Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/22

 and emancipation, and it grows far more bold and daring in the complicated case of his son Joseph. There is one, who has not discovered God, but knows how to "treat" Him; one who is not only the hero of his stories, but also their director, indeed the one who poetically "adorns" them; one who, it is true, still participates in the collective and mythical, but in a banteringly spiritualized and playful, purposefully conscious manner. In short, we see how the ego, in the process of its emancipation, soon becomes an artistic ego, attractive, delicate and—endangered, a tender concern for the respectable father, but with inborn possibilities of development and maturing, as have not existed before. In its youth, the artistic ego is of inexcusable egocentricity: it lives under the dangerous assumption that everybody must love it more than himself. But due to a sympathy and friend liness which nonetheless it never renounces, it finds its way into the social, while it matures, and becomes the provider and benefactor of a foreign people and of its own: in Joseph the ego flows back from arrogant absoluteness into the collective, common; and, the contrast between artistic and civic tendencies, between isolation and community, between individual and collective is fabulously neutralized,—as according to our hopes and our will, it must be dissolved in the democracy of the future, the cooperation of free and divergent nations under the equalizing sceptre of justice.

A symbol of humanity—in a certain way my work was entitled to this secret opinion of itself. After all, from the original and simple, the typical and canonical it led to the complicated, involved, late:; the way from Canaan to the Egypt of the New Kingdom is the way from the piously primitive, the God-creating, God-contemplative idyl of the archfathers to a highly developed and sophisticated culture [18]