Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand (Zurich, 1825-98, Kilchberg nr. Zurich), a Swiss, bilingual in French and German, wrote most of his œuvre between 1870 and 1887, choosing German, after some hesitation, in preference to French. Of patrician descent, he lost his father, who had a brief but distinguished career in the Zurich administration and as a teacher, in 1840. As long as Meyer remained in the care of his puritanical and over-anxious mother, his development and his artistic inclinations were severely checked. In 1843 his mother sent him for a year to be cared for by Louis Vuillemin, a family friend in Lausanne, who helped him to recover his self-confidence. He made a half-hearted attempt to study law at Zurich University. A simultaneous attempt at training as a painter failed through lack of ability, but Meyer continued to write poetry. During the next few years his susceptibility to a psychopathic condition became evident. It was checked for a time by energetic exercise. He became a keen mountain walker, swimmer, and fencer. In 1852 his mental stability broke down and he had to enter a mental asylum. After seven months' treatment he returned home to begin a new phase of life dominated by intensive study of literature and history. He turned his back on the Romanticism of his youth, and devoted himself to the study of Renaissance art and the cultural and historical works of J. Burckhardt, L. von Ranke, and Th. Mommsen, which were of great importance to his development. His mother's suicide in 1856 left him and his sister Betsy with considerable means, which enabled them to travel abroad and so consolidate his studies.
Meyer's visits to Paris and the Louvre, to Munich, and above all to Italy (1858), the world of classical and Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture, determined his predilection for a style which aimed at concreteness of presentation and at the absorption of the visual arts into literature. This aspect, more than any other feature of his work, marks the place he was to take among the writers of Poetic Realism (see Poetischer Realismus). It proved particularly congenial to his vulnerable nature, which left him hypersensitive to the exposure of personal sentiments. His style thus became also a means of ‘masking’ experience by adopting the disguise of historical objects and figures. Detachment in literature was an intellectual and a psychological need for him, and this also accounts for the late release of his creative powers. Meyer's studies in Lausanne (ending in 1860) are his last attempt to return and complete the studies begun at Zurich. His sister understood that he needed proof that his work was fit for print, and she succeeded in getting his first collection of poetry published anonymously as Zwanzig Balladen von einem Schweizer (1864). Some ten years of close collaboration with his sister in Zurich, and another visit to Italy (1872), established him in his career as a writer. In 1875 he married Luise Ziegler and settled in Kilchberg. He was in contact with many men of letters and artists, but his close friends François and Eliza Wille afforded him the staunchest support. In 1887, however, he began to show serious signs of a renewal of the mental illness of his youth, from which he did not recover. His literary production ceased at this point.
Meyer's first publication under his own name (he added his father's Christian name Ferdinand to his own to avoid confusion with Conrad Meyer, another Swiss writer) was a collection of poetry, Romanzen und Bilder (2 sections, Stimmung and Erzählung, with 46 titles). In 1882 Meyer's poetry was published in the single volume Gedichte. The poems are compact, restrained, well proportioned, and perfectly balanced. Many of them can be said to anticipate the ‘Dinggedicht’ of the 20th c. They are inspired by things seen, such as landscapes, architecture, statues, and paintings. In ‘Eingelegte Ruder’ the poet observes the drops falling from his oars as he pauses while rowing on a lake; ‘Lethe’ is derived from a painting; ‘Der römische Brunnen’ indicates its model, and, in its combination of precision, limpidity, and clarity, is possibly his finest poem. The high quality of Meyer's poetic achievement was not recognized in his lifetime.
In Meyer's own eyes, the epic Huttens letzte Tage (1871) was his ‘first’ work. It was followed by his idyll Engelberg (1872), which he had first conceived some ten years previously. The use of rhyming verse couplets with four stresses, stretching over some 1, 800 lines, makes his portrayal of what he called the medieval psyche a tour de force. Meyer's prose narrative works which followed are select rather than profuse, and are shaped with the same stringent consciousness of form. Having abandoned initial leanings towards drama, he adopted the Novelle, and for his most ambitious projects favoured the frame technique (see Rahmen). His highly successful novel, Jürg Jenatsch (1876 under the title Georg Jenatsch), which followed the publication of Das Amulett (1873), prepares for the style of his subsequent narrative works, Der Schuß von der Kanzel (1878), Der Heilige (1879), Plautus im Nonnenkloster (1881), Gustav Adolfs Page (1882), Das Leiden eines Knaben (1883), Die Hochzeit des Mönchs (1883-4), Die Richterin (1885), Die Versuchung des Pescara (1887), and Angela Borgia (1891). All these works are set in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Counter-Reformation, Meyer's favourite periods. He never confines himself to a narrow Swiss patriotism, but prefers to demonstrate the secular and religious forces shaping history in relation to what he himself termed the human psyche. He presents his characters as enigmatic figures, torn by conflicting emotions and attitudes, whose actions determine, at times almost accidentally, the course of history. Der Heilige (referring to Thomas à Becket) displays with characteristic mastery Meyer's tendency to deliberate ambiguity. He chooses well-known figures from history, or places fictitious characters at the centre of formidable historical events. Yet, however remote these characters and times may be, they reflect the scepticism of Meyer's own age, of which he, a characteristic Swiss, is a keen and critical observer. His astute intellect and his innate despondency combine to give to his fiction the imprint of a predominantly objective, ironic, and tragic portrayal of existence.
Sämtliche Werke (4 vols.) first appeared in 1926, and Sämtliche Werke, historisch-kritische Ausgabe (15 vols.), ed. H. Zeller and A. Zäch, 1958 ff.
