Translation:Writings of Novalis/Paralipomena of Pollen-From the Literary Remains

by Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg

2

From the handwriting

128. Schlegel's writings are lyrical philosophemes. His Forster and Lessing are superb minus poetry and resemble Pindaric hymns. The lyrical prosaist will write logical epigrams. Is he so drunk with life, that they will be modern dithyrambs, which a person must certainly enjoy and judge as a dithyrambs. A work of art is half intoxicated: In complete drunkenness the work of art dissolves. From the human arises an animal. The character of this animal is dithyrambic. The animal is an overly sated life, the plant a deficient life, the human a free life.

129. Hemsterhuis is very often a logical Homeric rhapsodist.

130. Goethe's philosophemes are truly epic.

131. Every individual is the centerpoint of a system of emanations.

132. Our books are an informal kind of paper money that scholars bring into circulation. This passion of the modern world for a paper pittance is the ground from which they spring up, often in one night.

133. In very many works the raisonnement of the author, or the bulk of them in which facts and experience are glued together, is a confluence of the strangest psychic phenomenon—exceedingly educational for the anthropognostic—full of hints of asthenic complexes and indirect inflammations.

134. Reviewers are literary police officers. Doctors are a kind of police officer. Therefore, there should be critical journals that artfully treat authors medically and surgically, and not just track down the sickness and treat them with schadenfreude. The previous methods of treatment were for the most part barbaric.

True police are not just defensive and polemical against existing evil, they especially seek to improve the diseased structures.

135. The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung is for the person, who out of attachment for the good things of this life, seeks to sustain this life as long as possible. Hufeland's Microbiotics has already been brought into practice by the dispatchers of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. In the beginning, it debuted new ideas. It always had a poor constitution. The long use of Kantian terms has done it much harm. Now it has become much more cautious and looks for only that food appropriate for times of fasting, seldom used intoxicating agents and conveniences to accommodate the weather, according to Hufeland's acclaimed principle of mediocrity, prolonging the golden dream of earthly existence as long as possible.

136. Whoever wants to take fragments of this kind at their word, he may be an upright person— but he should not take himself for a poet. Must one always be thoughtful? One who is too old for passionate enthusiasms, misses out on youthful socializing. There, one finds literary Saturnalias. The more colorful the life, the better.

137. Where the majority decides, power rules over form; it's the opposite where the minority have the upper hand. Theoretical politicians can not be accused of being bold. It has never occured to any of them that monarchy and democracy could and should be utterly united as elements of a truly universal state.

A true democracy is an absolute minus-state. A true monarchy is an absolute plus-state. The constitution of a monarchy is the character of the regent. Its guarantee is his will. Democracy, in the ordinary sense, is in principle no different than monarchy, only that here the monarch is a mass of heads. True democracy is Protestantism—the political natural state, in the way that Protestantism in a narrower sense is a religious natural state.

The moderate kind of reformation is half nation and half natural state. it is an artificial, very fragile machine, to which all of the brightest minds are opposed, but it is the hobbyhorse of our time. This machine would let itself be transformed into a living, autonomous being, which would solve its major problem. The caprice of nature and the compulsion to art would permeate one another when one dissolves them in the spirit. The spirit makes both of them fluid. The spirit is at all times poetic. The poetic nation is the genuine, complete nation.

A nation very full of spirit will be poetic of itself. The more spirit and spiritual relationships there are in a nation, all the more it will be drawn closer to the poetic, all the more joyous everyone will become through the love of beauty, the great individuo, willing to limit his claims and to make the necessary sacrifices, all the less the nation requires it, all the more similar will the spirit of the state be to the spirit of a unique ideal people, who have proclaimed a single law forever: Be as good and poetic as possible.

138. The true reader must be the amplification of the author. He is the greater authority, who has already worked out the issue from the lesser authority in advance. The feeling through which the author has dissolved the materials of his writing, is again separated into the coarse and the refined when reading a book, and when the reader of the book would work through the book according to his idea, so the a second reader would refine it even more, and so it happens that the processed substance is always returning to fresh receptacles, the substance finally an essential element, a member of the active spirit.

Through the impartial re-reading of his books, an author can refine himself. With strangers, it ordinarily happens that the peculiar character is lost, because it is a rare gift to be fully immersed in an idea belonging to another. Often even with the author. It is not a mark of greater education or greater ability, that one passes righteous criticism upon a book. With new impressions, a greater piquancy of its meaning is entirely natural.