f German life and literature, bad
taste and tediousness. But it is not excusable that much later, and
indeed at the very height of his literary powers and practice, he should
have written the article in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ on the author
of _Faust_, of _Egmont_, and above all of the shorter poems. Here he
deliberately assents to the opinion that _Werther_ is "superior to
everything that came after it, and for mere power, Goethe's paramount
work," dismisses _Faust_ as something that "no two people have ever
agreed about," sentences _Egmont_ as "violating the historic truth of
character," and mentions not a single one of those lyrics, unmatched, or
rather only matched by Heine, in the language, by which Goethe first
gave German rank with the great poetic tongues. His severity on Swift is
connected with his special "will-worship" of ornate style, of which more
presently, and in general it may be said that De Quincey's extremely
logical disposition of mind was rather a snare to him in his criticism.
He was constantly constructing general principles and then arguing
downwards from them; in which case woe to any individual fact or person
that happened to get in the way. Where Wilson, the "only intimate male
friend I have had" (as he somewhere says with a half-pathetic touch of
self-illumination more instructive than reams of imaginative
autobiography), went wrong from not having enough of general principle,
where Hazlitt went wrong from letting prejudices unconnected with the
literary side of the matter blind his otherwise piercing literary sight,
De Quincey fell through an unswervingness of deduction more French than
English. Your ornate writer must be better than your plain one, _ergo_,
let us say, Cicero must be better than Swift.

One other curious weakness of his (which has been glanced at already)
remains to be noticed. This is the altogether deplorable notion of
jocularity which he only too often exhibits. Mr. Masson, trying to
propitiate the enemy, admits that "to address the historian Josephus as
'Joe,' through a whole article, and give him a black eye into the
bargain, is positively profane." I am not sure as to the profanity,
knowing nothing particularly sacred about Josephus. But if Mr. Masson
had called it excessively silly, I should have agreed heartily; and if
any one else denounced it as a breach of good literary manners, I do not
know that I should protest. The habit is the more curious in that all