There are many examples proving this preference for abstract expression; and a particularly ridiculous one is afforded by the use of the verb to condition in the sense of to cause or to produce.  People say to condition something instead of to cause it, because being abstract and indefinite it says less; it affirms that A cannot happen without B, instead of that A is caused by B.  A back door is always left open; and this suits people whose secret knowledge of their own incapacity inspires them with a perpetual terror of all positive assertion; while with other people it is merely the effect of that tendency by which everything that is stupid in literature or bad in life is immediately imitated—­a fact proved in either case by the rapid way in which it spreads.  The Englishman uses his own judgment in what he writes as well as in what he does; but there is no nation of which this eulogy is less true than of the Germans.  The consequence of this state of things is that the word cause has of late almost disappeared from the language of literature, and people talk only of condition.  The fact is worth mentioning because it is so characteristically ridiculous.

The very fact that these commonplace authors are never more than half-conscious when they write, would be enough to account for their dullness of mind and the tedious things they produce.  I say they are only half-conscious, because they really do not themselves understand the meaning of the words they use:  they take words ready-made and commit them to memory.  Hence when they write, it is not so much words as whole phrases that they put together—­phrases banales.  This is the explanation of that palpable lack of clearly-expressed thought in what they say.  The fact is that they do not possess the die to give this stamp to their writing; clear thought of their own is just what they have not got.  And what do we find in its place?—­a vague, enigmatical intermixture of words, current phrases, hackneyed terms, and fashionable expressions.  The result is that the foggy stuff they write is like a page printed with very old type.

On the other hand, an intelligent author really speaks to us when he writes, and that is why he is able to rouse our interest and commune with us.  It is the intelligent author alone who puts individual words together with a full consciousness of their meaning, and chooses them with deliberate design.  Consequently, his discourse stands to that of the writer described above, much as a picture that has been really painted, to one that has been produced by the use of a stencil.  In the one case, every word, every touch of the brush, has a special purpose; in the other, all is done mechanically.  The same distinction may be observed in music.  For just as Lichtenberg says that Garrick’s soul seemed to be in every muscle in his body, so it is the omnipresence of intellect that always and everywhere characterizes the work of genius.