This remark, when it was spoken, passed unnoticed, being indeed nothing more than one of the commonplaces of party warfare.
He makes the commonplaces of a cosmopolitan philosophy interesting by his abundant illustration drawn from the private and social life of his contemporaries.
The poet Aarestrup (in 1848) declared that Blicher had raised the Danish language to the dignity of Icelandic. Blicher is a stern realist, in many points akin to Crabbe, and takes a singular position among the romantic idealists of the period, being like them, however, in the love of precise and choice language, and hatred of the mere commonplaces of imaginative writing.
Indeed, the deduction to be drawn from Goethe's contributions to botany and anatomy is that he, as no other of his contemporaries, possessed that type of scientific mind which, in the 19th century, has made for progress; he was Darwin's predecessor by virtue of his enunciation of what has now become one of the commonplaces of natural science - organic evolution.
He was not careful to exclude the commonplaces of the school, nor anxious to finish a work of art wholly free from fashionable graces and from contemporary conceits.
