[In the following essay, Sammons explores Freytag's rhetorical strategies in an attempt to account for the spectacular success of the novel in its own time and its almost complete neglect today.]

It does not often happen, in that tradition of modern literary scholarship that is on the verge of becoming classical, that serious attention is turned to novels that in their time were spectacular best-sellers, but no longer have canonical status. Perhaps we should not always be so exclusive, particularly in the area of the novel, a genre that at times in its history has led an uncertain existence near or astride the boundary of literature and sub-literature. It may be a small symptom of some changes that are taking place in the practice of academic criticism, especially in the area of German, that two students of literature, in places as far from one another as New Zealand and Connecticut, quite accidentally and simultaneously turned their attention to the outstanding best-seller in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855). T. E. Carter's observations on the novel and his most interesting statistics of its enduring popularity appeared in this journal recently;¹ the considerations I should like to raise presume Carter's account and owe much to the results of his researches.

Carter recognizes that there is some problem of literary evaluation involved here, but he seems to find it less troubling than I do. He is contented to say that the work has some ‘merits’, but, observing correctly that today its reputation is confined to passing mention in histories of literature, ‘if we take it as literature, this implied criticism by neglect is as it should be’.² He proceeds to describe the novel in terms of the society for which, and in self-interpretation of which, it was written. He is completely justified in doing so, but it is worth pointing out that there is more at stake here than a contrast between vast popularity and objective aesthetic value. The most popular writer since Luther ever to write in the German language is Karl May. But, whatever general sociological observations may be drawn from his works, as a kind of universal adolescent experience looked upon with good-humoured tolerance, they do not raise a problem of literary evaluation. With Freytag it is different, for it is a matter of the contrast between his great literary and academic prestige in his time and his total rejection from the canon in our own. Freytag's renown was more than a matter of commercial popularity. On his seventieth birthday, the Kaiser ordered his portrait placed in the National Gallery in Berlin, and at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Freytag's Ph.D. in 1888, no less a national spokesman than Heinrich von Treitschke attested that Freytag had renewed the purity of German classical literature and become the German exemplar of the thinking artist.³ The sociological reasons for Freytag's status in his time and after are not hard to understand, but the reasons for our own rejection of him may not be so self-evident and may be based on some unstated premises that are likely to lie outside the realm of pure hermeneutic criticism. These reasons can be approached by taking a closer look at some of Freytag's strategies.

Soll und Haben is the story of Anton Wohlfart, a nice boy who rises to modest success in the world of business because he is a nice boy. It is a kind of Horatio Alger story within a narrower polarity, the difference reflecting the still enduring contrast between the relatively rigid and stratified society of Germany and the greater fluidity in the United States in both fact and fancy. But for anyone well acquainted with German literature of the nineteenth century, there is one striking fact about this novel of the world of commerce, with its detailed and convincing accounts of such things as mortgages and credit transactions, and that is its early date. It appeared at a time when the development of industry and capitalism in Germany was still comparatively backward and when the society represented in literary works tended almost always to be even more static than German society was in fact.⁴ In the same year in which it appeared, the most prominent veteran of the liberal writers of the preceding generation, Karl Gutzkow, argued that the workaday world had no place in literature, the function of which was to treat life as an eternal Sunday.⁵ Gutzkow was one of the writers who had ventured farthest from the canons of the ‘Kunstperiode’, as Heine called it, but in retrospect Freytag's new direction seems, in the German context, to be the more radical break.

But Freytag's realism tends to be highly subjective and quite subordinated to the purposes of his sociological homiletic. The life of the hero and his fellow clerks is described without serious conflict; it is a comfortable idyll for the most part, and it is also seen to some extent from an elegiac perspective, for Freytag notes carefully that this kind of business, in which the diverse commodities are actually on hand in vast warehouses that are visible symbols of the solidity of the house, even at the time of writing is becoming obsolete in favour of transactions carried out exclusively on paper (I, 5).⁶ Freytag does not take the clerks altogether seriously; the gravity with which they conduct their affairs and act out their status is comic and philistine. This is an example of some lurking problems that he has with his point of view. For all the identification of the book with the ethos of a class, only the hero and his employer are fully recognized representatives of it; toward the clerks, with their quirks and petty oddities, the author takes a position beside the reader of superior amusement.

This commercial lower middle class in any case represents the nether boundary of Freytag's realism; the proletariat is beneath his reach. His labourers are well-behaved, droll fellows, happy in their work and ready to give their lives for the company; there could not be any room in their simple and cheerful heads for a rebellious, disrespectful, or Socialist thought. In essence, what develops is a bland representation of the dogma that, if the working man were only industrious, virtuous, and co-operative, poverty and degradation would not occur. But Freytag is in a sense pre-Victorian and does not subscribe to all the tenets of the doctrine. One of his favourite (and remarkably affluent) labourers, in order to keep up his strength for his heavy work, drinks forty pints of beer a day (II, 5), which in later decades would not have been thought conducive to the pursuit of prosperity.

The nuances, such as they are, of Freytag's treatment of these classes are less likely to capture the attention of today's reader than his treatment of the Jews. He has a current reputation as an anti-Semitic writer, but he was by no means an anti-Semite in the sense that the word was to take on in the last quarter of the century. He was a moderate liberal⁷ and did not hate the Jews, nor would he have advocated persecution of them. In later years he became rather apologetic about this aspect of the novel and went out of his way to praise Jews who had made significant contributions to German culture and society.⁸ Conscious racism was foreign to him; while he does not particularly stress that the behaviour of the Jews is a reflex of their oppressed condition, there can be little doubt on close reading that this was roughly his understanding. But he was in the first place a recorder of a social perspective and not a reformer, and in the second place a liberal individualist who placed the responsibility for the condition of the Jews not on the society that oppressed them but squarely on the Jews themselves. It is for them to change themselves and earn acceptance by the society, and this requires them to abandon their identity as Jews and become middle-class Germans. Nowhere is it remotely indicated, incidentally, that the Jews are a religious community. In fact, except for one minor character, no one in the novel has any religious orientation whatever. This total secularization of society and its ethical referents is most unusual in German writing up to this time. It permits Freytag to measure his Jews exclusively by standards of social behaviour and to compare them unfavourably with the bourgeois ethic.

Carter has made some worthwhile observations on the role of the Jews in Soll und Haben.⁹ To them might be added the point that Freytag gradually and almost subtly concentrates the reader's attention on the contrast between two of them, the ruthless Veitel Itzig, and the substantially assimilated Bernhard Ehrenthal, with the hero between them as the standard of virtue and manliness. Bernhard, who has become ethically assimilated to the German bourgeoisie through his university education, has begun to reach a desirable character for a Jew in Freytag's assessment of things. There is no guile or evil in him of any kind; his ethical instinct is uncompromising and sure, and it draws him into a tragic and fatal conflict with his more complicated and ethically alien father, the development of which is one of the outstanding merits of the novel. But Bernhard lacks strength for survival and is further weakened by a self-imposed isolation from the real world; he is sicklied o'er with Weltschmerz and mal de siècle. Itzig, for his part, is a thoroughly distasteful character, shabby in appearance and conduct. But whereas Bernhard, the culturally assimilated but non-participating Jewish intellectual, is unable to rouse himself from his lonely room and his collection of manuscripts, Itzig is characterized by extreme tireless ambition. Freytag does not share the later more common view that the Jew is an idle parasite, conjuring into his hands the rightful rewards of honest men by some impenetrable wizardry. Itzig puts himself to enormous pains to learn tolerable German and the tricks of commercial law and correspondence from a degenerate, alcoholic, and, significantly, Gentile lawyer. Apart from an element of psychological comprehension, all this indicates how strictly class-oriented Freytag's ethic is and how thoroughly he is a proponent of a juste milieu in human affairs, for no one in the novel, not even the hero, works as hard to better himself and get ahead as Itzig does.

On the whole, Freytag's treatment of the Jews, offensive as it may be, especially in retrospect, is not as thoroughly repellent as his treatment of the Poles, which Carter has also remarked upon.¹⁰ Freytag's Jews have human dimensions, are differentiated from one another not without skill, and, in Bernhard's case, are at least potentially convertible into Germans, but for the Poles and their aspirations to independence Freytag has not the remotest sympathy. This presentation of the Poles, it seems to me, ought to be an occasion for some meditation. For sociologists and historians who take the long, Marxist view of history, the case does not present any problems to speak of: Freytag's consciousness is that of an imperialist bourgeoisie whose expanding prosperity requires the exploitation of a colonial underclass beyond its borders. The question is whether the fact that Freytag undoubtedly did not think in these terms is of any importance, and if it is not more pertinent to the literary issue that he bears up badly in comparison to other novelists of very similar class determinations. Such questions touch obliquely on one of the knottiest theoretical problems of realism. For Freytag's treatment of the Poles as of the Jews is a realistic account organized according to a system of ethical values, and what seems wrong about it in retrospect is not his immediate apperception of reality but the value system as such. It is experientially true that rebels, being oppressed, deprived, and desperate men, generally make a tacky and ill-bred appearance, and, as is noted in the novel (III, 2) with almost comic obtuseness, revolution is not very neat and businesslike and appears at the moment to lack rational goals. Heine, after having had some experience of the Polish refugees in Paris, observed with characteristic acerbity that the Romantic enthusiasm in Germany for the Polish fight for freedom would have cooled down considerably if the Germans had had the Polish refugees on their hands for any length of time.¹¹ It would not be fair to argue that Freytag's Jews and Poles are surreal caricatures; he differs notably from his model Dickens¹² in this respect. Undoubtedly he wrote what he saw, and it would be foolish to claim that the German experience of the Poles in the East, which produced the idiom Polackenwirtschaft as the essence of a slovenly operation, is a mindless prejudice out of touch with reality; rather, its infuriating quality is a complacent lack of humane, analytic comprehension. This is worth remarking because Freytag does have some capacity for empathy when he turns to the other segment of society that he subjects to criticism.

His most skillfully managed character, for all that he, too, is obliged to act out a social and ethical thesis, is an aristocrat, Baron Rothsattel. When we first see him, he is a perfect, uncomplicated gentleman; courteous, kindly, honourable, restrained in his demands on life, and devoted to his family. The air of potential disaster about him is at first nowhere evident, but it is there, nonetheless. The gradual grinding up of his financial affairs through carefully organized bad advice and hapless industrial investment can fairly be called the most fascinating plot strand in Soll und Haben. His social identity, which turns on his nobleman's honour, is dissolved in the process. He ends a complete physical and moral ruin, blinded by an unsuccessful suicide attempt, his honour stained, capable neither of taking his affairs into his own hands nor of acquiescing gracefully to their management by the devoted and able bourgeois hero. But he is not merely a victim of Jewish machinations; it is the unexamined prejudices of his class orientation that make him totally incompetent and useless in capitalist society. For he treads cautiously on the unfamiliar financial ground; at every step he believes that he is making decisions carefully, slowly, and rationally, yet he slides ever deeper into the morass. This incongruence between the workings of his own mind and the realities of the situation is Freytag's one real tour-de-force in the novel.

E. K. Bramsted has analysed and explained in convincing detail the anti-aristocratic thrust of the German bourgeois novel in the nineteenth century, of which the conflict of character in Soll und Haben is an example of classical purity.¹³ But he has also noted the concomitant strain of envy and imitation of the aristocratic class, its elegance, its culture, and its manners,¹⁴ and of this, too, Soll und Haben is an example, although perhaps in a less obvious way. It seems of some significance that Freytag's most sensitive achievement in the novel is the representation of aristocratic decline, for his most interesting and entertaining character is also an aristocrat, although a renegade one. The intended location of Fritz von Fink on Freytag's ethical spectrum is clear enough: our approbation of him is to depend exactly on the degree to which he succeeds in emancipating himself from his own class and accommodating himself to bourgeois attitudes and occupations. Anton's influence is meant to be an important element of this development. But the character seems to elude the author's control. The first things to be noted are Fink's genuine independence of character and the relatively short ethical distance he travels in the novel itself. At the outset he is already completely alienated from his class, and, as the son of an aristocrat-turned-merchant, has accommodated himself, if temporarily and somewhat impatiently, to the commercial calling. Fink in fact rather transcends the world to which Anton is so wholly attuned. This does not become immediately apparent, and perhaps Freytag was not himself completely aware of it, for Fink's role would have generated a really serious problem if the novel were better than it is.¹⁵ The situation seems rather at first to be that the influence of Anton upon Fink is a purifying one that will free the letter from the remnants of aristocratic frivolity and carry him the rest of the way into the true ethical centre. After an initial period of chilliness, Anton impresses Fink and earns his friendship by bravely (and foolishly) challenging him to a duel over a minor insult (I, 7).¹⁶ When Fink embarks upon a highly promising project to seduce the elder Ehrenthal's daughter, Anton prevents this by threatening to withdraw his friendship (II, 6), and after Fink has gone off to America and got himself involved in business operations of a hateful kind, it is Anton's advice that gives Fink the backbone to torpedo the enterprise by publicly exposing his partners (V, 1).

But Freytag's equations do not work in this case, nevertheless, for Fink maintains a natural superiority not eroded by whatever doubts about his ethical being that might occur. His aristocratic ease of manner and his worldly experience combine in an accurate wit that makes him more attractive than the sober and humourless Anton. In the end he marries Baron Rothsattel's daughter and buys his run-down Polish estate; with his financial resources and imagination he is able to make the estate a going concern much more directly than Anton, as major-domo, was able to do with all his bourgeois virtues. More important, however, is the critique Fink brings to bear upon Anton's philistinism and the limitations of the milieu in the firm in which they work, from which he urges Anton to extricate himself (I, 5; II, 2). These views, with which the urbane reader will cheerfully identify himself, remain uncontradicted in the novel, and, indeed, they are assimilated by the narrative voice itself (II, 6), thus relativizing Anton's exemplary role. This breakdown of Freytag's socio-ethical structure is paradigmatic for the dilemmas of the bourgeois intellectual of mid-nineteenth-century Germany.

Persuasive as is Northrop Frye's argument that evaluations are only subjective functions of the history of taste and that ‘the difference between redeemable and irredeemable art … can never be theoretically formulated’,¹⁷ one may still wish that the exclusion of a novel like this from the literary canon can be made intellectually defensible, for the vast critical and interpretative enterprise that society supports in our universities must draw part of its justification from the assumption that literary perception can be made to grow both more refined and more catholic. In fact, Soll und Haben is not really all that atrocious, at least not for anyone who genuinely likes long and detailed nineteenth-century novels. If one were to accept M. F. Edgerton's view in his recent, rather chilly ‘linguistic’ definition of literature that ‘the good novelist is typically a practical sociologist and philosopher who can reduce the sociologist's and the philosopher's abstractions to the shape of concrete individual human lives’,¹⁸ then it would be possible to make a tolerably strong case for Soll und Haben as a good novel. The characterization maintains a careful balance between realistic nuance and typology. The parallel patterning of the fates of the main characters is not without its elegance, particularly as these fates are worked out in a plot constructed with unobtrusive skill and without recourse to the conventions of withheld information and secret family relationships that make many of the novels of Freytag's older contemporaries so tiresome. While the novel almost entirely lacks symbolic substance, it is not badly written, if one will accept as good writing a style that never deviates extravagantly in any direction from a level of narrative normalcy. Yet we do not look upon the book any longer as literature.

It might be said in passing that Freytag himself attempts to deal with this problem in an evident and inadequate way. He was clearly troubled by the same problem of ‘poesy’ and its apparent disappearance or impossibility in the post-Romantic situation that agitated Heine and the Young Germans in the second quarter of the century. The persistence of the problem, particularly in Heine's case, is symptomatic of the hypnotic hold that the Romantic mode maintained on literary consciousness in Germany and the extent to which it interdicted the development to realism. Carter has pointed out that Freytag ‘tries to bring out the poetry of commerce, describing the exotic origin of the merchandise which passes through the firm's storehouse and cellars’,¹⁹ and elsewhere Anton urges upon a dubious Bernhard Ehrenthal a sense of the high tragedy of bankruptcy as an example of the poesy of commercial life (II, 6). We may smile at this, yet Buddenbrooks demonstrates that bankruptcy can indeed be the stuff of tragedy or at least pathos, if the author takes the entrapment of his characters in the bourgeois system of values with enough ironic seriousness. In Freytag's case the argument is too evidently a defensive imposition of the author upon the ethos of the novel to be effective.

The question of the value of Freytag's novel drives us back, willy-nilly, upon matters of content and intent. This is not the place to argue the theoretical implications, but the process of evaluation that has in fact taken place seems to me to escape in equal measure the universe of discourse or hermeneutic criticism (which will not deal with the processes by which a canon is established), the sociologist's classifications (which will find Stendhal, Eugène Sue, Fontane, and Freytag of equal interest), and the theme of typological idealization in orthodox Marxist theories.

I would propose as a hypothesis that if a novel is suffused with ethical intent, the ethics as such ought to be susceptible to criticism. I would suggest, more tentatively, that a rejection of Soll und Haben on such grounds should not be regarded as dependent upon an objectively value-free history of taste, as Frye would have it, but upon a recognition that Freytag's incarnation of an ethical argument is inadequate to any reasonable conception of humane letters. The so-called bourgeois writing of the nineteenth century that has been received into the canon regularly has a powerfully critical or analytic component; the memorable novelists do not only reflect the social ethos they are describing, but undertake an urgent penetration into truth, so that the work of superior writers becomes significantly independent of a subsequent judgement upon the ethos itself. Balzac is a particularly instructive example. Even in lower reaches of literature this fundamentally ironic aspect is noticeable; C. M. Bowra has remarked of Kipling that ‘though he thought that the British had a divinely appointed mission to rule large parts of the world, he devoted much energy and eloquence to deploring how unfitted they were to do so’.²⁰ This judgement, in my view, makes of Kipling a poet, in that it implies that he concentrated the potency of his vision, such as it may have been, upon the centre of his concern, whereas Freytag, on the whole, leaves the trunk of his ethical organism bland and unanalysed, and allows an abstract judgement to branch out from it that co-ordinates all deviant phenomena in a pre-determined perspective. It is not currently fashionable to raise the issue of truth in art, yet it would seem that the instinctive repudiation of Freytag's novel is motivated by the book's deep and perhaps only semi-conscious mendacity. Whether such a concept is critically adequate I leave to the theoreticians, but I would submit that it is a primary element in the reflective process that excludes Freytag's novel from the literary canon.

Notes

1. T. E. Carter, ‘Freytag's Soll und Haben; a Liberal National Manifesto as a Best-Seller’, GLL [German Life and Letters], N.S. XXI (1967-68), 320-9.

2. Carter, p. 320.

3. Heinrich von Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze, IV (Leipzig, 1897), 443.

4. The novel of commerce does have a history in Germany before Freytag, but not a very rich one. See Wolfgang Kockjoy, Der deutsche Kaufmannsroman (Strassburg, 1932).

5. See Eberhard Lämmert, ‘Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eichendorffs in Deutschland’, Festschrift für Richard Alewyn, ed. Herbert Singer and Benno von Wiesse (Cologne and Graz, 1967), pp. 354-5. Freytag and Gutzkow became considerable enemies.

6. I have used a well-known edition of Soll und Haben published Leipzig [1925]. But there is such a vast number of editions that it seems more convenient to give references by book and chapter rather than by pages.

7. It gives some indication of the German political atmosphere of the nineteenth century that even Freytag, as a playwright, had difficulties with the censorship until 1857; such problems persisted for him in Austria until 1861 and in Russia until 1881. See H. H. Houben, Verbotene Literatur von der klassischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart, I (Berlin, 1924), 199-203. On one occasion in the mid-1840's he was nearly arrested by the Prussian government for his liberal activities: Freytag, Karl Mathy, Gedichte, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Leipzig, [1925]), p. 629.

8. See E. K. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes in Germany, rev. ed. (Chicago and London, 1964), pp. 134-5 and n. 4.

9. Carter, p. 326.

10. Carter, p. 324.

11. Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Elster (Leipzig, [1887-90]), VII, 83-4.

12. On the important influence of Dickens on Freytag, see Roland Freymond, Der Einfluß von Charles Dickens auf Gustav Freytag (Prague, 1912), and Laurence Marsden Price, The Attitude of Gustav Freytag and Julian Schmidt Toward English Literature (1848-1862), (Göttingen and Baltimore, 1915).

13. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes in Germany.

14. Ibid., pp. 190-9.

15. From an early date critics sensed the problem that Fink threatens to become the actual hero. See Bernhard Seuffert, ‘Betrachtungen über dichterische Komposition. I’, GRM [Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift], I (1909), 603.

16. This passage itself is instructive, for it bears on the whole ethos of duelling and its complicated class implications. By the rules of the game Anton is not entitled to satisfaction from the aristocrat, and, in any case, even if Fink had been willing to overlook that feature, he cannot properly overlook the concomitant fact of the class difference: that he is so much better trained in the art of shooting that a duel would be an impossible, ungentlemanly act of bullying and perhaps of murder. Thus he must exercise sharp diplomacy to extract himself from the challenge without fatally damaging the honour of either man. Anton's move is therefore a highly aggressive one; he justifies it by the argument that he is of an age and class to be a university student had his fate been to study rather than go into business, and he is thus potentially entitled to settle differences by duelling. This, in turn, is a pretty if involuntary example of the fateful assimilation by bourgeois university students of a meretricious and anachronistic code of honour derived from the aristocratic model.

17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 2nd edn. (New York, 1965), p. 25.

18. Mills F. Edgerton, Jr., ‘A Linguistic Definition of Literature’, Foreign Language Annals, I (1967), 121. Edgerton's argument seems to me to tend dangerously toward Josef Nadler's notorious attitude that everything written is literature.

19. Carter, p. 320.

20. C. M. Bowra, Poetry & Politics 1900-1960 (Cambridge, 1966), p. 13.