2), Auerbach drifted from preparation for the synagogue toward law,
philosophy, and literature. The study of Spinoza (whose works he
translated) gave form to his convictions concerning human life. It led
him to spend his literary talents on materials so various as the homely
simplicity of peasant scenes and peasant souls, on the one hand, and on
the other the popularization of a high social and ethical philosophy,
specially inculcated through his larger fictions. His college education
was obtained at Tuebingen, Munich, and Heidelberg.

Necessity rather than ambition prompted him to write, and he wrote as
long as he lived. A partial list of his works begins with a pseudonymous
'Life of Frederick the Great' (1834-36), and 'Das Judenthum und der
Neuste Literatur' (The Jew Element in Recent Literature: 1836), and
passes to the semi-biographic novel 'Spinoza' (1837), afterward
supplemented with 'Ein Denkerleben' (A Thinker's Life), 'Dichter und
Kaufman' (Poet and Merchant: 1839),--stories belonging to the 'Ghetto
Series,' embodying Jewish and German life in the time of Moses
Mendelssohn; the translation in five volumes of Spinoza's philosophy,
with a critical biography, 1841; and in 1842 another work intended to
popularize philosophy, 'Der Gebildete Buerger: ein Buch fuer den Denkenden
Menschen' (The Clever Townsman: a Book for Thinking Men).

[Illustration: BERTHOLD AUERBACH]

In 1843 came the first set of the famous 'Schwarzwaelder Dorfgeschichten'
(Black Forest Village Stories), followed by a second group in 1848.
These won instant and wide favor, and were widely translated. They rank
among the author's most pleasing and successful productions, stamped as
they are with that truth which a writer like Auerbach, or a painter like
Defregger or Schmidt, can express when sitting down to deal with the
scenes and folk which from early youth have been photographed upon his
heart and memory. In 1856 there followed in the same descriptive field
his 'Barfuessele' (Little Barefoot), 'Joseph im Schnee' (Joseph in the
Snow: 1861), and 'Edelweiss' (1861). His writings of this date--tales,
sketches journalistic, political, and dramatic, and other papers--reveal
Auerbach's varying moods or enthusiasms, chronicle his residence in
different German or Austrian cities, and are comparatively insignificant
among his forty or more volumes. Nor is much to be said of his first
long fiction, 'Neues Leben' (New Life).

But with 'Auf der Hoehe' (On