The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF

historical cognition. The object, as it is sketched in the title, indeed encourages one to expect a historical construction. This would have accentuated more effectively the state of consciousness of the author, and thereby ours, than what discloses itself in his up-to-the-minute considerations of Surrealism and existential philosophy. It would have unmasked the fact that Romanticism completes a process which was begun in the eighteenth century: the secularisation of mystic tradition. Alchemists, Illuminati and Rosicrucians set in train something concluded in Romanticism. The mystical tradition did not survive this process without damage. This was proven in the excrescences of Pietism, as much as the theurgy of figures such as Cagliostro and Saint Germain. The corruption of mystical teachings and needs was just as great in the lower social strata as in the higher ones.
    Romantic esoterism grew out of these circumstances. It was a movement of restoration along with all of its violence. With Novalis mysticism was finally able to find a place for itself floating above the continent of religious experience, and even more so in Ritter. Even before the close of late Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel already shows the secret sciences once again on the point of returning to the lap of the church. The beginnings of a social and industrial development – one in which mystical experience, which has lost its sacramental place, was put into question – coincided with the time of the complete secularisation of mystical tradition. For a Friedrich Schlegel, a Clemens Brentano, a Zacharias Werner, the consequence wasconversion. Others, like Troxler or Schindler, took refuge in evoking the dreamworld, and the vegetative and animal manifestations of the unconscious. They retreated strategically and evacuated areas of higher mystical life in order to consolidate those rooted in nature. Their appeal to dream life was a distress signal; it indicated not so much the return home of the soul to the motherland as the fact that obstacles had already rendered that return impossible.
    Béguin did not reach such a conception. He has not reckoned with the possibility that the actual synthetic core of his object, the way it discloses historical cognition, could emit a light in which the dream theories of the Romantics disintegrate. This shortcoming has left traces in the methodology of this work. In its turning to each Romantic writer separately, it reveals the fact that his confidence in the synthetic power of his question is not unlimited. Of course this weakness also has its merits. It gives him the opportunity to prove himself as a portraitist whom it is often truly charming to pursue. It is the portrait studies which make the book worth reading, irrespective of its construction. The first of them, which sketches the relations of sprightly G.Ch. Lichtenberg to the dream life of his fellow humans and to his own, provides a higher sense of Béguin’s capability. In his treatment of Victor Hugo in the second volume he delivers a masterpiece in a few pages. The more the reader burrows into the details of these physiognomic showpieces, the more often we will find the correction of an inherent prejudice which might have scuppered the book. A figure such as G.H. Schubert, especially as described by Béguin, shows, with great clarity, how limited the significance is of certain esoteric speculations of the Romantics, which, the more modest the yield that is granted to its immediate pickings, does all the more honour to the historian’s loyalty.
    â€”
    Translated by Esther Leslie and Esther Leslie .
    First published in Mass und Wert 2 (1938–9); Gesammelte Schriften III , 557–60. Also translated in Selected Writings 4 , 153–55.

CHAPTER 19
Still Story

    My Room (Meine Bude) , 1896.
    TOLD ON THE OCCASION OF MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY
    A D-train passed through a rainy landscape. A student sat in a third-class carriage. He was