Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the Parenthesis distemper—­though they are usually so mild as to cover only a few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb it carries some meaning to your mind because you are able to remember a good deal of what has gone before.  Now here is a sentence from a popular and excellent German novel—­which a slight parenthesis in it.  I will make a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader—­though in the original there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can: 

“But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-si
lk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met,” etc., etc. [1]

1.  Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide
    gehuellten jetz sehr ungenirt nach der neusten mode
    gekleideten Regierungsrathin begegnet.

That is from the old MAMSELLE’S secret, by Mrs. Marlitt.  And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model.  You observe how far that verb is from the reader’s base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all.  Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers:  but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people.  For surely it is not clearness—­it necessarily can’t be clearness.  Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover that.  A writer’s ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor’s wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman’s dress.  That is manifestly absurd.  It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk.  Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.