/lit/ - Literature

>>22975741
>German person is a burgerized pussyllanimous bugman
They may be outside of Americans the most heavily brainwashed population on earth. Post-war American Jews experimented on them with all sorts of social engineering schemes.

>>22975741
This may be the weakest bait I've ever seen on /lit/
Either that or OP has just gotten into linguistics

>>22975741
What then is the character of the Mediocre?
By this term, I should say, we commonly signify that which brings us no new and unknown thing, but the known already in a pleasing and insinuating form. In a good sense, it would be the product of Talent—if we agree with Schopenhauer that Talent hits a mark we all can see, but cannot lightly reach; whilst Genius, the genius of "the Good," attains a goal we others do not even see.
Hence Virtuosity proper belongs to Talent, and the musical virtuoso affords the clearest illustration of the preceding definition. The works of our great composers we have always with us; but he alone can perform them rightly, and in the master's spirit, who has the talent. To let his virtuosity sparkle solely for itself, the musician often trumps up pieces of his own: these belong to the class of the mediocre; whereas their virtuosity cannot in itself be strictly ranged in such a class, for we must candidly confess that a middling virtuoso is of no class at all.— A virtuosity very near of kin to that denoted, accordingly the exercise of Talent proper, we find most pronounced in the literary profession among the French. As instrument they possess a language that seems purposely built for it, whose highest law is to express oneself cleverly, wittily, and in every circumstance neatly and clearly. It is impossible for a French author to gain acceptance, if his work does not before all else comply with these requirements of his native tongue. Perhaps the very excess of attention he thus has to devote to his expression, to his style regarded in and for itself, makes it difficult for a French writer to have novelty of thought, to recognise a goal which others don't yet see; and for the simple reason, that he would be unable to find for these wholly new ideas the happy phrase that at once would strike all readers. This may account for the French having such unsurpassable virtuosi to shew in their literature, whilst the intrinsic value of their works—with the great exceptions of earlier epochs—seldom rises above the mediocre.

>>22975797
Now, nothing more perverse can be imagined, than the adoption by German writers of that attribute which makes the French such brilliant virtuosi on the ground of speech. The attempt to treat the German language as an instrument of virtuosity could only occur to those to whom the German tongue is truly alien, and who therefore twist it to improper uses. None of our great poets and sages can be rated as virtuosi of speech: every one of them was in the same position as Luther, who had to ransack every German dialect for his translation of the Bible, to find the word and turn to popularly express that New he had discovered in the sacred books' original text. For what distinguishes the German spirit from that of every other culture-folk is this, that its creative sons had first seen something ne'er yet uttered, before they fell a-writing,—which for them was but a necessary consequence of the prior inspiration. Thus each of our great poets and thinkers had to form his language for himself; an obligation to which the inventive Greeks themselves do not appear to have been submitted, since they had at command a language always spoken by the living mouth, and therefore pliant to each thought or feeling, but not an element corrupted by bad pensters. In a poem from Italy how Goethe bewailed his being doomed by birth to wield the German tongue, in which he must first invent for himself what the Italians and French, for instance, found ready to their hand. That under such hardships none but truly original minds have risen to production among ourselves, should teach us what we are, and at any rate that there is something peculiar about us Germans. But that knowledge will also teach us, that if virtuosity in any branch of art is the evidence of talent, this Talent is denied in toto to the Germans, at least in the branch of Literature: who toils to acquire a virtuosity in this, will stay a bungler; if, following the musical virtuoso who composes pieces of his own, he trumps up poetical sketches for setting off his fancied virtuosity, however, they will not even belong to the category of the Mediocre, but simply of the Bad, the wholly null.

>>22975797
>>22975806
Oh god why i see so much unnecessary spacious autistic theoritization every time i see a Germ trying into thinking?

>>22975806
this an interesting perspective on the german language!
>>22975957
you are stupid!