer strength of will that he forces his way out of the darkness of mental depression into the light of day in which he can achieve something: and every single work of his is an achievement, something wrested from the forces that threaten to submerge him. And he proposes to himself always the most difficult problems of form, as though to test his will power, his ability to the utmost: the subtle conflict between king and prelate is related by a simple-minded crossbowman. Meyer could hardly have made it more difficult for himself than by mirroring the psychological workings of the mind of Becket in the consciousness of the Swiss soldier who tells the story; and the technique of Die Hochzeit des Mönchs, with Dante himself as the story-teller, is more complicated than that of any other framework story.

The characteristic form for Meyer is that of the framework Novelle—just as for Storm it is the Erinnerungs-novelle; for Keller the cyclical framework story; for Heyse the Bekanntschaftsnovelle. Meyer himself writes: The tendency to use the framework is quite instinctive on my part. I like to keep the object at a distance from myself or more correctly as far as possible away from my eye' [Briefe C. F. Meyers, 1908]. The type of framework Novelle which Meyer uses may be defined more closely as that of the virtuoso framework, for he tends by the choice of the person who tells the story, or the situation in which it is told, to make his task as difficult as possible, so that the effect is rather that of difficulties triumphantly overcome, of a tour de force, the skill of which amazes though it may not necessarily delight. As an instance of this virtuosity of technique the framework Novelle Die Hochzeit des Mönchs may be considered in detail. The scene is the Court of Can Grande della Scala at Verona. The Duke and his courtiers are gathered round the fire when Dante, the exile, enters and asks for hospitality, which is granted him. The company is engaged in relating instances of sudden changes of vocation with good or evil results, and Dante is bidden to contribute a story. He agrees, saying that he will develop his story from an epitaph which he read on a tombstone years before in Padua. Translated from the Latin it runs: 'Here lies the monk Astorre with his wife Antiope: Ezzelin had them buried'. Now the form of the Novelle is that of a narrative set in the past and seen as something completed. If therefore Dante had related his story in such a way that he said: 'I know what happened; as a matter of historical fact, it was thus and thus'; then the result would have been the normal type of framework Novelle. But Meyer hits upon a more ingenious method than this: all Dante knows is the fact expressed by the epitaph; he makes up the story as he goes along, so that what we are listening to is not a piece of the past completed and laid aside; but a piece of the present going on before our eyes and not yet completed. But that is not enough for Meyer: he adds to the ingenuity of the form still further; the characters in the story which Dante tells are fitted on the characters of the persons present to whom he is telling the story. He takes his listeners and makes them the actors in his drama, adapting the characters of the personages of his story to what he considers to be the characters of the persons before him. The word drama is here used deliberately, because this Novelle of Meyer's stands on the very frontiers between narrative and dramatic poetry, confusing and interchanging them in a way which is both paradoxical and perverse and outdoing in ingenuity anything that the Romantics did in this line. Epic poetry deals with the past; the drama creates a fictitious present. The characters in Die Hochzeit des Mönchs exist both in the past and the present. The virtuosity of this method is astonishing. When the butler enters the circle of courtiers (in the framework) Dante immediately uses him as the major-domo in the story he is telling, his peculiarities of speech and gesture being transferred to his equivalent in the Novelle. Further, Dante acknowledges and at the same time annuls the presence of the court jester, in the framework, by obliterating him with a gesture in the Novelle, ' "ich streiche die Narren Ezzelins" unterbrach sich Dante mit einer griffelhaltigen Gebärde, als schriebe er seine Fabel, statt sie zu sprechen, wie er tat'. Again: in the court circle are sitting two ladies; the wife of Can Grande, a woman of commanding presence, and—as is suggested though not openly stated—the mistress of Can Grande, a woman of more facile charm. Suggested too, but only suggested, is the jealousy of the wife for the mistress. In the Novelle the monk hero forsakes his affianced bride, whom Dante endows with the personality of Can Grande's wife, for a woman who is modelled on the personality of Can Grande's mistress; and is murdered by the rival whom she has supplanted. But Meyer's ingenuity goes no further than this, though it may well be asked what would have become of the form if he had made use of the trick, so common in the drama, of making the characters of the play step out of its framework and become living persons; if at the point in the story at which Diana stabs Antiope, the wife of Can Grande had also stabbed her rival.

This Novelle of Meyer's is not cited here as an example of perfection in the Novellenform, but merely as an example of extreme virtuosity and ingenuity in the manipulation of technique, in what appears to be the rather perverse pleasure of Meyer in setting himself technical conundrums and solving them. Technical skill can go no further than this; but the result partakes too much of the nature of a tour de force for it to be entirely satisfactory as a work of art. If Meyer's command of technique in this Novelle be compared with an equal mastery in Goethe's Novelle, the difference between an arbitrary and a legitimate use of technique will be apparent. In Meyer's Novelle technique has become in modern slang a 'stunt'—always a sign of decadence in art, since it exists for its own sake and not as something subservient to the significance of the work. Herein it may be said that Meyer approximates to the cult of sheer artistry, of l'art pour l'art, which was the ideal of the last years of the century.

But Meyer's sense of form was in reality far less genuine and sure than the ordinary historian of literature asserts. No doubt there is a certain surface brilliance about it as in the technique employed in the narrative here and in Der Heilige—and this brilliant overcoming of technical difficulties, this bravura effect, blinds the reader to the fact that the inner form is often very faulty and that which ought to be a single unity is in reality a confusion of two separate themes. In this very Novelle, Die Hochzeit des Mönchs, two themes are imperfectly welded—two themes which are not necessarily connected at all: the theme of the monk who forsakes his vows, and the theme of the faithless bridegroom. The renegade monk is not at all necessary to the second half of the story: the bridegroom who abandons his bride for another on the eve of the wedding. Similarly in Der Heilige, the real theme, the conflict between King and Prelate, is entirely falsified by the episode of Becket's daughter Grace whom the King abducts, thereby causing her death. In Die Richterin, the real theme, that of a woman whose present life is disturbed by the memory of a past crime, is obscured, during a great part of the Novelle, by the theme of brother and sister love. In all three of these works the inner form of the story is not impeccable but indeed very faulty. In fact, in his form as well as in his subject matter, there is with Meyer a good deal of façade, concealing the inherent weakness and dualism.

As there is in Keller's Novellen a loading of the form with detail—an overloading perhaps—but still an enrichment by reason of the living quality of the detail; so in Meyer's works there is a similar overloading of his form with historical detail, which does not in any way contribute to the convincingness of the theme, but merely clogs with the weight of mere learning. This is particularly noticeable in Das Leiden eines Knaben, in which Meyer bolsters up his main narrative with continual references to the historical and literary conditions of the time. Thus the reader is informed that Madame de Maintenon, who is merely the listener to the story, is a granddaughter of Agrippa d'Aubigné; he is reminded of Madame de Sévigné, of Molière's last performance in Le Malade Imaginaire; that le Duc de Saint Simon is writing Mémoires, and that Condé won battles for Louis XIV. This is merely another instance of that quality in Meyer which leads him to overdo everything and produces an excess of ingenuity, an excess of strength, an excess of learning, an excessive mannerism of style. Keller wrote once, defending the sober quality of his own style: 'Es liegt mein Stil in meinem persönlichen Wesen: ich fürchte immer manieriert und anspruchsvoll zu werden, wenn ich den Mund voll nehmen und passioniert werden wollte'. Meyer was a man and a poet without passion, an observer of, not a participator in life. When he has to deal with passion in his works, he does not find the natural expression for it, but uses a mannered, forced style, which aims at producing the effect of plasticity, but in reality merely chills the feeling of the reader.

It is usual to speak of Meyer's Novellen as being specifically historical Novellen—and this is superficially true. But essentially Meyer was concerned not so much with the historical event and setting as with the ethical problem which was incorporated in the event of each Novelle. His Novellen are in the first instance Problem-novellen—just as those of Paul Heyse were—with the possible exception of Das Leiden eines Knaben. He himself wished to be recognized as a Problemdichter, to be appreciated as the describer of conflicts of the soul: he wrote in a letter: 'Je n'écris absolument que pour réaliser quelque idée'. 'Certaines profondeurs de l'âme où j'aimerais descendre.' He resented praise of his work which stressed his power of resuscitating the past, because this was to him of secondary importance as compared with the problem of conscience which was the real theme of his stories. The proof of this inherent method of his—the proceeding from the problem to the characters and events and setting by which it was to be rendered 'anschaulich'—can be gathered from the fact that he made various attempts to 'place' the problem incorporated in his Novelle Die Richterin, and tried Sardinia and Sicily for settings before he finally decided upon the Rhaetian Alps at the time of Charlemagne. The essential content of all Meyer's Novellen is the ethical problem, a problem of conscience. With regard to the last of his Novellen, Angela Borgia, he writes: 'Cette nouvelle est à proprement dire l'histoire de la conscience'. And if it be asked for what reason he places these problems in historical settings, the answer is given in his own words [in a letter to Félix Bovet, January 14, 1888]:

Je me sers de la nouvelle historique purement et simplement pour y loger mes expériences et mes sentiments personnels, la préférant au Zeitroman, parce qu'elle masque mieux et qu'elle distance davantage le lecteur. Ainsi sous une forme très objective et éminemment artistique, je suis au dedans tout individuel et subjectif. Dans tous les personnages du Pescare, même dans ce vilain Moroni, il y a du C.F.M.

The statement calls to mind Friedrich Schlegel's description of the Novelle, that it is particularly suited to render a subjective mood indirectly and as it were symbolically because of its natural tendency to objectivity. Meyer's Novellen form a singularly striking example of this, one in which at first sight the subjective and objective elements are an exact antithesis, and weakness, insecurity and doubt are concealed beneath the heroic attitude and the sculptural gesture.

The real Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has only lately been discovered. Earlier biographers and critics of his work drew attention rather to the heroic façade than to the insecure dwellings it fronted and concealed. It seems a truer estimate of him to recognize that this too, with its strong, self-reliant, active and vital characters, is a wishfulfilment of the real Meyer, who suffered under all the spiritual problems of a declining age.

Meyer's contribution to the development of the German Novelle was too original, too personally individual to have any real influence upon the genre as such. Moreover the German Novelle as a genre had exhausted its utmost possibilities in the works of Keller; every possible aspect of it had already been exploited and Keller's Novellen represent the summit of the development. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Novellen at the close of that development, like the stories of Kleist at the beginning, are too individual to be assimilated to any traditional form. Every writer of Novellen no doubt contributes certain individual features and enlarges the possibilities of the genre thereby; but not every kind of individual characteristic can be assimilated or is such that a later writer can profit by it. Kleist and Meyer are individual writers, whose specific qualities cannot easily be assimilated to the tradition of the genre, and their contribution compared with that of Keller, for instance, may be described as morbidly individual. Another writer of Novellen whose works are open to the same criticism is E. T. A. Hoffmann. All three writers have a certain originality which marks them out from other writers of Novellen and impresses them upon the memory and the imagination. Though their works considered singly may or may not conform to Heyse's theory and supply the 'Falcon', yet as a whole they have a more strongly marked silhouette, make a more vivid impression than that which is received from the works of other writers who have been discussed. Though they are less central and lie more on the periphery than the works of Keller, for instance, they attract more attention and seem to possess a greater positive quality than his. The reason is that, compared with the balance and harmony, the equal distribution and completeness of Keller's work, they obtrude some characteristic which is developed at the expense of the harmonious whole.

The Novelle is a bürgerliche genre. It reached the summit of its development, realized its essential form as a German genre in the works of writers like Stifter, Storm and above all Keller, writers standing within the confines of that literary movement known as Poetic Realism, which was the most characteristic expression of German Bürgertum of the middle of the nineteenth century. The critic von Lukacs in his book of essays, Die Seele und die Formen, writes: 'In the middle of the last century there were still in Germany, especially on the periphery, towns in which the old Bürgertum still remained strong and living, the Bürgertum which is the greatest contrast to that of to-day. 0f this Bürgertum these writers were begotten, they are its genuine, great representatives. . . . Their works are the historical monument of Bürgertum'. Heyse and Meyer are no longer representatives of that Bürgertum, but individualists living outside of it. Heyse's individualism moves only on the surface of life, belongs to the world of fortuitous and irresponsible contacts—the world of hotels and railway carnages; and already in his works the cosmopolitanism of the twentieth century announces itself. Meyer's individualism is of that morbidly psychological nature which isolates the subject from the society which surrounds him. Both of them—Heyse in his cosmopolitanism, and Meyer in his susceptibility to the spiritual problems of his age—were representatives of the disintegrating forces from without and within, which were undermining the Bürgertum with its established mode and accepted code of life.