he erratic
and unfortunate dramatist. During three years he was manager of the
Duesseldorf theatre, trying many valuable and idealistic experiments.
He died August 25, 1840.

The most important of his works are _Das Trauerspiel in Tirol_, 1826,
treating of the tragic story of Andreas Hofer; _Kaiser Friedrich II_.,
1827, a drama of the Hohenstaufen; the comic heroic epic,
_Tulifaentchen_, 1830, a satiric version of an heroic Tom Thumb;
_Alexis_, 1832, a trilogy setting forth the destruction of the reforms
begun by Peter the Great; _Merlin_, 1832; and his two novels, _Die
Epigonen_, 1836, and _Muenchhausen_, 1838-9.

In _Die Epigonen_, one of the long list of representatives of the
species of novels which began with Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, Immermann
tried to present the development of a young man and a picture of the
principal social forces of his period. But he was too imitative in
following his great model, and too much confused by subjective
preoccupations, to comprehend and to state clearly the substance of the
matter.

Only two of his works have enduring value, his mystical tragedy
_Merlin_, and the part of _Muenchhausen_ called "Der Oberhof" (The Upper
Farm), which deals with the lives and types of the small freehold
farmers. Immermann, following Baron von Stein, believed that the health
and future of society, endangered by the corrupt and dissipated
nobility, rested, on the sturdy, self-reliant, individualistic yet
severely moral and patriotic, small peasant. In the main character of
the story, the rugged, proud, inflexibly honorable old farmer, who has
inherited the sword of Charles the Great, he has drawn one of the most
living characters in early modern German fiction. The other figures,
too, are full of life and reality. The story has, aside from its
importance in the history of the German novel, an enduring value of its
own.

Immermann, in spite of his unremitting endeavor, failed to attain
literary or moral greatness. He lacked the fundamental and organic unity
of great natures. He had more qualities of mind than most of his
important contemporaries, but in not one of these qualities did he
attain to the degree which assures distinction. In his _Merlin_ he
treated a conflict which was fundamentally similar to that of
Grillparzer's _Libussa_. Yet Grillparzer, much more one-sided than he,
possessed the true Romantic-mystic quality, whereas Immermann had to
elaborate his symbolism with the patchwork of