Page:Flower, fruit and thorn pieces - Noel translation.djvu/88

 72 grotesque and obscure a style, that many, even of his German readers, find difficulty in understanding them, and therefore it was not to be expected that a translation could render them sufficiently intelligible to foreigners, to whom his strange mode of expression must naturally be still less familiar.

The above opinion has but a slight foundation in truth; for though Richter may justly be pronounced a writer not easy to be understood, certainly not one whom "he who runs may read," yet it is not his language or style that is obscure, nor is there anything in his mode of expression, besides the idiom common to all languages, which would render his meaning naturally more familiar to his own countrymen than to foreigners. The difficulty in comprehending Richter lies in his own originality. It is less national than universal. It is to be sought in the matter of his writings,—in the mass of knowledge, accumulated from every source, of science, art, history, biography, national manners and customs, even from the different professional branches,—by which he illustrates his ideas; and sometimes, it must be admitted, expresses them in so ornamented and flowery a manner, that, beneath the complicated tracery of simile and metaphor, the original simple outline of his thought is in frequent danger of being lost. If, therefore, we except the occasional passages that bear allusion to the local manners and customs of his own country, which, of course, always more or less require explanation, there is on the surface no reason why the works of Jean Paul should not be comprehended and relished by the English as well as by the German public.

But there are perhaps other and deeper causes than