Mimesis (88 page)

“Never belittle anything,” he would murmur. “A good mug is a good mug… The bosses are often lice; but there’ll always be bosses, won’t there? No use breaking your brains thinking about it.”

At once Etienne would become animated. What! the workman forbidden to think! Why, it was just because the workman was thinking these days, that things would soon change …)

This is not meant to be a specific conversation, but only an example, one of the many conversations which arise night after night at the Maheu’s under the influence of their tenant Etienne Lantier. Hence too the imperfect tense. The slow transition from torpid resignation to conscious awareness of one’s own situation, the budding of hopes and plans, the various attitudes of different generations; then too the somber poverty and the reeking atmosphere of the room, the densely packed bodies, the simple appositeness of the speeches: all this together
gives a typical picture of labor during the early socialist epoch, and surely no one today will seriously attempt to deny that the subject has world-historical importance. What level of style should be ascribed to such a text? There is here, beyond all doubt, great historical tragedy, a mixture of
humile
and
sublime
in which, because of the content, the latter prevails. Statements like Maheu’s (
si l’on avait plus d’argent on aurait plus d’aise
—or,
Ça finit toujours par des hommes soûls et par des filles pleines
), not to mention his wife’s, have come to be part of the great style. A far cry from Boileau, who could imagine the people only as grimacing grotesquely in the lowest farce. Zola knows how these people thought and talked. He also knows every detail of the technical side of mining; he knows the psychology of the various classes of workers and of the administration, the functioning of the central management, the competition between the capitalist groups, the cooperation of the interests of capital with the government, the army. But he did not confine himself to writing novels about industrial workers. His purpose was to comprise—as Balzac had done, but much more methodically and painstakingly—the whole life of the period (the Second Empire): the people of Paris, the rural population, the theater, the department stores, the stock exchange, and very much more besides. He made himself an expert in all fields; everywhere he penetrated into social structure and technology. An unimaginable amount of intelligence and labor went into the
Rougon-Macquart
. Today we are surfeited with such impressions; Zola has had many successors, and scenes similar to that at Maheu’s could be found in any piece of modern reporting. But Zola was the first, and his work is full of pictures of a similar kind and a similar value. Did anyone before him see a tenement house as he did in the second chapter of
l’Assommoir?
Hardly! And the picture he gives of it is not even seen from his point of view; it is the impression received by a young washerwomen who has recently come to Paris to live and who is waiting at the entrance. These pages too I should call classic. The errors in Zola’s anthropological conception and the limits of his genius are patent; but they do not impair his artistic, ethical, and especially his historical importance, and I am inclined to think that his stature will increase as we attain distance from his age and its problems—the more so because he was the last of the great French realists. Even during the last decade of his life the “anti-naturalist” reaction was becoming very strong; and besides, there was no one left to vie with him in working capacity, in mastery of the life of the time, in determination and courage.

In its grasp of contemporary reality French literature is far ahead of the literature of other European countries in the nineteenth century. As for Germany, or rather, the territory where German is spoken, we have briefly referred to it in an earlier passage (page 452f.). If we consider that Jeremias Gotthelf (born 1797) was but two years older and Adalbert Stifter (1805) six years younger than Balzac; that the German contemporaries of Flaubert (1821) and Edmond de Goncourt (1822) are men like Freytag (1816), Storm (1817), Fontane and Keller (both 1819); that the (comparatively) most noteworthy prosefiction writers born roughly contemporaneously with Emile Zola—that is, about 1840—are Anzengruber and Rosegger: these names alone are enough to show that in Germany life itself was much more provincial, much more old-fashioned, much less “contemporary.” The regional sections of the German language territory lived each in its own way, and in none of them had consciousness of modern life and of imminent developments ripened into concrete form; even after 1871 that consciousness was slow in awakening, or at least a long time went by before it manifested itself vigorously in the literary representation of contemporary reality. Life itself long continued to be more firmly rooted in the individual, the idiosyncratic, the traditional than was the case in France. It yielded no subject matter for a realism so generally national, so materially modern, so intent upon an analysis of the emerging destiny of European society, as the realism of France. And among the German writers who came out as radical critics of conditions in their homelands—almost all of whom had undergone the influence of French public life—there was no important realistic talent. Those noteworthy German writers who concerned themselves with the literary treatment of contemporary reality all had one thing in common. They were immersed in the traditional attitudes of the particular corner of the land in which they were rooted. Which meant that their romanticism, poeticism, Jean-Paulism or on the other hand their old-fashioned solidly bourgeois common sense—or a combination of both—long excluded the possibility of so radical a mixture of styles as had been evolved quite early in France. Anything of that nature made itself accepted only toward the very end of the century and then only after a hard struggle. In compensation, in the work of the best of them there is an intense reverence for life, a pure conception of the vocation of man, such as is nowhere to be found in France. Men like Stifter and Keller can give their readers a much purer and more intense delight than Balzac or Flaubert, to say nothing of Zola. Nothing is more unjust
than a remark in Edmond de Goncourt’s diary for 1871 (though perhaps it might be explained through the natural bitterness of a Frenchman who was hard hit by the events of the Franco-Prussian war): he denies the Germans every kind of humanism and insists that they have neither novel nor drama! But it is true that the best German works of this period had no world-wide importance and could not, by their very nature, become accessible to a man like Edmond de Goncourt.

A few dates may give a general view of the situation. Let us begin with the forties. In 1843 the most significant realistic tragedy of the period, Hebbel’s
Maria Magdalena
, appears. At about the same time Stifter makes himself known (first volume of the
Studien
in 1844,
Nachsommer
in 1857). The best-known narrative works of the somewhat older Gotthelf also fall in this decade. The following ten years witness the appearance of Storm (
Immensee
in 1852, but this writer achieves full maturity only much later), Keller (first edition of
Der Grüne Heinrich
in 1855,
Die Leute von Seldwyla
—first volume—in 1856), Freytag (
Soll und Haben
in 1855), Raabe (
Chronik der Sperlingsgasse
in 1856,
Der Hungerpastor
in 1864). During the decades before and after the foundation of the Empire nothing distinctively new appears in contemporary realism. There is to be sure the development of something like a modern novel of manners whose most popular representative at the time and on into the nineties was the now totally forgotten Friedrich Spielhagen. These decades are marked by a decline of language, content, and taste. Only a few members of the older generation, especially Keller, continue to write a prose which has cadence and weight. It is only after 1880 that Fontane, then already past the age of sixty, attains his full development as a delineator of contemporary subject matter. I am inclined to assign him a rank far below men like Gotthelf, Stifter, or Keller, but his clever and amiable art at any rate affords us the best picture we possess of the society of his period. Then too we can regard his art—despite its restriction to Berlin and the Prussian provinces east of the Elbe—as the transition to a freer, less secluded, more cosmopolitan realism. About 1890 foreign influences break in from all directions. As far as the portrayal of contemporary reality is concerned, this leads to the formation of a German naturalistic school whose most important figure by far is the dramatist Hauptmann.
Die Weber, Der Biberpelz, Fuhrmann Henschel
all belong to the nineteenth century. In the new century falls the first great realistic novel, which, despite its complete originality, corresponds
in its level of style to the works of the French nineteenth-century realists: Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks
, which appeared in 1901. It must be emphasized that Hauptmann too, and even Thomas Mann in his beginnings, were much more solidly anchored in the soil of their native regions—the mountains of Lower Silesia and Lübeck—than any one of the great Frenchmen.

None of the men between 1840 and 1890—from Jeremias Gotthelf to Theodor Fontane—displays, fully developed, all of the major characteristics of French realism, that is, of the nascent European form of realism: namely, as has appeared from our analyses in the foregoing chapters, a serious representation of contemporary everyday social reality against the background of a constant historical movement. Two figures as basically different as the practical, sturdy Gotthelf, who—in the best tradition of the clergy—flinched from no reality, and the young, oppressed, and somber Hebbel, who wrote the unrelieved tragedy of the cabinet-maker Anton and his daughter, have this much in common: that the historical background of the events they represent appears completely immobile. The homesteads of the Bernese farmers seem destined to rest for centuries in a calm stirred only by the change of seasons and generations, as they have done for centuries past; and the horrible old-fashioned code of petty-bourgeois ethics which smothers the people in
Maria Magdalena
also appears to be completely without historical movement. Hebbel, by the way, does not let his characters speak as colloquially as Schiller does his musician Miller for example. He does not localize them, for his setting is “a medium-sized town.” His dialogue—of which F. T. Vischer, even in his day, said that no housewife and no master cabinet-maker talked like that—contains, side by side with colloquial expressions, much forced poetic rhetoric, which at times affects us as unnatural and yet with as much terrifyingly suggestive power as would Seneca transposed into a petty-bourgeois key. In terms of our problem the situation is very much the same in the case of Adalbert Stifter, again a writer of a completely different genius. He too stylizes the language of his characters, making it so simple, pure, and noble that we never find a coarse expression, hardly ever even a hearty colloquialism. His language touches the common things of everyday life with delicate, innocent, and somewhat timid refinement. This has a direct bearing on the fact that his characters too live in a world with hardly a trace of historical movement. Everything which forces its way in from the bustle of contemporary history, from the modern life of the world,
politics, business, money matters, professional concerns (unless it is in the domain of agriculture or the crafts), he expresses in simple and noble, extremely general, allusive, and cautious terms, so that nothing proceeding from that ugly and impure confusion shall reach him and his reader. Much more politically inclined is Gottfried Keller, more modern too, yet only within the specialized and narrow frame of Switzerland. The democratic-liberal optimism which is the breath of life to him and which still permits the individual personality to seek its way in unhampered freedom, is for us today a fairytale from an earlier age. Then too he remains upon an intermediate level of seriousness. Indeed, the most compelling charm of his genius is his characteristic serene cheerfulness, which is able to play its game of benign irony with the most incongruous and repulsive things.

The successful wars which culminated in the establishment of the Empire had the most disastrous consequences morally and aesthetically. The noble purity of a regionalism which had kept apart from the rush of the modern world could no longer assert itself in public and literary life. And the modern trends which imposed themselves in literature were unworthy of the German tradition, false, blind both to their own falseness and to the problems of the times. To be sure, there were a few writers whose eyes saw more keenly—the aging Vischer for example, and Jacob Burckhardt (who was really not German but Swiss), and above all Nietzsche, who, in addition, was the first to experience the conflict between author and public which is to be observed very much earlier in France (see pages 499ff.). But Nietzsche was not concerned with the realistic portrayal of contemporary reality. Among those who were—that is, among the authors of novels and plays—there would seem, from 1870 to 1890, to have been no single new figure of weight and rank, no one capable of providing a serious creative expression for any part of the structure of contemporary life. Only in the case of Fontane, who was already getting on in years—and even with him only in his last and finest novels, those written after 1890—is it possible to discern the rudiments of a genuine contemporary realism. But they do not develop fully because his tone after all never goes beyond the half-seriousness of pleasant, partly optimistic, partly resigned conversation. To reproach him with this would be unjust, for he never claimed to be an essentially critical realist in respect to his age, in the sense in which Balzac or Zola were. On the contrary, it is to his honor that his name is the only one which nevertheless imposes itself when we discuss his generation from the point of view of serious realism.

Nor in the other countries of Western and Southern Europe does realism during the second half of the century attain the independent power and consistency which it achieved in France. Not even in England, although there are important realists among the English novelists. The quieter development of public life during the Victorian period is reflected in the comparative immobility of the contemporary background against which the events of most of those novels occur. Traditional, religious, and ethical motifs exercise a counterbalancing effect, so that realism does not assume the extreme forms it has in France. At times, to be sure, and particularly toward the end of the century, there is an important French influence.