is court, who perish of
their own spiritual vacuity.

The end of the play is unsatisfactory. The hero's surrender to the lust
of the flesh, undoubtedly suggested by Goethe's _Faust_ and consistent
in Goethe's poem, is foreign to the conflict of this play, which, not
being human, as is that of _Faust_, but an abstract antagonism of
general historic principles, should have been solved without the
interference of the mere creature weaknesses of the hero and the mere
creature sympathies of the reader. Immermann planned to untie the knot
in a second part, which was to treat of the salvation of Merlin; but he
never carried his purpose beyond a few slight introductory passages.

IMMERMANN'S "MUeNCHHAUSEN"

BY ALLEN WILSON PORTERFIELD, PH.D. Instructor in German, Columbia
University

Immermann first thought of writing a new _Muenchhausen_ in 1821, the year
of his satirical comedy, _The Princes of Syracuse_, which contains the
embryonic idea of this "history in arabesques." Conscientious
performance of his duties as a judge and incessant activity as a writer
along other lines forced the idea into the background until 1830, the
year of his satirical epic, _Tulifaentchen_, in which the theme again
received attention. In 1835 he finished _Die Epigonen_, a novel
portraying the social and political conditions in Germany from 1815 to
1830, and in 1837 he began systematic work on _Muenchhausen_, continuing,
from a different point of view and in a different mood, his delineation
of the civic and intellectual status of Germany of his own time. The
last part of the entire work was published in 1839, having occupied,
intermittently, eighteen of his twenty years of literary productivity.
The first edition was exhausted one year after publication, a second
appeared in 1841, a third in 1854, and since 1857 there have been many
of all kinds, ranging from the popular "Reclam" to critical editions
with all the helps and devices known to modern scholarship.

In so far as the just appreciation of a literary production is dependent
upon a study of its genesis, the reading of _Die Epigonen_ is necessary
to a complete understanding of _Muenchhausen_, for through these two
works runs a strong thread of unbroken development. Hermann, the
immature hero of the former, and his associates, bequeath a number of
characteristics to the title-hero and his associates of the latter; but
where the earlier work is predominantly sarcastic, political, and