104.
Undesirable Readers.—How an author is vexed by those stolid, awkward readers who always [pg 249] fall at every place where they stumble, and always hurt themselves when they fall!
105.
Poets' Thoughts.—Real thoughts of real poets always go about with a veil on, like Egyptian women; only the deep eye of thought looks out freely through the veil.—Poets' thoughts are as a rule not of such value as is supposed. We have to pay for the veil and for our own curiosity into the bargain.
106.
Write Simply and Usefully.—Transitions, details, colour in depicting the passions—we make a present of all these to the author because we bring them with us and set them down to the credit of his book, provided he makes us some compensation.
107.
Wieland.—Wieland wrote German better than any one else, and had the genuine adequacies and inadequacies of the master. His translations of the letters of Cicero and Lucian are the best in the language. His ideas, however, add nothing to our store of thought. We can endure his cheerful moralities as little as his cheerful immoralities, for both are very closely connected. The men who enjoyed them were at bottom better men than we are, but also a good deal heavier. They needed an author of this sort. The Germans did not need Goethe, and therefore cannot make proper use of him. We have [pg 250] only to consider the best of our statesmen and artists in this light. None of them had or could have had Goethe as their teacher.
108.
Rare Festivals.—Pithy conciseness, repose, and maturity—where you find these qualities in an author, cry halt and celebrate a great festival in the desert. It will be long before you have such a treat again.
109.
The Treasure of German Prose.—Apart from Goethe's writings and especially Goethe's conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again? Lichtenberg's Aphorisms, the first book of Jung-Stilling's Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter's St. Martin's Summer and Gottfried Keller's People of Seldwyla—and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.
110.
Literary and Colloquial Style.—The art of writing demands, first and foremost, substitutions for the means of expression which speech alone possesses—in other words, for gestures, accent, intonation, and look. Hence literary style is quite different from colloquial style, and far more difficult, because it has to make itself as intelligible as the latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered his speeches differently from what we read; he [pg 251] worked them up for reading purposes.—Cicero's speeches ought to be “demosthenised” with the same object, for at present they contain more of the Roman Forum than we can endure.
111.
Caution in Quotation.—Young authors do not know that a good expression or idea only looks well among its peers; that an excellent quotation may spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it seems to cry warningly to the reader, “Mark you, I am the precious stone, and round about me is lead—pale, worthless lead!” Every word, every idea only desires to live in its own company—that is the moral of a choice style.
112.
How should Errors be Enunciated?—We may dispute whether it be more injurious for errors to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths. It is certain that in the former case they are doubly harmful to the brain and are less easily removed from it. But, on the other hand, they are not so certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in fact, less contagious.
113.
Limiting and Widening.—Homer limited and diminished the horizon of his subject, but allowed individual scenes to expand and blossom out. Later, the tragedians are constantly renewing this process. Each takes his material in ever smaller and smaller fragments than his predecessor did, but [pg 252] each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the narrow hedges of these sequestered garden enclosures.
114.
Literature and Morality Mutually Explanatory.—We can show from Greek literature by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it entered upon different channels, and where it became enfeebled. All this also depicts to us how Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will proceed: how it was at first a constraint and displayed cruelty, then became gradually milder; how a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and conventions arose, and from this again a propensity for solitary exercise, for solitary possession; how the track becomes crowded and overcrowded with competitors; how satiety enters in, new objects of struggle and ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are awakened to life; how the drama is repeated, and the spectators become altogether weary of looking on, because the whole gamut seems to have been run through—and then comes a stoppage, an expiration, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end, or at any rate an end, has come.