Certainly the German
character is in no way so little remarkable as for its humor. If we were
to trust the evidence of Herr Hub's dreary _Deutsche komische und
humoristische Dichtung_, we should believe that no German had even so
much as a suspicion of what humor meant, unless the book itself, as we
are half inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the _want_ of
fun being the real point thereof. If German patriotism can be induced to
find a grave delight in it, we congratulate Herr Hub's publishers, and
for ourselves advise any sober-minded man who may hereafter "be merry,"
not to "sing psalms," but to read Hub as the more serious amusement of
the two. There are epigrams there that make life more solemn, and, if
taken in sufficient doses, would make it more precarious. Even Jean Paul,
the greatest of German humorous authors, and never surpassed in comic
conception or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named with
his master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What are Siebenkaes, Fixlein,
Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with
whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes,)
compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby,
characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind,
but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own?
Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern
poets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me wanting
in a refined perception of that inward propriety which is only another
name for poetic proportion, and shocks us sometimes with an
_Unflaethigkeit_, as at the end of his _Deutschland_, which, if it make
Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people hold
their noses.
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