Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
It is headed:--
ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION OF HESPERUS.
"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
announce loss and gain."----
This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
mouths the same _goutée_ over and over again, under the appearance of
six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
to the greater part of them.----
"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
and boiled in the moulting-season."----
This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
the year of birth.
"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
register!--
With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
own, as the world to its own.--
For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
it, that in its case this cannot be done.
However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
others.
My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
apart.
"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"