Still,
through all, what we feel is that we have to do with one who
criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he is
convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance. A
powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might
have looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for
instance, which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which
certainly do not exist yet. "Construction," he says--artistic or
literary construction--"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas!
also, "upon will." The instinct, at all events, was certainly his.
And over and above that he had possessed himself of the art of
expressing, in quite natural language, very difficult thoughts; those
abstract and metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German
mind has been rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers
towards the understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that
the intellect has produced.
But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause
purely intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein
of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his
complex nature.
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