Sentimentality and whimsicality are apt to strike one as the most prominent traits of any art that aims at what is characteristic and individual, rather than at what is typical and broadly representative. The Germans are individualists. They can cooperate efficiently with their fellow Germans, but each insists upon being himself. The German novelist will surely treat by preference a character of notable peculiarity, and if he writes many novels, he will try to give a conspectus of the qualities of the stock to which he belongs. Thus Reuter presents many characteristic figures taken from Mecklenburg; Ludwig from Thuringia; Auerbach from the Black Forest; Gotthelf, Keller, and Zahn from Switzerland; Fontane from Brandenburg; Storm and Frenssen from Schleswig-Holstein. So strong is this tendency that the Germans have a special name for this kind of art; they call it _Heimatkunst_, a word which may be translated "art of the native heath." If the author is a humorist, like Reuter or Keller, he will successfully recommend his whimsical creations to our indulgent esteem; or if he is a discriminating lover of mankind, like Ludwig, he will reconcile us even to the supersensitiveness of a narrow-minded but noble-hearted slater. The danger incurred by writers without humor and without discrimination is that their creations shall seem boorish or lachrymose. Probably the most pitiful failures in German fiction have attended those imitators of foreign models who mistook for "modern" what is simply shallow and frivolous, and, trying to be smart, proved themselves merely clumsy. Freytag, call him a Philistine if you will, is preferable, with his gospel of toil for one's daily bread, to those who would hold the dissolute idlers of the great cities to be typical representatives of modern life. Fontane, on the other hand, as "modern" as any, shows how an intelligent and cultivated man can assimilate foreign suggestions, remain himself, and treat the actualities of life with a matter-of-factness as far from cynicism as it is from prudery.