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Set in feudal Germany, the narrative concerns the young scientist Farina and his romance with the beautiful, well-born Margarita. First, along with his stalwart English friend, Guy the Goshawk, Farina is able to rescue Margarita from the clutches of the Robber Baron. This owes something to the Robin Hood legends. Robin Hood is also mentioned in Chapter 6 of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, entitled "Juvenile Stratagems"; the writing of these two works overlapped. Later, Meredith's nicknames for himself and his good friend and walking companion, the Tory barrister William Hardman, would be Robin and Tuck respectively. Perhaps as an allusion to Richard the Lionheart, another hero mentioned in Richard Feverel, Crane gives Guy a heraldic lion on his breast. Standing astride the defeated Baron, one arm protectively round Margarita, Guy is rightly shown as the epitome of heroic warriors and certainly the hero of this episode.

Later in the narrative, however, the lovelorn Farina, depicted by Crane in such a droopy posture, saves the whole city of Cologne. He achieves this not by any grand heroics, which he looks incapable of here, but by providing flasks of a special fragrance created from his experiments. This fragrance purifies the air, dispelling the stench spread by the Baron's champion — none other than the devil himself. Here, Meredith had drawn on the story of Giovanni Maria Farina, who invented eau de cologne in the early eighteenth century. He may also have been inspired by the work of a locally-based scientist, Charles Mansfield, who had isolated benzene from coal tar while working under a German chemist. Meredith's first wife Mary Ellen had perhaps been in love with the charismatic Mansfield (see Joukovsky).

It is touching that natural essences should be able to combat evil as effectively as the sword, but nothing is made of this at the end. Despite being peppered with archaisms and interjections like "Devil's Breeches!" and "Thousand Thunders!" this "Legend of Cologne" is told with less élan than The Shaving of Shagpat. It all seems rather shallow. Meredith completed the work before the final collapse of his marriage, and when Farina glories in having won "his sweet young bride, leading him from snares, priming his soul with celestial freshness" (Conclusion, 120), the wording reflects the early, more naive Meredith — one who leaves his hero to be guided and inspired by his wife without his own efforts.

This sort of thing was unlikely to be offered magazine serialisation, or to produce big book sales. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was the first of the more realistic, substantial narratives that would allow Meredith to live by the pen, and eventually transform him into the last great Victorian sage. Yet he would never turn his back entirely on the heroic and the extraordinary, and in that sense too Crane's title page captures something of this author's unique, larger-than-life personality, throwing out useful hints about his work as a whole.

References

Joukovsky, Nicholas. "Mary Ellen's First Affair: New Light on the Biographical Background to Modern Love," The Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2007, 13-15.

Meredith, George. Farina: A Legend of Cologne (with other short works). Memorial Edition, Vol. XXI. London: Constable, 1910.

———— Letters, ed. William Meredith. 2 Vols. New York: Scribner's, 1912.

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Last modified 28 January 2010