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that hundreds of works see the light, which with us would never get to the printing-house at all. The disadvantage is, that it encourages a prolixity of style, both in thinking and expression; two or three ideas are spun out into a volume, and literature is actually overwhelmed and buried under its own fertility and fruits. No human powers could wade through the flood of publication poured out every half year upon every conceivable subject. Selection even, in such an overwhelming mass, is out of the question, unless the catalogue-selection of judging from the reputation of the author, that the book may be worth reading. In our small book-world, periodical criticism our quarterlies and literary newspapers-keeps the ordinary reader up to the current stream of literary production; but who could get through the pile of periodicals published in Germany, and find time to eat, drink, and sleep? It is as at their table d'hôte the guest tastes this thing, and tastes that, and rises without having made so wholesome and substantial a meal as he would have done from one or two dishes. This superabundance, and the excess of employment to the mind about other people's ideas, influences the general literature of Germany. Men whose talents entitle them to be original in literary production, are but imitative. Their great original authors, Goëthe, Schiller, or Richter, or our great authors, Shakspeare, Scott, Byron, give the tunes which the crowd of German writers are whistling through the streets. This imitative turn, and the excess of literary production, influence even the material interests and character of the German people. politics, in social economy, in religion, and perhaps even in morals and the regulation of conduct, principles and opinions seem to have no time to take root, and to influence the actual doings of men-conviction is but loosely connected with action. The latter by no means follows the former, even when not drawn aside by prejudice, passion, or self-interest. All is speculation, not

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himself a world of idea, and a world of reality; and the former appears to have as little connection with the latter, as the evening of the monarch on the stage with the morning of the actor in his lodgings. This division of life into two distinct existences, this living in a world of reveries, this wide separation between ideas and realities, between thoughts and actions, common perhaps to all men of intellectual cultivation, is so widely diffused in Germany that it sensibly influences its social economy. All evaporates in speculation. Books, and theories, and principles are published and read, and there the matter rests. A new set of books, theories, and principles are published, and overwhelm the first, but all this never goes beyond the world of idea in which half their existence is passed. Improvement, reform, movement of any kind in social business or real life, either for the better or the worse, stand still, because real life is but half their existence. Leave them the other half, their ideal world, to expatiate in — and that cannot be circumscribed by any kind of government and they quietly put up with restrictions and burdens in real life which in our social economy would not be endured. Energy of mind and vigour of action in the real affairs of ordinary life are diluted and weakened by this life of dreamy speculation. sometimes see individuals among ourselves, novel-reading, romantic youths, forming a little world for themselves from the shelves of the circulating library, and dreaming away life in it. The literature, scholarship, and wide diffusion of the culture of the imaginative faculty in Germany, are in this view actually detrimental to the social development of the German people, to their industry, material interests, and activity in ordinary affairs of a mechanical kind, and to their energy and interest in claiming and exercising civil liberty or free-agency in real life.

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This double existence of the Germans accounts for some peculiarities in German literature. German authors, both the philosophic and the poetic, address them

selves to a public far more intellectual, and more highly cultivated than our reading public. They address themselves, in fact, in their philosophical works, like the ancient Greek philosophers, to schools or bodies of disciples who must have attained a peculiar and considerable cultivation of mind to understand them. The philosophy of Kant occupied Schiller, we are told in his biography, for three years of intense and exclusive study. In our literature, the most obscure and abstruse of metaphysical or philosophical writers take the public mind in a far lower state, simply cognisant of the meaning of language, and possessed of the ordinary reasoning powers. Locke, Dugald Stewart, Reid, Smith, Hume, require nothing more. Shakspeare, Scott, Byron require nothing more. German literature, even of the imaginative class, requires a highly cultivated imaginative faculty from the readers. Goethe's Faust, his Wilhelm Meister, many of Schiller's tragedies, all of Jean Paul Richter's productions, require readers trained, like the readers of Kant or Fichte, in a certain school, and to a certain considerable intellectual culture. Their philosophers and poets do not, like ours, address themselves to the meanest capacity. The social influence of German literature is, consequently, confined within a narrower circle. It has no influence on the mind of the lower, or even of the middle classes in active life, who have not the opportunity or leisure to screw their faculties up to the pitch-note of their great writers. The reading public must devote much time to acquire the knowledge, tone of feeling, and of imagination necessary to follow the writing public. The social economist finds accordingly in Germany the most extraordinary dulness, inertness of mind, and ignorance, below a certain level, with the most extraordinary intellectual development, learning, and genius at or above it the most extraordinary intellectual contrast between the professional reading classes and the lower or even middle non-reading classes engaged in

Another peculiarity in German literature arising from the social economy of the country is, that the class of literary composition to which the works of Shakspeare, Cervantes, Scott, Le Sage, Fielding, Goldsmith, belong as pictures of natural action and character, is poorly filled up. Situation and plot, not delineations of characters and incidents "true to nature," are the points on which the highest efforts of dramatic and poetic genius in German literature are the most happy. It is in the ideal world that the German mind is developed. The action of man upon man, the development of character and individual peculiarity by free social movement, are so restricted and tied down to uniformity by the social economy of Germany, that the author in this class of composition finds no type of reality around him for the imagination to work upon. It would be difficult to point out any character, speech, or passage from the German drama that has become popular literature- understood, felt, brought home to himself by the common man in Germany, in the same way that characters, expressions, verses, sentiments from Shakspeare, Burns, De Foe, Scott, are familiar to all of the slightest education in the same classes in Scotland or England. German literature is perhaps of a far higher cast, but it is not so widely diffused through the mass of the social body as our literature, although the class of people addicting themselves to it as a means of living are more numerous than the literary class in Britain; and German literature is certainly less influential than ours on the public mind and social economy.

The theatre in Germany, and in all countries which have no civil liberty, no freedom of action independent of government, and no free discussion of public affairs, occupies an important position in its social economy, is reckoned a great educational and social influence, a power not to be entrusted out of the hands of the state. The fictitious incidents of the drama supersede the real incidents and interests of life. In reading of the

organisation of the Prussian government, the simple English reader stares at finding among the ministers of state for home affairs, for military affairs, for ecclesiastical affairs, a minister of state for theatrical affairs. He can understand that from considerations of police, the theatre may be, as with us, under a censorship, and its superintendence attached to some office about the court; but that theatres are of such importance as to be held a subject for distinct administration, and one on which considerable sums of the public revenues are regularly expended, appears extraordinary to one coming from our social state, in which dramatic representation is of no social influence whatsoever-in which it is held to be of no moral or educational value-in which theatrical performers of high talent cannot get bread in cities as populous and wealthy as Berlin. The social economist hastens to visit the German theatres, to satisfy himself that there is no mistake about this supposed social influence of the stage-to see the working of this court-machine for education on the public mind to see the number and quality of the usual kind of audiences, as much as to see the play.

Germany is reckoned to have 65 theatres, employing about 2,147 actors and actresses, about 1,229 singers, male and female, about 448 dancers, and about 1,273 fiddlers and other musicians. About 5,000 people in all are on the theatrical establishments of Germany as the personale, without including tradesmen or others not on the boards. The Hof-theater, or court theatre, is a necessary appendage to every little residence or capital; and it is understood that the deficit in the expense of a well-appointed theatre in a small population is made up by the state. In Berlin, even with a great and pleasure-seeking population, it is said the theatres cost the country about 15,000l. a year, besides the receipts. At Berlin there are three theatres in constant work, Sunday evenings not excepted, and an Italian and a French troop are also in activity part of the year.

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