Century spendthrift, fraudulent-bankrupt; gone at length utterly insolvent, without real MONEY of performance in its pocket, and the shops declining to take hypocrisies and speciosities any farther:--what could the poor Century do, but at length admit, "Well, it is so. I am a swindler-century, and have long been,--having learned the trick of it from my father and grandfather;knowing hardly any trade but that in false bills, which Ithought foolishly might last forever, and still bring at least beef and pudding to the favored of mankind. And behold it ends;and I am a detected swindler, and have nothing even to eat.
What remains but that I blow my brains out, and do at length one true action?" Which the poor Century did; many thanks to it, in the circumstances.
For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe,--lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them mad,--there was, to men, a voice audible; voice from the heart of things once more, as if to say:
"Lying is not permitted in this Universe. The wages of lying, you behold, are death. Lying means damnation in this Universe;and Beelzebub, never so elaborately decked in crowns and mitres, is NOT God!" This was a revelation truly to be named of the Eternal, in our poor Eighteenth Century; and has greatly altered the complexion of said Century to the Historian ever since.
Whereby, in short, that Century is quite confiscate, fallen bankrupt, given up to the auctioneers;--Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them--a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness--are delineated for us.--"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?" cries the reader.
Yes, reader! truly. It is the ground out of which we ourselves have sprung; whereon now we have our immediate footing, and first of all strike down our roots for nourishment;--and, alas, in large sections of the practical world, it (what we specially mean by IT)still continues flourishing all round us! To forget it quite is not yet possible, nor would be profitable. What to do with it, and its forgotten fooleries and "Histories," worthy only of forgetting?--Well; so much of it as by nature ADHERES; what of it cannot be disengaged from our Hero and his operations:
approximately so much, and no more! Let that be our bargain in regard to it.
3. ENGLISH PREPOSSESSIONS.
With such wagon-loads of Books and Printed Records as exist on the subject of Friedrich, it has always seemed possible, even for a stranger, to acquire some real understanding of him;--though practically, here and now, I have to own, it proves difficult beyond conception. Alas, the Books are not cosmic, they are chaotic; and turn out unexpectedly void of instruction to us. Small use in a talent of writing, if there be not first of all the talent of discerning, of loyally recognizing;of discriminating what is to be written! Books born mostly of Chaos--which want all things, even an INDEX--are a painful object.
In sorrow and disgust, you wander over those multitudinous Books:
you dwell in endless regions of the superficial, of the nugatory:
to your bewildered sense it is as if no insight into the real heart of Friedrich and his affairs were anywhere to be had.
Truth is, the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow, and not afraid of labor, excels all other Dryasdusts yet known;I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in Nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter;dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg sand!--Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what probably my raw-material was!--Curious enough, Friedrich lived in the Writing Era,--morning of that strange Era which has grown to such a noon for us;--and his favorite society, all his reign, was with the literary or writing sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of all.
So far as I have noticed, there was not, with the single exception of Mirabeau for one hour, any man to be called of genius, or with an adequate power of human discernment, that ever personally looked on Friedrich. Had many such men looked successively on his History and him, we had not found it now in such a condition.
Still altogether chaotic as a History; fatally destitute even of the Indexes and mechanical appliances: Friedrich's self, and his Country, and his Century, still undeciphered; very dark phenomena, all three, to the intelligent part of mankind.