ion, in the power to
ascertain and utilize essential facts. It would not be fair to say
that he had little imagination, for in the parts of _The Ancestors_
that have to do with remote times, times of which our whole knowledge
is gained from a few paragraphs in old chronicles and where the
scenes and incidents have to be invented, he is at his best. But one
of his great merits lies in his evident familiarity with the
localities mentioned in the pages as well as with the social
environment of his personages. The house of T.D. Schroeter in _Debit
and Credit_ had its prototype in the house of Molinari in Breslau, and
at the Molinaris Freytag was a frequent visitor. Indeed in the company
of the head of the firm he even undertook just such a journey to the
Polish provinces in troubled times as he makes Anton take with
Schroeter. Again, the life in the newspaper office, so amusingly
depicted in _The Journalists_, was out of the fulness of his own
experience as editor of a political sheet. A hundred little natural
touches thus add to the realism of the whole and make the figures, as
a German critic says, "stand out like marble statues against a hedge
of yew." The reproach has been made that many of Freytag's characters
are too much alike. He has distinct types which repeat themselves both
in the novels and in the plays. George Saalfeld in _Valentine_, for
instance, is strikingly like Bolz in _The Journalists_ or Fink in
_Debit and Credit_. Freytag's answer to such objections was that an
author, like any other artist, must work from models, which he is not
obliged constantly to change. The feeling for the solidarity of the
arts was very strong with him. He practically abandoned writing for
the stage just after achieving his most noted success and merely for
the reason that in poetic narration, as he called it, he saw the
possibility of being still more dramatic. He felt hampered by the
restrictions which the necessarily limited length of an evening's
performance placed upon him, and wished more time and space for the
explanation of motives and the development of his plot. In his novel,
then, he clung to exactly the same arrangement of his theme as in his
drama--its initial presentation, the intensification of the interest,
the climax, the revulsion, the catastrophe. Again, in the matter of
contrast he deliberately followed the lead of the painter who knows
which colors are complementary and also which ones will clash.

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