Wahr:eitsliebe zeigt sich darin, daß man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schäzen weiß." GÖTHE. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY LEONARD SCOTT & CO., 79 FULTON STREET, CORNER OF GOLD STREET. 1856. THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. No. CXXVII. FOR JANUARY, 1856. ART. I.-GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. | can we imagine that the facetious element 1. Heinrich Heine's Sämmtliche Werke. Philadelphia: John Weik. 1855. 2. Vermischte Schriften von Heinrich Heine. Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe. 1854. no was very strong in the Egyptians; laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the broad calm lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians have had any genius for the comic: the round eyes and simpering satisfaction of their ideal faces belong "NOTHING," says Goethe, "is more signi- to a type which is not witty, but the cause ficant of men's character than what they. of wit in others. The fun of these early find laughable." The truth of this obser- races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner vation would perhaps have been more kind-loud-throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose dinner had no other "removes" than from acorns to beechmast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact they had to live seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become comedy, as those amiable-looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly au sérieux the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy experience in their case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit was to be made. apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them, than by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his school days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the ne plus ultra of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with the boyhood of the human race. The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and their pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers; the smile and the laugh are often mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of com- presentative and descriptive; it is diffuse, placency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor and flows along without any other law than Humour is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humour draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. Humour is chiefly re |