326 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



conscious of the actual nature of these word-pictures, that he 

 regarded it as an evidence of diversity in national tempera- 

 ment, when in Germany his prose was censured as c too poetic,' 

 and in England as ' dull and laboured,' l whereas, in point of 

 fact, both criticisms were equally true. c A vivid description ' 

 will never be obtained by an exaggerated use of adjectives. 

 Another chief cause of the ' laboured ' effects of Humboldt's 

 style lies in his second characteristic fault a necessary con- 

 sequence, indeed, of the preceding one namely, the too free 

 use of participles. For so far did he carry the habit of re- 

 garding the momentary aspect of an object as something in- 

 herent, that he often encumbered the subordinate members of 

 a sentence, and almost annihilated the power of the verb, by 

 the superabundant use of qualifications formed out of the par- 

 ticiple a peculiarity exceedingly ungraceful in the German 

 language. It is possible that this vicious habit was much 

 increased by the exclusive use, for many years, of the Roman- 

 esque idiom, especially of the French language. 



To the same source may also be traced the third peculiarity, 

 justly pointed out by Humboldt as one of his faults of style, ' a 

 too great concentration of a multiplicity of thoughts and feel- 

 ings in one sentence.' With those who lay the whole force of 

 speech in the verb, who, with the savage in his simple utter- 

 ances, or the genuine poet in his soul-stirring eloquence, think 

 out the sentence in its totality, ere a word be uttered, the verb 

 forms the centre of thought, round which the subordinate mem- 

 bers of the sentence naturally group themselves. Epithets, on 

 the contrary, may be mechanically inserted in the manner of a 

 mosaic ; and in many of Humboldt's periods, ponderous in their 

 weight of ornament, there is too frequent evidence of such a 

 process. To use perhaps a better simile, he often painted in 

 the whole of his picture before laying on the final layer of 

 colour during his tedious process of finishing ; in some places it 

 is evident where the high lights have been put in at the last. 

 He was quite aware that he carried this process too far. In a 

 letter to Bockh, for whom he ' had great veneration as an 

 elegant writer,' he once remarked : ' You possess the very 



1 < Briefe an Varnhagen/ No. 105 ; ' Briefe an Bunsen/ No. 44. 



