Actually I'm in that minority that doesn't find Sebald anything special.
Anyway, I was transcribing some passages from Mist and Mystery today. Here's one from Machen's review of Laurie Magnus’ English Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Here's he's contrasting two approaches to art: Pope's materialist realism versus Wordsworth's spiritualism:
“There is, of course, no reason on earth why the two philosophies should not dwell together in perfect peace and amity. A man is a highly composite creature: in his exaltation he is Wordsworthian, doubtless, and finds his highest and most acute delights in searching the very depths of his being, in penetrating beyond the remotest bournes of time and space. But a man must dine, must laugh, must be amused; he likes to note the little peculiarities of his neighbors, he is entertained by the social traffic of his day. But the nineteenth century determined and I think very wisely, that work of this sort was best done in prose; and so Pope became Jane Austen, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, who were able to survey mankind with all the greater ease and advantage in that they were not constrained by the limits of the heroic couplet. For poetry, as Mr. Magnus shows, is a kind of magic, a species of incantation, and its special and distinctive form is wasted and misapplied in dealing with the surfaces and obvious facets of the universe.”
Of course Machen would be sympathetic towards the old view that art is a way of magic. But he also seems to support the bias that prose is only fit for realism, which even at the time of this writing was being challenged, including by himself. As late as Sartre's silly essay, What is Literature? (1947) this antinomy was still being bandied about like a rule: prose/realism/communication vs. poetry/fancy/self-expression. The likes of Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov would have laughed at it (Nabokov of course did laugh at Sartre's artistically worthless novel, Nausea).
