244.  There was a time when it was customary to call Germans “deep” by way of distinction; but now that the most successful type of new Germanism is covetous of quite other honours, and perhaps misses “smartness” in all that has depth, it is almost opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did not formerly deceive ourselves with that commendation:  in short, whether German depth is not at bottom something different and worse—­and something from which, thank God, we are on the point of successfully ridding ourselves.  Let us try, then, to relearn with regard to German depth; the only thing necessary for the purpose is a little vivisection of the German soul.—­The German soul is above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and super-imposed, rather than actually built:  this is owing to its origin.  A German who would embolden himself to assert:  “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast,” would make a bad guess at the truth, or, more correctly, he would come far short of the truth about the number of souls.  As a people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element as the “people of the centre” in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:—­they escape definition, and are thereby alone the despair of the French.  It is characteristic of the Germans that the question:  “What is German?” never dies out among them.  Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough:  “We are known,” they cried jubilantly to him—­but Sand also thought he knew them.  Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself incensed at Fichte’s lying but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations,—­but it is probable that Goethe thought differently about Germans from Jean Paul, even though he acknowledged him to be right with regard to Fichte.  It is a question what Goethe really thought about the Germans?—­But about many things around him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life he knew how to keep an astute silence—­probably he had good reason for it.  It is certain that it was not the “Wars of Independence” that made him look up more joyfully, any more than it was the French Revolution,—­the event on account of which he reconstructed his “Faust,” and indeed the whole problem of “man,” was the appearance of Napoleon.  There are words of Goethe in which he condemns with impatient severity, as from a foreign land, that which Germans take a pride in, he once defined the famous German turn of mind as “Indulgence towards its own and others’ weaknesses.”  Was he wrong? it is characteristic of Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them.  The German soul has passages and galleries in it, there are caves, hiding-places, and dungeons therein, its disorder has much of the charm of the mysterious, the German is well acquainted with the