of content and form that characterizes a true
masterpiece of art. Character drawing and milieu painting, always
Ludwig's strong points, have again been most felicitously handled. With
equal success the author has developed the plot of the story which, in a
few memorable scenes, attains to truly dramatic scope and power. More
admirable than everything else, however, is the subtly realistic
treatment of the psychological processes in Fritz Nettenmair. His
gradual deterioration, step by step, from self-indulgent joviality,
through envy and jealousy, to the hatred of despair that does not even
shrink from fratricide, is depicted with masterly insight and
consistency. This phase of Ludwig's art strikes us as fresh and modern
today, and it must have appeared like a revelation to a generation that
did not yet, know Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_ or George Eliot's _Adam
Bede_.

Considered in his totality as man and as artist, Ludwig cannot be
counted among the names of the very first rank in German nineteenth
century literature. To him cannot be assigned the unequivocal greatness
of a Kleist, a Hebbel, a Keller. The narrowness of the circumstances of
his life and the invalidism of his mature years combined with, and no
doubt were aided by, an apparent lack of robustness and forcefulness of
character and temperament, and thus conspired to keep him from attaining
that victorious self-assertion, that sovereign balance between volition
and power, without which true greatness in the full sense of the word is
impossible. But among the leading names of second rank, his will always
occupy a place of distinction. If his was not the work of a Messiah, it
was that of a John the Baptist. Having been nurtured in the traditions
of the romanticism of Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, he was
one of the first to experience the artistic charm and possibilities of
unidealized reality and to respond to its call. It was he who seems to
have coined the phrase, even if he was not first to formulate the
principle, of that restrained or "artistic realism" that tries to set
its standards half-way between subjectively idealistic and objectively
naturalistic art. Even his extravagant admiration for Shakespeare was
chiefly due to the fact that he saw in his art the supreme embodiment of
this principle. Ludwig did not renounce beauty of art except where it
infringed upon the one thing needful--essential truthfulness to reality,
especially in all that pert