We can fancy him saying to himself; -- There are poets
enough of the ideal; let me paint the Actual, as, after years of
dreams, it will still appear and reappear to wise men. That all
shall right itself in the long Morrow, I may well allow, and my novel
may easily wait for the same regeneration. The age, that can damn it
as false and falsifying, will see that it is deeply one with the
genius and history of all the centuries. I have given my characters
a bias to error. Men have the same. I have let mischances befall
instead of good fortune. They do so daily. And out of many vices
and misfortunes, I have let a great success grow, as I had known in
my own and many other examples. Fierce churchmen and effeminate
aspirants will chide and hate my name, but every keen beholder of
life will justify my truth, and will acquit me of prejudging the
cause of humanity by painting it with this morose fidelity. To a
profound soul is not austere truth the sweetest flattery?
Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is
ephemeral, but this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral,
that mind only can see, in which the same order entirely obtains.
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