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Updated: May 27, 2025
Is it really good psychology when Vauvenargues writes: “All men are born sincere and die impostors,” or, when Brillat-Savarin insists: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are”? Or can we really trust Mirabeau: “Kill your conscience, as it is the most savage enemy of every one who wants success”; or Klopstock: “Happiness is only in the mind of one who neither fears nor hopes”; or Gellert: “He who loves one vice, loves all the vices”? Can we believe Chamfort: “Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts more easily than the palaces”; or Pascal: “In a great soul, everything is great”; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: “A gray eye is a sly eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows loyalty”? And too often we must be satisfied with opposites.
There is hardly any argument or dispute in conversation, in the higher ranks, about which the lower cannot also converse or give their opinion. Now, in Germany, since Gellert, there has as yet been no poet's name familiar to the people. But the quick sale of the classical authors is here promoted also by cheap and convenient editions.
In Gellert, however, this melancholy had a more peculiar phase: a sort of timidity had rooted itself in him, connected with his weak chest, and that secret gnawing pain in his head; it was a fearfulness which his manner of life only tended to increase.
A few plays of that time, in the manners of our own country, by Gellert and Elias Schlegel, are not without merit; only they have this error, that in drawing folly and stupidity the same wearisomeness has crept into their picture which is inseparable from them in real life.
And thus also did good society, which cannot easily endure any thing worthy near it, know how to spoil, on occasion, the moral influence which Gellert might have had upon us.
Gellert, who usually dined at his brother's, today had dinner brought into his own room, remained quite alone, and did not go out again: he had experienced quite enough excitement, and society he had in his own thoughts.
Long time the two sat quietly together: it struck eight. Gellert started up, and cried irritably: "There, now, you have allowed me to forget that I must be on my way to the University." "The vacation has begun: Mr. Professor has no lecture to-day." "No lecture to-day?
Thus, for example, Gellert still composed pastoral plays after bad French models, in which shepherds and shepherdesses, with rose- red and apple-green ribands, uttered all manner of insipid compliments to one another. Besides the versions of French comedies, others, translated from the Danish of Holberg, were acted with great applause. This writer has certainly great merit.
"You thought, I hope, that Gellert would be happy to receive an officer from the king, especially one who bears so celebrated a name," said Gellert, courteously, as he signed to Conrad to leave the room a sign that Conrad obeyed most unwillingly, and with the firm determination to listen outside the door.
Well, have you thought of one?" "Yes, your majesty," said Gellert, after a brief silence, "I believe I remember one." "Let us hear it," said the king; and, seating himself upon the fauteuil, he gazed fixedly at Gellert, who, standing in the middle of the room, his clear glance turned toward the king, now began his recitation.
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