the microscopist can perceive?  In general it is the “popular philosophers” who have, more than any one else, produced a fixed prose style; 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.