" Yet another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But it would be
absurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, and
doubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie
Gerhardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in everything save
workmanship. The case of Mann reveals a tendency that is visible in
nearly all of his contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic realist
not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually
taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later
books, "Koenigliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a
note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fraeulein Viebig
has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht
am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an
eloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always baffles
novelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries over
into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of
these German naturalists--and they are the only German novelists worth
considering--share the weakness of Zola, their _Stammvater_.
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