may read for hours together without getting hold of a single clearly expressed and definite idea.[1] However, people are easy-going, and they have formed the habit of reading page upon page of all sorts of such verbiage, without having any particular idea of what the author really means. They fancy it is all as it should be, and fail to discover that he is writing simply for writing's sake.
On the other hand, a good author, fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader's confidence that, when he writes, he has really and truly something to say; and this gives the intelligent reader patience to follow him with attention. Such an author, just because he really has something to say, will never fail to express himself in the simplest and most straightforward manner; because his object is to awake the very same thought in the reader that he has in himself, and no other. So he will be able to affirm with Boileau that his thoughts are everywhere open to the light of the day, and that his verse always says something, whether it says it well or ill:
Ma pensée au grand jour partout s'offre et s'expose,
Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose:
while of the writers previously described it may be asserted, in the words of the same poet, that they talk much and never say anything at all—quiparlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien.
Another characteristic of such writers is that they
- ↑ Select examples of the art of writing in this style are to be found almost passim in the Jahrbücher published at Halle, afterwards called the Deutschen Jahrbücher.
