PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease, while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover—the paper with organic globules and layers of phœnix ashes, that whole brilliant pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I address myself, and thou myself like a Quaker, and order myself about a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface. It is headed:—
ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF HESPERUS.
"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the Book.—Joke in the beginning.—Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.—The conclusion from the reflection.—Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens: That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo), appears only as a black spot.—(In your copy-book of letters you must have made numbers of such allusions.)—The world expects that the Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer, or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its right bearings.—Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest wax cakes, but no honeycomb.—No one so very much resembles as pedants do the magpies, which are at once thievish and garrulous: they dilute and filch.—Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely, the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the diarrhœa.—Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who announce loss and gain."—
This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life, and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our mouths the same goutée over and over again, under the appearance of six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of brilliants,—and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which, fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery, and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.—
Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assafœtida were thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only to the greater part of them.—
"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[[3]] bosoms, and backs at the present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and heads, unpicked.—It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise, because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless spots.—Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught and boiled in the moulting-season."—
This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except the year of birth.
"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may see just what you are.—One expects from the Preface to a second edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the register!—
With pleasure!—First, I have corrected all typographical errors,—then all slips of the pen,—then many cacophonies of language,—moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,—the jurist, theological ones,—the physician, both,—the mathematician, all of them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?—The woman is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for coldness in books, as in cakes of chocolate, he holds to be proof of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the purport of the one which he really despatched.—To which opinion shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?—Most properly to his own, as the world to its own.—
For the rest, my little[[4]] work can hardly see so many printed editions as I have arranged of written and improved ones in my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story itself, therefore,—even supposing I had forgotten that it is a true one,—there is little to change for the better, because the work is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,—which I easily explain by the want of episodes,—that the moment I take out from the first story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise, just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about it, that in its case this cannot be done.
However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic changes and improvements by true enlargements of it through historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any others.
My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.—Heaven grant it! I have slim hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that I had—although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in my Pantheon-Pandemonium—still, however, at least hung them farther apart.
"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical grafting-knife rather than the weeder!"
I just said that I have done so.
"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is taken with a reverse movement,—in short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),—make believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest, and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,—and therefore at the end of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"—
Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!—How could I remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[[5]] fragments of my Evening Star, which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?—And how hard and cold must the soul be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or third, into which it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings, and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands in the second world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become brothers?—
Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye as a rainy star,—only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the moonlight of poesy for the morning of truth, and dismiss too early its morning dreams!—But into the torture-chambers and through the prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves, some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.—Nay, and if I ever grow too old, then comfort me also!
Hof, May 16, 1797.
