Note 459 — Chapter II

Arno Holz—Johannes Schlaf, Die Familie Selicke, 3e Auflage; Berlin, 1892, p. vi.: ‘In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign authors. Let them say it, then.... It will be acknowledged some day that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced from without, more strongly originated from within—in one word, more national—than this movement, even at the further development of which we look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure our Papa Hamlet. Die Familie Selicke is the most thoroughly German piece of writing our literature possesses,’ etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they speak of themselves and their productions.