breakfast about people with no heart.
Apparently only people with heart are of
any consequence at all From this point
it was but one step to Dickens, whose
David Copperfield I finished reading yes
terday. A line can be drawn through the
middle of this book: on the one side peop
le with heart, on the other those without.
Dickens himself is a man with heart. For
this very reason he is able to see the heart
less with such deadly penetration. No
other writer has ever proved so capable of
producing such a gallery of characters, of
presenting us with such peculiarly hideous
examples of the heartless. The autobio
graphical novel David Copperfield de
mands an analysis - of its structure too -
which I hope soon to give here.
While the naturalist Hauptmann is quite
enthusiastic about Dickens, his contempo
rary Hermann Hesse, who was not a follo
wer of naturalism, seems to have fallen a
victim to the trends of this movement in
his judgment of Dickens. For Hesse failed
to appreciate Dickens' qualities; he
thought that in Dickens' works 'the boun
daries between noble feeling and sentimen
tality, between true narrative art and coar
se mass effects were often blurred'. And
on the occasion of Meyrink's translation of
some of Dickens' novels we are told that
'Hesse doubts whether it was worth while
expending such great labour on the transla
tion of works which even in the original
are not works of art. He finds Dickens
wrote carelessly and doubts whether Dic
kens took as much trouble with the origi
nal as Meyrink with the translation.
There are, however, some favorable state
ments about Dickens after World War I.
In an essay written in 1933, Robert Musil
refers to Dickens as one of the many
sources of inspiration for his generation.
In a lecture delivered in 1936, Musil
compared Dickens' and Meredith's 'positi
ve heroes' with the sickly, somewhat
'moth-eaten' heroes of modern writers.
Bertold Brecht, regarding Dickens as a
realist and a moralist, compares him with
Balzac. Another writer of the time, Walter
Benjamin, although not praising Dickens,
shows his interest by referring to his na
me. Drawing parallels between Doeblin's
Berlin Alexanderplatz and Dickens' novels,
Benjamin finds that in the works of both
writers 'respectable citizens and criminals
so gloriously set each other off, because
the interest of both are part of one and the
same world.
A short essay 'Rede iiber den 'Raritatenla-
den' von Charles Dickens' by the philos
opher Theodor W. Adorno must also be
mentioned because the standpoint of the
author appears rather advanced for the
time when the article (originally published
in Frankfurter Zeitung 18.04.31) was
written. For Adorno, The Old Curiosity
Shop is more than a realistic or a social
novel. He finds elements of a pre-bour-
geois age in it, elements of a baroque
nature as, in his opinion, they can also be
found in other nineteenth-century writers
like Raimund, Nestroy, and Kierkegaard.
The main scenery - the curiosity shop, the
puppet theater, and the churchyard - is
allegorical; the industrial town shows
mythological as well as historic-social
features. Symbolism kindred to Kafka's
abounds: Quilp stands for the profit-see-
king bourgeoisie, the industrial town re
presents the hell of the bourgeois world.
The pilgrimage of Nell and her grandfat
her - the relationship reminds Adorno of
that between the old harpist and Mignon in
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister - is a symbol of
the escape from a bourgeois world.
It has occasionally been insinuated that of
the authors who wrote after World War II
Ernst Penzoldt was stimulated by Dickens.
That Penzoldt had an intimate knowledge
of Dickens' works is demonstrated in his
Academy lecture study. Apart from this
learned piece numerous allusions to Dic
kens in Penzoldt's works show how near
the English author was to his heart. Fur
ther allusions to Dickens show that he is
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