But, considered as an
artistic whole, the English novel is so disjointed and uneven that the
interest often flags and almost dies, while many of the characters are
as grotesque and wooden as so many jumping-jacks. In Freytag's work,
on the other hand, the different parts are firmly knitted together; an
ethical purpose runs through the whole, and there is a careful
subordination of the individual characters to the general plan of the
whole structure. It is much the same contrast as that between an
old-fashioned Italian opera and a modern German tone-drama. In the one
case the effects are made through senseless repetition and through
_tours de force_ of the voice; in the other there is a steady
progression in dramatic intensity, link joining link without a gap.
But to say that _Debit and Credit_ is a finer book than _Dombey and
Son_ is not to claim that Freytag, all in all, is a greater novelist
than Dickens. The man of a single fine book would have to be
superlatively great to equal one who could show such fertility in
creation of characters or produce such masterpieces of description.
Dickens reaches heights of passion to which Freytag could never
aspire; in fact the latter's temperament strikes one as rather a cool
one. Even Spielhagen, far inferior to him in many regards, could
thrill where Freytag merely interests.
Freytag's _forte_ lay in fidelity of depiction, in the power to
ascertain and utilize essential facts. It would not be fair to say
that he had little imagination, for in the parts of _The Ancestors_
that have to do with remote times, times of which our whole knowledge
is gained from a few paragraphs in old chronicles and where the
scenes and incidents have to be invented, he is at his best.
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