Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/12

 and shaping which, as said before, is ordinarily reserved for the later years of life: for the mythical, it is true, represents an early and primitive stage in the life of humanity, but a late and mature one in the life of the individual.

There the word humanity has been pronounced—in connection with the ideas of the timelessly-typical and the mythical it automatically made its appearance. I had been in readiness to feel productively attracted by a subject-matter like the Joseph legend, because of the turning of my taste away from the bourgeois toward the mythical aspect. But, at the same time, I was in readiness for it because of my disposition for generally human feeling and thinking,—I mean: a feeling and thinking in human terms,—a disposition which was not only the product of my individual time and stage of life, but that of the time at large and in general, of OUR time, of the historic convulsions, adventures and tribulations, by which the question of man, the very problem of humanity was presented to us as an indivisible whole, and imposed upon our conscience as hardly ever to a generation before us.

I believe, Ladies and Gendemen, that the sufferings and stirring adventures, through which humanity has been going now for decades, will bring forth a new, deepened feeling of humanity, indeed a new HUMANISM, remote from all shallow optimism, but full of sympathy, which will be only too necessary for the work of reconstruction that will confront us after the tremendous moral and material devastations, after the collapse of the accustomed world. In order to build up, or at least lay the foundations for the new, better, happier and more social world, freed from unnecessary suffering, which we want our children and grandchildren to [8]