Steadiness
with honesty; the danger for a national spirit thus composed is the
humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble: in a word, das Gemeine,
die Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all
his life fighting. The excellence of a national spirit thus composed
is freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to
Nature, in a word, SCIENCE,--leading it at last, though slowly, and
not by the most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and
common, into the better life. The universal dead-level of plainness
and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and
feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal
beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere,
pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in
Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the
weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady
elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments
of human activity--this is the strong side; and through this side of
her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and is
destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness,
her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times
make us cry out, to an immense development.
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