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.
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