Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/110

 of unfamiliar vesture upon the commonplace that gives it a charm akin to that produced by idealization, and the result will be quite pleasing figures. But the range of sensuous and poetical imagery in the original language on the one hand, and the new conditions of life on the other, are finite and limited quantities. At some point their mutual penetration is completed; and when that point is reached the people celebrates its golden age and the source of its poetry runs dry. Somewhere or other there must be a highest point in the adaptation of fixed words to fixed ideas, and of fixed imagery to fixed conditions of life. When this point has been reached this people must do one of two things. It can either repeat its most successful masterpieces in a different form, so that they look as if they were something new, although they are in fact nothing but the old familiar things. Or else, if it is determined to achieve something entirely new, it can seek refuge in the unbecoming and the unseemly. In this case their poetic art will mix together the ugly and the beautiful and have recourse to caricature and humour, while their prose will be compelled to confuse ideas and to jumble virtue and vice together. This they must do if they seek new forms of expression.

64. When mental culture and life thus go their own separate ways in a nation, the natural consequence is that those classes who have no access to mental culture, and who do not even receive the results of it as they would in a living nation, are placed at a disadvantage as compared with the educated classes and are regarded, so to speak, as a different species of humanity, unequal to them in mental power from the beginning and by the mere fact of birth. Another consequence is that the educated classes have no truly loving sympathy with them and are not impelled to give them thorough aid,