f requires some introduction of mood for its romantic,
homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon
or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm
Meister, or Siebennkaes, or Goetz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and
Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little
sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain
that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most,
perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a
foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening
(as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic
qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and
canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life
intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates
and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied
climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere
visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a
row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to
understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of
articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we
become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and
almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and
grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and
sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and
we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore
it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of
mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"--"Tacitus's Germania," supposed
by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars"
of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of
humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of
purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and
Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."

I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amuesiren". It was wrong, very
wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have
to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true
Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For
it was long ago: Count B