Dramatic Personages [antikvár]

Introduction Looking for a man and finding only an author, is the reader disappointed by the man or by the author? He is disappointed by the relation of one to the other; by the inadequate man who reveals himself in the author, hence by the author, too, who reveals too little of the man. Usually an observation from the Pensées is quoted to establish a distinction between man and author to the latter's detriment. It is assumed that in general an author is worth less than a man; that he is, in a man, the share of artifices and deceptive appearances. But, in fact, nothing is less deceptive than a concerted appearance; nothing reveals so well the authentic man, that is, the combination of what he is and what he wants to be. The man without his work is not real, just as the work without its man remains a fine trap for psychologists. To separate them first in order to compare them better is to create the very type of the sophism, a problem of form and content, a problem of the chicken and the egg: Which of the two came first? Let us abide by the answer, quite Goethean in its himior, of the essayist Rudolf Kassner: "I leave the problem at the stage of the drama between the chicken and the egg, the subject and the object, and I shall not seek beyond the form—^for there is no drama without form, and reciprocally." How can we see a man's being outside of its manifestations? If, then, I concern myself with what is true in a man, it is in his work that I must seek it. For every work is the