JORN UHL, yErn-ool, by Gustav Frenssen is one of those novels, found in the literature of every nation, in which not a man but a well established national type is the hero. The author who makes such a type the central figure of a romantic story is sure of popular approval in just the proportion in which his character is true to life and recognizable, em phasizing the universal in the portrait, distin guishing the typical, shading down the personal. Gustav Frenssen was peculiarly successful in his attempt to create, .through Jorn Uhl, the picture of the young German peasant-farmer, industrious, idealistic, imaginative, doing his duty not only with patience but with high cour age, loving the land, but loving the stars more, and with a vision of something even beyond the stars. Contrasted with him are the equally life like figures of his drunken, pompous, spend thrift father, his drunken, idle, thieving older brothers, who waste the land beyond all power of Jorn Uhl's labor to redeem it. Together
they are the personification of a German peasant family a generation ago. The straight forward, provincial simplicity of Frenssen's style is thoroughly in harmony with the story and the character of the hero and deepens The sense of reality. It undoubtedly contributed to the almost unprecedented popularity of the book in Germany, a success which has never been duplicated outside. One chapter of the book, detailing the drafting of the young peasant for war service and his experience in the battle of Gravelotte, has the quality of permanent international literature, and has been translated for use in schools; the rest of the story, besides its undoubted value as pure fic tion, is interesting principally for that very qual ity of sincere but limited nationality which has narrowed its audience to Germany.