The Professor's Wife From the German Author:Berthold Auerbach General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1851 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. VILLAGE LIFE, AND MOUNTAIN LIFE. AFTER the Collaborator had, next morning, completed the interrupted task of putting the Legends into writing, he sought his friend, and found him before a sketch in colours, which was almost finished: a Tyrolean, who sings a new song to a company of youths and maidens of Upper Swabia. 'There thou hast embodied my Law,' remarked the Collaborator; ' the picture has a profound Tendency.' 'Don't smother me with thy Tendency,' replied the painter; ' men have packed off the Devil and sent him about his business; but they have twitched off his tail, and that is what they call Tendency. As it is in Morike's story, they put it in a book for a marker; put it everywhere. I should like for once to make something in which they could not ferret out any Tendency; something at which they would only be able to say, The thing is beautiful!' ' Thou art right; the Symbolical and Typical which is contained in every work of art, must mould itself by Natural-growth-laws.' ' Natural-growth-laws ! A fine expression ! But why do you not say, by natural growth, or simply, spontaneously.' ' You may laugh at me, but my doctrine is sound. In every work of art there is a symbolical and typical element. The situation, the occurrence, is there standing of itself, and does not require the support of ideas; it is independent. But to a deeper view, an embodied Thought, a pattern Image must reveal itself; and the Concrete becomes a case of the Universal. It is not Tendency when you put butter into blue milk to make believe that the cow gives milk full of cream; the Ideal exists as a for...« less