But that would have helped little, and could not have lasted long.

It is not the untrue imaginary Picture of a man and his life that I want from my Schiller, but the actual natural Likeness, true as the face itself, nay TRUER, in a sense.
Which the Artist, if there is one, might help to give, and the Botcher _ (Pfuscher)_ 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 meaning of nothing cosmic or noble, nor ever will know?
Poor wretch, one sees what kind of meaning HE educes from Man's History, this long while past, and has got all the world to believe of it along with him.