Long revered on the Continent, Fontane has had a hard time catching on in this country. Although he lived to old age and published extensively from his youth until the time of his death, no major work of his enjoyed a complete English translation until 1964. It may be that, caught between Goethe’s protean genius and Mann’s fin-de-siècle neuroticism, Fontane simply isn’t what we think of when we think of what a great German author ought to be. (If Mann has the temperament of a patient, Fontane has that of a physician. Ours is an age of patients.) The recent publication of two of his most delicate and beautiful novels will, with any luck, help turn the tide. One is the bittersweet romance, from 1888, “On Tangled Paths” (translated by Peter James Bowman; Angel Books; $21.95); the other is a curiously gentle tragedy called “Irretrievable,” first published in 1891 (translated by Douglas Parmée; New York Review Books; $15.95). Together, they convey the distinctive allure of an author who prided himself above all on his “finesses” and whose two salient traits—a severe reserve and a profound empathy—stemmed from an unusual ability, as Mann put it, to see “at least two sides to everything in life.”

Fontane himself was a mass of contradictions. He was a product of the middle class attracted to the aristocracy, a German patriot who admired England and came to detest Prussian militarism, a writer besotted with the “Romantic-Fantastic” who nonetheless had a zeal for collecting the hard facts of history, a liberal who spent much of his career working for an ultra-rightist newspaper, a well-known balladeer, a dogged journalist, an admired travel writer, and a prolific military historian whose extraordinary talent for writing fiction ripened only late in a life that had many more than two sides.

He was born on the next-to-last day of 1819 in Neuruppin, a military garrison town northwest of Berlin, to parents descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Prussia in the seventeenth century. Both his mother and his father, a rather eccentric apothecary, had firsthand experience of the Napoleonic wars, a national trauma that exercised a hold on the writer’s imagination all his life. (His first novel, “Before the Storm,” published in 1878, was a historical epic set during the wars, an attempt at a kind of Prussian “War and Peace.”) From Fontane senior, the future writer received a peculiar but effective education: the father enjoyed reënacting great moments from the wars with his young son. At least some of Fontane’s interesting bifurcations, political as well as temperamental, may be attributed to his mismatched parents: his father the Prinzipienverächter, the hater of rigid principle, his mother a Prinzipienreiter, a stickler for principles.

At sixteen, Fontane finished with his formal education and apprenticed as an apothecary. But his literary tastes and ambitions were already in evidence: he published his first story (about a quasi-incestuous brother-sister relationship) when he was not quite twenty, and in his mid-twenties he began publishing ballads and verses. In 1844, he was invited to join a Berlin literary club called Tunnel Over the Spree, and made the first of what would be a number of enthusiastic trips to England. (He had learned English by reading, and had translated “Hamlet” into German.) In 1848, that year of political upheaval throughout Europe, he had manned the anti-government barricades in Berlin, but his relationship to liberal politics, like everything else about him, was far from straightforward. The grandson of a courtier of the Prussian Queen Luise, for whom he maintained a lifelong reverence, and an on-again, off-again admirer of Bismarck, whose speeches he loved to read over breakfast (and whose style he compared, favorably, to Shakespeare’s), Fontane had an abiding admiration for the values of the old Prussian nobility, the Junkertum: simplicity, honor, and directness. As the scholar Alan Bance has pointed out, these values surface in Fontane’s greatest female characters, who often struggle to uphold them against the crassness of men, society, the new Prussian state.

By the time Fontane was thirty, he had decided to abandon the apothecary and embrace a life of writing. In 1850, he married Emilie Rouanet-Kummer, another descendant of French Huguenots, and soon afterward took a job in a government press office. A year later, when the first of the couple’s seven children was born—four lived to adulthood—Fontane, eager for some financial stability, queasily accepted a job writing about English affairs for Die Kreutzzeitung, a government-run newspaper. (“I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month,” he wrote a friend.) He was in England for several months in 1852, and in 1855 he began a three-year stint there; his job was to plant stories favorable to the Prussian state in the British press. He spent a great deal of time going to the theatre, and—prompted by his impassioned reading of Walter Scott and Robert Burns, and English and Scottish ballads, all faddishly popular among Germans in the mid-nineteenth century—taking long walks in the Scottish countryside. These walks partly inspired his splendidly discursive and erudite “Rambles in the March of Brandenburg,” whose combination of sentimental enthusiasm and the amateur’s besotted aptitude for historical anecdote and geographical and zoological minutiae suggests a kind of proto-Patrick Leigh Fermor. (In an affectionate study of Fontane, the historian Gordon A. Craig retraced the author’s steps.)

Fontane returned to Berlin in 1859 and (after briefly considering a post at the court of the mad Ludwig II of Bavaria) set to work on “Rambles,” which occupied him for the next two decades. But this was also the period in which Prussian political and military ambition exploded, culminating in three major wars—against Denmark, in 1864; Austria, in 1866; and France, in 1870—and the unification of Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns. Fontane published three major, exhaustively researched studies, one for each war. Contemptuous of “making books out of books,” he conducted extensive interviews and visited various battlefields, sometimes before hostilities ceased; at one point, he was captured by French troops, and Bismarck had to intervene to get him released. Fontane later wrote a book about the experience. Despite his historian’s admiration for Prussian warcraft, Fontane came to speak out with increasing vigor against the chauvinism, jingoism, and triumphalism that characterized so much contemporary writing about the wars. “The mere glorification of the military,” he later wrote, “without moral content and elevated aim, is nauseating.”

At the end of the eighteen-sixties, as he reached his fiftieth birthday, Fontane quit his post at the conservative, God-and-country Kreuzzeitung. (He waited to submit his resignation until the long-suffering Emilie—who wrote out the fair copies of each of his books and never quite believed that he would succeed as a writer—left for a vacation.) Soon afterward, he jumped at the opportunity to replace the recently deceased theatre critic for the liberal Vossische Zeitung: certainly because of the promise of a regular income but also, undoubtedly, because it provided an outlet for his love of the theatre. His criticism—conversational yet informed, often crustily amusing (he once wrote of a production of “Macbeth” that all the roles were played badly except that of the rain, which beat convincingly against the walls of the castle)—further increased his fame. He remained happily on the job for the next twenty years.Many critics have looked to various aspects of Fontane’s life—not least, his French ancestry—for clues to a style that was so fresh, so lifelike: so different, in a word, from that of many of his contemporaries. (The author’s relationship to his Frenchness was typically bifurcated: he liked to talk about his “essentially southern-French nature,” but also called knowing French “a great virtue, which I do not possess.”) But it seems clear that he owed much to his deep love of, and appreciation for, the theatre—instilled, you suspect, during those play-acting sessions with his father. His distinctive way of letting his characters reveal themselves through monologue and dialogue (or letters, or poems—anything that lets them speak for themselves) betrays an intuitive feel for the theatrical. “Jenny Treibel” opens with the title character, an arriviste with grand dynastic ambitions, bustling into the home of her childhood sweetheart, now a colorful old professor whose daughter, Corinna, will soon threaten Frau Treibel’s plans: