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.
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.