The theme in itself did
not particularly fascinate me; but I was not ignorant of the subject,
and it was one that allowed of being looked at in a wide connection,
i.e., the claims of the subject as opposed to the imagination of the
artist, in general. I was of opinion that just as in sculpture the human
figure should not be represented with wings, but the conception of its
species be observed, so the essential nature of a past age should be
unassailed in historic fiction. Throughout numerous carefully elaborated
abstractions, extending over 120 folio pages, and in which I aimed at
scientific perspicuity, I endeavoured to give a soundly supported theory
of the limits of inventive freedom in Historical Romance. The
substructure was so painstaking that it absorbed more than half of the
treatise. Quite apart from the other defects of this tyro handiwork, it
lauded and extolled an aesthetic direction opposed to that of both the
men who were to adjudicate upon it. Hegel was mentioned in it as "The
supreme exponent of Aesthetics, a man whose imposing greatness it is
good to bow before." I likewise held with his emancipated pupil, Fr. Th.
Vischer, and vindicated him. Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S.
Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed.
Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with
profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of
importance.
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