In comparison with the literature of France, thus defined and characterized by its sociable spirit, the literature of England is an individualistic literature.  Let us put aside, as should be done, the generation of Congreve and Wycherley, perhaps also the generation of Pope and Addison,—­to which, however, we ought not to forget that Swift also belonged;—­it seems that an Englishman never writes except in order to give to himself the external sensation of his own personality.  Thence his humor, which may be defined as the expression of the pleasure he feels in thinking like nobody else.  Thence, in England, the plenteousness, the wealth, the amplitude of the lyric vein; it being granted that individualism is the very spring of lyric poetry, and that an ode or an elegy is, as it were, the involuntary surging, the outflowing of what is most intimate, most secret, most peculiar in the poet’s soul.  Thence also the eccentricity of all the great English writers when compared with the rest of the nation, as though they became conscious of themselves only by distinguishing themselves from those who claim to differ from them least.  But is it not possible to otherwise characterize the literature of England?  It will be easily conceived that I dare not assert such a thing; all I say here is, that I cannot better express the differences which distinguish that literature from our own.

That is also all I claim, in stating that the essential character of the literature of Germany is, that it is philosophical.  The philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers.  Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his ‘Theory of Colors’ or in his ’Metamorphosis of Plants,’ than in his ‘Divan’ or his ‘Faust’; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression, “is overflowing” in Schleiermacher’s theology and in Schelling’s philosophy.  Is this not perhaps at least one of the reasons of the inferiority of the German drama?  It is surely the reason of the depth and scope of Germanic poetry.  Even in the masterpieces of German literature it seems that there is mixed something indistinct, or rather mysterious, suggestive in the extreme, which leads us to thought by the channel of the dream.  But who has not been struck by what, under a barbarous terminology, there is of attractive, and as such of eminently poetical, of realistic and at the same time idealistic, in the great systems of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer?  Assuredly nothing is further removed from the character of our French literature.  We can here understand what the Germans mean when they charge us with a lack of depth.  Let them forgive us if we do not blame their literature for not being the same as ours.