Introduction
Introduction
Complaints of infidelity and faithlessness are frequent enough between one man and another, and the comedy all too imminent that, rather than marking a difference between them, what we have is an all the more faithful image of the respects in which they are alike, accuser and accused transformed in a new misunderstanding, the one still seeing himself as the accuser of the other, instead of each separately accusing himself and finding an understanding. However much, and however justly, one person reproaches another for infidelity, fickleness, inconstancy, he is careful not to put his own inconstancy down to the same reasons, for that would be to betray himself as someone having the law of his existence outside himself – and yet what else is variability? If it is true that time changes everything – whatever can be changed – it is also true that time will show who it was that did not change. So for every faithful and committed person, instead of complaints and accusations, settlements and court decisions, there remains the compensation that a second look will in time show whether or not he was unfaithful and whether the charge of infidelity had the power to change him or not. Ironically enough, the person quick to accuse another could sometimes almost wish, at the moment of reckoning, that the vehemence of his accusation had obtained the opposite effect to the one he had wanted at the time; because it is the accuser who proves now to have changed, and who perhaps now in a renewed vehemence resembles himself in complaining about this invariability. As seldom as pain, suffering and mortal danger are to be found where the screaming is, so too is faithfulness to oneself seldom found where another is being stridently accused.
The same is not infrequently true in literary affairs: an author accuses the age of infidelity and the age accuses the author of the same, either for what it takes to be a decline in his ability or, perhaps, for his seizing all too anxiously and frantically, in his attempt to meet the demands of the age, upon something that still does not satisfy it. Both sides can be at fault. But here again the second look will decide whether it is the author in question who has remained essentially true to himself, and the world that has changed, or whether he is an inconstant mind, ‘a wandering star’1 that wants to capture the changeable with changeableness while nemesis captures him in his own snare.
In this, the situation resembles the one indicated above between man and man, except that special complications in literature make it dialectical; the two individuals stay in some factual sense the same, while an age, a reading public, has a quite other and dialectical character. An author just a little advanced in years, whether forgotten or familiar, quickly sees himself surrounded by a new influential age, whether not unreasonably entitled to the demands it makes or misled like that new pharaoh who knew not Joseph and his merits.2 The changed age sometimes expresses its change by then accusing the author of being unfaithful to his age – which is suspect, particularly when it remains unclear what is to be understood by his age or the age; for then it is eo ipso3 impossible for any author to end up other than by being unfaithful to his age just by remaining faithful to it, since the age is, sophistically, always the new replacement. The author, the individual person, who grows older with each year, can only be renewed within himself; he cannot become a new man with each age. If the seeming metaphysical profundity about the demands of the age isn’t to dissolve in confusion, here again the second look must be assumed capable of judging ethically, by deciding whether we have an author who stayed true to himself despite the demands of the age; or one who betrayed himself and the commitments he publicly undertook and thereby stood in the way of the fulfilment of a justifiable demand; or, finally, whether we have a sleight-of-hand artist who ended up hoodwinking himself. For unless the ethical is granted a decisive say over all this reckless talk of the demands of the age, not just our own age but every age is guilty of unfair, ungracious and nonsensical behaviour towards all older authors. Even if a power-hungry older generation will secure itself with a Bethlehem-style infanticide, a literary patricide is equally loathsome.*
Young people today can fairly often be heard saying wise things. That youth speaks you will hear sure enough on closer listening. For what a wise man doesn’t fail to see – that everything he says is about himself (that’s how selfish he is!) – the young man indeed fails to see (that’s how enthusiastic he is!). What the wise man does, namely understand everything as being relevant to himself, always taking himself to be a case in point, the young man fails to do; he makes the demand but fails to implicate himself – or indeed, the demands he makes being what they are, he implicates hardly anyone else either. You would think it was a drunken deity speaking, from his free manner with people, from the way his head swims in a fantasy of supposedly being able to grab for himself the monster product of generations of inhumanly exacted exertion; least of all would you believe it was an individual human being speaking. Clearly, he certainly speaks in the name of the age concerning the age’s demands, but this is precisely the contradiction that ought to put a stop to the youngster’s fairy-tale savagery; for no one, no fictional pirate captain, was ever so cruel as the demands of the age in the mouth of a young man; not even Elagabalus4 was that terrible to the ostriches, for he never had more killed than he could eat.
Scantier and scantier are the rations allotted to those who excel; ever more quickly are suspicions aroused about being unfaithful to the demands of the age; in the young man’s mouth ever new powers are demanded by the age. And this person who we suppose not to be making this demand on demand, who by being unfaithful to himself and to what it is to be human has in one way or another taken the demand that demands faithfulness to be his own demand, this monstrous creditor who can offer no explanation whatsoever of how he came into possession of the demand but merely advances it – this person does not dream that the judgement he pronounces will be the one by which he himself is judged, yes, by an even severer judgement and a narrower standard.5
We see less often a sincere wish to learn from life but, correspondingly more often, people’s desire and inclination and mutual encouragement to be deceived by it. Unabashed, people seem to lack any Socratic fear of being deceived. For the voice of God is always a whisper, and in the shape of a thousand-tongued rumour the demand of the age is not an almighty command that creates great men, but a stirring in the refuse that creates muddled minds; an abracadabra, as with all bringing forth, that brings forth its like. Even less do people seem, Socratically, to fear more than all else being deceived by themselves, and least of all do they realize that if of all the deceived the self-deceived are the most pitiful, then the most pitiful among these in turn are those who, in contrast to the piously deceived, deceive themselves presumptuously. Slow to listen, quick to judge,6 they comply with only half of the Socratic teaching that one draw modest conclusions from the little one grasps,7 for from the little they grasp they draw brazen conclusions. The momentary, a brilliant beginning, and a new time-reckoning dating from it are the little one grasps – if indeed it is possible to understand the momentary and the beginning inasmuch as the momentary lacks the eternal and, until the meaning is complete, the beginning lacks the conclusion; and one ought to wait for this for the sake not so much of the meaning as of the grasping. As for what comes next, there is no need of that, now that one speaks in the name of time, for time grasped in this abstract way is an extremely indifferent power; all will surely go well with it even should no young man concern himself on its behalf.
But those individual human beings, each of whom should have his time, what of them? For individuals something does come after, the consequent following that brilliant antecedent8 – those happy days of youth when one was oneself the demand of the age. As for this next phase, the less time allotted the older ones, the more speedily it arrives upon us and the longer becomes the consequent – and the shorter the tiny antecedent, if indeed it doesn’t dwindle to nothing at all because of the impossibility of grasping it together with the consequent. Truly a brilliant beginning for a new era! One cannot call it beginning with nothing,9 more like ending with the beginning becoming nothing. Not even Pandora’s box could contain so many disasters and so much misery as are concealed in that little phrase ‘the demand of the age’.10 Any person who has flirted with this phrase has only himself to blame; he can hardly complain about what the age demands when the demand is one he himself has made!
And yet people won’t understand the sequel. In our concern to let ourselves be guided, to rejoice fervently and with admiration in the older person when he stays true to himself, to be edified by fifty years of faithful service, to grasp slowly, to learn from the venerated, from whom one learns something other than from the luminaries of the moment – we seem to lack the patience to learn in this way what it is to be human, and to renounce the inhuman. But might not this, too, be the demand of the age? Yes, and if it is not the demand of the age, it is still that of the power higher than the age, for it is the demand of eternity. If it is not the demand of men, it is the demand of God. If it is not the demand of the young, it is the demand of the Ancient of Days!11 And is it really fidelity to demand fidelity only in an inhuman way? Is it fidelity to make far greater promises than any human being can keep? And isn’t comedy just around the corner in a conflict between two people one of whom made only an inhuman demand of fidelity without committing himself, so as to learn what human fidelity is, and the other of whom did commit himself but in such a way that fidelity proved impossible and infidelity that in which the antagonists resemble each other in the change?
But if this is how things are in general – and it is not very inviting – how refreshing then to focus attention on a phenomenon in which what is wanted comes together in mutual agreement; to allow one’s own, perhaps a reader’s, mind to dwell on what is dependable, to remind oneself, perhaps a reader, of what surely we all more or less clearly know. For if I mention A Story of Everyday Life, the occasion here is, fortunately for me, not the odious one of the hectic self-importance of a review, of directing attention, imposing the point of view; or by demonstrating the necessity of the development, of showing how the author here had to be a dramatist, there a natural scientist, etc. For me the occasion is the fond one of a happy repetition of a beautiful memory. The author has remained the same ‘one in all’.12 The reading public doesn’t need to be informed, doesn’t even need to be reminded, yet may still find pleasure in being put in mind of what it knew. Heaven knows there is constantly so much new to know that to be reading this will be almost a relief! No one, not even the most hotheaded youth, will expect in my mentioning A Story of Everyday Life to be witness to the court martial of a superannuated signature in the name of the age. But everyone in all fairness expects a review to be a solemn performance, as I too wish and hope; and if it proves not to be so I accept the blame in advance. If, as I am, one is firmly convinced that it is a reviewer’s duty always to be a ministering spirit, even if on rare occasions he is far superior to the one he reviews, here it would be difficult for anyone to fall into temptation, and for me impossible. Not really being a contemporary of this author’s debut, the truth is rather that I have grown up under him and, now his contemporary, I have not outgrown the impression he made then.
For close on twenty years there has been a happy relationship – one in which, as one says of marriages, the partners get along fine – between this author and the reading public. It is pleasurable to think of it and salutary for me to speak of it personally, even though what I say may be something different and again, in the difference, may mark the contrast between this author’s life-view and a more pronounced religious view. A passionate religious enthusiast would focus exclusively on the author’s faithfulness to himself and would, in his admiration, hear nothing of any relation to a reading public, nothing about the world, either its approval or its disapproval. He would exclaim: ‘Splendid, here is something for us to learn; yes, everyone, author or not, can learn something from this, for everyone can learn from a universal paradigm, and being faithful to oneself is what is universally paradigmatic!’ He would not say ‘only twenty years’ but ‘for twenty years!’. But then the author of these stories – if I may be so bold as to make him the examiner while I submit myself to the examination, to show how and what I have learned from him – would caution the enthusiast not to skip over life’s tribulations, not to make light of fortune’s incentives to merit. He would no doubt remind him, echoing an expression employed earlier, that ‘the road goes over the Bridge of Sighs’* then proceed to bid him let his ‘moderation be known unto all men’13 in resignation’s quiet joy over life, which shows here precisely that things are just as we learn in the stories; yes, even better, that not only will everything surely come to rights again, little by little, but that everything was and remained good. And yet, however willingly that religious enthusiast submitted to this instruction and accepted the lesson, perhaps he might revert once again to his view, which after all did not overlook suffering, does not put a rash trust in the world, but religiously wants success and failure to mean equally much – that is, equally little – and wants the religious to have meaning not by way of and together with something else, but to have absolute meaning in itself.
The author has been true to himself. Were anyone foolishly to remark that he has been faithful over only a few things14 because he hasn’t busily changed the subject, because he hasn’t explored all areas, because he has not juggled with a showy variety, I would answer this obviously trumped-up charge by saying, ‘This is exactly where the author’s great wealth lies.’ The life-view creatively sustaining these stories remains the same, while an ingenious inventiveness, a reserve of material gained from a rich experience and a fertile luxuriance of mood, all serve to produce change within the creative repetition. The disquiet stays essentially the same, the reassurance essentially the same, essentially from the same to the same in all cases. The conflict introduced has essentially the same power to seek resolution, the peace and quiet are again the same – that is, it is the same life-view. If we take one of these stories in its entirety and then consider the others, and if as we are wont we call the writer’s work a ‘creation’, I would rather describe the relation of the whole series to that one story with the single word ‘sustaining’. But is God, with whom one compares a writer when he is called creative, less admirable in the sustaining than in the creating? So too with our author’s continuing creation. Indeed, were it otherwise with the author, his own works would contain a contradiction. The life-view in the one story must be contained again in the sequels, for any discrepancy will show that despite all his seeming creativeness the author has no life-view; this author, though, in heartfelt faithfulness, reproduces his own originality in the repetition. Were we to measure his talent with, as it were, a psychological meter, we would find it essentially the same in all the stories; if we were to ‘log’ the momentum of passion psychologically, we would find it essentially the same in them all. All have the same closeness to the reality of daily life and the same distance from it in elevation, the same closeness to the conflict and the same distance from it in understanding. This author is thus equally close to and distant from reality; closer to it in the apprehension than a poet, not as far from it as a poet in the idealized presentation, for the author’s life-view lies on the outer boundary of the aesthetic veering towards the religious; where poetry to all intents and purposes stops, this author begins.
For the essence of poetry is not to achieve reconciliation with the actual, but to achieve reconciliation with the imaginative ideal through imagination. But in the actual individual this reconciliation is precisely the new split with reality. A knowledge of the pain of actual life, something poetry itself cannot bring out (because its dialectic of time and reality is less intense than that of despair), finds its reconciliation in a reassurance of a kind that poetry (stricte sic dicta) 15 cannot take hold of precisely because the reconciliation is with reality. All the same, in these stories the author never comes up with the kind of real-life pain that could find reassurance only in unmistakably religious categories and in the ideality16 of religion. Every life-view knows the way out and can be recognized by the way out it knows. The poet knows imagination’s way out, and this author knows reality’s; the religious person knows religion’s way out. The life-view is the way out and the story is the way. These categories themselves make it readily apparent that no one can bring about reconciliation with actual life in the way this author does, precisely because his way out is actual life. The mastery of the rendition lies in the fact that this is nowhere expressly stated but that it constantly happens, comes about, that the peace in which the story ends is achieved in the transparency of event and personality.
That this author was bound to achieve distinction by being true to himself is in any case not hard to explain psychologically, though the sublime ease of it all makes the fidelity no less admirable. A Story of Everyday Life (or Stories of Everyday Life) is easily recognizable as the fruit of a second maturity; which is exactly why there can be no question of the crises and crucial changes of direction inevitably experienced by an author entering upon his first maturity. The life-view sustaining A Story of Everyday Life (the first story, which gives its title to them all) must have matured in the author before he wrote it. His product isn’t part of his own development, but the development being mature, the fruit it bears is a product in inwardness. It is not its genius, not talent, nor virtuosity that make the product what it is, for if that were so, the creative element in it would practically vanish were these to disappear. No, if anything, the very production, the possibility of being able to yield such a work, is the reward God has bestowed on the author, since, twice matured, he has gained something eternal in a life-view. It is because he is an author who isn’t looking for himself, but one who found himself before he became an author, that he can be a guide. And whether or not one can repose in the same life-view oneself, here at least are the peace and incorruptibility of a quiet spirit.17 Just as any message of heart-rending tragedy (and God knows how anyone thinks that might be put across!) is seldom to be found in the stories, neither is there any of that self-importance that arouses expectant curiosity about whatever is supposed to satisfy the demand of the age, which today’s uneasy author complacently assumes to be whatever makes for happiness.
No, A Story of Everyday Life is not only a consummate story, it is the story of consummation itself. We begin reading it with pleasure, knowing already that here is the dependability of a life-view not about to be disturbed by a wandering star’s vacillations, but under a guiding star’s protection. Knowing the life-view in advance, we now rejoice to see it once more come into existence, changed but in repetition; a change not, with masks and mummery, inviting others inquisitively to snatch something new, but a change for inwardness. This has been going on for close on twenty years while the outward demeanour has remained the same: the same almost feminine resignation that nevertheless instils respect, the same modesty of approach, the same remoteness from the turmoil and demands of the age, the same domesticity and faithful adherence to a Danish reading public; and this, too, is so delightful – that A Story of Everyday Life is as good as untranslated into any foreign language: a contented and self-conscious joy over little Denmark! Oh, how delightful to be such an author, how delightful to be that celebrity who has appended his famous name as editor. Just like the stories themselves, those two also form an association in fidelity. The editor acquired no fame from them – he was famous already. But the stories, which have won a name of their own, next to the editor’s one of the most important, continue to seek in the sacrifice of anonymity a place among the celebrated.
And the reading public has been true to the author. He has always been received with a welcome, and though he has never excited expectation, least of all unreasonable expectation, he has always been expected. That’s how it was at the beginning when Professor Heiberg18 assumed aesthetic command of Danish literature and tossed these stories episodically into Flyveposten’s exuberant, witty, edifying, instructive entertainment, in a way that deceived the eye and made it impossible to tell whether it was fact or fiction. By often reading Flyveposten and these stories in that evasive setting, younger people have tried to enter into the spirit of the enchantment that the stories must have exercised over contemporaries. The manner of their reception at the beginning was no different when, later, the stories came out so appealingly, year after year, at Christmas. For whatever objections there are to making such an adventitious season into a trade fair, and particularly for such an adventitious reason as a need for presents, as if Danish literature were nothing but a presentation literature,19 it is never in that way that A Story of Everyday Life has arrived with Christmas. The special place it has acquired would have been enough to prevent any offensive misunderstanding, even if its plain and unassuming appearance didn’t already, even at very first sight, preclude any misunderstanding. However sad it is that the Danish reading public is so small, this can still have its appealing side and enable an author, precisely by keeping his own person out of it, to enter in a congenial and friendly way into an almost personal relationship with his public.
That is how A Story of Everyday Life came at Christmas. It never struck anyone as a book that one bought; the price was more like a tip given to the bearer of welcome news, and the book really was a gift one accepted. People imagined, individually flattering themselves, that it was the author’s own concern that made the book appear just at Christmas. In Flyveposten the reading public had seized upon A Story of Everyday Life in surprise, taken in by the ambivalent lighting and bamboozled by getting it only a little at a time. At Christmas it came as a welcome gift; looking forward to it was itself a pleasure, to receive what was expected no less so. It was received in the same way at every other time of the year, as now with the most recent issue that came out in November. Thus has it enjoyed its splendid continuity from the start. And where is the genuine reader of Danish literature who doesn’t somehow have one or two of these short stories woven into his own life memories, whether as what the story means for himself or as what it means in a cherished situation? Young people have read it aloud, perhaps to this or that person; lovers have decided in advance to make the book a New Year gift; a housewife has in addition to a new silk dress every year insisted on the expected Story of Everyday Life annual; a lovers’ quarrel has been patched up and marital tension eased by reading such a novel. It is also due to their very dependability, the foreknowledge that no actual relationship, neither love nor marriage, nor family, nor station in life, would be cast in a misleading light, but would on the contrary be clarified and made endearing, that these stories have contributed so much to interpersonal commerce and exchange.
But what power is it that this author possesses that enables him to do all this, if it is due neither to anything special in a particular novella nor to his superiority as a novelist? What else than the fact of his being a representative of a specific life-view? And it is precisely this extra that places him above novelists in general, an advantage quite different from whatever may be claimed for him by comparing him with others within the novelist category. Often, after making the acquaintance of seventeen characters in a story, hearing them talk, reading their correspondence, having been transported to so many places, picked up local knowledge and benefited from glorious vistas, one ends up none the wiser because the novel itself, taken as a whole, ends in a tangle because it lacks a life-view, and knowing all those characters provides no greater enrichment than getting to know seventeen people at a party. The acquaintance may be all very interesting but it does not illuminate life; one is confirmed in what one already knows about these people, or perhaps one finds a new individuality not quite as one finds in real life; but there is no illumination of the whole.
If a creative writer – and here it is not a matter of comparisons but of what marks someone out as being essentially a writer – is said to transport and inspire because it is essentially through imagination that he produces his effect, then I would say of the author of A Story of Everyday Life that he ‘persuades’. The ability to captivate and entertain is less his distinguishing mark since the same can be said of the poet and of many other novelists. He persuades, and this too is a difficult but also beneficent art. If one likes to say that the poet (stricte sic dictus) has only high or low notes, and so cannot talk with people as they are in real life, then the life-view of the author of A Story of Everyday Life can be said to possess the middle note of persuasion, and the perfection of the enunciation of that life-view lies precisely in this. What we hear are not loud, animated, agitated calls to fight, to find pleasure, to flout life’s opposition, nor cries of despair; nor do we see such scenes depicted, nor endings brought about by resolutions of the sort. Here the inviting intimacy of the cheerful inner sanctum opens its shrine to us, from which heated emotions, perilous decisions and excesses of exertion are excluded, since here such things can be neither accommodated nor tolerated.
Allowing oneself to be spoken to is a prerequisite of accepting the guidance of persuasion. This low-key compliance is the prerequisite, in turn, of persuasion’s ability to elicit from low spirits a new harmony. Everything will be for the better again. By what means? Yes, ask it with due decorum, for even when you ask correctly, to ask vehemently renders impossible the assimilation of the answer. By what means? By the use of common sense, so as to gain for suffering a more merciful aspect; by having patience, a patience that expects good fortune to smile again; by the friendly sympathy of loving people; and by the resignation that renounces its claim not to everything, but to the highest, and through contentment transforms the next-best into something almost as good. And none of this is put across – it just happens – and it is for this very reason that, if one gives oneself up to it, the persuasion is so powerful. No orator can persuade like this, simply because he has a motive, and contemplation always gives birth to doubt. Here, however, persuasion is not a matter between two persons but the pathway in the life-view, and the novel leads one into the world that that view creatively sustains. But, then again, this world is precisely the actual one; so you have not been deceived by the view; it has simply persuaded you to stay where you are.
For what is persuasion, how does one define this concept philosophically and affirm its noble meaning, remembering that here it is not a matter of a relation between two individual human beings but that of a life-view to its recipient? Persuasion presupposes a difficulty, an obstacle, an opposition. It starts with that, and then persuasion clears it away. Persuasion is a movement on the spot but one that changes the spot. Aesthetically, the individual is led away from the actual world and translated into the medium of the imagination; religiously, the individual is led away and translated into the eternity of the religious. In each case the individual becomes alien to the actual world. Aesthetically, the individual becomes alien to the actual world by being absent from it; religiously, the individual becomes an alien and a foreigner in the actual world. So a difficulty is presupposed, or the immediate internal coherence of happiness and immediacy is assumed to be broken. But the break does not end meaninglessly in despair, nor does it become the beginning of a qualitatively new life. As a broken flower is held up by its stalk until, though still bearing the mark of its fracture, it regains its strength, so too is this life-view the support that sustains the person who is broken until he raises himself up again. Yet precisely this is persuasion. Immediacy does not know what persuasion is because it has no need of healing, while religion is unable to persuade for the very reason that it presupposes a new beginning.
A Story of Everyday Life thus persuades, and here again is indicated the limit it does not want to transcend. If one wanted to combine with it a striving in the direction of the ultimate completion of the Idea, then the story would again be persuasion, but like a friendly, restraining force, while even the most unruly person will nevertheless not evade the responsibility of shunning that court of appeal.
No doubt many, captivated by its persuasiveness, have found their foothold in this life-view. And even if others demand more decisive categories, A Story of Everyday Life is still a resting place or, if you like, a place of prayer,20 for a certain religious tinge is unmistakable simply because the life-view is not just common sense but common sense mitigated and refined by persuasive feeling and imagination.
But what am I saying? If someone demands more decisive categories? Am I not then speaking of the demand of the age? Instead of being one single human being, who like all such cannot be confused with the age, with criticism, etc., and so when faced with something like A Story of Everyday Life readily learns respect for it, have I not become an agitated party leader at the head of a revolt, stamping in the parterre and shouting the demand of the times? Happily not, and happily there is still something that eo ipso becomes nonsense when made into the demand of the times. For what can one not contrive to call the demand of the times? And is there anything that doesn’t acquire a sort of prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand of the times is eo ipso a contradiction.
Whereas, if one has any concern or inclination in this direction, one can in any case be hard put to it to decide whether this or that really is the demand of the age, the investigation here is briefer, and not one of fact as to whether it really is the case, for it is an impossibility that this should be the demand of the age. So even if it actually were the demand, it would still not be that so long as one also demanded that one grasp what it is one is demanding. As a claimant, ‘the age’ is too abstract a category to be able to demand the decisive religious categories, which belong precisely to individuality and particularity. You just cannot make en masse, collectively and noisily, demands for what can only fall to the single individual in particularity – solitariness, silence. Demanding has its own intrinsic dialectic too, so that the demands of the age should not be identical with the hue and cry of irrationality and be only appreciable in the human throng. Therefore no demand of the age can displace A Story of Everyday Life, as can be seen in the categories of individuality that underlie everything and in the use made of them in the stories. The single individual, or those who by becoming single individuals seek the decisive category of religiousness, will hardly be tempted to displace the persuasion; on the contrary, they will know to both honour and appreciate it. With regard to any tremor in the individuality that is ultimately only psychological, the life-view of A Story of Everyday Life is eo ipso one of consolation and recovery. And this is presented in these stories by such a master, endowed with such warmth and artistic skill, as to have reached its perfection. An individuality’s spiritual tremor is eo ipso the indication of decisive religious categories, and spirit must therefore not be thought by any means identical with talent and genius, but with resoluteness in passion. A simple person can feel the need for the decisively religious, and even if a person of superior talent felt that need it would be very foolish to declare on that basis that he was an artist of the kind that is the author of these stories. Once religiousness in this way makes play with the word ‘spirit’, it has eo ipso ceased to be religiousness and become presumption.
A Story of Everyday Life has endured in this way for close on twenty years. To the older generation it has been an illumination of life or a corroboration of their understanding, and for the younger generation who have grown up with it, a guide – so what more natural a title for this new novel than Two Ages? But similarly, what more natural than an objection I would rather dispose of here, lest any suspicion arise that it might occur to me after I had read and reviewed the book to respond to anything of the kind? Objections are made to a book which in effect never gets beyond the binding and the title page, and which are therefore best answered, or more correctly disposed of, out of court. The problem here indeed appears on the title page, the difficulty is promptly rendered as an indictment of the book, and just as the Jews drained money from the country by way of bonds, so with similarly distorting conversions superficiality takes the pith and meaning out of literature. The puzzle is a difficult one. Yes; ergo it is not solved. No; whether it is solved or not is seen only by way of the book itself and a much more thorough inspection. The difficulty is this, that an older generation is undertaking to comprehend a more recent age. This is impossible, says the objection in passing, and concernedly shakes its head. Objections of this sort become all too easily popular, since every garrulous barber, even if he did not father it, gladly serves as its godfather. It’s an impossibility, goes the objection, because an older generation is always on the side of its own age and cannot understand ours. But this can also be turned around: a younger generation wants to understand an older – ergo its understanding fails because a younger generation is eo ipso on the side of its own age.
What does this mean? Translated into sensible language it means: this is a difficult problem. The reason I let this objection appear here was, in case some nimble wit hurriedly got to work promoting it cito citissime,21 to usher it to its seat, transformed, certainly, as is the transformed title itself – transformed into a fitting and respectful admission of the difficulty of the problem. An objection like this can, in this way, even though in alien service, still be of some use; and it also suitably concludes the Introduction, in case anyone finds what I am about to add to it inappropriate. The first thing I ever wrote contained among other things some words in review of, or more correctly, in an effusive discourse upon, those novellas.22 I have not tried my hand as a reviewer since. It is my wish, after seven years, to make a second and last attempt, again using a story of everyday life. I would hazard the guess, as far as decorum permits in connection with an anonymous author, that the honoured unknown author did read my little piece at the time. Should he honour me again by reading these lines, I hope he will find me unchanged or, if possible, changed in the repetition: a little more clarity in presentation, a slightly lighter and more flowing style, in recognition of the difficulty of the task a little less hurried, a little more inwardness in the discernment: in other words, changed in the repetition.