This green-and-gold volume contains both the works
of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady
Wilde. The first is "Sidonia the Sorceress," the second, "The Amber
Witch." I don't know where one may turn for a stranger view of
the Middle Ages, the quaint details of simple life, with sudden
intervals of grotesque savagery. The most weird and barbarous things
are made human and comprehensible. There is one incident which
haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers
with the villagers as to what price they will give him for putting
some young witch to the torture, running them up from a barrel of
apples to a barrel and a half, on the grounds that he is now old and
rheumatic, and that the stooping and straining is bad for his back.
It should be done on a sloping hill, he explains, so that the "dear
little children" may see it easily. Both "Sidonia" and "The Amber
Witch" give such a picture of old Germany as I have never seen
elsewhere.
But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in
whom I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who
is, if I mistake not, young and with his career still before him.
"The Forerunner" and "The Death of the Gods" are the only two
books of his which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of
Renaissance Italy in the one, and of declining Rome in the other,
are in my opinion among the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that
as I read them I was pleased to find how open my mind was to new
impressions, for one of the greatest mental dangers which comes upon
a man as he grows older is that he should become so attached to old
favourites that he has no room for the new-comer, and persuades
himself that the days of great things are at an end because his own
poor brain is getting ossified.
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