Mrs. Atherton. The picture would be as mysterious as an Emblem by Albert Durer.
Gower. It is that suggestiveness I so admire in the Germans. For the sake of it I can often pardon their fantastic extravagances, their incongruous combinations, their frequent want of grace and symmetry.
Atherton. So can I, when an author occupies a province in which such indirectness or irony, such irregularity, confusion, or paradox, are admissible. Take, as a comprehensive example, Jean Paul. But in philosophy it is abominable. There, where transparent order should preside, to find that under the thick and spreading verbiage meaning is often lacking, and, with all the boastful and fire-new nomenclature, if found, is old and common,—that the language is commonly but an array of what one calls
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing;—
This puts me out of all patience.
Gower. The fault you object to reminds me of some Flemish landscape-pieces I have seen; there are trees, so full of grand life, they seem with their outstretched arms to menace the clouds, and as though, if they smote with their many hundred hands, they could beat away the storm instead of being bowed by it; and underneath these great ones of the forest, which should shadow nothing less than a woodland council of Titans or a group of recumbent gods, the painter places only a rustic with a cow or two, an old horse, a beggar, or some other most every-day of figures.
Mrs. Atherton. And you mean that the German words are large-looking as the trees, and the ideas worn and ordinary as the figures? What will Mr. Willoughby say to that?
Atherton. I think Willoughby will agree with me that it is high time that we should go back to our theurgic mysticism and Iamblichus. Here is a letter of his:—
Iamblichus to Agathocles.