FEW personalities in German literature of the nineteenth century have evoked more interest and more divergent views than Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Swiss poet and writer of Novellen; stylistic craftsman of genius, narrator of great events, delineator of great characters; and at the same time a paradoxical nature that has been the despair of biographers and critics who have tried to bring order out of the conflicting chaos of his life and work, to find reasons for the distance between this unhealthy, corpulent, shy man and the colossal figures of Renaissance, Reformation, and medieval history, who are the subjects of his art.

Professor Burkhard has proceeded in his study of Meyer from periphery to center, from the style to the man, and offers his solution of Meyer's complexity in "the principle of polarity", which he sees evidenced through the whole extent of the writer's work. Previous Meyer-Investigators, notably Brecht, d'Harcourt, and Faesi, have arrived rather by deductive means, at conclusions suggesting this, for example Faesi's statement that artistic creations may be either image or counterpart of their creator; but no scholar hitherto has advanced so logically from detail to totality, and none has formulated as precisely this ultimate answer to the problem, as the author of this book. Not that Meyer was the spirit of an Italian condottiere in the body of a burgher of the humdrum Swiss nineteenth century, but that through overcompensation for his won sickly body and for the narrow sphere of his activity, he fied--from weakness, not from exuberance of strength--to the grandeur of the times and heroes he represents in his works.

The conclusions which Professor Burkhard derives concerning Meyer, and sets forth in the chapters "The Principle of Polarity" and "The Attainment of Form", are based on an exhaustive study of the writer's productions, that is not inferior in throughness to the best German treatments of the subject. Each of Meyer's works has been carefully analyzed, both quantatively and qualitatively, with the intent of determining the degree to which they express his often-quoted purpose of creating "grand style, grand art", and of conjuring up plastically tangible figures". Almost two-thirds of this book is devoted to these topics, and not until the validity has been firmly established, does the author occupy himself with pointing out the relation of Meyer's style to his personality, and in summarizing, in a final chapter, the failure of Meyer to attain in his art, that equilibrium of contest and form that marks in Goethe the height of German literary achievement.

This is a book of distinction, one deserving of a place beside the studies of Meyer to which some of Germany's most capable literary historians have devoted themselves.