United States or Myanmar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The book of his that pleased me most was 'Edelweiss, which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very delicately done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach's work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.
With great enthusiasm, Alwine Frommann had already drawn my attention to Auerbach's Pastoral Stories. After that I read the Pastoral Stories of the Black Forest, which had so quickly become famous, and I, too, was strongly attracted by the contents and tone of these realistic anecdotes about the life of the people in a locality which it was easy enough to identify from the vivid descriptions.
He was an important personage in the land and so was his wife also, of course. His daughter was the "catch" of the region, and she may be already entering into immortality as the heroine of one of Auerbach's novels, for all I know.
Whether it really occurred there is not stated; but that Faustus was said to have been at Leipzig, and even in Auerbach's cellar, is an historical fact, attested by two pictures still extant at this famous old tavern, where many of our curious American travellers may have seen them.
Let him who desires to look on such a panorama, faithfully and thoroughly depicted, read Auerbach's "Diethelm von Buchenberg." Things went a little more quietly in the shop after this for a while: Turnbull probably was afraid of precipitating matters, and driving Mary to seek counsel from which much injury might arise to his condition and prospects.
The reader will be aware that this is the tale of which Goethe availed himself in representing Faustus's visit to Auerbach's cellar at Leipzig.
He wanted to know if the yellow wine was still as cool and clear as ever down in the twilight of Auerbach's cellar, what burlesques had lately been played at the theatre, and whether such and such a beer-garden was still to the fore; whereas he heard only analyses of overtures, and descriptions of the uses of particular musical instruments, and a wild rhapsody about moonlit seas, the sweetness of French horns, the King of Thule, and a dozen other matters.
In the weeks that followed they read "Werther" and "Wilhelm Meister" and "Wahlverwandschaften"; they read "Undine" and "Peter Schlemil" and the "Leben eines Taugenichts"; they read Heine's poems, and Auerbach's and Freitag's novels, and Wieland's "Oberon" is there anybody in Germany who still reads Wieland's "Oberon?"
Having passed through the Werther period, and tried a little Faust of which experience he spoke to his Marguerite as if it had included an acquaintance with Mephistopheles, Blocksburg, and Auerbach's wine-cellar he now felt that he was a Wilhelm Meister, serving his apprenticeship to the great masters of life.
He is Dionysos, who causes red wine to flow from the dry wood, alike on the deck of the Tyrrhenian pirate-ship and in Auerbach's cellar at Leipzig. He is Wayland, the smith, a skilful worker in metals and a wonderful architect, like the classic fire-god Hephaistos or Vulcan; and, like Hephaistos, he is lame from the effects of his fall from heaven.
Word Of The Day