And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.—And for thee, my dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday or passion-week of thy life![[128]]—
FOURTH PREFACE,
OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW, WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED.
Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer's-ink a new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the Orient,—and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face, which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two abecedarians, when I pass a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I'll seize him by the tail, I'm not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought, coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist right into his jaws,—so!"—
It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the critical feline race,—which Linnæus reckons in the royal line of lions,—while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and assails Journals in his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.
In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,—the one after the Fortieth and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,—cannot have seen this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true Intercalary Days.
Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my manner. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner is of itself nothing but what follows: the æsthetic ideal and integral, like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our finite strength are incessantly coming nearer to it, never so much as near; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every temperament and number of strings of any given Æolian harp stands to the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo. Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the human manner at least; nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary angel,—not to say a seraph,—another Reviewer than he who will criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a manner.—And such I manifestly have.—But yet more: as the degree and the relation of our powers change from year to year,—and consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner—: accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron[[129]] is still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann's ages of art according to the statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and hardened!—Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth.
Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,—instead of a single tone,—as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon's or at least hunter's horn,—the poet as an oaten pipe,—the author as a composing-instrument,[[130]]—the Pope as the organ-works,—the belle as Bestelmeier's hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,—my reviewer as a pitch-pipe,—and I on myself as Maelzel's great Panharmonicon. But we are all only tones, as in Potemkin's orchestra every one of the sixty metallic flutes gave only one tone. Therefore I am glad of every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the church music of natures.
Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer's perplexity for want of materia peccans to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles—in future—as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm[[131]] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.