Germanism/' 



139 



and other men of his stamp whom Carlyle tried hard to " boom,'* 

 I must confess that, even as depicted by Carlyle himself, they 

 appeared to me to be rather " dull dogs/" 



One other country threatened for a time to wrest literary 

 supremacy even from England herself, and might have done so, 

 were it not for Shakespeare, whose superiority in knowledge of 

 mankind seems to me greater every year I live. Cervantes and 

 Lope de Vega, in the sixteenth centur}^ reached a high level, from 

 which the former can never be deposed ; yet I have, I confess, 

 always doubted whether Cervantes intended to express sorrow 

 for the disappearance of knight-errantry from the world, or 

 whether he only meant to cover with the most felicitous ridicule 

 the disappearance of what he regarded as an exaggerated and 

 false moral and spiritual ideal. But Spain lost her literary 

 predominance contemporaneously with her political and martial 

 supremacy of late years, and has made no attempt to regain it. 



Of France, in the matter of literature, not much need be said. 

 Her literature is not so much the literature of thought, as of 

 expression. The institution of the French Academy has com- 

 pelled French authors to express themselves clearly and in 

 scholarly fashion, and to take great care to use words in their 

 proper senses, and to construct their sentences according 

 to laws laid down by authority. Germany, on the other 

 hand, has sanctioned sentences of the most involved 

 character, and has cultivated a style, or an absence of 

 style, which obscures the author's meaning, and often leads him 

 to mistake slovenliness and unintelligibility for profundity. 

 Unfortunately for ourselves, we are just now parting with the 

 natural grace and elegance of our own diction, without adding 

 any strength to our powers of expression. The involved sentences 

 of the German, the slang and cant expressions of the American, 

 the haste with which we think and study, and the still greater 

 haste with which we compose, make too many articles and 

 books of the day a strange conglomeration of false concords, of 

 ungrammatical treatment of words derived from other languages, 

 and of the imposition of an altogether new sense on words with 

 which we have long been familiar. 



But this by the way. German literature is generally supposed 

 to be superior in depth of thought to that of other countries, and 

 Germany to be the home of science and the parent of research. 

 That the German is wondrously industrious and ingenious, cannot 

 be disputed. But that the scientists of Germany are superior to 



