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.
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