Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/140

 mediocre think it easy to write like Horace, because they think it easy to write better, and because this “better” is unluckily worse. The older one gets (provided that one becomes wiser with years), the more one despairs of writing better than the ancients. One recognizes at last that the measure of all truth and beauty is Nature, and that although we all of us carry this measure in ourselves it is so covered with the rust of prejudices, of words which have no corresponding ideas, and of false ideas, that nothing can any longer be measured with it. It takes a good deal nowadays to come to the front as a sculptor, without resolving to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to prostrate oneself at the feet of the Vatican Apollo. Everyone goes there with the intention of worshipping the god, but none to study his divinity. It will be found that all intelligent people incline to express themselves briefly, to say at once what is to be said. This is why languages are no slight characteristic of national intelligence. How difficult a German finds it to translate Tacitus! Even the EnglishI mean their best writersare more concise than we. They have a great advantage over us in possessing distinct words for species of things, where we make use of the genus with a limitation, which leads to prolixity. There would be no harm in counting the words in every sentence and always trying to put it into the least number.