Most of the tales in the present volume belong to the "Phantasus." A party of persons meet together for conversation on various subjects of art and literature, and these stories, with sundry other dramas, are read aloud by different members of the society. They are introduced with the following prefatory dialogue:—
"It is not at every moment, nor every time we choose to turn to her," said Antony, "that Nature will unfold her secrets to us; or rather, it is not always that we are in the mood to feel her sacredness. There must first be a harmony in ourselves, if we are to find what surrounds us harmonious; otherwise we do but cheat ourselves with empty phrases, without ever rising to a true enjoyment of beauty. It may be, perhaps, that there are times when unexpectedly some blessed influence descends out of Heaven upon our hearts, and unlocks the door of inspiration; but towards this we can add nothing. We have no right, no means of looking for it; it is a revelation within us we know not how. So much is certain, that it is not above twice, or at most three times, in a man's life that he has the fortune, in any true sense, to see a sunrise. When we do see it, it does not pass away like a summer cloud before our minds; rather it forms one of the great epochs in our lives. From such ecstatic feelings as we receive then it is long and long ere we recover; by the side of these exalted moments years dwindle into nothingness. But it is only in the calmness of solitude that these high gifts can descend upon us. A party collecting itself to see it as a sight on the top of a mountain, is only standing as it were before an exhibition at a theatre, and can bring from it nothing but the same kind of empty pleasure and foolish criticisms."
"Still stranger is it," said Ernest, "that the great majority of men are so dead to that awe and wonder, that fearful amazement with which Nature often fills some minds. If they can feel it, it is only as an obscure bewildered sensation of they know not what."
"It is not only on the dreary peaks of the St. Gothard that we can feel the terribleness of Nature. There are times when the most beautiful scene is full of spectres that fly shrieking and screaming across our hearts. Such strange shadowy forms, such wild forebodings, go often hunting up and down our fancy, that we are fain to fly from them in terror, and rid ourselves of our phantom rider, by plunging into the dissipations of the world. While under such influences wild poems and stories often rise up in us to people the dreary chaos of desolation, and adorn it with creations of art; and these forms and figures will be unconscious betrayers of the tone and temper of the mind in which they spring. In these kind of stories the beautiful mingles itself with the terrible, the sublime with the childish, goading our fancy into a kind of poetic madness, and then turning it to roam at will through the entire fabric of our souls."
"Are the stories you are going to read to us of this kind?" asked Clara.
"Perhaps," replied Ernest.
"And not allegorical?"
"As you please to call them. There is not, and there cannot be any creation of art which has not some kind of allegory at the bottom of it, however little it may let itself be seen. The two forms of good and evil appear in every poem; they meet us at every turn, in every thing man produces, as the one eternal riddle in an endless multiplicity of forms, which he is for ever struggling to resolve. As there are particular aspects in which the most every-day life appears like a myth, so it is possible to feel oneself in as close connexion with, as much at home in the middle of the wildest wonders as the ordinary incidents of life. One may go so far as to say, that the commonest, simplest, pleasantest things, as well as the most marvellous, can only be said to be true, can only exert an influence on our minds, in so far as they contain some allegory as their groundwork, as the link which connects them with the system of the universe. This is why Dante's allegories come so home to us, because they pierce through and through to the very heart and centre of reality. Novalis says, there is no real history, except what might be fable. Of course, there are many weak and sickly poems of this kind, which merely drag wearily on to the moral, without taking the imagination along with them; and these of all the different sorts of instruction or entertainment are the most tiresome. But it is time to proceed to our tales."
And here we would gladly leave this matter, and let the tales tell their own story. What their idea is as a whole, they speak plainly enough; and it would be to destroy their effect, as well as to misunderstand the whole theory of this kind of fiction, to translate them into a series of moral reflections, and append a didactic sentiment to them as to one of Æsop's fables. And yet English readers will not be content with a suggestion of allegory; they will be asking for meanings, and requiring to have the whole matter laid out before them in fair, plain characters of black and white; so that notwithstanding my full consciousness of the general undesirableness and the unphilosophical nature of such a proceeding, I will offer a few general remarks, in the way of elucidation, for three or four of these stories, which shall put people on the scent to find the real meaning, not only of these stories in particular, but in general of any such as may be brought before them. Consoling myself, therefore, with the reflection that a preface is always read, as it is written, the last thing in a book, and that in that case my explanation can hurt no one, and may be of some profit to those who have failed to see any thing for themselves, I proceed.