„Wahr:eitsliebe zeigt sich darin, daß man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schäzen weiß.“ GÖTHE. AMERICAN EDITION. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY LEONARD SCOTT & CO., 1856. THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. No. CXXVII. FOR JANUARY, 18 5 6. ART. I.—GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. | can we imagine that the facetious element 1. Heinrich Heine's Sämmtliche Werke. was very strong in the Egyptians; no 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 apparent if he had said culture instead of wine-cup, taken too little account of in character. The last thing in which the sober moments to enter as an element into cultivated man can have community with their Art, and differing as much from the the vulgar is their jocularity; and we can laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan as hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient gulf which separates him from them, than Briton, whose dinner had no other "reby comparing the object which shakes the moves" than from acorns to beechmast and diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly back again to acorns, differed from the complex pleasure derived from a real witti- subtle pleasures of the palate experienced cism. That any high order of wit is ex- by his turtle-eating descendant. In fact ceedingly complex, and demands a ripe they had to live seriously through the and strong mental development, has one stages which to subsequent races were to evidence in the fact that we do not find it become comedy, as those amiable-looking in boys at all in proportion to their mani-preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen festation of other powers. Clever boys has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, 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 complacency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor 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. 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 representative and descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than |