Page:The Theme of the Joseph Novels.djvu/27

 greatness: at the age of twenty-five, when I tried my hand at the novel of the German bourgeoisie Buddenbrooks, at the age of fifty, when in the Magic Mountain I made a friendly alter ego pass through the adventures of European intellectual controversies, and between sixty and seventy, when I told mankind's fairy tale of Joseph and his brothers. To participate playfully in the consciousness of great creativeness and to acquire, thereby, the right to a more familiar celebration of greatness than the wholly inexperienced and uninitiated possess, that is something, that is worth a life. "That a man entertains himself and does not spend his life like dull catde," I have my Joseph answer a critic of his mythical temerity, "is after all what matters most; and what heights of entertainment he is able to reach—that is what counts."

And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me finally return to the fact which seems to me to have a certain symbolic value, after all, namely that the mythical play of Joseph and his Brothers, begun in Germany, continued in Switzerland, transplanted to America was completed here, in contact with the American myth. For there is such a thing; you, too, live in a tradition here, walk in footsteps, in paternal foot steps, which you call your "Way of Life." The pioneer-like optimism and hearty faith in man, the mental youthfulness, the benevolent and confident ideas and principles upon which the Union was founded by the fathers, amounts to the American myth, which is alive today. In his biography, Goethe speaks about an "alleviation for humanity" effected by the American war of liberation; and the European emigration to America (which finds its way into the final parts of the Wilhelm Meister), sprang from the constant desire to participate in this alleviation; it was the pilgrimage to a [23]