The Lost Manuscript: A Novel
Gustav Freytag
Gustav Freytag
The Lost Manuscript: A Novel
PART I
"A noble human life does not end on earth with death. It continues in the minds and the deeds of friends, as well as in the thoughts and the activity of the nation."
PUBLISHERS' PREFACE
Gustav Freytag has expressed the central idea of his novel The Lost Manuscript in the motto which he has written for the American edition:
"A noble human life does not end on earth with death. It continues in the minds and the deeds of friends, as well as in the thoughts and the activity of the nation."
This idea of the continuity and preservation of soul-life permeates the whole work. It meets us at every hand. We observe the professor in his study, ever eager to fathom the thoughts of the great thinkers of the past and imbuing his students with their lofty spirit. We sympathize with the heroine of this novel, the strong, pious Saxon maiden, in her religious and intellectual development; we behold her soul enlarging under the influence of unusual and trying situations; we watch her mentally growing amid the new ideas crowding in upon her. We enjoy the droll characterizations of the half-educated, of Mrs. Rollmaus and the servants, in whose minds the mysteries of soul-life appear in the shape of superstitious notions. And we see, again, the consequences of wrong-doing, of errors, and of mistakes continuing like a heavy curse, depressing the mind and hindering its freedom. And this last provokes a wholesome reaction and is finally conquered by unshirking courage in honest spiritual combat.
Illustrations of psychical laws showing the connections and continuity of the threads in the warp and woof of human soul-life, are found indeed in all the works of Gustav Freytag. The great novelist anticipated the results that have of late been established by the experiments of modern psychology. He says in his Autobiographical Reminiscences:
"What a man's own life accomplishes in the formation of his character, and the extent to which it fully develops his native capacities, we observe and estimate even in the best cases only with imperfect knowledge. But still more difficult is it to determine and comprehend what the living have acquired in the way of advancement and hindrance from their parents and ancestors; for the threads are not always visible that bind the existence of the present to the souls of generations past; and even where they are discernible, their power and influence are scarcely to be calculated. Only we notice that the force with which they operate is not equally strong in every life, and that sometimes it is too powerful and terrible.
"It is well that from us men usually remains concealed, what is inheritance from the remote past, and what the independent acquisition of our own existence; since our life would become full of anxiety and misery, if we, as continuations of the men of the past, had perpetually to reckon with the blessings and curses which former times leave hanging over the problems of our own existence. But it is indeed a joyous labor, at times, by a retrospective glance into the past, to bring into fullest consciousness the fact that many of our successes and achievements have only been made possible through the possessions that have come to us from the lives of our parents, and through that also which the previous ancestral life of our family has accomplished and produced for us."
Is not this a revival of the old idea of the transmigration of souls? To be sure, the soul is not a material thing made of an invisible and airy substance, fluttering about after death and entering into another body. There are no material migrations of soul taking place, however tenuous the substance of the soul might be imagined to be. The memories of the present, our recollection of our past existence, depend on the fact that the living matter which is constantly replacing itself in us by other living matter, like the water in a wave rolling on the surface of the sea, always assumes the same form. It is the form that is constantly re