ed operations. It is poor skill that cannot
find material enough in the moral sufferings of men and women, and is
driven to seek effect in descriptions of disease and surgery. Surely in
any literature worthy of the name these are topics which a richer
imagination and a more prolific art would have found unnecessary, and
better taste would have left undescribed.

To another class of writers--those who handle a pretty pen without
having anything definite to present, or anything important to say,
Goethe has also an applicable word. It is a class which is always
increasing in number, and tends to increase in talent. We may admit that
second- or third-rate work, especially in poetry, was never before done
so well as it is done now; and still we may find some useful truth in a
distinction which Goethe drew for the benefit of the minor poets and the
minor prose-writers of his own age. "Productions are now possible," he
said, "which, without being bad, have no value. They have no value,
because they contain nothing; and they are not bad, because a general
form of good workmanship is present to the author's mind." In one of the
many neglected volumes of his miscellaneous writings Goethe has a series
of admirable notes for a proposed work on _Dilettantism_; and there the
reader, if he is interested in Goethe's literary criticism, will find
some instructive remarks in close connection with this aphorism, and
also certain rules for discriminating between good and indifferent work
which ought to receive the most attentive study. And the stylists who
neglect plain language for a mosaic of curious phrase and overstrained
epithet, may profitably remember that, as Goethe here says, "it is not
language in itself which is correct or forcible or elegant, but the mind
that is embodied in it."

"Translators," he tells us, "sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty
and rouse an irresistible longing for the original." To them also he
gives a piece of excellent advice: "The translator must proceed until
he reaches the untranslatable." This is a counsel of exhortation as well
as of warning. It bids the translator spare no effort, but tells him
that at a certain point his efforts are of no avail. But none the less,
Goethe might have added, the faithful translator must strive as if this
hindrance to perfection did not exist; for it is thus only that he, or
any one else, can do anything worth doing. On methods of translation
much may be said, an