A Passage From The Higher Criticism
Heinrich von Kleist
It requires more genius to evaluate properly the second-rate than the first-rate work of art. Beauty and truth reveal themselves to our human nature in the very first instance, and just as the most mysterious lines are the easiest to understand (only minute detail is hard to comprehend), so the Beautiful pleases quite readily; the defective and the mannered, however, demand effort for pleasure. In a superb work of art the Beautiful is so purely contained that every healthy intelligence, as such responds to it instantly; in more mediocre works it is mixed with so much that is fortuitous or even contradictory, that a far sharper judgment, a more delicate sensitivity, and a more practiced and lively imagination--in short more genius--is necessary to cleanse it of these impurities. Therefore, opinions are never divided over first-rate works (I do not account for differences arising from the passions); we argue and bicker only over those that fall short of greatness. How moving is the invention in many a poem, but so distorted by diction, images and turns that one must often have an infallible intuition to discover it. This is indeed so true that the conception of our most perfect works of art (a great part of Shakespeare, for instance) has derived from the reading of bad chapbooks and other trash long since forgotten. Whoever praises Schiller and Goethe, therefore, hardly, as he may think, provides proof of an extraordinary and superior aesthetic sense; but whoever finds something good here and there in Gellert and Cronegk causes me to suspect, if he is right about some other things too, that understanding and sensitivity, and both in rare measure, are indeed creditable to him.
