[I].
This rifacimento of Arion's story is not mere mythological twaddle. As allegories abound, and as in fact there is a suspicion that the whole Romance may be only an allegory, an "Apotheosis of Poetry,"--the reader must keep open his internal eye.
Arion is the Spirit of Poetry as embodied in any age, whether in a single voice, or many. This the age always attempts to drown,--seldom with applause. The sailors are the exponents of an age, or its critics. In the case of Arion, they belonged to a certain tribe of Philistines,--not yet extinct.[5] There is a deep significance in the fact, that they resolutely stopped their ears against the Poet's song. The treasures of the Poet are his ideas of the good and the beautiful, which he fetches from his far home; for he comes, "not in entire forgetfulness." The fact, that Arion preferred jumping overboard to being converted into a heave-offering, is typical of the self-extinguishment and natural dissolution of the true soul, born into a humanity which is not its counterpart, which cannot answer to it. Those providential dolphins are a grateful posterity, which preserve not only the Poet's treasures, but his memory. The conflict among the sailors, too, has a deep meaning, hidden also in that old, wonderful myth of the Kilkenny cats.
But an allegory has many sides, like a genuine symphony. Each reader will interpret all of them best from his own point of view. Should Henry himself turn out to be Arion, the feat would only be one of inverted transmigration, and not more extraordinary than the regular method.
[II].
An opportunity is taken to introduce some further remarks of the author concerning History. They are found among a multitude of fragments, arranged under the three heads of Philosophical, Critical, and Moral; an amorphous heap of sayings, generally of great beauty and power. The present have little connexion with the text, but will be their own excuse. The total of his remarks will be seen to hint at a theory of History, with which most school-histories and respectable annals are in no wise infected.
'Luck or fate is talent for history. The sense for apprehending occurrences is the prophetic, and luck the divining instinct. (Hence the ancients justly considered a man's luck one of his talents.) We take delight in divination. Romance has arisen from the want of history.
'History creates itself. It first arises through the connexion of the past with the future. Men treat their recollections much too negligently.
'The historian organizes the historical Essence. The data of history are the mass, to which the historian gives form, while giving animation. Consequently history always presupposes the principles of animation and organization; and where they are not antecedent there can be no genuine historical chef d'œuvre, but only here and there the traces of an accidental animation, where a capricious genius has ruled.
'The demand, to consider this present world the best, is exactly analogous to that which would consider my own wedded wife the best and only woman, and life to be entirely for her and in her. Many similar demands and pretensions are there, which he who dutifully acknowledges, who has a discriminating respect for everything that has transpired, is historically religious, the absolute Believer and Mystic of history, the genuine lover of Destiny. Fate is the mysticised history. Every voluntary love, in the common signification, is a religion, which has and can have but one apostle, one evangelist and disciple, and can be, though not necessarily, an extra-religion (Wechsel-religion.)