HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA
Page: 17

might help to give, and the Botcher (Pfuscher) italic> never can! Alas, and the Artist does not even try it;
leaves it altogether to the Botcher, being busy otherwise!--

"Men surely will at length discover again, emerging from these
dismal bewilderments in which the modern Ages reel and stagger
this long while, that to them also, as to the most ancient men,
all Pictures that cannot be credited are--Pictures of an idle
nature; to be mostly swept out of doors. Such veritably, were it
never so forgotten, is the law! Mistakes enough, lies enough will
insinuate themselves into our most earnest portrayings of the
True: but that we should, deliberately and of forethought,
rake together what we know to be not true, and introduce that in
the hope of doing good with it? I tell you, such practice was
unknown in the ancient earnest times; and ought again to become
unknown except to the more foolish classes!" That is Sauerteig's
strange notion, not now of yesterday, as readers know:--and he
goes then into "Homer's Iliad," the "Hebrew Bible," "terrible
Hebrew VERACITY of every line of it;" discovers an alarming
"kinship of Fiction to lying;" and asks, If anybody can compute
"the damage we poor moderns have got from our practices of fiction
in Literature itself, not to speak of awfully higher provinces?
Men will either see into all this by and by," continues he;
"or plunge head foremost, in neglect of all this, whither they
little dream as yet!--

"But I think all real Poets, to this hour, are Psalmists and
Iliadists after their sort; and have in them a divine impatience
of lies, a divine incapacity of living among lies. Likewise, which
is a corollary, that the highest Shakspeare producible is properly
the fittest Historian producible;--and that it is frightful to
see the Gelehrte Dummkopf [what we here may
translate, DRYASDUST] doing the function of History, and the
Shakspeare and the Goethe neglecting it. 'Interpreting events;'
interpreting the universally visible, entirely INdubitable
Revelation of the Author of this Universe: how can Dryasdust
interpret such things, the dark chaotic dullard, who knows the