s something that waits
to grow.

And scarcely one man in a century appears so highly gifted with that
wonderful quality for which we have no better name than Humor. His humor
is the conciliation that takes place between love and knowledge. The two
tendencies create the bold and graceful orbit on which his well-balanced
books revolve. With one alone, his impetuosity would hasten to quench
itself in the molten centre; and with the other alone, he would fly
cynically beyond the reach of heat. This reconciling humor sometimes
shakes his book with Olympic laughter; as if the postprandial nectar
circulated in pools of cups, into which all incompatibilities fall and
are drowned. You drink this recasting of the planet's joys and sorrows,
contempt and contradictions, while it is yet fluent and bubbling to the
lip. There are all the selfish men, and petulant, intriguing women in
it, all their weaknesses, and the ill-humor of their times. But the
draught lights up the brain with an anticipation of some future solution
of these discords, or perhaps we may say, intoxicates us with the serene
tolerance which the Creative Mind must have for all His little ones. Is
not humor a finite mood of that Impartiality whose sun rises upon the
evil and the good, whose smile becomes the laughter of these denser
skies?

It is plain from what we have said that the task of translating this
novel must be full of difficulties. There are strange words, allusions
drawn from foreign books that are now a hundred years old or more and
never seen in libraries; the figurative style makes half the sentences
in a page seem strange at first, they invite consideration, and do not
feebly surrender to a smooth consecutive English. Just as you think you
are at the bottom of a paragraph and are on the point of stepping on the
floor, he stops you with another stair, or lets you through: in other
words, you are never safe from a whimsical allusion or a twist in the
thought. The narrative extends no thread which you may take in one hand
as you poke along: it frequently disappears altogether, and it seems as
if you had another book with its vocabulary and style.

It is not too high praise to say that Mr. Brooks has overcome all
these difficulties without the sacrifice of a single characteristic
of Richter's genius. We have the sense and passion unmutilated. The
translation is accurate, and also bold. By the comparison of a few
test-passages with the original, Mr. Bro