At the beginning of the nineteenth century the German Romanticists proclaimed the novel (in German _der Roman_) the supremely appropriate form for Romantic literature, and they regarded this truth as especially illustrated by Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister." The novel, they said, is not merely the most elastic, the most inclusive, the freest of the literary forms, it is the form in which a writer can most perfectly convey by suggestion and implication the infinitude of relations in which persons and objects stand to their environment, but which the necessarily sharper contours of the other forms--notably the drama--do not permit. By contrast to the drama, which in a certain sense is similar to statuary, the novel is picturesque; that is, it presents figures in relation to their background; and it is quite conceivable that in some compositions the whole, with what corresponds to perspective and to light and shade--in other words "atmosphere"--is more significant than the individual figures that are given their setting in this whole. This, at any rate, is the case with "Wilhelm Meister." A story first conceived as the fulfilment of a theatrical mission by a young man whose experience was an education, became the picture of a world full of influences, many of them mysterious, that operate to develop personality. The German novel after Goethe followed his lead. The idea of education by experience, and the idea of the symbolical presentation of the inexplicable background of life, give to some of the greatest examples of prose fiction of the nineteenth century--such as Moerike's "Maler Nolten," Keller's "Gruener Heinrich," and Spielhagen's "Problematische Naturen"--this Goethean, Romantic picturesqueness. If the heroes are seldom great public characters and the background of their lives does not always suggest relations with illimitable space, these facts find their explanation in the German proneness to particularism. To this particularism the short story would seem to be especially adapted. In fact, the Germans--again following Goethe's lead--have probably attained to a higher excellence in the short story than in the novel. It is to their advantage that in the narrow limits of this form they have no opportunity to philosophize; they must relate how something happened of which their auditors have not heard, or must depict a situation as it discloses itself to a passing glance. The Swiss Keller and Meyer and many Germans, Austrians, and Swiss of our own time have attained considerable virtuosity in this form; but many of their products would have to be called little novels rather than short stories in the technical sense.