In itself, much of this mode of procedure is correct,
but the result is merely racy. A single one of them, seized largely and
affectionately, shown in such manner that the different paintings and
figures became a description of himself, but were simultaneously the
unfolding of a culture, would have been five times as understandable. A
contrast can be drawn in when opportunity arises, but that is not the
essential task. Yes, this is an illustration of the form of your
criticism. It is an everlasting, and often very painful, juxtaposition
of things appertaining and contrasting, but just as poetry itself is an
absorption in the one thing that it has extracted from the many, so
comprehension of it is dependent on the same conditions. The individual
work or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the
same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has
become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have
said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have
supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude
definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again
succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly
Danish, or peculiarly beautiful.
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