Son_ is not to claim that Freytag, all in all, is a greater novelist
than Dickens. The man of a single fine book would have to be
superlatively great to equal one who could show such fertility in
creation of characters or produce such masterpieces of description.
Dickens reaches heights of passion to which Freytag could never
aspire; in fact the latter's temperament strikes one as rather a cool
one. Even Spielhagen, far inferior to him in many regards, could
thrill where Freytag merely interests.

Freytag's _forte_ lay in fidelity of depiction, 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. Schröter 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
Schröter. 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