Hard as it is
for a German to be clear, still harder to be light, he is more than ever
awkward in his attempts to produce that quality of style, so peculiarly
French, which is neither wit nor liveliness taken singly, but a mixture
of the two that must be drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will not
bear exportation into any other language. German criticism, excellent in
other respects, and immeasurably superior to that of any other nation in
its constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting at whatever
principle of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom lucid,
almost never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we have patience,
into every obscurest cranny of its subject, one after another, but it
never flashes light _out_ of the subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve, for
example, so often does, and with such unexpected charm. We should be
inclined to put Julian Schmidt at the head of living critics in all the
more essential elements of his outfit; but with him is not one conscious
at too frequent intervals of the professorial grind,--of that German
tendency to bear on too heavily, where a French critic would touch and go
with such exquisite measure? The Great Nation, as it cheerfully calls
itself, is in nothing greater than its talent for saying little things
agreeably, which is perhaps the very top of mere culture, and in
literature is the next best thing to the power of saying great things as
easily as if they were little German learning, like the elephants of
Pyrrhus, is always in danger of turning upon what it was intended to
adorn and reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death.
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