We have the best specimens, but if not of the worst class, surely not of the best.
In Germany, speech has been less and thought more free than in England. The popular element has never had an immediately available voice in public matters. Whilst criticism in England has been busy with daily politics; in Germany a doubtful, if not forbidden ground; it has been applied in the latter country to thought, to literature, philosophy, and art. In Germany the best and most cultivated minds have been the critics: in England these have rather been the criticized. The results are before us: of what value, they are perhaps too near to us, as yet, for us to form a definite opinion.
We do not recognize as an original element the conscious, reconstructive, self-restoring principle of criticism in the other European nations. France is indeed hypercritical; but French criticism is skeptical: it destroys the old faith, and leaves no basis upon which to build a new. The German, while he criticises, is never skeptical, but substitutes a living belief for that which had become dead and inert. The French Revolution could find no reconstructive element on which to pause, and rebuild a political fabric. No truth was left but such as could be found in exact science or brute strength. The former was tried by Sieyès and others, and failed, as such attempts always must. The latter prevailed. In Napoleon, they found a strong man; in a European war, necessity of action. Wholesome exercise restored health; but France has since been the sport of fortune, rather than the exemplification of principles. Of its literature, what shall we say? That it goes on, dissecting away the ground whereon the social basis rests, a skepticism of all purity and honor? Its literary men seem to us analogous to the politicians of the Revolution,—men of wonderful talent, of fearless mind, weighing every old institution, and, as it is found wanting, casting it aside; but suggesting in their room nothing practicable, finding in the end nothing real but passion and power. Do we not hear of a great French discovery whereby all society is to be remodelled (within six years, the inventor says) upon the principle of
