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Updated: May 1, 2025
"All History is an imprisoned Epic, nay an imprisoned Psalm and Prophecy," says Sauerteig there. I wish, from my soul, he had DISimprisoned it in this instance! But he only says, in magniloquent language, how grand it would be if disimprisoned; and hurls out, accidentally striking on this subject, the following rough sentences, suggestive though unpractical, with which I shall conclude:
"Wars are not memorable," says Sauerteig, "however big they may have been, whatever rages and miseries they may have occasioned, or however many hundreds of thousands they may have been the death of, except when they have something of World-History in them withal.
Alas, the Ideal of history, as my friend Sauerteig knows, is very high; and it is not one serious man, but many successions of such, and whole serious generations of such, that can ever again build up History towards its old dignity. We must renounce ideals. Has the reader heard of Sauerteig's last batch of Springwurzeln, a rather curious valedictory Piece?
"Voltaire was the spiritual complement of Friedrich," says Sauerteig once: "what little of lasting their poor Century produced lies mainly in these Two. A very somnambulating Century! But what little it DID, we must call Friedrich; what little it THOUGHT, Voltaire. Other fruit we have not from it to speak of, at this day.
The distinguished Sauerteig, in his SPRINGWURZELN, has these words: "To burn away, in mad waste, the divine aromas and plainly celestial elements from our existence; to change our holy-of-holies into a place of riot; to make the soul itself hard, impious, barren!
Not at once, surely! So that Friedrich and Voltaire are related, not by accident only. They are, they for want of better, the two Original Men of their Century; the chief and in a sense the sole products of their Century. They alone remain to us as still living results from it, such as they are. With more of the like sort from Sauerteig.
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