as a reader of good
but not exclusively classical education once acknowledged to me that
the German of J.J. Engel was more comprehensible to him and seemed
more "modern" than that of Goethe. As a matter of fact, the narrator
Goethe, in the enchanting youthful composition of _Werther_, did
venture very close to the lyrical, but in his later novels his style
at times dangerously approached a dry statement of facts, or a
rhetorically inflated declamation; and even in _The Elective
Affinities_, which stands stylistically higher than any of his other
novels, he has not always avoided a certain stiltedness that forms a
painful contrast to the warmth of his sympathy for the characters. On
the other hand, in scientific compositions he succeeded in
accomplishing what had hitherto been unattainable--just because, in
this case, the new language had first to be created by him.

Seldom are even the great writers of the following period quite free
from the danger of a lack-lustre style in their treatment of the
language, above all in narrative composition. It is only in the
present day that Thomas Mann, Jacob Wassermann, and Ricarda Huch are
trying along different lines, but with equal zeal, to form a fixed
individual style for the German prose-epic. The great exceptions of
the middle period, the writers of prose-epics Jeremias Gotthelf and
Gottfried Keller, the novelists Paul Heyse and Marie von
Ebner-Eschenbach, the narrator of anecdotes Ludwig Anzengruber, with
his greater predecessor Johann Peter Hebel, and his lesser
contemporary Peter Rosegger, the portrayer of still-life Adalbert
Stifter and a few others, have, more by a happy instinct than anything
else, hit upon the style proper to their form of composition, lack of
which prevents us from enjoying an endless number of prose works of
the nineteenth century, which, as far as their subject matter goes,
are not unimportant. In this connection I will only mention Karl
Gutzkow's novels describing his own period, or, from an earlier time,
Clemens Brentano's fairy tales, Friedrich Hebbel's humoresques, or
even the rhetorically emotional historical compositions of Heinrich
von Treitschke, found in certain parts of his work. But this lack of a
fixed specific style spread likewise to other forms of composition;
Schiller's drama became too rhetorical; Friedrich Rueckert's lyric
poetry too prosaically didactic; that of Annette von Droste-Huelshoff
often too obscure and sketchy.

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