sdom were
all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with "Candide." Here Voltaire
had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and
satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous
is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting
us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a
witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of
measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the
antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in
which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For
this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable
to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the
German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to
gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary
concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of
metaphysics. For _Identitat_ in the abstract no one can have an acuter
vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose
approximation. He has the finest nose for _Empirismus_ in philosophical
doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco smoke in the air he
breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German--_Vetter
Michel_--it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch, whether his
teacup be more or less than an inch thick; whether or not his book have
every other leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor's conversation be more
or less of a shout; whether he pronounce _b_ or _p_, _t_ or _d_; whether
or not his adored one's teeth be few and far between. He has the same
sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a
German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever
come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of
Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word
_Langeweile_, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered
_what_ it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of
long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that _hochst fesselnd_
(_so_ enchaining!); not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in
that as _grundlich_ (deep, Sir, deep!); not the slowest of journeys in a
_Postwagen_, for the slower the horses, the more cigars he can smoke
before he reaches his journey's en