a brief apprenticeship to Jean Paul and to the romantic ideal,
never whole-hearted, because of the disintegrating influence of his
simultaneous acquaintance with Boerne and Heine, Gutzkow utterly
renounced the earlier movement and became the champion of a definite
reform. He aimed henceforth to enrich German literature by abundant
contact with the large, new thoughts of modern life in its relation to
the individual and to the community. He was no less sincere in his
determination to make literature introduce the German people to a
larger, richer, freer, and truer human life for the individual and for
the state. In his eyes statecraft, religion, philosophy, science, and
industry teemed with raw material of surpassing interest and importance
for the literary artist. He accordingly set himself the task in one way
and another to make his own generation share this conviction. It is
quite true that he was not the man to transform with his own hands this
raw material into works of art of consummate beauty and perfection. He was
conscious of his own artistic limitations and would have confessed them in
the best years of his life with the frankness of a Lessing in similar
circumstances. We may agree that he lacked the skill of many greater
poets than he, to compress into artistic shape, with due regard for line,
color, movement, and atmosphere of the original, the material of his
observation. Yet we still have to explain the fact that he wrote novels
and dramas pulsating with the life of his own contemporaries--works that
claimed the attention and touched the heart of thousands of readers and
theatre-goers and inspired many better artists than he to treat themes
drawn from the public and private life of the day.

It would take us too far afield to trace in detail the nature and
sources of Gutzkow's writings, by which he accomplished this important
result. A few suggestions, together with a reminder of his great
indebtedness to the simultaneous efforts of other Young Germans, notably
those of Laube and Wienbarg, must suffice. Practically all of his
earlier writings, like the short story, _The Sadducee of Amsterdam_
(1833), as well as the essays entitled _Public Characters_ (1835), _On
the Philosophy of History_ (1836), and _Contemporaries_ (1837), are
evidence of the intense interest of the author in the social,
philosophical, and political leaders of the time. They are preliminary
studies, to be used by him presently in his work