482 GERMANIC LITERATURE 



The Hebbel revival finds a necessary counter-weight in a Stifter 

 revival. 



Stifter has been hitherto regarded as one of our most independent 

 writers, a true product of our soil, peculiar to us more than any other. 

 He sprang from a district which then lay far from the channels of 

 trade, where wood, cliff, and heath meet, where a bit of the primeval 

 forest still remains in Europe. A knotty, primitive type of man, 

 not unlike the old frontiersman of America, there struggles hard for 

 his scanty living. They are hunters, wood-choppers, and the like. 

 Odd and original characters are not lacking among them. There 

 depth, inwardness of soul, thrive in hardy strength, leading at times 

 to taciturn hardness, but occasionally also to a dreamy thoughtful- 

 ness and to poetic talent. The legends and traditions of his forest 

 home sounded around Stifter in childhood. His education in one of 

 the worthiest of the Austrian convent schools confirmed him in his 

 native Catholic view of the world, which became his unshakeable 

 conviction. Not till late in his career did he exchange the painter's 

 brush for the pen of the writer. Practically unaffected by all the good 

 or evil movements in the spirit of the times, he entered literature 

 when nearly thirty-five years old, or about 1840, the very year in 

 which Friedrich Hebbel appeared, and two years after two spirits 

 kindred to his own, Eduard Morike and Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff , 

 had published their epoch-making collections of poems. Like these 

 two, he shows the opposite tendency to that of ''Young Germany," 

 like them he unites in himself all the healthy elements of Roman- 

 ticism, without falling to the grade of a weak imitator or gleaning 

 epigone all three are Romanticists after the Romantic move- 

 ment. Once more the heart won the victory over the intellect, 

 enthusiasm over enlightenment, idyllic peace over the so-called 

 "Movement-literature"; the poet free from politics, free from time, 

 won the day from the poets of the times, the political lyricists, the 

 tendency dramatists, the writers on current events, who, like smug- 

 glers, misused fiction as the "dark-lantern of ideas." At the very 

 moment when the manifesto of the Halle Yearbook against Roman- 

 ticism was scoffing even at its love of nature and enthusiasm for 

 the woods, there arose in these sensitive artists the best interpreters 

 of nature and the woods, their truest worshipers and most inspired 

 prophets. 



His first Studies 1 (The Condor, The Field Flowers, The Fool'x 

 Fort, Great-grandfather's Map} show Stifter following the same path 

 as Joan Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Tieck. The Heath Boy, 2 written 

 in the tone of an Oriental legend, proves him for the first time 

 a master of nature description. In his own home, familiar to him 



1 Der Kondor, Die Feldblumcn, Die Narrenl/urg, Die Mappe des Urgrossvalers. 



2 Dcr Heideknabe. 



