the Heights), a philosophic romance of court
life in the capital and the royal country seat of a considerable German
kingdom (by no means merely imaginary), inwoven with a minute study of
peasant life and character, Auerbach's popular reputation was
established. His plan of making ethics the chief end of a novel was here
exhibited at its best; he never again showed the same force of
conception which got his imperfect literary art forgiven. Another long
novel, not less doctrinaire in scope, but dealing with quite different
materials and problems, 'Das Landhaus am Rhein' (The Villa on the
Rhine), was issued in 1868; and was followed by 'Waldfried,' a long,
patriotic, and on the whole inert, study of a German family from 1848
until the close of the Franco-Prussian War.

In spite of his untiring industry, Auerbach produced little more of
consequence, though he wrote a new series of Black Forest sketches:
'Nach Dreissig Jahren' (After Thirty Years: 1876); 'Der Forstmeister'
(The Head Forester: 1879); and 'Brigitta' (1880). The close of his life
was much embittered by the growth of the anti-Semitic sentiment; and his
residence in Germany was merely nominal. He died at Cannes, France,
in 1882.

'On the Heights' is doubtless Auerbach's best representative. 'The Villa
on the Rhine' is in a lower key, with less appealing types, and less
attractive local color. Moreover, it is weighted with more
philosophizing, and its movement is slower. In 'On the Heights' the
emotional situations are strong. In spite of sentimentality, a true
feeling animates its technique. The atmosphere of a German royal
residence, as he reveals it, appears almost as heavy as the real thing.
Auerbach's humor is leaden; he finds it necessary to explain his own
attempts at it. But the peasant-nurse Walpurga, her husband Hansei, and
the aged grandmother in the family, are admirable delineations. The
heroine, Irma von Wildenort, is genuinely human. The story of her abrupt
atonement for a lapse from her better self, the gradual process of her
fantastic expiation and of her self-redemption,--through the deliberate
sacrifice of all that belongs to her treacherous past,--her successful
struggle into a high ethical life and knowledge of herself (the element
which gives the book its force), offer much that is consistent, and
appealing and elevating to the conscience.

Auerbach crowds material into the book, tangles up too many different
skeins of plot, offers too m