And yet what
do we not owe it? Mastering all languages, all records of intellectual
man, it has been able, or has enabled others, to strip away the husks of
nationality and conventionalism from the literatures of many races, and
to disengage that kernel of human truth which is the germinating
principle of them all. Nay, it has taught us to recognize also a certain
value in those very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or food for
the fallen seed.
That the general want of style in German authors is not wholly the fault
of the language is shown by Heine (a man of mixed blood), who can be
daintily light in German; that it is not altogether a matter of race, is
clear from the graceful airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and of
Grimm in French. The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader from
so many German books is mainly due, we suspect to the language, which
seems wellnigh incapable of that aerial perspective so delightful in
first-rate French, and even English, writing. But there must also be in
the national character an insensibility to proportion, a want of that
instinctive discretion which we call tact. Nothing short of this will
account for the perpetual groping of German imaginative literature after
some foreign mould in which to cast its thought or feeling, now trying a
Louis Quatorze pattern, then something supposed to be Shakespearian, and
at last going back to ancient Greece, or even Persia.
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