"I write it last, in order that it may not be read first. I will here leave the world free again, after I have had it in my service barely 2 hours 33 minutes and 36 seconds longer,[[212]] seeing that I have been in its service just so many years and months. Let it not begrudge me three words more; that is to say, seven last ones.
"The first is my joy in the fact that the readers, like children, have been obliged to eat the bread, which they would not bite at the table, afterward. With a similar stroke of art I shall drive them into my future flogging-cellars. For from this time forth no book of mine will appear without such an Appendix,—unless I send it out first and the work itself afterward.—Has not everything on this Anglicized comet-ball its appendix [or -dage],—the Universal German Library the dearest, the Almanac the cheapest?—has not Robespierre his queue,—the comet of 1769, a tail of forty million miles,—the Predicaments,[[213]] four Postpredicaments,—and Kant, his Fichte?
"The second last word is to beg the reader that he will not quite yet—as I have hardly made a feeble beginning in my deliveries of Titan—draw two or three hundred conclusions therefrom, but wait for the twentieth volume. The opus desires to be judged like the moon, which rises bay-colored and swollen and cloudy, and which one needs to allow half a night's time before expecting to find her on her high-climbed pathway pure, white, and radiant. Modern romances easily get themselves into the greatest repute on the appearance of their very first volume, because they take no thought for the next morning (i. e. for the next volume), but enjoy the present; because they have not so much a plan—and thereby, too, the pauses in the same, the episodes, are avoided—as ten thousand plans, which they carry out one after the other; so that the work, when one gets it at length from the bookbinder, then and not till then, produces a good effect and represents a whole; just as the army-worm appears to the vulgar to roll itself along magnificently in a length of twelve ells, although it amounts only to an inch-deep procession of mere gnat-larvæ (Larvæ tipulæ). My infusorial, on the contrary, is entire, and yet is fed till it grows to a giant-snake,—but that is quite as wonderful.
"Third word. In every epic history there lie whole volumes full of morals, more than in a fable; but not otherwise than in actual history, which is not the daughter of moral philosophy, but the mother, of whom every one can beget such a daughter as he pleases. I find in the biographies which the Infinite One writes more poetry, more poetic justice and justification by motives, than in those which the heroes of the former, like poor fools, send to the press. A divine biography is, besides, not only a little work of art, but also a part of an infinitely great one; and we are all so bound to our paths that one must be able, from the diurnal arc of his life's epicycloid of the 988th power, to calculate the ellipse which humanity describes around the immovable Infinite; in other words, one can (bold as it may sound) from the incidents of his forenoon infer much with regard to the next that will appear in the newspaper.
"Fourth last word. They still continue in Jena, Wenigen-Jena, Jena-Priesnitz, and the surrounding localities, to moot the proposition, that a poet must, like a fly, travel along on transparent gauze-wings, and not on any heavily bedizened pinions of the bird of paradise. The reader, they continue without metaphor, cannot at once fly and carry; Pegasus cannot be a packhorse; still less may a poetic pinion like that of the angel alluded to have eyes, which at most can belong to the peacock's tail.—Thereto I lately, while attending Mozart's Zauberflöte, came out with the striking answer, namely, the question: 'But the opera, good people?—Must not here, 1st, the genial interworking of all the instruments, as well as, what is quite as great, of all the actors; 2dly, the optical, and, 3dly, the acoustic imitation; then, 4thly, the poetic composition itself; and finally and 5thly, the splendor of the decoration,—be all comprehended and enjoyed at once? A building in the five orders of architecture is easier for you than one with gorgeous foliaceous ornamentation? The five wise virgins at once leave you wiser than one foolish one?—Say, Jenaite! But no; write on, and a happy journey home to you in this infernal cold!'
"Since one word begets another, and accordingly the fifth begets the sixth, I give my word with both, that to-day, on which I say my last word and this next, is to me no day of finding a cross, but of taking down from one. Is not to-day Virgil's day, and are not the first volume of this work and the first and last winter months over?—For to-morrow there blooms for me the morn of spring; namely, the first of February, the Sunday eve (Sonnabend) of Candlemas. Already must many a freezing German have with me found in February the aurora of spring, at least in the rapid lengthening of the days. Hovers not already in the cold ether out there the first vernal song, the first fluttering lark? Does not the wren climb and glide up along a black bough, dripping in the sunshine, and chirp, warmly gilded with bright rays, his winter-solo? Does not the returning sun re-bind my manuscript books with gilt edges? and has not my neighbor shoved up the slides of his beehives, that the merry bee-tribe may joyously fling themselves forth from the narrow, sultry prisons upon the fresh green, variegated, not with flowers, but with sunbeams, and creep about over it with vigor?—Virgil, whose anniversary is to-day celebrated, on thy grave they break now only fictitious laurel-twigs; but on the graves of the seasons ever fresh ones bloom after.—
"To-day shall, after a long satirical ice-month of quarrelling, reconcile me again to the times. Let my last and seventh word be, Peace! as He also said it who spake the seven words on a more painful wood than my writing-table is.
"Peace be with the age!—one should often exclaim to himself.[[214]] As an annoying day does not put us out in the hopes of our life, so neither should a suffering century deprive us of that hope wherewith we paint the far future. The pyramid of the age seems, like an Egyptian one, to lift itself up, either to a narrow and sharp apex, or into completeness; but when one climbs it, the summit proves to be a roomy level.
"Where a goal appears to us divine, there must the road also have been so; because this was once that, and that will become this. Well may we all be nearer to Thee, O Infinite One, than we know:—for Thou only canst know how near we are; and we live in Thee, not merely from Thee, just as our earth moves in the midst of the atmosphere of the sun's globe,[[215]] while it seems only to revolve far off around his light."
EXPLANATION OF TITLE.—As regards the title of TITAN, the translator has been strongly tempted to fall back upon his first idea, that Jean Paul hardly meant, after all, anything more definite by it than to express the magnitude of his aspiration in undertaking the work; and that, as Mr. Longfellow's "Hyperion" hints at a book of the beautiful, so Titan, like Hesperus, has a corresponding, more moral than mythological reference, and signifies that this was to be the author's Titanic work.