I cannot help thinking of P.L. Moeller,
as I knew him in Paris.
There are a thousand things between Heaven and Earth that you understand
better than I. But for that very reason you can listen to me. It seems
to me now as if the one half of your powers were undoing what the other
half accomplishes. I, too, am a man with intellectual interests, but I
feel no cooperation. Might there not be other tasks that you were more
fitted for than that of criticism? I mean, that would be less of a
temptation to you, and would _build_ up on your personality, at the
same time as you yourself were building? It strikes me that even if you
do choose criticism, it should be more strongly in the direction of our
educating responsibilities and less as the arranger of technicalities,
the spyer out of small things, the dragger together of all and
everything which can be brought forward as a witness for or against the
author, which is all frightfully welcome in a contemporary critical
epidemic in Copenhagen, but, God help me, is nothing and accomplishes
nothing.
This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor's
tone assumed in it, partly by a summing up of my critical methods which
was founded simply and solely on the reading of three or four articles,
more especially those on Rubens and Goldschmidt, and which quite missed
the point.
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