So the weapons lay ready to the hand of the dramatist Lessing, the
lyric poet Goethe, and the preacher Herder, who had helped to forge
them for their own use; for drama, lyrics, and oratory separate
themselves quite naturally from ordinary language, and yet in their
subject matter, in the anticipation of an expectant audience, in the
unavoidable connection with popular forms of speech, in singing, and
the very nature of public assemblies, they have a basis that prevents
them from becoming conventional. But not quite so favorable was the
condition of the different varieties of narrative composition. Here a
peculiarly specific style, such as the French novel especially
possesses, never reached complete perfection. The style of Wieland
would necessarily appear too light as soon as the subject matter of
the novel became more intimate and personal; that of the imitators of
Homer necessarily too heavy. Perhaps here also Lessing's sense of
style might have furnished a model of permanent worth, in the same way
that he furnished one for the comedy and the didactic drama, for the
polemic treatise and the work of scientific research. For is not the
tale of the three rings, which forms the kernel of _Nathan the Wise_,
numbered among the great standard pieces of German elocution, in spite
of all the contradictions and obscurities which have of late been
pointed out in it, but which only the eye of the microscopist can
perceive? In general it is the "popular philosophers" who have, more
than any one else, produced a fixed prose style; as a reader of good
but not exclusively classical education once acknowledged to me that
the German of J.J. Engel was more comprehensible to him and seemed
more "modern" than that of Goethe. As a matter of fact, the narrator
Goethe, in the enchanting youthful composition of _Werther_, did
venture very close to the lyrical, but in his later novels his style
at times dangerously approached a dry statement of facts, or a