Page:Flower, fruit and thorn pieces - Noel translation.djvu/91

 Rh heavy and far-fetched humor, or unsuccessful attempts at humor.

To all this Jean Paul may plead guilty; and yet, granting to our own countrymen the superiority of taste and elegance of writing, these defects do not amount to any sufficient ground for denying his works a consecutive reading. True, he has good and excellent things, acknowledged as such by all, passages of grandeur and beauty such as are to be found in few other authors; and these would make a large volume, or many volumes, of "beauties"; but by these beauties Jean Paul would never be known. As well might we detach the bestexecuted portions of a landscape of Claude, or of a painting of Raphael, and expect to know the artist, as by such extracts expect to obtain a just estimate of Jean Paul; for Jean Paul is an artist in the true sense of the word. In what is the artist principally distinguished from the good designer, the good colorist? In what but in the pervading harmony, the nameless spirit, that is breathed, as a golden glowing vapor, over the whole composition, as in Claude's sunsets; the due proportion of light and shadow; the bold relief of the one object, the subordination of the others; the delicate touch that, while maintaining the breadth, yet gives so much to the imagination; in a word, that wonderful power of genius, of revealing the infinite in the finite.

It is the same in literature as in art. All this is lost when a work is not contemplated as a whole. Where would be the superiority of Shakespeare, had we only preserved his finest passages? How immensely are we repaid by the excellence above hinted at for all the faults and coarseness of which he may be justly accused! How