ABSTRACT
In his article ‘Realism in art: Modern German Fiction’, written in Dresden in the summer of 1858, G.H. Lewes is in no doubt that ‘the novels of Germany are singularly inferior to those of France and England’ (WR, 70: 491), and in no doubt either about the reason for that inferiority: ‘If German novels are, for the most part, dreary inflictions, it is because they have so little realism that they resemble nothing on earth or under it’ (518). The failure of writers like Gustav Freytag and otto Ludwig to achieve anything like the realism that Lewes admires is defined by contrast explicitly with Balzac, and implicitly with the fiction of his partner, who was currently engaged in the writing of Adam Bede. Indeed, George Eliot’s own realistic creed had been spelt out a few weeks earlier in Chapter 17 of that novel, written during the couple’s stay in Munich, in which she proclaims her commitment ‘to the faithful representing of commonplace things’ (17, 178). She not only assisted in the preparation of Lewes’s article, reading German fiction with him and to him, but she also held with equal conviction to the same principles. The criteria he used to judge the German novel and its failings were hers, too. It is fair to assume that she shared his view of the German novel.
