Goethe's language, even to a foreigner, is full of character and
secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds
like the dialect of wise, ancient, and true-hearted men: in poetry,
brief, sharp, simple, and expressive; in prose, perhaps still more
pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, clear, unpretending
and melodious; and the sense, not presented in alternating flashes,
piece after piece revealed and withdrawn, rises before us as in
continuous dawning, and stands at last simultaneously complete, and
bathed in the mellowest and ruddiest sunshine. It brings to mind what
the prose of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Browne, would have been, had they
written under the good, without the bad influences, of that French
precision, which has polished and attenuated, trimmed and impoverished,
all modern languages; made our meaning clear, and too often shallow
as well as clear.
But Goethe's culture as a writer is perhaps less remarkable than his
culture as a man. He has learned not in head only, but also in heart:
not from Art and Literature, but also by action and passion, in the
rugged school of Experience.
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