It was no misfortune that this
unworthy man endured for only a few years his sojourn among the
barbarians.
During these ten years, from 1746 to 1756, Frederick acquired literary
independence, and that importance as a writer which is not yet
sufficiently appreciated in Germany. As to his French poetry, a German
can only judge imperfectly. He was a facile poet, who was easily
master of every mood in metre and rhyme, but from the point of view
of a Frenchman, he never completely overcame in his lyric poetry the
difficulties of a foreign language, however diligently his confidants
revised his work. He even lacked, it seems to us, the uniform
rhetorical spirit, that style which in Voltaire's time was the first
mark of a born poet. The effect of beautiful and noble sentiments, in
splendid phraseology, is spoiled by trivial thoughts and commonplace
expressions in the next line. Nor was the development of his taste
sufficiently assured and independent. In his esthetic judgment he was
quick, both to admire and to condemn; in reality, he was much more
dependent upon the opinion of his French acquaintances than his pride
would have admitted. What was best, moreover, in French poetry at that
time--the return to Nature and the struggle of the beauty of reality
against the fetters of an antiquated conventionalism--remained to him
a sealed book. For a long time he looked upon Rousseau as an eccentric
vagabond, and upon the conscientious and accurate spirit of Diderot
even as shallow.
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