"PREFACE TO TITAN.
"I write it last, in order that it may not be read first. I will here
leave the world free again, after I have had it in my service barely 2
hours 33 minutes and 36 seconds longer,[212] seeing that I have been in
_its_ service just so many years and months. Let it not begrudge me
three words more; that is to say, seven last ones.
"The _first_ is my joy in the fact that the readers, like children,
have been obliged to eat the bread, which they would not bite at the
table, afterward. With a similar stroke of art I shall drive them into
my future flogging-cellars. For from this time forth no book of mine
will appear without such an Appendix,--unless I send it out _first_ and
the work itself afterward.--Has not everything on this Anglicized
comet-ball its appendix [or -_dage_],--the Universal German Library the
dearest, the Almanac the cheapest?--has not Robespierre his queue,--the
comet of 1769, a tail of forty million miles,--the Predicaments,[213]
four Postpredicaments,--and Kant, his Fichte?
"The _second_ last word is to beg the reader that he will not quite
yet--as I have hardly made a feeble beginning in my deliveries of
Titan--draw two or three hundred conclusions therefrom, but wait for
the twentieth volume. The _opus_ desires to be judged like the moon,
which rises bay-colored and swollen and cloudy, and which one needs
to allow half a night's time before expecting to find her on her
high-climbed pathway pure, white, and radiant. Modern romances easily
get themselves into the greatest repute on the appearance of their very
first volume, because they take no thought for the next morning (i. e.
for the next volume), but enjoy the present; because they have not so
much a plan--and thereby, too, the pauses in the same, the episodes,
are avoided--as ten thousand plans, which they carry out one after the
other; so that the work, when one gets it at length from the
bookbinder, then and not till then, produces a good effect and
represents a whole; just as the army-worm appears to the vulgar to roll
itself along magnificently in a length of twelve ells, although it
amounts only to an inch-deep procession of mere gnat-larvæ (_Larvæ
tipulæ_). _My_ infusorial, on the contrary, is entire, and yet is fed
till it grows to a giant-snake,--but that is quite as wonderful.
"_Third_ word. In every epic history there lie whole volumes full of
morals, more than in a fable; but not otherwise than in actual history,
which is not the daughter of moral philosophy, but the mother, of whom
every one can beget such a daughter as he pleases. I find in the
biographies which the Infinite One writes more poetry, more poetic
justice and justification by motives, than in those which the heroes of
the former, like poor fools, send to the press. A divine biography is,
besides, not only a little work of art, but also a part of an
infinitely great one; and we are all so bound to our paths that one
must be able, from the diurnal arc of his life's epicycloid of the
988th power, to calculate the ellipse which humanity describes around
the immovable Infinite; in other words, one can (bold as it may sound)
from the incidents of his forenoon infer much with regard to the next
that will appear in the newspaper.
"_Fourth_ last word. They still continue in Jena, Wenigen-Jena,
Jena-Priesnitz, and the surrounding localities, to moot the
proposition, that a poet must, like a fly, travel along on transparent
gauze-wings, and not on any heavily bedizened pinions of the bird of
paradise. The reader, they continue without metaphor, cannot at once
fly and carry; Pegasus cannot be a packhorse; still less may a poetic
pinion like that of the angel alluded to have _eyes_, which at most can
belong to the peacock's tail.----Thereto I lately, while attending
Mozart's _Zauberflöte_, came out with the striking answer, namely, the
question: 'But the opera, good people?--Must not here, 1st, the genial
interworking of all the instruments, as well as, what is quite as
great, of all the actors; 2dly, the optical, and, 3dly, the acoustic
imitation; then, 4thly, the poetic composition itself; and finally and
5thly, the splendor of the decoration,--be all comprehended and enjoyed
at once? A building in the _five_ orders of architecture is easier for
you than _one_ with gorgeous foliaceous ornamentation? The five wise
virgins at once leave you wiser than one foolish one?--Say, Jenaite!
But no; write on, and a happy journey home to you in this infernal
cold!'
"Since one word begets another, and accordingly the _fifth_ begets the
_sixth_, I give my word with both, that to-day, on which I say my last
word and this next, is to me no day of finding a cross, but of taking
down from one. Is not to-day Virgil's day, and are not the first volume
of this work and the first and last winter months over?--For to-morrow
there blooms for me the morn of spring; namely, the first of February,
the Sunday eve (_Sonnabend_) of Candlemas. Already must many a freezing
German have with me found in February the aurora of spring, at least in
the rapid lengthening of the days. Hovers not already in the cold ether
out there the first vernal song, the first fluttering lark? Does not
the wren climb and glide up along a black bough, dripping in the
sunshine, and chirp, warmly gilded with bright rays, his winter-solo?
Does not the returning sun re-bind my manuscript books with gilt edges?
and has not my neighbor shoved up the slides of his beehives, that the
merry bee-tribe may joyously fling themselves forth from the narrow,
sultry prisons upon the fresh green, variegated, not with flowers, but
with sunbeams, and creep about over it with vigor?--Virgil, whose
anniversary is to-day celebrated, on _thy_ grave they break now only
fictitious laurel-twigs; but on the graves of the seasons ever fresh
ones bloom after.--
"To-day shall, after a long satirical ice-month of quarrelling,
reconcile me again to the times. Let my last and _seventh_ word be,
Peace! as He also said it who spake the seven words on a more painful
wood than my writing-table is.
"Peace be with the age!--one should often exclaim to himself.[214] As
an annoying day does not put us out in the hopes of our life, so
neither should a suffering century deprive us of that hope wherewith we
paint the far future. The pyramid of the age seems, like an Egyptian
one, to lift itself up, either to a narrow and sharp apex, or into
completeness; but when one climbs it, the summit proves to be a roomy
level.
"Where a _goal_ appears to us divine, there must _the road_ also have
been so; because _this_ was once _that_, and that will become this.
Well may we all be nearer to Thee, O Infinite One, than we know:--for
Thou only canst know how near we are; and we live _in_ Thee, not merely
_from_ Thee, just as our earth moves in the midst of the atmosphere of
the sun's globe,[215] while it seems only to revolve far off around his
light."
EXPLANATION OF TITLE.--As regards the title of TITAN, the translator
has been strongly tempted to fall back upon his first idea, that Jean
Paul hardly meant, after all, anything more definite by it than to
express the magnitude of his aspiration in undertaking the work; and
that, as Mr. Longfellow's "Hyperion" hints at a book of the beautiful,
so _Titan_, like _Hesperus_, has a corresponding, more moral than
mythological reference, and signifies that this was to be the author's
Titanic work.