national as well as individual styles, with contrasts equally salient or glaring, is known to every scholar. Metaphors and similes are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste, it is said, the lava in the vines on the slopes of Etna. As thinkers, the Germans have to-day no equals on the globe. In their systems of philosophy the speculative intellect of our race-its power of long, concatenated, exhaustive thinking-seems to have reached its culmination. Never content with a surface-examination of any subject, they dig down to the "hard pan," the eternal granite which underlies all the other strata of truth. As compilers of dictionaries, as accumulators of facts, as producers of thought in the ore, their book-makers have no peers. The German language, too, must be admitted to be one of the most powerful instruments of thought and feeling to which human wit has given birth. But all these advantages are, to a great extent, neutralized by the frightful heaviness and incredible clumsiness of the German literary style. Whether as a providential protection of other nations against the foggy metaphysics and subtle scepticism of that country, or because to have given it a genius for artistic composition as well as thought would have been an invidious partiality, it is plain that, in the distribution of good things, the advantages of form were not granted to the Teutons. In Bacon's phrase, they are "the Herculeses, not the Adonises, of literature." They are, with a few noble exceptions, the hewers of wood and drawers of water for all the other literatures of the world. The writers of other countries, being blessed more or less with the synthetic and artistic power which they lack, pillage mercilessly, without acknowledgment, the storehouses which they have laboriously filled, and, dressing up the stolen materials in attractive forms, pass them off as their own property. It is one of the paradoxes.

of literary history, that a people who have done more for the textual accuracy and interpretation of the Greek and Roman classics than all the other European nations put together who have taught the world the classic tongues with pedagogic authority-should have caught so little of the inspiration, spirit, and style of those eternal models.

The fatigue which the German style inflicts upon the human brain is even greater than that which their barbarous Gothic letter, a relic of the fifteenth century, blackening all the page, inflicts upon the eye. The principal faults of this style are involution, prolixity, and obscurity. The sentences are interminable in length, stuffed with parentheses within parentheses, and as full of folds as a sleeping boa-constrictor. Of paragraphs, of beauty in the balancing and structure of periods, and of the art by which a succession of periods may modify each other, the German prose-writer has apparently no conception. Instead of breaking up his "cubic thought" into small and manageable pieces, he quarries it out in huge, unwieldy masses, indifferent to its shape, structure, or polish. He gives you real gold, but it is gold in the ore, mingled with quartz, dirt, and sand, hardly ever gold polished into splendor or minted into coin. . . .

...

In direct contrast to the heavy, dragging German style is the brisk, vivacious, sparkling style of the French. All the qualities which the Teutons lack-form, method, proportion, grace, refinement, the stamp of good society-the Gallic writers have in abundance; and these qualities are found not only in the masters, like Pascal, Voltaire, Courier, or Sand, but in the second- and third-class writers, like Taine and Prevost-Paradol. Search any of the French writers from Montaigne to Renan, and you will have to hunt as long for an obscure sentence as in a German author for a clear one. Dip where you will into their pages, you

find every sentence written as with a sunbeam. They state their meaning so clearly that not only can you not mistake it, but you feel that no other proper collocation of words is conceivable. It is like casting to a statue: the metal flows into its mould, and is there fixed forever. If in reading a German book you seem to be jolting over a craggy mountain-road in one of their lumbering eilwagen, ironically called "post-haste" chaises, in reading a French work you seem to be rolling on C springs along a velvety turf, or on a road that has just been macadamized. The only drawback to your delight is that it spoils your taste for other writing: after sipping Château-Margaux at its most velvety age, the mouth puckers at Rhine wine or Catawba. This supremacy of the French style is so generally acknowledged that the French have become for Europe the interpreters of other races to each other. They are the Jews of the intellectual market,—the moneychangers and brokers of the wealth of the world. The great merits of Sir William Hamilton were unknown to his countrymen till they were revealed by the kindly pen of Cousin; and Sydney Smith hardly exaggerated when he said of Dumont's translation of Bentham that the great apostle of utilitarianism was washed, dressed, and forced into clean linen by a Frenchman before he was intelligible even to English Benthamites. It is sometimes said that French literature is all style; that its writers have labored so exclusively to make the language a perfect vehicle of wit and wisdom that they have nothing to convey. If in a German work the meaning is entangled in the words, and "you cannot see the woods for the trees," in the French work the words themselves are the chief object of attention. But the critic who says this is surely not familiar with Pascal, Bossuet, D'Alembert, De Staël, De Maistre, Villemain. In these, and many other writers

that we might name, there is such a solidity of thought with an exquisite transparency of style, so subtle an interfusion of sound and sense, so perfect an equipoise of meaning and melody, as to satisfy alike the artistic taste of the literary connoisseur and the deeper cravings of the thinker and the scholar. . . .

To define the charm of style-to show why the same thought when conveyed in one man's language is cold and commonplace, and when conveyed in another's is, as Starr King says, "a rifle-shot or a revelation"-is impossible. It is easy to see how a magnetic presence, an eagle eye, a commanding attitude, a telling gesture, a siren voice, may give to truths when spoken a force or a charm which they lack in a book. "But how it is," as the same writer says, "that words locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, will contrive to tip a wink; how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states; how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love; how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion; how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite, who has fathomed this wonder?" There is a mystery in style of which we cannot pluck out the heart. Like that of beauty, music, or a delicious odor, its spell is subtle and impalpable, and baffles all our attempts to explain it in words. Like that of fine manners, it is indefinable, yet all-subduing, and is the issue of all the mental and moral qualities, bearing the same relation to them that light bears to the sun, or perfume to the flower. Not even the writer himself can explain the secret of his art. In the works of all the great masters there are certain elements which are a mystery to themselves. In the frenzy of creation they instinctively infuse into their productions that of which they would be utterly puzzled to

give an account. By a subtle, mysterious gift, an intense intuition, which pierces beneath all surface-appearances and goes straight to the core of an object, they lay hold of the essential life, the inmost heart, of a scene, a person, or a situation, and paint it to us in a few immortal words. A line, a phrase, a single burning term or irradiating word, flashes the scene, the character, upon us, and it lives forever in the memory. It is so in sculpture, in painting, and even in the military art. When Napoleon was asked by a flatterer of his generalship how he won his military victories, he could only say that he was fait comme ça.

THE SONGS OF THE TROUBADOURS.

H. W. PRESTON.

[One of the most attractive and valuable books upon Provençal literature is "The Troubadours and Trouveres" of Harriet W. Preston, from which we select a brief general description of the troubadours and their times. The era of the troubadours was one in which the condition of society and the movement of thought were unlike those of any other period of human history, and the literature thence resulting had a very marked character of its own. Miss Preston's work is one of the best and most interesting expositions of this literature and state of society. In addition she has written "Aspendale," ""Love in the Nineteenth Century," and "Merèio," a translation from Frederick Mistral.]

IT is not easy to say how much of the interest of the new Provençal literature is due to the ancient dignity of its name, and to a kind of reflected lustre which it receives from the far-away glories of the old. Yet when we come to look carefully for the connection and resemblance between the two, we shall be surprised to find how slight