A poem like the _Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ roused
his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not
appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently
well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe's short
things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words
in his mouth rang very French.
_Lieber dur Laydenn moecht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Froedenn des
Laybengs airtrah'ge_, was intended to be--
Lieber durch Leiden,
Moecht ich mich schlagen
Als so viel Freuden
Des Lebens ertragen.
Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and
lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his
expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly,"
he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was
too inartistic for him (_ils ne savent pas ecrire, cela me degoute
d'eux_).
I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had
been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote
a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely
worldly paper, _La Vie Parisienne_, was a powerful, broad-
shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and
very unlike one's preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and
fashionable weekly in Paris.
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