Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/11

 of the author but of the work itself, it has been incorporated in its linguistic sphere, it is indirect, a stylized and bantering language, a contribution to the pseudo-exactness, very close to persiflage and, at any rate, to irony; for scientific treatment of wholly unscientific and "legendary matters is pure irony.

It is quite possible that such secret charms played their part at the time of the earliest conception of the work. But this does not answer the question as to how I came to select this archaic subject-matter from the dawn of mankind. Different circumstances, some of a personal and others of a general temporal character, contributed to it, and the perspnal ones were also of a temporal nature; they had something to do with those years, with a stage of life that had been attained. The readiness is all. As a man, and as an artist, I must somehow have been in readiness to be productively attracted by such subject-matter, and my Bible- reading was not mere chance. The various stages of life have different inclinations, claims, tendencies of taste—as well as abilities and advantages. It is probably a rule that in certain years the taste for all purely individual and particular phenomena, for the individual case, for the "bourgeois" aspect, in the widest sense of the word, fades out gradually. Instead, the typical, the eternally-human, eternally-recurring, timeless, in short: the mythical steps into the foreground of the interest. For, after all, the typical is already the mythical, insofar as it is pristine pattern and pristine form of life, timeless model and formula of eld, into which life enters by reproducing its traits out of the unconscious. Definitely, the attainment of the mythical viewpoint is of decisive importance in the life of the narrator; it signifies a peculiar enhancement of his artistic mood, a new serenity in [7]