National Types of Style

2.	National Types of Style.
The tendency to yield to one or the other of these opposing influences, time and truth, marks the distinc¬tion of national styles of writing.
(1)	The German Style.—The Germans, a race of patient thinkers, are controlled chiefly by the truth- relation in the construction of sentences. Mr. De Quincey thus describes a German sentence :
"Every German regards a sentence in the light of a package, and a package not for the mail-coach, but for the wagon, into which his privilege is to crowd as much as he possibly can. Having framed a sentence, therefore, he next proceeds to pack it, which is ef¬fected partly by unwieldy tails and codicils, but chiefly by enormous parenthetic involutions. All qualifica¬tions, limitations, exceptions, illustrations, are stuffed and violently rammed into the bowels of the principal proposition. That all this equipage of accessories is not so arranged as to assist its own orderly develop¬ment, no more occurs to a German as any fault, than that in a package of shawls or carpets, the colors and patterns are not fully displayed. To him it is sufficient that they are there. And Mr. Kant, when he has suc¬ceeded in packing up a sentence which covers three closely printed octavo pages, stops to draw his breath with the air of one who looks back upon some brilliant and meritorious performance."
(2)	The French Style.—The French, on the other
hand, a quick, impatient people, are most influenced by the time-relation. The result is an almost monot¬onous brevity of sentences. "A long or involved sen¬tence," says the critic last quoted, "could not be pro¬• laced from French literature, though a sultan should offer his daughter in marriage to the man who should find it."
(3) The English Style.—As the mixture of Nor 
man-French and Teutonic blood gives an intermediate 
character to the English people, so the average English sentence lies midway between the extremes. The tend¬ency, under the influence of German literature, is to¬ward a Teutonic length and involution.