Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,—and that not apparent,—this is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!—
Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.—I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with laurel oil no flies alight.
Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased authoress, Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much approbation one of her works in the Strassburg Gazette, married him on account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the sex of my reviewer,—in which connection, however, this must be looked to, that the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming period of a reviewer's life, wherein one can still readily feel and impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,—if the editor will see to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry her.
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.
NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.
VICTOR'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.
Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much as in poetry. On all systems—even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of Walch—the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is, that precisely the consequent or consistent systems, without the atomic Clinamen[[132]] of feeling, deviate from each other the most widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw the brightest point of light upon the object;—how pitifully, e. g., does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of Christianity over into Stoicism,—then into Mysticism,—then into Monachism, till the stream spreads out and oozes away into Fohism, as the Rhine loses itself in the sand!—The theory of Kant, with all logical systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that deflection[[133]] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy[[134]] scratched and beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a Conscious Person, and an Immortality!—
Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the finding, but to the proving and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.
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